Rev Left Radio - On Patriotism...

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

Alyson Escalante joins Breht to respond to arguments that the US left should embrace American patriotism. Together they discuss revolutionary v. reactionary nationalism, US history, settler colonialism, proletarian internationalism, Browderism, anti-imperialism, the CPUSA, tailism, accusations of ultra-leftism, and much more.  Outro Music: "U.S.A." by The Exploited ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we're going to do something a little different. Allison and I decided to kind of team up and put together a response to a debate that's going on. It's been going on historically, of course, but is really taken off on left social media in the last week. And that is this argument around patriotism, the use of patriotic aesthetics on the left, what is sometimes called red patriotism or proletarian patriotism. And basically, the argument is between whether this is a viable strategy to reach working class people or not. And that argument has been bouncing back and forth.

There's a lot of perspectives on this argument, but all Allison and I can do is try to engage with it in good faith. put together an honest response to it and articulate what we believe to be the principled Marxist and communist position on the topic as best as we can. And we think it's a worthwhile debate to have if it wasn't and if it was something that didn't have some sway with some amount of people on the Marxist left, it wouldn't even be worth addressing. But today we think it is worth addressing and we want to go through these arguments. And so, yeah, with that said, I'll just ask Alison and maybe up front the best thing to do here is just to sort of articulate what we want to accomplish with this episode and then what we are and are not saying because I think clearing the path

of some obvious and ready-made strawmen might be helpful as a starting point to this overall conversation. Totally. So I think at least how I want to approach this conversation, like Brett said, is in a pretty good faith manner, right? I don't think everyone in these debates are acting in good faith, but I think we should always strive to be doing that. we're going to try to do that, and we're going to lay out kind of some ground rule assumptions and arguments of what we are and are not saying. Just kind of get that out of the way up front. One thing I want to say is I don't think we are going to like give you the definitive Marxist answer here, right? Like we're two people who are going to have a conversation with each

other trying to work through some of this that hopefully can push you towards thinking through some of these questions as well. We're not going to give you everything you need. A podcast could never do that. But hopefully we can point you to some historical phenomena that are relevant and some contemporary perspectives that are relevant that then you can take to your organizations, to your affinity groups, whatever your organizational situation is, and work through collectively, right? We're just kind of here to intervene into debate that's happening among essentially Marxist public intellectuals and social media, and that is nowhere near the end-all be-all of the question. But we do feel like it is worth chiming in because we think that this is something that is

definitely picking up steam. And a lot of the conversations about it are happening in tweets at different people and in replies to each other. And that's just an inherently stupid way to have a conversation, because Twitter is not good for long-form argumentation and theory that Marxism demands. And we have a podcast, so it looks like we're going to use that. So with that said, that's kind of how I want to approach what we're doing here. And I want to real quick just start with a sort of list of here's what we are saying, here's what we're not saying. When we announced on social media that we were going to be doing an episode, talking about red patriotism, the history of Browderism, etc. We got a lot of responses kind of assuming we were making certain

arguments before we said anything. And I just want to clear up that we're not making a lot of those arguments, right? And so I'm going to kind of lay out what I have here. Seven, we are saying this. We are not saying this statements that can kind of set the groundwork. So to start, we are saying and we'll be arguing today that the concept of labor aristocracy has contemporary relevance and should be a part of discussions about patriotism today. So we will defend that concept. But we are not saying that every single worker in the United States is a member of the labor aristocracy. And I at least am not saying that all white workers are members of the labor aristocracy either. I think that would be far too simple of an assessment of things. So those are

two claims that we are not making, even though we are going to argue that the concept of labor aristocracy is a relevant concern. So the next, we are going to be arguing that the working class in the U.S. benefits in some specific ways from U.S. imperialism. But we are not. not going to argue that this means that their interests are 100% aligned with imperialism, or that there's no ways in which imperialism hurts them either, right? We are not going to be that reductionist either. We will also not argue that this benefit means there's no revolutionary potential whatsoever in the United States. That would be a cynical and defeatist position, in my opinion. Number three, we are arguing that settler colonialism is a relevant,

ongoing process of occupation and genocide in the United States. But we are not arguing that settlers constitute a class in the Marxist sense of the word, right? So that's not our claim, but we do think settler colonialism is an analytic that is necessary and a process that is still ongoing. Number four, we will be arguing that the theory of settler colonialism is a necessary theory that can be reconciled with Marxism. We will not be arguing word for word from Sakai's settlers, which is often how people treat this debate. I personally am not actually super influenced by Sakai or by settlers. I don't think it's the authoritative work on settler colonialism, and my influences are much more from contemporary indigenous Marxists

and communists who are integrating questions of settler colonialism into their analysis. So we are not going to be defending the entirety of Sakai's thesis or anything like that here, or telling you to read settlers. So number five, we will also be arguing that the history of broaderism as a phenomenon in the CPUSA, which combined revisionism, class collaboration, popular frontism, and patriotism is relevant to consider when we're discussing the question of communist patriotism. But we will not be arguing that those promoting American patriotism are quote-unquote Brouderists, as Browder doesn't exist anymore, and that's not a coherent faction within the CPUSA at the moment, or that they're indistinguishable from the politics of Earl Browder.

So we will say Browderism is a relevant consideration here, but you can't just slap that label in all contemporary patriotism, right? Number six, we will also be arguing that the history of Browderism shows the danger of patriotism as a communist strategy, while also acknowledging that Browder was following flawed directives that were coming from the common turn itself. So we will not be arguing that Brouderism was a unique problem to the historical or contemporary CPUSA. There was a broader issue producing Brouderism, and we are going to acknowledge that today as well. And then our final point is that we will be attempting to raise questions which can problematize the strategy of communist

is patriotism in America by considering the history of its implementation alongside questions of imperialism and colonialism. But we will not be diving into the personal views or lives of the many individuals who uphold patriotic viewpoints within communism as one, there are just too many people and too diverse. They're not represented in a single platform or anything like that. And that would also be a liberal form of criticism that would focus on ad hominem personal attacks instead of discussing and working through the politics, the history, the question of struggle. Our question here is not about the people who promote social patriotism as a theory, but rather

about the validity or lack of validity of patriotism as a broader strategy for communism. So those are kind of the ground rules of what we're doing up top here. I think it's important to lay them out because, again, we made a tweet simply saying we were discussing broaderism and revisionism, and we're very quickly accused of saying a bunch of things that we do not intend to say, in fact. So let's be very clear about the constraints of what we are going to say. these are the arguments we are making, these are the arguments we are not making, and we'll discuss them in detail and then get to some questions that we think we can all work through

together that can help us consider whether or not this idea of proletarian patriotism, red patriotism, social patriotism, what have you, is a theoretically and strategically sound concept. Yes, absolutely, well said, and that's really important as a starting point for the rest of this conversation. So having laid that out, having told you what we want to accomplish, what we are, and are not trying to say and do, I am going to now open up a basic argument. So when this topic came up on social media, lots of people responded from lots of different directions. And I wanted to at least launch a sort of opening salvo that lays on the table a bunch of threads that Allison and I will then pick up and go through for the remainder of this

episode. So this is just that opening salvo, if you will. Patriotism in a brutally violent, imperialist, settler colonial society built on slavery and genocide and maintained through racialized violence at home and abroad will be chauvinist and reactionary pretty much by definition. Embracing patriotism and waving the stars and stripes on the left will actually only alienate the colonized masses at home and the countless victims of Americanism abroad. America is not an abstract ideal. It is not merely geography and the people living on it. It is not silly putty in the hands of socialists to mold into whatever shape we want.

