Why is nationalism such a powerful force?
Nearly all communists buy into it in some form.
Seems like we cant seem to get rid of no matter what. Why? Whats so special about it?
I wouldn’t say nearly all communists nor would I compare black nationalism to the ultranationalism of the Nazis.
That said the answer to your question is Sorel’s conception of social myth and perhaps nationalism being a logical extension of tribal impulses that start with the clan/village and extend outwards.
You really think some random brown is gonna have solidarity for some random African is gonna have solidarity with some random European? People hate on each other for having a slightly different dialect or subscribing to a slightly different interpretation of the same god. I’m sorry but international proletarian revolution is never coming.(Chudposting)
>>2843805There is a difference between nationalism and basic in group preference.
People generally just prefer others who are similar to them then those who are not
National liberation ≠ nationalism
>>2843817Thats just something ml's made up to cope with being liberals enforcing idpol
>>2843794A lot of effort went into building nationalism. If you want people to believe in something called internationalism you'd have to build similar institutions where people can actually live and benefit from it.
>>2843794I think it’s because we haven’t yet made flying a swastika punishable by death.
>>2843794Not necessarily nationalism as much as patriotism, which I think taps into an innate tribal instinct in humanity. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be nationalism, as seen by how tribal fandoms can be, and those are based on consumer items, as well as the fact in pre-modern history where nations didn’t really exist religion and place of birth and familial lineage often took precedence for people’s identities. Now, tradcons may say nationalism is somehow more “rooted”, but I beg to differ as nationalism can be thought of as a fandom in and of itself or a proto-fandom of sorts because there’s no country with unbroken heritage between past and present. Not India, nor Sumeria, Babylon, the Roman Empire, any number of post-Alexandrine Hellenistic states, the Hand dynasty, the Inca empire, or even the Frankish empire.
So in this sense, the mythos of the nation-state can be deemed as a fictional product made by elites from which a fandom is formed, and modern Macedonia is a case study. Many dismiss it as fake despite the conception of Macedonia dating back to the 19th century. By those same standards, one can dismiss ANY nation-state as “fake” insofar that they’re invented by somebody as opposed to being some organic product.
As for a multiracial proletarian revolution, while a common cultural background is needed, I think history has shown that more than race and ethnicity what trumps it all is a common and shared national experience and a mythos on which to base it. For Cuba, it was the Cuban revolution. For the USSR, it was WW2. For America, it is the civil war + civil rights revolution.
I think time will tell when that will happen for the world.
>>2843794Nationalism is taught to people from childhood. Personal identity becomes linked with nationality. Imagining a world without countries/states is foreign for most people.
National symbols, anthem, flag, etc. only reinforce this idea. Japan is an example of a very successful nationalist campaign
>>2843812The capitalist class, at least to an extent, have international, inter-religious, inter-ethnic solidarity as a class against the working class. Does that mean they never are divided along these lines? No. But when it comes to class struggle they are not divided in their will to crush the workers. As soon as the workers see this, the steps they need to take to beat the capitalists becomes evident.
>>2843794>Why? Whats so special about it?Nations are useful to protect private property. Even under global trade. So small capitalists love it.
>>2843812Doesn't matter what random people anywhere think. Power is what matters.
the capitalist class have a stranglehold on the most powerful propaganda apparatus in the world though they wield inefficiently. even so, it is so enormous it drowns out and kills or subsumes any burgeoning class conscious community. through it they redirect class grievances which everyone feels into more base and vulgar struggles (national supremacy, ethnic supremacy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
>Some political analysts have focused on where people's understanding of their interests originates. In an essay entitled "False Consciousness", Michael Parenti challenges the assumption that working-class Americans freely define their interests but then choose, for various reasons, to think and act against those interests. Instead he writes that "the development of one's own interests and political consciousness in general may be stunted or distorted by misinformation, disinformation, and a narrow but highly visible mainstream political agenda that rules out feasible alternatives".[14] Parenti's contention is that ideological confusion is being propagated in the nation's politics and mass media and thereby causes people to misjudge what their real interests are. >>2843986>The capitalist class, at least to an extent, have international, inter-religious, inter-ethnic solidarity as a class against the working classImagine believing that lmao
>>2843794there is a material basis to it. Which is shared language, culture, national mythos, and perceived identity, as well as having been long ruled by the same elites with the same laws. And a lot of effort went into it by these elites historically to solidify their rule.
