Why Should We Feel 'Patriotic' for a Genocidal Capitalist State?
“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
The Canadian establishment is fretting this July 1 over results of a recent Canada Day poll by Global News, which found that seven in 10 Canadians agree with the statement “Canada is broken”. Feelings of pessimism were most acute among respondents between the ages of 18 and 34, of whom 78 per cent believe the country needs fixing. Compared to five years ago, 32 per cent said they were less likely to attend a Canada Day event, 28 per cent were less likely to fly a Canadian flag, and 35 per cent were less likely to say they are proud to be Canadian.
Results of the Canada Day poll parallel surveys in the United States. An Axios poll last year found that American patriotism had faced a steep decline among young adults over the last decade and had reached a record low, with only 18 per cent of young people saying they are proud to be American.
Anyone surprised by these results is living in a bubble, totally separate from the daily struggle for existence of workers and young people who face a housing crisis, rampant inflation and skyrocketing living costs. Poverty and homelessness are soaring in the richest countries in the world. People are dying on the streets, yet politicians offer no solutions. Why would they? Much of Parliament consists of MPs, including Pierre Poilievre, who are landlords themselves and benefit from the housing crisis.
Meanwhile, the facade that Western bourgeois democracies stand for “freedom” and “human rights” has been shattered by their support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. For nine months the world has borne witness to a livestreamed genocide, as the Zionist regime inflicts the most horrific daily atrocities against Palestinian men, women and children.
The response of Western “democracies” has been to fully back the perpetrators of this genocide, to provide them with endless political and military support, and to smear anyone who criticizes Israel as “antisemites”—even as these same governments support Nazis in Ukraine and give them standing ovations in Parliament. In addition, they have unleashed brutal police repression against anti-genocide protesters, illustrating the lie that we enjoy freedom of speech under capitalism. “Genocide Justin” Trudeau has blood on his hands as much as Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the rest of the war criminals.
Of course, support for genocide is nothing new in Canada and the United States. The capitalist regimes in both of these countries were founded on the genocide of Indigenous people. Today, many Indigenous communities in Canada continue to face horrific conditions resulting from colonization and the intergenerational trauma of residential schools, including a suicide crisis, which the ruling class ignores. Many Indigenous communities still do not have clean drinking water and have been under boil-water advisories for decades.
The leaders of this country, who represent the capitalist class, have made clear that they do not care whether the toiling masses live or die. We’ve seen that through the COVID-19 pandemic, when the ruling class allowed tens of thousands of seniors to die in long-term care homes and forced workers into unsafe conditions that killed many of them. The capitalist courts defend these acts of social murder.
Amid a global climate catastrophe, the ruling class is only accelerating the warming of our planet. The Canadian capitalists is going all-in on fossil fuels, from Trudeau spending tens of billions of dollars on a pipeline to provincial governments that loyally serve the oil barons. The natural beauty of our landscape is literally going up in flames thanks to wildfires fueled by the climate crisis.
Why should working people feel any pride for a capitalist state that represents the very class that oppresses us, that is driving us further into poverty, that is literally killing us and making our planet unliveable? Why should we champion a state that exists to keep us in subjugation? Nationalism is a poison that encourages us to identify with our oppressors, when the truth is that workers in all countries share the same class interests.
The flag of workers is the red flag. Our path to liberation and a society fit for human beings lies through the world revolution. While ruling classes in Canada and the United States encourage us to celebrate Canada Day and Independence Day, workers have nothing to gain from nationalism—a form of class collaboration that encourages us to identify with “our” national capitalists. Our fight is for unity of workers across borders in a Socialist Federation of the Americas, as part of a world socialist federation and democratically planned economy based not on profit but social need. That’s what the Revolutionary Communist Party is fighting for.
Excellent article. Spot on.