Upstream - Nationalism and the Error of Patriotic Socialism w/ Sina Rahmani and Nick

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

You can listen to the full episode with Sina Rahmani of East is a Podcast and Nick of The Intervention Podcast by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber, not only will you get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, as well as early access to certain episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers, depending on which tier you subscribe to, but you’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. The United States is the world’s leading purveyor of immiseration, destruction, death, and instability—as the swamp that sustains our current world order of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, the United States is still, and has been for a century now, the leading global hegemon, the imperialist super power that calls the shots on the world stage. Its drive towards accumulation and geopolitical dominance has wrought hell on the rest of the world’s nations and the planet itself. So why, then, are some so-called Marxists out there trying to wrap themselves up in a flag of U.S. patriotism? Patriotic socialism, MAGA communism, red patriotism—these are just some of the names that have been used to describe a recent phenomenon that, although certainly has its antecedents in things like the LaRouche movement of the mid-20th century, has begun, again, to creep its way into the discourse, albeit mostly online, of the left. What is this phenomenon and what does it get wrong? Why is it an error to attempt to wed U.S. nationalism with Marxism and communism? These are the questions we explore in this Patreon episode with our two guests: Nick, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, and a co-host of The Intervention Podcast, and Sina Rahmani, a podcast producer and host of the show East is a Podcast. In this wide-ranging conversation we unpack the phenomenon of so-called patriotic socialism, and in doing so, explore many related topics ranging from nationalism more broadly, to the distinction between nationalism of the oppressed versus nationalism of the oppressor, the United States’s role of global hegemon, imperialism, and the revolutionary potential of the western working class. Further resources: The Intervention's Linktree The East is a Podcast Why The Rage Against The War Machine Rally Is #AntiWarSoWhite, Black Agenda Report   

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. The project of the United States as a state project is a project of settler colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and bourgeois nationalism, right? As a Marxist in the US, we have to take this very seriously if we want to address what we should rightfully view as primary contradictions and antagonists in terms of the US, US's role as the imperial hegemon in this totalizing imperialist system,

and also as the antagonism that has developed as, again, the settler colonial oppressor of so many nations that are oppressed within like the borders of this nation state. To just simply collapse that crazy, complicated schizophrenic history of like all these different historical forces into like, oh America good, we have to push out our ruling class only. Bro, you got lost at Albuquerque somewhere.

You took a wrong turn. Like you don't know what you're standing for because like that project will never ever break away from the ruling classes who birthed it, right? Like that's part of its hegemonic power is that it requires this like sort of voluntary army of proletarians, mostly proletarian workers who believe in it. So all of that is to say that to simply wash your hands of that and be like, yeah, man, we're just going to be American still. There's something good and redeeming about this. You're worshiping a false god, guys. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you

thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. The United States is the world's leading purveyor of immiseration, destruction, death, and instability. As the swamp that sustains our current world order of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, the United States is still and has been for a century now the leading global hegemon, the imperialist superpower that calls the shots on the world stage. Its drive towards accumulation and geopolitical dominance has wrought hell on the rest of the world's nations and the planet itself.

So why then are some so-called Marxists out there trying to wrap themselves up in a flag of US patriotism? Patriotic socialism, MAGA communism, red patriotism. These are just some of the names that have been used to describe a recent phenomenon that although certainly has its antecedents in things like the LaRouche movement of the mid-20th century, has begun to creep its way

into the discourse, albeit mostly online, of the left. What is this phenomenon, and what does it get wrong? Why is it an error to attempt to wed US nationalism with Marxism and communism? These are the questions we'll explore in this Patreon episode with our two guests, Nick, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, and co-host of the Intervention podcast, and Sina Rahmani, a podcast producer and the host of the show, East is a Podcast. In this wide-ranging conversation, we unpack the phenomenon of so-called patriotic socialism,

and in doing so, explore many related topics ranging from nationalism more broadly to the distinction between nationalism of the oppressed vs. nationalism of the oppressor, the United States' role of global hegemon, imperialism, and the revolutionary potential of the Western working class. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Sina Rahmani and Nick. Nick, Sina, it's great to have you both on. Thanks for having us, Robert. Hi, Rob.

