Part of This Series of Posts:
Recently we have seen anti-patriotic ‘socialists’ refer to ‘patriotic socialism’ as if it is a separate distinct ideology. However this is a farce, the truth is that there is no socialism that is not patriotic. Just as in the same way we see people identify as ‘democratic socialists’ despite there being no socialism that is anti-democratic. What is real is socialist patriotism, which is a core socialist value.
It is obvious to Communists all over the world throughout history and to this day that to be a Communist is inextricably linked with Patriotism for one’s people, one’s country, one’s culture and the progressive history of those who have come before them and struggled for a better world.
With this compilation of quotes I have very decisively shown this.
Here is a general outline of other resources on this topic.
To any self-declared ‘Communist’ who sees this and still holds an anti-patriotic line you either are oblivious to reality and our history or else you are a federal agent. Either way you should be treated as a subverter who does not want us to win. The feds spent almost the entire 20th Century trying to smear us Communists as Un-American with McCarthyism and now you want to fall in line with and pigeon-hole yourself into their caricature of us? Taking a national nihilist stance would effectively snooker us from having any chance at reaching the masses.
It is clear that the pro-patriotism side of the argument are right to any Communist outside of America and the anti-patriots have no ground to stand on except with strawmen such as patriots supporting imperialism despite Communists being the most anti-imperialist or it not being compatible with the national question when Communists have always advocated for the self-determination of native peoples.
From an outside perspective it reflects very badly on American Communists that this was even a debate. It shows the infantile nature and petty bourgeois radicalism present within Communist circles in the United States and shows that a lot of work has to be done towards building a mass party which can win over the working masses and take power. The rest of the world needs American Communists to take power, the boot of American imperialism can only be freed from the neck of the world when the Communist party wins the hearts and minds of the masses and from there victory can only be assured. However this can never happen while you dismiss the masses as ‘reactionary’ and ‘settlers’ or refer to the landmass that is materially known to millions of people as America, as ‘Turtle Island’.
If you are not patriotic for something you are not a Communist. You are liberal with a red mask who has a calvinistic depraved moralistic worldview. Now it is understandable if Native American or Black people don’t support the American flag, but the vast vast majority of Americans identify strongly with the American flag and Communists support the self determination of Native American tribes as per the National Question as well as for the Black Belt if they so please.
There is no contradiction between patriotism and support of the national question and the nationalism of the oppressed. There is no contradiction between patriotism and internationalism. There is no contradiction between patriotism and anti-imperialism in fact anti-imperialists are the only real patriots. Revolutionary defeatism is the manifestation of patriotism Communists must take in America as the wars of aggression are hurting the people of the world and neither are they helping the American people, they are enriching a few parasites at the expense of the rest of the world. Us Marxist-Leninists want our paper tiger, reactionary, imperialist government to lose and we want its enemies to win, we also do anti-war action (and expose the truth) in the imperial core better than the so called Third-Worldists (who out of infantilism reject American workers). We do this while building up a revolutionary movement as we are actually genuine. Finally to state the obvious there is no contradiction between Communists and patriotism, in fact Communism is the most true expression of Patriotism and love for one’s own people.
The reason the patriotism debate is so important is because we defend China and other anti-imperialist states.
The U.S. is doing everything it can to demonise these states to the public because they know they are losing, it is because of this that in the coming years as we get out to the masses more and more that they will call Communists ‘Un-American’ for supporting anti-imperialist states. This is the reason that the feds are working overtime to make sure that the anti-patriotism side of the debate gets pushed as much as possible and it is because of this that we must distinguish ourselves from the slime and show how we are patriotic for the people and want to improve things and show how this is in no way contradictory to supporting anti-imperialist states. We cannot let the ruling class own the flag and let super-patriotism (jingoism and chauvinism, as opposed to proletarian patriotism), as Michael Parenti called it, dominate. We must desire to improve the conditions of the working masses and we must not let the ruling class control the narratives whether it be on what patriotism is or whether it is lies about anti-imperialist states.
