16.07.2026

Anyone but England?

Despite going down to Argentina, there is still England vs France. Should we apply Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism to this and other matches? Can such an approach win the masses to revolution, or does it leave revolutionaries isolated from the masses? Carl Collins looks at football culture

My five-year-old nephew had barely finished colouring in his ‘Come on, England!’ poster before I removed it from his hands and deposited it in the recycling. “I’m sorry, Harry,” I explained, while reaching for a flannel to remove the St George’s Cross painted on his cheeks, “but your support for the England football team represents nothing more than regressive nationalism. It’s all there in the Socialist Worker editorial.” He looked at me puzzled. “Have you given any thought today to the systematic starvation of Bengal?” I asked him. He admitted that, until a few moments earlier, he’d been mainly thinking about how many goals Jude Bellingham might score.

My family protested that he simply liked football and was joining in watching the game with the rest of them - like they did for most tournaments, indeed as they do every weekend when supporting the local domestic club. Undeterred, I replaced my nephew’s plastic St George Cross flag with a placard reading, “The main enemy is at home”, and suggested he critically support Argentina instead!

As the rest of the family blithely gathered around the television with crisps and beer, committing the grave error of enjoying a football match together, I remained vigilant against outbreaks of class treachery. Every cheer for England was met with a brief seminar on the “plantation of Ulster”. Every rendition of ‘Sweet Caroline’ was interrupted with a lecture on African slavery. By full time, my nephew had retired to bed to dream about dinosaurs, my sister-in-law had asked me to leave, and absolutely nothing whatsoever had happened to British capitalism.

Confiscating a five-year-old’s ‘Come on, England’ flag is, of course, absurd. Yet the little story is useful because it exposes what happens when political theory is applied mechanically, detached from concrete conditions. Marxism insists upon concrete analysis of concrete circumstances. It is therefore worth examining why the July 8 Socialist Worker article’s treatment of football, national symbols and revolutionary defeatism departs from that method and becomes mechanical.

Firstly, we must ask what social relation is actually expressed by displaying the England flag. The editorial mistakes the object for the social relation. It argues that because the St George’s Cross has been associated with empire and British nationalism - both historically and contemporarily - displaying it during the football World Cup should be understood as reproducing that political tradition.

This is a simplistic, perhaps idealist, approach. It assumes that a symbol possesses a fixed political meaning, determined by its historical associations rather than by the social practice in which it appears.

Historical materialism proceeds differently. Objects do not possess intrinsic political meanings. Their significance depends upon the concrete social relations in which they are embedded. A church may function as a place of worship, a polling station or a food bank. A red flag can signify the demand for revenge in Shia Islam, international socialism or a warning sign on the railways.

The same applies to football. For the overwhelming majority of England supporters, displaying the St George’s Cross expresses participation in a mass sporting culture. It signifies support for the football team, encompassing family traditions and collective enjoyment. Millions of people who would never support chauvinist nationalism or an imperialist war enjoy international football. Their activity cannot simply be reduced to an endorsement of Britain’s colonial past.

Marxism has always distinguished between the ruling class and the people. The British working class did not create the East India Company, organise the plantation system in Ulster or engineer the Bengal famine. Those were all the result of the ruling class. To identify ordinary workers with the history of their rulers is erroneous.

The Socialist Worker editorial therefore fails to recognise that form can be given more than one content. Because the same flag was once used by feudal Crusaders and then formed the centre of the Union flag, it assumes that displaying it during a 21st century football tournament necessarily carries the same political meaning.

Contested terrain

Popular culture is contested terrain, not nationalist or fascist property. This does not mean denying that the far right attempts to appropriate football culture.

Reactionary movements have always sought legitimacy by attaching themselves to existing forms of mass culture. Fascism did not invent football … or popular music. It sought to colonise them. In reality, football supporters remain politically diverse rather than inherently reactionary.

The Socialist Worker editorial appears to move from the reasonable observation that reactionaries seek to exploit football culture to the conclusion that football culture itself is politically suspect. This is guilt by association rather than historical materialism.

Taken seriously, the logic quickly becomes untenable. The far right has attempted to utilize punk music, skinhead culture, environmentalism, anti-globalisation rhetoric and even the language of working class solidarity. No serious communist concludes that these cultural forms are therefore intrinsically racist or fascist. Instead, Marxists should understand them as sites of ideological struggle.

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is useful here. Popular culture is neither politically neutral nor permanently owned by any one social force. It is a contested terrain. The political question is therefore not whether football has been used by reactionaries - it plainly has - but whether communists abandon that terrain or contest it.

Historically, the labour movement invested heavily in culture, because it understood that political consciousness is shaped not only in workplaces, but also through leisure, community and everyday life. Working men’s institutes, choirs, brass bands, football clubs and educational societies all reflected the understanding that culture matters.

If millions of working class people derive identity, friendship and enjoyment from football, simply informing them that they are objectively reactionary does little beyond isolating socialists from the very people they hope to organise.

Although writing about participation in trade unions, parliament, etc, Lenin repeatedly criticised forms of socialism that confused political purity with political effectiveness. Communists do not win workers by demonstrating moral superiority over their everyday lives. They engage with existing popular culture, while challenging the bourgeois ideas that exist within it.