America is an ongoing settler colonial process initiated by white supremacists and proffered aristocrats. The founding of America was by and four-properied white men, a rising bourgeoisie, and as historian Gerald Horn has made clear in his book, the counter-revolution of 1776, its founding was in large part a reaction to the specter of the ending of chattel slavery in the British Empire. America is a project, an ongoing process of colonialism, imperialism, and of capitalist accumulation. From its founding to its current form, it stands militantly against everything that Marxists believe in and fight for. Globally,

it has drowned entire societies in blood, slaughtered our comrades, propped up fascist dictatorships on every continent and works to this day to put a violent end to any attempt by peoples anywhere in the world to build socialism. It invaded Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, hoping to murder that revolution in its infancy. It lent aid to the slave owners in Haiti to put down their slave revolts. It funded, armed, and trained right-wing death squads in Central and South America. And it threatened to blow up the entire planet to stop the spread of Marxism in the Cold War. In fact, every socialist movement that has ever existed since the founding of America, at home or abroad, has been met with American violence and bloodshed. To wave the stars and stripes as a socialist, in my opinion, is really to spit in the face of America's victims.

It is to spit in the face of Fred Hampton, of Asada Shakur, of Malcolm X. It is to wave the flag that flew over slave plantations, the trail of tears, and mass graves filled with indigenous bodies. It is the flag that flew over the irradiated corpses of babies in Japan, and Agent Orne poisoned children in Vietnam. As for the proletarian part of the proletarian patriotism, the ongoing project of America is to dismantle working class formations and militant unionism by any means necessary from the earliest days of American industrialization to the present moment,

from the Great Uprising of 1877 through the Pullman and Homestead and Haymarket Affairs strikes, to Blair Mountain and beyond. It helped to overthrow Mossadec in Iran, Allende in Chile, Sankara in Burkina Faso. It propped up the brutal Batista regime and tried to assassinate Castro hundreds of times. From the first red scare all the way through the rise of neoliberalism, the American project is fundamentally anti-working class to its core. It has weaponized nationalism and patriotism to obscure and defaying class politics

and proletarian internationalism. to bolster them. And this is why, in part, fascists today from the Patriot Front to the proud boys happily draped themselves in the American flag. Moreover, as we will discuss in this episode, the attempt to recuperate Americanism on the left is an already failed project. It's been tried. It's not a new or unique idea. It's objectively an historical failure. And we aim to prove that today. In short, it's an attempt not just to reinvent the wheel, but to reinvent an already broken wheel. A popular idea of the Red Patriot faction, if you will, on the U.S. left is that communist can and should embrace patriotism by embracing the radical tradition and history

of the United States. But here's the thing. The radical tradition and history here in the United States has always had to fight against patriots and flag waivers and America itself. From indigenous struggles to slave revolts to militant union uprisings to international anti-imperialist struggles is precisely the fight against America and everything it stands for that makes up the radical tradition, at home and abroad. And years of working in kitchens, at fast food restaurants, at gas stations, and at retail stores, has shown me, beyond any doubt, that the majority of colonized and working class masses here in the U.S. know that this system isn't run in their interests. They know these wars are not fought for their freedom, and they know intuitively

that this country is of by and for the ruling class and always has been. And on those occasions where a co-worker is a proud patriot, they are almost always, without fail, in my experience, either a naive liberal or a full-blown reactionary. The apolitical, and those who lean left intuitively, have no particular love for a country and a tradition that has robbed them of a future, that has placed them in low wage and precarious work,

that loads them up with debt, pays them starvation wages, denies them health care, pollutes their communities, excludes them from having a voice in how their own lives are run, and who, if they dare to take to the streets to protest these conditions, will sick their violent police force on them to beat them bloody and lock them in a cage. The red patriot political project, attached to the American project and not in fundamental conflict with it, can only ever really end up functionally as liberalism. The absolute best that a working-class patriotism could possibly produce, in my opinion, is something

like a Bernie Sanders campaign, which abandons anti-imperialist internationalism almost by definition. It certainly can't produce a revolution because for that you'd have to engage with the millions of poor and working class colonized in this country, the very historical victims of the flag these red patriots so eagerly seek to waive, and convince them to become patriots of an oppressor nation whose boot has been on their throats for centuries. Ultimately and lastly, the duty of revolutionaries is to unite the advanced, bring a, up the intermediate and, depending on the circumstances, either win over or isolate the backwards. It is not our duty to lower ourselves to the level of the intermediate or to join the ranks

of the backwards. That is a particularly noxious form of tailism, and it doesn't turn nationalists into revolutionaries. It alienates the victims of American nationalism, makes reactionary nationalists laugh and amusement, and makes a mockery of proletarian internationalism. Alison, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that is all extremely well said. I think especially the question of what is our task is important, right? Because this is at its core, I think a strategical question on a certain level. The people who promote the patriotic standpoint make these arguments about the fact that a huge chunk of America is already invested in American patriotism as kind of a starting point

and therefore it would be easier to use patriotism as a starting point in a way in to get to them. They also argue that anti-nationalist sentiment against the United States would be alienating to the working class. So there's this strategic question. I think you're right. The Marxist position, especially coming out of the Maoist tradition, has always been that we do not drop to the ideas of the masses, but rather we meet the masses where they are and through the mass line, bring them to a higher level of consciousness. This also precedes, you know, Maoism itself, right? It's hard to not look at Lenin's critiques of economism and miss the fact that Lenin believed that we needed to raise consciousness above the level at which it currently existed. So there are

clear reasons to believe that the job of communists is not just a sort of crass populism that would start with what the masses already believe and give them everything they want. It asks something of the masses as well, i.e., for them to become conscious of capitalism as a global structure and of imperialism as a global structure. And I think it is simply true to say that that is something that we need to address. Now, I do think up front it might be worth kind of thinking through one of the semantic questions that's at play here, which is the question of what precisely patriotism is and what an American patriot is patriotic about, right? So I do think we might want to raise this right here. The proponents of the patriotism perspective will generally

respond to a kind of argument like what you've made, Brett, by saying, well, we're not patriotic about the United States government, right? We are patriotic about the American people or something broader like that, right? They'll gesture towards this more abstract idea of Americanism. So they'll say, of course, we dislike American imperialism. Of course, we dislike what America has done abroad. But there's something else to America, the revolutionary tradition of it that is worth celebrating. And you gesture towards why that doesn't necessarily make sense, right? Referring to Gerald Horn's work, of course, but also referring just to the history of what that

revolution looked like. But I'm wondering if you'd be interested maybe in unpacking a little bit more, why there isn't this external revolutionary American tradition that can so simply be appealed to by patriots aside from appealing to the American government. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I guess I kind of said it in the argument itself, which is that the history, the radical tradition of America has always had within America, right, the indigenous struggles, the black struggles, the immigrant struggles, the working class struggles, has always had to go to war with the American system as it stands. And yes, you can say that there's a difference

between the American government and these people who fought against the government. But that flag, the American flag, is the symbol of the national bourgeois government. It is the symbol of that structure and that entire formation. So, you know, to say that on one hand, you know, you don't believe in the government and you don't believe in the system of capitalism that undergirds it, the economic, the political system. but on the other hand, to insist that we fly its flag and become patriots of a bourgeois nation, I think is sort of inherently contradictory. And I think it also speaks to the big difference between revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism.

And one good way to think about that, and I think is actually a Marxist Paul on YouTube who makes the point, is that if there is no oppression occurring specifically along national lines, then there is no basis for left-wing nationalism. Now, black nationalism is a thing precisely because, you know, I think the Marxists see black people, you know, new Africans in this context, as an oppressed nation. We see indigenous people within the U.S. borders as an oppressed nation. And so they have genuine claims to left-wing revolutionary nationalism. But a nationalism that picks up the aesthetics, the symbols, and the sort of framework of a bourgeois, brutal, imperialist, settler, colonial nation state, I think is antithetical to what we stand for.

