[The following text has been excerpted and translated from here.]
Let’s talk about the “fatherland”: this is a very hackneyed idea; progressives, conservatives, and regressives, that is, those who go forward, those who stop and those who go back, have very different concepts of the fatherland; and just in case something is missing to muddle things up, even the indifferent, the neutral, the pan-nationalists are mixed in, as if to imply that one can have or not have an opinion on important matters of life, the universe or death, but the fatherland is intangible and that on this matter there is no other way than being patriotic.
In the life of mankind, the fatherland is a passing institution, a transitory work of progressive evolution, a shelter for one night that is abandoned the next day to continue the march towards the ideal.
The so-called patriots are not correct; and the least bad thing I can say of them is that they give themselves that title as a matter of course, subject to unconscious suggestion; and if they dare to reply to me that they are certain in their patriotic feeling and thought, I will say with Spies, that great anarchist whom the Republican gallows of Chicago honoured by elevating him to the rank of a martyr to humanity, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels!” And he said this when Grinnel, the representative of the judiciary, was already arousing the zeal of that ignominious jury which sentenced him by invoking patriotism to kill unjustly, knowingly sketching a thought which was formulated on the heights of Montjuich [a medieval Jewish burial ground in Catalonia] in these words: “We must close our eyes to reason”.
According to lexicographers, homeland and patrimony, the one meaning country of birth and the other the property of one’s parents, are ideas that have their etymological origin in the word ‘father’. Therefore, at least in the thinking of the inventors of the word, with regard to the fatherland, all of us who live in it are its ‘children’, and with regard to the patrimony we are ‘brothers’.
In any case, this is how they would have us believe that they understand the fatherland, particularly when it comes to the fulfilment of duties, i.e., to the obligations they want to impose on us as such.
I will only say that this reactionary prattle about fathers, sons and brothers, in this matter of the fatherland, we know or should know well; we should bear it in mind and never forget it as long as we live under the regime of the present society, about which there is nothing paternal besides the name; as well we should know how the charlatans of patriotism interpret this idea and how each one interprets the same idea whenever patriotic concern pushes them to attribute common sense to what essentially lacks it. There is nothing positive left but this interpretation: the fatherland is property, and the only ones who have the duty to be a patriot, because they are the bosses and heirs of capital, are the possessing class.
The fatherland being thus—and so it is because of the traditional error enshrined in the laws and institutions contained in that triple package which is called Nation, Fatherland, State—because of the coercive power which the State gives to the erroneous and the unjust, the national “patrimony” is left as a plot of plunder in a state of usufruct for some and inheritance for others and while we workers find ourselves dispossessed and disinherited, the owner is the only de facto patriot, and he is also the only one who can rationally boast of the title of ‘citizen’.
I, for my part, declare that I renounce it, I do not want it, and I reject the label if anyone applies it to me as a matter of course and against my will. In short, all the political rights which the title of citizen could possibly recognize rather than grant, because my rights are an integral part of my personality, rights that are annulled by a police search which has my liberty at the mercy of a crude, uneducated official of those whom the State pays the lowest price, no doubt in relation to the kind of service it expects of it, and which has already twice torn me from my bed, brutally separated me from my family and locked me up in a dungeon.
Even if you, reader, would like to pass for a citizen, I will not call you one, but I will give that already dishonoured title to the bourgeois who exploit us, the landlord who evicts us to the street, the shopkeeper who gouges us, the cop who locks us up, the politician who tries to stupefy us with their bullshit and even the priest who takes his ration with the spoon of the budget or blesses for money the one who asks for his services.
I did not invent it, nor do I have to quote the thoughts of insolvent demagogues in my support: “Man is prior to and superior to the citizen”, and that is what I stand by. For the time being, that is Renan’s thought. Now here is another by Marmontel, the famous French writer before the [French] revolution: “It is in the mouths of the oppressors of the people and of ambitious tyrants that the word “fatherland” is heard most loudly”. And the famous Mirabeau wrote:
“The fatherland, for him who possesses nothing, is nothing, because duties are reciprocal”.
