Our Patriotism?

"Marxism-Leninism has always insisted upon combining proletarian internationalism with the patriotism of the people of each country. Each Communist Party must educate its members and the people in a spirit of internationalism, because the true national interests of all peoples call for friendly co-operation among nations. On the other hand, each Communist Party must represent the legitimate national interests and sentiments of its own people. Communists have always been true patriots, and they understand that it is only when they correctly represent the interests and sentiments of their nation can they really enjoy the trust and love of the broad mass of their own people, effectively educate them in internationalism and harmonize the national sentiments and interests of the peoples of different countries."

So spoke an editorial in Renmin Ribao(People's Daily)in 1956.

July 4 has passed. It seemed that the parades and excitement were muted this year, that smaller-than-usual fireworks displays took the place of speech-making, that it was hard to muster enthusiasm while wars and economic crises and ecological destruction continue on. The local right-wing inexplicably cancelled their July 4 rally at the State Capitol.

Still, July 4 cannot pass without a reflection on patriotism. In the US the right-wing has long laid claim to all that is patriotic. With the re-emergence of liberal or left-leaning populism and progressiveism the right's ownership of patriotic sentiment has been challenged to the point that its recent efforts to recreate McCarthyism and move the US backwards 50 or 60 years has largely stalled. We are witnessing and taking part in a real political struggle for ownership of what is left of the American Dream.

It seems to me that neither the right nor the left can legitimately claim ownership of patriotic sentiment and that we need to put these matters in better order. Sentiment might logically flow from ownership of the American Dream, or it might not. Scratch the right-wing rhetoric and you find only sentiment and cynicism. There is no established belief or ideology on the right which holds that "average" people can actually and directly govern ourselves peacefully. Moreover, their America forever promises what it cannot deliver by definition: a society divided by race, gender, class and circumstance cannot at the same time be a springboard for full equality before the law or prosperity or progress. The very relative and shifting nature of these terms betrays their lack of real foundations in society.

For our part on the left, it is indeed difficult to envision a US patriotism free of jingoism, well thought out and inclusive of all. We are generally alienated from our own revolutionary traditions in the US because our two revolutions---the American revolution and the Civil Warand Reconstruction---went only so far and no further and because we have not been able to maintain those revolutionary traditions very well. Some of us tend to look at the US as a forced amalgam of several captive nations or region which, if given the chance, might well choose self-determination or even independence. The Chicano Nation, Native Americans and African Americans fall into this category or schema. For us, then, defining the US is problematic. If we cannot easily define the US by its borders, what then specifically do we attach ourselves to in a patriotic way?

At one time we may have seen this as a problem of the left not being properly rooted in the American experience and being unable to communicate a message in distinctly American terms. Those problems have not entirely disappeared, but it must also be remarked that American society has devolved to the point that finding an "American experience" and one distinctly American social or political idiom is difficult or impossible now. We are one group of many and taking leadership in a fractured and wounded society is proving as difficult for us as it is for any other political formation present in the US. Organizing, struggle and leadership flow from engagement and trust as much as they flow from the maturing of contradictions within society. I argue that engagement and trust are lacking across society.

The left should be finding our base in the class struggle and speaking from there, making the contradictions which create that struggle the real American experience. For a number of complicated reasons we are unable to do this at present.

I do not want to repeat the mistakes or the dogma of the social democrats who proclaimed in the 1960s that "we should launder and not burn" the American flag. That said, I do not accept anti-patriotism as an article of faith on the left. Most Americans are probably indifferent to our national symbols at this point, as they are to most of the political and social options before them, but sentiment and prejudice can flare quickly from the past and engulf society. Moreover, we still live with the effects of the suppression of Radical Reconstructionism after the Civil War and we cannot progress as a nation or as a left without taking this up and carrying forward the struggle against slavery and its effects and for self-determination for African Americans and other oppressed national minorities.

Our challenge is to invent a new social life with the working class and oppressed of our country---a culture of stability, solidarity and engagement at the very base of capitalist society--and guide this forward to a revolutionary end. Is that a patriotic task? Not at present. Could it become a patriotic task? Certainly.