This is where the fun part begins:

The national question raised by imperialism is vastly different from brain dead “patriotic socialism”

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, which means in imperialized countries it is more urgent to establish a national consciousness than a worker consciousness. MLs sometimes make a workerist error (i.e. the belief that the workers should be the focus to the exclusion of everything else) because they don’t first identify the chief contradictions. In imperialized countries there is a common struggle that unites the imperialized workers and the imperialized bourgeoisie (and the peasantry, the lumpen-proles, etc), which means national consciousness in imperialized countries is a progressive force that unites the masse. That’s been the basis of revolutionary forces from Algeria to Vietnam to China itself, and while working class organizations played a big role in all those cases it was under a national party line.

This is vastly different from trying to build socialism inside of the imperial core, so-called “patriotic socialism”. Here, we are the beneficiaries of imperialism. The superprofits of the empire are redistributed to workers in the imperial core in the form of welfare and reformism and artificially cheap commodities, which prevents a revolutionary class consciousness from ever forming. That also means that national consciousness can only ever be reactionary inside the imperial core, because it fools the workers into thinking they are united with their bourgeoisie against the imperialized masses of the world.

And don’t get it twisted, there are imperialized nations inside of the imperial core as well. The Black Nation, the First Nations, the transnational Latine diaspora, etc. They can hardly be said to be beneficiaries of imperialism, and instead, are superexploited the same as workers around the world. That’s why they fill the sweat shops and the prisons and the morgues.

As for the white working class, the beneficiaries of imperialism, then only by betraying the empire can someone actually call themselves a socialist and have it mean anything. Their patriotism only sides with oppression and empire and all its associated cruelties.

I’m drawing from Mao, Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois to get to these conclusions. What the fuck are “patriotic socialists” reading? Tweets?

Anyway, all of that is to say, I guess I don’t just do this for fun. It’s also a useful exercise, because by shadow boxing with random encounters on the internet I can organize my thoughts and draw further conclusions I may not have otherwise. Online debate is exercise.