And all this is as clear as daylight, because, as Détré says in L’Humanité Nouvelle, in short:
“For those who, Masons or Jesuits, nobles or bourgeois, own, govern, rule or aspire to rule, while preserving the present institutions, the fatherland is their particular interest, the interest of their class or their caste, their property, their dignities, their titles, their jobs and their hundred pence”.
It is therefore understandable that General Savary in 1814, instead of running against the invading foreigner, should have exclaimed: “I fear the Cossacks of our slums more than the Cossacks of the Don”, and that after the surrender of Paris, General Ducrof should have dared to say before the Bordeaux assembly:
“If I beat a retreat at Champigny, it was because I feared a demagogic movement in Paris, and I wanted to repress it”.
“Fatherland, fatherland; land of our ancestors!” What a bloody mockery for the human being deprived of land, of house, of science; deprived of hygiene; deprived of education; reduced to wage slavery and still forced to be the defender and sycophant of his masters!
Now, in the idea of the fatherland, I must make it clear that the fatherland is elastic according to the vicissitudes of history; it stretches or shrinks according to the vicissitudes that befall its dominators: sometimes a weak king whose neighbour is another king, who wants to gain fame as a royal skewer or a glorious conqueror, sees his borders trampled on, and signs a peace, leaving two or three provinces between the nails of his cousin or else he strips him of the kingdom completely, not giving a damn about the divine right of the dispossessed and the patriotism of the vassals who change masters. At other times a piece of the fatherland is cut out, as if this operation were performed with scissors on a map and given as a dowry to a princess who could not find a bridegroom without this bargain, and so lands and inhabitants go to the royal bedchamber to endure this patriotic abomination. There have been times when the fatherland was so small that it could fit into a cave in the mountains of Asturias, and history, to explain the fact, had to invent the miracle of Covadonga; on the other hand, there have been times when the sun did not set in the dominions of a taciturn and vile man called Philip II, and then it was necessary to glorify the bloody usurpations of criminal adventurers like Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, and so forth. Depending on the times, all those who today call themselves Spaniards were either compatriots or foreigners, and could be found fighting as comrades in arms in the same field or in diametrically opposed ones, because here the homelands have changed in an astonishing way; so much so that if all the borders that have existed were to be traced on a map of Spain, it would look like a sheet of a fashion pattern in which, to make the most of the paper, all the pieces of a complicated dress are traced, forming such a tangle of lines that the dressmaker can hardly understand them. We have been everything there is to be: Celts, Celtiberians, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Alans, Huns, Arabs, according to our ancient dominators; and according to the regions, we have considered ourselves Catalans, Aragonese, Navarrese, Castilians, Valencians, Andalusians, nationals of I don’t know how many kingdoms. As regards religion, everything has been worshipped here, being by turns pagan, Muslim, Arian, Christian, Catholic or Protestant; that is to say, always enemies, according to the taste of the mandarin of the time or place. It is excused to say that if such enmities have existed between those who formerly formed the community of those who today are theoretically brothers because we find ourselves, I will not say sheltered, but rather enclosed within the present borders, then enemies were the ancestors of every fatherland of the world.
Referring now to what previous fatherlands have given of themselves and to what the present fatherland has made of Spaniards, I think the following considerations are appropriate: If Spain in the past won or was granted brilliant adjectives, in the present it has to place an asterisk before all of them, which indicates that the former merits have sunk into an abyss of decline.
National and foreign historians describe this nation as noble, loyal, generous, enterprising, heroic, intelligent, artistic, etc., and the Spanish name is linked to great events and important progress in humanity, but in the times we live, here is the judgement that Spain’s situation inspires in a French writer, who is like an echo of the opinion of Europe and America:
“The only salvation for Spain consists in the immigration of a superior race, accustomed to big mercantile and industrial business and capable of benefiting from the products of the soil and subsoil”. In case this opinion seems exaggerated, see what a doctor from Barcelona wrote: “… The sad misfortunes of our unfortunate homeland have awakened generous initiatives of regeneration, but… the but is always doubtful, we have that such initiatives will not germinate in our Spain, because this Spanish people is a sickly, weak, puny people, exhausted by its lousy public administration, which deprives it of the most indispensable things for its life, deprives it of the protection of hygiene. The Spanish people eat little and badly. In the big cities they live in unhealthy places in small rooms in unbelievable overcrowding. Sanitary science is a lamentable oversight, it is the cause, not only of the excessive mortality observed in most of the cities of Spain, but also the cause of an appalling morbidity, to such an extent that it is evident that the Spanish type is a sickly type characterised by the pale colour of its integuments, its small stature and its diminished physical strength”.
