"Combining contradictory tasks — patriotism and socialism — was the fatal mistake of the French socialists. In the Manifesto of the International, issued in September 1870, Marx had warned the French proletariat against being misled by a false national idea; profound changes had taken place since the Great Revolution, class antagonisms had sharpened, and whereas at that time the struggle against the whole of European reaction united against the entire revolutionary nation, now the proletariat could no longer combine its interests with the interests of other classes hostile to it; let the bourgeoisie bear the responsibility for the national humiliation — the task of the proletariat was to sight for the socialist emancipation of labor from the yoke of the bourgeoisie."
~Vladimir Lenin, "Lessons of the Commune", Writings on the Commune
National-patriotism is correspondent to the democratic revolution that must necessarily precede the socialist revolution. In movements of national unity characterised by the transition from feudal to capitalist property-relations, the working class subordinates itself to the revolutionary elements of the bourgeoisie, and the new state that emerges is founded upon the unity of the various gradations within the property-owning classes.
In such a movement the bourgeoisie engages the proletariat with “national tasks” that rest upon class-collaboration (as it is advertised to the workers, but is in fact just the continuation of existing class relations) to the end of a society that enshrines private property as an individual right.
All the while, bourgeois political-economy seeks to separate the political sphere of society from its economic sphere. Namely, this is the process of establishing the independence of the free market from the state and its supremacy over it. This puts the bourgeoisie increasingly out of the regulatory reach of the state it built.
Over time, this creates a situation where the proletariat must experience the full, unfiltered force of their economic exploitation. In this condition, they come face to face with the lack of social power that comes with their separation from their labour’s surplus value. The social value of their labour is converted to private capital. It becomes, in turn, the social power of the capitalist class. This is the extended consequence of the development of labour into yet another commodity in the commercial circuit.
At this point, the function of national-patriotism is to steer the proletariat away from a true understanding of their economic position in society. The propaganda order of the day repeats the need for national unity across classes — classes that continue existing in their contemporary form, the state of class-relations unthreatened — in order to achieve those national tasks.
The proletariat is made not to notice that these national tasks face one major obstacle: the bourgeoisie and its compulsion to retain its capital, its wealth, its social power.
The progression of these functional phases of national-patriotism accompanies the evolution of production as it goes from handicraft and guild-associations to manufacture and to industrialisation. Specifically, these phases are, first, national liberation led by the bourgeoisie with the proletariat as its auxiliary, and second, dissuading the proletariat from its unique task of “socialist emancipation”. It is only under the progression of those conditions (and in turn, the development of the struggle between capital and wage-labour) that the proletariat can come to understand the nature of itself in the context of capitalist society.
“And indeed the true nature of bourgeois “patriotism” was not long in revealing itself. Having concluded the ignominious peace with the Prussians, the Versailles government proceeded to its immediate task — it launched an attack to wrest the arms that terrified it from the hands of the Paris proletariat. The workers replied by proclaiming the Commune and civil war…
But two mistakes destroyed the fruits of [the Commune]. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of “expropriating the expropriators,” it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhnist theories about a “just exchange,” etc., still prevailed among socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.” ~ibid.
Class-patriotism is irreconcilable with national-patriotism. It implies an understanding of the contradiction that arises between the industrial bourgeoisie and the accomplishment of “national tasks”. The bourgeoisie that arose out of feudalism was revolutionary, and so too at first was the state built upon bourgeois property rights. The dynamics of the class struggles in developing capitalist countries highlighted the contradiction between private property rights as a political ideal and capitalist competition as a material circumstance. Put simply, workers were empowered to acquire capital while capitalists were equally empowered to take it from them via competition. The bourgeoisie was equipped with the economic self-awareness to navigate that contradiction in its own favour. Specifically, this was the process of establishing a “free market” separate from society’s political sphere.
Concerning the dynamics between capitalists and workers, this had the effect of depriving the workers of any government institution with which to wage their own struggle. Where the dynamics between large- and small-scale capitalists were concerned, on the one hand, the capitalist class consolidated itself by way of competition. While some grew in wealth, others shrunk or were cast back into the proletariat. On the other hand, this competition created circumstances where the remaining property-owners “socialised” their production, planned coordination between industries that arose alongside the continued private appropriation of surplus value — monopoly capitalism, the parent of imperialism.
It is in the monopoly/imperialist phase of capitalism that, even among other forms of property-relations, capitalist property-relations bear the most significant gravity. It is only in these phases that an awakening of class-patriotism becomes possible.
Such an awakening implies a diminution of the proletariat’s attachment to ideas of all-class-embracing national unity. But before the awakening can take place, the proletariat has to be alienated from its attachment to both the liberal republic as its subjects, and to the bourgeoisie as their countrymen. A process of division exists naturally in the “national unity” built upon class-patriotism.
Central to the positive development of this division is the proletariat arriving at two critical understandings. The first is that the bourgeoisie constitute the biggest obstacle to achieving even the smallest, most modest “national task”. For them to pursue those tasks with the equal benefit of the whole nation in mind would mean relinquishing the social power that their wealth represents.
The second understanding is the law of class proportion: in capitalist society, wage-workers always outnumber private-property owners. This extends from the fact that a greater amount of labour is required to set greater amounts of capital in motion. Wherever capital exists, labour also exists as a social majority by any political or mathematical definition.
The consequence of these realisations is that a socialist movement that encompasses the broad mass of workers is by definition a democratic mass movement. By further consequence, such a movement constitutes a new national unity on the basis of class-patriotism. So a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is not in any way to be considered a reduction or abolition of the democratic character of a society, but rather an expansion, even a purification of it.