It's also the obvious target basis for any large scale transformation of society, such as socialism
nationalism and cosmopolitanism are immanent to the capital mode of reproduction itself.
that does not mean that identification of an in-group by shared land, language, historical relations, etc. to the exclusion of others is unique to capitalist mode. it also does not mean that identification with people regardless of land, language, historical relations etc. is unique to capitalist mode. but the particular interchange & opposition between these concepts that we are familiar with only exists in the context of social reproduction relying on generalized reproduction of capital.
conceptually its somewhat like there were cultures that only worshipped a single god prior to monotheism, and despite similarities this was meaningfully distinct from monotheism strictly speaking, because it did not necessarily deny the existence of other gods despite only worshipping a singular god. it is an imperfect analogy because the relationship between material-historical developments and the spread of theological concepts is much more opaque. but i provide it as an example of a case in which there are examples of beliefs in many ways resembling "nationalism" throughout history, that we might loosely refer to as nationalism, but in a non-superficial analysis its very clear that the geographic & cultural self identity of hans, persians, and athenians of antiquity was fundamentally distinct from germans, chinese, and americans of modernity.
communists believe that internationalism is the sublation of the "national question."
nationalism and cosmopolitanism are presented as superhistorical ideas unto themselves and debated on their merits and flaws in a way that inevitably obscures the actual structures and functions underlying these ideas. it is true that cultural differences exist, and these differences perpetuate themselves or fail to do so by many different means, most prominent among them being interchange of goods and purposes for the purposes of reproduction, which relies on various degrees of geographic proximity and potential to easily communicate. these features, persisting over time among a stable population, engender political and ideological differentiation that further actualizes the distinctness of "a people." among the political distinctions are a state that recognizes itself as obliged to enforce law within particular geographic boundaries, which includes the regulation of property within and across those borders. liberal cosmopolitanism can appeal to the reality of our interrelatedness and shared humanity in spite of borders and nation-states, but it cannot wish away this reality. so at best it can only advocate for a less abrasive politics of nationalism, and more often just takes the form of individual moralist posturing about ones own global perspective and concerns.
communists seek to do away with the nation-state, but that doesnt mean just saying the nation-state is bad or irrational. it certainly doesnt mean denying the existence of the nation-state and saying its "merely" a social construct. communists also want to do away with the proletariat, and it would be obviously ridiculous to say that this means that the proletariat isnt real. in the same way that the dictatorship of the proletariat is meant to use the historical means and terrain at our disposal (the mechanisms of the state) to lay the groundwork for the self-abolition of the proletariat by surpassing the necessity for sale of wage-labor, internationalism seeks to use the historical means and terrain at our disposal (diplomacy, recognition, and methods of interchange between national peoples) for the self-abolition of nation-states, by surpassing the necessity for the legal and political distinction between nations.
>>2843812Well, now that you mention it, we don't have solidarity for you.
>>2843794Inertia that continues to be withered by the real movement
>>2843794"nationalism" isn't a single phenomenon with set reasons for its success, black nationalism exists for very different reasons from white nationalism, tutsi and hutu began as economic categories, greeks still thought themselves romans for centuries after it was economically advantageous, etc.
>>2843812Why would some random person in Kentucky have solidarity with some random person in Arizona? Why would some random native to Bordeaux give a fuck about a random native of Nice? Nationalism is a myth.
I don't think nationalism is that special or impossible to get rid of. Not to be Marxstradamus, but I think that as the fact that the nation-state is an untenable organizational form for working class politics becomes more obvious, it will be easier to separate nationalist reaction from the real movement. The biggest class base for nationalists today are lumpenized and declassed workers, downwardly mobile petit bourgeoisie, and workers whose bourgeois freedoms are limited by despotic regimes, lack of skill, or conditions nearing slavery. The global working class in the classical Marxist sense of the term has no qualms about migrating or working for foreign companies so long as the places and the firms they can work for offer better terms. Of course, these people are not free from the competition between workers, hence they are prone to reactionary and particularist impulses of their own (see Indian migrants in the UK who would vote for Reform based on limiting the number of migrants allowed to enter the country) but they have a practical class experience of being an international subject and might therefore be more amenable to the idea of proletarian socialism rather than national socialism(s).
