Towards an Australian National Bolshevism

This article is about National Bolshevism and why Australian nationalists should take it up. Given that National Bolshevism is a controversial topic in the nationalist community, I spend a lot of time here arguing for my case.

To begin with, we should define some terms, seeing as the average nationalist reader doesn't, I think, encounter them every day.

Marxism refers to the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - political, economic, and sociological theories which portend the appearance of class struggle (conflict between the workers and the bourgeoisie) leading up to a class war, culminating in the inevitable transformation of capitalist societies into socialist ones after the collapse of capitalism 'under the weight of its own contradictions'. Marxist-Leninism refers to the development of Marx's ideas by Lenin and their embodiment in a political party (a vanguard party, which is well in advance of everyone else in terms of its thinking) which upholds the principles of 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the abolition of capitalism and liberal democracy through violent revolution, etc. Marxist-Leninism is more or less what we know as communism. There are only five communist states in the world today: Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, China. At least one of them (China) has abandoned much of communism in practice, especially when it comes to the command economy and the abolition of property.

Socialism is another word communists use for Marxist-Leninism; they don't recognise the liberal and parliamentary forms of socialism, e.g., social-democracy (the socialism of the Australian Labor Party or the British Labour Party) as being truly socialist. Bourgeois refers to just about anything that is non-communist: the Australian Labor Party is a bourgeois party, not a true party of the workers. As for the working-classes themselves, this refers to the social class that doesn't own property and has to work for a living. Generally the communist ideology, in practice, only refers to them as working-class if the workers are capable of being recruited and ensnared by the communist movement; chavs, skinheads, conservative Liberal Party voters, anti-communist Catholics - these are not working-class, instead they are bourgeois, perhaps even reactionary and fascist.

National Bolshevism refers to a tendency in the German communist movement which first appeared in the early 1920s. Certain communist intellectuals argued certain sectors of German bourgeois society (especially the Far Right and the German military) should be won over to communism through a change in rhetoric; German patriots could form an alliance with the communists against the Versailles treaty, the French occupation of the Ruhr and Allied finance-capital. An alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia was endorsed; the two of them would stand, in an Eastern coalition, against the Allies in the West.

A good outline of German National Bolshevism can be found here. From this article, we can see that the history of National Bolshevism and the Red-Brown alliance can be divided up into two parts. National Bolshevism first appears in Germany political discourse in the early 1920s, when two prominent communists put forward the idea of a patriotic alliance against the Treaty of Versailles:

Though in pre-war German (unlike in Russia today) the term ‘National Bolshevism’ was not the name of any organised party or group in Germany – it was in Germany that it had its roots, the very terms ‘National Communism’ and ’National Bolshevism’ having first been coined by the German communists Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim (the latter himself Jewish by birth) at the end of the 1st World War. What defined their stance was an appeal to German workers’ councils and soldiers, now freed from the dictates of the Kaiser and his generals, to reject the Versailles Treaty and instead continue the war against the Anglo-French entente - yet this time as a national revolutionary war – conducted in alliance with Soviet Russia against international finance capitalism.

Although their appeal to Lenin to follow this line was rejected, it was his slogan that they used to define ‘National Bolshevism’: “Make the question of the people a question of the nation; then the question of the nation will become the question of the people!”

‘Laufenberg and Wolffheim were expelled from the KPD after they attempted to resist the leadership of Wilhelm Pieck. Radek, after showing initial enthusiasm, soon also denounced Laufenberg’s ‘National Bolshevism’ vehemently. Laufenberg went on to become a founder member of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), joining Wolffheim at the Heidelberg conference establishing the party. By 1920 however he had been expelled from the party, with his national Bolshevism the official reason for his departure. Laufenberg was mourned as a pioneer of National Bolshevism by Ernst Niekisch who wrote that “in 1919 Laufenberg already thought in terms of continents”.’

“Laufenberg … who in pre-war times had already made his name as a historian of the Hamburg workers’ movement, sickened by the dividedness of the working class and the impotent fight of all against all whilst the nation suffered unspeakably under the oppression of the victorious powers, demanded, together with his friend Wolffheim, the building up of a free and cohesive people’s organisation to bring down exploitative international finance capitalism. They sought to win allies from all strata among the freedom-loving people, conspiring also with officers, because only the unity of soldiers and workers could free the nation. The official parties defamed both determined heads as ‘National Bolsheviks’… “

The second phase of National Bolshevism was the attempt of the German Communist Party to lure Far Rightists (including National Socialists) into a united front:

The failure of the ‘National Communism’ of Laufenberg and Wolffheim was by no means the end of the story as regards the story of National Bolshevism in Germany i.e. the principle of uniting factions from both Right and Light, including dissident members of both the Nazi and Communist parties. In 1930 a new step in this direction was initiated under the banner of a new, ‘Social Revolutionary Nationalism’ - this time from associations of the nationalist Right and Nationalist youth. Hence the following press declaration from ‘Die Kommenden’ (‘The Ones to Come’) a weekly journal of the Association of National Revolutionary Youth [Bündisch-Nationalrevolutionären Jugend].

“On Ascension day 1930, what for long had been a loosely connected group of young National Revolutionaries who saw socialism as the essence of true nationalism were called together from different parts of the country to form a ‘Socialist Revolutionary Nationalist Group’ [‘Gruppe social revolutionärer Nationalisten’ or GSRN]. The group does not wish to form a new organisation but to create an umbrella embracing all young people with a similar world-view from diverse nationalistic groupings and associations – including both National Socialists and people from the ‘left’ – under the slogan of ‘Nation and Socialism’ and its realisation in the form of a state based on people’s councils.”

The aim of the Group was not only to build an “Anti-Capitalist Front of youth from both Right and Left” but an Anti-Fascist one – hence also the use of the term ‘Socialist Nationalism’ instead of ‘National Socialism’. And as its founder Karl Otto Paetel points out, the fact that it included in its ranks card-carrying members of Hitler’s National Socialist Party was so that the Nazi party could itself be infiltrated and its leadership ultimately overtaken, and its programme transformed into a thoroughly socialist one free of fascist elements. Indeed a new, more radically socialist manifesto for the National Socialist Party was distributed at a Nurenburg Party Conference. This concluded with the following words:

“Since total control over the whole of German industry lies today in the hands of organs of international finance capitalism, the national revolution is directed unconditionally against international finance capitalism. As a result, any fully realised German revolution will immediately call forth the use of all powers and means by America and its leagues of countries against the German worker’s and peasants’ state. The first task of National Socialist foreign policy is therefore the organisation of a revolutionary defence against the imperialist powers, unity with the Soviet Union and support for revolutionary movements in all countries of the world that oppose international finance capital.”

I will explain in a moment how certain of these ideas can be applied in an Australian context. But it should be noted that unfortunately there's not much in the way of theoretical content for National Bolshevism at the present time - the works of Niekisch, Paetel and others haven't been translated from the German; Otto Strasser's work (or ghost-written work) has been translated into English, hence the popularity of Strasserism, but really doesn't have much in value. Literature for National Bolshevism, National-Anarchism and Third Positionism is thin on the ground, and this leads to problems down the line. Anyone who is an activist of any ideology needs plenty of original content, i.e., content written for that ideology and no other. Because of the lack of original content, a National-Anarchist (for example) must either pass off the work of a nationalist thinker as being 'National-Anarchist' or go back to the old neofascist and racialist ideologies (and their endless preoccupations with Negroes and Jews) once one's stock of National-Anarchism runs out.

This isn't a serious problem so far as National Bolshevism is concerned, though. National Bolshevism is compatible with Marxist socialism, and there is a lot of Marxist-Leninist thought out there. All one has to do is import it into a National Bolshevist context - that can fill out the spaces left by the Niekischs and Paetels. The thing is to adapt the theory - Marxist and National Bolshevist - to the peculiar circumstances of one's country. Those circumstances include the 'revolutionary situation' (i.e., the amenability of that country to an uprising or revolution) the country is in.

Australia in 2014 is a capitalist country, of course, with a liberal democracy; it is, at the same time, in the process of being conquered, economically, demographically, politically, culturally, by Chinese imperialism. This is not what the old Maoists called 'social imperialism' - i.e., one communist power dominating a weaker one - but an imperialism of a new type. China is not fully communist and neither is it fully capitalist and liberal-democratic, but we can say, however, that it gone far down the capitalist road after the death of Mao and has transformed itself into a hybrid of a type which has never been seen before.

What is the response of the Australian patriot to Chinese imperialism? The answer is the same as that of the old Bolsheviks and Maoists: resistance, revolution, struggle. In fact, several old concepts of the Left - including the Maoist Left - can be dusted off and used again in this unprecedented situation. One such concept is Mao's New Democracy - that is, collaboration with the bourgeois (non-communist) elements which are patriotically opposed to the invader (in Mao's time, the Japanese) and who wish to form a resistance movement - what Mao called the national-bourgeoisie. In the present day Australian context, the national-bourgeoisie are the conservative groups (including businessmen), plus the reformist (social democratic and non-communist) trade unions, the right-wing intellectuals and others who are opposed to Chinese expansionism. An appeal to them can be made through patriotism, nationalism and racialism. But implicit in this appeal is the proposition that capitalism helped get us into this mess in the first place, and that the country will need to steer towards 'real socialism' once the invader has been driven from our shores.

