Proletarian Patriotism

I find it interesting how none of the people simply mocking or dismissing out of hand this concept are calling it what they call themselves, they never use the word Proletarian and often try to construct a three word phrase for it to make it sound more ridiculous.

I don't like that the people embracing this concept right now are mostly the same Leftists who are simping for Putin and being Class Reductionist on Trans and other "Woke" issues.  But the concept itself I see as useful.

NonCompete had a video where he very cynically condemned the whole idea.  But now he has a two part series on the IWW's efforts to Unionize Black and Poor Whites together, that's exactly the kind of thing the Proletarian Patriots want online Leftists to do more often, to talk about the History of The Left in America, how they were a part of American Political history already before Bolshevism was ever even a thing.  At the same time the IWW was doing everything those videos talk about the Socialist Party of America was also providing Guns to Striking Coal Miners during the West Virginia Coal Wats.

The reason May First is International Labour Day is because of the actions of American Leftists in The Haymarket Affair.  The fact that May 1st wound up being the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the USSR gave the Soviets an excuse to ignore the Holiday's American Origins, then Conspiracy Theorists started saying it was the founding of The Bavarian Illuminati.

The original coining of the word Patriot during the lead up to the War of Independence was as a derogatory word, and then even once embraced by the Patriots it was understood as being in contrast to Loyalist.  The word was never meant to mean blind loyalty to the Government or the Status Quo.  Some of the Early Patriots even opposed the 1787 Constitution like Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, some of these Anti-Federalists were even already making Renegade Cut's argument that the office of President is basically a King in all but name.  They also understood how it undermined the common people even though they lacked a fully developed Dialectical Materialism.

And that's why Anti-Authoritarian and Anti-Establishment Americans of various ideologies have called themselves the True Patriots, and have also said there is nothing Patriotic about the Patriot Act.

None of the Founding Fathers were Communist or even as Proto-Marxist as we know people could already be at that time.  But they also weren't a Monolith, they disagreed with each other on everything basically, even the two main camps we often group them into had their internal squabbles.  Some of the ones that had the best track record on opposing Slavery were on the wrong side of almost everything else.  But a couple like Aaron Burr and Thomas Paine were progressive enough that I honestly think they only needed a slight push.  Talking about them as if they were all Mustache Twirling Villains is just as Reductionist and Anti-Materialist as Conservatives treating them like they were all Divinely Inspired Prophets.  The South Carolina Delegates at the Constitutional Convention were the most evil, they do anticipate most of the eventual Confederate ideology, they however are not among the ones most people today know the names of.

And the problem with the people who most want to talk about American Socialism being Dogmatic MLs is that they think from 1920 onwards only explicitly Bolshevik Parties count as the real Left so they won't talk about the continued legacy of the Socialist Party of America which was always actually more popular then the CPUSA, or how the Teamsters were lead by Trotskyists during their most successful era.

I said above that none of the Founding Fathers were Socialists, and that's true in a Strictly Political Sense.  But there was a Communistic Spirit alive in the Colonies from well before them and that's via the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Quakers had their roots in the most Radical Elements of the English Revolution including connections to the Diggers.  They quickly became the forefront of the Abolitionist Movement largely because of an Enthusiastic Abolitionist Dwarf named Benjamin Lay, Pennsylvania was the first State to Abolish Slavery outright in 1780.  A colonial Quaker is also one of the oldest documented examples we have of a person with a Non Binary identity.

It's the common people of a country who Proletarian Patriotism claims solidarity with, in opposition to the State and the Ruling Class.

Liberalism and Socialism

The only time in my life (prior to writing this post) when I ever Self Identified as a Liberal was after I was already a Socialist.  

I now understand that I was actually a type of "Classical Liberal" the entire time I was an Austrian-School Libertarian with some Paleo-Conservative Characteristics (or Ron Paul Libertarian for short). But at the time I was fully tricked by the way Conservatives used the word Liberal.  By this point I understood that not all Liberals were Socialists, the mainstream Democratic Party certainly wasn't.  But I still bought into the idea that Socialism is a line you cross from being very Liberal.  But I quickly learned that Socialists and Communists don't like being called Liberals, one person I interacted with on Twitter got really angry and offended at my associating our shared values with Liberalism.

