In The Ideological Struggle against Fascism, Dimitrov explained something that today’s U.S. Marxists urgently need to understand if we want to win:
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.
Yet within Marxist spaces, we see just such sentiments all the time. Ben Norton, the media figure who’s been able to find great success in the algorithm despite nominally being a communist, promotes just such rhetoric; Norton has said that
Trying to “reclaim” the genocidal US flag as a symbol of the ‘left’ would be like Israeli leftists trying to reappropriate the Israeli flag. You can’t claim to support Palestinian liberation while waving an Israeli flag. The same is true for the US flag. It’s a ridiculous idea. “Patriotism” in an imperialist country founded on genocidal settler-colonialism will never be remotely similar to patriotism in a formerly colonized country. It depends on one’s position in the capitalist world system. Patriotism in the imperial core is inherently reactionary.
That Norton uses “leftist” and “communist” interchangeably further shows the anti-Marxist nature of the ideas he pushes, because communists are not the same as the left. Whereas communism is a way of bringing history to its next stage of development, the concept of the “left” comes from the idea of bringing progress within the bourgeois system. It comes from how the progressive side within early bourgeois democracy sat on the left side of Parliament in France. That’s why the view of the U.S. national identity which Norton’s camp promotes is consistent with what the New York Times, and other liberal institutions, have been saying in recent years.
In 2021, Jake Silverstein of the Times wrote a defense of the 1619 Project, the effort by a series of academics to promote the ahistorical idea that the American revolution was fought to preserve slavery. In this article, Silverstein noted some things that should make every Marxist suspicious of the ideas this Project represents. Referring to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the original piece, Silverstein described how “Portions of Nikole’s opening essay from the project, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, were cited in the halls of Congress; candidates in what was then a large field of potential Democratic nominees for president referred to it on the stump and the debate stage; 1619 Project book clubs seemed to materialize overnight. All of this happened in the first month.”
If these ideas are so revolutionary, why have they been getting gladly embraced by our imperialist institutions? Because imperialism’s ideological support doesn’t only come from jingoism. Especially in the modern era, its narrative basis also comes from the inverse to jingoism, which is national nihilism. The propaganda method that the “radical” wing of the liberal establishment has been using, where it gets left-leaning people to conclude that U.S. history is all bad, represents just as effective of a means for manufacturing consent as super-patriotism does. If not more so, because today many of the same people who have the greatest sense of patriotism have been coming to a conservative antiwar orientation. At the same time, many of the same people who agree with Project 1619’s thesis have been the ones most inclined to support imperialist wars, especially against Russia and Syria. Or at least they’ve been among the ones most actively working to undermine the resistance to these wars, taking a non-commital “neither NATO nor Russia” stance and attacking everyone who supports multipolarity.
At the moment, the jingoist narrative strategy from the Cold War and the Bush era is gaining more prominence, as the ruling class is using a controlled anti-woke backlash to attack the pro-Palestine cause. This anti-woke psyop is likely to continue being the direction the narrative managers take, partly because they need a way to prevent antiwar conservatives from gaining further revolutionary consciousness. What we always need to remember, though, is that the woke and anti-woke color revolutions are dependent on each other. The presence of the anti-woke psyop is used to strengthen the woke psyop, and the same is true the other way around. Even as anti-woke rightism comes to be the predominant overall propaganda angle, the ruling class is going to continue backing the pseudo-radical element which the 1619 Project represents.
The threat from the anti-woke backlash will be used by these synthetic radicals to make themselves appear to be the only ones to turn to for anybody who’s against the right. They want to keep Marxism tied to radical liberalism by scaring Marxists into becoming dependent on the promoters of national nihilism. It’s the same thing the Democrats do when they point to the Republican Party as supposed evidence that we have no choice but to vote blue. The goal is to push out any genuine sources of dissent by intimidating potential rebels into compromising with the forces of reformism, convincing them that a united front with capital’s “progressive” wing is the only way to combat fascism.
There are plenty of Marxists who consciously embrace this idea, as they represent an explicitly reformist current of “Marxism” that believes we need to vote Democrat. But most people who call themselves communists want to believe they’re authentically working against the Democratic Party, so the way that they’re brought into the liberal coalition is different. They’re told, through the kinds of arguments which Norton makes, that the best way they can resist imperialism is by fighting against U.S. patriotism. Yet they only strengthen imperialism, because they’ve fallen for a discourse psyop.
Burning the U.S. flag, or telling the workers that their cultural identity is inherently wrong, doesn’t even partially have a positive impact. All it does is keep Marxism confined to the left. The anti-woke wing of the ruling class isn’t hurt by it, but rather benefits from it, because these radicals are only convincing other radicals that their national nihilist position is correct. It’s not something that’s capable of winning mass support. The anti-woke element can then use the actions of these radicals as agitprop, convincing more of the masses that communism is opposed to their interests.
Actors like Norton don’t care that what they’re doing has these effects, because fundamentally they aren’t concerned with winning the masses. They’re concerned with building influence inside the left, meaning communism will never get majority support as long as it’s guided by their ideas. This is why they say that using the U.S. flag is the same as using the flag of the Zionist state: in order to keep up the perception that an anti-popular practice is capable of defeating the capitalist state, they need to make it seem like revolution can happen here the same way it can happen in Palestine.
The idea which leftists who subscribe to these narratives come to is that we can defeat the U.S. ruling class by simply replicating the methods the Palestinian resistance is using against “Israel.” Which translates to fetishizing armed struggle within conditions where armed struggle will be secondary to the other tactics for winning the class war. Because the overwhelming majority of “Israelis” have a primary material investment in colonialism, and therefore aren’t going to become part of the effort to end Zionism, violent resistance is the main thing Palestinians must do in order to gain their liberation. The equivalent is not the case in the United States, because most of the white workers here lack a primary stake in continuing the oppression of indigenous and African peoples. It’s possible for workers of all colors to unite on a mass scale, with the white workers not making up a marginal number within this effort.
That’s the distinction Norton ignores: in the USA, the majority of the people share an interest in revolution regardless of their race, unlike is the case in the tiny U.S. welfare colony of “Israel.” The U.S. hasn’t been able to sustain its stable old dynamic, where most white workers were part of the labor aristocracy. The decline of the imperial order since the mid-20th century, wherein inequality has vastly increased, has made most U.S. Americans unified in a desire for economic change.
It’s because of this systemic decline that we’ve seen the country’s political reorientation from the last twenty years; the shift where tens of millions of conservative-leaning people, who would have been pro-imperial jingoists in an earlier time, have been increasingly turning against the war machine. Our big problem at this stage is that the primary current of “Marxism” acts like this shift hasn’t happened, and like jingoism is still the only big pro-imperialist narrative tool. We must escape the cycle of defeat that this current has long been keeping the class struggle within, and build a Marxism which centers the masses.
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