Socialist Patriotism: Difference between revisions

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 <blockquote>“''Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionised, being cleansed of religious, patriotic (bourgeois patriotism) and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy...'' ''A truly democratic government, unless it were to fail and be crushed under the violent attacks of big business, would have no alternative but to develop into the general type of government now existing in a number of countries of Eastern and Central Europe and known as People’s Democracy. This new kind of government, in which the basic economic system is controlled by the people, the power of monopoly capital is shattered, and the working class is the leading class, is one which definitely tends to orientate toward building socialism, and not toward patching up obsolete capitalism. Socialism in the United States naturally would have some specific American characteristics. However it would embody the socialisation of all the social means of production and distribution, the carrying on a planned production for use instead of for profit, with the Government under the acknowledged leadership of the working class. Only with such a system, with the exploitation of man by man completely abolished, will American society finally be freed of the fascism, poverty, economic chaos, and warmongering that are increasingly menacing our country as well as other lands. All these socialist measures would, naturally, be legally adopted by the people’s democratically elected government, by the People’s Democracy, despite employer resistance, whatever its form and violence...'' ''Dearborn, Kentucky, England (Ark.), Lawrence, Pittsburgh coal strike, etc., reflect the new spirit of the American class struggle. The capitalists, in the midst of the sharpening general crisis of capitalism, are determined to force the living standards of American toilers down to European levels, or lower. The workers will respond to this offensive by increasing class consciousness and mass struggle. More and more they will turn to the Communist party for leadership, and eventually they will be joined by decisive masses of the ever-more ruthlessly exploited poor farmers. The toiling masses of the United States will not submit to the capitalist way out of the crisis, which means still deeper poverty and misery, but will take the revolutionary way out to socialism. The working class of this country will tread the path of the workers of the world, to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a Soviet government. Lenin was profoundly correct when he said in his Letter to American Workingmen, of Aug. 20, 1918: ‘The American working class will not follow the lead of its bourgeoisie. It will go with us against its bourgeoisie. The whole history of the American people gives me this confidence, this conviction...'' ''Socialism in the United States will, out of necessity, have some American characteristics.” - William Z. Foster, Toward a Soviet America''
 “''We will incorporate U.S. traditions into the structure of socialism that the working class will create.” - William Z. Foster, Toward the American Revolution''
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 “''Throughout the ages the central principle of all great systems of morals has been ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Under slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, although the ruling classes have constantly preached this maxim to their slaves as a way by which to regulate their lives, they themselves have cynically ignored it in practice. Their systems of exploitation, including present-day capitalism, have always been based upon a ruthless class ethics, condoning the most brutal violation of every principle of human solidarity. That is why Christianity has never ‘worked.’ As has been truly said, ‘It has never been tried.’ It is only with the introduction of socialism, and later of Communism, that the Golden Rule, without benefit of religion, becomes a matter of practical politics and of general acceptance by society as a whole.” - William Z. Foster, The Communist''
-“''There is no other group as loyal to the interests of the workers and the people as the Communists. As I have pointed out earlier, the whole life of our party has been a ceaseless fight for the interests of the workers, the Negro people, the nation. In our demand for socialism for the United States, we are giving expression to the supreme interest of the overwhelming majority of the American people. It is precisely because the Communists are the very best defenders of the interests of the American people that eventually our party will be the leading party of the nation. I, as other Communists, love the American people and their glorious revolutionary democratic traditions, their splendid scientific and industrial achievements. And I love, too, our beautiful land, in every corner of which I have lived and worked. I want only the best of everything for our people and this country. I have only contempt, therefore, for the ‘foreign agent’ charge, and doubly so because it comes from reactionaries who live by exploiting the American people and whose basic principle of operation is to peddle away the national welfare for the sake of their narrow class interests. We Communists revere our country. We are ardent patriots, but not nationalists. We