I think leftist movements in the imperial core will need to embrace at least some national symbols in order to go mainstream. We're 3-4 centuries into this whole national identity thing, the last of which involved wall-to-wall national propaganda and persecution of citizens who opposed the national identity project. Opposing all of that is a(nother) gargantuan task, but there's no material reason for people to buy into it (as you have with opposition to capitalism).
There's also no material reason for leftists to prioritize a conplete rejection of national identity. If everyone in the U.S. government was magically replaced with clones of Lenin, would it make any sense to oppose this new U.S. on the grounds that the flag was the same?
National identities also contain many positive concepts ("liberty and justice for all") that leftists can repurpose. Which is going to be easier: convincing some middle American from first principles that poor people deserve a decent life, too? Or leaning on "everyone says liberty and justice for all, we just take it seriously"?
No, I am already highly critical of even global south nationalism, I am never going to accept it in the imperial core. We are internationalists, there is no inherent difference between a french and english. We don't believe in national borders, folks. Please, we should stand for a new world and new concepts not try to use inherently reactionary images.
I agree, but you can't solve every problem at once. You can't jump from here to utopia. You have to take one step, then another, then another.
At each of these steps it makes sense to ask if we can be doing more, but we're not going to get real far if we if we don't critically support all those intermediate steps.
A comrade once explained Trotskys idea of the transitional program to me, I forgot the details, but I feel like I should inform myself again. It seems like the right concept fro this problem.
nah im disgusted by symbols that represent oppression of millions or billions of people. If you want a movement of confused reactionary chauvinistic white people go ahead but you're alienating all the people who actually matter. I wouldn't even entertain the thought.
case in point: this organization in the tweet above, and the caleb maupin crap show you that people who embrace the "national identity" of the west are weird creeps and losers. Moderately successful movements in the west didn't use the US flag.
Socialist patriotism is not about whitewashing your country’s history or national chauvinism. Socialists must oppose reactionary nationalism and jingoism which are a dangerous false path for working people.
Fucking patsocs.
whitewashing your countries history or national chauvinism.
Like the UK isn't currently complicit in bullshit like aiding in the genocide in Yemen. It's not a history of colonialism if you never stopped. :screm:
Fucking hell, further down the thread they claim that the chartists were an English cause and not a protest movement happening all over the UK.
Like as if the Newport rising wasn't important to winning the working class the vote.
Edit: literal next comment they try to claim that the miners' strike was an achievement of ENGLISH workers. :knifecat: where were the majority of these mines you fucking coward?
the miners strike was all accross the UK and many of the most famous events happened in Birmingham
So you understand why that account saying, "Britain’s Communist movement and the Miners Strike are just a few pieces of working class English heritage." is bullshit then?
That whole thread is listing off a bunch of historical workers movements (and a bourgeois revolution) and claiming all of them were the work of English workers alone.
they are English heritage as it is an event that happened in England the black death similarly is a piece of English heritage
St George's day is not an event celebrated in the rest of the UK it is only an English holiday thus only focusing on the English aspects of historical events on the day isn't a slight to the rest of the UK
But these lot are supposed to be communist and stripping away the prevailing material conditions of these historical movements in favour of nationalistic self praise flies in the face of Marxist historical analysis.
It's this antimaterialist nationalist ideology that gets the English revolution (a theocratic coup by some members of the English Bourgeoisie against a different group of English Bourgeoisie) listed in the same breath as Wat Tyler's peasant rebellion as struggles of the working class because they both happened in England.
The English revolution was a very complicated time and explaining it as a conflict between just the bourgeoise is as reductive as it is to do so with the French revolution
The theocratic coup you described was also the introduction of the political notion of fundamental human dignity regardless of position in the class heirarchy into English public life. The anarchist movement has it's origins in the puritan theology of the time. These were complicated historical events with a great deal of nuance and far reaching effects. Including the lifting of the ban on Jewish people living in England and the introduction of the right to not have the police cut body parts off of you.
Wat Tylers revolution with it's notion that if man is decended only from Adam and Eve then there is no natural distinction between lord and peasant could also and is attirbuted with contributing to the philosophical rejections of the aristocracy the bourgeoise used in their rebellion
The theocratic coup you described was also the introduction of the political notion of fundamental human dignity regardless of position in the class hierarchy into English public
Hard disagree here considering the suppression of the levellers and diggers, and the confiscation of land from Catholics carried out by the Puritans.
the introduction of the right to not have the police cut body parts off of you.
Except if you're Scottish or Irish.
the levelers were literally one of the factions in the parlimentarian army and were themselves puritans.
Also it is worth noting that the wars with Ireland and Scotland that followed were in no way breaks from the continual level of violence on those fronts before or after and that those wars were results of the Irish and Scots attempting to restore the Stuarts to power in England. The very same Charles the 2nd who went on to grant a charter to the transatlantic slave trade
They fought with the parliamentarians yes, but then under Cromwell their demands were ignored and those that continued to aggravate for them were either imprisoned or executed.
And napoleon brought back slavery and declared himself emperor yet people still glorify the french revolution. It all came to nothing and we had the Stuarts back soon enough continuing their bloodyminded repression but it was also one of the few times in English history where the human dignity of the everyday person came even slightly into the forefront of political sphere as a legitimate and worthwhile thing
Funny you should bring up the French revolution considering that Marx viewed it as a bourgeois revolution.
yeah they both were but there were other social factors going on in both revolutions as well as the conflict between aristocrat and bourgeoise
that is not a gotcha, marx considered the bourgeois revolutions a necessary and progressive step in historical development
Curiousity compelled me to see if they had anything to say on the saints day of other national saints.
