I also agree, as I said before, that the nation is a construct, which Orwell wouldn’t really have seen then (I imagine he’d get it now though). But I think we (just as he stretches his meaning of nationalism way beyond the nation) can also think of something akin to his concept of patriotism, an affect of belonging, in relation to other small, perhaps also construcuted units like neighbourhood, community, region. I think we could probably also think of a kind of patriotism of class. Not sure about that.

I’ll print out your Trotskyism and war, as this is something I find very interesting, and read it over the weekend, when I might be back!

With regard to World War II, there are a number of demands which Marxists could have agitated for even whilst supporting the preparations for war: the arming of the workers, industrial democracy and so on. It is an absolute fzct that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted with the defence of Britain.

As was witnessed in Holland and France, as soon as things began to look hairy, they jacked it in and waved their Hitlerian flags. We were lucky – we had a natural barrier between us and the Nazi armies. Had that not been the case, our little bourgeoisie might have ignominiously surrendered too.

In such a conflict, it is chance that patriotism and ‘right’ are on the same side – but patriotism, even the benign kind, mobilised to encourage struggle, doesn’t imply the sort of conclusions that a class analysis is necessary to draw. Essentially patriotism is a dead-weight, not useful in political analysis.

It exists in sentiment, undeniably – but attempts to appeal to it are, when it comes down to utilising the concept of ‘the nation’, based on a contradiction. There is no ‘nation’, not even for the purposes of a war against Germany.

(As a full disclosure, I’ve changed my position on World War Two about forty times so I am the last person who can lay claim to consistency here. I wrote this article on Trotskyism and War; not my best work, but if compared to what I say today, I think it contrasts me favourably with the “National Defence” socialists who were mobilised by Orwell’s type of patriotism, and who came in for such a barracking from the old man).

I guess in a purely imperialist war, where no side is objectively better than the other, then an Orwellian socialist would have to choose between suppressing their patriotism or betraying the principles of genuine internationalism. Given Orwell’s unequivocal denunciations of imperialism and colonialism, I like to think he would have been on the right side in World War I, with Sylvia Pankhurst and Rudolf Rocker.

In World War II, revolutionary defeatism was the wrong approach, as large sections of the Trotskyist movement recognised and even anarchists like Rudolf Rocker. In World War II, in my view, while the rulers of the Allies may have had cynical, imperialist motivations (at least in part) for fighting Hitler’s Germany, they were objectively right, so happily Orwell’s patriotism and his anti-fascism came together, and he used patriotism as a resource in promoting anti-fascism.

Today, it seems to me, many liberal anti-fascists use patriotism to combat the BNP – not just the mainstream politicians, but also the Anti-Nazi League/UAF, whose mantra-like invocation of the word “Nazi” for any variety of fascism seems to me to play into a little England memory of war-time enmity with Germany. If you don’t distinguish patriotism from nationalism, then you have to sharply condemn that tactic.

I guess I am revising my claim that patriotism has no practical application, to say that patriotism has a frequently benign political application, as a resource to be mobilised in motivating struggle, as part of the stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves active – in our case, stories of Tom Wintrington’s Home Guards, or of Tom Paine and the English revolution. When patriotism starts to be used to promote the national interest above the interests of humanity, or of social justice, then it starts to enter into the blurry territory where it passes into nationalism rather than patriotism.

If patriotism has no practical application, I agree, it’s benign and not a bad thing. But I fail to see, if it has no practical application, of what relevance it is to talk about it in a political context – as Orwell repeatedly does, and as others have done using Orwell’s words.

But could there be an anti-nationalist patriotism? The opponents of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the ones that celebrated a cosmopolitan, mixed idea of Yugoslavia, they’d probably count. (These were the people that Red Aid/Workers Aid made contact with in places like Tusla, although Splinty probly has a different view on that.)

I keep meaning to read Billy Bragg’s book about this.