But since at least 2018 I've been using the word Liberal the way most Online Leftists use it.  But lately as I've been learning more and more about the history of modern Political ideas in 2023, I'm starting to wonder if I was actually right the first time and Socialism should be thought of as Sub-Genre of Liberalism, as a child of Liberalism that got disowned at some point.

The Wikipedia Page for Liberalism defines the core definition this way "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law".  The only one of those values that even at face value looks incompatible with Socialism is Private Property.  And I already on this blog did a post on how Private Property existing or not is irrelevant to the definition of Communism, and it's relevance to Capitalism I would argue conflicts with the idea of viewing it as an innate Human Right, plenty of the Third World Governments the CIA considered Communist enough to overthrow and replace with a Junta were people who merely Redistributed Land Ownership.  But even if you feel Private Property can't exist at all under your interpretation of Socialism, is removing only one of six core values enough to make something not Liberal at all?

Wikipedia does go on to list Market Economics as one of the secondary optional values depending on the type.  Meanwhile Market Socialism also exists though I don't support it.  And to my shock the page didn't use Merit or any derivative words at all, Meritocracy is the real Justifying Ideology of Capitalism, not anything innate to Liberalism.

John Locke is often considered the father of Liberalism but James Tully argued that on property Locke's views were not compatible with Capitalist ideology at all, he was co-opted.  Rousseau was another Enlightenment Figure who both Liberals and Socialists see an intellectual ancestor.  David Ricardo was a Whig Economist who influenced certain strands of Socialism.  And even Adam Smith was cited as an influence on some Socialists not in merely an "I'm debunking him" way. American anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote in Individual Liberty:

The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations,—namely, that labor is the true measure of price. ... Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy ... This seems to have been done independently by three different men, of three different nationalities, in three different languages: Josiah Warren, an American; Pierre J. Proudhon, a Frenchman; Karl Marx, a German ... That the work of this interesting trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously would seem to indicate that Socialism was in the air, and that the time was ripe and the conditions favorable for the appearance of this new school of thought. So far as priority of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American,—a fact which should be noted by the stump orators who are so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an imported article.

Ryan Chapman described Marxism as a Critique of Liberalism.  But you can Critique something from within, Marx was literally employed by a Republican Party News Paper in New York where he and the Earliest American Marxists Campaigned for Abraham Lincoln, and also saw his ideas as developing out of certain factions of the French Revolution, not all of whom I would properly label Socialist.

This notion that Liberal should be just as much of a Dirty Word to us as it is to Conservatives is weaponized by various NazBol or Class Reductionist types, seeing all the WOKE talk from Breadtube as fundamentally Liberal ideas and that's why they're Capitalist Torjan Horses.  But then even some Anarchists like CuckPhilsophy and Zoe Baker will make videos on how the Left shouldn't care about Equality or Human Rights.

But Breadubers also use Liberal as a Dirty Word.  They when not using the proper definition seem to define it based on Centrist Democrats, especially when critiquing what they call the "Liberal" takes on Race, Gender or Queer issues.  There are non Socialist even Anti-Socialist Liberals who are Woke SJW Critical Race Theorists.

It also factors into the Leftist Critiques of the Basic Income I've been fighting back against.  Leftists don't want to support something that sounds "Liberal" same as Conservatives don't want to support something that sounds "Socialist".

Etymologically the word Liberal and Libertarian both have fundamentally positive meanings coming from Liberty, so maybe we should stop conceding to Pro-Capitalists that they have a Monopoly on them.  

In fact if anything it should be Defenders of Capitalism who are excommunicated. 

Isaiah 32:5-8 

"The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.  For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.  The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.  But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand."

The word Liberal didn't refer to an ideology at all yet in 1611, making these verses all the more Prophetic.

Basic Income could become the next New Deal

Andrew Yang liked to cite Thomas Paine's Citizens Dividend from Agrarian Justice as part of arguing that the Basic Income is a very American idea.  What's interesting though is that Thomas Spence criticized Paine in The Rights of Infants, he agreed with having a Basic Income but combined it with full Abolition of Private Property.  Spence was an influence on Charles Hall who Karl Marx cited as an influence.  The Basic Income was part of the Socialist Tradition before Marx was.

