Reclaiming Our Flag: Why the Working-Class Left Must Re-Embrace Patriotism

When the Left abandons cultural identity, the Right doesn’t just fill the void…they weaponise it.

For too long, the British Left has been wilfully blind to a political truth as stark as the morning light: when we abandon our nation’s cultural identity, the reactionary right weaponises it against us. While we’re tangled in abstract theories, debating the finer points of some obscure academic text, the hard right is out there, shamelessly wrapping themselves in the Union Jack and declaring themselves the sole guardians of British identity.

This isn’t just a problem; it’s a profound, self-inflicted wound. This wholesale rejection of national identity isn’t revolutionary, it’s political suicide.

It hands the forces of reaction a free, unchallenged monopoly on patriotism. More catastrophically, it alienates millions of working people across our towns and cities, for whom love of country and the bitter struggle for class liberation are not contradictory ideals, but profoundly intertwined causes.

This isn’t ideological purity; it’s a strategic betrayal, plain and simple, and it’s high time we dragged it into the harsh glare of reality. A corrosive, frankly sickening, trend has taken root amongst sections of the progressive movement: a sneering disdain for anything that smacks of national pride, a wilful, ignorant disregard for our own magnificent working-class history and the true conditions of our nation, and sometimes, let’s be blunt, outright contempt for Britain itself. This isn’t principled stands; it’s a shameful surrender, laying the narrative of our national story on a silver platter for the reactionaries to devour.

Some self-proclaimed “lefties” – often those more comfortable in university common rooms than on the factory floor, love to denounce any talk of patriotism as “chauvinistic,” bleating that it flies in the face of the internationalist principles laid down by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. But that’s not just a misreading of history; it’s a deliberate intellectual laziness.

Dig into the actual writings of these revolutionary giants, study their lives and struggles, and you’ll find the truth: patriotism isn’t just compatible with socialist principles; it is absolutely, fundamentally, vital to them.

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Patriotism: A Working-Class Principle, Not a Bourgeois Ploy

Let’s be clear: there are two kinds of national pride.

First, there’s bourgeois nationalism. This is the ugly, twisted version that serves imperialism, exploits the Global South, and launches aggressive wars. It’s the kind of nationalism that leads to the vile “ethnic nation” vision of the Nazis. We reject that absolutely.

Second, there’s genuine patriotism. This is a deep love for our country, coupled with an unwavering commitment to making it truly flourish. It means pride in our revolutionary history and traditions, but crucially, it demands we stand against the oppression of other nations. As Marx and Engels put it: “No nation can be free while it continues to oppress other nations.”

True patriots understand that a nation is a work in progress, a political project that needs to evolve. And the working-class left uniquely grasps that this evolution can only happen through the struggle for socialism and a fairer, multipolar world.

Harry Pollitt crystallised this position in 1935, declaring that communists must “destroy the slanderous canard that ‘the Communists are friends of every nation but their own.’ […] We must prove that we love our country so well that our lives are dedicated to removing all the black spots on its name – to removing poverty, unemployment, and the bloody oppression of colonial peoples.”

The working-class left’s position is crystal clear: reject bourgeois nationalism, embrace genuine patriotism. Those who conflate the two aren’t attacking socialism; they’re attacking a strawman of their own making.

“As the great socialist writer George Orwell so incisively put it in ‘Notes on Nationalism‘:

‘By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature, defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.’

Orwell’s distinction perfectly encapsulates the working-class left’s understanding: our love for Britain is about its true flourishing, not about domination or imperial ambition.”

Internationalism

The true Proletarian internationalism, the one that says ‘workers of the world unite’, is an internationalism of workers, not corporations and Bankers. Neither is it the internationalism uttered by politicians that translates to globalisation, true Proletarian internationalism comes when the trade unions form the ‘International Workers Association’ who have the interest of all workers in mind, where they work together to negotiate for the best interest of all workers and when those interests are denied then the right to carry out appropriate industrial action in every country is practised, true international solidarity such as we have witnessed with both the Bakers Union and the McStrike and the RMT who practice Proletarian internationalism and while not necessarily taking industrial action almost always bringing to light the plight of workers throughout the world.

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Lenin: Patriotism and Internationalism Go Hand in Hand

Some like to twist Lenin’s words, using his early recognition that “Capitalist domination is international. That is why the workers’ struggle in all countries for their emancipation is only successful if the workers fight jointly against international capital” to argue against any form of national pride. This is a profound distortion.

Look at his 1914 speech, ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians.’ It lays bare four crucial points:

1. National connection fuels working-class struggle: Lenin asked, “Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness.”
2. True national pride means pride in revolutionary history: “We are full of national pride because the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class, because it, too, has proved capable of providing mankind with great models of the struggle for freedom and socialism, and not only with great pogroms, rows of gallows, dungeons, great famines, and great servility to priests, tsars, landowners, and capitalists.”
3. Patriotism demands opposing the oppression of other nations: “We are full of a sense of national pride, and for that very reason, we particularly hate our slavish past (when the landed nobility led the peasants into war to stifle the freedom of Hungary, Poland, Persia, and China), and our slavish present, when these self-same landed proprietors, aided by the capitalists, are loading us into a war to throttle Poland and the Ukraine, crush the democratic movement in Persia and China.”
4. Internationalism springs from national interests, not abstract ideals: “‘No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations,’ said Marx and Engels… And, full of a sense of national pride, we Great-Russian workers want, come what may, a free and independent, a democratic, republican and proud Great Russia, one that will base its relations with its neighbours on the human principle of equality.”

These passages utterly demolish the false idea that patriotism and internationalism are at odds. They’re not. They’re intertwined, two sides of the same revolutionary coin.

