If your goal is the overthrow of the ruling class, first you need to develop the idea of the ruling class. And if it helps your efforts to identify it with a specific racial identity that transcends national boundaries (for example, whiteness), then that’s a way to marry tribalism and socialism. You can probably even get people within that class to side against it ideologically. Next you work on developing the idea of a persecuted and oppressed class identity that transcends national lines. If you can line that up with a racial or other biological identity that transcends national boundaries (sexual identity subcultures could and have become a trans-national tribal identity, for example; and people of color, generally construed, are another one), then you’ve got a basis for an oppressed class that can unite across technical national boundaries because it retains the power of biological tribal proximity without being a formal nation.

That’s how you marry nationalism with socialism. You just figure out what the common underlying unity was in nationalism that was a problem, and figure out a way to work with it and maneuver it into the position you need it to occupy. Then draw the distinctions between the oppressed class (which is now also a racial or biological identity class) and the oppressor class (which is now also a racial or biological identity class), and tell the story of that oppression again and again. Keep redrawing those differences and emphasizing the story of those differences, inflame those racial/class/tribal differences. Explain how the victims have been unfairly oppressed and how the perpetrators are their enemies. Make the story of that oppression the story of everything. Reinterpret all history, all civil and private institutions, all interactions between people in those terms, as a conflict between those classes. That provides the justification for the wholesale dismantling and restructuring of those systems. And right there you’ve got the makings for a worldwide, trans-national revolution.

Postscript: This post might require some background in the history of socialist movements to really make sense. One of the fundamental problems of socialism and the Marxist theory is that the workers of the world failed to unite. It was very hard to get socialist regimes to cooperate across national boundaires. And it was very hard to get people to take the sort of class-based action that was needed when they were still hanging on to the filial attachment of nationhood. It was very hard to get people to identify properly with class and set aside their commonality of history and proximity and tribal ethnic identity. Socialist theoreticians underestimated the power and tenacity of tribal identity to unite people across class boundaries.

Familial attachments were, of course, another problem. If anyone has ever read the mission statements of a Marxist organization and wondered, “What does dismantling the nuclear family have to do with socialism?” then they either haven’t properly understood the desired social structure socialism aims toward, or they haven’t properly appreciated the power of the family.

The family unit has the ability to be terrifically tenacious and powerful, to persist across time and across differences within a group of people. It is its own little state, its own micro-society and micro-government. And that makes it a competitor to the socialistic, centralized class-defined state. It introduces loyalties that oppose and restrain the socialist project and weakens loyalties the socialist project needs to emphasize. So its power base, its franchise on loyalty, has to be eroded and reassigned to the collective.