--- On Fri, 8/8/08, Tahir Wood <twood at uwc.ac.za> wrote:
> You're right. But two things: First the essentially
> nationalist premise
> that underlies most of this sort of debate is utterly
> worthless to me,
> and I don't think that all of us should stay cool and
> calm in the face
> of it. Someone's got to protest occasionally, so it
> might as well be me.
> As you might have noticed, I have particularly come to hate
> the
> ideological fig-leaf of 'anti-imperialism' that is
> so often used to
> sanction this descent into nationalist cretinism.
[WS:] Ditto.
However, it would be interesting to explore why internationalist communism degenerated into "nationalist cretinism" or identity politics in general. My own conjectue is that it is connected to the outcomes of WW1 and WW2 - specifically the emergence of a great number of nation-states in Eastern Europe and Middle East (especially Israel). International communism can be conceptualized as eschatology promising universal liberation from oppression though class struggle. The emergent nation-states, on th eother hand, offered a quick fix alternative to that eschatology - national "liberation" instead of universal liberation.
Many intellectuals and public figures abandoned the internationalist project and jumped on the bandwagon of nationalism. The Polish 1920s socialist turned nationalist dictator Josef Pilsudski put it very nicely in the following metaphor, when Socialists (who helped him in the 1926 coup d'etat) accused him of subsequent betrayal (I quote from memory:) "You and I once traveled in a red street car. You are still onboard waiting for the final stop called "Socialism," while I got out at the stop called "Nationalism."
I think this metaphor nicely summarizes the change in the postions of left-wing intellectuals and public discourse generally throughout the 20th century.
Wojtek