History and nationalism.
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A socialist knows that even if s/he attempts to start saying that we workers should not identify with the nation-state, s/he can expect immediate vilification and to be dragged into a slanging match full of hatred and contempt.
How does one begin, given the mass ignorance of social history, to explain how the nation-state arose, how it was not always here, how our peasant ancestors were robbed and evicted from their lands etc., to people who have not even a basic awareness of historical chronology? How does one begin to explain how today came about, how society has evolved, even supposing they would have any interest in knowing?
I think the first step is to drop the moral superiority complex.
The second step is to realise that online / social media isn’t the best environment for changing views. It’s actually the worse place. (also a high percentage of comments on social media will be generated by bots and not human beings)
Thomas More wrote: “How does one begin, given the mass ignorance …to explain…”
It requires organised workers to attempt to introduce a system of workers’ education, including Proletarian Universities, covering a syllabus from philosophy, maths, physics, biology, etc. to history, sociology, architecture, art, etc.
To my knowledge, this has only been tried once at a national level (leaving aside minor schools or individual teachers), and that was the Proletcult movement led by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, during the initial stage of the Soviet Union.
I’m minded to comment that the dominance of a ‘materialism’ of those supposed ‘Marxists’ who follow Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov, which believes that ‘the material conditions’ will bring socialism/communism, rather than workers’ active consciousness, is the explanation for the continued failure to build a democratic workers’ education system built by workers themselves.
Even the SPGB won’t have workers democratically controlling ‘science’. As ‘materialists’, they believe that ‘science’ is a social product best left to an elite, and that democracy has no part to play in physics.
And my experience (face to face) of the ignorant is that they are proud of their ignorance and make fun of knowledge.
I do not mind the gentle and compassionate who are uninformed. It’s the ignorant who are arrogant and proud that I despise.
One can only try to address those who want to know things, and it’s a long haul; and with never time enough or opportunity enough. So, convincing a majority?
The empirical evidence is that people’s minds are changed gradually through shared community and activities, rather than by jumping straight into competitive debate or by challenging facts. That’s why people engaged in activities such as trade union activity are much less likely to have rascist views – they’re engaging in a common project with people from lots of different backgrounds/
https://iai.tv/articles/we-need-to-stop-talking-about-politics-auid-3375
https://sarahsteinlubrano.substack.com/p/what-to-do-instead-of-talking-aboutHopefully that will help lift the gloom.
I have been dealing with nationalists for several decades, and it is really difficult to deal with them; it is one of those things that prevents them from obtaining the proper concept of socialism/communism.
Now that capitalism has expanded around the globe and the concept of nation state is in danger of being eliminated, nationalists are coming back with more efforts and desperation to spread nationalism among the population; all types of nationalism have racist roots, and that is one of the main feature of populism, it is not only taking place within the ‘white population’, it is spreading around the whole world
The concept of nation state is not scientific, and it is only an illusion. Its history shows that it is mainly a characteristic of the capitalist society, but most people believe that it has always existed in human society, and most people are proud of their national origin and national superiority, without knowing that it is based on false conceptions
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta. The demise of the nation-state
This article, published by the Socialist Party, shows how nationalism was born in Germany after the capitalist development of Britain and France, and it became a racist concept.
It was spread around the world, including the African world. The so-called African nationalism has its roots in Germany, and it is also based on false conceptions, like any other type of nationalism and patriotism, and it is as racist as white nationalism.
I have had difficulty dealing with workers who believe that the Socialist Party of England, the WSPUS and the Socialist Party of Canada are nationalist and European institutions instead of looking at their worldly ( instead of internationalist) conceptions. Their nationalist view has prevented them from joining the World Socialist Movement and understanding its principles
I do not think it has anything to do with materialism, Engels and Kautsky; it is the influence of bourgeois ideology in their minds, and that influence is also strongly present with the leftwingers.
Social media can not replace face-to-face conversations, but social media is a good tool to spread socialist principles, and the socialist party has spent more time explaining what is not socialism due to the confusion created by Leninism, Bolshevism and nationalism
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1991/no-1043-july-1991/nationalism-a-dangerous-illusion/. Nationalism, a dangerous illusion, to “have a country or to belong to a nation” is absolutely meaningless. Feelings of loyalty to a nation-state are purely subjective, having no basis in reality.
I would actually place the birth of popular nationalism in late 18th century England among the Church and King mob and the prizefight craze. Nationalism crystallised round the prizefight heroes, especially Daniel Mendoza, as a recent book explains.
But the nationalist mob co-existed with the very different English Jacobin movement which looked to revolutionary France for misplaced inspiration.
Come Napoleon, British nationalism came to the fore, but it remained a lumpen phenomenon, as it largely does today. The most patriotic and jingoistic of the proletariat are the lumpenproletariat, in the popular sense if not necessarily the economic.
(Have not socialists always used the word ‘lumpen’ to mean ruffian and proudly ignorant, and not strictly for its economic definition?)The national sentiment existed in England and France, but the political theory of nationalism and the nation-state emerged later, as the nation-state is a new concept which emerged along with the development of capitalism. World Wars Warld 1-2 were not a product of nationalism; it was a sentiment used to move the working class to defend the so-called homeland, but both were based on socioeconomic interests
I never said nationalism caused the world wars. I said Germany’s late arrival on the scene of capitalism and of colonial aspirations created the conditions which produced the German wars in Europe (WW1 & 2).
The first nation-state was Spain. But nationalism originated in Britain.
I’ve always thought of nationalism as as a form of tribalism that the princes (and later Bourgeoisie) used to initially split from the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope in the name of Protestantism during the Reformation?
The Humanists, like More and Erasmus, saw the Henrician Supremacy (which was not Protestant) and Luther’s revolt as signs of the disintegration of Christendom, and thus opposed it, whilst pursuing their own Humanist reforms under the aegis of Rome.
Nation-states were emerging and an English nationalism supported the Elizabethan war against Spain. But this nationalism was still tied to religion and was really anti-papist. The rural population, subject to enclosures, was still predominantly Catholic and had supported Mary’s march on London in 1553.
Of course, the British school system mispresents history in modern nationalist terms.Spain, England’s main enemy at the time, had become the first nation-state with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and yet nationalism was absent. Like Reformation England, religion was foremost. The rise of nation-states which remained Catholic was expressed by the Counter Reformation, which was not a counter reformation but was the Reformation in the Catholic countries. It produced ecclesiastical, but Catholic, independence in Spain, with episcopal loyalty going to the monarch rather than the Pope, and Gallicanism in the Church of France, promoting monarchical and ecclesiastical centrism.
In the German states battling the Emperor, the Lutheran revolt was in fact reactionary, championing the feudal princes against Imperial centrism. It delayed the rise of Germany as a unified state until the late 19th century and kept the princes in control and the bourgeoisie in subjection.
I quite like this definition as it implies that the ideology was a spin-off of technological advances – very Marxian:
‘The origins and early history of nation-states are disputed. A major theoretical question is: “Which came first, the nation or the nation-state?” Scholars such as Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault and Jeremy Black[10][11][12] have advanced the hypothesis that the nation-state did not arise out of political ingenuity or an unknown undetermined source, nor was it a political invention; rather, it is an inadvertent by-product of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography[13][14] combined with cartography[15][16] and advances in map-making technologies.[17][18] It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation-state arose.’
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