Socialist Patriotism

Socialist patriotism is a core socialist value which can literally be found in the textbooks issued to elementary school children in every Communist state in history. The notion that Communists in America must be motivated by deep patriotic feeling, and a sense of belonging to their country and its people, has always been basic Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. All of this changed when fat anti-social retards in universities declared that Marxism-Leninism (or "Stalinism") itself is "fascist," and decided that socialism was about scolding ordinary people for not being "enlightened" enough about transgenderism.

Socialist patriotism is not the same as so called "Patriotic Socialism."

Socialist Patriotism refers to the national and patriotic form which Socialism has assumed which is part and parcel to its meaning. As evinced by the DDR, Polish People's Republic and other Eastern Bloc states' grounding of their respective Communist Parties in the soil of their own peoples was not incidental to their country's involvement in the process of decolonization. The indisputable fact that communism invariably assumed a deeply national and patriotic form is not in fact a matter of happenstance– it is directly tied up with the essence of socialism itself. As first stated by Marx (and later elaborated upon by Stalin and Mao), the universal truth of Marxism finds expression only in specific national characteristics and its acquisition of a definite national form.

One must begin with the realities that actually exist and not proceed from abstractions of the imagination; So too must one first and foremost recognize the national realities in the land itself that gives rise to a definite and historical people. It is only from a recognition of this premise that what is common between a people can come to the fore, in this way socialism discloses a people's living and material being or what Heidegger calls their historical Dasein the meaning of their history, tradition and their cultural achievements.

Marx's materialism proceeds from Earth to Heaven as opposed to Western leftists who proceed from Heaven to Earth. For Western leftists the essence of socialism exists in spite of the concrete sociality or the living being of a people, they proceed from empty abstractions, from cosmopolitan man uprooted from his substantive base; whereas Marxism teaches us to proceed from the people as they actually exist. It is the reactionaries who in fact share with them a one-sided and idealist conception of the nation. Like the liberal cosmopolitans, reactionaries confuse the outward appearance of the nation with its essence, which is inexhaustible and irreducible to its existent form, rather than keeping up with the reality of the people whose development of national being they restrict with the weight of dead abstractions. Reactionaries and their idolatry of superficial appearance are not sufficiently rooted in the traditions of their own people. It is the same idealism that permeates the idolater's corrupted vision of Internationalism which exists at the expense of national realities. It is the development of the essence of the nation that proceeds from national premises itself. That is why (for Marxists, historically) internationalism comes into being through the nation and corresponding to a deepening of national realities rather than their forsaken.

"Land back" is a feel-good pipe dream for the overwhelmingly white American left. The vacuous and performative "land back" position of american leftists, meanwhile, bears no organic connection with the actual claims of American Indians– who are used as cannon fodder for the Calvinist left seeking to extirpate itself of all the sins of its forefathers. The extremity of such a position can only be made in the minds of those who are insulated from such communities and from working people in general. What they channel, in fact, is nothing more than their own mental reconstruction of American Indians and other historically oppressed groups. Such mental reconstructions– which bear little resemblance with the realities of black and indigenous peoples– are utilized solely for the purpose of invoking feelings of moral superiority in leveraging this over their peers. The moral economy that "land back" and other childish rhetoric rests upon is thus only for the purpose of saturating the feelings of guilt felt by white leftists. The impossibility of these demands is clear to all parties including themselves; and as a matter of strategy such extremist positions will never win over the American masses– not even her (America's) non-white sections. Their Puritanical finger-pointing distances them more and more from the American people. Strategically it is a non-position, which is why "J Sakai leftists" never have and never will pose a threat to the existing establishment and they are, in practice, the radical left flank of actually existing white supremacy.

Communism has nothing to do with land back and everything to do with land reform. It is only in the re-parcellation of land as the most basic means of production that the productive capacities in entrepreneurial spirit of the American people can be unleashed. Communists do not win by opposing everything the American people find sacred– a childish and anarchistic position they do not win with, a "burn it all down" attitude– Communists will win by fighting for American working people, giving them recognition in their words and in their deeds, and promoting the prosperity and dignity of America's working masses. That one finds pride in their country and love for her people is in no way irreconcilable with making good on the promise of "forty acres and a mule", nor does it annul the necessity of recompense and dialogue with tribal authorities and the increased autonomy that socialist reconstruction would give way to. On the contrary; it is a precondition for these things as patriotic sentiment is the surest sign that one is connected with and fights on behalf of the masses. The reality is that "land back" leftists, who screech and bemoan the fact of America's existence, do the work of the right by poisoning the well with all sorts of unjustifiable and impossible demands that they themselves don't believe. Whether they are aware of it or not these same people open the door to the exact claims being levied against the People's Republic of China and to a lesser extent Russia– other convenient coincidences where radical liberal discourse mysteriously aligns with U.S. imperialism.

Quotes

“The government of the United States represents, as its army also does, the finances of the United States. But these finances do not represent the North American people; they represent a small group of financiers, the owners of all the big enterprises… who also exploit the North American people. Clearly they do not exploit them in the same manner that they exploit us, the human beings of inferior races… for we have not had the good fortune of being born from blood, Anglo-Saxon parents. But they do exploit and divide them, they too are divided into black and whites, and they too are divided into men and women, union and non-union, employed and unemployed.” - Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

"The U.S. flag is your flag, you cannot allow the U.S. ruling class to own the flag. The working class of the U.S. must fight for the flag and once socialism is established it is up to the workers to decide what they want to do with flag and the U.S. as it exists." - (Fidel Castro, Addressing a group of students who did not want to associate with their flag while people from other countries sat next to theirs)

“Can a Communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but also must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism. Communists must resolutely oppose the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The Communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interests of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat the better. This is what the Japanese and German Communists should be doing and what they are doing. For the wars launched by the Japanese aggressors and Hitler are harming the people at home as well as the people of the world. China’s case, however, is different, because she is the victim of aggression. Chinese Communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism. We are at once internationalists and patriots, and our slogan is, ‘Fight to defend the motherland against the aggressors.’ For us defeatism is a crime and to strive for victory in the War of Resistance is an inescapable duty. For only by fighting in defense of the motherland can we defeat the aggressors and achieve national liberation. And only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation. The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries. Thus in wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism.” - Mao Zedong

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done. This is a beautiful country.” - John Brown

“We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labour of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?” - Karl Marx

“The unity of the nation was not to be broken; but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence; that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production; if the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.” - Karl Marx

“It is a truth which at the very least teaches us to see the hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state and to hide our faces in shame. I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” - Karl Marx

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.” - Karl Marx

“It is altogether self evident that; the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle.” - Karl Marx

“The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” - Karl Marx

"’For Mussulmans, there is no such thing as subordination’, Inequality is an abomination to ‘a true Mussulman’ (a Muslim), but these sentiments, (…) ‘will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.” - Karl Marx

“‘No socialist,’ remarked the Doctor, smiling, ‘need predict that there will be a bloody revolution in Russia, Germany, Austria, and possibly Italy if the Italians keep on in the policy they are now pursuing. The deeds of the French Revolution may be enacted again in those countries. That is apparent to any political student. But those revolutions will be made by the majority. No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation.’” - Karl Marx

