Link to the article it's responding to: https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-american-58299798
This article was not convincing. What Popuchet seems to be missing is that unlike Russia or Vietnam or even Peru, the United States was founded by the bourgeoisie and slave holding class, and only exists through that lens. Russia existed as an empire and a society and ethnicity for a long time, and even states in Latin America like Peru were not founded with the explicit purpose of genociding natives and acquiring more wealth, as those crimes mostly predate the founding of Latin American states. Not so for the United States, which was an explicit imperial project that engaged in these crimes wholesale. The people of the United States have a gloriously militant working class history that absolutely should be leveraged, but to be patriotic over a state whose entire history is dripping with blood the world over? Nah fam, not me. We can build something more inclusive and powerful than American patriotism by appealing to the past and working class heroes like John Brown, Nat Turner, Huey Newton without having to become patriots for a state and a culture whose entire existence is predicated on death.
I mean, it's just bad on every level. It ignores the tensions created in the USSR by needing to implement socialism in one country (a problem that no revolutionary movement within the US should be concerned with, because revolution in the United States would be cognate to revolution in Germany, not Russia) and completely disregards the harms that came from mixing Russian nationalism with Marxism-Leninism (namely that Russian nationalism survived. ML government, not so much), regardless of the necessity. Moreover, it makes no answer to the question of socialist internationalism or the artificiality of the nation-state. Instead, it presumes that to care for one's neighbor means one must care for the construct of their nationality, instead of caring for their humanity. Nothing could be less Marxist than the embrace of national identity over humanism. Worse, it embraces the liberal delusion that "patriotism" is different from nationalism.
There is no such thing as patriotism. Patriotism is nationalism with better PR. It is the thin film of "but not like those guys!" on top of the same philosophy that makes a nation-state identity into the earliest and most toxic form of fandom. It comes in no form that is not a reinforcement of nationhood over class. It substitutes national-chauvinism for international solidarity.
Likewise I think this is mostly arguing about labels and I'm sure Popuchet would agree with what I just said above and just say that what I'm describing is patriotism which uh ok but I disagree. Per this:
To be a patriot does not need to be realized through caricatures, but simply a devotion to your people and building a progressive future for them.
Personally I'd argue that the historical context of the American Revolution was that of a bougeoise revolution against late-stage feudalism, which is an overall positive step in the progression of Humanity. This revolution resulted in the expansion of suffrage from the British mixed-monarchy system where the dominant power of the State was in the hands of the aristocracy whom inherited the right to vote through their inbred blood whereas the bougeoise could only fume at their powerlessness - to that where the bougeoise wielded full power of the state for the first time.
Of course what they did with that power is pretty dogshit to say the least, but hey, every successive system of production is born with the birthmarks of the old system.
So first, I'd like to wholeheartedly reject this Hegelian progressive historical view of "human development" as Marx did later in life and argue that the American revolution was not by any means a "positive step in the progression of Humanity." Under what circumstance is the total destruction of millions of lives and countless cultures at all positive or progressive? How can we possibly claim the foundation of the United States, which has kept millions in bondage around the globe something that has progressed humanity on iota? We will spend centuries, millennia even, undoing the damage that the American revolution and its consequences have done to this planet. The potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the tribal democratic confederacy of the Iroquois, the waterworks of the Pueblo Indians, these are far more progressive than anything the United States has produced and are examples of systems we can hope once again to emulate, all of which were stamped out.
Second, the bourgeoisie in the United Kingdom by and large were the aristocracy, and therefore were already in control of the British state long before the American Revolution. This is partially why capitalism in the modern sense came from the United Kingdom. All the American Revolution is change the hands of control from the British bourgeoisie to a local American one. And the expansion of American democracy in 1830 came part and parcel with the expansion of slavery and the genocide of native peoples.
Finally, the bourgeoisie have been in control of states for some time before the American Revolution. Venice and other Italian city states were bourgeoisie-controlled polities. The United States of the Netherlands was a bourgeoisie controlled state as well, with only a nominal alliance with the House of Orange. In fact, the "secret sauce" of the West's success and why capitalism was able to expand all across the globe, indeed the part of the definition of capitalism itself (according to some historians like Braudel) is when the state becomes identified with and amenable only to the needs of capital. It is only when the state falls into the hands of the bourgeoisie that capital is unleashed to spread unchecked across the globe, and that had been going on for long before the American Revolution.
All these people trying to retroactively rescue the conceptions of America as progressive from the 19th century all ignore the fact that what made America actually exceptional was not democracy, plenty of societies around the world had as much or more, it was free land. The USA and Canada were the one place you could go from being a serf or tenant farmer to actually owning land* and become something like an aristocrat. That is GONE, and the replacement for it, a suburban lifestyle and the job to support it*, is also GONE. America is not fucking good or special or more progressive today even on its own terms. As a trans person I can say that the only way it is more 'progressive' for us is in it's sheer incompetence of construction and inefficiency that lets some of us slip through the cracks of oppression that you see in other countries. America is a fucking shithole, that were it not for the giant pile of imperial lucre that it accidneted its way into after the second world war, would be a complete poverty riven basket case; not just a partially poverty riven basket case.
