Essay:Patriotic socialism is not socialist patriotism

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by CriticalResist
Published: 2022-09-28 (last update: 2023-09-23)
15-30 minutes

In the current context of the class struggle in the United States of America, it seems that with each passing day, a strand of theory known as patriotic socialism is becoming more and more popular with the masses.

At least, that is what its proponents would have us believe. Unable to create their own movement, self-proclaimed "patriotic socialists" in the States would rather focus on destroying other established communist parties and projects. This is how we were flooded with the "CPUSA 2036" slogan on Twitter: an attempt to infiltrate the Communist Party of the USA, hijack its power structures, and redirect its energy to "patriotic socialism".

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In the current context of the class struggle in the United States of America, it seems that with each passing day, a strand of theory known as patriotic socialism is becoming more and more popular with the masses.

At least, that is what its proponents would have us believe. Unable to create their own movement, self-proclaimed "patriotic socialists" in the States would rather focus on destroying other established communist parties and projects. This is how we were flooded with the "CPUSA 2036" slogan on Twitter: an attempt to infiltrate the Communist Party of the USA, hijack its power structures, and redirect its energy to "patriotic socialism".

But first, what is patriotism and how does it apply to socialism?

Patriotism in a socialist framework

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Karl Marx.

Patriotism is a word with a wide range of definitions, and it would be unbecoming of us as communists to use the simple liberal, bourgeois definition. As with everything, patriotism goes through its own contradictions and dialectic, and emerges differently in different epochs and different classes of societies.

In other words, patriotism has a class character.

Bourgeois patriotism for example focuses on promoting one identity above others, so as to better divide the proletariat and keep them fighting against each other. To recruit willing cannon fodder in their imperialist wars, and justify them. To prevent any progressive change from happening. After all, we have it pretty good here, don't we? At least we're not like those people in some faraway country.

Bourgeois patriotism gave us colonialism, which evolved with its own strands as well. French colonists for example, as cited by Aimé Césaire (Discourse on colonialism), believed at different times that they were on a civilising mission; spreading the right religion; educating the colonised. They even thought their superior French values allowed to "respecting their differences" while subjugating Africa!

Proletarian patriotism focuses on national liberation (China, DPRK) and, in imperialist countries, can be used to defeat their imperialist bourgeoisie. Analysing the war against the Japanese invasion of 1933 for example, Mao correctly pointed out that the Chinese have a "patriotic hatred" against the enemy, which gave them an advantage. In this case he was not making a judgment of values, but simply a statement on their strengths and weaknesses in the war. The patriotism of the Chinese -- not believing they were a superior race, better than any other -- but uniting with a common identity against an invader, was in this case progressive.

On the Japanese side, Mao urged their patriots (a term he used in the context of his book, opposing it to Chinese patriots) to practice revolutionary defeatism, a term we owe to Lenin -- doing their best to ensure the end of the war and their whole imperialist State, instead of waiting for things to happen without their input.

This is the class character of patriotism.

Patriotic socialism: a strand of socialism?

It might seem obvious, then, that patriotic socialism is the same as socialist patriotism. That it is merely patriotism and socialism fused together.

This would be wrong.

Patriotic socialism has evolved to become its own ideology and strand of socialism (though we shall see it has very little to do with socialism). Therefore, the two terms must not be confused: patriotic socialism exclusively refers to the US-born and US-centric ideology. This is a word patriotic socialists have picked for themselves and claim for themselves -- therefore, it is legitimate to use this term on them.

This ideology obeys its own principles and has its own figures, and therefore goes beyond mere patriotism as applied to socialism (or as applied to the proletariat).

This is something patriotic socialists know, as we will see, but the confusion around the terms works very well in their favour.

In this manner, they can claim to be descendants of more notorious, progressive patriotism (war of defence against Japan, Palestinian resistance movement, Vietnamese war of self-determination, etc). In essence, this gives them credibility to defend their new movement.

But because patriotic socialism is its own strand, it has nothing to do with the previous examples of patriotism. They are two entirely separate movements and it makes as much sense to put them in the same box than it does putting materialism and idealism together (they are, after all, both schools of philosophy!)