What are your thoughts on that, Alison? I think it's extremely well said, right? And I think that it's important to recognize what you're gesturing at, which is that nationalism is not the default Marxist position, right? It's not that Marxists are in every context supporters of nationalism. Nationalism and national liberation, from the Marxist perspective, are supported on the basis of their relationship to anti-imperialism and anti-colonial struggle, right? So the reason that we adopt those positions is because of the importance of national liberation

in the struggle against colonialism, the struggle against imperialism as global phenomena. So I think you're correct, right? There's no reason to think that American nationalism is uniquely positioned in a way to be able to intervene into that struggle in a positive way. But I also think you're gesturing at something that I think is worth thinking about, which is maybe abstract a little bit, but it's almost a semiotic question, right? What does the imagery of American imperialism mean? What does the imagery of the American flag mean?

and is that something that we as Marxists are free to just make up in a libertarian free will manner? I don't think so, right? The American flag has a history. The images of American patriotism have a history. They are the flags that were flown as napalm was dropped on Vietnam. They are the flags that was flown during the bombing of Korea. They are the flags that was flown as we were making this one last drone strike killing civilians in Afghanistan this last month. This flag has a meaning in and of itself. And we are not just able to, to, as radically free agents, re-escribe meaning to political symbols that already have a context. There's a reason that around the world, those struggling against imperialism, burn the American flag. There's a reason that domestically, those struggling against police occupation of colonized communities,

burn the American flag, right? We are not simply free to just re-ascribe meaning to these symbols. Semiotics simply doesn't work that way, and it would be, I think, really kind of an idealist idea to believe that we could simply impose our ideal version of the meanings of these symbols onto a hundreds years long history that has already imbued meaning with them globally and domestically. Exactly. And I think that's a really important thing. You want to recuperate this symbol, but how does that symbol look to the people that we care about and we are on the side of, the indigenous people, you know, black folks here, but all across the world? I mean,

what do people in Iraq and Afghanistan to talk about timely incidences? think of the American flag? What do Palestinians think of the American flag? What do Vietnamese people think of the American flag? And what would it look like if you were at a left wing rally, right? And some people started coming up waving the American flag. What would you automatically think? You would think they are in reaction to the protest, that they're coming out to counter protest. And that weight, that reality that is intrinsically a part of that symbol, as you said, Allison, you can't just dismiss that. You can't just wipe all that history, all that context out of the way and just in a vacuum, reappropriate the symbol and turn it in

to something that is actually directly in opposition to what the symbol actually means historically and in context. So I do think that's important. And what we do in a situation where we live in a country that is like the U.S. and imperialist settler colonial nation is we embrace internationalism. And to Embrace internationalism means to fight against that very imperialist power that seeks to undermine it and drown it in blood whenever any other country or any other society around the world tries to build an economy and a political system that is antithetical to America's geopolitical and economic interests. Yeah, I think that's important. The one other thing that I think may be saying up top sort of to work with your argument a little bit more before we get into the details is in addition to kind of trying to say, like, oh, we're defending the revolutionary tradition in America, of the Black Panthers, these other groups, some among the social patriots, and we saw this historically with Earl

Browder did this, and it's a little less popular now, but you do see it. We'll talk about sort of like what they see as the bourgeois revolutionary tradition in the United States, right? So the revolution, the American Revolution, as a progressive force in history, or Lincoln as a progressive force in history, and they'll try to make an appeal to those. Do you want to comment maybe, again, this is where I think Gerald Horn's work kind of comes in a little bit on why that is a failed approach to understanding a revolutionary history in the United States. Yeah, I mean, Gerald Horner, even you can look at the work of somebody like Sylvia Federici who really challenges this idea that the rise of capitalism was in and of itself a revolutionary

and progressive force. It had revolutionary aspects for sure, but in the, especially in the Haitian revolution and, you know, to some extent in the French Revolution. In the American revolution, though, out of those three major bourgeois revolutions, I think it was by far the most reactionary. And obviously, I can't detail all the arguments from Gerald Horn's amazing work, the counter-revolution of 1776, but I urge people to go and read that. And once you do and engage with other thinkers in this realm and take a real stock of American history, the idea that it was wholly or even mostly, a particularly revolutionary or progressive force, I think, starts to fall apart very quickly.

And to raise up the genocidal, slave-owning leaders of a bourgeois revolution, and to say that they are part of our radical tradition, I think, is also misguided. And sometimes it obscures, like, by centering somebody like Abraham Lincoln, it obscures much broader historical processes that forced the hand of somebody like Abraham Lincoln or the entire system itself. It was like this contradiction, this crisis is intensifying, and whoever is at the helm of the nation state at that point is going to be forced to pick aside and play out that historical drama. But it's not the good heart or the well intentions or the inherent revolutionary radicalism and egalitarianism of Abraham Lincoln that caused the emancipation of the slaves. It was a long historical process marked by slave uprisings and revolts by the abolitionist movement more broadly.

and by the contradiction coming to an intensity that it otherwise and beforehand hadn't come to. And those are much broader than any one individual political figure. And of course, Lincoln himself, like all U.S. presidents, had very backwards, very white supremacist ideas and frameworks of thinking. So they are not particularly progressive figures. And again, I would say that when America as a society has been quote unquote progressive, it's because it's been forced to move in that direction from movement. coming from the bottom, challenging the very idea and the very hierarchy of America as a whole, not working with it or becoming a part of it.

Yeah, and I think that's a good point. In the context of Lincoln, right, I think, like, if we want to think about the revolutionary tradition that pushed Lincoln into the Civil War, right, we might think about the figures like John Brown, who took direct violent action to precipitate that crisis. And if we look at John Brown, we don't see someone who was, you know, necessarily framing himself as a patriot. John Brown's language around the United States was profoundly strong discussing the United States as a land whose sins could only be washed away with blood, right? There was a oppositional framework that was there. And if we also think about the many black abolitionists

and freed slaves who had escaped to engage in this kind of organizing as well, we didn't see those appeals to patriotism as the primary function there that precipitated that crisis. So again, when we find the actual revolutionary movement that is played historically, it has been opposition in nature towards American patriotism. Yeah. Well, do you want to move on and kind of go through the history of Browderism since we already laid those threads on the table early on? Yeah, I think that would be good. Okay. Yeah, you can start wherever you want and just sort of go through that history

and let people know what it is first because I think probably a lot of people might not be familiar with that term and then get into the history from there. Totally. So let's go ahead and hop right into that. So we're going to talk about the concept of Browderism as a broad perspective and also of Earl Browder as a figure. So to give you kind of just the most brief overview I possibly can. Earl Browder was the general secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1945 and the chairman of the CP USA from 1934 to 1945. So Browder was in a leadership position for quite a significant amount of time. And the party under Browder took some strange and interesting directions that I think are relevant and worth considering here.