To conclude, it is clear this should never have been a debate in the first place and now that this line has convincely won out it is clear that Americans must join the CPUSA and work towards improving it and building it into a mass party which can win over the masses. This is what the world needs the most!
I’m gonna paste a quote from reddit as it says it better than I could, of why no ML in the imperial core should be a “patriot”.
It’s very cringe to see “socialists” and “communists” defending the fucking “Declaration of Independence” and the “Constitution”. We must discard bourgeois terminology and bourgeois texts of the bourgeois American Revolution which spawned the most disgusting nation on the planet. American “patriot socialism” is incompatible with Marxism-Leninism.
The constitution was written by white supremacists in the intellectual tradition of liberalism. Language such as “consent of the governed” may sound very flowery and nice and it may look like the founding fuckers actually, seriously meant this, however this is not true at all. The disgusting imperialist, in his justification of the US colonisation of the Phillipines, said this in his speech in congress “the Declaration contemplates all forms of government which secure the fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — self-government, when that will best secure these ends, as in the case of people capable of self-government; other appropriate forms, when people are not capable of self-government. And so the authors of the Declaration themselves governed the Indian without his consent; the inhabitants of Louisiana without their consent; and, ever since, the sons of the makers of the Declaration have been governing not by theory, but by practice, after the fashion of our governing race, now by one form, now by another, but always for the purpose of securing the great eternal ends of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not in the savage, but in the civilized meaning of those terms — life according to orderly methods of civilized society; liberty regulated by law; pursuit of happiness limited by the pursuit of happiness by every other man.” Albert J beveridge, “Our Philippine Policy,” speech to the United States Senate, 9 January 1900.
In the text he basically says that “consent of the governed” doesn’t apply to the Phillipines because they are racially inferior, and the founding fuckers, who didn’t explicitly say this in their writings, actually followed this racial superiority term as evidenced by their genocide and forced conquests against Native American Indian nations. This man is a disgusting imperialist, but his interpretation of the declaration of independence and constitution is correct in that these “texts” are bourgeois and racist tools of domination and do not “enshrine” any human rights at all.
As socialists and communists, we must discard these bourgeois texts and bourgeois founding fuckers as any sort of reference point and revile them for their imperialist nature. Instead we must refer to the works of Marx and Engels and many other socialist thinkers and revolutionaries who have genuinely given precedence to the workers of the world and have always fought against the reactionary and capitalist forces of racism, sexism, imperialism, genocide and unending exploitation.
You say ‘Instead we must refer to the works of Marx and Engels and many other socialist thinkers and revolutionaries’. In which case I implore you to look at this masterpost:
Here are a selection of quotes from this in relation to the constitution, American revolution and revolutionary figures:
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world” - Karl Marx
“We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?” - Karl Marx
“The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. This does not mean that the American people have an original sin that they must be cleansed of by fire and destruction. The illegitimate state shall be destroyed, not the people” - Karl Marx
“In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the Communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat…” - Friedrich Engels
“This party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to the them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans” - Friedrich Engels
“[The] War the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery; The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition [which] is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the civil war in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the ‘destruction’ of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” - V.I. Lenin
“The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires…” - V.I. Lenin
“But people cannot live together, for lengthy periods unless they have a common territory. Englishmen and Americans originally inhabited the same territory, England, and constituted one nation. Later, one section of the English emigrated from England to a new territory, America, and there, in the new territory, in the course of time, came to form the new American nation. Difference of territory led to the formation of different nations” - (J.V. Stalin, Marxism & The National Question)
“Hitlerites are not patriots since they invade other countries and destroy other cultures; Hitlers come and go, but the German people and German State remain” - J.V. Stalin
“American exceptionalism is posturing that America is exempt from the general laws of historical development” - J.V. Stalin