As one can see, the National Bolshevist line in the context of Australia and Australia's national struggle in 2014 practically writes itself and tends to determine the tactics (propaganda, the methods of organisation, the attitudes towards other groupings in society, etc.) used. It's not too difficult to arrive at a blending of the most extreme socialism and nationalism which should appeal to some both on the Far Left and the Far Right.

I anticipate, contra to this assertion of mine, two responses: a) you don't really want to turn Australia into a Cuban or North Korean (or Venezuelan) economy do you, and b) are you so arrogant that you can really achieve this?

These objections are a case of another question hiding behind the question asked. In his 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Communism, Archie Brown identifies six key fundamental tenets of what he calls 'communist systems', that is, countries run by communist parties. Two of these fundamentals are: i) the abolition of property and ii) the command economy. Now, at first sight, our interlocutor is asking us whether or not a Cuban or North Korean-style economy - where property is more or less abolished and where the economy runs along command lines - is desirable, here in Australia or anywhere else. It's a reasonable question to ask and one easy enough to answer. But any answers would be banal. I.e., one would respond with truisms to the effect that Cuba and North Korea have their good and bad sides, and as to whether or not the good preponderates over the bad, well, that depends on where you stand politically. Perhaps 'the truth lies somewhere in the middle'. I don't think the interlocutor is asking that question: no, what they are asking is, are Cuba and North Korea inevitable? Is the capitalist system heading towards a crash, as Marx and Engels claimed, and will the existing system be 'inevitably' replaced by a socialist one after a revolution of the working-classes?

Any sociologist can use Marx's method of class analysis and view society through the prism of class. One can do this and not be a Marxist. What makes one's analysis of classes truly Marxist is this (from a famous letter Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer:

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

This is related to a third tenet identified by Brown: the doctrine that the 'socialist' (i.e., Communist Party-ruled) states were moving towards communism and the 'withering away of the state'. Khrushchev, in a 1961 speech, made the famous prediction that the USSR would attain communism by 1980. According to Brown, very few communist leaders believed, after 1960 or so, in the 'transition to communism' doctrine, although they continued to state, in public, that they did so. But the 'transition' doctrine is one of the fundamentals of Marxism, and is of a piece with the doctrine of the 'inevitability' of socialism and capitalist collapse. Marxism is built on the idea that history progresses 'inevitably' through economic, social and political stages, and this is something that distinguishes it from the other socialisms out there.

Which is why the events of 1991 were such a blow: given that the capitalist and feudal societies of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., had 'inevitably' given birth to socialism, there was no going back - and yet they did and it was as though Lenin had never existed and one of the decisive turning points in history - the 1917 October revolution - had never occurred.

In Victor Sebestyen's 2009 book, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, we find the East German leader Egon Krenz declaiming, in October 1989 (shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall): ‘We [in the Communist Party] have no other interest than that of the people... Our historical optimism results from the knowledge of the ineluctability of the victory of socialism founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin’.

Krenz was putting a brave face on it, holding fast to the Marxist doctrine in the face of imminent defeat. Perhaps Krenz will be right in the long run: communism will eventually triumph in a hundred or a thousand years from now. But the point of Marx's and Engel's predictions of the 'ineluctable' collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism was that they would come true in the near future. The argument of Marxist-Leninism is that the prediction did come true, in Russia in 1917, a mere 22 years after the death of Engels. But the events of 1989-1991 in Europe and Asia disproved the Marxist hypothesis; they constituted a refutation of Marxism. Quite possibly communism will never recover. National Bolshevism, then, is wrong because it is built, in part, on the false theory of Marxism.

All is not lost, however. We have to look to the example of the Left. In the early 1990s, the communist Left was faced with two choices. One was to give up - and many of the pro-Soviet communist parties (including Australia's) dissolved themselves by 1991 - and the other choice was to soldier on. The Indian Maoist guerrillas - perhaps the last true Maoists in the world - soldier on; the hundreds of Trotskyite, Maoist, Hoxhaist and other communist grouplets in the West continue, in a half-hearted way, and attract little in the way of mass support. One can't say of them that they are a growing movement. But much of this is due to age and weariness. Many of them lived through the time of the Soviet Union and really couldn't conceive of a world without a great power - of the stature of a China or Russia - which was not a 'communist system' and didn't serve as an example to the communist parties struggling to bring about a socialist revolution in the West. After 1991, they lost heart; they couldn't bear to pick up the pieces and start over from scratch - even though Marxist-Leninism preaches that communists should struggle for revolution even in the most difficult conditions and in the most 'reactionary' settings.

This is one of the aspects of Marxist-Leninism which a nationalist should find intriguing: the starting from scratch, the modularity (that is, being able to carried from place to place) of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary doctrine. Marxism doesn't accept things as they are; it is not content to sit still. They have a get up and go attitude, or at least, they did, before 1991. Only the Indian Maoists today have the same spirit.

So, if National Bolshevik ideologists such as Ernst Niekisch or Karl Otto Paetel were alive today, they would counsel National Bolshevists to follow the example of the Indian Maoists and, in the words of Churchill, 'Keep buggering on' - despite the notion that the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the backsliding of China into capitalism, disproves Marxism.

So how do we implement National Bolshevism in the context of (Far Right nationalist) political group? The first thing to do is to change one's propaganda line. Here are a few suggestions.

For starters, a nationalist group can reach out to the Left - towards a particular socialist nation, that is, and not to any particular Trotskyite or Maoist group - by putting a 'Hands off Cuba' or 'Hands off North Korea' icon on the sidebar of one's site. (The really novel thing to do would be for a nationalist group to organise a sight-seeing trip to North Korea and then write an article on it once one gets back to Australia - 'North Korea: Positive Aspects'. If Holocaust Revisionists like Dr Fred Toeben and Dr Robert Faurrison can attend conferences in Tehran, why can't nationalists go to Pyongyang?).

The second thing is to downplay certain elements of Far Rightism: no obvious white nationalism / Whitakerism, WWII or Holocaust Revisionism, anti-Semitism, etc. in one's propaganda - these subjects can be brought up in face to face conversations, but can't be identified publicly with the organisation. Similarly, one's language can be cleaned up - Chinese aren't referred to as 'gooks', 'slants' and 'chinks, and perhaps one can use the old Soviet euphemisms for Jews - 'Zionists' and 'cosmopolitans'. It's all about how one wants to be perceived by other people at the start of one's interaction with them.

Nationalists can adapt their rhetoric in these face to face conversations with non-nationalists. One can alter the thrust of one's conversation, depending on whom one is talking to - a left-winger or a right-winger. To a left-winger, a nationalist can talk about anti-capitalism and the struggle for worker's rights and better conditions, and then slowly shift to the topic of Chinese economic, political, cultural and demographic expansionism (demographics can be left to last) and how openness to the importation of Chinese capital and labour undercuts Australian workers; then talk about how China has changed since 1978 after Deng Xiaoping and how it has deviated from Maoism; then finally, on to the Maoist concepts such as New Democracy and the national bourgeoisie and how they are to be applied in a present-day Australian context. For a right-winger, one has to make the same progression backwards: one condemns the Gina Rinehart comprador class (the comprador class is the section of the capitalist class which benefits economically through a relationship with the foreign imperialist power) and the Chinese capitalist expansion, and then sketch out the difference between the Rinehart comprador bourgeois and the 'patriotic' national bourgeoisie, and how a real worker's revolution here in Australia would overthrow one and then the other.

This strategy has some real merits, which I will go on to argue for in a moment. But the question may be asked: to what extent do should a group publicly identify itself with National Bolshevism? Should it call itself a National Bolshevist party, like Limonov's group in Russia? Should it adopt the 'Nazbol' symbol? I would answer in the negative, because of the risk of sectarianism - that is, alienating the working-classes and the masses from the cause and isolating itself from them. This alienation and isolation comes about when a communist group becomes too overtly radical, and hence frightening, and when it refuses to work with non-communist elements of the Left (and the general population) for a common cause (e.g., nuclear disarmament) because it considers itself to be ideologically pure and believes that it will be tainted by contact with non-communist groups. We know from our own activism that there is a sectarianism of the Far Right as well as the Far Left.

Another reason why any nationalist should hesitate before aligning themselves with the National Bolshevik movement as it is today (Limonov, et al.) simply for the reason that there's not much there. The author of the National People's Party website doesn't seem to have a grasp of Marxist-Leninism - he seems to be more an anti-bankster populist in the C.H. Douglas / Lyndon Larouche vein - and any half-decent Marxist-Leninist who encountered him would be able to tear his ideas to shreds. It's a matter of substance. What's needed are national intellectuals who can apply the ideas of Marx, Lenin, to the Australian revolutionary situation (or lack of it) and to a certain extent simplify the ideas for the Australian patriotic working man.