Browder is most notable for having pushed a sort of patriarchalier view of communism, putting forth the slogan, communism is 20th century Americanism, so this kind of tying of communism to Americanist values. Browder also, not originally, but eventually would end up kind of liquidating the Communist Party, arguing that it should exist more as a political organization and pressure group to push the ruling bourgeois elite in the United States in a specific context. He eventually pretty much completely capitulated to the Democratic Party, supporting FDR, who he had earlier seen quite negatively, and pushing the idea of a popular

front between progressive forces against fascism. We'll get into all of those details, but that's broadly who Browder was. Now, a question that apparently needs to be addressed is why is Brouder relevant? Why is the history of Earl Browder relevant? And I think it's worth being very clear about this. It is not because those who promote Red patriotism today are Browderis per se, right? Earl Browder is dead. Browder was expelled from the CPUSA, and his position was repudiated by the calm and turn eventually. So it's not quite accurate to say they are Browderous, but it's rather because Browderism represents an actual instance of red patriotism being put into practice. And as Marxists, our concern isn't just with abstract ideals, but seeing

how ideals have been put into practice in reality and what results that yielded. So Browderism gives us sort of a case study to parse through in order to determine what the strategy of red patriotism in the U.S. has looked like when it was put into practice. So this isn't to say that the endpoints of Browderism, the things that it resulted in in practice, are the same things that contemporary red patriots want to see happen, right? But it is to say that contemporary red patriots need to address the question of Browterism and need to address the fact that when this idea has been tried before, it resulted in a specific result. I don't think the history of Browderism is the final word on the question, but it is a relevant part of the history that I want us to think through a

little bit. So thinking through the history of Browderism a little bit more, and then we'll get into a quote from Browder at length. I think that's important to recognize that Earl Browder was not making a mistake in and of himself, right? So often when we talk about Browderism, we talk about the error that occurred in the CPUSA regarding class collaboration and patriotism, but we don't connect it more broadly with the fact that there were certain mistakes being made in the common turn as well. And so in order to kind of get to the root of that, I want to look a little bit at a really interesting text from the Bay Area Study Group called the Roots of Brouderism that got into some of these questions back in the 70s. And when trying to wrestle with the roots of

Browderism, they actually explicitly link Browder's errors to a broader common turn error. So they wrote that, quote, the chauvinism referred to above, found its justification, and and Dimitrov's exhortation at the 7th Common Turn Congress for communist parties and capitalist countries to use nationalism to counter the appeals of the national demagogu of the fascists. In failing to mention that the use of nationalism by a communist party in a capitalist country is fraught with danger, Dimitrov provided the U.S. with the excuse to betray their obligations to the people oppressed by imperialism. End quote.

So it's important to say that the mistake that Browderism made was following a broader mistake within the common turn. When fascism originally started to emerge as a, you know, political phenomena, the common turn came to the conception that fascism represented the interest of a part of the bourgeoisie, but not the entirety of the bourgeoisie, which led to the development of a popular front strategy, which argued that a sort of national coalition between socialist and progressive elements of the bourgeoisie could stand in opposition to fascism in the first place. And so Browderism was kind of a natural result of this assumption, right? What Browder was pushing was exactly such a popular front of coalition

in the United States. And so I do think it's fair to say that the error of Brouderism does not occur simply in Earl Browder himself. It occurs in a broader problem that the common turn made and that the communist internationalist movement made. That problem would later be corrected and Browder would be kicked out of the party actually, but this is all important to think through. That peace on the roots of Browderism continues. Quote, for a communist party in imperialist countries to promote nationalism, particularly an uncritical nationalism, is for it to express the grossest kind of chauvinism. Dimitrov at the 7th Congress pointed out that fascism's demagogic use of nationalism was capable of having mass influence. So to counter fascist

demagogic nationalism, he extorted the communists to link up the present struggle with the people's revolutionary traditions and past. end quote. And this is exactly what Browder did. Browder, in this concept of socialism's 20th century Americanism, put forward this idea that there's a revolutionary tradition in America that can be traced to Lincoln and can be traced to Jefferson, actually, and that communism can link up with this tradition. And that's part of the problem that we saw. The Roots of Browderism article further continues, quote, Dimitrov failed to mention that the use of nationalism by a communist party and an imperialist country is fraught with danger. After all, our

not the imperialist countries built through the oppression of peoples and nations without and within. Dimitrov's failure to point this out in effect condones the imperialist past, excuses the communists reminding the working class of its special obligations to the people and nations oppressed by their nation. It excuses the communists from reminding the working class in the oppressor nation that much of their sustenance comes from super profits, end quote. And so what that piece kind of ends up concluding, I think correctly, is that one of the mistakes of Browderism was the failure to account for the fact that the working class in some ways benefits from imperialist super profits and using patriotism as a means to paper over that fact

and ignore it in a way that was ultimately very dangerous and liquidated the Communist Party. Now, because I saw the response we got the moment we mentioned Browderism, I think that it is worth kind of being clear about a couple things. It is true, as some of our opponents have said, that Browderism is more than just social patriotism, right? Browderism had a broader aspect to it. There was the popular front, the working together between the Democratic Party and various other progressive socialist groups as part of a coalition. That was absolutely a part of it. And there was also eventually just explicit corruption and liquidation on Browder's behalf deferring to FDR to essentially set the national policy and for communists to be nothing

more of a pressure group. Those are all there. But what I would contend, and the reason that I think Brouderism is worth considering, is that I think that the patriotism aspect of Browder was the ideological justification for that form of class collaboration and liquidationism, right? The patriotism blurred the lines in the first place between the oppressed and the oppressor, the exploited and the exploiter, and more importantly, between the capitalist and the worker and the colonizer and the colonized. And by blurring those lines ideologically through a revival of Americanism, this enabled Browderism to be able to engage in the forms of class collaboration and liquidationism that it would later participate in. And I think there's a

couple ways that we could see how Browderism sort of eroded this. Browder himself consistently throughout his writing pointed to the need to return to a Jeffersonism and praised liberal trade unions and anti-communist trade unions like the CIA for their willingness to embrace the tradition of Jefferson. He also said that Jefferson was a progressive revolutionary leader who fought against the counter-revolution of the federalists to pursue liberation in America, and he positively referred to the purchase of the Louisiana territory as an opening up of the continent for national development. A couple of things that are worth thinking through here, right? This assessment of the history of the United States that Browder gave as a result of

his patriotism is highly reductive and historically inaccurate. While it is true that Jefferson pushed back against some of the consolidating efforts of the federalists, It is also true that Jefferson did so in the name of slave-owning small landowners, right? It is not just a progressive force. It is also true that Jefferson was a tireless defender of the right to slavery and the ability for an agrarian slave society to continue to exist in the United States. If one wants to see the fruits of Jeffersonianism, it's not communism so much as the Confederacy itself. And Browder very easily pushes over that.

But further, in the praise for the Louisiana purchase, the praise for the over opening up of the territory's national development, Browder simply brushed over a genocide that was opened up through that purchase, the constant displacement further and further west of indigenous people, the lies of manifest destiny to justify it, and the wholesale slaughter of existing nations that already existed in this land, are treated as nothing more than national development in Brouderism. And this is obviously something that I think we ought to be horrified and concerned about. Now, again, those who defend red patriotism will say, we are not defending Browderism, and I will concede to them that, yes, I'm sure you probably

think Earl Browder was a bastard, too. It's pretty obvious that he was. But what we can see in Browderism is that the way that patriotism blinds us to these material processes of primitive accumulation, settler colonialism, and internal domination. It blurs the lines. And that blurring of the lines is what allowed all the bastardry of Browderism's capitulation to the Democrats, capitulation to the national bourgeoisie to function. And so I think that, that is very important for us to wrestle with. Now, one last thing I think we need to address about Brouderism is the question of how it ultimately ended it and what it meant for American communism on the whole. It is absolutely, and some people will be surprised to hear me say this,

to the credit of the CPUSA and to the international communist movement at the time that Brouderism was defeated. There were factions in the CPUSA who tirelessly fought against it. Many of them faced serious reprisals for fighting against it. And because of external criticism coming largely from the French Communist Party, the common turn eventually turned on Browder. Browder would end up becoming internationally denounced and communists within the CPUSA would do the right thing and they would remove him from power. He was expelled from the party and spent the rest of his life in obscurity, a fate that all opportunists of Browder's sort ultimately deserve. This saw the reversal of some of the most egregious errors of Browderism in terms of blatant national chauvinism