“The government of the United States represents, as its army also does, the finances of the United States. But these finances do not represent the North American people; they represent a small group of financiers, the owners of all the big enterprises… who also exploit the North American people. Clearly they do not exploit them in the same manner that they exploit us, the human beings of inferior races… for we have not had the good fortune of being born from blood, Anglo-Saxon parents. But they do exploit and divide them, they too are divided into black and whites, and they too are divided into men and women, union and non-union, employed and unemployed” - Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
“All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” - (Ho Chi Minh, The Vietnamese Constitution, in a direct quote from the American Constitution)
“I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colours in the world, whether white, black, yellow or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practised by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing agression against and menacing the overwhelmingly majority of nations and peoples of the world. We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than 10 percent of the 3,000 million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that with the support of more than 90 percent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end” - Mao Zedong
“The United States, had first fought a progressive war of independence from British imperialism, and then fought a civil war to establish a free labour market. Washington and Lincoln were progressive men of their time. When the United States first established a republic it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries. Now the American people need to struggle for liberation from their own monopoly capitalists” - Mao Zedong
“The U.S. government still has a veil of democracy, but it has been cut down to a tiny patch by the U.S. reactionaries and become very faded, and is not what it used to be in the days of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. The reason is that the class struggle has become more intense. When the class struggle becomes still more intense, the veil of U.S. democracy will inevitably be flung to the four winds” - Mao Zedong
“Washington, Jefferson and others made the revolution against Britain because of British oppression and exploitation of the Americans, and not because of any over-population in America” - Mao Zedong
“Society pushed us on to the political stage. Who ever thought of indulging in Marxism previously? I hadn’t even heard of it. What I had heard of, and also read of, was Confucius, Napoleon, Washington, Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration, the three distinguished Italian [patriots] - in other words, all those [heroes] of capitalism. I had also read a biography of Franklin. He came from a poor family; afterwards, he became a writer, and also conducted experiments on electricity” - Mao Zedong
"The U.S. flag is your flag, you cannot allow the U.S. ruling class to own the flag. The working class of the U.S. must fight for the flag and once socialism is established it is up to the workers to decide what they want to do with flag and the U.S. as it exists - (Fidel Castro, Addressing a group of students who did not want to associate with their flag while people from other countries sat next to theirs)
“The Revolution had therefore set the benchmark against which future generations of Americans - men and women, white and black, rich and poor - would measure their standing. Not only that: in its own time, it proved to be the curtain-raiser on a new epoch of world revolution. For, in the year following ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, defeated a military coup, and unleashed the French Revolution” - (Neil Faulkner, Chapter 8: The Second Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions, pp 123, A Marxist History of the World)
“‘Down with U.S.A.’ means down with the ruling class. It means death to the American politicians currently in power. It means death to the few people running that country; we have nothing against the American nation” - Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei
“Earlier, the bourgeoisie presented themselves as liberal, they were for bourgeois democratic freedom and in that way gained popularity with the people. Now there is not one remaining trace of liberalism. There is no such thing as “freedom of personality” any more, - personal rights are now only acknowledged by them, the owners of capital, - all the other citizens are regarded as raw materials, that are only for exploitation. The principle of equal rights for people and nations is trodden in the dust and it is replaced by the principle of Full rights for the exploiting minority and the lack of rights of the exploited majority of the citizens. The banner of bourgeois democratic freedom has been flung overboard. I think that you, the representatives of communist and democratic parties must pick up this banner and carry it forward if you want to gain the majority of the people. There is nobody else to raise it. (Stormy applause.)” - Stalin
If the declaration of independence has racist parts of it. Then we just ignore that. We are patriotic because we like the Good parts. We like the bit about freedom of religion and expression. We can See flaws in the things we are patriotic about BUT we can still enjoy the beauty in them and the things we like and love about them.
Also I love the bit about “bourgeoise texts”
MARX QUOTED ADAM FUCKING SMITH and hundreds of other bourgeoise Economists because some of their observations were correct and he formed his beliefs based on reading all those works, He found the GOOD in those documents, just like we find the GOOD in the declaration of indpendence.