On top of this, the National Bolshevist groups - Strasserist and non-Strasserist - go out of their way to criticise Hitler, National Socialism and the NSDAP and, on that topic, sound like liberals. I don’t know why they do this: perhaps they are under the mistaken assumption that they will get a free pass from liberals and the Left. At any rate, any of this criticism is sectarian and tends to alienate the traditional Far Right base. (It’s not that Hitler and National Socialism can’t be criticised; it’s that the self-professed National Bolsheviks are trying to make a political point through that criticism. There are plenty of people one can criticise from that era - Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek - why Hitler? It’s because the National Bolsheviks are desperate not to be seen as run-of-the-mill ‘Neo-Nazis’, which is fine, but antagonising the Far Right base is not the way to do it).

My proposed Australian National Bolshevism avoids such a quandary by downplaying WWII, Holocaust Revisionism, Jew-baiting, etc., and it must be admitted that these topics don’t have much relevance to the Australian revolutionary and national struggle today (as a cursory examination of Hitler and the NSDAP’s texts will reveal).

A nationalist ought to get involved in trade union struggles as part of a National Bolshevik strategy. But this presents a danger to nationalists and it is one that is often encountered by the radical Left.

Australia has a large social democratic party (the Australian Labor Party) and trade union movement, and while the latter is declining, it is still a powerful force, politically, to be reckoned with. Communists have long sought to infiltrate the union movement world wide, build power bases there, and steer it towards strikes and other manifestations (as they see them of) class struggle leading up to class war and thence revolution. The trouble is that they can get absorbed by the trade union struggle and swallowed by it whole; they end up losing their identity as communist activists and getting dissolved. This is opportunism and has always been a big problem for communists. No doubt nationalists adopting a National Bolshevism will face the same problem and be unprepared for it more than the communists, given their inexperience with working inside mass organisations. The nationalists in the trade union must always keep in mind the three struggles: the trade union struggle (trade unionist), class struggle (socialist) and national struggle (nationalist).

The flip side of opportunism is sectarianism, and again, one has to be careful not to be sectarian. National Bolshevism is an eccentric, unusual doctrine and I know from personal experience how alienating such doctrines can be. I was part of a nationalist group which was gradually infiltrated by a National-Anarchist tendency. I was told, by the National-Anarchist in the group, that the National-Anarchist mixture of ‘left’ and ‘right’ symbols (similar to the Nazbol symbols) was good in that it ‘confused the Left’, who would be unable to identify National-Anarchism as being on the Left or Right, and, furthermore, would be perturbed by an erstwhile Far Right nationalist group’s appropriations of their symbols. (Obviously, this strategy of the National-Anarchists, and the term National-Anarchism itself, was inspired by the National Bolshevist formations). In practice, however, the National-Anarchists weren’t very convincing anarchists and didn’t seem to know what they were talking about on the topic of anarchism; it would have been impossible for them to successfully infiltrate, for example, an anarchist gathering and convince the attendees that they were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists. (A really clever, Machiavellian stunt would have been for Troy Southgate, the founder of National-Anarchism, to publicly renounce Far Right nationalism and ‘racism’ altogether and then attempt to pass himself off as a bona-fide, born again conventional anarchist and libertarian communist. He could have used his newfound position as an anarchist penitent to sow racialist ideas in the Left. But that would have required a discipline and long-term dedication that he didn’t have). The National-Anarchists didn’t make any inroads with the anarchist Left and, over time, ended up isolating themselves from the Far Right nationalist base, which they depend upon still for support (despite, at the same time, disparaging it). There is a lesson there, should they care to learn it, for the National Bolsheviks, Freie Nationalisten and any other Far Right groups which seek to introduce and apply left-wing ideas to the Far Right.

So what are the advantages of National Bolshevism? Let's look at this from a perspective most Far Right nationalists will find unusual - the perspective of someone from the radical Left who may wish to form a Red-Brown alliance. As we have seen, this was one of the strategies of the communist Left back in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. National Bolshevist rhetoric was used, especially by the KPD (German Communist Party), as a means of converting National Socialists to communism. We today in Australia don't find ourselves in a similar situation as the National Socialists and Communists in the early 1930s, of course. Today's Left is weak and fragmented, despite appearances to the contrary, and isn't the slightest bit interested in recruiting Neo-Nazis, neofascists, Far Rightists, right-wing nationalists or in changing their minds, simply because it doesn't see any political advantage in doing so. In the early 1930s, things were different; the NSDAP were stealing millions of working-class votes from the communists. All the same, the Far Right in the West is growing and should be categorised as a 'live' movement, whereas the Far Left is imploding (and has been in decline for at least thirty years) and should be categorised as dying if not dead. A really smart communist would use National Bolshevism in order to appeal to the Far Right and to nationalists.

So what are the benefits? The first is that any appeals to nationalism will make the Far Left cause more attractive. Most of the communist revolutions in the 20th century were national-communist - nationalism of some sort played a role - and often racialist. (We can look at Vietnamese communism, for example; Vietnamese communism was nationalist and anti-Chinese). The Western Left in the 20th century shot itself in the foot by abandoning nationalism. As Gilad Atzmon says, the Left has become deracinated, anti-nationalist and fragmented; its ideological world-view encourages us to see ourselves as atomised individuals with no race or history or nation.

Related to this is that the Far Left has become sectarian and ultra-left, and as a result, has only isolated itself from the working-classes (who tend more often than not to be conservative). The communists have always been for left-liberalism, of course; there has never been a time when they held to a socially conservative line. But in the 21st century they've gone overboard. No real working-class Australian, no blue-collar trade unionist, will have anything to do with the Trotskyite communists in this country simply because they recognise today's Trotskyite groups for what they are - homosexual and lesbian social clubs. The Left will always berate the workers for their racism and homophobia and argue that the fault lies in the workers and that the workers need to be lead away from their natural 'reactionary' beliefs. But there comes a time when one must stop trying to push further and further to the left and for more and more radical social change - to slow down and work with what one has instead of trying to continually adjust it. This is where National Bolshevism comes in. It can slam on the brakes. The Left will be adjusted and adapted to mainstream Australia instead of the other way around.

Another benefit for the Left (and this comes back to recruitment) is that National Bolshevism can get members of the Far Right thinking about anti-capitalism, socialism and Marxism. Most nationalists and Far Rightists are sympathetic to anti-capitalism; the Slovak nationalist platform, for example, calls for social justice (the Slovaks are inspired by the fascist and national-socialist Czech priest and wartime collaborator with the Germans, Father Tiso). A cunning leftist will be able to capitalise upon this. The Trotskyite Victor Serge recounts a speech given by a German communist to an NSDAP audience in 1923:

The three public debates between Fascist speakers and our comrade Hermann Remmele  – at Stuttgart on 2 and 10 August and at Göppingen on 16 August – have, like Radek’s articles, gone right around reactionary Germany, which is on a civil war footing.

Let’s look through the little pamphlet containing Remmele’s speeches to the South German Fascists, and we’ll be looking at what idiots – or dishonest politicians – are calling National Bolshevism. ‘You’re fighting Jewish finance’, says Remmele to the Fascists, ‘Good! But also fight the other finance, that of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes, Klöckner and so on!’, and he makes these anti-Semites applaud the class struggle. ‘You are fighting the workers because your masters, the big capitalists, want to divide and rule, want to divide you people from the ruined proletarianised middle classes, from us proletarians!’, and he gets these reactionaries to applaud the united front of all the exploited. ‘Are you patriots?’, he asks, and he shows how big German industry is linked in many profitable deals with French capital, selling it its manufacturing secrets, like the Baden aniline trust, preparing the way for the colonisation of Germany, and getting rich from the falling value of the mark. ‘Which of you wants to get killed for capitalist Germany?’, and he gets the whole hall to shout out: ‘None of us!’

In its positive part, his line of argument is simple:

Hungry Germany cannot be free without first shaking the yoke of its national capitalism.

The Treaty of Versailles cannot be cancelled until there is no longer a capitalist Germany.

One people has already shown you how to liberate yourselves: look at the example of the internationalist Soviets!

Together we are between 16 and 18 million proletarians whose wages have fallen by at least four-fifths; and between nine and 11 million small business people who have been ruined. They used to tell you that Communism would take everything away from you: it’s capitalism which has taken everything away from you. The proletariat will liberate you by liberating itself.

