Socialist Patriotism: Difference between revisions

''“At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the work-people of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them… It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.” - Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism''

''“To love your country, and be willing to sacrifice and battle for it, that is patriotism. To have no home, to be unable to provide self and loved ones with food, clothing and shelter, that is poverty. At first sight it would appear that a man afflicted with poverty could not possibly be a patriot. He owns no part of any country, and patriotism means love of one’s own country, not love of a country owned by others. What matters it to the poor devil who is starving whether the country in which he is hungry is owned by this ruler or that ruler, if his miserable status changes not? But we see that poverty, instead of crushing patriotism. actually appears to produce it. The troops who left New York yesterday to fight the Chinese were mostly men who own nothing in the way of property in this country. They are not going to fight for love of their country. That have none. Their very poverty gave birth to the bastard patriotism of the Hessian. Here is a sample of the leave-takings between the soldiers and their wives: 'Oh, why did you go and enlist, Charlie? And now you have to go and leave me and the child all alone,” said a weeping young wife, as she held her strapping soldier husband about the neck. ‘It had to be done, Lizzie.’ he replied. ‘You know I could not find any work.’ The capitalist papers which contain the above item also contain the usual silly talk about the ‘patriotism of our volunteers,’ and thus furnish proof for the socialist contention that the capitalist class is at once ignorant and corrupt. Ignorant in not knowing that this paid-for bastard patriotism portends the doom of their class, and corrupt in attempting to pass this counterfeit for the genuine article. Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred. Instead of the American freeman bidding his wife be of good cheer that he was going to fight for his country, we have the wage-slave driven by hunger to fight for a hireling’s pittance. Instead of repelling a foreign foe, he goes to loot and ravage a peaceful race, so as to swell the coffers of his own capitalist masters. The patriotism which poverty produces is as yellow as the gold which buys it.” - Daniel De Leon''

''“No honest man will consider anything he gives to the socialist movement a sacrifice. It is no sacrifice at all to invest all our time, wealth, knowledge, and all else, so as to leave our children the estate of the socialist or cooperative Commonwealth.” - Daniel De Leon''

''“What is Patriotism? Love of country, someone answers. But what is meant by ‘love of country’? ‘The rich man,’ says a French writer, ‘loves his country because he conceives it owes him a duty, whereas the poor man loves his country as he believes he owes it a duty.’ The recognition of the duty we owe our country is, I take it, the real mainspring of patriotic action; and our ‘country’, properly understood, means not merely the particular spot on the earth’s surface from which we derive our parentage, but also comprises all the men, women and children of our race whose collective life constitutes our country’s political existence. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals. It is the mission of the working class to give to patriotism this higher, nobler, significance. This can only be done by our working class, as the only universal, all-embracing class, organising as a distinct political party, recognising in Labour the cornerstone of our economic edifice and the animating principle of our political action." - James Connolly''

''“…Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman - the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared. The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.” - James Connolly''

''“After studying the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland (- Karl Marx); We are told that the English people contributed to help our enslavement. It is true. It is also true that the Irish people have contributed soldiers to duly crush every democratic movement of the English people from the deportation of Irish soldiers to serve the cause of political despotism under Charles to the days of Featherstone under Asquith. Slaves themselves the English people helped to enslave others; slaves themselves the Irish people helped to enslave others. There is no room for recrimination. We are only concerned now with the fact - daily, becoming more obvious - that the English workers who have reached the moral stature of rebels are now willing to assist the working class rebels of Ireland, and that those Irish rebels will in their turn help the rebels of Ireland, and that those Irish rebels will in their turn help the rebels of England to break their chains and attain the dignity of freedom. There are still a majority of slaves in England - there are still a majority of slaves in Ireland. We are under no illusions as to either country. But we do not intend to confound the geographical spot on which the rebels lie with the political government upheld by the slave. For us and ours the path is clear. The first duty of the working class of the word is to settle accounts with the master class of the world - that of their own country at the head of the list. To that point this struggle, as all such struggles, is converging.” - James Connolly''

''“The socialist of another country is a fellow patriot; the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy.” - James Connolly''</blockquote><blockquote>''“We are full of a sense of national pride, and for that very reason we particularly hate our slavish past (when the landed nobility led the peasants into war to stifle the freedom of Hungary, Poland, Persia and China), and our slavish present, when these selfsame landed proprietors, aided by the capitalists, are loading us into a war in order to throttle Poland and the Ukraine, crush the democratic movement in Persia and China, and strengthen the gang of Romanovs, Bobrinskys and Purishkeviches, who are a disgrace to our Great-Russian national dignity. Nobody is to be blamed for being born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews a striving for freedom but justifies and eulogises his slavery (eg. calls the throttling of Poland and the Ukraine, etc. a ‘defence of the fatherland’ of the Great Russians) - such a slave is a lickspittle and a boor, who arouses a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“We know that the especially favourable conditions for the development of capitalism and the rapidity of this development have produced a situation in which vast national differences are speedily and fundamentally, as nowhere else in the world, smoothed out to form a single ‘American’ nation.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“American Revolutionary workers have to play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“Bolshevism, our reading of Marxism, actually originated in America. Daniel De Leon left the Socialist Party, he resigned, he founded a more radical party, a more truly Marxist party, which he called the Socialist Workers Party of America” - V.I. Lenin''

