Do socialists celebrate the Fourth of July, and other important questions
stuberyl asked if socialists celebrate the Fourth of July; I'd been kind of thinking about the same thing, so I decided it was a good topic for a blog entry.
I realized, though, as I was thinking about this, that I needed to be more exact about what it means to celebrate a holiday. If you go to a Fourth of July barbecue, are you celebrating the holiday? What about if you go to a "Fuck the Fourth" event or an "Anti-imperialist Fourth of July" event (to name a couple I saw on Facebook friends were attending this year). What if you don't have articulate politics around the holiday, but you go to whatever barbecue with your friends or family?
For that matter, what holidays did I celebrate before I became a socialist? What holidays do my (rather conservative, when it comes to holidays) family celebrate or observe?
Since the only reason I really keep this blog is to indulge my urge to catalog things, I took the list of US national holidays and am breaking them up, for my family, into four categories. I'm only including holidays I remember getting the day off from in school, or some similar big to-do.
1) holidays we celebrated, and the meaning of them was palpably present in our celebration of them
New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Father's Day
These are all kind of minor holidays really, but what we did around them was fairly directly related to the thing that was supposedly being celebrated. (I suppose Memorial Day is a bit of a confusing one. We always went to the cemetery to visit family graves, and some of our dead family members were veterans, but the ones I was there for visiting didn't die in any wars. However, the family who were veterans, and the men and older people in the family in general, made a fairly big deal out of this one.)
2) holidays we celebrated, where the basic meaning was occluded but was imbued in the celebration in some significant way
July 4, Thanksgiving, Christmas
These were arguably the most important holidays for my family growing up, but they generally passed without much if any discussion of what we were ostensibly celebrating. I was told many times as a kid that if you want to maintain family harmony, don't discuss religion or politics. (I suppose in this respect I've fallen far, far from the tree.) I think Thanksgiving and Christmas were more about family being together than about a founding moment of our country or about Jesus. At the same time, these occasions did encourage a generally reverent attitude towards their objects. Thanksgiving was sometimes about giving thanks, but the patriotic angle was fuzzy at best. Christmas was basically approached as being about family and gift exchange; however, family members who didn't go to church during the year would sometimes make the effort to go on Christmas, and family members who were non-religious, like my mom, would refrain from badmouthing religion on Christmas. (I think these may be fairly typical relations to these holidays for large swaths of people in the US; I'm not recording them to say that we were particularly odd or anything.)
I put July 4 here because again, there was very little discussion of patriotism or country, though of course that was present on TV (more so than with Christmas or Thanksgiving, or at least in a more undistilled fashion). Of course everything had to be red, white, and blue. I would say if you asked anyone in my family what they thought about the meaning of July 4, on July 4, they would have expressed a reverent attitude towards something about US patriotism. But it wasn't really spoken.
3) holidays we observed, but with the basic meaning pretty throughly obscured
Easter, Halloween
It took me a long time to figure out what we were celebrating on Easter - I think I had to ask. And then, once I understood, I had a hard time fitting the dead / risen Jesus thing with the bunny and candy thing. (For some reason, the Santa Claus / baby Jesus thing seemed to make sense. Go figure.)
4) holidays my family didn't think were "real" holidays (though nobody argued with the day off).
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Labor Day
I didn't really realize how conservative this list was until I made up these categories and had to put MLK Day and Labor Day here. Even my liberal-ish mom was a conservative when it came to holidays, and could see no use for these except as good excuses to stay home from school.
So, back to the question of "do socialists observe the Fourth of July? Using my categories here, I think a lot of socialists (and anarchists, and anti-capitalist anti-imperialists) would like to downgrade the Fourth of July to a 3) or 4) level, that is, they would like to strip it of its meaning or not celebrate it at all.
I've noticed that a lot of my friends, some of whom are leftists and many of whom are vaguely on the left, don't quite know what to do with the Fourth, at least here in Northern California. We kind of mope around and sheepishly do something at the last minute that is very low-key. The Fourth is too big to just ignore, a la Presidents' Day, but seemingly too closely tied to the injustices of this country to fully embrace.
However, I would like to make an argument for leftists to critically engage with the Fourth of July as a holiday, and to celebrate it.
First of all, what is it? In lefty terminology, we are celebrating a national-democratic revolution, one which was left incomplete due to slavery in the US, thereby leading to the Civil War and Reconstruction as a "second American revolution" (which was then itself left incomplete). Of course it's also problematic even at this level, in that we are "celebrating" the expropriation of land from and genocide of American Indians, and the related imperial project of the US, first territorial expansion then capital expansion. You can't deal with one without the other. My advice is that we take these contradictions on board, don't hide from them but also don't hide from the occasion.
If we had a more significant cultural presence, leftists should probably find a holiday to celebrate to talk about this second revolution and the counter-revolution that ensued. I propose June 25. In 1868, six Southern states were readmitted into the Union under Radical Reconstruction in a three-week period:
Arkansas - June 22
Florida and Louisiana - June 25
North Carolina - July 4
South Carolina - July 9
Alabama - July 13
Furthermore, in 1876 we had the Battle of the Bighorn and the death of Lt. Col. Custer. I think this makes for a pretty good holiday for continuing radical reconstructionists....
In any case, this is a proposed addition (again, if we had the cultural and political media to motivate such an addition), not a substitution. Radicals should celebrate the Fourth of July, even if it represents an incomplete revolution. We shouldn't accept as a given the Right's lock on something called patriotism. We should talk about what freedom means for us - which is something contiguous with, but extensive beyond, the notions of the US revolutions I and II. We should talk about the visions of freedom people in the US, citizens and immigrants, have had, and broaden the discussion far beyond the redigested pablum of "founding fathers" usually dished out to us.
This would be an intervention into the national-popular of the US which accepts our presence within it, responsibility to it, and inability to step completely outside of it - rather than hiding away and only talking about our ideas with the already-convinced.