　
I have spoken here of the advantages of National Bolshevism for the Left; now I will list some of the advantages for the Right. The first is that the Marxist-Leninist component will give the Far Right a little more weight and solidity. Much of the Far Right racialist and nationalist ideology doesn't add up to much if you scratch the surface. The white nationalist and Whitakerite discourse is all about identity - 'Who am I? - and how one's identity as a white person is thrown into sharp relief when it is contrasted against the behaviour of non-whites, and in particular, one non-white race - the African race. The denizens of Birmingham, Port-au-Prince, Detroit and Soweto are very non-white indeed and any white person (whether they be from Portugal or Ireland) becomes very aware of his whiteness once he comes into contact with them. It's only in these extreme situations that slogans and phrases such as 'white power' and 'pro-white' have any concrete meaning. Otherwise, one descends into abstraction. As of the time of writing, we are faced with the inability of two very white, subracial groups - the Ukrainians and the Russians - to come to an agreement as to the status of Crimea. What's the 'pro-white' thing to do?

The counterpart of the white nationalist and Whitakerite ideology in the US is the left-wing campaign against ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white skin privilege’ (a term invented by an American Maoist intellectual). See here for a typical example. The Left in Australia allege that the Aboriginals are oppressed by the descendants of the European ‘invaders’ of 1788, but hardly anyone takes this sort of thing seriously. ‘White supremacist’ and ‘white skin privilege’ talk really hasn’t taken root here, mainly because Australia was never what America and South Africa were - segregated societies in which whites lived among a large, potentially hostile population of black people. White nationalism and Whitakerism doesn’t have a place here, whereas some form of national Marxism does.

Another of the advantages of National Bolshevism is that it could potentially broaden the base of the nationalist movement. Partially this is because Marxism is much more respectable than anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, white nationalism / Whitakerism, neofascism; it is, in fact, part of the liberal establishment. Today's Australian communists are not the persecuted communists of the 1950s, forced to live semi-underground and in danger of being banned. They are allowed to flourish and work in the open. Marxist-Leninism is, paradoxically, today conservative. As such, a Marxist-Leninist veneer can give nationalists camouflage. So long as the nationalist activist is able to walk the walk and talk the talk, and gives the impression of really knowing his socialism (and not of being a faker, like the Nationalist-Anarchist), he can find fresh fields for nationalism; he can branch out and reach to the intelligentsia, the trade unionists, the students. Doors which have been traditionally been closed to the Far Right will open.

One can argue, contra to this, that National Bolshevism will only serve to alienate people, seeing as most Australians (presumably) don't want to live in a North Korea or a Cuba and don't vote for the communists who do bother to run in elections. I think that one has to distinguish between alienation and polarisation. National-Anarchists simply turned droves of people off, that is, it alienated them (which is a bad thing) when it intended to split them down the middle, that is, polarise them (which is a good thing). Bolshevism, in the beginning, was ultra-sectarian; that is, it relentlessly attacked and sought to distinguish itself from its competitors in the socialist movement. It split the Left down the middle and thereby made itself stronger. On top of that, it was not a mainstream, liberal-democratic and parliamentary movement; it positioned itself on the outside of liberal society. It refused to dissolve itself and become absorbed in mainstream political and trade union life. Nationalists can learn from the Bolshevik example. Radicalism and differentiation is a positive, and not a negative, and we know that any attempt by Australian nationalists to make nationalism 'respectable' and therefore appealing to a Liberal Party or mainstream conservative (i.e., Andrew Bolt) electorate has invariably led to failure. 'Mainstreaming' Australian nationalism has not raised its profile; rather, it has obscured it. What's more, it has encouraged dangerous delusions, among nationalists, that somehow the mainstream political parties will get Australia out of its current predicament.

The arguments I have made here can be applied to (what I call) the anti-China line. Chinese imperialism and expansionism serves better as a target for our propaganda than, say, Judaism, Illuminatism, Freemasonry or the American Negro (the obsession of the American Far Right) because it is visible, concrete and tangible. The Australian masses can see it and they understand it. China is not something abstract and it is not (in 2014) something in a far away land: it is right here, right now. What's more, it is not something that happened yesterday in other countries, like WWII and the Holocaust. The anti-China line efers to our present historical situation which is unique. China has never before been the imperialist, capitalist and expansionist power it is now and has never penetrated Australia demographically to the extent that it has now.

The anti-China line and National Bolshevism, then, are an improvement on the old Australian nationalist rhetoric. One of the defects of the nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda of the 1980s was that it continually referred to Asian immigration - i.e., that it used the term 'Asian', which is an abstract, anthropological immigration. It's always better, in propaganda, to use concrete terms. E.g., it's far more efficacious to refer to immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka as 'Indian' even if they don't hail from India. (As a slogan, 'We are against immigration from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka' is rather a mouthful; as for 'We are against immigration from the Sub-Continent', that's a little too anthropological and geographic - one doesn't want to get into a debate as to where and what 'The Sub-Continent' is). The same goes for immigration from Asia. Most of the Asian immigrants into Australia in the past ten years have come from South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and China - the Chinese making up the bulk. Australian nationalists are opposed to all such Asian immigration, of course and want all these immigrants (along with the Indian, Muslim and African immigrants) to be returned to their homelands. But they will find it far more advantageous to make the immigrants from China the main target of their propaganda. For one, 'Chinese' evokes a particular racial and ethnic type; 'China' evokes a nation which most Westerners have a dim view of (Colin Liddell remarks that most in the West see China as a 'totalitarian sweatshop'). Australians can be made to understand, quite easily, the links between Chinese demographic expansionism and Chinese cultural, economic, and political expansionism. In other words, the racial element of Chinese immigration can be linked to the political element, i.e., Chinese immigration as serving the purposes of expanding Beijing's political power.

The Australian mainstream is not (despite what some on the Far Right may think) completely oblivious to the Chinese takeover. Certain of the intelligentsia, the trade union movement, the media, academia and even the political class are discomforted by China's expansion into Australia and the South Pacific. The politically-conscious Australian knows, straight away, what you are talking about when you bring up the topic - he won't understand what the devil you're talking about if you bring up the subject of Masonry, Zionism, Illuminatism. Which is why the anti-China line can help the Far Right reach out to segments of the Australian population which have generally proven indifferent to Australian nationalism.

This is where National Bolshevism comes in. China has its hooks in Australia through the importation of capital and labour and through trade. One can speak of an embedding of China in Australia. 'White power' ideology doesn't provide us with the conceptual tools to explain all this and combat it, whereas Marxism-Leninism - and in particular, the Maoist rhetoric of national liberation - does. 'Comprador bourgeoisie' - this is a useful concept. So are the Marxist concepts of class struggle help illustrate that it is the Australian worker who stands to lose the most out of Chinese expansionism (whereas the Rineharts will do well).

Romney or Obama '12? American Jews, the Euro and a Return to Gold

'Carthage must be destroyed': I've always, so long as I've been a nationalist, subscribed to the notion that 'America must be destroyed'. (I mean, by 'America' what I call 'The Anglo-Judeo Alliance' (America, Israel, the United Kingdom)). In the 1930s, after the election of Roosevelt, the US, the UK and Jewish-Americans entered into a sinister alliance, which proved to be the most destructive and malevolent force in the history of Western civilisation up to that time; the alliance, as we know, started (and finished) WWII, laid waste to Europe, enslaved the Western half and gave over the Eastern half to communism... We nowadays assume that America was always liberal, anti-"racist", anti-German, pro-Israel and pro-immigrant, but that wasn't the case: America only took that turn comparatively recently, in the past eighty years after Roosevelt. (Likewise, "The West" has only been liberal, pro-Israel, etc., since 1945). We in the West are still in the grip of three men - Roosevelt, Churchill and Churchill's friend and political accomplice Chaim Waizmann - who have been running the show, in effect, since the 1930s. It's this sinister alliance which has been at the root cause of all the problems in the West since then. Which is why I look at anything that sets today's America - Roosevelt's America - back with untrammelled glee.

Having said that, there are two Americas: there is today's America - the America of Wal-Mart, Zionism, anti-depressants, Afro-Americophililia which venerates Martin Luther King Jr. as a secular saint - and the 'old', good America of the immediate post-war period, which is portrayed by the TV series, Mad Men (2007-2012). Paradoxically, it's the old America - which was run by handsome, immaculately-groomed WASPs like Don Draper - which bombed German cities, occupied half of Germany, cut German rations below starvation levels, and tortured and hanged Germans at Nuremberg, and it's the old America I prefer to today's. I wouldn't like to live in 1962, of course - I don't think anyone of my generation could survive a day without mobile phones or the Internet or DVDs - but, in the old America (and old Australia) of 1962, I would have lived in an ethnically-homogeneous society. America, right now, is suffering - from its defeats in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, from Obamanomics, from enormous Mestizo immigration, from blighted cities like Detroit, from geopolitical decline - but this isn't the same America that enforced the Morgenthau Plan, and it's not the America of WASP scions Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling (who would have been horrified by Obama). If there were any justice in the world, the old America should be the one suffering, not the new, but such is life.

The question is, who should, in the upcoming US presidential elections, a nationalist support? Who do we want to win? Who will (inadvertently) help the nationalist cause the most?