>>2859157> as the fact that the nation-state is an untenable organizational form for working class politics becomes more obvious, it will be easier to separate nationalist reaction from the real movementretards will be nationalist forever unfortunately.
because nationalism represents culture and identity? this predates capitalism, dont be fucking retards please.
For the same reason the same news story if it happens across town is endlessly fascinating, if across the country you might give it a skim, on the other side of the world, might as well never happened.
Because nations are real social phenomena that objectively exist
Kinda like gender and money
why are humans attached to their highest stage of organisation (so far in history)?
OP quality in the fucking gutter these days
>>2887892Umm actually the highest stage is the United Nations. That's why I fly the U.N. flag. I'm a citizen of the world!
>>2843794It's not nationalism, it's statism.
Capital has constructed a world-spanning mode of production that is nevertheless still constrained by a system of sovereign nation-states operating in an international anarchy. Seizing state power is seen as the only avenue for political action, so every political actor is methodologically a statist. Everyone unconsciously accepts this and then justifies it ex-post with an appeal to 'national culture' or 'patriotism' or whatever.
because locality is the enemy of megalomania, you can't truly rule a world that is fragmented into a million small localities that have their own languages and cultures and values. sure you can rule their material circumstnaces, you can conquer their land and steal their resources and enslave them, but you can't conquer their minds and make them think the way you want them to think. to do that you need much more than just armies and ships and weapons, you need systems for mass communication and indoctrination, you need to force them all to speak one language and think they are one people, bombard them with propaganda and revisionist history from the day they are born, you need to make them forget who they are and where they came from and rewrite their mental programming.
>>2888117This all happened to Europeans in modernity by the rise of nationalist movements. We are still seeing the struggle for local accents and dialects against the sweeping tide of standardisation.
Lassalle won
Humans fucking love making themselves feel special, comrade
>>2888128imo the struggle is the other way, people already have a tendency to fragment into lots of smaller cultures and it takes tremendous resources and effort to keep them nationalized and it never seems to be enough, even in a very nationalized country like the united states you see people fragmenting on various ideological or generational or ethnic fault lines despite all attempts to keep everyone together speaking the same language and thinking the same way. on top of this, there is another struggle to prevent solidarity from forming between various fragmented cultures, because that's another natural tendency that humans have, not only to live as a bunch of small tribes but to also form loose, anarchic communication networks between various tribes where they remain culturally-distinct but not separate. distinction without separation does not compute with western authoritarian thinking, people either have to be united into a perfect homogenity or completely isolated into separate classes, a bunch of small fragmented cultures forming an unpredictable network of random ephemeral connections with each other is highly resilient to top-down governance and therefore extremely dangerous to the ruling class, something they cannot possibly account for.
>>2888190This is why all temporary unity can be understood as hegemony, and when hegemons recede, tribal warfare breaks out, since the Hobbesian war of all against all commences. Hegel had the same idea, that only an external enemy could internally unite a people, and without this, the nation enters into civil war. Kant also rationalised war as a progressive force of "perpetual peace", where disputes are resolved by the forced result of a concession. Marx uses the same logic in the market; that competition resolves itself into monopoly, as the basis of Communist production. Authoritarianism and imperialism are essential hallmarks of all civilisation, and especially modernity. I am much less optimistic than the progressive militarists, personally.
>>2888224Hobbes has been thoroughly discredited by modern archeological evidence, we were far more peaceful with each other before civilization made nature only a tertiary threat and not the primary one faced by hunter gatherer tribes.
>>2888227Well, the state of nature - or war, is still valid, as far as it concerns the foundation of lawful recognition. For example, many of the European colonists consulted the ruling classes of various tribes in their acts of domination. African slaves were sold by African masters. Native land was often purchased from native peoples, and so on. So, there is the mutual agreement between tribes, but exclusive to class relations at the same time, which is really the foundation of trade and contract. None of this violates Hobbes' view. What would violate Hobbes' view is the idea of the government collapsing and then everyone getting along even better than before. We know that this wouldn't happen.
As far as anthropology is concerned, I'm aware of social bonds like gift exchanges (read: Mauss, Baudrillard), but this is a constitutional act, of what I would see as an unwritten code, or "symbol". We often form mutualist bonds with other species, but it is temporary, is my point. It is ultimately a condition. The more scarce resources are, the more competition, and the more authority. So, we cannot deny the natural incentives of interpersonal domination, either.
