Clemens Schneider // 18 September 2024

The internationalist claims of the left have always stood on shaky ground. Since the Hamas attack on 7 October, cosmopolitan left-wing circles have nonchalantly assumed that nation-states are a reality and bear rights.

Socialism is easier to sell nationally

"This is the final struggle, Let us gather together, and tomorrow the Internationale will be the human race." This is a slogan many generations of leftists have chanted at the top of their voices. These lines reflect the utopian vision of the pioneers who envisioned a new, fairer world, laying the foundations for socialism and anarchism in the nineteenth century. They yearned for the boundless – neither economic classes should determine the fates of people nor borders. They wished for the Enlightenment universalism of "all men are created equal" to descend from the ivory tower of pamphlets and constitutions and manifest in people's everyday lives. They envisioned a future where the idea that "All men are created equal" would no longer heard only in bourgeois concert halls, but experienced in the fields, factories, and bellies of steamships.

However, such lofty ideas were difficult to implement given the reality that the pioneers were confronted with when they tried to translate their theories into political practice. They soon realised that many of the toiling workers in the steelworks in Duisburg not only had little interest in their fellow sufferers in Scunthorpe or Dunkirk, but due to strong cultural and language barriers, sometimes despised them more than the factory owner's sons, who were picked up from school by coach. (Imagined) blood was often thicker than sweat. Cosmopolitanism remained a project of the bourgeoisie. The maverick German politician Sarah Wagenknecht has been reminding us of this for years – the Left is successful when it plays patronage politics for its own group. Ideals can sometimes be a luxury that neither the disadvantaged nor politicians can afford.

Woke on Orban's path

Nevertheless, there has been an idealistic strand in left-wing movements, with prominent advocates such as Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler. A not insignificant part of the left camp – often the avant-garde – saw nationalism as part of the ideological enemy to be fought, consisting of capitalists, militarists, imperialists, and sexists. To this day, the attitude, labelled as ‘woke’ by friends and foes alike, is based on the belief that all discrimination should be dismantled and that the individual should not be defined by external attributes. Strangely, though not perhaps surprisingly, these leftists are now also discovering nationalism, although they may not even be aware of it.

When the kufiya wearing and eyebrow-pierced students at Berlin's Humboldt University chant ‘from the river to the sea’, they are using a slogan that has implications other than ending oppression, colonialism, or patriarchy. It is neither the same as Bertha von Suttner's call to ‘Lay down your arms!’ in 1898 nor the same as the protests of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Rather, nationalist – sometimes even racist – narratives are being adopted. This slogan implies that there is a Palestinian nation that must be preserved, which has a claim to a certain territory, and whose existence is good in itself. This is the classic assumption of the nation-state. This is the logic according to which Orban, Fico, Le Pen, and Kaczyński also operate. As familiar as the protesters may be with thinking and feeling using the categories of us versus them, in this case, the distinction is not defined by economic differences or power relations. It is defined by blood and soil. The ‘Palestinians’ should prevail against the ‘Israelis’.

The left is facing a painful process of self-cleansing

The fact that this is a dangerous development is certainly being discussed within the left-wing; for example, the German Amadeu Antonio Stifung has dealt in great detail with how Islamists and anti-imperialists have been rapidly converging since 7 October, and critical voices can also often be read in the left-wing taz newspaper. But these voices often come from the left-wing establishment. A new radical generation no longer understands that some ideas can destroy human coexistence – ideas such as a sense of superiority and hatred of nations. For them, it is fixed groups of people who are responsible for the evil – old white men, Zionists, and financial elites. Similarly, fixed groups of people are victims in need of redemption – queer people, Palestinians, workers.

The political tectonics of the West have drifted massively over the last decade and a half – right-wingers are using social populism to attract followers from the traditional left, left-wing ecological milieus are becoming acceptable in the bourgeois camp, and social democrats are turning into champions of Fortress Europe. In this context, traditionally unbreakable firewalls are falling when pro-Palestinian activists storm the Democratic US president (in favour of Donald Trump) and queer activists march side by side with the henchmen of the Iranian mullah regime. In this rapid process of change, the traditional left ought to wake up and vigorously push back these deviations from the struggle for emancipation, solidarity, and progress within its own camp. Because just as some of the protagonists of 1968 later moved strongly to the right, the same can happen to the Woke radicals. Israel and Palestine could be used as examples to illustrate this push-back: There are victims in need of solidarity on all ‘sides’ as well as perpetrators who work with violence and oppression and sow hatred.

This blog was originally published by Prometheus in German.