After September 11, it became clear that the perpetrators of the attack (whoever they were) had gauged American psychology beautifully. The perpetrators sought to provoke America and give it the impetus to undertake rash, precipitous action - i.e., invade a country like Afghanistan, which they couldn't possibly hope to conquer (at least, by using their standard conventional-warfare tactics) and thus give it its second Vietnam. The results, in 2012, are better than could be expected: two lost wars, and on top of that, America's proxies Israel and George lost a total of three wars. It would take a very skillful leadership to negotiate one's state to an improved power-position, in spite of such a succession of military defeats, or perhaps really good luck (America won half of Europe off the Soviet Union, nearly fifteen years following its catastrophic defeat in Indochina). America, fortunately, doesn't have that skillful leadership. Military defeats have led to a geopolitical decline, a loss in power and prestige. America has lost Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela (which are now firmly in the anti-American camp), longtime enemies Russia and China have become stronger, and long-suppressed Germany and Turkey are, incredibly, beginning to resume their natural leadership roles (perhaps, at this rate, even Japan may awaken after its seventy-year slumber). This is quite a fall from the late 1990s, when America (and Israel) were at the peak of their political and economic strength.

The reason why this is important to nationalism is because the internal policy of a country - e.g., the ideology of its leadership - is largely determined by external geopolitics. Fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, would never have gotten off the ground without the example of Germany and Italy, and the fact that Western Europe has been so liberal democratic, so pro-Zionist, for seventy years comes about from the Allied victory in 1945. Were the Allies - that is, Churchill, Roosevelt and Waizmann and their spiritual heirs -  to suddenly become geopolitically weak, then the ideology of Europe would change. Just as Libya, Syria and Egypt, in the absence of the Arab secular socialism of Ghaddafi, Assad and Mubarak, stand in danger of turning towards the most extreme (Salafist) Islamism - Europe could turn to Far Right conservatism and fascism.

The Left understands this process very well. Both Mao and Lenin attributed the success of communism in their countries in part to China's and Russia's military defeats at the hands of the Japanese and Germans respectively. Without the displacements brought about by war, China and Russia would probably have remained non-communist. In the case of Europe and Germany, it's all about getting the boot - the American jackboot - of one's neck. Once that boot is removed, Europe can breathe a little more freely, and then start behaving like itself.

In order for German nationalism - and by nationalism, I mean the ideology of the German NPD, the DVP, the Freie Nationalisten and others - to succeed, certain fundamentals must be in place. Germany has to be strong again. And what is good for Germany, in this case, is good for Europe and all of the West.

In the post-WWI, Weimar period, Germany was stronger, politically, more sovereign than it was now (surprisingly enough). America, which was largely responsible for the Allied victory, had no interest in occupying Germany and making Europe a permanent vassal (although it did interfere by breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, giving Poland its independence, and so forth). As a result, Germany, France, Italy, Britain, were largely left to their own devices. France quickly became the ascendant power on the Continent (much to the alarm of Britain) and pushed Germany around quite a bit; but, all the same, Germany was never as pulverised, demoralised and brainwashed as it was after 1945. After Hitler's ascent to power, of course, Germany became steadily more powerful, more sovereign, and resumed its old, traditional role of The German Bully. It goes without saying that this would never have happened had the Allies been as brutal and repressive in 1918 as they were in 1945.

Which helps explain why nationalism, in Europe, can only be achieved in stages. I've always thought that the likes of the NPD were too ambitious for this reason: I want to say to them, 'Hang on a minute, Germany has been under Anglo-Judeo occupation - politically and mentally - for the good part of seventy years; and now you want it to become a great, powerful and sovereign nation, like it was in WWI and WWII, and the Weimar era, and thus bring down the wrath and enmity of the USA and Israel upon your heads'. One has to walk before one can run. Fortunately, Germany is beginning to walk. Prior to 2011-2012, Germany was part of that amorphous entity called 'Europe', that is, the EU, and if there was a sovereign state in the EU, it was Brussels. Now, of course, Germany has leaped to the forefront and de facto owns the Continent.

It's as though a long-running company - let's call it Western Civilisation Holdings, European Division - had a CEO who all of a sudden became sick and unable to perform his duties (interestingly, Forbes had a recent article, 'New York Times proves Clint Eastwood correct - Obama is a lousy CEO', 03/09/2012). The members of the board get together and discuss the worsening situation: 'It's evident that we need a new CEO to replace this one. Who is there? Why not that Fritz guy? He can do the job... In truth, there's no-one but him who'll take it on anyway'. Fritz is a former CEO, who was demoted a long time ago in an internal coup following a scandal - a man of great competence and skill, who is known for being hard but fair, capable of getting the job done, but something of a bully. If you want Fritz, you have to obey him unconditionally, and overlook his abrasive manner, his guttural way of speaking. The board decides: 'We've no choice! Fritz it is'. And Fritz resumes his old position, without barely batting an eyelid - it's as though he never was away. Formerly, there was resistance to him, but now, because of the extent of the crisis, there is none. Fritz doesn't gloat over his return to power; Fritz is where he is because, in part, he's not the type to gloat. Instead, he sits down with the board members, opens the company's books, and recounts, in a pedantic fashion, the company's rather dire fiscal position, and the harsh measures needed to remedy it...

Today's Germany, and its liberal democratic politicians, of course, are far away from being nationalist. But at least it is slowly clawing its way back to its position in 1918, when the Kaiser abdicated and German liberals and communists instituted the Weimar Republic. Things in politics take time - it's taken Germany seventy years to reach its current position...

The same could be more or less said of Turkey, and who knows, maybe even Japan will grow a backbone. To me, however, the main concern is Europe - as Kevin MacDonald says, 'The [nationalist] revolution will begin in Europe', and I think that things, as they are in Europe, are progressing nicely. My only fear is a resurgence in American strength. One can never say never in politics, and it's possible that the Anglo-Judeo Empire may come roaring back. In other words, the match is still ongoing, and one shouldn't call the match at half-time. In this instance, however, I'm not willing to be prudent, and I think that America (and Israel) are down and out. They aren't going to have the streak of luck that they had in the 1980s, with the resurgence of America under Reagan, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then the Soviet Union - and the surreptitious abandonment, by its enemies China and Vietnam, of the communist project.

The fate of America has implications for Australia, of course. Australia has never been a sovereign nation: prior to the 1930s, it was a vassal of Britain, and then, when America began its big acquisition of European states - Britain, France and Poland - the British subsidiary, Australia, came under American ownership. The absence of sovereignty is not necessarily a bad thing: small states, like Romania, or Belgium, have traditionally been content to let a bigger country run things, and let's face it, not every country wants to be a leader. But when the sovereign power, the 'protector', of Australia, is the Anglo-Judeo Empire, then Australia has problems. Jewish-Americans determine America's foreign policy (and, by extension, Australia's) and a large part of its internal policy as well. This wouldn't be a problem if Jewish-Americans were a race of super-beings, but the fact is that they're not. White people make mistakes - it was a series of mistakes by President Herbert Hoover which brought about the Great Depression, and the ascent of Roosevelt, and his Jewish-American 'advisors', to political power. But (so the classical anti-Semite thesis runs), Jews, in the long run, tend to make more mistakes than white people.

Which brings us back to the problems of economics. Many advocates of supply-sideism believe (correctly) that America's, and the West's, economic problems today are largely the result of America, and the world's, abandonment of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971. They are perfectly right in this, I believe, and had America been still on gold, the 2008 financial crisis (and its aftermath) would never have happened. But the supply-side analysts are mistaking the effect for the cause. One has to ask: why did America abandon gold? It had stayed on gold for a hundred years prior to 1971, out of a belief that abandoning gold, and undertaking a system of floating exchange rates, would lead to inflation, disorder and ruin (as it did during the American Civil War, when America (briefly) abandoned gold). My thesis is that Nixon broke up Bretton Woods, and left gold, largely at the urging of his (Jewish-American) economists, and what's more, stayed off gold because of those same economists (initially, he put it about that the abandonment of gold was a temporary measure, but, after he announced, in 1973, that the float was permanent, he oversaw a huge stock market collapse - which was, in real terms, the worst collapse in value since 1929). We know the results, of course, of Nixon's decision: monetary chaos and disorder (which led to, among other things, the creation of the euro). The reason why Nixon, and subsequent US presidents, didn't reverse this decision was because Jewish-Americans occupied all the positions of power and influence - in finance, economics, journalism, academia and so forth. Classical anti-Semitism says that Jews will make the wrong decisions, again and again, more often than not; it also says that Jews prefer chaos to order. It's almost as though they gain a pleasure and delight in flushing a country down the tubes, while not being consciously aware that they are doing so. (Indeed, when they lead a country, as they do America, they will blame its travails, not on themselves and their bad decisions, but on external circumstances of which they have no control; what's more, they will make problems out to be more difficult than they actually are; and claim that these problems are, ultimately, insoluble).

