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The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

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The penetrating critique of nationalism, of both left and right. This is an essential essay for a critical understanding of nationalism.

The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the holocausts, can only lead people to want to dismantle the system, is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is true-er, namely that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetrate holocausts. --from the pamphlet

64 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1984

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About the author

Fredy Perlman

40 books59 followers
Fredy Perlman (August 20, 1934 – July 26, 1985) was an author and publisher. His most popular work, the book Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, is a major source of inspiration for anti-civilisation perspectives in contemporary anarchism.

Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and finally settled in Lakeside Park, Kentucky.

In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953-55. Perlman was on the staff of The Daily Bruin, the school newspaper, when the university administration changed the constitution of the newspaper to forbid it from nominating its own editors, as the custom had been. Perlman left the newspaper staff at that time and, with four others, proceeded to publish an independent paper, The Observer, which they handed out on a public sidewalk at the campus bus stop, since they were forbidden by the administration to distribute in on the campus.

In 1956-59 he attended Columbia University, where he met his life-long companion, Lorraine Nybakken. He enrolled as a student of English literature but soon concentrated his efforts in philosophy, political science and European literature. One particularly influential teacher for him at this time was C. Wright Mills.

In late 1959, Perlman and his wife took a cross-country motor scooter trip, mostly on two-lane highways traveling at 25 miles per hour. From 1959 to 1963, they lived on the lower east side of Manhattan while Perlman worked on a statistical analysis of the world's resources with John Ricklefs. They participated in anti-bomb and pacifist activities with the Living Theatre and others. Perlman was arrested after a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. He became the printer for the Living Theatre and during that time wrote The New Freedom, Corporate Capitalism and a play, Plunder, which he published himself.

In 1963, the husband and wife left the U.S. and moved to Belgrade, Yugoslavia after living some months in Copenhagen and Paris. Perlman received a master's degree in economics and a PhD at the University of Belgrade's Law School; his dissertation was titled "Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region," which created an outrage among some members of the faculty. During his last year in Yugoslavia, he was a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo and Metohija.

During 1966-69 the couple lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Perlman taught social science courses at Western Michigan University and created outrage among some members of the faculty when he had students run their own classes and grade themselves. During his first year in Kalamazoo, he and Milos Samardzija, one of his professors from Belgrade, translated Isaac Illych Rubin's Essay on Marx's Theory of Value. Perlman wrote an introduction to the book: "An Essay on Commodity Fetishism."

In May 1968, after lecturing for two weeks in Turin, Italy, Perlman went to Paris on the last train before rail traffic was shut down by some of the strikes that were sweeping Western Europe that season. He participated in the May unrest in Paris and worked at the Censier center with the Citroen factory committee. After returning to Kalamazoo in August, he collaborated with Roger Gregoire in writing Worker-Student Action Committees, May 68.

During his last year in Kalamazoo, Perlman had left the university and together with several other people, mostly students, inaugurated the Black and Red magazine, of which six issues appeared. Typing and layout was done at the Perlman house and the printing at the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In January 1969 Perlman completed The Reproduction of Daily Life. While traveling in Europe in the spring of 1969

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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for Nile.
92 reviews
September 28, 2018
'What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?'

The closing line of Perlman's argument is the sort of long-term, grand-scheme thinking I think he is best at. Some writers discuss the immediate, Perlman speaks of trends three thousand years in the making.

His core argument is that nationalism, held up as a form of liberation, was, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the master's tools eternally remaking the master's house. Alongside this, that such nations, bereft of colonies, turn inwards to accumulate the capital to industrialise. Pogroms, expulsions, forced labour, genocide.

Perlman, who himself escaped the Holocaust and lost many family members to it, uses Israel as the prime example of those who escaped or survived a genocide, living to within years start their own. That Israel alongside others e.g. the US, are the epitome of taking atomised individuals stripped of cultural identity, and giving them as substitution state; garlanded with pastiches of said lost culture, as core identity.