But in the last several years as the Basic Income has become a trendy proposal online among progressives and social democrats, a number of Socialist and Communist YouTubers have made videos on how it's bad actually because it's another Capitalist plot to appease the Proletariat with a mere reform of the Market Economy.  And the thing is The American Left has made this mistake before.

During the first term of the FDR administration both the Socialist Party of America and the CPUSA under William Z Foster opposed the New Deal because they saw it as a Capitalist plot to appease the Proletariat with a mere reform of the Market Economy.  And that decision more then anything else is what killed the early Socialist Movement in the United States.

In the 1932 Presidential Election the Socialist Party Candidate Norman Thomas got 884,885 votes and Foster got 103,307, which were both up from their 1928 numbers.  In 1936 Thomas got only 187,910 votes and the CPUSA Candidate Earl Browder got 79,315 votes.  Now Browder would actually reverse Foster's position on the New Deal but it was in 1936 itself he took over the party, it was kind of too late but still perhaps why the CPUSA didn't have as big a drop.  

Marxists love to talk about materialism, how our main objective Politically should be to advocate for The Working Class not get all caught up on some specific Utopian Vision.  It was absolutely possible to support the New Deal and Huey Long's Share Our Wealth project while still talking about how that's a drop in the bucket compared to what our Party wants to do and also criticizing the Racism in how the New Deal was being implemented.  Their decision not to do that but flat out oppose the New Deal destroyed most of the support the Socialists had in the country, they never returned to their 1932 numbers.

Caleb Maupin loves to white wash the CPUSA's New Deal era history, lying by omission to make it sound like they were always in support of the New Deal.  He calls himself a Foster Communist not a Browder Communist even though his opinions on the New Deal and the Popular Front are exactly what Browder's break with Foster was.  It also amuses me how all his hyping up of the early CPUSA's legacy ignores how the Socialist Party was always more popular, they Elected multiple Mayors the CPUSA elected none, they twice got a Representative in Congress the CPUSA never got anyone in Congress.

The Basic Income isn't Communism or Socialism, but as far as Goals achievable in the short term to do something for the Working Class it's doable alongside Universal Healthcare and Student Loan Debt Forgiveness.  We need to be seen fighting for them not against them.

Yet some Communists especially MLs actually have bought into the American fetishization of Work as a concept, and that is a problem.  Most people do want to work and not just sit around all day doing nothing, making it so they don't literally have to in order to not starve increases their bargaining power.  But some people don't, and that's why I recommend the book The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue.

The thesis of that book has nothing to do with why Marx said of certain French Marxists "If they are Marxists then I am not a Marxist". Rather it was Lafargue and Guesde's militant Anti-Reformism that he was referring to.  Now someone who's still anti-Reformism as a general rule may say Marx supported those Reforms because they organically arose out of the demands of the working class, and I'd argue the same is happening with the Basic Income, it's growing broad popularity is at it's core coming from the left of center yet being supported even by some conservatives and libertarians makes it a true manifestation of the will of the Proletariat.

Neoliberalism doesn't exist

I have decided that I really do have to break with most of my fellow online Leftists and agree with Casual Historian that Neoliberalism isn't actually a thing.  But it's not just a talking point of self described Socialists and Communist but also of Progressive Liberals, Centrist History YouTubers and even some online Conservatives.

Now it is true that the Republican and Democratic Parties are really just variations of the same basic Economic ideology, that ideology being Free Market Liberalism, no Neo prefix necessary, and they exist alongside various other variants.

The Neoliberalism narrative typically goes like this. 

Milton Freidman developed the Chicago School of Economics in the 1970s and influenced the Economic Policies of Chilean Dictator Pinochet.  Sometimes a claim that his ideology is just a slight modification of Ayn Rand's is thrown in.

Then in the 80s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher applied Freidman's ideology in the U.S. and U.K. overthrowing the prior Keynesian status quo.  

Finally in the 90s under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair the parties that were supposed to oppose those parties just caved and became just as Neoliberal and really still disagreeing with the other party only on Social Issues and sometimes maybe Foreign Policy.

I'm going to work backwards here, but I can only really comment on the U.S. since I don't have the lived experience of growing up in the U.K. during the 90s.