America's progress, economically, under Obama has been an interesting textbook study in Keynesianism: to whit, Keynesianism has been tested under near-perfect laboratory conditions, and been shown not to work. Obama has devalued the currency against gold, just like Roosevelt did, and instituted a huge program of public works and deficit spending, like Roosevelt; he has also sought to raise taxes - like Roosevelt - to an astronomic degree - he hasn't achieved this goal yet, but may, if he gets his way and allows the Bush Jr. tax cuts to expire and levies new taxes (we can see his proposed tax hikes from this article from the Wall Street Journal):

It's enough to make a supply-sider choke. Obama wants these tax increases because he's an instinctive socialist, of course, but mainly, he wants them because he's a Keynesian. The old New Deal / Keynesian doctrine was that the economy was driven by consumer spending. Because the poor spend their money more than the rich (who have a tendency to save), the rich have to be taxed and their wealth redistributed to the poor - who will go on and spend it. (At the same time, interest rates have to be driven down, so that people will save less and spend more). All this is designed to bring about 'full employment' - something which is conspicuously absent under the Obama administration.

Bernanke, of course, has been the partner in crime, monetarily, with Obama. The Keynesian monetary doctrine is that the currency has to be devalued until it's a worthless peso, in order to bring about an inflation, 'lower interest rates', 'boost exports' and 'create jobs' (not that the policy of devaluation has done much good for Zimbabwe). The US Federal Reserve has succeeded spectacularly in implementing devaluation: since 2000, the US dollar has been devalued, against gold, by nearly 800%. (In contrast, Roosevelt devalued the dollar from $USD20 a gold ounce to $USD35 - a devaluation of 75%). Bernanke's third round of devaluation - or 'quantitative easing' - will, no doubt, devalue the dollar even more. (Because the global economy is so interconnected, other currencies - such as the Australian dollar, the pound and the euro - will have to be devalued in tandem). More rising commodity prices, more chaos, more political upheaval in the Middle East and the rest of the world, more US economic stagnation...

So what will the US presidential election bring? The founding text of supply-side economics is Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works (1978), which is to supply-sideism what Keynes' General Theory- (1936) is to Keynesianism. Wanniski was a journalist by trade, not an economist (although he was tutored, in the supply-side doctrine, by two professional, academic economists, Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer). One consequence of this is that half of Wanniski's great work is devoted to his unique musings on politics, in particular, electoral politics, or what he calls his 'political model'. The supply-sider, John Tamny, gives a capsule summary of it:

In The Way the World Works, the late Jude Wanniski’s classic 1978 book which explained how economies grow and contract, he introduced an electoral model that remains controversial to this day. Put plainly, Wanniski argued that the electorate always gets things right, or in his words:

“…the electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.”

No doubt many readers are scratching their heads in response to the above, but as Wanniski put it to the late William F. Buckley (paraphrase), “You’re likely smarter than every individual inside a packed football stadium, but collectively those individuals are smarter than you are.” The wisdom of crowds….

The logical response is that if the electorate is so smart, why then did it foist on us ghastly presidents of the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama variety? Isn’t the electorate instead overemotional, and too impassioned to vote the right people into office? Readers would have a point, but going back to Carter’s election, and really long before that, the electorate has gotten it right every time. We may not have always liked the end result, but the electorate has always been right.

['Jude Wanniski's Electoral Model Points To a Slim Romney Victory', Forbes, 16/09/2012.]

In the Wanniski electoral model, the electorate's wisdom is greater as a whole than in the sum of its parts, and pretty much has what the economists call 'perfect information', which Wikipedia summarises as thus:

In microeconomics, a state of perfect information is assumed in some models of perfect competition. That is, assuming that all agents are rational and have perfect information, they will choose the best products, and the market will reward those who make the best products with higher sales. Perfect information would practically mean that all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times (including knowing the probabilistic outcome of all future events), and therefore always make the best decision regarding purchase. This is physically impossible, however, as the Bekenstein Bound provides a physical limit to the amount of information that can be stored in a given physical system (in this case, a market participant). Still, perfect information is a common assumption in economic models because it allows mathematical derivation of desirable results. ['Perfect Information', Wikipedia]

In its collective wisdom, the electorate is an economist, and what's more, a supply-side economist. When it comes to elections, then, it prefers a politician who is a supply-sider. But when such a candidate isn't available (and more often than not, they aren't), the electorate will go for more of the same - or a socialist who will redistribute wealth to the suffering...

 Tamny does a good account of recent US electoral history, in the light of this model, and makes the interesting point that Obama really is the reincarnation, economically, of George W. Bush:

Readers can cite the long list of errors made by Obama since his election, I’ll agree with many of their criticisms, but the reality is that absent egregious errors of George W. Bush’s own making, there’s no President Obama today. Republicans can wail that they don’t recognize what the U.S. has become (funny because Obama extended the Bush tax cuts, followed Bush’s lead on the bailouts and nosebleed spending, reappointed Bush’s Fed appointee in Ben Bernanke, and doubled down on Bush’s weak dollar policies), but the reality is that policies given us by admittedly clueless Republicans gave us Obama. Of course in doubling down on Bush’s policies of dollar debasement, heavy spending and bailouts, along with his own personal disaster in the form of Obamacare, President Obama was disciplined by an all-knowing electorate.

Unbeknownst to Obama, Bush handed him the opportunity of a lifetime in the form of an economy that was on its back. Here it can’t be stressed enough that when economies are recessing, they are healing themselves. The greater the downturn the greater the recovery, and that’s the case because the greater the downturn, the more the healing that is occurring. If Obama had sat back and done nothing upon arrival in Washington, he would today be presiding over a nice recovery. And then if he’d sat back and done nothing while adopting Reagan/Clinton dollar policies, he’d be presiding over the kind of boom that would have him on the verge of a Reagan style victory circa 1984.

But as we all know, Obama wasn’t immune to the “do something” illness that endangers the political health of nearly every politician, and because he wasn’t, he proceeded to try and fix an economy that would have fixed itself if left alone. The pro-growth policy in Obama’s case was to be Clinton-like with the dollar, and then do little else. Obama reversed the latter playbook, he’s as a result presiding over a sick economy that should be strong, and as the electorate dislikes failures, Obama’s days in the White House are numbered. [Ibid.]

Tamny is, of course, quite disappointed in Romney, as are many supply-siders, Republicans and conservatives, but he still believes that Romney will be the winner:

Indeed, Obama’s only hope for a voter reprieve lies in his opponent, Mitt Romney. Oblivious to the historical truth that Americans consider themselves winners soon to be among the 1%, Romney has pursued his own version of class warfare with targeted tax cuts, China bashing that plays to society’s losers in a nation of winners, and an alteration of Obamacare that fails to remove one of its most offensive aspects: mandated insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.

Put plainly, Romney doesn’t understand an electorate that is seeking a growth message. The electorate is dying to fire Obama, history says it will given its aversion to failures, yet Romney’s timidity with regard to policies actually meant to grow the economy point to a close win for Romney when it should be a rout. Wanniski’s electoral model says so. [Ibid.]

I will say that, by supply-side standards, Romney's tax policies pass muster, as the above table shows: in 1986, Reagan cut the top rate of income tax to 28%, which is what Romney wants to do. The Republican Party thoroughly understands supply-side fiscal policy. The trouble is that the Republicans don't fully appreciate the supply-side doctrine on monetary policy, and the 'bad' monetary policy (i.e., massive dollar devaluations) swamps the 'good' fiscal policy. As Tamny observes:

Bush partisans point to the ’03 tax cuts, and while it’s true that those cuts were the only smart major legislation achieved on his watch, they were more than blunted by the above-mentioned mistakes, not to mention the Bush Treasury’s weak-dollar policies that revealed themselves on day one in the form of the much lamented Paul O’Neill. The list of errors by Bush (think steel and softwood lumber tariffs,  Ben Bernanke,  Harriet Miers, Obamacare designer John Roberts?) could surely fill a book, but with space in mind, his saving grace in 2004 was that the horrors of his dollar policies had not quite hit the economy yet, plus we were at war. The electorate unhappily gave him another shot; one it presumably came to regret.

Indeed, by 2006 so disgusted was the electorate with Bush that it handed control of the House and Senate back to the Democrats. Amid this handover, an economy sapping rush into housing was taking place thanks to a weak dollar that forced limited capital away from future seeing companies a la the Reagan/Clinton era, and into the tangible inflation hedges of yesterday. To remember what the housing boom was like one need only refer to the Gilder quote from earlier about the Carter years, but needless to say it slowed economic growth enough that mortgage payments from overextended borrowers seeking shelter in homes started to come in late, or not at all. [Ibid.]

The supply-siders, however, did achieve a victory insofar as Romney - at the urging of the supply-side wing of his party - has promised a 'Gold Commission' to investigate the feasibility of a return to the gold standard. The Reagan administration launched a Gold Commission in 1981, and because the Commission was dominated by monetarists (advocates of a Bernanke-like policy of floating exchange rates and devaluations), it came out against a return to gold. The supply-sider Brian Domitrovic, however, makes a convincing argument that the mere fact of a Gold Commission frightened the Federal Reserve into tightening monetary policy and ending the devaluation of the US dollar. Who knows how a second Gold Commission will turn out if Romney is elected.

