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Did you all notice that week or so of utter shock from federated Lemmy liberals when they saw takes to the left of themselves?
(hexbear.net)
I don't just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of "legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community" 
takes.
I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we're Russian/Chinese bots.
Sure they still do that but they've slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.
This is a good ovservation. It seems to me that historically the rise of liberalism is paralel to the rise of the nation state. This may be a historical accident or may be because merchant capital and financial capital beneft from a strong state and viceversa. One would expect that as capital becomes international the libs would become less nationalistic. But there is still a large block that would semengly go against their own material interests starting stuff with china for example.
Nationalism is a competing ideological framework to class consciousness. Get people to identify with their “nation” instead of with their class and you can get them to fight and die in your wars for you instead of turning around and pointing the guns at you, the capitalist. Nationalism essentially won out in Europe over class consciousness when it came to WW1 and even the social democrats and socialists of most of those countries embraced it and supported their countries in that war EXCEPT for in Russia where the people embraced class consciousness and communists came to power.
Yes of course. But there are many ways for the elites to repress the other clases, and this includes atacking class conciousnes. They can send people to die for god, gold and the local lord. And this has been the norm through history. The nation state is 500 years old or so. And most of that time it was limited to a small periferal area of the world.
At an ideological level, we know the main actors of history are classes. While facists and some libs think its the state.
My question is wether the nationalism in lib ideology is an accident of history. That the nation state arose do to geografical conditions that were only tangentially related to the rise of capitalism.
The alternative is that bourgeoise capitalism and the modern nation state in particular are linked in a more fundamental way.
The state itself rose as part of the need for the ruling class to have violent suppression against the classes it exploits. The nation state on the other hand is partially an accident of geography due to most people not travelling far(or having the means to), and liberalism today takes advantage of this as a tool of racial conflict dividing the working class but I think it's most likely that this was simply a useful tool for adopting a hostile stance to indigenous populations. They're "barbarians" therefore it is ok for us to kill them all and take their land. Very useful for colonialism.
Master race and untermenschen nazi ideas come from the ruling class justifying their right to rule as "betters", and likely evolved as various capitalist families sought to adapt the divine right of kings to bourgeoise rule. In particular it rose during an era of far greater class conflict than we have currently today so they had a lot of cause to try and provide reasons for their rule as socialist sentiment boomed.
American nationalism serves as a useful tool as it's essentially the leader of the capitalist empire. If you view capitalism primarily as the imperial core(european+american global north or "international community") exploiting the periphery (global south) with the US as the leading force of this empire then the usefulness of this nationalism kind of explains itself.
If we break the american soft-left libs out of a national mindset and into a global one where they no longer view themselves as citizens of america but instead as citizens of the world we will find ourselves a lot more allies.
Good post. Thank you for yoir toughtful response. It is very clear the state in general arose as a tool for the ruling class. I like the idea that ideological justifications such as divine rigths of kings gain importance as a funcion of class conflict. Im thinking of primitive temple states in sumeria that requiered the regular kidnaping of statless people to mantain a labor force. Or other teocratic goverments.
As for the nation state as a geografic accident. Thats what i ment if it is an acvident of history. Western europeans wer unable to form large states mostly because of their periferal position in eurasia. And since liberalism and developed in europe they just happen to develop together.
But this new state differs from previous states. There has been a trend in increasing organisation, tax base and scope of the state during the early modern era. The ancient regime be it the roman empire or grat han or more feudalistic polities rarely got a tax base of over 5%.
One exame may be tbe rise of europen trade in the indian ocean in the modern era. At that time the europeans still lacked a technological advantage. But their merchant companies were backed by the power of nation states allowing them to take more risks and corner certain markets. While the local traders originally more numerous were private concerns that did not have the cohesion of a single company.
It would also appear that certain aspects of liberalism arose once the industry of violence became separate from economic production. In a fedal system a landlord controls production because he holds the land by force of arms. It is not so for the bourgoise. That is why a strong state with a tigther mo opoly on violence becomes a concern.
Maybe this is not posible if your polity is over a certain geografical size. Maybe its not so coincidental.
As for modern libs. I was thinking that eventually a strong staye would become its own economic interest affecting the interests of capital. And we sort of see them calling for deregulation and international arbitrage tribunals and so on. Specially in the clinton years. But i guess they never trurly became internationalized.
But wat you said makes sense. Capital still has a lot of its interests tied to the political structure of empire. They become more nasionalistic now that there are international contenders.