defend the people’s interests but we do not try to shove official American (capitalist) interests ahead at the expense of those of other peoples. For that is the road to war and general ruin. We are Marxian internationalists. We realise very well the common interests that the workers and the peoples of the whole world have together. They key to an intelligent internationalism in our day is friendly co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This collaboration is indispensable if world peace is to prevail. On this basic issue we Communists stand four-square, come hell or high water! Our resolute position in this fundamental matter puts us into direct and irreconcilable collision with the imperialists.” - William Z. Foster, in a speech delivered at the 14th National Convention of the Communist Party USA in 1939''</blockquote>The liquidationist, cosmopolitan, national nihilist trend that rejects the very soil on which you have been bred and the deep rooted relationship of the workers to the land and product of their labour, has always been present within the American Communist movement. <blockquote>“''The emphasis of young radicals on the negative and reactionary side of American tradition is understandable. It is an effort to counteract the brazen hypocrisy and lies with which the ruling class has concealed its own historic role. Its racist oppression of minority peoples, the pilfering of this nation and the plundering of foreign nations, should all be dealt with and exposed. But the ruling class also distorts the history and struggles of the people; it seeks to bury the revolutionary and progressive side of our traditions - the tradition of Black people, the working people, the various ethnic groups, and so forth. It wishes to hide from the people the fact that every gain they have made was because of their own struggle and not because it was given to them. And it is important that the people know about the progressive side of their tradition so that they can reject the caricature of themselves handed to them by their exploiters. To adopt a nihilist position toward one’s own people and past is to become a stranger in one’s own land. It is to surrender the fight to win the people. It is to mistake those whose minds are poisoned by ideological pollution with the class source of that pollution. If everything in the past of our people had been bad, by what strange logic is one to assume that any good can come from it now or in the future? Such a nihilist position leads only to elitism.” - Gil Green''</blockquote>The great African-American Communist leader, Henry M. Winston rejected the idea that America was a colony. Paul Robeson and Harry Haywood both emphasised that they were patriotic and W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that the Black people were not their own distinct nation.
+“''There is no other group as loyal to the interests of the workers and the people as the Communists. As I have pointed out earlier, the whole life of our party has been a ceaseless fight for the interests of the workers, the Negro people, the nation. In our demand for socialism for the United States, we are giving expression to the supreme interest of the overwhelming majority of the American people. It is precisely because the Communists are the very best defenders of the interests of the American people that eventually our party will be the leading party of the nation. I, as other Communists, love the American people and their glorious revolutionary democratic traditions, their splendid scientific and industrial achievements. And I love, too, our beautiful land, in every corner of which I have lived and worked. I want only the best of everything for our people and this country. I have only contempt, therefore, for the ‘foreign agent’ charge, and doubly so because it comes from reactionaries who live by exploiting the American people and whose basic principle of operation is to peddle away the national welfare for the sake of their narrow class interests. We Communists revere our country. We are ardent patriots, but not nationalists. We defend the people’s interests but we do not try to shove official American (capitalist) interests ahead at the expense of those of other peoples. For that is the road to war and general ruin. We are Marxian internationalists. We realise very well the common interests that the workers and the peoples of the whole world have together. They key to an intelligent internationalism in our day is friendly co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This collaboration is indispensable if world peace is to prevail. On this basic issue we Communists stand four-square, come hell or high water! Our resolute position in this fundamental matter puts us into direct and irreconcilable collision with the imperialists.” - William Z. Foster, in a speech delivered at the 14th National Convention of the Communist Party USA in 1939''
