I didn't even watch the video, but there's a lot of pure ideology going on in this thread. Too many fart huffing liberals for me to dunk on myself.
nationalism based around a white settler colonial state only ends in racial supremacism. you can't untie the US from the absolute cold hard material reality the land it is on was stolen in an ongoing racially motivated genocide, slavery, and the concept that land was willingly given by God for white people to take as their natural destiny. the entire concept of the united states must be eradicated and have something new built in its place, born out of those contradictions that has learned from them and doesn't fucking mythologise them in romanticism
A nation that has spent its entire history sowing toxic divisions between the Native Americans, the Black chattel slaves, the "white" working class, migrant laborers, genders, sexual orientations, religions, etc. with the specific aim of undermining class solidarity and internationalism.
:is-this:
Is this a symbol of the global proletarian struggle?
you can't say country bad because then the reactionary white people will get mad :(
we simply just have to accept white settler states and their entirely false founding myths of freedom. we need red-brown bipartisanship :maybe-later-kiddo:We wouldn't want to alienate all the extreme nationalist chuds from our labor movement! Alienating people of color and the entire LGBTQ community by pretending that America has been anything but horrible to them? Meh, whatever, how many of those are there anyway?
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Pretty cringe, but I do wanna point out that Parenti talked about "Superpatriotism vs Real Patriotism," positioning his position as "Real Patriotism." It's very lib but I guess it could be used to pipeline :shrug-outta-hecks:
GOOD post
I think it's important that there is a distinguished difference between patriotism and nationalism. I will admit most US patriotism stuff gives me a knee-jerk reaction to assume it's bad, typically because it is. But at the same time, I'm proud to have grown up or learned from American comrades. I got love for all comrades around the world, many people are trying to improve things in many different ways and I respect that. There are plenty of people who hate much of America but still have solidarity and love with their neighbors, friends and family, culture and art. It's just the vast majority of force fed patriotism goes directly against my ideals.
The republic is something that's important to any socialist project. America had one at some point, but it's kinda died in favor of a diffuse federation of states with a supreme capitalist bureaucracy in charge of all the currency and labor armies/real armies.
You need some form of love of your fellow worker through a shared myth of the republic, but the issue with America is that any alternative myth has been totally excised from mass consciousness. There is no working class hero, there is no just war, there is nothing but slavery and consumption backing our shared mass consciousness.
I didn’t even watch the video
ngl I'm pretty sick of seeing this kind of shit in online left communities although I suppose it's to be expected of online communities in general considering how their platforms are designed. I watched the video and also the Parenti one and what they say comes across as pretty reasonable. These are good faith actors putting forth a reasoned argument and yet people just shit on them without even really engaging with any of their points.
I gave him a good 30 seconds or so and he started talking about how we're not gonna get fascist class traitors on board with our movement by saying death to America. Yeah, no shit. We're not going to get them on board with any socialist project, regardless of how much you pretend there's something salvageable about the United States. The idea that we can simply hang an American flag up in the background of our socialist monologues and get the support of subhuman chuds is utterly laughable and naive. There's nothing these chuds hate more than liberals, and liberals actually do love America and all its racist, genocidal tyranny. How is pretending to love America going to win them over?
:this:
We've got a better message in saying everything is fucked than trying to do the "omg america so good, but why can't we be a little less racist".
If a socialist is to succeed electorally, they either have to run as a Republican and convince them they're fighting for conservatism/"the working class" or go entirely scorched earth on people's perception of contemporary and past America.
I'm convinced that all you need to do to win over enough republicans to win in the general is to torch all of their other systemic bogeymen. Google IS trying to control your thoughts. The media IS liberal, i.e. protecting viewership by not being overtly racist, but also not supporting anything that benefits people over corporations. Sympathize with the anti-vax dipshits by saying they're right to mistrust big pharma. Place all of the problems with homelessness, inner city education, housing & tuition costs, and crime squarely on the liberals.
Take whatever it is the right-wing media machine is getting people pissed about, agree, get pissed about it too, then direct blame from marginalized people to liberals and wealthy capitalists.
Do socialism, be mad, blame libs.
If a socialist is to succeed electorally, they either have to run as a Republican
Is there any way this works, or turns out well?
or go entirely scorched earth on people’s perception of contemporary and past America
Look at how much shit Bernie caught for comments as mundane as "Cuba has good healthcare and education." Is tripling down on that approach going to work?
It's not about appealing to chuds, it's about appealing to people who might actually be persuadable, but who aren't currently leftists. There are lots of folks out there who are receptive to all sorts of leftist ideas but balk at something as "tame" as calling Iraq and Afghanistan imperial wars.
If we had decades, maybe we could bring a decent chunk of non-chuds around to the idea that there are precious few things the U.S. has to be proud of. But we don't have the luxury of time, and it's not absolutely necessary to have that at the core of a socialist movement. That can be worked out after we figure out how to get some appreciable amount of political power (and then it'll probably be far easier).
There are lots of folks out there who are receptive to all sorts of leftist ideas but balk at something as “tame” as calling Iraq and Afghanistan imperial wars.
Then they'd better learn. Liberals are not my comrades.
We can shit on libs all we want, but we can't run from the fact that we need to convince millions of them to see things our way if we want a snowball's chance in hell at getting anything significant done.
We need to get the "mass" part of a mass movement from somewhere. So where are we getting the bulk of people we'll need to seize state power (by whatever means you prefer) if we're writing off all the libs from the jump? Keep in mind that Bernie leaned hard into activating people who aren't ordinarily political, and while that had some success it wasn't close to enough by itself.