''“We are ruining the Russian language. We use foreign words with no need to use them. We use them incorrectly. So why say ‘defects’ when we can say flaws, or deficiencies, or lacunae?.. Isn’t it time to declare a war on the unnecessary use of foreign words?” - V.I. Lenin''

''“The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition [which] is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the civil war in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the ‘destruction’ of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” - V.I. Lenin''

''“The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these ‘civilised’ bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in; all parts of the world.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires…” - V.I. Lenin''

''“The proletariat… evaluates every national demand, every national separation from the angle of the class struggle of the workers.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists. We take pride in the resistance to these outrages put up from our midst, from the Great Russians; in that midst having produced Radishchev, the Decembrists and the revolutionary commoners of the seventies; in the Great-Russian working class having created, in 1905, a mighty revolutionary party of the masses; and in the Great-Russian peasantry having begun to turn towards democracy and set about overthrowing the clergy and the landed proprietors” - V.I. Lenin''

''“We remember that Chernyshevsky, the Great-Russian democrat, who dedicated his life to the cause of revolution, said half a century ago: ‘A wretched nation, a nation of slaves, from top to bottom - all slaves.’ The overt and covert Great-Russian slaves (slaves with regard to the tsarist monarchy) do not like to recall these words. Yet, in our opinion, these were words of genuine love for our country, a love distressed by the absence of a revolutionary spirit in the masses of the Great-Russian people. There was none of that spirit at the time. There is little of it now, but it already exists. We are full of national pride because the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class, because it, too, has proved capable of providing mankind with great models of the struggle for freedom and socialism, and not only with great pogroms, rows of gallows, dungeons, great famines and great servility to priests, tsars, landowners and capitalists.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“‘No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations,’ said Marx and Engels, the greatest representatives of the consistent nineteenth century democracy, who became the teachers of the revolutionary proletariat. And, full of a sense of national pride, we Great-Russians want, come what may, a free and independent, a democratic, republican and proud Great Russia, one that will base its relations with its neighbours on the human principle of equality, and not on the feudalist principle of privelage, which is so degrading to a great nation. Just because we want that, we say: it is impossible, in the twentieth century and in Europe (even in the far east of Europe), to ‘defend the fatherland’ otherwise than by using every revolutionary means to combat the monarchy, the landowners and the capitalists of one’s own fatherland, i.e., the worst enemies of our country. We say that the Great Russians cannot ‘defend the fatherland’ otherwise than by desiring the defeat of tsarism in any war, this as the lesser evil to nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Great Russia. For tsarism not only oppresses those nine-tenths economically and politically, but also demoralises, degrades, dishonours and prostitutes them by teaching them to oppress other nations and cover up this shame with hypocritical and quasipatriotic phrases.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“This is a lie; it is disgusting, intolerable hypocrisy. Everyone knows - and the Grütlianer openly publishes this bitter truth - that the congress is being postponed because these social-patriots are afraid of the workers, afraid that the workers will decide against defence of the fatherland; that they threaten to resign their seats in the Nationalrat, if a decision against defence of the fatherland is carried. The social-patriot (referring to ‘socialists’ who supported their own imperialists war of aggression, this caused the SPD/KPD split and was the main dividing line between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) ‘leaders’ of the Socialist Party of Switzerland, who even now, two and a half years after the beginning of the war, favour ‘defence of the fatherland’, i.e., defence of the imperialist bourgeoisie of one or the other coalition, have decided to disrupt the congress, to sabotage the will of the Swiss socialist workers, to prevent them from discussing and determining, during the war, their attitude towards the war, towards the ‘defenders of the fatherland’, i.e., towards the lackeys of the imperialist bourgeoisie.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“All Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivelaged nations (for example Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly ‘unpleasant’ for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible; the hypocrisy of the reformists and Kautskyan advocates of self-determination who maintain silence about the nations which are oppressed by ‘their’ nation and forcibly retained within ‘their’ state will remain unexposed.” - V.I. Lenin''

''“We live in the capitalist system, so called because it is dominated by the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers are the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class.” - Eugene V. Debs''

''“On this May Day let us stand upright and be counted. We need to be united. We need to get together. We need to feel the common touch. The world will always be against us if we are not for ourselves. You who produce everything, you who really create, you who are conserving civilisation - how can you endure to think that you are the bottom class, the lower order? When you go for a job to the master class you work upon conditions which they prescribe. You depend upon them for tools, you work for their benefits.” - Eugene V. Debs''