I don't like Obama, Bernanke, Paul Krugman and the legions of monetarists and Keynesians very much. I'd like to see their economics thrown into the dustbin of history, and see the election of a US president who will bring back gold, who will show gold to be superior to the present system, and thus refute the nay-sayers and reduce them to an impotent rage. This is despite the fact that any revival of fortunes for America (and the Judeo-American Empire) would be against my own best interests as a nationalist. It's a purely intellectual exercise...

Romney is a nice enough fellow, but a bland creature - a LDS Mormon (that is, a non-polygamist Mormon) whose only motivation in life has been to make money. He is financed by the shadowy Jewish-American (and maniacal Israel-Firster - he has dual citizenship with both the US and Israel) Sheldon Adelson, and can be expected, of course, to carry out a pro-Israel foreign policy (including bombing Iran, if need be) once elected. Which really doesn't mean that much, in real terms: it doesn't portend Armageddon for the enemies of Israel and Jewry - Israel hasn't won a war since 1982. It will be the same old Roosevelt-Churchill-Waizmann gang (with Netanyahu playing the role of Waizmann), but much less powerful, geopolitically speaking. In other words, more of the same.

Like Reagan (and Hitler), I believe problems often have simple solutions. Europe has to go first towards nationalism, and then the rest of the West will follow. In order for Europe to 'go nationalist', a certain number of prerequisites have to be met. The euro has to be fixed to gold, and Europe has to achieve a certain level of economic self-sufficiency (a goal which can be reached - Europe's oil needs can be satisfied by Norway and Romania, also, oil can be imported from Russia). After that, the millions of Muslim, Indian and African immigrants can be persuaded - nicely - to leave. It's then that a certain number of important lifestyle questions can be addressed. Europe's cities need to go car-less, and much, much needs to be done for animal rights. Europe also has to enact a program of public education, warning its youth about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle... Then there's a need to introduce the death penalty (for serious sexual crimes). But the economics has to be taken care of first. Luckily, Europe is moving, ever so slowly, towards self-sufficiency and a separation from the Anglo-Judeo global economic order, and towards Hitler's 'New European Order', or (the German ideologist Naumann's) 'Mittel Europa'.

What's the goal of all this? To ensure good lives for we white Westerners, and our children and grandchildren. America and Israel (and possibly Britain) will object, furiously, to the 'New Europe', but, over time, America and Britain (and Australia, New Zealand and Canada) will lean towards following the European example.

Manual for the Radical Nationalist, Part II: Keeping a Group Together

I am pleased to report that, since my post, In Praise of Neo-Stalinist Doctrinairism, things have been going well for my group. Why is this? The answer is, my understanding - of how to organise in politics - increased. As to how it increased, I'll explain presently... Before I do, though, I'll note - for the sake of other nationalists who are trying to work in a group or party - that questions of organisation, management, leadership, and so forth, are different in politics than they are in fields of human endeavour. At first sight, it seems that running a political group is like running any other organisation - e.g., a trade union, a business, a bowling club, an army, whatever. But this isn't the case. Politics operates according to laws which are unique to it. The character of a political group depends on its fundamental political philosophy, which needs to be articulated and made explicit - time and time again. That philosophy encompasses everything in a group: it not only determines the objective of a group (e.g.,  a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') or its relations to rival groups and ideologies, but its internal organisation as well. In other words, theory determines practice. Some groups and parties, of course, get by with very little theory: e.g., your average conservative or social democratic party, or parties like Mussolini's PNF, or the German NSDAP... Those sorts of parties run like a smooth, well-oiled machine, with very little internal dissent over policy and objectives. For newish groups in the nationalist movement, though, a great deal of theory is necessary, and, what's more, this must be articulated, made explicit, in the form of a constitution and a party program. Without clarity, internal disagreement will fester, and the group will shrivel up and die - or, most likely, split apart...

In the past few months, I have read around 15 (!) books written by communists from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc: it's been an invaluable education, politically, ideologically, intellectually, and an experience I recommend to all my fellow nationalist intellectuals. In truth, I enjoy, these days, reading these books more than nationalist material: I learn something new, every time (even if I don't always get something useful), whereas, if one sticks to the nationalist corpus - usually, the 'New Right' and 'Conservative Revolution' authors (Schmitt, Evola, et al.), one comes to a dead halt, sooner or later... (I speak, of course, after ten years of reading these 'approved nationalist authors').

As I mentioned before, 80% of the problems in the nationalist movement come about because groups can't last for long: because of the (near-inevitable) clashes of personalities, a group falls apart in short order. This is quite unlike conventional politics. Take, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which has been around since 1935 and has been operating under tremendous state oppression. They are, at present, on the threshold of political power in Egypt: but, even supposing that the Mubarakist military strikes back, and denies them legislative and executive power - well, the Brotherhood won't be defeated. They'll simply make a tactical retreat and prepare for the next offensive. In nationalism, though, this doesn't happen: compare the Brotherhood to One Nation or the British National Party - a real 'party machine' just never really existed there. Nor were they, or any other prestigious (prestigious in the nationalist world, that is) parties ever on the threshold of 'seizing power' in the past forty years. The German NPD, for example, has been around since 1964, and is incapable of winning federal representation. (Yes, a nationalist in Germany faces a tough assignment: but it can't be tougher than Mubarak's Egypt, or Assad's Syria). As for the non-parliamentary nationalist groups, these tend to form into small, extraparliamentary grouplets (just like the radical Left) and fall apart fairly quickly (just like radical Left). I've seen a few good groups, overseas, come and go, based on a progressive, anti-capitalist ideology (influenced by the German Frei Nationalisten groups), which got off to a good start but broke up in mutual recrimination. (You know that they've broken up when you go to check their websites, and find that they're all down, and have been so for months; and you hear gossip, on the nationalist grapevine, that the group fell apart after such-and-such an internal dispute).

Why can't such groups - that is, progressive, anti-capitalist nationalist ones - stick together? I think the answer is simple: anarchism. Trotskyite and Maoist groups are heavily influenced by anarchism - hence their tendency to split and subdivide into smaller and smaller groups - and so are the anti-capitalist groups on the Far Right: the Freie Nationalisten are more or less a German nationalist version of the neo-anarchist Autonomen groups. Anarchism is prone to splitting, divisiveness, sectarianism, lack of sustained action towards socialism: anarchism, because of lack of mutual agreement on a constitution and a democratic, party-like structure, leads to hierarchy, authoritarianism and individualism (surprisingly enough). The conventional charge against Marxism is that it leads to hierarchy and a lack of democracy, whereas anarchism is free, non-hierarchical and democratic: but, in truth, it's the other way around - that's the conclusion I've drawn from the literature on the subject. At any rate, Marxist-Leninist theory - for all its many faults - provides a skeleton, a structure, for a left-wing group. Without it, left-wing groups degenerate into neo-anarchism - and end up falling apart. That's what's happening to the once-promising Occupy movement in America.

(This is the conundrum of the Left in America: they'll only get anywhere if they form a communist type party, with the old democratic centralism, Leninist discipline and the rest; but obviously, this has already been tried there a thousand times in the past hundred years. Obviously, the old Marxist-Leninism is unsatisfactory to the modern American Left, which is why it opted for the New Left in the sixties and now Occupy. But without Marxist-Leninism, the American Left can't get together even the beginnings of a disciplined offensive against American capitalism. It's a catch-22. In my opinion, the only way the American Left can break out of the vicious circle is to go back towards the old party methods of organisation, but adopt racialism, anti-Semitism and nationalism as an ideological platform and embrace the white working-class American. But that, of course, will never happen...).

So, it's the lack of Marxism which explains the failures of the nationalist groups, in Europe and elsewhere, which have adopted anti-capitalism. In the end, it gets down to the class-content of one's ideology: which class do you, as a nationalist group, represent? If you're going to be an neo-anarchist type group, you'll end up gravitating towards a representation - of the classes traditionally attracted to anarchism, viz, the lumpenproles, and the peasantry. (We don't have peasants any more in the West, of course, but we do have lumpenproles - among the the poor students and punks who live in squats and eat charity food, who are a declassé social group and who seem to make up the anarchist and Antifa formations). It's not that these types are undesirable people (they are): it's that they are not the right fit for Far Right nationalism. We have to recall the fascist parties of our forebears, the parties of Hitler, Mussolini, Mosley: the class composition was working-class - the disciplined white European working-class (particularly the German, which was extolled by Marx, Engels, Lenin). True, many of these men were indigent, out of work, in straitened circumstances - but they were still of the working-class. They didn't lower themselves by dropping out of their class, in the way that quite a few students have (here in Australia and Europe): viz, the students have renounced their petit-bourgeois origins (many Australians students come from middle-class families, as do many British students) and descended, on the rungs of the ladder, to the level of the lumpenproletariat.