Saint Patrick is the closest on 17th of March, nothing to say about occupied Ireland.
Next is Saint David's day on 1st of March, no Welsh flag, no importance of Welsh workers' heritage.
Posts start at 5th of December 2022 so no Saint Andrew's.
:soviet-hmm:
he aint kill no dragon it was just an unusually large lizard named frank who WAS INNOCENT. St George was a COP
the actual reason he's a saint is he was killed by the romans for refusing to arrest innocent people
St george is the patron saint of England and Palestine I see no harm in celebrating the day
“we hate our country”
It's more like "the country that currently exists here and the country we're trying to build here have so little in common that using symbols of the former to represent the latter would be peculiar." Although, optics-wise, I have no idea whether that's actually better.
Not that you can’t discuss changing these symbols and stuff, but foaming at the mouth at them this hard every single time when nobody else does that, especially not working people who’ve got more to worry about, is just weird.
This shit shows you fundamentally do not understand the UK. If the English flag is seen outside of sporting events it is assumed by pretty much everyone that that person is a racist gammon. It is synonymous with racism, the EDL and white supremacy. The majority of the UK finds flag shagging somewhat embarrassing at the best of times, let alone when it's specifically chosen flag shagging as a means of white virtue signalling.
The people that claim "English heritage" are white people that do not see anyone other than white anglos as English.
Are you from the UK? Or is this an american perspective? Because that would make sense given how fucking normalised flag shagging is over there. It's deeply embarrassing shit and a very large number of people elsewhere in the world cringe when they see people doing it.
You should ask yourself who the people waving this flag define as "English".
Fuck off patsoc. Go somewhere else and defend american communists waving the american flag, it's the same fucking thing. Seriously do not want to receive another message from you. Period.
Believe you pay infinite times more attention to those people than I do.
You are those people
:england-cool: :england-cool: :england-cool: :england-cool: :england-cool:
What people do you think waving the English flag is "getting on their side" ? And what people do you think it is alienating to? Given its usage outside of sports is regarded as racism.
I'll ask you again. Who do you think the people waving this flag define as "English" ?
but you can’t do it by calling the people who use them racist when they only use them because it represents their country and they’re not even thinking of the bad things it might symbolize
I don't think you quite understand how thoroughly the English flag is used to represent "England for the English" type of rhetoric. Outside of the sports context (the only justified use of it today) the people waving the English flag rather than the union jack are doing so to intentionally make a statement about being white, it is utilised in all cases as a dogwhistle for anglo-white English racism.
This is why "Who do you define as English?" is such an important question here. I guarantee you that someone with afro-caribbean ethnicity (quite common in the UK) or indian or pakistan ethnicity, but born in England, is not considered "real English" to the people who fly this flag. I stress the outside of sports part here.
i get you're well meaning, but outside of a major sporting event, it is seen as about the same level of far-right scumfuckery as the yank confederate flag
and i live in one of the poorest parts of the countryThey literally seceded and thus, weren't Americans
What, is there some kind of crippling shortage of vocabulary for racists in your country?
:michael-laugh:
the only people who care about the american definition are yanks
Yes, and that was during the period of time the other poster was referring to
It's just funny how Euros constantly call us morons for not knowing history and yet suddenly someone can come up with a hilarious misnomer like "Confederate Yankee" and they thinks they're the one that's right.
You see, the thing is that the English flag isn't actually used for anything other than sports. The Union Jack is used as the flag of the country, because the country is the United Kingdom.
This is what creates the unique usage of the English flag by racists.
This isn't something that is just an "internet forum" thing either. This is in the mainstream discussion regularly, year after year after year.
Here's a bunch of racists talking down a black man raising issues about this topic. Reminder that Farage is known to have drawn the National Front logo on all his schoolbooks in school so his reference to them in argument here is telling.
And we don't just have this discussion about the English flag, but the Union Jack too
I'm fucking bored of it to be honest I could dig up something that refers to this discussion year after year after year. But it is what it is...
In london sure in the countryside the english flag is just a fairly common symbol that doesn't mean much
I am in several orgs. Lick my taint. You're the one that COMPLETELY MISREAD the above comment.
And how is shagging the English flag not alienating to say, Scottish comrades who only this year saw parliament clamp down on Scottish sovereignty?
The Youth Communist League has made zero comment about Parliament stepping in front of Scottish Parliament rulings. I know very little about them (other than what I can gather from scrolling through their official social media) so on the ground activists may be a different issue, but I can imagine that it might be alienating to have this group that's going on about the importance of English patriotism after not saying shit about Parliament obstructing devolved powers.
well if their issue is with the union between scotland and england so I would assume that they would find the british flag more offensive as that is the flag specifically symbolising that
yes and the cross of st Andrew and some other lines to symbolise northern Ireland. The flag was designed by James the 6th of Scotland
Are these guys Trots? I tend to just assume all British communists are Trots
[We] must destroy the slanderous canard that 'the Communists are friends of every country but their own'. …We must prove that we love our country
No no no, the correct way to destroy that canard is to identify one country other than your own which you hate. Incidentally, in my case that country is England.