Treating ordinary football supporters as politically equivalent to fascists because both may display an England flag refuses to distinguish between appropriation and ownership, or between sporting enthusiasm and chauvinism.

The Socialist Worker editorial hints at extending the ‘bread and circuses’ idiom into a full adoption of a sort of revolutionary defeatism when supporting national football teams - from imperialist war to international football. Revolutionary defeatism, however, is one approach to an imperialist war, not sport, ignoring the conditions in which Lenin adopted the stance.

Revolutionary defeatism is remembered mainly from World War I. Most socialist parties abandoned internationalism and supported their own ruling classes in the inter-imperialist conflict. Workers were being mobilised to kill one another in the interests of competing capitalist states. Lenin’s insistence that “the main enemy is at home” addressed a specific political reality: participation in imperialist war strengthened the domestic bourgeoisie, while weakening the prospects for socialist revolution. Football occupies no comparable social relation.

Supporting England on a football pitch does not strengthen British imperialism in the same sense that supporting Britain’s participation in an imperialist war would. A football match is not a military campaign, however enthusiastically politicians may attempt to exploit sporting success for patriotic purposes.

States undoubtedly seek to harness sporting victories for ideological legitimacy. But this does not mean every supporter becomes an active participant in that ideological project. Otherwise one could argue that using public healthcare represents support for capitalism because bourgeois politicians and governments celebrate the NHS.

Choosing not to support England may be a perfectly legitimate personal choice. It is not, however, revolutionary defeatism in the Leninist sense, nor is it inherently anti-imperialist or anti-racist.

In demanding that readers of Socialist Worker stop waving the flag when supporting the football team, we must ask, whether, if they do that, capitalist power has been weakened. Has working class organisation advanced? Has imperialism or racism suffered a setback? The answer is no, of course. Refusing to support England remains primarily an impotent symbolic gesture rather than a revolutionary act. After all, bar pitch invasions the crowds can only boo and cheer. They are not active agents in bringing about victory or defeat. That is decided by 22 players … well and the ref.

This article’s opening scene illustrates the point. Nobody seriously imagines that removing a child’s face paint and replacing his England flag with a lecture on colonial history advances socialism. In reality, it is likely to do the exact opposite. The absurdity lies not in anti-imperialism itself, but in mechanically transplanting a slogan developed in the midst of an inter-imperialist war into an entirely different social sphere.

Communists should oppose racism, challenge chauvinism and resist every attempt by the ruling class or the far right to monopolise popular culture. But none of that requires treating football supporters as unconscious agents of empire or transforming revolutionary defeatism into an injunction to prefer whichever team happens to be playing against England.

Nationalism

Socialist Worker also appears to collapse patriotism, nationalism and chauvinism into a single category. Yet this is not how Marxists have traditionally approached the national question.

Marxism has never treated nations as eternal or sacred. Nations are historical formations shaped by material conditions and class relations. The political significance of national feeling therefore depends upon the interests it serves.

Lenin opposed Great Russian chauvinism, while defending the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. Communist and anti-colonial struggles globally have consciously mobilised patriotic sentiment against imperial domination. Whatever one’s assessment of particular movements, they demonstrate that not every expression of national feeling is politically identical.

A ruling class may invoke patriotism to justify war or austerity. Ordinary working people may experience attachment to their country through local traditions, shared institutions, language, family history or indeed sport. These experiences are not automatically progressive, but neither are they automatically reactionary, as Socialist Worker suggests.

For precisely that reason, communists have generally sought to distinguish popular patriotism from chauvinism rather than abandoning patriotic symbols altogether. This is not because patriotism is inherently progressive, but because politics cannot be conducted by surrendering every area of popular culture that reactionaries attempt to occupy.

If socialists insist that displaying an England flag necessarily places ordinary football supporters alongside racists, many workers will conclude that socialism has little to say about the cultural life they actually live. The beneficiaries of such an approach are not the left, but those on the far right, who wish to monopolise national identity.

Patriotism

Socialist Worker closes by saying, “there’s no such thing as progressive patriotism”. Is this correct? As a universal statement I do not believe so. Whether patriotism is progressive, reactionary or politically ambiguous depends on its class content, historical context and material function.

As I have outlined, chauvinism and patriotism are not the same thing. Chauvinistic nationalism subordinates the working class to its ‘own’ ruling class, encouraging workers to identify with the interests of capitalism against the global working class. Patriotism, by contrast, can simply denote attachment to a country, its people and its revolutionary and democratic cultural traditions.

Could a strong patriotic feeling against colonialism, invasion or occupation not be funnelled towards progressive movements and outcomes? Did Marx, Engels and Lenin not support Irish independence from British colonial rule? Would not the patriotism of the Irish people towards their country and culture be a component of any successful independence movement?

This point in particular is what surprised me most about the editorial, given the Socialist Workers Party’s participation in supporting the Palestinian national liberation struggle, where it frequently uses Palestinian national symbols - including the Palestinian flag. If one argues that there is no such thing as progressive patriotism, then it becomes difficult to explain why the patriotic attachment of Palestinians to their homeland is treated as something to champion.