Perlman wrote this in 1984, and perhaps those who laughed then (or now) should look to the descent of Yugoslavia the next decade. What was seen - and is still seen - as inexplicable, Perlman outlines here. His is a highly unorthodox position, yet one of the few to give a decent answer.

Perlman is critic, not architect - he doesn't offer something else in its place, but does skewer what is there.
Profile Image for tout.
89 reviews15 followers
December 18, 2012
This essay continues on in part where 'Against History, Against Leviathan' left off and was the last completed work before Fredy Perlman died. In an age where all past cultures have been emptied out in order to create a more malleable human being, where all past culture we know is what we think we may have lost, identity is affirmed to fill this gaping hole. It's fairly obvious that this essay was written at a time when national liberation struggles were standard within the anti-capitalist discourse, this is less so now, but this essay still has the power to brutally annihilate the idea that what we have lost is something that can be named/represented and something that can be included in the system of domination which structures our existence.
Profile Image for Sarah Meowurrs.
3 reviews1 follower
February 4, 2014
Such a great analysis of nationalism. I think this would be my favorite excerpt:
"The stability assured by a national repressive apparatus gave the owners
something like a hothouse in which their capital could grow, increase, multiply.
The term ‘grow’ and its corollaries come from the capitalists’ own vocabulary.
These people think of a unit of capital as a grain or seed which they invest in
fertile soil. In spring they see a plant grow from each seed. In summer they
harvest so many seeds from each plant that, after paying for the soil, sunshine
and rain, they still have more seeds than they had initially. The following year
they enlarge their field, and gradually the whole countryside becomes improved.
In reality, the initial ‘grains’ are money; the sunshine and rain are the expended
energies of laborers; the plants are factories, workshops and mines, the harvested
fruits are commodities, bits of processed world; and the excess or additional
grains, the profits, are emoluments which the capitalist keeps for himself instead
of dividing them up among the workers."
Profile Image for Eadweard.
604 reviews521 followers
December 17, 2017
"After the war, many reasonable people would speak of the aims of the Axis as irrational and of Hitler as a lunatic. Yet the same reasonable people would consider men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sane and rational, even though these men envisioned and began to enact the conquest of a vast continent, the deportation and extermination of the continent’s population, at a time when such a project was much less feasible than the project of the Axis. It is true that the technologies as well as the physical, chemical, biological and social sciences applied by Washington and Jefferson were quite different from those applied by the National Socialists. But if knowledge is power, if it was rational for the earlier pioneers to maim and kill with gunpowder in the age of horse-drawn carriages, why was it irrational for National Socialists to maim and kill with high explosives, gas and chemical agents in the age of rockets, submarines and ‘freeways’?"
Profile Image for Raú.
4 reviews
December 25, 2025
"La actividad de una persona es productiva, es decir, útil para la sociedad, solo cuando es actividad vendida. Y el propio ser humano es un miembro productivo de la sociedad solo cuando las actividades de su vida cotidiana son actividades vendidas. En cuanto la gente acepta las condiciones de este intercambio la actividad cotidiana adopta la forma de la prostitución universal."
Profile Image for emily.
126 reviews
October 8, 2025
Absolute drivel. Unashamedly claiming that Lenin was a bourgeois reactionary capitalist who acted as the progenitor to fascism, and then passing this off as an academic text, is as astounding as it is enraging.

This is the last anarchist text I read, it’s infantile nonsense.
Profile Image for Kszug.
8 reviews
July 28, 2024
An interesting read, but definitely to short, this topic is enough for multiple thousand page volumes, but still it's a book I think every "leftist" should read
Profile Image for Ingmmar.
9 reviews
June 21, 2025
Essential reading on role of nationalism in primitive accumulation, and the dead end it is in emancipatory strategies.
Profile Image for Siddiq Khan.
110 reviews11 followers
May 15, 2021
The final work finished by Perlman before he died, this remains a timely book in an era of rising nationalism among the white populations of Europe and America, not to mention similar developments in Turkey, India and Brazil. More generally, the animus behind the politics of national identity lurks behind all identity politcs -- both are consequences of an age in which authentic individuality -- rooted in community and communion, in commitment and belonging, in dialogue and dialectic -- has been utterly obliterated by the processes of alienation at the heart of everyday life in the modern world.