and support for the Democratic Party. But it's important to note that it didn't take the CPUSA back to its positions it held prior to Browderism. The CPUSA would never again support the Black Belt thesis for a national liberation of black people in the United States. They would never completely repudiate the concept of social patriotism, still to this day arguing for a Bill of Rights vision of socialism. And so, although Browder was defeated, and it would be patently incorrect, to refer to the contemporary CPUSA or even to the contemporary American patriots as Brouderist, for example,

that does not mean that the history or legacy of Brouderism is irrelevant. We still need to wrestle with it, and we need to think of the ways that all of the mistakes of Browterism were not undone, ultimately, in order to return to the proper anti-revisionist position of supporting national liberation

of colonized people than the United States. One final point that I want to make, again, after seeing the responses we got to even mentioning Browder's name, is that it is true that it would not be sufficient to blame the fall and decline with the CPUSA on Browderism. Browderism was one part of that, but ultimately the CPUSA, throughout its entire lifespan, has seen extensive repression by the United States government, by the FBI, and by, you know, various different fascist forces in the United States as well. And to ignore these

and say that chauvinism was the only thing that collapsed the CPUSA in the time that it was essentially liquidated and that has pushed the new reconstituted version of the CPUSA into a higher level of obscurity than it once had would, of course, ultimately be correct. So I think that's important for us to consider. But at the same time, we also have to think about the fact that this sort of revisionism, which underlied Browderism, did do lasting damage to the CPUSA. There's a reason that later movements for black liberation, later anti-revisionist movements and anti-war movements in the United States happened outside of the CPUSA, right, for the most part. The CPUSA had involvement in them, but by the time the 70s came around, there was an external anti-revisionist movement

with its own host of fucking problems, but an external existing anti-revisionist movement that was engaging in these forms of activism in very intense ways that produced things like the Black Panther Party as an example. So, in summary, Browderism is important to consider because it was a time that Red Patriotism was put into practice. The people we are arguing against can probably not accurately be labeled Browderist. But we do have to wrestle with the fact that the idea of patriotism, when it was put into practice, acted as a mask for class collaboration and liquidationism. And when we look at Browder's own ideas, we can see how it allowed those things by blurring lines and obscuring material conditions in order to paint

a rosy picture of American history that treats slave-owning reactionary fuchs like Jefferson as progressive heroes. And that is something we just cannot capitulate to again. Absolutely. Incredibly well said. A wonderful summary of really important and really relevant history. A great job overall. I want to address really quick this accusation that these people are really leaning on online, which is to call the sort of arguments that you and I are laying out right here ultra left. That this is an ultra left error that you and I and people who agree with us are making. I would just say that I am well to the left of American patriotism for what that's worth. But how do you deal with that accusation of this entire position being an ultra-left position? Yeah, I mean, so one, again, in the interest of acting in good faith, there's an iteration of the argument we're making that could become ultra-left, right?

So if one were to take these insights and just say, therefore, no one ever anywhere in the United States has any revolutionary potential or any role in a revolutionary movement, which historically, unfortunately, some of the more extreme Maoist third worldists have made, that would be an ultra-left error, right? The endpoint of that error is left liquidationism, essentially, right? You get to liquidationism through another route. And that would be an ultra-left error. But again, part of why I started up front saying what we're saying is I don't think either you and I, Brett, believe that there's no revolutionary potential in the U.S. working class, right? That's not a position that we hold. I don't think either of us believe that settler colonialism or the necessity

of decolonization mean that there's no room for white workers within the communist movement in the U.S. Those just aren't positions that you and I hold. And they're not positions that I think the majority of people who push this sort of perspective that we have do hold. It is totally true that there have been historically and in the present day ultra-left versions of this that end in liquidationism the same way the right ends in liquidationism. But that's part of why I'm trying to spend so much time really carving out exactly the limits of the argument that we're making. We are not making that iteration of this argument. Absolutely.

Another thing that we hear a lot and I think is sort of somewhat implicit in the ultra-left accusation is that our position is somehow a deviation from Marxism, Leninism, and those names, Marx and Lenin, and that somehow that this is not the principled communist position on the topic. We've done lots of work on Lenin's major works, on Marx and Engels's major works. We've addressed the national question in multiple different ways on multiple different episodes. But do you want to get into this communist tradition and what it says about this particular position? Yeah. So up front, I think that there's one thing that we should say worth noting is that in the United States, there have been two communist traditions functionally, right? There has been the tradition in the official CPUSA and the traditions that have formed externally to the CPUSA, right?

and those are two traditions that have disagreed with each other. We talked about some early exiles from the CPUSA whose position we uphold, you know, when we're upholding the Black Belt thesis in Haywood, right? That's precisely what we're doing. We're looking at a figure who was forced out of the CPUSA and who us and other people in the anti-revisionist tradition have upheld as having the correct position. Does that put us outside the orthodoxy of the Common Turn Approved Party in the United States? Yeah, right, it does.

I'm willing to acknowledge that. right? But if we're thinking about the history of communism in the U.S., there has been the anti-revisionist iterations of it, which again have had their fucking shit shows. There's no question about that, right? If we look at RCP USA as an example of that, or if we even look at students for democratic society's history and the ways that went, no one is free of huge errors, both in terms of right and left deviationism here. But it is important to note that there have been these two traditions. I position myself in relation to, and Brett, I would imagine you that anti-Revisionist tradition that has existed outside the confines of the CP USA. Others position

themselves within that. There's also, I think, worth acknowledging kind of these third camp Trotskyist groups within the United States that have existed historically distinct from both of those as well. But what is the Marxist position is something that has been contested for the last hundred years of American communism, right? These are debates that have been ongoing, that are continuing to be ongoing. And for anyone to say just, yeah, we are the Marxist position hands down leave it at that by pointing to a few Lenin quotes while ignoring a hundred years of dissent internal and external to the CPUSA and internal and external to the anti-revisionist camp within the USA is just not adequately historically accounting for the fact

that this is a line struggle occurring in the US over the last century. So that's kind of my perspective on that broadly. At the same time, I also happen to think that Marx and Lenin are on our side of this question. So there is that as well. So one thing that I think you may have noted when you were listening to some of what we were talking about in the Browderism section, that anti-revisionist piece on the roots of Browderism that we were talking about gestures towards the idea of imperialist super profits and the buying off of the working class of the United States. And this is a concept that people oppose to social patriotism generally uphold.

It's a position we uphold. And it's very closely related to the concept of the labor aristocracy, who have a relation to super profits as well. And thankfully, our boy Vladimir Lennon has written a whole lot about the labor aristocracy. And I think that those considerations might be necessary for us to work through if we are going to ask questions about patriotism in the first place. So do you think should we move there now, Brett, or do you want to go somewhere else first? Let's do that, yeah.

All right. So let's just get right into the question of the labor aristocracy. I want to say up front, personally, I think it's stupid to treat this issue as a question of who has the most linen quotes, right? is kind of a reductive way to do these debates. But since there's arguments about the legitimacy of one invoking the tradition of linen, what Lenin's perspective was on these questions, I think is necessarily important. And I think we can also acknowledge up front that things have changed since Lenin's time, and it's very possible that Lenin could have been

wrong on certain issues, right? We are not dogmatists. But nonetheless, since there are many who argue that Lenin has an authoritative word on this and that our position is a skew of linens, we're going to go ahead and just quote him at length. I have four fairly extensive quotes from some linen texts here that address the question of the labor aristocracy and of super profits, and that I think all complicate the patriotic strategy. So if it sounds good to you, Brett, maybe I'll read through them one at a time. We'll do a little discussion on each one. And at the end, we can try to wrap it up with what they might have to say about patriotism taken as a whole. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. Okay. So sorry everyone, this is going to be a lot of quotation.