“The English laughed heartily when I began my speech with the observation that our friend Lafargue, and others, who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in ‘French’, i.e., in a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand. I went on to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.” - Karl Marx

“‘The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. This does not mean that the American people have an original sin that they must be cleansed of by fire and destruction. The illegitimate state shall be destroyed, not the people.’” - Karl Marx

“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” - Karl Marx

“The biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown and, on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia.” - Karl Marx

“No, I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” - Frederick Douglass

“It is a strange transition from the states to Canada. First one imagines that one is in Europe again, and then one thinks one is in a positively retrogressing and decaying country. Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for a rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides the country is half-annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all of the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line - and when the time comes, John Bull will say ‘Amen’ to the matter.” - Friedrich Engels

“The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation of life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level. Accordingly the working class movement, in America, has started with truly American vigor, and as on that side of the Atlantic things march with at least double the European speed, we may yet live to see America take the lead in this respect too.” - Friedrich Engels

“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

“A country like America, when it is really ripe for a socialist workers’ party, certainly cannot be hindered from having one by the couple of German socialist doctrinaires.” - Friedrich Engels

“In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the Communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat - that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.” - Friedrich Engels

“This party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to the them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans.” - Friedrich Engels

“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

“The Socialist does not cease to love his country when he tries to make that country the common property of its people; he rather shows a greater love of country than is shown by those who wish to perpetuate a system which makes the great majority of the people of a country exiles and outcasts, living by sufferance of capitalists and landlords in their native land. Under Socialism we can all voice the saying of the poet; at present ‘our’ native land is in pawn to landlords and capitalists.” - 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

“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

“It is necessary to develop a line of thought that combines wise nationalism, properly understood, with proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism should be based on the nationalism of individual countries […], between that properly understood nationalism and proletarian internationalism there can be no contradiction. Nationless cosmopolitanism, which denies national sentiment and the idea of the nation, doesn’t have anything in common with proletarian internationalism.” - Georgi M. Dimitrov

"Heroism presupposes ideological inspiration. The heroism of the commanders and the rank and file of the Red Army is supported and raised aloft on the wings of Soviet, socialist patriotism. This is patriotism of a special kind. It does not nourish or tolerate hatred of other peoples. On the contrary, it is bound up dissolubly with internationalism." - Georgi M. Dimitrov

“Soviet patriotism, expressing the devotion of the Soviet people to their socialist Fatherland, is cementing the foundations of the Soviet multinational State, rallying all peoples and nationalities of our country into a united, fraternal family. Soviet patriotism serves for the people of our country as a powerful ideological booster for unselfish work and heroic acts for the fame of the socialist Fatherland, for the sake of the victory of Communism. With the blazing expression of Soviet patriotism is the lofty feeling of Soviet national pride, the awareness of the immeasurable superiority of Soviet society and socialist culture over bourgeois society and its culture.” - F. Chernov

“In the era of imperialism the ideology of cosmopolitanism is a weapon in the struggle of imperialist plunderers seeking world domination. Cosmopolitanism is the negation of patriotism, its opposite. It advocates absolute apathy towards the fate of the Motherland. Cosmopolitanism denies the existence of any moral or civil obligations of people to their nation and Motherland. The bourgeoisie preaches the principle that money does not have a homeland, and that, wherever one can ‘make money,’ wherever one may ‘have a profitable business’, there is his homeland. Here is the villainy that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is called on to conceal, to disguise, ‘to ennoble’ the antipatriotic ideology of the rootless bourgeois-businessman, the huckster and the traveling salesman. Lenin proved here that the bourgeoisie places the protection of its self-serving class interests ‘higher than the interests of the fatherland, the people, or anything else,’ that in the name of protecting its class interests the bourgeoisie creates a ‘union of imperialists of all countries’ against the workers.” - F. Chernov

“Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are not opposites, but are merely two sides of bourgeois-imperialist ideology. Cosmopolitanism always was and is merely a screen, a disguise for nationalism. In due course, unmasking the German bourgeois ‘true socialists,’ Marx and Engels indignantly wrote: ‘…such a narrow nationalist world-view lies at the foundation of supposed universalism and German cosmopolitanism.’” - F. Chernov

“The period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the building of socialism in the U.S.S.R. is a period of the flowering of national cultures that are socialist in content and national in form.” - J.V. Stalin

“The strength of Soviet patriotism lies in the fact that it is based not on racial or nationalistic prejudices, but upon the profound devotion and loyalty of the people to their Soviet Motherland, on the fraternal cooperation of the working people of all the Nations inhabiting our country. Soviet patriotism is a harmonious blend of national traditions of the peoples and the common vital interests of all working people of the Soviet Union.” - J.V. Stalin

“A Leninist cannot be just a specialist in his favorite science [like mathematics, botany or chemistry]; he must also be a political and social worker, keenly interested in the fate of his country, acquainted with the laws of social development…” - J.V. Stalin

“Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form.” - J.V. Stalin

“Under capitalism the exploited masses do not, nor can they ever, participate in governing the country, if for no other reason than that, even under the most democratic regime, under conditions of capitalism, governments are not set up by the people but by the Rothschilds and Stinneses, the Rockefellers and Morgans.” - J.V. Stalin

“Earlier, the bourgeoisie presented themselves as liberal, they were for bourgeois democratic freedom and in that way gained popularity with the people. Now there is not one remaining trace of liberalism. There is no such thing as ‘freedom of personality’ any more, - personal rights are now only acknowledged by them, the owners of capital, - all the other citizens are regarded as raw materials, that are only for exploitation. The principle of equal rights for people and nations is trodden in the dust and it is replaced by the principle of Full rights for the exploiting minority and the lack of rights of the exploited majority of the citizens. The banner of bourgeois democratic freedom has been flung overboard. I think that you, the representatives of Communist and democratic parties must pick up this banner and carry it forward if you want to gain the majority of the people. There is nobody else to raise it. (Stormy applause)” - J.V. Stalin

“Earlier, the bourgeoisie, as the heads of nations, were for the rights and independence of nations and put that ‘above all.’ Now there is no trace left of this ‘national principle.’ Now the bourgeoisie sell the rights and independence of their nations for dollars. The banner of national independence and national sovereignty has been thrown overboard. Without doubt, you, the representatives of the Communist and democratic parties must raise this banner and carry it forward if you want to be patriots of your countries, if you want to be the leading powers of the nations. There is nobody else to raise it. (Stormy applause)” - J.V. Stalin

“What is a nation? A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. The modern Italian nation was formed from Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Teutons, and so on. The same must be said of the British, the Germans and others, who were formed into nations from people of diverse races and tribes. Thus, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people.” - J.V. Stalin

“American exceptionalism is posturing that America is exempt from the general laws of historical development.” - J.V. Stalin

“Hitlerites are not patriots since they invade other countries and destroy other cultures; It would be ludicrous to identify Hitler’s clique with the German people, with the German state. The experience of history indicates that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain.” - J.V. Stalin