On patriotism. I know that the line between patriotism and nationalism as Orwell defines it can blur in practice. Myself, I think so long as we acknowledge that blurring, then we can say that patriotism in his sense is benign while nationalism is malign. The warm and comfortable wave you mention is precisely patriotism in his sense, even if probably a week variant of it, and the fact that it doesn’t affect your politics is what makes it benign. For Orwell, patriotism only becomes political defensively, at times when the “nation” is attacked or invaded, and here it presumably becomes a positive resource if the attacker is also objectively bad, as in the case of Britain or Russia vis a vis Nazi Germany. It could also be a positive resource in the way Carl Raincoat Optimist talks about – making a political tradition more vivid, I guess. I’m not one of them, but I can think of lots of soft-patriotic people with a class perspective I’ve known on the rank and file left, although they may well count as “anti-communist” in your sense.

I just re-read Splint’s comment and realised I have no idea who Lewis is in that context.

Anyway, thanks for helping me think about this!

He suggests that we can escape by employing our reason. My point is that this reason does not exist in the abstract. It is not present in some people and absent in others; analytical categories based on such a distinction break down easily and aren’t valid for drawing wider conclusions. I then subsequently used Orwell’s view to challenge his materialism.

I don’t think that Gramsci’s view of intellectuals necessarily has a part to play here. I agree with James, Orwell and Gramsci when it comes to the need for an “organic intellectual” (which Orwell probably never openly stated, but he did hate overly-complex language). To that I would add Lenin’s insistence on the practice, which quickly condemns most intellectuals.

But none of this really changes my point, that Orwell is being normative, just not very clearly, and that this is based on a subjective view-from-the-outside of extremist theories and groups, rather than a real attempt to understand what’s going on in its complexity. For which one still need not use overly complex language.

As for patriotism, which was the real core of my article to begin with, I suppose whether or not patriotism is bad depends on two things. The first is semantic; what are we classifying patriotism? The second requires an outline of how it relates to practical political positions and action.

As a reflex, I’m inclined to think all patriotism is bad. Not to say I don’t feel a warm and comfortable wave of sentiment when I step off the plane on to home soil, or darken the doorstep of my home, locked up tight, if I’ve been away for a while. But such sentiments have no practical relevance for me; if you dropped me down in the middle of France, my political views would be unchanged.

Those people for whom ‘patriotism’ does have a practical relevance tend to be either on the political right, or on the anti-communist, anti-class wing of the political left. I welcome my education in the matter, always.

I do agree that he is not materialist enough, but I think you interpret him as being much more un-materialist than he is. (But then I guess I am probably somewhat less materialist than you! I tihnk morality is important in politics. Marxism – and academic leftism in general – is often predicated on a drive to “correctly” analyse, but I think coming to a moral judgement is an important part of understanding too. I think we need more humility to temper the Marxist will to truth.)

I also disagree that his “late” politics has no practical application whatsoever. He of course was pretty ill in the later part of his life, so was not exactly an activist, but he supported the Atlee government, for example, and continued in his anti-fascist propoganda. I think that the critique of nationalism, actually, is one of the most important political tasks of our time, and eminently practical for that matter.

On ordinary and normal. I think “normal” is normative in a way “ordinary” isn’t. Mainly, I think Orwell is using “ordinary” not to mean un-ideological or un-passionate, but simply not part of the intellectual class. He is not saying “ordinary” people aren’t intellectually capable, but that intellectualism as an aspect of a way of life (surely class-inflected) creates certain deformities of thought. Again, I think this can be usefully placed alongside Gramsci, in that what Orwell is criticising is the “traditional intellectual” in Gramsci’s sense, and arguing for a more vernacular sort of thinking, that is related to Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”, his insistence that everyone is a philosopher. CLR James made similar points in Notes on the Dialectic, where he contrasted the dialectical thought of untrained rank and file union activists to the un-dialectical thought of the American Trotskyist movement.

By the way, I’m not completely clear on what you are saying about patriotism. Is all patriotism automatically bad?

(Feel free to continue or discontinue – I don’t want to take up your time unless you want to!)