This is important to nationalism, because so many of nationalists one encounters are precisely from the same class - the petit bourgeoisie. The tendency for that class - especially at the fringes of politics, i.e., at the extreme Left or Right - is to gravitate towards a freakish individualism, an excessive 'subjectivism', of 'me-firstism', where one's tastes, preferences, self, dominate over the 'objective' (that is, politics, economics, class). Nothing wrong with subjectivism and individualism, of course. But these have to be put to good use: to the pursuit, in a straight line, of an impersonal goal, which is, of course, the communist or fascist state, Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat', whether it be a red dictatorship or a brown dictatorship... In this regard, the amazing thing about the pre-war fascist movement in Europe was that these men and women organised themselves, in a socialist and Marxist-Leninist way, without paying attention to Marxist theory! They were influenced by Lenin, and Marx, to an incredible degree: but you will (hardly ever) find a fascist politician or intellectual quoting Lenin or Marx or Stalin in support of their positions. Which is why I define fascism as a kind of pre-reflexive Marxism: that is, a Marxism without theory, a Marxism which doesn't think of itself as Marxist...

As to why the fascists were like this... The answer is, they absorbed communism into their bloodstream, by osmosis. It was part of the air that they breathed. Soviet communism, under Lenin and then Stalinism, was a viable alternative to liberal democracy. When people of my generation think of Soviet communism, they, of course, think of the decrepit communism of the 1980s - of Brezhnev and his (soon-deceased successors) and the 'young' Gorbachev. But, back in my great-grandfather's time, Soviet communism really was something. Someone on the Far Right had to acknowledge it: one couldn't escape it, or the effects on people's lives. It was like the iPhone, or Twitter, or Facebook (all of which I despise)... We moderns - we Westerners in the year 2012 - can't understand this. Hence, we have to re-educate ourselves. We have to go through the necessary stages before we can duplicate the success of the old, European, working-man's movement of the 1920s and 1930s which was fascism. In other words, we must learn to be Marxists and socialists before we make ourselves to be fascists. Which leads to a kind of over-compensation: one has to go full-tilt to Marxist-Leninism and take on board all it has to offer - in terms of political economy, politics, philosophy. We simply can't suck in Marxism from the air and absorb it into our bloodstream, in the way that Hitler, Mussolini, Primo de Rivera did - for the simple reason that, in 2012, communism, much less a viable Stalinist, Soviet communism, is no longer with us.


So, nationalist intellectuals need to embrace Marxist theory. 'But what of all the faults in that theory?'. Well, of course there are faults; but, in the end, these don't matter. It seems that every day, on the front page of some respectable newspaper, an announcement will appear (from some respectable scientist) that the Earth isn't warming as rapidly as the environmentalists claim; or that the Earth is cooling; or that 'greenhouse gases' weren't as responsible for that warming as once thought; or that the warming isn't going to be disastrous as once throught... These scientists aren't in the pay of Big Oil, or neoliberal think-tanks, either. Despite this countervailing evidence, however, environmentalism keeps marching on its way; more and more useless, environmentalist legislation - to 'combat global warming' - will be introduced... Pretty much communism went the same way. Trenchant criticisms of Kapital, made as early as the turn of the century, had zero effect. The fact that millions starved to death in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, or in China in the early 1960s - that wasn't a disproof of Marx's theory.

(What did make a difference to Marxism was the collapse of the USSR in 1991 - and the backsliding of China after 1979. But that's a story for another day).

But to return to fascism: the difference between Bolshevik Marxism, and the socialism of the fascist kind, was not only on the national question, but on the extent to which a socialist government, a revolutionary government, should abolish property.

One can say, on this point, that the fascists were right. Perhaps the communist governments went too fast - and this is a retrospective criticism - in getting rid of property altogether; perhaps they would have survived longer, had they not been in such a rush to introduce socialist property relations... Perhaps man could be steered away from capitalist property relations towards socialist ones, but this 'steering' would take a hundred years or more. This sort of thinking, of course, is 'right-wing', even 'revisionist' and 'social democratic' of me: but the capitalist, liberal democrat and bourgeois system is still here, while the USSR isn't. So, who is right and who is wrong?

But this, in turn, raises a number of questions: one of them is the fascist 'line' on capitalism and private property. In Hitler's speeches, we find him lauding private enterprise and individual initiative in one speech (before one audience, usually a business audience), and then praising socialism and the German worker the next (before a different audience). Overall, we do find a consistency in Hitler's day-to-day policy - which is, I argue, a 'Left' policy - but from speech to speech, pronouncement to pronouncement, an inconsistency. The same goes for Mussolini. The anti-fascist Left will use Hitler's pronouncements on private enterprise to prove that he was a neoliberal - which is nonsense. But then, the Left has a tendency to go by what a man says, and not what he does. By his actions, Hitler wasn't a neoliberal; his immediate successors, in the post-war Bonn republic, were (Ludwig Erhard is one of the gods in the pantheon of neoliberal-approved politicians). The fact is, in the day-to-day running of the country, or in the contesting of an election, a politician will occasionally contradict himself. Mussolini and Hitler did this to an alarming degree. But the Left does it as well. Many years ago, I stumbled across a quote from Lenin (in the first pages of the anti-communist compilation, Marx Refuted: The Verdict of History (1986), edited by Colin Wilson and Ronald Duncan) from 1917 in which he declares he is 'No longer a Marxist'. One has to consider the context of such an extraordinary statement. But, suffice to say, the Soviets would have obscured such a statement from the historical record: that is, everything written, or said, by Engels, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, was presented in order to give readers a portrait of men who were fully consonant in thought and deed - for every single day of their lives. When, in reality, such a thing is not possible...

But this is not an excuse for inconsistency. On the contrary, a nationalist group should strive for the utmost consistency: its press releases, articles, transcribed or recorded speeches, etc., should be fully consonant with the principles and positions as outlined in the constitution and party program.

All this talk of economics brings us to another point. Would, or should, major nationalisations take place under a Far Right government? Critics of socialism argue that widescale nationalisations 'destroy the economy' and 'reduce the confidence of foreign investors', etc., etc. Communist governments, operating under the constraints of Marxist ideology, view capitalist property relations as 'the exploitation of man by man', and so are bound, by that view, to abolish all property (the USSR, of course, abolished all property except at the local, market garden level). The conservative anti-communists argue that this policy led to economic ruin. But it is possible for a country to do well, in 2012, with a nationalised economy - to a certain extent. The UAE, for instance, doesn't have income, corporate, value-added, capital gains, or sales taxes: the country is about as tax-free as one can get. The UAE's revenue comes from state-owned oil. Oil-rich countries like Iran, with a state-owned oil sector, though, don't do well - possibly, this is because of an extensive corporate, sales and income tax regime, with rates cutting in at low thresholds of income (inflation, brought about by loose monetary policy, in Iran only increases the 'bracket creep' effect, in which Iranians are pushed into higher and higher progressive tax brackets through inflation). The point is, one can envisage, then, a UAE-type arrangement in Australia, in which the mining and resources sector is state-owned, while all taxes are, in effect, abolished.

But one should not be hamstrung to such a policy. One wouldn't think it, but one of the tenets of Marxist-Leninism is that communist leaders should not be bound to an economic policy which has been devised (as I have just done) in abstraction, a priori, separate from existing reality. Marxist-Leninism does justify discretion on the economy. In this regard, it is flexible, fluid, organic... It castigates the 'Left' communists who demand that such-and-such an economic scheme (which was devised a priori) be introduced, as a matter of principle, even if the existing realities don't call for it. This is what the Marxist-Leninists call 'dogmatism'. And it is this 'dogmatism' which is one of the distinguishing traits of Trotskyism and Maoism. (But, it should be said, the line between a mad, 'Left-adventurist' and 'dogmatic' scheme, and a good, proper, socialist one, is thin: how are we to distinguish between, say, Stalin's collectivisation program in the Ukraine, and Mao's crazed, 'adventurist' Great Leap Forward?).

Marxism's organic approach is what separates it from the 'utopian' forms of communism. 'Utopian' communism devises abstract, a priori schemes for social reform, and demands that they be imposed, from the top down, and all at once. Marxism, on the other hand, believes that reality is gradually inclining towards socialism - that's the tendency in the economic and social arrangements of the world today - but these tendencies may end up zig-zagging: that is, there may be a sudden spurt towards socialism, and then a turning away from it... The goal of the Marxist political leadership is to divine the existing tendency and work with it, and not against it.

The essential thing is that there will be struggle between the existing tendencies - the one towards capitalism and away from socialism, and vice versa. Marxism is the metaphysics of struggle.

Nationalists should take this metaphysics on board. Many of them exhibit surprise that there is a struggle, that there is a terrible fight, in politics. Some profess to be bemused by present-day policy on immigration, for example: 'Why doesn't' Romney and the US Republican Party see sense on non-white immigration, and just ban it? But, according to Marxism, there must be a struggle: a fight, a battle, will be necessary. Marxism is a close cousin of Darwinism, of course, and it's not for nothing that Hitler named his memoirs, 'My Struggle'...