Hi, everybody. So, I'm wondering if you could both introduce yourselves for our listeners and maybe talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing and how you started podcasting and the organizing work that you're doing and all of the above. Yeah. So my name's Nick. I have a podcast with my co-hosts, Steve and Levi called The Intervention Podcast.

It was kind of conceived by my friend Steve and I initially because Steve's English. So we wanted to start a show talking about English and American imperialism and just do a bunch of random analyses and try to figure out how these things kind of interlock. I think as we've gone through, we've added Levi, who's an anti-Zionist Jewish man. So we've really, especially lately, been focused on Palestine, Zionism, and how those relate to those imperial projects. So it's been a growing process, I guess, for us. And it's really been a platform, I think, for me to learn more than anything and meet people like you guys that I've learned so much from as I've developed myself.

But, you know, for me, it's also important because it's translated, I hope, into like real life organizing. So I'm here tonight as somebody that I don't have a degree in any of this stuff. I didn't study it at the collegiate level. I just try to learn on my own and apply it to practically organizing. So I'm an organizer with PSL in Pittsburgh here. And I'm very proud of that. Very proud of the work that we've been able to do during the Palestine

solidarity movement that's much needed and it needs to grow even bigger, obviously. But yeah, so that's why I'm here. Awesome. Thank you. And Sina? Yeah. Hi, I'm Sina. I, I host a show called the East is a podcast.

I produce a few other ones. I launched my show like five years ago, which is crazy to say it loud. I guess going on six this year. But yeah, I would say that I got into podcasting through listening to a lot of podcasts. Like there was like, I just listened to a lot of podcasts in like the 2010s, basically.

And like the truth is most of them were about baseball. That's the funniest part of all this. No one knows this about me. Not even like Mike Duncan. I was like a baseball fanatic for like, I don't know how many years, many years. And it coincided with my like discovery of podcasts. So like podcasting was like a means to to an end to get more baseball content in my life. So that when I wasn't at home stationary, I could learn about the...

It was crazy. I had a mental illness. And then I did my PhD and I was a postdoc for a while. And then it was rapidly becoming clear to me that like, this was a profession that was like circling the drain. So then I just, I just like stopped applying to jobs. It's like the joke from like office space, like how he got fired, but he kept getting paid.

The guy, what's his name in the basement with the stapler. And it's like, that's like, I just kept going, but like I wasn't trying. It was a weird couple of years for me. And from those times where I wasn't doing really anything else, I started a podcast and from that I met other people, other people who were interested in starting their own shows. And so I helped a group called the Red Nation get their podcast off off the ground and a few other shows since then most of them you probably haven't heard I also produced the

MacDeezy Brothers show it's called MacDeezy Street it's really good you should check it out I produced also Kuskaya which is under the Red Nation brand which is like you know the Media and Brother or whatever Red Media media, they're indigenous podcasts. So if you speak Spanish or catch well by any chance, Spanish is more likely. There are more Spanish speakers. You should check that out. Kuz Kaya K U Z K A L L A. So that's a good show.