“But people cannot live together, for lengthy periods unless they have a common territory. Englishmen and Americans originally inhabited the same territory, England, and constituted one nation. Later, one section of the English emigrated from England to a new territory, America, and there, in the new territory, in the course of time, came to form the new American nation. Difference of territory led to the formation of different nations.” - (J.V. Stalin, Marxism and The National Question)

“In fighting for the right of nations to self-determination, the aim of Social-Democracy is to put an end to the policy of national oppression, to render it impossible, and thereby to remove the grounds of strife between nations, to take the edge off that strife and reduce it to a minimum. This is what essentially distinguishes the policy of the class-conscious proletariat from the policy of the bourgeoisie, which attempts to aggravate and fan the national struggle and to prolong and sharpen the national movement. And that is why the class-conscious proletariat cannot rally under the ‘national’ flag of the bourgeoisie. That is why the so-called ‘evolutionary national’ policy advocated by Bauer cannot become the policy of the proletariat. Bauer’s attempt to identify his ‘evolutionary national’ policy with the policy of the ‘modern working class’ is an attempt to adapt the class struggle of the workers to the struggle of the nations. The fate of a national movement, which is essentially a bourgeois movement, is naturally bound up with the fate of the bourgeoisie. The final disappearance of a national movement is possible only with the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Only under the reign of socialism can peace be fully established. But even within the framework of capitalism it is possible to reduce the national struggle to a minimum, to undermine it at the root, to render it as harmless as possible to the proletariat. This is borne out, for example, by Switzerland and America. It requires that the country should be democratised and the nations be given the opportunity of free development.” - J.V. Stalin

“I daresay you yourself do not know quite clearly why you have lost these illusions. You are a patriot, - as good a one as any among these super-patriots. You are very sincere in your patriotism, but so too are they. So there must be something wrong in the very conception of patriotism, which can lead men to pursue such contrary and often contradictory goals. Actuated by the same spirit of patriotism, one man reads the Gita, one sends missionaries to America to preach the gospel of Sri Ramkrishna, one orders the whole nation to spin, one cooperates in the working of the Montagu Reforms, another throws bombs, and there are even some who drink three bottles of whiskey a day. There is absolutely no reason to doubt that all of them are equally patriotic. Every one of them loves the Motherland, serves her, worships her, glorifies her, idealises her, - almost every one of these Indians believes implicitly in the providential mission of India to spiritualise the world. Yet in spite of all this, these patriots and the philosophy they preach do not satisfy you any longer, although there was a time when you accepted their teachings as infallible. This shows that there is some fundamental difference between your patriotism and that of the leaders in whom you have lost faith.” - M.N. Roy

“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.” - William Z. Foster

“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.” - William Z. Foster

“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

“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.’” - William Z. Foster

“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

“Now that the insane Tsar and his soothsayers are relegated to the farm, Lenin is a patriot to the limit, as well as an internationalist, ready to fight for the world.” - William Z. Foster

“Socialism in the United States will, out of necessity, have some American characteristics.” - William Z. Foster

“We will incorporate U.S. traditions into the structure of socialism that the working class will create.” - William Z. Foster

“One thing is certain: the economic survival of the Black in the South depends on close union with white workers, so as to present a united front against the tremendous growth of monopoly capital in the South today. When we compare African Americans with other groups we are not comparing nations or even cultural groups, since African Americans do not form a nation and are not likely to, if their present increasingly successful fight for political integration succeeds. They will exercise political power but not as a unit, since that would contradict their fight against segregation. They do not even form a complete cultural unit, although by reason of suffering and discrimination, and by historic artistic gifts, such a culture may be deliberately cultivated and in the end will unify the Black with other groups rather than divide them. African American, Russian and Irish art can flourish in the same state side by side. How the political aspect will develop is not clear. The old idea of mass migration of African American to found a foreign state is unlikely to be renewed. The newer idea of an American Black state within the United States is both improbable and undesirable. It contradicts our present effort at complete integration, and also the modern tendency toward fewer rather than more separate political states with state antagonisms, hatreds and war. Cultural units may, on the other hand, develop and grow to the advantage of all." - W.E.B. Du Bois

“The question here concerns the ideology encouraged by the imperialists, which propagates a sham ‘obsolescence’ of the principle of sovereignty, the ‘legitimacy’ of limiting state independence, an indifference to natural traditions and contempt for national culture. This ideology alleges that at the present time the idea of motherland is devoid of any meaning. For the financial oligarchy of the U.S.A., cosmopolitism has proved the best way of disguising its struggle for world supremacy and for the doing away with the independence of other states; The unions of monopolists are presented as the embodiment of ‘unity of the European peoples’ and as the way to overcome ‘national limitations’. Small wonder that such propaganda is openly supported and financed by the big monopolies; The favourite thesis of the ideologists of cosmopolitism, especially the Right-wing socialists among them, is the allegation that in the modern world the principle of sovereignty has become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces; The enemies of Marxism assert that by defending the principles of state sovereignty and independence Communists oppose the tendencies of social development and want to preserve the division of the world into states and the disunion of the nations in the international arena; Nor can the danger of war be eliminated by a campaign against sovereignty. In our time wars do not arise as a result of adherence to state independence, as the ideologists of bourgeois cosmopolitism allege, but owing to socio-economic causes connected with the predatory nature of monopoly capital; the propagandists of cosmopolitism claim that the principle of sovereignty is antiquated because it hampers the development of general culture aand impedes the fusion of the peoples into one family; The fact that the proletariat defends the freedom of the nations, their independence and national traditions is an expression of the patriotism of the working class, which is the direct opposite of both the chauvinist and cosmpolitan ideology of the bourgeoisie. The patriotism of the working class springs primarily from the feeling of pride in the contribution that the people or nation concerned has made to the struggle of the oppressed and exploited masses for their liberation from exploitation and oppression. The patriotism of the working class is therefore profoundly progressive and revolutionary. Bourgeois propaganda tries to represent the capitalist class as the bearer of patriotic feelings. They want to slur over the fact that the patriotism of the bourgeoisie is always subordinate to its selfish, narrow class interests, and to disparage the patriotism of the working class and Communists. In this connection, bourgeois propagandists sometimes refer to the passage in the Communist Manifesto which says that ‘the working men have no country’. It is perfectly clear, however, that it is not a question of repudiating the fatherland, but of the fact that in a society ruled by capitalists the fatherland is actually usurped by exploiters and is not a good father but a vicious stepfather to the workers. By overthrowing the rule of the exploiting classes the working class creates the conditions for the fullest possible manifestation of its patriotism, for it itself is the true bearer of patriotism in our time; Developing the Marxist point of view regarding the fatherland, Lenin wrote in 1908: ‘The fatherland, i.e., the given political, cultural and social environment, is the most powerful factor in the class struggle of the proletariat… The proletariat cannot be indifferent to and unconcerned about the political, social and cultural conditions of its struggle and, consequently, cannot remain indifferent to the fate of its country. But the fate of the country interest it only to the extent that they affect its class struggle, and not in virtue of some bourgeois ‘patriotism’, quite indecent on the lips of a Social-Democrat; The whole spirit of Marxism, its entire system demands that each proposition should be considered α) only historically, β) only in connection with others and χ) only in connection with the concrete experience of history.’; In what historical situation the slogan of defence of the fatherland is proclaimed, what class proclaims it and for what purposes - these are the things that primarily interest the working class; The Bourgeois ideologists allege that by combating cosmopolitism Marxists disavow the international character of their doctrine and become nationalists. But the authors of such falsifications perpetrate a double forgery. Firstly, they put a sign of equality between the cosmopolitism of the bourgeoisie and the internationalism of the working class, and, secondly, they ascribe to Marxists the nationalist views which are characteristic precisely of bourgeois ideology. The internationalism of the working class is, as already stated, an expression of the community of interests of the workers of all countries in their struggle against their common enemy - capitalism, of the unity of their aim, the abolition of exploitation of man by man… and the unity of their ideology - the ideology of friendship and fraternity of the peoples. In this sense all workers belong to the same ‘nation’ - the world ‘nation’ of working people oppressed and exploited in all bourgeois countries by the same force - capital. This does not in any way mean, however, that while belonging to the single international army of working people, the worker ceases to be a Frenchman, Englishman, etc. Quite the contrary. True and not sham patriotism springs naturally from proletarian internationalism. In point of fact, does not faithfulness to the ultimate ideal of the working class imbue the workers with a fervent desire to see their own people free, prosperous, and achieving social progress? Seeking liberation from all forms of oppression and exploitation… The working class wants this not only for itself, but also for all the working people, for the whole nation. Only the achievement of the ultimate aims of the working class, i.e., the overthrow of the power of the exploiters, who impede the progress of the nation… and the building of socialism, can bring every nation real freedom, independence and national greatness. It follows that the most internationalist class - the working class - is at the same time the most patriotic class; The Communist Parties of the capitalist countries hold high the banner of national independence and freedom. Preservation of state sovereignty and realisation of an independent foreign policy are demands that form part of the programme of the Communist movements in France, Italy and other countries.” - (Otto Wille Kuusinen, Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism)

