Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

24 I Ramnath
way of speaking, feeling, thinking, and acting; and it is this
idiosyncrasy that constitutes the essence of nationality."2 In
contrast, Rudolf Rocker argued that it was positional and
contingent: "nation is not the cause, but the result of the
state. It is the state that creates the nation, not the nation
the state." Moreover, he warned, in any talk of nationalism,
we must not fo rget that we are always dealing with
the organised selfishness of privileged minorities
which hide behind the skirts of the nation, hide
behind the credulity of the masses. We speak of
national interests, national capital, national spheres
ofimerest, national honour, and national spirit;
but we forget that behind all this there are hidden
merely the selfish interests of power-loving politicians
and money-loving business men for whom the
nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal
greed and their schemes for political power from
the eyes of the world.
What he described was the state hijacking the creclulom
masses through the method of nationalism. 3
Later Landauer tried to differentiate the folk or
people, viewed in an almost spiritual sense, from the institutional
mechanisms of the state.4 The dangers here (as
Rocker surely guessed) are obvious: it's a slippery slope
from the praise of a vOlkisch spirit to a mysticism of blood
and soil, to chauvinism and fascism-especially when the
state to be distinguished from the organic soul of the people
was identified with modern bureaucracy and a liberal