The principles of patriotic socialism

As we have said, patriotic socialism is a wholly Statesian development. Their behaviour, based on extensive observation, can be summarised as:

1. A reverence or upholding of traditional (white) Statesian figures: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, etc.
2. Upholding the US revolution against Britain as a progressive.
3. An appreciation for the US flag, constitution and generally its institutions.
4. An appreciation for Dugin as a theorist.
5. A tendency to create cults of personality around their living figures.

The ideology is rapidly evolving, and it is difficult to keep up to date with its developments, which is mostly given by a handful of figures such as Haz (of Infrared), Jackson Hinkle and, until recently, Caleb Maupin.

Some might see a contradiction appear: how is it possible to uphold US institutions, which are directly inherited from slave owners, exist to promote anti-communism, serve the most advanced imperialist country on the planet, and be a socialist?

Truthfully, we are not sure either. As their ideology evolves rapidly and is not known to make much sense (which we will see also later), it is difficult to get a straightforward answer on this. They will usually cherry-pick quotes and events in which the "Founding Fathers" acted somewhat progressive to rehabilitate their whole image. They will also cherry-pick quotes and passages from marxist theorists (including Marx, Engels and Lenin) to promote their message. However, when presented with a rebuttal to their argument from the same theorist, they will claim we are cherry-picking and misunderstanding the passage.

Patriotic socialists are not organised in any party. Their biggest front, the Center for Political Innovation (led by Maupin), was a self-proclaimed think tank -- but never a political party. Their biggest plan was to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (which is vehemently against patriotic socialism) and change it from the inside. As such, they hold no coherent or common platform; they do not write party programmes; they are not involved in material struggles in the real world (strikes, food drives, protests, commentary on laws, elections and other political happenings in the country). This is a movement that exists solely online and thus makes it very difficult to extract a common thread in all this mess.

There is also, of course, the big contradiction between the United States' foreign policy and self-proclaimed socialists that want to uphold this status quo. A country that has been at war for 75% of its existence, is the main driver of imperialism today and is responsible for millions of deaths and misery around the world does not inspire confidence in the international proletariat. To see self-proclaimed socialists try to rehabilitate its symbols and institutions strikes fear in the international working class.

There is, this must be pointed out, a rich history of resistance, progress and labour struggle in the United States. But it does not come from George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. The Revolution against the British was, strangely enough, neither reactionary nor progressive. It was merely exchanging power from one oppressive ruling class to another. The "founding fathers" never hid that their revolution was about taxes (and the unwillingness to pay them), it was never about "freedom" or "self-determination". It was led by bourgeois liberals and for a time, a monarchy was considered instead of a republic with George Washington at its head! Famously, the United States of America continued the slave-master and colonialist policies of Great-Britain.

Patriotic socialists and others will say that Great-Britain was a monarchy (therefore implying they were following a feudal mode of production), and that revolutionary figures in the war of independence were bourgeois and therefore wanting a capitalist mode of production. This revolution would indeed be progressive if such were the case (Engels, Principles of communism).

But this is an incorrect reading on the 1776 war of independence. At the time, both Great-Britain and their American colony largely followed a petty bourgeois mode of production preceding capitalism. Feudalism was on its way out -- serfdom had been abolished, and primitive accumulation was starting. Manufactories, the predecessor to factories, were widespread in Britain. Liberalism was already established in Great-Britain: The wealth of nations was published the same year the war of independence started, and Enlightenment philosophers in France (who gave us a great body of works on liberalism, along with British philosophers), looked to Britain as a beacon of freedom compared to the French monarchy.

Essentially, the bourgeoisie was already well established in Great-Britain at the time despite the existence of a monarchy -- the nobility, owing to Britain's history of class struggle, were never liquidated. Thus British nobles became bourgeois, with capitalist projects of their own.

In this way the closest class the founding fathers represented was the comprador bourgeoisie: forced to submit capital and profit to the occupier, but wishing for sovereignty so they can reap the whole benefits of their capitalist ventures.

It would be one thing if patriotic socialists upheld other important figures (such as Black or Native figures) or made clear that they look beyond the United States as it currently exists to create something better.

But they do not.

Strasserism of the 21st century

Patriotic socialism is a very mystical ideology. That is to say, it is difficult to make sense of it and understand it. It evolves rapidly and is mostly propagated by its current figureheads, who are building it up as they go along. This is also, we believe, the reason they promote Dugin so much to their audience: another mysticist author who seems profound but says very basic things and still gets them wrong most of the time.