So to start from imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, a text that we have an entire episode on that you can go check out if you want more depth, and also just a pretty short text that you should pick up and read, right? It is not extremely difficult. But let's quote Lenin at length from this. Lenin writes, quote, the national income of Great Britain approximately doubled from 1865 to 1898, while the income from abroad increased ninefold in the same period. While the merit of imperialism is that it, quote, trains the Negroes, to habits of industry, end quote, the danger of imperialism lies in that Europe will shift the burden of physical toil, first agricultural and mining, then rougher work in industry, to the colored races, and itself be content with the role of rentier, and in this way, perhaps, pave the way for the economic and later the political emancipation of the colored races. And in speaking of the British working class, the bourgeois student of British imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century is obliged to distinguish systematically between the upper stratum of the workers and the lower stratum of the proletarian proper. The upper stratum furnishes the bulk of membership and cooperatives,

of trade unions, of sporting clubs, and of numerous religious sects. To this level is adapted the electoral system, which in Great Britain is still sufficiently restricted to exclude the lower stratum of the proletariat proper. In order to present the conditions of the British working class in a rosy light, only this upper stratum, which constitutes a minority of the proletariat, is usually spoken of. For instance, the problem of unemployment is mainly a London problem and that of the lower proletarian stratum, to which the politicians attach little importance. He should have said to which bourgeois politicians and socialist opportunists attach little importance. One of the special features of imperialism connected with the facts I am describing

is the decline in immigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into those countries from the more backwards country where lower wages are paid. As Hobson observes, immigration from Great Britain has been declining since 1884. In that year, the number of immigrants was 242,000, while in 1900, the number was 169,000. Immigration from Germany, the highest point between 1881 and 1890, was a total of 1,453,000 immigrants. In the course of the following few decades, it fell to 544,000 into 341,000. On the other hand, there was an increase in the number of workers entering Germany from Austria, Italy, Russia, and other countries. According to the 1907 census, there were 1,342,294 foreigners in Germany, of whom 440,800 were industrial workers and 257,329 agricultural

workers. In France, the workers employed in the mining industry are, in a great part, foreigners, Poles, Italians, and Spaniards. In the United States, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are engaged in the most poorly paid jobs, while American workers provide the higher percentage of overseers or of the better paid workers. Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among workers and to detach from the broad masses of the proletariat. Let's try to get a couple things out of this that we might be able to wrestle with. So the first thing that I really want us to take into account here is that Lenin is noting

that imperialism has created internal divisions among the proletariat between an upper stratum and a lower stratum, right? This will later be developed more fully into the concept of labor aristocracy, but it's extremely important for us to understand that that division is there. Lenin goes on to trace this idea to Marx himself, who stated that the proletariat in England is becoming more bourgeoisie, and that someday England shall be a country only with the bourgeoisie, is the quote he kind of points to. So there's this division that is occurring in which the working class is separated into a lower and an upper stratum, and the upper stratum finds itself in coalition

as opportunists and as sometimes self-avowed socialist opportunists with the bourgeois interests. The second thing that I think is crucial to note here is that this division within the working class is not arbitrary. The line on which Lennon saw it falling on his time is the line of nationality, right? So whether or not one is a foreigner or not might shape whether or not one is in the upper or lower stratums. In the United States, he notes that is the American-born people who form the upper stratum, and it is those coming in from other countries who form the lower stratum. We might add, it is also those descended from slaves who form. the lower stratum. We might also add is also those whose nations which already exist in the

United States who formed the lower stratum. And so one thing that we can see here is that Lenin in imperialism was acknowledging that domestic divisions within imperialist countries exist, that those divisions are used to pull some of the working class in line with the interests of the imperialists, and that those divisions raise questions of nation and of national liberation and of nationality because those are the lines upon which those divisions are drawn. Yeah. Well said. And, you know, that's incredibly essential to this conversation.

And again, it's not saying that imperialism and the super profits extracted from its victims go to benefit the entire working class. It's meant to, and it serves to split the working class. And if you live in a society that is settler colonial and white supremacist and order, origin, it's also going to be racialized along those divides. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I think the main thing I want to take away from that, though, is we're not suggesting something new, right? When we say that these rationalized and national divides have to deal with colonization are divides within the working class that are used by imperialism, right? This is a position that comes from Lenin. And I actually think we are going to get into

an even more important quote from Lenin that is going to address this even more. Because one thing that we should be up front about, right, is that many of the defenders of the social patriotism strategy argue that if we tell the workers that, you know, like, oh, some of you benefit from imperialism, they'll side with imperialism, right? And they argue that the workers will be afraid by the fact that their lives will be made worse in that situation, right? One of the arguments they make against decolonization is like, how are you going to sell the workers on the fact that we should do this thing that will make their quality of life lower in some ways, that will remove them from their privileged position as colonizers? And thankfully, Lennon also

also has an answer to that question for us. So we can look a little bit at a speech that Lenin gave to the Second Communist International, where he was dealing with this question pretty directly and with some opportunists and revisionist, Crispian in particular, in the context of Germany. And so this is going to start with some contexts that might not make sense. You should go look at the whole piece, but quickly you'll see what Lenin is saying. So Lenin writes, second, the independence should not deplore this, but should say the international working class is still under the sway of labor aristocracy and the opportunists. Such is the position, both in France and in Great Britain. Comrade Crispian does not regard the split like a communist, but quite in the

spirit of Kautzky, who is supposed to have no influence. Then Crispian went on to speak of high wages. The position in Germany, he said, is that the workers are quite well off compared to the workers in Russia or in general in the east of Europe. A revolution, as he sees it, can only be made if it does not worsen the workers' condition too much? Is it permissible in a communist party to speak in a tone like this, I ask? This is the language of counter-revolution. The standard of living in Russia is undoubtedly lower than in Germany. And when we established the dictatorship, this led to workers beginning to go more hungry and to their conditions becoming even worse. The workers' victory cannot be achieved without sacrifices, without a temporary deterioration of the conditions. We must tell the

workers the very opposite of what Crispian has said. If in desiring the workers for the dictatorship, one tells them that their conditions will not be worsened too much, one is losing sight of the main thing, namely that it was by helping their own bourgeoisie to conquer and strangle the whole world by imperialist methods, with the aim of thereby ensuring better pay for themselves that the labor aristocracy developed. If the German workers want to work for revolution, they must make sacrifices and not be afraid to do so. In the general and world historical sense, it is true that in a backward country like China,

you cannot bring about a proletarian revolution. However, to tell workers in the handful of rich countries where it is easier thanks to imperialist pillage that they should be afraid of too great impoverishment is counter-revolutionary. It is the reverse of what they should be told. The labor aristocracy that is afraid of sacrifices, of trade of too great impoverishment during revolutionary struggle cannot belong to the party.

End quote. So, I think Lenin says things pretty clearly there. Let's just try to think about them real quick. First, on a basic level, Lenin here explicitly says that segments of the proletariat benefit from imperialism. In fact, he says that these labor aristocrats supported imperialism with the aim of gaining better pay for themselves. He also has said pretty explicitly that the general standard of living that workers in imperialist countries have is a result of imperialist pillage.

