Labour history is patriotic

As I continue to mull over and reflect on the intellectual legacy of that towering theorist of violence and myth Georges Sorel – and his eerie applicability to our current American cultural moment in which not only our political system and structure, but also the basis of our national mythology is unravelling – I note with chagrin that the American left, fragmented and dispersed and sectarian as it is, has not fully escaped the ‘pull’ of the two duelling mythological ‘frames’ of American historiosophy. Indeed, the left has actually led much of this duel. It’s rather unfortunate that the American left has essentially tied itself to two horses going opposite ways, and is poised to fragment over this issue. It doesn’t need to.

As I have said before, we are currently faced with an attempt by a certain subset of the ‘woke’ élite to rewrite American history in the form of the 1619 Project. There is fairly openly displayed in this ‘framing’ of American history, a religious idea that America was conceived in the iniquity of slavery, and that this iniquity has shaped our national development ever since. There is a germ of truth hidden in this framing – a germ of truth which indeed appeals to my Johnson-inspired High Tory antiracism – but actually the lens of racial determinism through which this germ is examined is fundamentally wrongheaded. This is no accident. Even if the historians who write for the New York Times are not themselves members of this élite (that we know), it is still absolutely necessary to understand that the ‘woke’ élite in fact represent the interests of global capital and want to continue as long as possible for their own benefit the Atlanticist policies of imperialism and exploitation of third-world wealth. The left, if they allow certain strands of anti-Americanism to carry them off in the direction of a 1619 mythology, stand only to lose, as they will be divided from a working class which is in fact highly patriotic, rooted to place and feels itself (justly) to be under threat.

So here it may sound as though I’m taking the stance advocated by the Trotskyite Fourth International, as articulated by Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North at the World Socialist Web Site. Again, though, as I have said before, their analysis is deliberately left incomplete, and has its own problems with presupposing certain forms of historical determinism:

I agree wholeheartedly with Niemuth, Mackaman and North insofar as they hold to the limited argument against the 1619 Project and its central conceit. It is indeed not ‘in the DNA’ of America or Americans to hate each other based on the colour of their skin – either literally or figuratively. The biological and sociological determinism of the worldview behind the 1619 Project is ahistorical and, indeed, morally noxious – for the very reasons they describe.

But the problems begin to crop up very quickly when the authors for the Fourth International stray from this narrow critique into a broader take on world history, and their sweeping and reductive takes on ‘the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world’. For one thing, classical slavery and modern chattel slavery were and are very different institutions, underpinned by very different material conditions. It’s actually something of a travesty, that authors proclaiming themselves to be Marxist overlook this. Any Marxist worth his salt should have a ready materialist explanation for the differences between classical and early modern slavery.

So we can start to see the fracture point even here. We have a ‘woke left’ – a ‘left’ in fact more postmodernist than Marxist – that is both deeply antiracist and also convinced that the American project itself is irretrievably racist. On the other hand, we have a certain fragment of the Old Left, the Trotskyites, who are willing to wed the entire project of class liberation to the mythology of the founding of the American Republic. In this they are quite consciously following in the footsteps of, say, Daniel DeLeon and his panegyrics to the Founding Fathers. Georges Sorel must be chuckling from his box seat in the Great Beyond – he saw the same thing happening in the France of his day.

Now, Georges Sorel was about as ideologically impure, from a standard leftist perspective, as it’s possible to get, having flirted at various points in his career with anarcho-syndicalism and with a certain traditionalist-right intégrisme before embracing Leninism – without ever having given up on the working class and without ever having really altered what he fundamentally believed. Indeed, he is often seen as a representative of the French far right! As a result, significant swathes of the American left are likely to view Sorel – as they would do Lasch or Mailer – as a figure too heavily compromised to be of any use to them. That’s a damn shame. Sorel had placed his finger squarely on the crux of our current predicament when he diagnosed the division within the French left of his day as being one of mythology. It’s true – he had little but contempt for parliamentary socialists whose mouths were ever full of the glories of 1789, viewing them (particularly Jean Jaurès) as opportunistic parasites who would happily sell out working-class interests in pursuit of political and bureaucratic sinecures. But this is somewhat beside the point. Better than any other intellectual figure in late nineteenth-century Europe, Sorel understood the power of mythology in motivating and directing action – and he sought to apply it to the idea of the general strike.