We have seen such double-dealers in the past: the Strasser brothers.

The Strasser brothers were involved in the SA in Nazi Germany (The SA was a short-lived paramilitary group that helped put Hitler in power. They were liquidated shortly after he became Chancellor). They were big supporters of Hitler, but disagreed with him on some points. Notably, while they believed his anti-semitic theories, they considered themselves to be socialists and differed on the execution of anti-semitism in the Reich. To that end they envisioned a Germany that nominally had social programmes, but still carried pogroms against their Jewish population, still vied for class collaboration over the class struggle, still believed in German superiority to other nations.

It is very telling that in the patriotic socialism sphere, there do not seem to be minorities represented or even considered. Patsocs uphold white figures of US liberalism. They uphold a flag associated with slavery, colonialism and imperialism. The only time they ever speak about the Black Panthers, for example, is for their association with the Young Patriots: a socialist group of anti-racism Whites in the Southern States that originally used the Dixie flag (flag of the civil war), as they were not well-versed in its history. After the Panthers reached out, the Young Patriots changed their flag. There are still pictures with the BPP in front of the YP Dixie flag, which patriotic socialists use to whitewash their movement and the flag in question.

Their common retort is: "but if other communists can wave their flag, why can't we?" precisely forgetting that communists in other (non-socialist) countries do not fly their national flags either.

In a way, it is a development that could have only taken place in the United States, owing to its rabid history of nationalism and exceptionalism.

It should come as no surprise then that many self-proclaimed patriotic socialists not only espouse reactionary views that are incompatible with socialism on a State level, but are also proud to claim them. Here is an example on the right:

MechaOrvo for example includes "Anti-Globalist" in his Twitter biography, a known dogwhistle almost entirely used by fascists to mean Jews. "Globalism" is not the same as "globalisation"; the former is a supposed ideology (denoted by the -ism suffix), while the latter is a process that happened as capitalism developed.

MechaCena includes "honk honk 🚚", a nod to the 2021 truckers protest in Canada, which were a reactionary, bourgeois-aligned series of strikes that aimed to force the Canadian government to drop covid lockdowns and restrictions (thus bringing people back to work in a deadly pandemic, which is in the interest of the bourgeoisie that lost billions in potential profits over the course of lockdowns).

A popular movement?

Listening to patsocs talk about their movement, one would think it is the vanguard of communism in the United States. We have seen also that they misuse the word patriotism and the two definitions we have given above to make it seem like they represent something else than they really do.

Their self-aggrandizement is not as accepted as they would make it seem; they remain a very small movement after all (if vocal), and many communists in the United States do not identify with them and correctly label them as chauvinists. This includes marxist-leninists, maoists, hoxhaists, and many other socialist denominations.

To give an idea of their size, Infrared's Telegram channel boasts 920 members, and their Youtube channel 23 thousand subscribers. As these numbers are from social media, we must also consider many accounts are inactive, joined for other reasons than supporting the channel (collecting data, keeping up to date...), are bots, etc. Thus their actual numbers are slightly lower.

In absolute terms, this means infrared (for one) is smaller than many other "leftist" youtubers or figures.

Jackson Hinkle, another virality-chasing patriotic socialist, boasts 129000 members on his Youtube channel but struggles to reach even 60 thousand views on his videos -- an indication that many started following him but forgot about it over time, and probably don't remember they were subscribed in the first place.

Patriotic socialists may have one thing going for them: their reaching out to the reactionary portions of the working class; but we must stress out the "may" in this sentence.

Indeed, if the revolution rests on the organising of the working class, then it follows that sooner or later, their reactionary elements, elevated to a state of false consciousness towards the interests of the bourgeoisie, will have to be integrated in the socialist state. In past revolutions, we have seen that the reactionary elements of the proletariat first join the counter-revolution against communists, but then still exist even after the revolution -- and must be dealt with in one way or another.

There are two things to consider however. First, there is the reactionary proletariat who believes that capitalism or even fascism is preferable, and will actively fight against the revolution for the bourgeoisie. Then there is the "backwards" proletariat, who holds some positions antithetical to socialism (or socially regressive opinions) but might still join the revolution for various reasons (national liberation for example).

