“Working men have no country,” Marx famously said in/The Communist
Manifesto/. “We cannot take from them what they have not got.” He meant
nationalism is something manufactured by the ruling class, who rule the
roost and wave a flag that ordinary people salute. Marx, like Joyce, was
a peripatetic cosmopolitan, a broad-minded internationalist.
In/Ulysses/, Joyce’s alter-ego Leopold Bloom confessed a preference for
“a continental” rather than “insular manner of life.” Bloom’s open and
secular vision of reality is most evident in “Cyclops” (episode 12),
whose drama unfolds in Barney Kiernan’s pub. There, Bloom stands up to
the jingoism of the so-called “citizen,” the aggressive and bullying
Irish nationalist. If he were English, the citizen’s rhetoric would not
sound too out of place in Brexit Britain—or, if he were American, in
Trumpland. Indeed, the citizen’s ultranationalist types now have their
platform, not on the fringes but unashamedly in the political
mainstream. Bloom has none of it, though. “Persecution,” he says, “all
the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national
hatred…isn’t what life’s about for men and women.” So, what is it about?
the citizen wonders. “Love,” says Bloom. “I mean the opposite of hatred.”
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/03/01/a-commodius-vicus-of-recirculation/
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