Racial and ethnic restrictions may apply, actual freedom and rights sold separately. Please see small print for further conditions, no refunds.*
Late to the party on this post but I agree with and appreciate the succinctness in which you’ve made the point.
Patriotism seems like it requires myth making, not materialism. (I'm also not an academic, tell me I'm wrong and I'll probably believe you.)
Maybe it would be easier for me to stomach pro USA patriotism arguments if I had never been a part of the imperial Army of the USA, but its really difficult for me to actually "want" to play the part of patriot after being where I've been, seeing what I've seen, smelling what I've smelled.
Maybe someday, far into a future where whatever the USA becomes addresses is past horrors honestly and its people actively change their culture to make those horrors something is in fact, something that "only happened in the past" while having become a better people in the process would I think it could be acceptable to be a "patriot."
In fact, patriotism and nationalism do have different meanings, the former (2) places its loyalty to the people of the country...
I don't see this as much of a practical distinction.
If your essay's title includes the sarcastic depiction of its subject as non-Marxist, it is not a comradely response.
Many on the anti-patriotic left raise their qualms with the growing discussions of patriotism in the communist movement, citing red herrings such as bourgeois nationalism, imperialism and the history of colonialism to encapsulate why the United States is uniquely incapable of reconciliation - why socialist principles used in imperial and settler colonial countries of the 20th century are incapable of practice in the United States. This critique is reminiscent of Jay Lovestone’s argument regarding capitalism in the U.S. to which led to the phrase coined by Stalin ‘American Exceptionalism’. Often these days, we use this term to describe the imperialist class and their double standards of law and democracy, but lest we forget this term found its birth against a faction in the Communist Party USA who thought the United States was too exceptional of a case for basic communist principles to be applied to. I fear the anti-patriotic left mirrors this error.
Now you too can cackle like a mad person whenever a hog talks about American exceptionalism in a positive light. Because it's literally historical fact our big lovable boy :stalin-cig: coined the phrase "American exceptionalism" and not the Marquis De Lafayette.
Citation: Jay Lovestone was a former prominent figure in CPUSA during the time of Comrade Forester who argued that, during the 20s right before the great depression, that America was too wealthy, rich, and had such a strongly entrenched bougeoise that it was impossible for the Communist movement to gain any ground.
J.Stalin told Lovestone that he's full of shit and a right-opportunist who thinks that America is uniquely exempt from historical materialism and said he should either correct his anti-communist perspective or leave the Party.
And then the great depression happened, Lovestone and his people formed a faction and split from the party, and down the road Jay Lovestone joined the fucking CIA as an anti-communist expert.
The lesson Kayla here is pointing out, is much like how Comrade Stalin looked upon the past and drew the conclusion that "History shows that there are no invincible armies." When the Nazi machine was portraying itself as an unstoppable juggernaut, we should understand that History shows us there are no immortal empires.
America is not exceptional. And America will one day fall. How that happens is up to whoever seizes the vanguard role to guide the people towards the future.
The absolute gall to cite Lenin on "The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" and present him as on the side of "patriotic socialism". I mean look at this shit: (emphasis my own)
Imperialism means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of the world by a handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between the latter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations; it means a period in which the masses of the people are deceived by hypocritical social-patriots, i.e., individuals who, under the pretext of the “freedom of nations”, “the right of nations to self-determination”, and “defence of the fatherland”, justify and defend the oppression of the majority of the world’s nations by the Great Powers.
That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism. It is from this division that our definition of the “right of nations to self-determination” must follow, a definition that is consistently democratic, revolutionary, and in accord with the general task of the immediate struggle for socialism. It is for that right, and in a struggle to achieve sincere recognition for it, that the Social-Democrats of the oppressor nations must demand that the oppressed nations should have the right of secession, for otherwise recognition of equal rights for nations and of international working-class solidarity would in fact be merely empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy. On the other hand, the Social-Democrats of the oppressed nations must attach prime significance to the unity and the merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations; otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations.
US leftists I am once again asking you to get your shit in order, what an absolute waste of attention span this was.
Commies and giving their writings incredibly long titles
:they-were-comrades:
I had to read it a few times to make sense of it.
Patriotism is great! If you've already sacrificed your humanity towards the people who have suffered the most from capitalism/nationalism. Actually, patriotism sucks, and makes you look like a loser. fuck that stupid shit. God damn america
I was sad to see them get into this shit. I’ve never listened to any of their stuff but Sina Rahmani had a recent episode of The East is a Podcast with them on, and it was really my first exposure
Guessing he’s regretting it now, that sucks lol
I’m not going to read any of this but be aware that left inhaler patriotism is both bad and John brown’s actual ideology, it’s a ploy that we turned away from because of Lenin’s 21 points I think