In Sorel’s view, it was superfluous for a man of the French left to seek to appropriate the imagery, the statuary, the religious and mythical symbolism of the French Revolution. The French Revolution itself had defined its mythology on its own: why should the working class be subject to it? For Sorel, such exhausted borrowed glory would be far and away inferior in motivating action – in driving great deeds of altruism, in spurring virtue and excellence and spirited ferocity in battle, in directing and giving meaning to targeted acts of political violence – to a mythology that was authentic and autochthonous to the labourers’ own experiences and history. Sorel sought to build a Mythos of the General Strike, in order to supplant the chimæra that the parliamentary socialists in France had created from borrowed bits and pieces of the glories of the French Revolution. He very much looked forward to a day when the Revolution was rendered politically irrelevant by the General Strike: ‘What remains of the present Socialist movement will be the epic of the strikes.’ Sorel appreciated the power of patriotism: but for him the working classes themselves were sufficiently patriotic in its own self-understanding; they didn’t need validation from the soi-disant caretakers of a past in which the workers and farmers had a limited and indeed often passive (if not antagonistic) rôle.

A similar situation attains in America. The mythology of Jeffersonian liberalism and the Constitutional compromise is a spent force. Its legitimacy has been squandered in the attempts to bring about old Tom’s ‘Empire of Democracy’. The apologists of the American mythos on the centre-right – your Brookses and Frenches and Sullivans – all sound curiously exhausted and beleaguered as they find themselves under sustained assault both from the political left and right, and from the dawning reality of a multipolar world which stubbornly refuses to acquiesce to the ‘requests’ of American military and diplomatic power. The attempts from certain portions of the left to siphon off the last ergs from this ideological dynamo are almost cartoonishly pitiable, and deserve much the same derision that Sorel reserved for the parliamentarian French centre-left.

Still, the left has an opportunity here which it is squandering with its rearguard actions over myth (both the 1619 version and the 1776 version). It’s a non-starter to hector the American working class for being insufficiently internationalist according to the vagaries of an ever-shifting abstract standard – or worse still, for being ‘racist’ and ‘deplorable’ and generally un-‘woke’. But it’s also highly ill-advised to take the Trot line and pander and condescend using the trappings of the American Revolution to a working class that’s, for one thing, sick to death of political posturing. For another thing, we who have always belonged to the working classes will always struggle to see ourselves reflected as a unified power in between the lines of a mythology which by its very nature glorifies almost exclusively Virginia planters and big Boston merchants – rather than dockworkers, millworkers, refugees, religious dissenters, smiths, carpenters, sharecroppers or slaves.

The patriotism of the American working classes is heartfelt and genuine. But the nature of this patriotism is, to a significant degree, pre-ideological. (It’s not quite right to say it’s non-ideological.) The American working classes love their physical places and do not want to abandon them. They love the culture that they grew up in. Ironically, the American working classes see their rootedness as a source of freedom, as a source of dignity and pride. If the left ever wants to have a shot at taking power, it needs to understand this. As it stands, the nouvelle nouvelle-droite understands this very well indeed, even if they are using this understanding for manifestly evil ends. Georges Sorel – in general, not the greatest fan of America himself – would nonetheless advise us, that this is the material from which the new mythos must be built, by which the working class can be spurred to new forms of virtue and excellence and martial heroism.

The left shouldn’t have to pretend to love powdered-wig planters and Boston Brahmin merchant princes to be considered patriotic. Nor should they jettison patriotism altogether because they can’t stand the bourgeois platitudes associated with it. Because here’s the secret: the working class has always been patriotic. Labour history is patriotic. The ones who – willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly – sacrificed the most of themselves to build up this country were always the people on the bottom. A leftist mythos of America needs to start, not from a reference point associated with the upper classes, but instead from a reference point which sees the working classes fighting alongside and for each other, to better each other.

Gabriel Prosser
Organiser of an 1800 revolt in Virginia
by both free whites and enslaved blacks for mutual benefit