(I’m starting to think that patsoc threads on lemmy are the equivalent of sex work threads on r/genzedong – i.e., both start as “discussions” and inevitably turn into raging dumpster fires. But I’ll chime in anyway.)

We need to be clear on what patriotism is. People use the word in several contradictory senses. Why? Because if patriotism is, literally, “love for the nation,” the word “nation” has since the 18th century taken on several different meanings; and these meanings have tended to become confused and blended in everyday speech, so that nobody – and that includes most patsocs – understands the concept at all clearly.

The formal, philosophical definition of a nation, and the one you will learn in most political science classes, goes something like this: “a group of people living in an area with legally-constituted geographical boundaries, who are defined as political subjects by having a specific legal relationship vis-a-vis their central government (citizenship).” In this sense, the nation is a purely legal construct; though it does need a certain material-historical basis, as even liberals will admit if you push them. But the idea of nations as constituted in their constitution, laws, etc., is actually quite recent; it first appears in the 18th century, and only becomes widespread with the decisive victory of liberalism in the 19th century. Which is what one would expect, from the purely idealist nature of the definition in question.

But there is an older, more material sense of nation, that most people – working people especially – still tend instinctively to use. According to this, a nation is a group of people who are bound together by common economic ties, some sort of a shared history, and an historically-forged identity that is not broken easily. Stalin used the word in this sense, and formalized it as: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” This “material” nation, as the substratum of the “ideal” or legal nation, may exist through changes of government, territorial adjustments, or even fracturing of the tradition “homeland” into several different legally-constituted countries. Before their respective unification movements, Germans and Italians were widely considered “nations” in this sense, even though, politically, they were divided into a myriad of small kingdoms and principalities.

It is in this second, material sense, that a socialist should be patriotic. (Note that this material sense is not reducible to race; the fascist attempt to do so is ahistorical, and as Stalin points out, shared genetic background does not necessarily translate to shared economic interests or shared cultural identity). One loves one’s material nation, and fights for it to be legally constituted under socialism. Ultimately, of course, the international working class is the prime reality. But that international proletariat itself is not a monolithic unity, because people are never a monolithic unity. They tend to “clump” or congregate based on local interests; internationalism means getting these local interests (nations) to work together, and to see that the local interests are simply parts of a common interest. Lenin’s dictum that the true socialist fights for the destruction of his nation so that it may reborn is in fact a classic dialectical statement: the true socialist fights for the destruction of the bourgeois, and ideally-constituted, nation so that the material nation may be reborn, and find its own ideal expression that is not a construct, but flows from material reality. This is, of course, socialism.

Finally, with that said – the United States is a peculiar case. It is doubtful whether the country is really one nation in any kind of material sense. Moreover, the tendency of Americans has always been to ignore the material, economic substratum of a nation entirely, and to believe that the nation itself exists purely in the realm of the ideal – except they seem also to believe that the ideal can shape and mold the material world. Marx points out (I don’t remember where, unfortunately) that American reformers have always been content just to make a new law and leave it at that. Thus you get the belief that the legal prohibition against slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have somehow exorcized racism from the US; or that the mere fact of having one party in office means the others have been decisively defeated. It is this facet of American patriotism – namely, its purely ideal nature – that makes it troublesome for socialism. I am not sure that if you take away the bourgeois nation-state, there will be any kind of unity remaining. It may be that in the US, socialism will have to focus on becoming something new, on growing into a Yugoslavia-like confederation of nationalities; which, to be fair, might fit well with the value most Americans put on change and inventiveness.

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