That's in that second to last sentence that we read there. So Lennon is being extremely clear about the fact that imperialism does confer benefits on at least segments of the working class, if not its entirety, and that those segments have historically been very willing to sell out their interests for the sake of imperialism. Furthermore, Lenin argues that not, you know, trying to shelter workers from the fact that the sacrifices of a revolution will hurt them is a mistake. So the idea that we need this patriotic vision of America so that the workers don't worry that we're going to destroy this thing that has made their lives better is absurd. Lennon, in fact, calls it counter-revolutionary and says it has no place within a communist party. So we must face the fact that there are ways in which getting rid of an imperialist, southern colonialist nation would, require sacrifices, material hurt to the working class.

But that has been true in every revolution. As Lennon says, even in Russia, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat immediately made the life of many of the Russian workers worse. And our job isn't just to affirm every fear that the working class might have. Rather, Linden says, it's to swage those fears and tell them about the necessity for sacrifice

in the name of internationalism. Absolutely. You want to keep going through these quotes? Yeah, we got two more. The next one's not too long, and then the fourth one I'll probably cut down a little bit. But the next one I think is also pretty straightforward. So this comes from Lennon's statements on the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, where he says, quote, the non-propertyed but non-working class is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters.

Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletariat partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labor, but the labor of the practically enslaved natives in the colony that maintains the whole of society. The British bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from the many millions of the population of India and other colonies than from British workers. In certain countries, this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must

nevertheless be clearly realized and its causes understood in order to be able to to rally the proletariat of all countries with the struggle against such opportunism. This struggle is bound to be victorious since the privileged nations are a diminishing faction of the capitalist nations, end quote. Not much else here to say other than the fact that Lenin does really again hit, I think, quite correctly on the fact that the imperialists bribe the working class with the spoils of imperialism in such a way that they create a labor aristocracy, right? And this is not an idea that we are suggesting.

this is an idea that Lenin was suggesting, and that, as we've seen in these other quotes, maps itself onto the question of, you know, race and colonialism and nation. Those are ways that this has functioned in the past. So one more quote that we'll look at, and I'm going to cut it down very extensively, comes from Lenin's fantastic essay, imperialism, and the split in socialism, which again, you can find all of these on Marxist.org. And when talking about the idea of English monopoly, he finishes by saying, secondly, Why does England's monopoly explain the temporary victory of opportunism in England?

Because monopoly yields super profits, i.e. a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world. The capitalist can devote a part, and not a small one at that, of those super profits to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance. Recall the celebrated alliance described by webs of English trade union and employers between the workers of the given nation and the capitalists against the other countries. England's industrial monopoly was already destroyed by the end of the 19th century. This is beyond dispute. But how did the destruction take place? Did all monopoly disappear? And he goes on from there. End quote. So the thing that I want us to get from here is, again, he explicitly

ties the question of imperialist super profits to the paying off of segments of the domestic working class to push them in a chauvinist direction. He states that this is related to nations. He states that this is related to the idea of chauvinism and an alliance between the workers and the national bourgeoisie. And so what we can see here over and over again is that Lenin demands of the working class and imperialist countries that they be willing to make sacrifices that will hurt themselves. And that in an attempt to mask that, the opportunists have pushed forms of national chauvinism, forms and nationalism and forms of class collaboration like Browder did to push against that. And in that sense, I think when we think about what Lenin has to say,

patriotism can only blur the points that Lenin's trying to make, right? It can only distract us from the fact. Lenin says that the working class owes an obligation to the rest of the world in a certain sense, that they have to be willing to take those sacrifices. And to brush that aside in favor of patriotism would be an absolute mistake. So I don't think that we are coming out of nowhere outside of the Marxist tradition. I think Lenin is very, very clear about this question, and this foundation is there. So those are at least my thoughts on the question of Lenin, at least. I had more quotes, but I think that's probably enough. Yeah, for sure. And I think it addresses what you said it addresses. It also addresses an argument. You hear a lot from this faction that, you know, this

position that imperialism really only enriches the imperial bourgeoisie and does not benefit in any way the proletariat in the imperial core. And I think for exactly the reasons Lenin just laid out that that is untrue, ultimately. And I actually, you know, I want to read a quote from Mao now because we talked about Lenin, and I think this clarifies the question of patriotism in a reactionary versus revolutionary sense. Mao says, quote, can a communist who is an internationalist at the same time be a patriot? We in China hold that he not only can, but he must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the patriotism of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and then there is our patriotism. Communists,

must resolutely oppose the patriotism of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interest of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat, the better. And he goes on, but he's basically making a, I don't want to read too many quotes, but he's basically making the argument of patriotism in the context. of national liberation and patriotism in the context of, in this instance, Nazi Germany and Japan, which were imperialist nations acting aggressively to the countries around them in order

to take them over and extract their resources, et cetera. So even Mao was making very clear that there is a patriotism to be had, a left-wing nationalism to be had, but it depends, as he says very clearly, by the historical conditions. And in a place like imperialist Germany, imperialist Japan, and I would add imperialist settler colonial USA, the patriotism takes on a very different form and shape and is reactionary by definition. And so whether we're talking about Marx and Angles, we're talking about Lenin or we're talking about Mao, this position comes from this general communist tradition and is not at all anathema to it. I agree. I think one last thing we could maybe transition to, do you want to talk a little bit about settler colonialism since

we've gestured at it throughout. Yeah, I think we can wrestle with it. And I do think settler colonialism here is an absolute hinge point. And I think it goes on to inform this discussion at a very deep level. And I think there is on the other side of this argument, some real skepticism towards the whole idea of settler colonialism, the history of it, and how our position is rooted in it. So how would you open up that box? Yeah.

So a couple things that I want to say. So first, if you want a much more extent. explanation of settler colonialism. We did an episode about settler colonialism comparing the United States' iteration of settler colonialism to Israeli settler colonialism, in which we got a good bit into the history of why the U.S. is settler colonial. If you want to get a better sense for the theory, I would highly recommend checking that episode. But we'll recap a little bit and discuss a couple things. So first off, I want to say, settler colonialism is not a claim of American exceptionalism, It's not a claim that America has this unique history that is separate from the rest of the world.

Settler colonialism actually holds that there are several settler colonies throughout the world, right? So if we want to think about settler colonies throughout the world, we could think about the United States, we could also think about Australia, we could also think about New Zealand, we could think about South Africa, we could think about Israel, right? We are not making some claim that the U.S. is unique in some given way. Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism, which has occurred in multiple contexts globally. So to give a brief distinguishing idea of what settler colonialism is, again, we've gone into this in depth elsewhere, settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which the goal of establishing

colonies is not merely the extraction of resources, but the establishment of a new society of settlers. So when people came to the United States, the goal of those people, by and large, was not merely to send back profits to Britain. In fact, many of the people who can came to the United States, wanted nothing to do with Britain from the very beginning. We can think of the religious fanatics who came over originally, but also of those businessmen who came over to try to start commerce here specifically. And in fact, we can see that the American Revolution was largely fought between a bunch of people in the colonies who saw themselves as a distinct and independent new society and between a country that wanted to treat them as a

traditional colony. But in the United States, as in several other countries, a form of colonialism developed where the focus was not about sending resources or goods back to the motherland, but about establishing a new nation. And this establishment of a new nation required, of course, the displacement of the people who were already here, the taking of their land. One thing that is distinct about settler colonialism is that by and large, you do not see widespread intermarriage between settlers and the colonized. A form of racial purity usually crops up as it did here, which treats those who are being conquered as backwards and needing to be eliminated, so that space can be made for the settlers establishing this new future-oriented society. And we saw that

in the United States. Settler colonialism then has built into it an imperative of land theft, occupation, and genocide, the elimination of the nations that existed prior to its rival for the establishment of its new nation. And to be very clear, there were nations in the United States when the settlers got here. There were complex political structures like the Iroquois Confederacy that would form and interact with the settlers. And there were, were millions of people on this continent, many living in cities as well. So these nations already existed. But when the colonizers came and began to settle the land, that necessitated the destruction of these indigenous people. That's the brief historical understanding of