So yeah, that's what I do. I'm a podcaster and, uh, I just, I talk into a mic, which is like weird, but I also edit, I guess mostly what I do is produce. I'm more of a producer of podcasts now. And what's weird, too, is that one of the things that happens, at least for me, so I stopped listening to podcasts for fun. Like I think maybe a few here and there, but definitely like not like it was before, because I just happened to listen to so many podcasts

as a job. So I went from a weird amateur love of amateur relationship to podcasting to a professional one. And it's weird. But anyways, that's my podcast odyssey, my pod-yssey. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you both for that. And Nick, I love how you talk about podcasting

as just one part of larger organizing. And I think that's really important. And Sina, I also, I think you were talking about Milton. Is that the office-based character? Yes, Milton. I was like, no, I wrote about Dickens. I was confused for a second. Yeah. Milton with a stapler. See, I'm prepared to talk about Milton Friedman later on in this podcast at some point. So my head went in a completely different direction. Yeah, that could be a sweet callback at some point. I also, it's interesting to hear that you got into podcasts through a baseball

podcast. Several baseball podcasts, sir. I will have you know, I would listen to hear that you got into podcasts through a baseball podcast. Several baseball podcasts, sir. Several, several, yes. I will have you know, I would listen to like six a day. I had a disease. An unhealthy number of baseball podcasts. Yeah, it was very bad. I'm so ashamed.

I hope nobody hears this. I like baseball a lot too, man. That's a lot. I just actually started listening to my first sports podcast, which is a Toronto Maple Leafs podcast. And they record like every other day and they're like two to three hour episodes. Wow. I'm like, this is a thing.

We should save this for later because this is actually a key to understanding American nationalism because sports is like such an important vector for it. And like partly because of how Hollywood is, but we should just put a pin in that for now. Sorry I interrupted you, but I want to, I want to tell myself this. That's great. And you know what? I think that that's a great sort of segue into what we will be talking about today, which if you read the title of the episode, you're probably not going to be super shocked. We're talking about US nationalism.

Well, not just US nationalism. We're going to be talking about nationalism more generally, imperialism and some other sort of, I guess you could call them ideological tendencies that have sort of married or tried to marry these ideas of patriotism and nationalism with communism and Marxism. So before we dive into all of the details and get into the trenches, I think just to start maybe if you can both sort of talk about what patriotism means to you, just from like a 20,000 view perspective, how would you describe and define these ideas of nationalism as well, maybe from a Marxist perspective? Sina, you want to kick it off or?

I mean, so there's a problem here. We have a problem at the outset, which is the semantic range of a word is likeordinately affecting my ability to think about it. So when you hear patriotism, you think about US nationalism, because the strand of nationalism that has developed in the US is so strange, it's so boisterous and so loud, and it stomps over every other, let's say, historical cousin that the US has, which is to say other British settler colonial entities. I start with Canada, but also Australia and also like English nationalism because itself is its own kind of weird machine. But certainly I wouldn't say they would use the language of patriotism,

whereas you hear that word and you think of the red, white and blue. But that just also could be me, because I've lived under the hegemony of US culture forever, because I'm in a satellite of the US, Canada, and all of our culture is US culture and like the news and like also so much of like the trade is determined for the US. So we really are like a like subservient or like a you know, quasi sovereign entity that lives to the north of the US. But we're so interlocked with it and like its economy, but also its cultural sphere because of English too. So like instantly we're into a like a little quagmire because like what do you do with that? Like there is a term for patriotism, patriotism in the general sense, but it's been so spoiled by the US and like so like tinged and like red white and blue. And

so then the other thing you said was about nationalism. Now nationalism is easier thing to work with because it precedes the US, thank God, God forbid something actually existing outside the US. But it's also like, it's not that much older, right? And so like our notions of like nationality and the expression of an identity through that sense of belonging to a nation. This is like relatively new technology, but I have to put like an immediate addenda to that, which is to say that like our understanding of like nationalism is heavily, heavily, like the way we talk about it here in English is like heavily, heavily inflected through Eurocentrism. So like the model of nation state nationalism

that flourishes in 18th and 19th century Europe, which actually like Marxism has an important role in its history. So we should talk about that when we get to the MAGA stuff. So the idea of nationality is like a historical kind of unit that we can play with, that I think is much easier actually and like gives us more wiggle room than necessarily patriotism.