“The internationalism of the Communist Party was expressed by the Communist Timbaud, who was killed at Chateaubriant shouting ‘Long Live the German Communist Party!’ adding ‘Vive la France!’; There is no left or right wing in our party. The Communist Party has never been as united around its Central Committee as it now is in the task that it is accomplishing - together with all patriots - to wrest victory over Hitlerite Germany as quickly as possible.” - Maurice Thorez

“I fell in love with my country - its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. No one can take my love of country away from me! I felt then, as I do now, it’s a rich, fertile, beautiful land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class.” - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

“Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed. The French Revolution - what was it based on? The land-less against the landlord. What was it for? Land. How did they get it? Bloodshed. Was no love lost; was no compromise; was no negotiation. I’m telling you, you don’t know what a revolution is. ‘Cause when you find out what it is, you’ll get back in the alley; you’ll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution - what was it based on? Land. The land-less against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed. And you’re afraid to bleed. I said, you’re afraid to bleed.” - Malcolm X

"The American dream reminds us that every man is heir to the legacy of worthiness." - Martin Luther King Jr.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

“I criticise America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world; I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

“At first, patriotism, not yet Communism, led me to have confidence in Lenin… By studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only Socialism and Communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people.” - Hồ Chí Minh

“All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” - (Hồ Chí Minh, The Vietnamese Constitution, in a direct quote from the American Constitution)

“I would like to tell the American people that the aggressive war now being waged by the U.S. Government in Vietnam not only grossly flouts the national fundamental right of the Vietnamese people, but also runs counter to the aspirations and interests of the American people. This aggressive war has also besmeared the good name of the United States, the country of Washington and Lincoln. I wish to tell the American people about the determination of the entire Vietnamese people to fight the U.S. aggressors till complete victory. But as for the American people, we want to strengthen our relationship of friendship with them.” - Hồ Chí Minh

“Our secret weapon is nationalism. To have nationhood, which is a sign of maturity, is greater than any weapons in the world.” - Hồ Chí Minh

“I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own [American] working class will bury you.” - N.S. Khrushchev

“Something new has happened: For the first time in history our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people, and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland.” - Walter Ulbricht

“The reason that I am here today, from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa… That is the kind of independence like Sukarno got in Indonesia… The other reason that I am here today, again from the State Department and from the court record of the court of appeals, is that when I am abroad I speak out against the injustices against the Negro people of this land. I sent a message to the Bandung Conference and so forth. That is why I am here… I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America… My mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors baked bread for George Washington’s troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave. I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. And they are not. They are not in Mississippi. And they are not in Montgomery, Alabama. And they are not in Washington. They are nowhere, and that is why I am here today. You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too. And that is why I am here today.” - Paul Robeson

“The demand of Africa and Asia for independence from alien domination and exploitation finds warm support among democratic-minded peoples everywhere. Although the calling of the Bandung Conference evoked bitter words of displeasure from high circles in Washington, the common people of America have not forgotten that our own country was founded in a revolution of colonies against a foreign tyranny - a revolution proclaiming that all nations have a right to independence under a government of their own choice. To the Negro people of the United States and the Caribbean Islands it was good news… Typical of the Negro people’s sentiments are these words from one of our leading weekly newspapers: ‘Negro Americans should be interested in the proceedings at Bandung. We have fought this kind of fight for more than 300 years and have a vested interest in the outcome.’” - Paul Robeson

“In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No colour prejudice like in Mississippi, no colour prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. Where I did not feel the pressure of colour as I feel [it] in this Committee today. [Why do you not stay in Russia?] Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the Fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with Fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people.” - Paul Robeson

“I say that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the non-patriots, and you are the Un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” - Paul Robeson

