Comrade Ferret<p>Considering a way to describe what's been called left nationalism, or progressive nationalism, since nationalism itself has come to be associated purely with reactionary movements since Mussolini and we, as a socialist movement, never sought to reclaim or replace it, instead internalizing its theft and allowing it to be taken wholesale from our ideology.</p><p>I meet so many self-proclaimed Leninists that think internationalism means no borders, no nations, and no discussion at all of nationalism, seeing it as wholly reactionary. In particular, I'm told simply that Canadian resistance against American imperialism isn't valid, simply because Canada, too, is part of the imperial core — entirely ignoring that so is Ireland, so was Poland for Luxemburg, so were the nations within Russia for Lenin. For none of these thinkers, nor other thinkers on progressive nationalism, such as Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-sung, was nationalism only valid in the case of undeveloped countries, and more a quality of how it views the nation within a global context.</p><p>So, the way I'm thinking of describing it is in relating it to the "shop local" movement. No one shops locally because they think their local area is the best in the world, and anything sold or manufactured outside of it is inferior because the people outside of their local area are inferior. That is reactionary nationalism, the kind of nationalism that Mussolini, Hitler, Trump, etc. exhibit. People who aren't insane don't think that way, though: We shop local because it's economical, it's good for our communities — and it's good for other communities, too! It curbs the influence of huge corporations, and also curbs the imperialist exploitation of others around the world, of workers just like us. "Shop local" is, perhaps ironically, incredibly world-conscious, just as left nationalism is, in reality, necessarily internationalist. And just as one can hardly call oneself globally conscious without an understanding of the value of shopping local, internationalism is also necessarily nationalist.</p><p>Anarchists, too, should consider the importance of the nation as a formal expression of the culture and history of a people, as well as the validity of national resistance against imperialism. While I don't know of any anarchist thinkers who have discussed it, perhaps that ought to change.</p><p><a href="https://fedi.workersofthe.world/search?tag=communism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>communism</span></a> <a href="https://fedi.workersofthe.world/search?tag=anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>anarchism</span></a> <a href="https://fedi.workersofthe.world/search?tag=shoplocal" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>shoplocal</span></a></p>