These two groups are not the same at all: there is no overlap between the two. What patriotic socialists look to do is to pander to the first category, not the second. What socialist revolutionaries such as Lenin and Mao did was educate the second group and fight the first with weapons.

Instead of elevating the reactionary working class to become class-conscious and realise their proletarian interests (through the theory and praxis of Marxism-Leninism), patriotic socialists would rather tail them -- meaning to let them carry on and simply follow the reactionary elements in their reaction. Instead of educating, they validate. Past the revolution, what will happen to those reactionary elements that were integrated and validated into socialism? They will keep being reactionary, with a state that now also has no choice but to sanction their reactionary demands (as that state was built on tailing the reaction). Thus such a state could only be reactionary in nature, and not progressive (i.e. working towards communism).

MAGACommunism

The new infrared-aligned development of MAGACommunism is an attempt to summarily fuse MAGA (Make America Great Again, the slogan to Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign and now a primarily petit-bourgeois movement of its own) and communism. Their body of theory (explaining the reason for existing of MAGACommunism) is concentrated in one essay Haz (of Infrared) published on his substack page. The essay is overly mystical in nature, and that is perhaps why patriotic socialists are turning towards Dugin, another mystical quasi-fascist author: it makes their community more susceptible to reading what they perceive to be groundbreaking theory when it is dressed in obscure, seemingly profound language.

The role mystical language plays is double-fold.

First, it allows one to do the legwork themselves. This is a great propaganda tactic: people are more sure of their ideas when they arrive at conclusions themselves. Making people decipher the meaning of a passage is a great way to validate the opinion one propagates.

Secondly, their obscure, obtuse and overly flowery language allows them to say and not say things depending on context. When one criticises such texts, the only counter-argument needed is to say they clearly didn't understand it and should read it again.

When MechaOrvo said, for example, that "Revolutions are inherently conservative", what did he mean by this? That is a case of a sentence being vague enough to insert whatever one wants it to mean. Was he talking about conservatism as practiced in the USA? Or another form of conservatism, more general, to mean "conserving values?" Nobody knows, not even him. But if one were to criticize this affirmation, it would be all too easy to tell them they clearly did not understand what he meant by "conservative" or "revolution" and therefore, one's argument is defeated. Always.

It's interesting to note that MAGACommunism made an apparition shortly after the Center for Political Innovation disbanded. The reason for the dissolution was that allegations came out from former members against Caleb Maupin, whose CPI was his personal project that he controlled much like a cult leader would (and indeed indoctrination, as well as sexual harassment and abuse, was brought up against Maupin).

Prior to that, Infrared pushed the "Mechatankie" hashtag, following their theory that only manual and heavy industry labourers form the proletariat, and "Starbucks baristas" or other service workers (in a country where more than 70% of employed people work in the service industry) are not.

Tactics

Patsocs do not currently form the vanguard in the United States, nor are they interested in becoming it.

Instead, their movement is solely found online where they act in any way necessary to create visibility and engagement in an attempt to go viral.

Following this, it's entirely possible to analyse their social media tactics as any other viral attempt from businesses or influencers. But that would only be telling half the story.

We see for example that patsocs only ever attack the left (even the marxist-leninist left, which they also claim to be!). They sometimes retweet or reply in agreement to conservative or otherwise reactionary public figures.

Analysing their behaviour on social media, we see several things happen. As we have had the chance to be the focus of a patsoc brigade recently (mostly led by the infrared community), we are in a good position to analyse and describe their tactics.

In a word, their tactics can be described as "self-aggrandizing". The guideline they apply is to make it seem that they are more popular than they really are, always.

They present a distortion of Marxism, using cherry-picked quotes that agree with them without studying their context. Marxism is not a science that can be understood atomically (meaning that one can get the whole philosophy from just reading excerpts or books focused on a single issue); it is closer to a holistic domain, one that has overarching guiding principles through which individual texts can then be understood and replaced in their context.

Brigading and "likebombing"

Their group is small, but tightly-knit. They all follow each other on Twitter (their main social media) and as such can act as the sentry to an artillery gun: just point and shoot.