“During the consultations which the Central Committee of the CPSU held on questions of Soviet music, Zhdanov said in part: ‘He cannot be an internationalist who does not love and respect his own people.’ A bitter struggle is now being pursued in the Soviet Union under this slogan against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in art, philosophy and in science. In the editorial already quoted in No. 2 of the ‘Voprossy Filosofii’, cosmopolitanism is defined as follows: ‘Cosmopolitanism is a reactionary ideology which preaches renunciation of national traditions, disparagement of national individuality in the development of different peoples, rejection of feelings of national honour and national pride.’ Of course, we can agree completely with this definition of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism today is a weapon in the hands of American imperialism, a mean’s of spiritual disarmament of a people who are, or are to come, under its domination. Cosmopolitanism proceeds hand in hand with the most unbridled nationalism which belittles, humiliates and rejects all that is foreign, and proclaims everything of its own as ‘racially pure’ and original; nationalistic cosmopolites or cosmopolitan nationalists are seeking ‘proofs’ in all corners of the globe and in all fields of human activity of the decisive spiritual influence of their nation upon which to base their exceptional rights to definite territories. Cosmopolitanism as spiritual quislingism is expressed in the slave-like imitation of all that is foreign, in the fettering of the development of national culture, in the servile discrediting of oneself, in reducing the cultural achievements of one’s nation to the passive copying of foreign examples. The general laws of social development appear only through the specific forms of development in every individual country. Each nation with its share, with its achievements of material and spiritual culture, participates in the building of universal world culture. Living connections with one’s fatherland and nation are, therefore, the prerequisite for every progressive movement of science, philosophy and art. It is possible to penetrate into the essence of a phenomenon only by making a thorough study of the different specific forms of its manifestation. The generalisation of revolutionary theory becomes fuller and more profound in content, they deepen upon taking concrete form in the specific conditions of time and place, through application in the revolutionary activity of the national parties of the proletariat. Classics of Marxism-Leninism teach that national nihilism is alien to the working class, that the working class cannot and must not be indifferent to its fatherland and to its nation, to the positive traditions of its nation, to the national culture of its country. On the contrary, the working class of every country is the lawful heir to all the great and the significant that has been created in that country for the development of the nation and all of mankind. Engels, in the preface to the first edition of his work ‘The Development of Socialism from A Utopia to A Science’, stresses: ‘We German socialists are proud of having our source not only in Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.’ In his article ‘Bellicose Militarism and Anti- Militaristic Tactics of the Social-Democrats’, written in 1908, Lenin said: ‘The proletariat cannot bear itself with indifference and with equanimity towards the political, social and cultural conditions of its struggle, and, hence, it cannot be indifferent to the fate of its country.’ By its profundity, sincerity, and warmth, Lenin’s article ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians’ is a unique example of deep love for one’s fatherland and for one’s people for their cultural heritage and for their great progressive traditions. Comrade Stalin, in his works, and especially in his addresses delivered during the Second World War, fired the national consciousness of the Soviet peoples by pointing to their magnificent traditions of struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland, by calling upon them to be worthy of their great ancestors, thinkers, poets, patriot-generals.” - (Boris Ziherl, Communism and Fatherland)

“I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colours in the world, whether white, black, yellow or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practised by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against and menacing the overwhelmingly majority of nations and peoples of the world. We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than 10 percent of the 3,000 million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that with the support of more than 90 percent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end.” - Mao Zedong

“The U.S. government still has a veil of democracy, but it has been cut down to a tiny patch by the U.S. reactionaries and become very faded, and is not what it used to be in the days of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. The reason is that the class struggle has become more intense. When the class struggle becomes still more intense, the veil of U.S. democracy will inevitably be flung to the four winds.” - Mao Zedong

“The United States, had first fought a progressive war of independence from British imperialism, and then fought a civil war to establish a free labour market. Washington and Lincoln were progressive men of their time. When the United States first established a republic it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries. Now the American people need to struggle for liberation from their own monopoly capitalists.” - Mao Zedong

“Society pushed us on to the political stage. Who ever thought of indulging in Marxism previously? I hadn’t even heard of it. What I had heard of, and also read of, was Confucius, Napoleon, Washington, Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration, the three distinguished Italian [patriots] - in other words, all those [heroes] of capitalism. I had also read a biography of Franklin. He came from a poor family; afterwards, he became a writer, and also conducted experiments on electricity.” - Mao Zedong

“Washington, Jefferson and others made the revolution against Britain because of British oppression and exploitation of the Americans, and not because of any over-population in America.” - Mao Zedong

“Washington [has] a bad ‘reputation’, and we can ratify him as the ‘Communist Party’; Not being able to join the Communist Party is one thing. At that time there was no Communist Party. The revolutionary role played by Washington we should admit that he played a very advanced role at that time and was very progressive. And Lincoln is the same; [The American people] I wish them progress. If I wish them liberation, some of them might not approve of it. I wish those who realise that they have not yet been liberated, and those who have difficulties in life, be liberated; The Americans need to be liberated again. This is their own business. Not liberated from British rule, but liberated from monopoly capital.” - Mao Zedong

“The whole world, Britain included dislikes the United States. The masses of the people dislike it; The people are dissatisfied and in some countries so are the authorities. All oppressed nations want independence. Everything is subject to change. The big decadent forces will give way to the small newborn forces. The small forces will change into big forces because the majority of the people demand this change. The U.S. imperialist forces will change from big to small because the American people, too, are dissatisfied with their government.” - Mao Zedong

“Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn’t. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger; We have to destroy it piecemeal; If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.” - Mao Zedong

“The Japanese nation is a great nation. It will never allow U.S. imperialism to ride on itself for a long time. Over the years, the patriotic united front of the people of all strata of Japan against U.S. imperialist aggression, oppression, and control has continued to expand. This is the most reliable guarantee for the victory of the Japanese people’s anti-American patriotic struggle. The Chinese people are convinced that the Japanese people will be able to expel the U.S. imperialists from their homeland.” - Mao Zedong

“All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.” - Mao Zedong

“The only ones who crave war and do not want peace are certain monopoly capitalist groups in a handful of imperialist countries that depend on aggression for their profits.” - Mao Zedong

“As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them - but should befriend them - unite with them, and convince them and encourage them to go forward.” - Mao Zedong

“The attitude of Communists towards any person who has made mistakes in his work should be one of persuasion in order to help him change and start afresh and not one of exclusion, unless he is incorrigible.” - Mao Zedong

“…In applying Marxism to China, Chinese Communists must fully and properly integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, or in other words, the universal truth of Marxism must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula.” - Mao Zedong

“We must be united both with the party and those not in the party; to be united both domestically and internationally; then, for what will this be unity for? For us all to construct a great socialist country. We can absolutely use the word ‘Great’ to describe our country. Our party is a great party. Our people is a great people. Our revolution is a great revolution. And our task is of a great task. A country with 600 million, the only one in the world, this is us… that is why in the process of this construction, our ultimate goal is realist and be a great socialist country, to fully change what has been our hundred years of backwardness; hundred of years of being ridiculed; hundred years of being viewed as a sick man; these sorts of poisonous situations. We must as such catch up with the world’s most powerful capitalist country, that is, the United States.” - Mao Zedong

“The Mongols and Han should co-operate closely and have faith in Marxism. All our minority nations should trust each other, no matter what nationalities they are. They must see on which side truth lies. Marx himself was a Jew, Stalin belonged to a minority nation; and Chiang Kai-shek is a Han, a bad one, whom we strongly oppose. We must not insist that only people of a given province can take charge of the administration of that province. The place of origin of a man is irrelevant - northerner or southerner, this national minority or that minority, [they are all the same]. The questions are whether they have Communism and how much. This point should be explained clearly to our national minorities. To begin with, the Han was not a big race, but a mixture of a great number of races. The Han people have conquered many minority nations in history and have driven them to the highlands. [We] must take a historical view of our nationality question and find out that we either depend on minority nationalism or on Communism. Of course we depend on Communism. We need our regions but not our regionalism.” - Mao Zedong

“In some places the relations between nationalities are far from normal. For Communists this is an intolerable situation. We must go to the root and criticise the Han chauvinist ideas which exist to a serious degree among many Party members and cadres, namely, the reactionary ideas of the landlord class and the bourgeoisie, or the ideas characteristic of the Kuomintang, which are manifested in the relations between nationalities. Mistakes in this respect must be corrected at once. Delegations led by comrades who are familiar with our nationality policy and full of sympathy for our minority nationality compatriots still suffering from discrimination should be sent to visit the areas where there are minority nationalities, make a serious effort at investigation and study and help Party and government organisations in the localities discover and solve problems. The visits should not be those of ‘looking at flowers on horseback.’” - Mao Zedong