There is no equating the “nationalism”/ patriotism of oppressed nations, and that of imperial core nations. Countries like the US, germany, and England all had “left” nationalists who supported their empires because of the benefits that imperialism brings to core-nation workers.
As an ML, I can say without hesitation that Marx was 100% wrong on the american revolution as being a “anti-imperialist” movement. The key issue was westward expansion / conquest of Indian territories, which the US founding fathers wanted to continue, while the brits at that time opposed.
From zak cope
For Lenin, superprofits derived from imperialism allow the globally predominant bourgeoisie to pay inflated wages to sections of the (international) proletariat, who thus derive a material stake in preserving the capitalist system:
In all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting “gain” from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of “their own” country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain super-profits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution.
There are several pressing reasons why the haute bourgeoisie in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis. Economically, the embourgeoisement of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital’s expanded reproduction. Politically, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government. Militarily, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories. Finally, ideologically, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits imperialism brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.
In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:
At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies—the yellow, black, and red colonial people—and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist “fatherland.”
Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:
I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread!” “bread!” and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
I am not very familiar with theory behind this topic, because as a westerner never have i heard Communists self-refer to as patriots. However, in WWII my country was liberated by patriots, fighting under the greek flag and the red flag of Communism. It was not the national army that fought against Germans first and British afterwards, but the Peoples’ Army, under the lead of the Communist Party. Not everybody in those militias was a communist, yet he found himself there, instead of the national army. This wasnt by chance of course, unless we consider people stupid. (the mainstream propaganda on that matter is that both armies were recruiting people against their will - what a joke!). A lot of things followed the defeat of People’s Army back then and communists were heavily percecuted for many years afterwards, as well as their ideology. Patriotism was replaced by nationalism and was connected with military parades, fiestas, nationalist speaking and thousands of blue-white flags, until today. Now i understand why. Because the way i see it, indeed you cannot be a communist if you are not patriot first, meaning to care about the real well being of your people and their independence from any external enemy. From all the things that Communists lost in the country, the right to self-refer to as patriots is the most hurting one. We should NEVER again let the enemy take our words and their meaning, to which we give real flesh and blood. Because it is also about that. Thank you for reminding.
" “Declaration of Independence” and the “Constitution”. We must discard bourgeois terminology and bourgeois texts of the bourgeois American Revolution." taken from the comment below.
It is not bourgeois terminology. It is that bourgeois hijacked the meaning of these words, applying to them their own totally distorted reality. But these words came out of the struggle of people who were feeling like that. It is the most serious defeat to give up your own wording. On the contrary, you ought to give them your own meaning. How Communists mean patriotism. Have you noticed how systematically our slogans are stolen and distorted by the bourgeoise? In greece during the 80s the demsoc party was elected using the same slogans as the Communist Party. It is because these words speak to peoples’ hearts and not by mistake. Havent you noticed what happened to words like liberty and democracy? Have you noticed how only the bourgeois coin all the time weird new terms that nobody understands? The fight has always been about this, as well. I believe we should reclaim them back, give them their meaning in action and do not let people forget about it again.
This is telling, esp the comments.
There are two strains at work here.
The Exclusionary: ‘If it’s not pure enough, get rid of it/them!’
And the inclusive: ‘Sure, not all perfect. This and This are bad, but this other part is great! We should do that part, and not the bad parts.’
This shows up in things like Lincoln, and modern Russia.
“Sure, lincoln owned slaves and was racist. So was damn near everyone. But he was progresssive for his time, improved the lives of the working class, and did these good things. So we should uphold him as generally one of the good bits of our history.”
"Sure, Russia is capitalist now. But they are a strong anti-imperialist force, and worth supporting for all the good they do, even if they are not communists.’
vs:
“Lincoln owned slaves. He was a racist white guy. Fuck him.”
“Russia is capitalist, imperialist, not communist. Fuck them.”
One of these two approaches builds, one tears down. You can guess which will win.