settler colonialism. And it's not an understanding of it that many people would argue against, right? Most people can concede that that happened. But the question that is more contested is whether or not, this is a present concern, right? So some people have tried to claim subter colonialism. That was just primitive accumulation, right? That happened in the past. We are no longer there. Things have changed. But those who defend the theory of subler colonialism argue that settler colonialism is an ongoing process. The indigenous people who the U.S. attempted to genocide never stopped existing. There are indigenous nations in the U.S. today. There are actually quite a lot of indigenous nations in the U.S. today who have managed to fight for and gain various forms

of territorial sovereignty. And furthermore, those nations continue to this day to contest the territorial sovereignty of the United States. We can see this through heroic activists from indigenous nations standing up as water protectors against infringement by United States capitalists onto their land to build oil pipelines, to destroy traditional sacred indigenous sites. We can see that there's an ongoing process, which has taken place here, of resistance today by the colonized people of the U.S. who had their nations here before us. And furthermore, we can see that an ongoing genocide against those people is still going today. It was only in the 1970s that the Bureau of Indian Affairs sterilized 50 fucking percent of indigenous women in the United States.

50 percent of them in the 1970s. That is not so long ago. That is not in our deep colonial past. But furthermore, the plague of missing and murdered indigenous women who disappear off reservations are preyed on by settler men primarily, and who the government is willing to allow to continue to be killed and disappeared in mass as part of a process of depopulation is ongoing today, right? And so the claim that we make is that settler colonialism is not a event which happened in the past, but an ongoing process taking place concurrently today. I think Brett and I also both uphold the idea that there are colonies within the United States in addition to the indigenous nations that are here.

I believe that there is a black nation internal to the United States that can best be understood as an indigenous colony. And I would argue that even if this is not a nation, which universally conceptualizes itself as a nation, we do see territorial disputes here. I don't know how you can see the burning of the precinct in Minneapolis as anything other than a colonized community saying no to an occupying colonial force in their neighborhood. There are ongoing territorial disputes about colonialism. Here is the United States taking place at this moment. These are not things of the past. These are present realities. And the people fighting in this are at the fucking forefront of revolutionary struggles in the U.S. as well. And that is incredibly important to

affirm. So if settler colonialism and if the idea of internal colonies is a meaningful idea, as we have defended elsewhere that it is in our coverage for a Leninist position on the Negro question, and our coverage of settler colonialism in the U.S. and Israel, then it follows that patriotism is at odds with those movements, right? Why would we fly the flag of the force that is occupying that land? Right? Why would we fly the flag that those police officers occupying colonized communities wear on their fucking uniforms?

Why would we ever feel patriotism about that? If there's a patriotism to be found in the United States is the patriotism of the internal colonized peoples and nations who over the last 10 years have been rising the fuck up against police forces and against capitalist corporations, seeking to destroy the land in the United States. And so settler colonialism necessarily challenges the patriotic perspective because it challenges the idea that these revolutionaries in American history,

the Thomas Paines, the Samuel Adams, the Patrick Henrys, and the Jeffersons, were anything other than genociders, right? That they were doing anything other than spreading chattel slavery and depopulating a continent for the sake of a colonial project. There's no appeal to them that can also simultaneously appeal to the people rising up against colonialism right now. There's a trade-off between those things. If you want to cast your lot with fucking Trump dudes who like the American flag,

be your guest, I'll cast my lot with the people rebelling against American colonialism right now. And I think that that is the strategically sound positioned. Amen. Could not agree with every single syllable more. Talking about black nationalism, thumbs up. You're talking about indigenous nationalism, thumbs up. You're talking about American nationalism.

Fuck off. And just as genocide is a settler colonialism is an ongoing. process. Slavery is also an ongoing process. It is just now transformed into prisons through which slavery is carried out. And on those prisons, guess what flag flies on top of them? The red, white, and blue. So I'm not going to pick up that flag and wave it anytime soon. And as Uncle Stalin said, that the class conscious proletariat cannot rally under the national flag of the bourgeoisie. And that the class conscious proletariat has its own tried and true banner, and it has no need to rally to the banner of the bourgeoisie. I am not waving the flag

of my class enemies and of settler colonists. I'm just not going to do it, and that is not what the principle, in my opinion, Marxist position should be. And I think we make that very clear throughout this entire episode. Is there anything else you want to touch on, Alison, before we wrap this up? I mean, I think we hit the main things that I want us to hit, right? We talked about how others would view us using that flag, both domestically and internationally. I think that's fucking relevant. We've asked the question whether or not there's an America that we can be patriotic for separate from its government.

And to the extent to which there is, that is an America that is itself a genocidal culture. Right. So I think we've touched on that. We've touched on the settler colonial status of America and we've touched on the rooting of this and went in. So I think that all of that is there. One thing I just want to say, right, we have given you, I think, a fair amount of contemporary and historical analysis on this.

It's not the last word on this, right? Like, this is a debate that's going to keep going on. We have missed things. There are plenty more things we've covered. And the last day I've seen, like, a couple people trying to argue that the labor aristocracy is anachronistic and no longer relevant or all these other things. We cannot get into all of that, right? There are thousands of people on Twitter spouting thousands of things.

You can't respond to all of them, unfortunately. But I hope that we've here, at least, in a way that's not too uncharitable, tried to ask the question of patriotism and wrestle with what's involved in it. And I think when you think about the history of the United States, you think about when patriotism has been tried, and you think about the way that there is ongoing opposition to settler colonialism now that ought to be unified when Marxism, not separated from Marxism. It is very clear that patriotism is a strategy that can only hold us back. It pushes back against the ability for us to unite movements for water protection or movements against colonizing police with the movement of the working class. And our job as Marxists is to link those movements up and patriotism can only get in the way of that. Yeah, exactly. And if you disagree with us, there's no need to take it personally. I mean, the best way you could take this is that here is a robust argument of the other side of my position and I can sharpen my position in response to these arguments. And so it doesn't need to be individuals hating other individuals. This is a broader line struggle within the reemerging American left. And it's important for that.

reason and it doesn't need to be dragged down to the level of personal individual resentment. And I hope the way that we go about this stuff and the way that we carry ourselves with Red Menace and Rev. Left more broadly attests to that fact that we're not, you know, just shit flinging sectarians, but we actually do want to engage in these important conversations and have that sort of principled back and forth because we think these arguments are important and worth having. Yeah. And I think, you know, one thing of that, I will say personally is like, I got the fuck off social media for the most part, right? Like, I dipped the fuck out of Twitter. And I try not to get pulled back in as much as I can. I think

often what we do in Red Menace is disconnected from some of the broader discourses that are happening on Twitter. And I think that's a good thing about Red Menace. But the fact that we're intervening into this, I think, should be a statement about how important we think this question is, right? And how central we think it is. And again, my goal really has been to kind of depersonalize myself from my politics. And I hope that people can respond to this that way as well. There's a reason I'm not throwing out the names of the dozen of people who come to mind who make these arguments, because that's fucking irrelevant. The question is which political line is the correct Marxist political line that has and can be put into practice? And we hope that those on the other side of this struggle can adopt that same perspective that we've adopted.

Absolutely. All right. Well, that will end it for today. Thank you, everybody that listens. Thank you, Alison, for coming on and doing this with me. And we're interested and genuinely, you know, excited to hear the feedback from our listener base and from the Leftmore, broadly. So love and solidarity to everybody out there. We'll talk to you soon.