Almost every single person here was a lib at some point, and not a single one of us arrived here by leftists coddling us and saying that actually it's okay to be in favor of genocide.
ok i tried to watch it but the american flag hanging in the background burned my retinas so i had to turn it off sorry
Man as much as I love the old-school CPUSA imagery from the 40s of a "patriotic" communist USA with cool communist flags for every state... it's just not possible within the framework of a state founded on settler-colonialism. It's nice to think about but it's neither desirable nor, crucially, practicable.
I'm gonna break a bit from this thread since I think there's a distinction to be made from the USA and just the vague notion of "Americans". One traces its lineage directly to a capitalist, settler-colonial experiment that has proven it cannot remotely change its underlying nature, while the other is an amorphous concept of a group that implies entirely different things to different people. We can reframe it to mean something else entirely, and also point out the inherent hypocrisy in how the usual American "patriotism" treats its actual people.
You can look at other historical examples. The Bolsheviks didn't create a "Soviet Russian Empire", but they did create the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. They didn't glorify the concept of Russia's pre-Socialist history, but they did adopt symbols and bits of the past they came to appreciate or even identify with (why else would they wear pointy wool head kettles?). This isn't to say they were perfect in breaking with the past, since remnants of "Great Russian" chauvinism still persisted throughout the Union's history, but such cases could be understood and approached properly within the USSR, as opposed to the Russian Empire. Same could be true in a hypothetical socialist society in place of the US.
Regardless of how any of us personally feel about it, this country's obsession with patriotism isn't going to change, but it will bend and fold to whatever direction depending on the material circumstances, just like it did for countries leading up to socialist revolutions. Attempts at coopting patriotism can and should be made, not only to gain legitimacy in the eyes of Americans but to also take the bite out of rhetorical attacks coming out of reactionaries. Still, there are lines to be drawn. I sure as hell wouldn't try to co-opt Washington or Jefferson like the CPUSA did, for example. And there are plenty of other symbols to rally behind that aren't long-dead, slave-owning white men (the Torch of Liberty, for instance).
I think the major hurdle lies in the differences between the national character of the Russian empire and the USA. The former was comprised of Russia itself, which included a core axis of what even counted as "Russia" in the first place (Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev), alongside its colonial holdings in central and eastern Asia, all of which directly bordered Russia. The USA is a settler colonial project, started in large part by the British Empire, Spain, France, and the Netherlands sprinking a bit of their own character, built on lands originally occupied by other nations of peoples displaced and killed for its formation, replacing them with foreign white settlers in their place. Therein lies the key difference and contradiction with the USA's national character, in that it gives no representation to those displaced peoples and never did. It would have been a very different national character if indigenous nations were annexed but still recognized and allowed some degree of autonomy in the same way Poland and Finland were under the Russian empire. Instead, these nations were torn out, its peoples killed and rendered extinct, or flung to the far reaches of the most harsh and unlivable parts of the territory and prevented them from leaving. There cannot be any meaningful national character until after decolonization has begun and a new national identity, one no longer gloating and profiting over the graves of countless nations, has been established.
All of the obvious imperialism ignoring aside, isn't this the guy who shits on the squad constantly for ftv? How does that work into the whole, working within the mechanisms that already exist thing? Can't expect to have m4a or anything other remotely left legislation if you don't at least work with the few agreeable legislators when they are reasonable.
The only thing we could claim to be proud of are the ideals laid out in the declaration and constitution, which we've never even attempted to materialize.
It's now called Horse the Vote since the guy who came up with it now is literally shilling ivermectin.
Jesus christ that's awesome. Which kind of guy is this?
It's Jimmy Dore because of course it's Jimmy Dore!
Don't you get it? When it comes to flag-waving, jingoistic "white working class" folks, you have to meet them where they are and work with them to change the system from the inside. But when it comes to literally all existing progressive or left-leaning organizations or politicians or political projects, they're idpol neolib garbage and must be categorically rejected and burned down. That's how we achieve socialism!
1914 called, they want their war credits supporters back
I'd say American socialists should push American patriotism along the collective lines of the history of American workers. From telling tales of the Blair mountain battles to talking about the sheer grit of the railroad workers as they connected the people across the land together. It should be taking notes from Woody Guthrie's best known song "This land is your land", and encouraging honest working folks communalism while condemning the bourgeoise hollywood culture's personality cults that infects our society.
Of course that doesn't mean every fella needs to be twanging on a banjo and whistling through :british-maw: teeth. We can look at contemporary musicians like Bambu, Rocky Rivera, and Ruby Ibarra, Boots and The Coup, the snotty nose rez kids, and the many other socialist musicians.
We must wage war on the bourgeoise culture we exist in, not in the sense a "culture war" as the libs and reactionaries view it, but as one of the aspects of total class war - a war of workers culture versus bourgeoises culture.
America, but the finding fathers are Pete Seeger, Eugene Debs, and Malcolm X
I could imagine it in a generation or two, maybe, but for any mainstream political movement in the next 5-10 years, I'd bet you're right. It's way easier to tell people that the warm fuzzy feelings they have about "American ideals" are fine, but that we need radical change if we want to actually live by them, than it is to tell people that their country is shit and those ideals are shit and they should feel like shit until they destroy it. I'm also struggling to think of any successful socialist movement that's lacked a patriotic element.
"What, then, is patriotism? "Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. [Samuel] Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman..." -Anarchism and Other Essays
*sobs* "You can't just call anything you want patriotic!"
*points at seagull* "Patriotic."
The cpusa alright tried this years ago and never got anywhere sooo
They attracted quite a few members and peaked at about 80K during the 30s. They got nowhere because they squandered all of their potential on electoralism and simping for FDR.
