Rebecca Long-Bailey, in announcing her intention to stand to replace Corbyn as Labour Leader, says that she would be a champion of "progressive patriotism". There is no such thing. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel according to Johnson; for Wilde it is "the virtue of the vicious". Putting the word progressive in front of patriotism is not only to create an oxymoron, but to illustrate that its proponents are duplicitous, vicious scoundrels. That Long-Bailey proposes to make such an objective the forefront of her campaign simply illustrates what was known all along, which is that she would represent a continuation, and, in all likelihood, an intensification of all of that reactionary nationalism that lay behind Corbyn's own disastrous pro-Brexit stance, as promoted by the reactionary nationalism of the Stalinists that stood behind him, and who now stand behind Long-Bailey.
Lenin put it like this,
“One such idea is refined nationalism, which advocates the division and splitting up of the proletariat on the most plausible and specious pretexts, as for example, that of protecting the interests of ‘national culture’, national autonomy or independence’, and so on and so forth.
The class conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism, both the crude, violent Black Hundred nationalism, and that most refined nationalism, which preaches the equality of nations together with… the splitting up of the workers’ cause, the workers’ organisations, and the working class movement according to nationality. Unlike all the varieties of the nationalist bourgeoisie, the class conscious workers, carrying out the decisions of the recent (Summer 1913) conference of the Marxists, stand not only for the most complete, consistent and fully applied equality of nations and languages, but also for the amalgamation of the workers of the different nationalities in united proletarian organisations of every kind”
In the 19th century, it was still possible for patriotism/nationalism to fulfil a progressive role. The American patriots who overthrew the rule of George III, in 1783, following the revolutionary war, as part of their national revolution, were progressive. They created the basis for the US nation state to develop as a bourgeois-democratic state. Garibaldi, and his patriotic red shirts were progressive in bringing about a unified, bourgeois Italian state. Even the Prussians, who brought about a unified Germany by military means, were progressive.
All of these were progressive, because they took the development of society forward. They were the forces that acted as the midwives of historical changes that were already underway. The British nation state had already been constructed over a prolonged period. It reflected the fact that capitalist development in Britain required a large single market, in which common tariffs, and regulations existed. A single state to enforce those conditions is required.
The spread of capitalism across the globe meant that every other part of the world had to follow in this trajectory. It meant that the 300 nationalities that existed in France, split across a wide number of principalities, had to be forged into a single nation state, the same with Germany, Italy, and so on. The United States, which had already created a nation state, as a result of its revolution, still needed to ensure that the power of the centralised Federal State held sway over the demands for the separate states to plough their own furrow. It completed its revolution, via the Civil War, which imposed that power of the Federal State.
Even in South America, where the old European colonial powers had held sway over empires, the national revolutions undertaken by Bolivar and others, established independent bourgeois nation states. That process was completed, by the destruction of the old colonial empires in Asia and Africa after WWII, in part on the insistence of the US, and in part on the basis that the old colonial powers could no longer afford to hold on to them, and in part due to the struggles of national liberation movements in those countries. From that point on, there has been nowhere in the world where patriotism/nationalism has any progressive role to play. It is now, everywhere, a reactionary force.
Patriotism/nationalism only had a progressive role to play in so far as it was a means of replacing small scattered states with large centralised nation states, in just the same way that Marx describes the progressive role of capitalism in replacing the small scattered independent means of production of the peasant and artisan producer, with the concentrated and centralised means of production of the capitalist producer. It is a necessary means to an end. But, that end has now been achieved. Not only has it been achieved, but society has moved beyond the limits imposed by the primitive nature of that initial transformation.
Not only did capitalism sweep away all of the independent scattered means of production, and replace them with capital, as large-scale, concentrated and centralised means of production, but it also swept away these earlier primitive forms of capital. It replaced free market competition with oligopolistic competition, and with the planned and regulated market and production that goes with it; it replaced the private capitalist, even the biggest private capitalists, with socialised capital. And, alongside this development, it not only created a world market, but it it created the need for much larger states than the old nation state, as the basic economic unit. Only the largest states, like the US, and China could continue to function as nation states, themselves essentially being federations of separate nation states, whilst the small European states, the South American states, the Asian states, and African states, have found the need to combine together in large economic blocs, like the EU, Mercosur, ASEAN, and the ACFTA. All of these are, necessarily, proto-states, on their way to forming into new super states to compete with the US and China.
Progressive politics, today, involves taking forward this new movement, in the same way that, in the 19th century, it involved forging together the individual principalities into the nation state. Today, those that attempt to promote the nation state as against these larger states are reactionaries; they are the ones trying to hold back the course of history of human development, in the same way that George III, the European colonialists, and the opponents of Garibaldi did in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Already, by the 19th century, after the British state had come into existence, British patriotism was reactionary. It harked back to ideas based upon something that had already been achieved. It did so, not in order to thereby push forward with some progressive development, but as a means of holding back further progressive development. It did so in order to utilise the ideas that had once had progressive content for what was now a wholly reactionary objective. It was used to set apart Britain from other countries, and thereby to set British workers aside from their foreign comrades. It is what creates the conditions for the slaughter of the First World War, fought out for the benefits of profits for the capitalist class.
By the end of the 19th century nearly all bourgeois nation states that would exist had been created. Even those of Africa and Asia essentially existed, even though they were under the political control of colonial masters. That is why Lenin wrote,
“We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a lesser federal unity etc. for the complete political unity of a state.”
In those cases, of the colonies, it was not a matter of creating new class states but of freeing existing class states from their colonial masters. But, the existing nation states like Britain, France, Germany and so on, did not suffer any such political domination. Patriotism/nationalism, in their case, is immediately reactionary, and used only to promote the interests of the national bourgeoisie of that particular country, a section of the bourgeoisie, which, because it is nationally based, always tends, thereby, to be small, and narrow in vision. It is used to separate the workers from their foreign comrades, and to tie them to the national bourgeoisie.
The Progressive Patriotism touted by Long-Bailey is no such thing. It is necessarily reactionary from start to finish. Swathing it in radical rhetoric is nothing new. It is the age old method of the demagogue, be it Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, or Mosely. It is the same soup as offered up by the Strasserites as with the Mosely Memorandum. It repeats the mistakes of the last election campaign of trying to avoid tackling the bigotry and reactionary ideas that infect sections of society, including sections of the working-class, not even by closing your eyes to it, but by accommodating to it, whilst offering up economic bribes handed down from on high. It led to disaster in the election, and it will lead to even greater disaster if Labour pursues that route in the future.
“Those who seek to serve the proletariat must unite the workers of all nations, and unswervingly fight bourgeois nationalism, domestic and foreign. The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.”
(Lenin and Equal Rights for Nations Within One State)
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