This article by Gaya Makaran was originally published in Regeneración, made by Federación Anarquista de México-IFA

Thus, anarchism reminds us that “left-wing nationalism” does not exist, a clear oxymoron, as Latin American populism is nothing more than an attempt to build or reinforce, at most, a state capitalism with a new national bourgeoisie projecting itself as “progressive,” “patriotic,” and “anti-imperialist” against the old oligarchy. Yet, in reality, due to its class interest, it soon abandons the popular agenda in favor of new alliances with global capital and imperialism.

Nationalism, the great magician of modernity, responsible for countless crimes against humanity over the past two centuries, is still alive and thriving as it did in its best days. You only need to read the news any given day to witness its disgusting hegemony, regardless of party colors or its supposed leanings towards the right or left of its devotees. United with racism and xenophobia, its logical allies, it manifests in the genocide in Gaza, in the migrant bodies washed ashore along the Mediterranean Sea, in the Arizona desert, or incinerated in detention centers in Mexico. The specter of fascism has long extended beyond the far right and seems to be turning into the common sense of the era. In this context, the anarchist critique of homelands, borders, and walls is always welcome. Let’s take a look.

Anarchism, by actively promoting proletarian internationalism, has opposed patriotism and nationalism, understood as synonymous and identified as main pillars of bourgeois ideology used to divide and dominate the oppressed classes. For example, from Paraguay, anarchist writer Rafael Barrett (1876-1910) appealed to the solidarity of “the exploited” within the framework of the “great proletarian homeland” beyond state borders: “These exploited people form, across the surface of the planet, a vast suffering homeland. What is urgent is the prosperity of this great homeland, not that of the small homelands. Your true compatriots and brothers are not your bosses or your leaders, but the workers of London, Saint Petersburg, and New York” (The Strike [1907], in Barrett, 2011: 145). In this sense, in his 1910 article La patria y la escuela (Homeland and School), Barrett attacks patriotic education, which, according to him, only teaches “stupid hostility” toward the other, “military ferocity,” and a culture of war in the name of “national interest,” which is nothing but the interest of the exploiting class. For Barrett, love for one’s own only has value if it is joined by love for others in a human solidarity without borders: “Love your land and also the foreign land. Love your children and also the children of others… But if you only love what is yours, you do not love—you hate” (Patriotism [1908] in Barrett, 1978: 169).

Similarly, Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958), an important anarchist critic of nationalism and Nazism, argued that the nation is not the cause but the result of the state, as it is precisely the states that create nations, not the other way around, as nationalist discourse suggests. Therefore, nationalism claims a state nation and an abstract and essentialized people (volk), ahistorical and quasi-sacred entities, preceding and superior to society, which serve to impose the will of the state over individual wills and freedoms, where any divergence from the nationalist project is considered “heresy” and a crime against the homeland. Rocker said that nationalism would then be “a political religion,” a kind of “secular religion” of modernity, as Gellner put it, aiming to legitimize the bourgeois state.

Thus, nationalism is mobilized to contain the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, disarm the class struggle, and build a social self-discipline far more effective than direct government violence. In this sense, as Rocker points out, the nation is defined as “the organized selfishness of privileged minorities” that, under the inter-class discourse of national interest, in reality, promotes its particular class interest: “They speak of national interests, national capital, national markets, national honor, and national spirit; but they forget that behind it all are nothing but the selfish interests of power-hungry politicians and loot-thirsty merchants…” (Rocker, 2011: 413, 430). Thus, the state, legitimized by the nation, seeks to become the unquestionable owner of identity markers, monopolizing the feeling of belonging and love for one’s own within the framework of a jealous homeland, an enemy of other homelands.

These traits of 19th-century nationalism were radicalized in the 20th century with fascism and Nazism, which, according to Rocker, represented: “the will of the state at all costs, the complete suppression of the human being in sacrifice to the higher purposes of power,” where “love for fellow humans must be crushed under ‘the greatness of the state,’ to which individuals must serve as fodder” (ibid.: 413). Likewise, Luce Fabbri (1908-2000), an Italian-Uruguayan anarchist who sought refuge in Montevideo from Mussolini’s regime, associates 20th-century nationalism with fascism. According to her, fascism is “a power force in search of an ideology,” “a profoundly conservative and genuinely anti-socialist force” that uses nationalism as the necessary ideology to ground its “will to power.” “Nationalism, then, is far from constituting the essence of fascism, but it seems to be the most important of its force-ideas, somehow related to its true essence” (Fabbri, 2019: 20). For Fabbri, fascism emerges from the fear of the elites before the growing socialist movement and is a “preventive counter-revolution” that manipulates popular feelings to divert them from the class struggle to a fight for a vague national/racial interest against imagined “enemies of the people.”

In the specific case of Latin America, anarchism, both as a theoretical proposal and as a mass movement under the banners of anarcho-syndicalism, distanced itself sharply from nationalisms, including the “left-wing” and “anti-imperialist” ones promoted by populist/“progressive” governments that have proliferated in the continent since the 1930s and into the present day. Anarchists opposed the argument that Latin American nationalism could be different from European nationalism in terms of its merits in the fight against imperialism and its policies in favor of “the poor.” Thus, Latin American populist nationalism was rather associated with fascism and never with socialism (unless we speak of Nazi “national socialism,” excuse the irony). In fact, Fabbri defines Juan Domingo Perón’s Justicialist government in Argentina as “the most typical, though incomplete, experience of fascism in our Latin America” (2019: 26). As a result, the author warns of the dangers of confusing nationalism with social struggle and seeing it as a tool for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist liberation. Amid the confusion reigning in the field of social struggles of her time, the author reiterates the role of anarchism in “emphasizing the fraternity between the oppressed and exploited of the dominated country and the oppressed and exploited of the dominant power,” and stresses the importance of “separating justice and freedom from the idea of the homeland, no matter how much the latter disguises itself as anti-imperialism” (1990: 221).

Thus, anarchism reminds us that “left-wing nationalism” does not exist, a clear oxymoron, as Latin American populism is nothing more than an attempt to build or reinforce, at most, a state capitalism with a new national bourgeoisie projecting itself as “progressive,” “patriotic,” and “anti-imperialist” against the old oligarchy. Yet, in reality, due to its class interest, it soon abandons the popular agenda in favor of new alliances with global capital and imperialism. Its project of strengthening the nation-state within the framework of capitalist modernization requires subordinating and corporatizing the labor world, annihilating union autonomy, persecuting genuine social struggles, and discursively suppressing class antagonism in the name of national “anti-imperialist” unity, often embodied in a charismatic leader and their party, the homeland’s only hope. We must not forget that any nationalist project is founded on a strong alliance with the military sector, by excellence authoritarian and counterinsurgent, canonizing the armed forces as defenders of the homeland and the driving force of civil society.

Thus, the anarchist slogan “let all homelands burn!” which arises from internationalism and the rejection of war as an expression of imperialist domination, is more than a cry of hate—it is a cry of love against the chauvinistic segregation and separation of human beings. As Caetano Veloso sang in Língua: “I have no homeland, I have a ‘matria.’ And I want ‘fratria.’” Is it possible to think of the liberation and self-determination of peoples along with their collective identity beyond and against nationalism? We will explore this in Part II of this essay.