''“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasise the fact - and it cannot be repeated too often - that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.” - Eugene V. Debs''

''“It is ‘patriotism’ of the workers of one nation to fall upon and foully murder the workers of another nation to enlarge the possessions of their masters and increase the piles of their bloodstained riches, and as long as the poor, deluded toiling masses are fired by this brand of ‘patriotism,’ they will serve as cannon fodder and no power on earth can save them from their sodden fate. We socialists are not wanting in genuine patriotism, but we are deadly hostile to the fraudulent species which is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’ and which prompts every crook and grafter and every blood -sucking vampire to wrap his reeking carcass in the folds of the national flag that he may carry on his piracy and plunder in the name of ‘patriotism.’ Ours is a wider patriotism - as wide as humanity. We abhor murder in uniform even more than we do in midnight assassination. We stand with Garrison upon the proposition that the world is our country and that all mankind are our countrymen. We stand for peace and for the only system that makes peace possible. They, who support a system that breeds war cannot consistently say they are for peace, and they who prate so much about their ‘patriotism’ have, as a rule, the hearts of poltroons and the souls of cowards. Patriotism, like brotherhood, must be international and all embracing to be at all. Socialism rightly understood is the most profound patriotic movement on the planet.” - Eugene V. Debs''

''“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.” - José Carlos Mariátegui''

''“In the lead-up to Nazi aggression, we have seen Stalin stress the need [to] link ‘national sentiment’ and the idea of the nation [to] a healthy nationalism, correctly understood with proletarian internationalism; [He similarly distinguishes between] cosmopolitanism [and an] internationalism [which knows - and in fact must know - how to be] profoundly national [as well].” - Antonio Gramsci''

''“Who is the real patriot, or rather what is the kind of patriotism that we represent? The kind of patriotism we represent is the kind of patriotism which loves America with open eyes. Our relation towards America is the same as the relation of a man who loves a woman, who is enchanted by her beauty and yet who cannot be blind to her defects. And so I wish to state here, in my own behalf and in behalf of hundreds of thousands whom you decry and state to be antipatriotic, that we love America, we love her beauty, we love her riches, we love her mountains and her forests, and above all we love the people who have produced her wealth and riches, who have created all her beauty, we love the dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty. But that must not make us blind to the social faults of America. That cannot make us deaf to the discords of America. That cannot compel us to be inarticulate to the terrible wrongs committed in the name of patriotism and in the name of the country. We simply insist, regardless of all protests to the contrary, that this war is not a war for democracy. If it were a war for the purpose of making democracy safe for the world, we would say that democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world” - Emma Goldman''

''“I am not a world refugee, I am a German with great national, but also international experiences. My nation, to which I belong and which I love, is the German people, and my nation, which I honour with great pride, is the German nation, a chivalrous, proud and hard nation. I am blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the German workers and therefore, as their revolutionary child, I later became their revolutionary leader. My life and work knew and knows only one thing: to use my spirit and my knowledge, my experience and my energy, indeed my whole personality, for the victorious socialist struggle for freedom in the new springtime of the German nation!” - Ernst Thälmann''

''“…Who therefore is a patriot? They or us? Capital doesn’t have a country and seeks profit in whatever country it is able to. That is why it isn’t concerned for the existence of borders and the state. But all we own are our hats and the small kerb in front of us… So, who can be interested more in their country? They, who remove the capital from the country, or us who are stuck on our doorsteps here?..” - Aris Velouchiotis''

''“The proletarian state will gradually turn, as socialist construction succeeds, capitalist relations are eradicated and the capitalists disappear, into a state of the whole people.” - (Mikhail Kalinin, What the Soviet government is doing to achieve democracy, 1926)''

''“Mussolini does his utmost to make capital for himself out of the heroic figure of Garibaldi. The French fascists bring to the fore as their heroine Joan of Arc. The American fascists appeal to the traditions of the American War of Independence, the traditions of Washington and Lincoln. The Bulgarian fascists make use of the national-liberation movement of the seventies and its heroes beloved by the people, Vassil Levsky, Stephan Karaj and others. Communists who suppose that all this has nothing to do with the cause of the working class, who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people in a historically correct fashion, in a genuinely Marxist-Leninist spirit, who do nothing to link up the present struggle with the people’s revolutionary traditions and past - voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation, so that the fascists may fool the masses.” - Georgi M. Dimitrov''

''“We Communists are the irreconcilable opponents, in principle, of bourgeois nationalism in all its forms. But we are not supporters of national nihilism, and should never act as such. The task of educating the workers and all working people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the fundamental tasks of every Communist Party. But anyone who thinks that this permits him, or even compels him, to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad masses of working people is far from being a genuine Bolshevik, and has understood nothing of the teaching of Lenin on the national question.” - Georgi M. Dimitrov''