The degeneration is, then, in the mass of our blood; it is in the blood of the priest, of the friar, of the beggar, of the bullfighter, of the ruffian, of the bourgeois, of the exploited. This is what privilege has reduced those heroes, wise men, and artists to. Considering, moreover, in agreement with the few intelligent Spaniards who still remain, as has been made clear, that all the regenerative proposals that are being publicised, however sensible they may seem, will be a dead letter if we do not at once abandon the labyrinth of worries in which we are entangled, if we do not manage to raise up, energetically and enthusiastically, the human dignity that aspires to the generalisation of the ideal, from the depth of ignorant pessimism in which the fainting will lies, to the consummation of that ideal.
Let’s say it frankly: the nationalist regime is incompatible with freedom; reform with the change from monarchy to republic is like the blessing of a quack to cure consumption, and in that regime and with that change, the application of all initiatives arising from science will be prevented by Silvela’s maüser or by Moret’s clean shot, which are the poles around which the sociology of the Spanish monarchical restoration revolves, as demonstrated by practice in all the republics and confirmed by the statements made by Pi y Margall in his book La República de 1873, who, referring to his time in power, wrote these memorable words, impregnated with authoritarianism:
“No sooner had I set foot in the Ministry of the Interior than I began to receive news that town councils had been dismissed and revolutionary juntas established in many towns on the peninsula… I immediately gave the most pressing and severe orders to dissolve the juntas and reinstate the town councils. I had those who refused to obey them threatened with force, and almost without doing anything more than showing the most rebellious the bayonets of the army, I succeeded in re-establishing order in a matter of days”.
It is necessary to be disillusioned: a nation must always be under the power of a Pontius, whether it claims to represent a supposed supreme being whose pantheistic throne is the endless universe where the candid imagination of the mystics has placed him, or whether it claims to represent that sovereign people which is an infinity of molecules without solidarity or cohesion, and therefore without positive personality, whereby it comes to pass that there is no such representation, and what is called such is nothing more than a manifest farce. Ultimately, divine right and democratic right are two phases of the same falsehood, the so-called political lie, and in this concept—realist, absolutist or federal republican, and so forth—they are co-religionists; they may be separated by the aspiration to the greater or lesser amount of authority; but both deny me my absolute liberty, both distrust my moral sufficiency, both are continuators and direct successors of that first legislator of cursed memory who commanded that a piece of land bordered by North, South, East and West, with such other pieces, is the exclusive property of So-and-so, and from that piece of the world which is his, he can forcibly throw me off and only allow me to tread upon it to work it for wages. Today that they say I am a citizen of a free nation, and for the pittance of my ancestors, when they were serfs or slaves; damned pittance, damned wages, damned property, and no less abominable law and the nationalist regime that sustains the cause of so many curses! Yes, all politicians are co-religionists, as are those defectors from the movement for workers’ emancipation, i.e., those socialists who want a “workers’ state” that will carry along doing all the abominations that are essential to the state, and who openly campaign for elections, hoping to reach the ministries, from where they will impose the creed of workers’ emancipation; from where they will impose the opportunist creed on the starving, and so, while there will be jaded and newly elevated former workers who will point the maüser-guarantee against their class brothers and sisters.
It follows, then, that if the paternal abstraction with which the idea of the fatherland is concealed does not distribute its benefits equally; if in the possession of the national patrimony we are not all sons or brothers, whether the title of citizen and the qualification of patriot must include, without any difference of any kind, those who are so seriously differentiated, as well as the favoured heirs of the world, at the expense of the privations and sufferings of the poor and disinherited who crawl through the abysses of misery. And if the social revolution that we will carry out leaves all the politicians of the world lagging behind, bent on the absurdity of pouring new wine into old wineskins, there is no recourse but to tear down the four walls that serve as the frontiers of nations, to leave the shelter of night, to truly wake up as revolutionaries, and begin walking forwards.
League of Internationalist Communists 