The Left cannot be both Nationalist and Socialist at the same time. And yet national identity is a large part of liberation movements from the SNP to the FLN. There is an apparent contradiction in terms, if the Left wants to grip nationalism. In this article, Professor Roy Casagranda argues that a Nationalist Socialism based on national liberation rather than national supremacy is possible. Therefore, national identity can be an essential part of a liberatory socialist movement.
I’m going to start this conversation by making a seemingly contradictory statement. You cannot be a nationalist and a socialist, but Socialist Nationalism (a.k.a. Nationalist Socialism (not National Socialism)) is a legitimate form of socialism. For any conversation about that statement to be meaningful, we probably need to make sure we are using our language in the same way. Orwell’s warning about the decay of the English language came true, only the mechanism was not the one described in 1984. We disassembled the English language, especially in the US, using the thesaurus instead of the Newspeak Dictionary. Almost every word stands for a unique concept. If I can get you to believe that 5 words mean the same thing, I have destroyed 4 concepts or at least rendered having a conversation about them difficult if not impossible. One of the ways that this is manifest is the interchangeable usage of the terms: “country” and “nation” (especially in the US). The tragedy is that what is meant most of the time is a third term “state.” Neither country nor nation resembles state in any meaningful way.
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