At its centre is the key insight into the necessary role played by nationalism and racism in the primitive accumulation of capital during the first phase of modernisation in any country. Fascinating parallels are drawn between external colonisation by Europe and America, internal colonisation by the national socialist regimes of Nazi Germany, Maoist China and Bolshevik Russia, and the political mobilisation of racialism by Zionists as the basis of their own colonial project.

As always, Perlman´s humour, his knack for drawing striking analogies, and his penchant for demolishing political pretense through cutting irony, all reminiscent of HL Menken, makes for an edifying and entertaining read. In this case, he makes some valuable original contributions towards understanding the world we live in. The nationalism of our time is, contrary to his own era, a phenomenon of decadence and decline, coming as it does not at the start of any modernisation project, but at the end. I am not qualified to conduct a detailed analysis of the present era, nor is this the appropriate place to do so. All I can say is that, in our struggle to come to grips with what is going on around us, clear-sighted accounts into the past such as this will no doubt prove more than a little valuable.
Profile Image for Artnoose McMoose.
Author 2 books39 followers
August 13, 2010
While rereading Letters of Insurgents, I had a go with the copy of The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism that's been on my shelf since last summer. [withstanding the urge to name-drop right now:]

My head is or course swimming in the sea of Letters of Insurgents, so I'm enamored with the fact that it's the same text font. When I look at the photocollages throughout the book, I am reminded that they printed the book themselves, and I think about printshop scenes in Letters of Insurgents and Having Little, Being Much.

The book is a short history/opinion about the history of modern nationalism. One of the primary themes is the creation of nationalistic traits to use as welding material for the purpose of securing capital.

Short and worth a read.
Profile Image for Ronan.
62 reviews3 followers
August 11, 2008
Hmm, not really sure about this one. I like Perlman's writing style, but I'm not sure if he offers any 'tools for change' in this pamphlet. There is good history (not enough references for proper history though) and some interesting analysis but I finished this feeling decidely underwhelmed. I think it might be because he puts rhetoric above results in many ways, caught in the grand flow of history everything seems more than a bit hopeless. The pamphlet also offers my favourite characterisation of Lenin ever, painting him as an efficiency mad capitalist striving to manage production better than the lazy Russian capitalists.
Profile Image for Aonarán.
113 reviews75 followers
September 6, 2016
I feel like the ideas in the text are a 4 or a 5, but Fredy's tone at time gets a little too contemptuous for me.

I know a lot of friends who I've recommended this to who have really enjoyed it and I would recommend it in general.
Profile Image for Kirk.
10 reviews
July 4, 2013
Just re-read this. Though it shows its age in many places, the points that Perlman made remain relevant and timely.
Profile Image for Zoë Birss.
779 reviews22 followers
July 20, 2015
Good book. The best for me was the identification and description of racism as a tool of controlling a state's majority population.
Profile Image for Fernando Polanco.
Author 2 books24 followers
December 31, 2017
Lúcido ensayo cronológico sobre el nacionalismo y el imperialismo.
Aterradores los micro-ensayos que diseccionan el capitalismo.
Profile Image for Read While It Rains.
124 reviews23 followers
June 25, 2018
An enjoyable read but I can't say that I found Perlman's presentation of valid arguments to be particularly convincing.
Profile Image for Andrej.
11 reviews
Read
April 5, 2025
A few important points.

“The goal of the Dictator of the Proletariat was still American-style progress, capitalist development, electrification, rapid mass transportation, science, the processing of the natural environment. The goal was the capitalism that the weak and inept Russian bourgeoisie had failed to develop. With Marx’s Capital as their light and guide, the dictator and his Party would develop capitalism in Russia; they would serve as a substitute bourgeoisie, and they would use the power of the state not only to police the process, but to launch and manage it as well.”