>>2888227>>2888246Also on the point of conflict and difference; it is my psychoanalytic view that we always hate those more like ourselves than otherwise (e.g. the narcissism of small differences). We see in Puritan England for example, a complete oppression of the Catholics and Irish, yet an acceptance of Jews. Jewishness is more different but more tolerated.
>>2888224>Kant also rationalised war as a progressive force of "perpetual peace", where disputes are resolved by the forced result of a concession.that's a load of crap. during kant's lifetime europe was in a state of perpetual war and he was insulated from all of it because he was a privileged intellectual, a gentleman scholar. his closest exposure to war was during the seven years war, when his homeland the prussian empire teamed up with the british empire and went to war with the rest of europe, killing about 10% of the entire european peasant population at the time. for a few years the russian army had occupied kant's home city and he and his fellow prestigious academics all immediately betrayed their country and swore allegiance to the russian empress in exchange for being allowed to keep their wealth and their positions. just for comparison, if a peasant soldier in the prussian army even tried to desert he would be forced to slowly walk a gauntlet back and forth between two rows of soldiers caning him on his bare back until he died, but a privileged prussian scholar like kant could publicly swear allegiance to a foreign enemy and it wasn't considered a crime at all, it was just business. this is the kind of person whom we are supposed to revere as one of the brilliant philosophers of our great western culture, this craven powdered-wig fop who lived inside of a plastic bubble totally removed from reality, sitting on ornate furniture writing about war and morality while getting drunk on expensive wine imported from an enemy country. a so-called "world citizen", like these modern-day silicon valley techbros who think that they are outside of everything and have this higher understanding of it all and are totally oblivious of their own tremendous privilege. western people who call themselves leftists really need to do something about their preprogrammed eurocentrism and deification of the historical european intellectual elite, which includes marx and engels. they need to stop internalizing the idea that all of the knowledge of the world comes from the minds of a few great men in europe and a few highly-publicized books, start becoming more mindful of the extreme historical biases in play and the fact that there is a whole other vast universe of knowledge beyond what we are taught in our schools that has always been systematically ignored and suppressed and discredited as heresy or primitive superstition or lowly folk wisdom.
>>2888251If your family is from genoa it’s easier to bring a girl from Mali to them than a girl from Venice
>>2888496Hegel also welcomed the conquest of Prussia by Napoleon because of the illusions of progress. If Hegel's life was immediately threatened, I doubt he would be so enthusiastic. As for Kant himself, he only published his Critique of Pure Reason when he was 57, and so lived a life of leisurely contemplation before then. His ultimate aims for the project of Perpetual Peace was the creation of a global government, such as the United Nations. Liberals in this time also concieved of free trade as a means of ensuring mutual interests, but free trade itself is mostly an imperial interest, so we return to hegemony.
On Kant's politics, I have discovered inconsistencies, where in "Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals" (1785) he sees the "moral law" as categorical imperative by practical reason, and so we are made free by the legislative act, presuming the legislative body above the executive branch (e.g. parliament above president). This has continuity in "Perpetual Peace" (1795) where a code of international law is suggested (which before this time there was only the "law of the seas" of Grotius, 1609). This really has precedence in Rousseau, such as in his "Discourse on Political Economy" (1755), where he says that the limit of positive law grants freedom henceforth, similar to Thomas Paine in "Common Sense" (1776), where he defines government as a "necessary evil", and thus a ground for freedom by its constitutive limit. We see in Coke's "Petition of Right" (1628) a cause for the "rule of law"; a sentiment carried on into Enlightenment. Yet, in Kant's other work "Principles of Political Right" (1791) we see that Kant views Sovereignty as the right of executiveship, reversing his apparent Republicanism by favour of monarchy over democracy. Kant's attitude to royalty was always inconsistent, offering praises to the Prince in his first edition of Critique of Pure Reason. He was an opportunist, as you imply. On Kant's class interests, we also see him philosophically justify an idea of intellectual property in his text "Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books" (1785). Copyright Law itself was an 18th century invention, with precedence of publishing rights limited in the case of the KJV Bible (1611), which is still in effect today. Kant makes note of the "profit" of unauthorised publishers being owed to authors, and so intertwines morality and money, as a typical capitalist.
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nobody cares larping faggot, now fuck off this board
>>2888840orrrr?????? nothing you are a fat jewish man with a bald head
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