Socialists on Twitter are usually fighting about something, and it appears this month, it’s the singing of “The Internationale”. The main accusation is that it is “cringe” and it is “LARPing” (“Live Action Role-Playing” for the uninitiated, used in modern parlance to designate aping political aesthetics detached from the mass movements that created them). It is worth mentioning that the person who posted this comes from America, and there are certain reactions to this. However, much of what can be said about American left culture today can also be applied to Britain. As such, we thought it worth to opine in what is our first open letter.
The Internationale was never a widely sung song in Britain. This is likely due to a few reasons: the song came from France at a time when the British socialist movement was quite inward-looking, “The Red Flag” would be penned a decade later and become the song of socialism in Britain and Ireland, and the fact that its original translation was quite stilted (an issue that persists to this day). Add to this that the British Communist movement, unlike its continental cousins, never grew to contend as the main force of the left (let alone be its leading light), it makes sense that the Internationale remained relatively minor. Still, the British Left for most of its history retained a tradition of political song singing that carried through all of its eras. Reports from the anti-fascist Battle of Holbeck Moor in Leeds state they drowned out Mosley with The Red Flag, a song that would have been half a century old to them. Likewise, during the great and final miners’ strike of 1984, choirs recorded versions of it to raise money for those battling neoliberalism, and then during the Corbyn Years, it made a minor resurgence. The Red Flag, like The Internationale and Solidarity Forever, are songs that anchors us to struggles past and to our international comrades.
At a recent performance for the Italian diaspora on their “Liberation Day” (25th of April), we played two of their songs from their anti-fascist struggle: Fischia il Vento (sung to the tune of the WW2 partisan song “Katyusha”) and the well-renowned Bella Ciao. As we finished the second of these, a man called out from the back: “L’Internazionale!” Was this elderly working-class Italian from the Mezzogiorno a LARPer? Is he cringe for wanting to sing the international song of our movement? Of course not! (For the record, it was decided we would break for lunch before singing any more songs, and we never managed to reconvene to sing either The Internationale or Bandera Rossa, but the point still stands.)
When made a ritual of ingroup identification, anything can be a LARP that is outwardly cringe. What separates an in-group identifier from a tradition is the desire to incorporate a community into it. Socialism is not a “scene”; it is not about gatekeeping to maintain purity or edginess. It is the movement for the emancipation of the proletariat, the wage-earning working class. So if it must be taught, teach the Internationale. Teach its origin in the despair and hope following the defeat of the Paris Commune. Its use by the workers of Russia, Belgium, and America in the face of the gendarmerie. It’s place in the anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia. Its symbolism in anti-imperialist resistance and unity in Latin America. At The World Transformed 2025 in Hulme, Manchester, we helped form a choir that, together with the Manchester People’s Orchestra, performed a setting of the tune by Alan Bush at the closing ceremony. Our Palestinian comrades were initially meant to sing a verse in their variety of Arabic written especially for this performance. However, earlier that day, they had received the news of Saleh al-Jafarawi’s assassination by Israel, and felt they could not sing such a song of hope. Instead, we hummed the tune in harmony. At this moment, in her own words, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media broke down and cried. She said it hit home that we were singing the song of countless martyrs in the cause of freedom: an inheritance that we articulated in a song that predates the invention of the telephone. She was not alone. That is the power of The Internationale. That is why we sing it.
There is one point of agreement that we believe all sides of this discussion can come together on, however: there isn’t a good English language version of The Internationale. This needs to be rectified whenever possible.