If they find someone to brigade, one of theirs will like the tweet to brigade and might retweet it or quote tweet it. This action will show up on others' timeline, acting as a signal (the pointing part), where they will jump in (the shooting).

Soon enough, other patsocs will follow and drown you out in endless replies. They systematically like and retweet each others' content, and even their own tweets (known as likebombing) to make it seem they are bigger and more popular than they actually are.

In truth, anyone looking at the profiles that like these tweets will see that they are mostly liked by the same people and rarely reach over 20 likes. As we pointed out, their community is still absolutely small (in relative terms, they are insignificant compared to the whole USA). As Twitter shows all notifications, including who liked replies to your tweets, their practice is even more obvious: it is not uncommon (even normal) to see a random, patsoc account like and retweet 5, 7 or 10 replies in a few seconds.

Quantity over anything

To take over the CPUSA by 2036, Infrared will inevitably have to organise IRL (In real life).

In these replies, as well as their tweets more generally, their guideline is to post whatever goes through their mind without thinking much. The point is to keep posting so that there are more chances of a tweet going viral. This is how we end up with nonsensical tweets that contradict themselves sometimes (see on the right).

This flood of quantity also servers another purpose: drown out arguments and get visibility. It is simply impossible for a single person to reply to every tweet they are assailed with in such a brigade, asked for a debate and arguments left and right.

Avoid, pivot, retort

A common tactic used in bad faith discussions in general is the "avoid, pivot, retort" tactic -- much like in a boxing match.

If you make an argument in a discussion with them, they will first avoid it: completely ignore it and talk over it.

They will then pivot to another argument: change the topic completely from what you were talking about.

Finally, they will retort (or counterattack) with their own attack: after changing the topic, attack your character or make up opinions they think you have. Then repeat the process.

The important thing in this technique is to always come out on top. Always come out looking better than your opponent, and make up arguments, opinions, anything you can lie about to make them seem worse than they really are.

For example, while most of these users never once used Prolewiki or have read any of our pages, they were suddenly experts on our principles and mission statement and thought it welcome to offer their suggestions on how to lead our encyclopedia. One of them, for instance, tried to claim that we used British English (in a bid to make it seem like we were not Statesian, which we are not and have never claimed to be) but it was officially decided to use Statesian English on Prolewiki, and most of our pages reflect this.

Make up self-important arguments, victim complex

The evidence that led to the removal of administrator jucheguevara.

As we pointed out, patsocs like to make themselves seem more important and bigger than they really are. As such, when attacking leftist or communist structures (CPUSA, Prolewiki...), they will misrepresent one's points and arguments in favour of a scarecrow.

When Prolewiki voted to remove a conniving administrator that went behind our back, the infrared community (who was mobilised to make accounts under false pretences on the wiki) tried to spin this as Prolewiki banning them pre-emptively, without reason. The evidence of the administrator's conspiring was given however and was plain to see (see picture).

They show a pathetic (in more meanings than one) victim complex in this behaviour: always making themselves to be victims of "not real" communists, of ultras trying to keep "actual communists" down.

The importance of being "actual communists" is important to them, likely in an attempt to co-opt the communist movement itself in the USA.

None of them actually tried to make accounts.

Breaking down, building up

In their self-important brigading tactics, patsocs will also notably try to break their victim down: we stopped counting the times they just outright tweeted insults at us.

Later, after a thorough thrashing, they will reach out with the olive branch: "we could work together, there's no reason not to, if you would just be reasonable". This is ignoring that they started the "beating" and have not once argued in good faith or tried to reach out before starting the brigade.

This is, interestingly, a tactic cults use to indoctrinate their victims. It's more generally a tactic abusers know and employ very well.

Rebooting profiles

Finally, they will once in a while reboot their profile. They will change their profile picture as well as their name and sometimes handle, possibly in an attempt to look like a new member. In this way they can make it seem like they are more popular than they really are and that they have a lot of followers.

Does it work?

Now that we have identified these tactics, we must ask if they actually work.

Truthfully, not really.

The only people that like or engage positively with patsoc tweets are other patsocs, who are already down in the pipeline and cannot be reasoned with -- they act like this already.

Meanwhile, in the course of the brigade that started over Prolewiki removing an administrator, our twitter account gained over 80 new followers from just the announcement that we had removed an administrator.