The core ideology of the mainstream Democratic Party is just as Keynesian as it ever was.  The destruction of Cash Welfare during the Clinton Administration wasn't spearheaded by Clinton himself, it was a consequence of the Republicans taking control of the House under Newt Gingrich.

Since then the Democrats have never had enough control necessary to undo all the Reagan era damage.  Even when controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress they've never had a Filibuster Proof Majority.  The last Presidential Election to ever be a true landslide was 1984.  We've been in a fairly perpetual stalemate for a Generation.  In my opinion to deny the Obama administration was Keynesian is as absurd as denying he was an born in Hawaii.

But another reason people fail to see Keynesianism in the modern Democratic Party is that some people waxing Nostalgic for the 50s have overstated just how Progressive Keynes actually was.  He was not anywhere near the Social Democracy of Bernie Sanders, he didn't want Nationalization of Industries and he wasn't even as big a fan of Welfare and Unions as you probably assumed he was.  If anything it might be possible to argue that modern Democrats are actually closer to Keynes then FDR or Kennedy were.

Now it is true thar Milton Freidman was an influence on Reaganomics, he was an advisor to Reagan and other Republican leaders, but he wasn't their only advisor, regular old William F. Buckley style Conservatives were the far greater influence.  And the U.S. Government becoming more fiscally Conservative actually started under Carter.  Opposition to Social Programs and Government hand outs for the Poor had been a part of Burkean Conservatism since Edmund Burke himself in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, Reagan didn't need the Chicago Boys to get the idea.

Milton Freidman wanted the Federal Reserve Abolished, Decriminalization of Drugs and Prostitution and no Minimum Wage.  The last of those is indeed something Republicans want but simply aren't getting.  But the Republican Party as a whole never even began to flirt with even mild criticism of The Federal Reserve until after Ron Paul made his big impact in the 2008 Election.  And Friedman's opposition to the Federal Reserve was not some minor issue you can deem expendable, it was a core pillar of his ideology, as long as we still have the Fed you can't claim Freidman won.

Ron Paul was an outlier within the Republican Party, and even he wasn't a Chicago Schooler, he was Austrian School like Murry Rothbard.  Milton Freidman hated both Rothbard and Ayn Rand, and Rand hated all Libertarians from either school.

Frankly I feel Neoliberalism discourse is parallel to the old Neoconservatism discourse I remember from my Ron Paul supporting youth.  I've never seen anyone self describe as either Neoliberal or Neoconservative, and after watching some videos from a Trotskyist deconstructing the Trotskyism-Neoconservatism pipeline narrative I'm pretty sure it too isn't a real thing.

Neoconservatism was a boogeyman invented by Pacifist Conservatives to justify their denial that War Mongering has always been a part of the Conservative Tradition, but it has from William McKinley to how Joseph McCarthy became Senator.  Likewise I think the Neoliberalism narrative began among Progressive Liberals who wanted to deny that the problems of the last 4 decades are innate to Market Economies.  Then a bunch of those Liberals became Socialists after jumping on the Occupy Wallstreet or Bernie Sanders bandwagon and that's where Breadtube comes from.

I've also seen it suggested that Neoconservatism should maybe be considered an Antisemitic Dog Whistle, from the claimed Trotsky connection to the claimed Henry Kissinger connection to the sometimes claimed association with William F Buckley's Zionism.  And the way they would often be depicted as behind the scenes manipulators "Neocons don't win elections, they attach themselves to winners" was a quote I remember.

And since it's Milton Freidman and Ayn Rand who's actual influence on the current status quo is being massively overstated, and a WASP Gentile who's continued influence is being denied, maybe Neoliberalism should be considered an Antisemitic Dog Whistle as well.

Update: Here's an interesting Twitter Conversation I had after sharing this.

https://twitter.com/afran90/status/1689419942964199424

Another Update: John Todd

John Todd was in the 70s a Right Wing Evangelical Christian Conspiracy Theorist, one of the first to claim to actually be a former member of the Illuminati who left, before Warnke or Schneoblen made that a trend.  He specifically claimed that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the Illuminati Blueprint for a Satanaic Take Over and even specifically predicted 1980 would be the year of that take over.

In other words the Neoliberalism Narrative actually claims the predictions of a 70s Conspiracy Theorist were essentially right, simply minus the accusing them of worshiping Satan.