“I owe my allegiance to the working class; we want to build a society where our children can live in peace and prosperity, a society where they will control the wealth of this country.” - Seamus Costello

“On the question of whether we are nationalists or not I can say the following: we are nationalists to the exact degree necessary to develop a healthy socialist patriotism among our people, and socialist patriotism is in its essence internationalism. Socialism does not require of us that we renounce our love for our socialist country, that we renounce our love for our own people. Socialism does not require of us that we should not make every possible effort to build up our socialist country as quickly as possible, in order that we may so create the best possible living conditions for our working people. Our creative drive in building up our country, that is the creative drive of our workers, our youth, our people’s intelligentsia, and all our working peasants and citizens, who are voluntarily contributing their share to the work of construction within the People’s Front, - none of these things need, or indeed can, be stigmatised as some sort of nationalist deviation. No, this is socialist patriotism, which in its essence is profoundly international, and for that reason we are proud of it.” - Josip Broz Tito

“The notion of patriotism must be understood in a class context - one can be patriotic in defense of a capitalist state or… a workers’ state (proletarian patriotism). These are two different things, for when a worker is patriotic in a capitalist state (referring to false patriotism) he is just serving his own oppressor.” - Walter Rodney

“The substance of socialist democracy lies in efficient socialist organisation of all society for the sake of every individual, and in the socialist discipline of every individual for the sake of all society.” - L.I. Brezhnev

“We, Negro Communists, do not accept the status of ‘aliens’ to which the Negro Resolution relegates us. We are an integral part of the Negro movement, embodying the great revolutionary traditions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, etc. We do not become ‘foreigners’ when we become Communists. It is, therefore, not only the right, but the duty of Negro Communists to project forms and methods of struggle consistent with the great revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. As true patriots, we call for a consistent fight against U.S. imperialism as the main enemy of the Negro people. We call for an alliance with the white working class based upon common revolutionary aims. We call for international solidarity with the heroic struggles for national liberation, peace and Socialism which embrace the vast majority of mankind.” - Harry Haywood

“And no man single-handed, can hope to break the bars; it’s a thousand like Ned Kelly, who’ll hoist the flag of stars.” - John Manifold

“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

“Without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal.” - Thomas Sankara

“I ask every Communist individually to set an example, by deeds and without pretense, a real example worthy of a man and a Communist, in restoring order, starting normal life, in resuming work and production, and in laying the foundations of an ordered life; only with the honour thus acquired can we earn the respect of our other compatriots as well.” - Janos Kadar

“If colonies cannot decolonise and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist. Nor, we believe, will they ever exist again. And since there must be nations for revolutionary nationalism or internationalism to make sense, we decided that we would have to call ourselves something new.” - Huey P. Newton

“He [a friend of Huey] was inclined to believe you would have been on the side of the colonisers [British]. I’m pleased with the answer, and I agree with [Buckley’s support for the American Revolution] the only revolution that is worth fighting is a humane revolution.” - Huey P. Newton

“‘We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.’ Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British government had certain laws and rules that the colonised Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonised immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: ‘…whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organising its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness’ Now these same colonised white people, these ex-slaves, robbers and thieves, have denied the colonised black man the right to even speak of abolishing this oppressive system which the white colonised American created. They have carried their madness to the four corners of the earth, and now there is universal rebellion against their continue[d] rule and power.” - Huey P. Newton

“Workers! Farmers! Anti-fascists! Spanish Patriots! Confronted with the fascist military uprising, all must rise to their feet, to defend the Republic, to defend the people’s freedoms as well as their achievements towards democracy.” - Dolores Ibárruri

“It is a lie that I made the people starve. A lie, a lie in my face. This shows how little patriotism there is, how many treasonable offenses were committed… At no point was there such an upswing, so much construction, so much consolidation in the Romanian provinces. I guaranteed that every village has its schools, hospitals and doctors. I have done everything to create a decent and rich life for the people in the country, like in no other country in the world.” - Nicolae Ceaușescu

“I may be a German patriot, but if unification comes with McDonalds the class-traitors can keep it.” - Erich Honecker

“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

“From the beginning of our policy in regard to the national bourgeoisie was not only to carry out the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution together with them, but also to take them (proletarianisation) along with us to a socialist, Communist society.” - Kim Il-sung

“Patriotism is not an empty concept. Education in patriotism cannot be conducted simply by erecting the slogan, ‘Let us arm ourselves with the spirit of socialist patriotism!’ Educating people in the spirit of patriotism must begin with fostering the idea of caring for every tree planted on the road side, for the chairs and desks in the school… There is no doubt that a person who has formed the habit of cherishing common property from childhood will grow up to be a valuable patriot.” - Kim Il-sung

“France is one country, one nation, one people. We protest indignantly against such ridiculous and odious allegations. For us, as for all the citizens of our country, every man and woman of French nationality is French. Every attempt using hazardous criteria which borders on racism in an ill-defined way, seeking to define as not purely French such and such members of the French community, is offensive to the national consciousness. Nobody here can accept that, our Party least of all.” - (Georges Marchais, Letter to the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R., February 1984)

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem… Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.” - Kwame Ture

“Capitalism means that the masses will work, and a few people - who may not labour at all - will benefit from that work. The few will sit down to a banquet, and the masses will eat whatever is left over.” - Julius Kambarage Nyerere

“The African is not ‘Communistic’ in his thinking; he is - if I may coin an expression - ‘communitary.’” - Julius Kambarage Nyerere

“The working class of each country faces two responsibilities - national and international. How to unite these task has always been a challenge to the revolutionary movements. The main weapon of the enemy is a skillfull use of chauvinism, nationalism, and a false use of patriotism.” - Gus Hall

“The difference between most radical left, new left, socialist and quasi socialist parties that say they speak for the working class - and the Communist Party USA is: The Communists mean what they say.” - Gus Hall

“To view the U.S. working class as a partner of monopoly capital in its imperialist exploitation is a slander and a falsehood. The U.S. working class is a victim of the same monopoly capital as are the workers of the U.S. owned plants in other lands. This type of slander is not going to be helpful in getting the U.S. working class to meet its historic responsibilities in the fighting against imperialism. The people on the left who spread this slander are only placing additional obstacles in the path of giving leadership to the working class.” - Gus Hall

“There is nothing more criminal, more insane, unpatriotic and Un-American than spending billions for the military, than permitting rich families to plunder and pillage our economy out of hundreds of billions of dollars while tens of millions of Americans live below the official poverty level. The policy of austerity and scarcity creates a crisis for the whole working class, but for working youth it is an absolute catastrophe, a dead-end. Because of this policy, you are not to be allowed to enlist in the future of the United States, except as cannon fodder to kill and be killed for Exxon and Shell.” - Gus Hall

“The party which represents the working class has a right to fight. By all standards, that’s a legitimate American concept - part of our colonial heritage.” - (Samuel A. Darcy, who was expelled from the CPUSA for protesting Earl Browder’s leadership)