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The Perils of National Nihilism: Lessons from History

Lenin’s insights were tragically vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Xi Jinping’s critical question in 2013 – “Why did the Soviet Union collapse?” – led to a clear answer: historical nihilism. They repudiated their own history, their revolutionary figures. This caused ideological chaos, the Party lost its way, and ultimately, the USSR fell apart. It’s a stark lesson for us all.

Georgi Dimitrov, another key figure, warned that communists who ignore their nation’s revolutionary heritage effectively hand over the historical narrative to reactionaries. This was catastrophically evident during the rise of fascism, when many Marxists preached internationalism while rejecting all forms of patriotism. This created a vacuum, allowing fascist “nationalism” to be contrasted with Marxist “national nihilism.”

Dimitrov explained how this played straight into the fascists’ hands: “The fascists are rummaging through the entire history of every nation so as to be able to pose as the heirs and continuators of all that was exalted and heroic in its past. […] Communists who suppose that all this has nothing to do with the cause of the working class, who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people in a historically correct fashion, in a genuinely Marxist-Leninist spirit, who do nothing to link up the present struggle with the people’s revolutionary traditions and past –voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation, so that the fascists may fool the masses.”

He was unequivocal: “We Communists are the irreconcilable opponents, in principle, of bourgeois nationalism in all its forms. But we are not supporters of national nihilism and should never act as such. The task of educating the workers and all working people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the fundamental tasks of every Communist Party. But anyone who thinks that this permits him, or even compels him, to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad masses of working people is far from being a genuine Bolshevik and has understood nothing of the teaching of Lenin on the national question.”

History proves him right: the national nihilistic German left was crushed by fascism in 1933. Meanwhile, patriotic Chinese communists drove out Japanese invaders in 1945, defeated the Kuomintang, and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The difference is stark.

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Socialism in One Country: Putting Theory into Practice

The famous line from The Communist Manifesto, “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got,” doesn’t invalidate national movements. Crucially, the Manifesto also states that “the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national” and “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”

When the Bolsheviks put Marx and Engels’ theories into practice, building socialism in one country became paramount. Lenin recognised in 1915 that “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone.” By 1918, he declared: “To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.”

As revolutions didn’t materialise across other advanced capitalist countries, Stalin championed “Socialism in One Country,” believing it was possible to develop socialism within the Soviet Union with “the sympathy and support of the proletarians of other countries, but without the preliminary victory of the proletarian revolution in other countries.”

The Second World War undeniably vindicated Stalin’s approach. The Soviet Union’s rapid industrialisation enabled the Red Army to decisively defeat Nazi forces on the Eastern Front. As the British Communist Betty Reid explained: “Had the Soviet Government and the CPSU shared Trotsky’s panic, had they turned away from the colossal task of building socialism in a backward country, ravaged by war and imperialist invasion, encircled by enemies, the object of hatred and plotting by the capitalist world. Had they waited for the workers in other lands to save them, then indeed world fascism would not have been halted. The fascist armies would not have been destroyed, nor a great section of the world be removed from the orbit of imperialism, and a tremendously powerful socialist state created as the focal point of future struggle against imperialism.”

Building socialism in one country doesn’t contradict internationalism; it actually creates the conditions for ultimately eliminating national hostilities altogether. As the Manifesto states: when “the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

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Reclaiming Britain’s Revolutionary Heritage

Here in Britain, the working-class left has to step up and prove we are the authentic champions of national and popular interests. We must reclaim patriotism from the reactionary forces who wave the flag while ignoring the true needs of our people. They talk about “national interest” but then pour billions into appeasing foreign warmongers like Zelensky and Netanyahu, all while neglecting our own communities and working-class families.

It’s our duty to carry forward Britain’s rich revolutionary history. Think of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, with Wat Tyler, Robert Cave, and John Ball standing up against the Poll Tax and royal tyranny. Remember Oliver Cromwell’s bourgeois revolution of 1649, culminating in the execution of Charles I. The Levellers, the Diggers, and don’t forget the Chartist movement of 1835, fighting for universal suffrage, secret ballots, annual Parliaments, and removing property qualifications for voting. The Poll tax riots, the miners’ strike of 1984. These are just glimpses of Britain’s deep revolutionary legacy.

Indeed, as Tony Benn, a towering figure of the British Labour movement, powerfully articulated, true love for one’s country is inseparable from the defence of its democratic soul. Speaking on the crucial matter of national sovereignty, he declared:

‘If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.’

This conviction underscores that genuine patriotism for the working-class left is about defending the fundamental right of the people to govern themselves, not merely upholding existing power structures

The struggle continues, and many more revolutionary moments await us. The question isn’t whether we’ll embrace patriotism; it’s whether we’ll allow the reactionaries to monopolise it while we hide behind ineffective internationalist abstractions. The choice is clear: reclaim our revolutionary heritage or surrender it to those who would weaponise it against the working class.

The left abandoning cultural identity has been a catastrophic mistake. It’s time to fix it. We need to build a movement that speaks to the deepest aspirations of our people, while remaining absolutely true to our internationalist principles. Only then can we hope to build the socialist future our nation, and indeed, the world, so desperately needs.

While the modern Labour Party under Starmer ties itself to global capital, NATO wars, and outsourced identity politics, it is the job of socialists to plant our flag where it belongs, with the people, in the soil of this land, against all forms of oppression, foreign or domestic.

As Lenin said:

“No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”
But no class can be free if it despises the culture, heritage, and dreams of the people it claims to represent.

We don’t reject internationalism. We insist that true internationalism begins at home, by lifting our own people out of poverty, restoring our national sovereignty, and rejecting the neoliberal order that starves both solidarity and soil.

In short:
We are patriots because we are socialists.
We are socialists because we love this country enough to change it.