+"The cultivation of the democratic, revolutionary American traditions among the mass organisations is one of the most important tasks in the building of the democratic front. We must not permit the reactionaries to steal and distort the national traditions and aspirations of the people. The great democratic masses must be taught by constant reference to American history that it was their struggles in the past that built our republic, that the democratic front movement of today is the continuation of all the fights for liberty in the history of our own country; that in the achievement of the current demands of the masses lies the fruition of all that is progressive and glorious in American history; that socialism is the climax toward which the entire historic struggle of the democratic American people inevitably tends." - William Z. Foster, in a speech delivered at the National Conference for the Defense of the Negro People, held in New York City in April 1936</blockquote>The liquidationist, cosmopolitan, national nihilist trend that rejects the very soil on which you have been bred and the deep rooted relationship of the workers to the land and product of their labour, has always been present within the American Communist movement. <blockquote>“''The emphasis of young radicals on the negative and reactionary side of American tradition is understandable. It is an effort to counteract the brazen hypocrisy and lies with which the ruling class has concealed its own historic role. Its racist oppression of minority peoples, the pilfering of this nation and the plundering of foreign nations, should all be dealt with and exposed. But the ruling class also distorts the history and struggles of the people; it seeks to bury the revolutionary and progressive side of our traditions - the tradition of Black people, the working people, the various ethnic groups, and so forth. It wishes to hide from the people the fact that every gain they have made was because of their own struggle and not because it was given to them. And it is important that the people know about the progressive side of their tradition so that they can reject the caricature of themselves handed to them by their exploiters. To adopt a nihilist position toward one’s own people and past is to become a stranger in one’s own land. It is to surrender the fight to win the people. It is to mistake those whose minds are poisoned by ideological pollution with the class source of that pollution. If everything in the past of our people had been bad, by what strange logic is one to assume that any good can come from it now or in the future? Such a nihilist position leads only to elitism.” - Gil Green''</blockquote>The great African-American Communist leader, Henry M. Winston rejected the idea that America was a colony. Paul Robeson and Harry Haywood both emphasised that they were patriotic and W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that the Black people were not their own distinct nation.
 <blockquote>“''It seems paradoxical that the recent avalanche of books and articles portraying the Black condition in the U.S. as that of a colony has been issued by the same monopoly-controlled book and newspaper publishers who use most of the rest of their ideological output to deny the imperialist nature of U.S. state monopoly capitalism. It seems paradoxical but it is not. This development marks a new state of sophistication in the ideological offensive of U.S. imperialism. The colony theory is particularly useful to the monopolists because it appears to be so radical; in fact, it contains the admission that the oppression of Black people in the U.S. is comparable to colonial oppression in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This emphasis on the intensity of Black oppression gives the colony theory its ring of authenticity. But this admission of oppression is not as candid (one might even say benign) as it might seem. By promoting the colony theory, the white ruling class aims to define and determine the direction of the Black liberation movement. In yet another form, the monopolists are striving to prevent Black people themselves from defining the specific features that constitute the special oppression they experience. By analogy, this theory directs attention to those aspects of the Black condition in the U.S. which most closely resemble colonial conditions. These similarities are so powerful that one’s attention may be diverted from what is unique in the status of the triply-oppressed Black peoples in colonial or semi-colonial situations, past or present. Via the colony analogy, and variations on this unscientific, anti-Marxist theme, U.S. imperialism’s ideologists are trying to influence the Black liberation movement into adopting a self-defeating strategy. While the U.S. ‘internal Black colony’ theory resembles a winning strategy for an oppressed majority living in a colony, it would mean certain defeat for an oppressed minority - which has indeed been the Black condition for more than 350 years in this part of the world. The supposedly ‘revolutionary’ (even so- called ‘Marxist’!) books on the colony analogy, now in mass circulation, were written by white radicals who have abandoned the struggle against racism, and by Black radicals who seek theoretical short cuts to liberation. By portraying the status of the Black people in the U.S. as a colony, these radicals assist the ruling class’ aim of diverting the Black liberation movement from a winning strategy: one that would advance the self-organisation of the Black liberation movement, and simultaneously combine this independent of strength with that of allies - the working class, Black, Brown, Yellow, Red and white, together with all the poor and exploited - in a new formation. This is the basis for an antimonopoly coalition, the only strategy that opens the way to a future without racism, exploitation, or oppression.” - Henry M. Winston''