But it's all there is also literally true, like the word patriotism doesn't have to be associated with the US. It's just because of my brain. But yeah, Nick, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I don't have like, I guess like a Marxist definition of patriotism, right? It's just kind of in that broad sense. It's just kind of like the sense of loyalty, pride or devotion to a given national project or nation state construction, right? And I think there's to your point, Sina, there's a difference between those two. We can also talk about like the historical conditions in which the idea of a nation state even arose, right? I think the fact of the matter that we still have to grapple with is that like, we're living in a world where at the international level, like the nation state

construction is still what gives people representation for better or for worse at the international stage, you know, like at something like the UN. As imperfect and flawed as that is, I still think it's like, it's an important thing that we have to grapple with given, you know, what Western imperialism in Europe has basically wrought on the rest of the world. So that's kind of where we're at, right? I think to kind of piggyback into what you were saying, Sina, both of these things, both of these terms as we throw out there, I think our analysis is very context dependent, right? It's not enough to say this nationalism is bad or this nationalism is good or this patriotism is bad and this is good. We have to analyze what we're exactly talking about, right? Because to me personally as a communist in the US,

I have a very negative visceral reaction to US specific patriotism because it evokes militarism, blind faith in these documents written by the wealthiest slave owners 250 years ago, and support conscious or otherwise for the most violent empire in history. Who is the primary antagonist against people's movements here and abroad? Right? So that's US patriotism in my mind. Right. And it's devotion to those things. When you talk about US patriotism, devotion to the project that basically reaps these things on the rest of the world, whether you like that or not, that's what it is fundamentally. And I think of nationalism and a little more grounded of a sense, it's kind of like you mentioned as a technology,

Sina. I think of it as like an ideological tool that can still have enormous material impact. Right. So in general, I think it basically amounts to a person identifying their interests with those of a given project, whether that be an existing nation state, a national liberation struggle, et cetera, right? So getting back to that context, it's about analyzing that context of a given nationalism. And I know we're gonna get more into this later, but I think this is really crucial, at least for me. So like, again, let's ask ourselves,

is the nationalism of Palestinians, Cuba, or the DPRK, the same as the bourgeois nationalism authored by the US ruling class? Definitely not, right? If we're serious and committed to socialism and communism, we have to be honest with ourselves about that. So again, you have on one hand, the colonized and the oppressed struggling to forge sovereignty against the world imperialist system dominated financially and militarily by the US and using that tool of nationalism to inspire their masses to continue the fight, right? And on the other, you have the oppressor using nationalism to uphold the status quo that

Western capital primarily benefits from. So again, these aren't the same. And just for like a quick concrete example, even not of today, even though there's like various that we could bring up, I think of how the Soviet Union and Russia still to this day refer to World War Two as the great patriotic war, right? And that was very intentional to inspire the masses and build national unity to fight against the Third Reich. So is nationalism bad in that sense? Like, I would absolutely say no. Now, can problems develop later down the line with the national chauvinism developing if it's not addressed? I mean, Lenin talks a lot about like great Russian chauvinism. That's still something that you have to contend with that could manifest as a reactionary element, even if like

this idea of the great patriotic war is used for like a good cause on a broad level, right? But again, you can't tell me that the nationalism in whatever case of the Soviets fighting against the genocidal Nazi force is the same as the nationalism inspired by Hitler in Germany. And in any case, and I think this is really what's going to ground me in this conversation, is like, Sina, you said this on our podcast, but like my body's here, I live in the US, so that's what I'm focused on in terms of what I choose to organize against. And again, I don't know if this is like the Marxist description or whatever, but I think it works in a sense that this is a force that we have to contend with and you always have to analyze it and talk about it in its proper historical and material

context. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Sina Rahmani of East is a Podcast and Nick of the Intervention Podcast. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber of Upstream. As a Patreon subscriber, not only will you get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, as well as early access to certain episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers, depending on which tier you subscribe to. But you'll also be keeping Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support or patreon.com forward slash

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