“Talk of exploitation no longer served a purpose, and had in fact become embarrassing, since it was obvious to all, especially to wage workers, that successful revolutionaries had not put an end to wage labor, but had extended its domain.”

“Even the useless resentment of workers toward their alienated wage labor is liquidated. When the nation is liberated, wage labor ceases to be an onerous burden and becomes a national obligation, to be carried out with joy.”
Profile Image for Valdemar Gomes.
333 reviews37 followers
January 9, 2025
I would never expect such a lucid and holistic approach to the subjects in such a little book. Amazing and higly reccomended.
Profile Image for Parker.
5 reviews
August 8, 2025
Had me until he claimed that Marx never wrote about primitive accumulation
Profile Image for Gabriel Baquero.
6 reviews9 followers
October 13, 2016
Este hermoso libro, publicado por la excelente editorial Pepitas de calabaza, contiene tres escritos del inigualable Fredy Perlman: "El persistente atractivo del nacionalismo", "El antisemitismo y el pogromo de Beirut" y "La reproducción de la vida cotidiana". Estos tres escritos me han forzado a repensar muchas cosas que yo creía tener claras. Me han demostrado la innegable conexión que existe entre los fenómenos del capitalismo, el nacionalismo, el imperialismo, el industrialismo y hasta la civilización misma.

Gracias a este libro, he llegado a entender que la acumulación originaria de capital (y su acompañante violencia brutal) no es un proceso que ocurrió solamente al inicio del sistema capitalista; sino más bien un fenómeno que se repite una y otra vez cada vez que un grupo humano oprimido funda su propio Estado-nación, para lo cual necesita de ingentes cantidades de capital (para financiar a la policía y demás aparatos represivos del Estado, así como para poner en marcha la maquinaria industrial nacional); para lo cual necesita expropiar violentamente a otro grupo humano, ya sea en una colonia externa o al interior del propio país, al cual califica de "raza inferior" para justificar las atrocidades cometidas contra él durante el saqueo que conocemos como acumulación originaria de capital.

Este proceso se repite y se ha repetido incesantemente a lo largo de la historia humana, argumenta Perlman, pues lamentablemente las víctimas y sobrevivientes de pogromos, holocaustos y demás atrocidades a menudo no se vuelven personas más simpáticas para con los más oprimidos, sino que puede darse todo lo contrario: las y los sobrevivientes de genocidios se tornan en genocidas ellos mismos, o al menos en hinchas de otros genocidios. Los oprimidos a menudo no desean otra cosa más que convertirse en opresores, fundando sus propios Estados y haciendo lo mismo que les hicieron a ellos a otras personas.

Esta es la triste realidad del mundo en el que vivimos, y los que siempre salen ganando de este proceso son el capitalismo y la civilización industrial occidental, que se nutren del trabajo asalariado de los y las trabajadoras explotadas, así como de la devastación de la naturaleza. Pero al final de "La reproducción de la vida cotidiana", Perlman ofrece un atisbo de esperanza: basta con que los seres humanos nos neguemos a seguir alienando nuestras vidas laborales para ponerle un freno permanente al sistema capitalista.
Profile Image for Aonarán.
113 reviews75 followers
Read
July 29, 2016
Hard copies of this classic critique of nationalism are available from MessingAround Press for $1-3+ shipping.

contact info: messingaround@riseup.net

Mi español es una mierda, pero lo intentaré una traducción. Las copias impresas de esta crítica clásica del nacionalismo están disponibles en MessingAround Press. Escala móvil de $1-3 (EE.UU) + envío.

messingaroundriseup.net

Profile Image for SomiadorElegit.
121 reviews24 followers
December 2, 2020
Una pedazo de lectura. Magnífico. Trata temas complejos con un lenguaje sencillo y ahonda profundamente en los engranajes del poder (la nación-Estado, el Capital) para avisarnos de las sutilezas y paradojas ocultas. Un canto a la liberación del hombre contra el falso progreso y las capas y capas de "razón" que ocultan la destrucción de la naturaleza tanto del hombre como de la Tierra.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews

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