“My history… describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labour organisers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chávez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirised imperialism. I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality - and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.” - Howard Zinn

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” - Howard Zinn

“The fate of American capitalism lies in the hands of the American workers. The working class must be aware that the current order will remain unhindered so long as the workers plead for higher wages instead of demanding ownership over the means of production and partnership. This should be the objective of workers’ strikes.” - Muammar Gaddafi

“Nationalism does not conflict with internationalism. Mutual help, support and alliance between countries and nations - this is internationalism. Every country has its borders, and every nation has its identity, and revolution and construction are carried on with the country and nation as a unit. For this reason, internationalism finds its expressions in the relationships between countries and between nations, a prerequisite for which is nationalism. Internationalism divorced from the concepts of nation and nationalism is merely an empty shell. A man who is unconcerned about the destiny of his country and nation cannot be faithful to internationalism. Revolutionaries of each country should be faithful to internationalism by struggling, first of all, for the prosperity of their own country and nation.” - Kim Jong-il

“Marxism-Leninism is ultimately deeply internationalist and, at the same time, deeply patriotic.” - Fidel Castro

“There are few times when the human word would appear to be as limited and deficient as it does today, to express the series of feelings, emotions, and ideas born in the heat of the great display of patriotism we have witnessed this morning, moments of emotions similar to those experienced on other occasions when we have had the chance to meet with large crowds. We consider tonight’s event as a victory for Cuba, a victory for Cubans. And the fame of the virtue and the patriotism of our people will grow throughout New York and the prestige of Cuba will grow. As the Apostle said, help the martyr, the martyr who asks for help, who awaits help, who relies on help, who wants to redeem himself with help. Not just today, but every day, not with the patriotism of a single day but with the pure patriotism of an entire lifetime, not just in a moment of fleeting enthusiasm.” - Fidel Castro

"The U.S. flag is your flag, you cannot allow the U.S. ruling class to own the flag. The working class of the U.S. must fight for the flag and once socialism is established it is up to the workers to decide what they want to do with flag and the U.S. as it exists." - (Fidel Castro, Addressing a group of students who did not want to associate with their flag while people from other countries sat next to theirs)

“The Revolution had therefore set the benchmark against which future generations of Americans - men and women, white and black, rich and poor - would measure their standing. Not only that: in its own time, it proved to be the curtain-raiser on a new epoch of world revolution. For, in the year following ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, defeated a military coup, and unleashed the French Revolution.” - (Neil Faulkner, Chapter 8: The Second Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions, pp 123, A Marxist History of the World)

“Portraying German history as a line of uninterrupted misery is a reactionary and anti-national concept which serves objectively to destroy national self-respect and the national consciousness of the German people.” - Victor Grossman

“Conservatives pawn themselves off as being more patriotic than liberals. Liberals think they are more patriotic than socialists, but we on the left are second to nobody in our patriotism. We want Perestroika, we want fundamental restructuring and democratisation of overseas and domestic policies. We want fundamental restructuring and democratisation of the political process, values, institutions, the economy, and the class power of this country. We real patriots say along with Albert Camus, ‘I want to love my country and justice too’, and in fact, I believe that the only way you can be a real patriot is to love justice because you can’t love, you can’t be patriotic to something that’s unjust. We want to spend less time trying to save the world with bombers and battleships and more time healing ourselves. This is not a good idea of noble pronouncement; it is a historical necessity. This country does not belong to Ronald Reagan and his billionaire friends, although they act like it does. It belongs to us and sooner or later we will take it back!” - Michael Parenti

“In contrast to the superpatriots, there are the real patriots who care enough about their country they want to improve it. Their patriotism has a social content. They know that democracy is not just the ability to hold elections. Democracy must also serve the needs and interests of the demos, the people. Real patriots educate themselves about the real history of their country and are not satisfied with the flag-waving promotional fluff that passes for history. They find different things in our past to be proud of than do superpatriots, such as the struggle for enfranchisement, the abolitionist movement, the peace movement, the elimination of child labour, and the struggle for collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, occupational safety, and racial justice and gender equality.” - Michael Parenti

“If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy… But the American way is to criticise and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.” - Michael Parenti

“In the real patriot’s pantheon can be found Tom Paine, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Eugene Victor Debs, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, Jeanette Rankin, Rosa Parks, Paul Robeson, A.J. Muste, Harry Bridges, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King - and the millions in ranks who championed social justice.” - Michael Parenti

“Real patriots advocate a freedom of speech and freedom of ideas in the major media that would include dissident Left views as well as the usual right-wing and conventional opinions we are constantly exposed to. Real patriots want some relief from the evasive, fatuous, mealymouthed, knowit-all empire-boosting pundits and conservative or otherwise insipid commentators. They want major media debates on the basic assumptions behind U.S. foreign policy and free-market globalism. They want to reclaim the nation’s airwaves, which belong not to the network bosses but to the people of the United States. Some real patriots want a government that will go directly into not-for-profit production. They want a fair chance given to worker-controlled enterprises and public ownership. If private industry cannot provide for the needs of the people, cannot build homes and hospitals enough for all, then the public sector should do so - not by contracting it out to private profiteers but by direct production as during the New Deal when public workers made tents, cots, and shoes, and canned foods for the destitute - a not-for-profit production that created jobs, served human needs, and expanded individual spending power and the tax base, all done without the parasitic private investors making a penny on it. Real patriots want to open up our political system to new political parties, not just two capitalist globalistic empire-building parties, not just one party that Red-baits and liberal-baits and the other that lives in fear of being Red-baited and liberal-baited. We need to do what numerous other democracies have done and institute proportional representation, ready ballot access to dissident parties, convenient voter-registration conditions, public campaign funding for all candidates, and free TV time for all political parties. Real patriots are not afraid of dramatic changes - if they are in a democratic direction. They want the fundamental democratisation of the political process and the economy of this country. As Mark Twain put it more than a century ago, his loyalty was not to his countries institutions and officeholders as such. His loyalty was to its basic principles of democracy, to the understanding that ‘all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient’. In sum, real patriots are not enamoured by the trappings of superpatriotism but are interested in the substance of social justice.” - Michael Parenti

“Finally, real patriots are internationalists. They feel a special attachment to their own country but not in some competitive way that pits the United States against other powers. They regard the people of all nations as different members of the same human family. In 1936, individuals from many countries and all walks of life joined together to form the International Brigade, which fought in Spain to protect democracy from the fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco. Charles Nusser, a veteran of that great struggle, relates this incident of international patriotism: ‘Sam Gonshak and I, both Spanish Civil war veterans were in Guernica on June 1, 1985 [to commemorate the Spanish Civil War]… I will never forget the speech of the organiser of the gathering. He referred to Sam and me as ‘Patriots of the World’. There have always been too many patriots in various countries straining to get at the throats of patriots in other countries.’ ‘Patriots of the World’ who happen to live in the United States want to stop destroying others with jet bombers and missiles and US-financed death squads and start healing this nation. This is not just a good and noble ideal, it is a historical necessity. It is the best kind of security. Sooner or later Americans rediscover that they cannot live on flag-waving alone. They begin to drift off into reality, confronted by the economic irrationalities and injustices of a system that provides them with the endless circuses and extravaganzas of superpatriotism, heavy tax burdens, a crushing national debt and military budget, repeated bloodletting in foreign lands, and sad neglect of domestic needs, denying them the bread of prosperity and their birthright as democratic citizens. We need a return to reality. We need to unveil the lies and subterfuges that so advantage the wealthy plutocracy. We need to pursue policies at home and abroad that serve the real needs of humanity. Then we can love our country - and peace and justice too.'” - Michael Parenti

“I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side wont be the heavies.” - Michael Parenti

“We are going to create an American liberation front to combat the avaricious businessman, the demagogic politician and the fascist cops who brutalise and terrorise the people.” - Bobby Seale

“Socialist patriotism [meant] true love for one’s motherland …[and]…free[dom] from all forms of chauvinism and racialism.” - Mengistu Haile Mariam

“‘Down with U.S.A.’ means down with the ruling class. It means death to the American politicians currently in power. It means death to the few people running that country; we have nothing against the American nation.” - Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei

“All revolutionaries, and all revolutionary organisations eventually have to make a choice between revolution and counter-revolution, if they will not take the lead from the vanguard, then they will have to move to the other side. From now on we will not take theory, but actions as the basis for the coalitions we make. The Young Patriots [A Chicago white working-class youth organisation] are the only revolutionaries we respect that ever came out of the mother country.” - (David Hilliard, Aug. 9, 1969 issue of The Black Panther newspaper)

“Revolutionary defeatism means that you oppose the actions of your own government and ruling class in carrying out their wars, which are wars for empire. It means that you welcome any setbacks they suffer in those wars, because that weakens their oppressive hold over masses of people, here and in the world more generally.” - Bob Avakian

“We (Russians) are the last power on this planet that is capable of mounting a challenge to the New World Order - the global cosmopolitan dictatorship. We must work against our destroyers, using means as carefully thought out and goals as oriented as theirs are: the unity of all nationalist forces is as necessary to this end as air.” - Gennady A. Zyuganov

“Some of the left think that patriotism is in itself proto-fascist. I say no, it means you have a strong trust in your culture and don’t need xenophobia; Patriotism is socialism.” - Slavoj Žižek

“Patriotism is not a mere slogan. A patriot is one who closely intertwines his/her own ideals with the future of the country, and his/her life with the fate of the nation.” - Xi Jinping

"Everything we Chinese Communists do is to better the lives of the Chinese people, renew the Chinese nation, and promote peace and development for humanity." - Xi Jinping

“We commemorate Deng Xiaoping by learning from his immense love for the Chinese people. His entire life is an expression of love for the people, which is an inexhaustible source of strength for Chinese Communists… He once said, ‘I am a son of the Chinese people. I have a deep love for my people and my country.’ It was his love for the people that fostered his love for the Party and the country. That is why he said, ‘My life belongs to the party and the country.’” - Xi Jinping

“I’m a patriotic American. I love the American people, but I hate the American government. It is the Fourth Reich. It is the equivalence of Nazi Germany today.” - Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley

“Nothing is more precious than the people, as they constitute the foundation of the country, and nothing is more sacred than their interests.” - Kim Jong-un

“Slavery is not the remarkable fact of America, but its abolition is.” - Chris Cutrone

“I don’t want socialism because I want to destroy America. I want socialism because I want to save America.” - Caleb T. Maupin

Even in cases which are not (explicitly) Communist can there be found a sense of patriotism-- a critical and genuine patriotism:

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism; The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” - George Washington

“My ardent desire is, and my aim has been, to comply with all our engagements, foreign and domestic, but to keep the United States free from political connections with every other country; to see that they may be independent of all and under the influence of none.” - George Washington

“The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

“When the people shall have torn to shreds the Constitution of the United States, the Elders of Israel will be found holding it up to the nations of the earth and proclaiming liberty and equal rights to all men, and extending the hand of fellowship to the oppressed of all nations.” - John Taylor

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty ought to have it ever before his eyes that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it.” - James Madison

“If Congress has a right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.” - Andrew Jackson

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” - John Quincy Adams

“[America’s] glory is not dominion but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.” - John Quincy Adams

“This nation, under God - shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” - Abraham Lincoln

“I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institution in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe.” - (Abraham Lincoln, 1865, not long before he was assassinated)

“Labour is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labour, and could never have existed if labour had not first existed. Labour is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” - Abraham Lincoln

“The capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.” - Abraham Lincoln

“Man still is vile. But such large steps have lately been taken in the true direction, that the patriot has a right to take courage.” - Thaddeus Stevens

“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… and when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” - (James A. Garfield, 1881, not long before he was assassinated)

“America is another name for opportunity; When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the high financial power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw the tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, indebted to the financiers, to the vigorous Republic, confident and self-providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus dig an abyss between the two parts of the Republic.” - Otto von Bismarck

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” - Mark Twain

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president. It is patriotic to serve him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth about the president or anyone else.” - Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

“We must dare to be great; and we must realise that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.” - Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

“Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.” - Calvin Coolidge

“I'm for the poor man - all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. ‘Every man a king’ - that’s my slogan.” - Huey P. Long

“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.” - Clarence Darrow

“We must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The American Dream is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of one’s birth.” - James Truslow Adams

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country; One person can make a difference, and everyone should try; A revolution is coming - a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; Compassionate if we care enough; Successful if we are fortunate enough - but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character, we cannot alter its inevitability; Let us not seek the Republican answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” - John F. Kennedy

“Some have spoken of the American century, I say that the century on which we are entering can be and must be the century of the common man.” - Henry A. Wallace

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.” - Sydney J. Harris

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually; We can make America what America must become.” - James Baldwin

“The problem isn’t a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you’ve given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.” - Bill Hicks

“I don’t like ass-kissers, flag wavers, or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you ‘there is no ‘I’ in team.’ What you should tell them is: Maybe not, but there is an ‘I’ in independence, individuality, and integrity.” - George Carlin

“In my generation, Abraham Lincoln was patriotism… What Lincoln represented, as President, was the reaffirmation and the consolidation of the original intent of the founders, an intent which is located in the question of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ in opposition to the Lockean principle of greed. And, the idea that every human being is not only made in the image of God, but society must be ordered in a way which conforms to the implications of that, as I’ve defined them. Today, that principle is the central issue of all global politics: The fact that the United States, when we were called to service in World War II, went to service with the heritage of Lincoln, and the Union victory in the Civil War…” - Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr

“My definition of patriotism is to defend your country with the truth no matter the consequences; I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.” - John F. Kerry

“Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong.” - Ron Paul

“The rich people apparently are leaving America. They’re giving up their citizenship. These great lovers of America who made their money in this country - when you ask them to pay their fair share of taxes, they’re running abroad. We have 19 year-old kids who died in Iraq and Afghanistan defending this country. They went abroad. Not to escape taxes. They’re working class kids who died in wars and now the billionaires want to run abroad to avoid paying their share of taxes. What patriotism! What love of country!” - Bernie Sanders

“When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity. We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity.” - Donald J. Trump