Recently Matt Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker's Party caused a scandal by renouncing white nationalism and crossing over to communism. But watching Heimbach's video here with a commentary by Alternate Hypothesis, I could find no real evidence of any Marxism in Heimbach's new Weltanschauung.
This disappointed me somewhat, as the idea of a conversion from Far Left to Right intrigues me. In the Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek observed that fascists can frequently convert to communism, and communists, to fascism (Hayek here was propounding an early version of horseshoe theory), and I initially thought that Heimbach's recent change of heart would constitute another instance of that Left to Right and Right to Left phenomenon, that, in other words, Heimbach would be following in the footsteps of Jacques Doriot, a fascinating figure who made a transition from communism to fascism. But I am not quite sure that Heimbach has thought everything through.
Alternative Hypothesis refers to Heimbach throughout as a Nazi. Is he one? The answer is no, not in the usual (German) sense of the word, only in the American. Alternate Hypothesis' video has made me realise that when Americans use the word 'Nazi', they are making a cultural and class distinction: they are referring to redneck and hillbilly white nationalists who hail from what Colin Woodard calls Greater Appalachia. The Traditionalist Worker's Party, and Schoep's National Socialist Movement, were made up of men of this stripe, as is (most likely) the Aryan Nations prison gang. Surrounded by such people, day in and day out, one can understand why it was that Heimbach, even in his Naz Bol days, declared that he was a socialist and champion of the working class.
So why did Heimbach break from the Right? It becomes clear from the video, and Heimbach's back story, that Heimbach is a man who craves fame and celebrity, and it is this that explains why he made the jump. He wanted acceptance from his peers. Being a white nationalist, Neo-Nazi, Naz Bol, makes one an outlaw in society, and while some on the Far Right relish that outlaw status, others find the life of an outlaw hard going, understandably enough, and it is the wavering type that will evince a desire to come in from the cold and be a 'normie', even at the expense of renouncing one's beliefs, cutting ties with one's comrades, and foregoing one's status in the movement.
Unfortunately, Heimbach has been misled - by the political establishment that controls the media / entertainment complex, education, organised religion and so forth - as to what 'normal' is. The Far Left is composed of what Steve Sailer calls the 'coalition of the fringes', and that is: Social Justice Warriors; Greta Thunbergs; crazy cat ladies who voted for Hillary; LGBT activists, Jewish, Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, Muslim and other minority activists; Marxists (real and crypto); antifa and anarchists; Hollywood progressives; crusading liberal billionaires of the George Soros / Mark Zuckerberg / Bill Gates type; degree-holders in black studies, queer studies, women's studies, and post-colonial studies... The political establishment has succeeded in framing this coterie of cranks, oddballs, misanthropes and radicals as mainstream. But the reality is that the 'KKKrazy glue' (to use Sailer's phrase) that holds the coalition together is hatred of the average white American male. Now, while the Coalition of the Fringes does contain whites, these left-wing whites do not represent salt of the earth American whites, who are mostly either indifferent to politics or who voted for Trump. The conclusion, then, is that Heimbach, who is looking for crossover appeal to 'normies', is looking for it in the wrong place. While the newly-minted leftist Heimbach may meet with approval from the Left, he will never get it from the Right or Center. Yes, it is true that the average Republican opposes racism, but he does so only from the position that 'Democrats are the real racists', Martin Luther King Jr was a conservative, white nationalism is identity politics and therefore collectivist, etc., etc. In other words, the average conservative opposes racism not from perspective of a Marxist or antifa, but a middle of the road civic nationalist who would rather not talk about race at all.
Heimbach's conversion may have been misguided, but the question of Heimbach's socialism remains interesting. Even before his recent break from the Right, Heimbach, along with Matt Parrott, Richard Spencer, Eric Stryker, Hunter Wallace and other 'wignats' and 'Naz Bols' was accused of attempting to steer the nationalist and racialist movement towards communism. Here I will be the exploring what communism, in 2020, means and how any adoption of it by a nationalist may entail some conclusions which he will find quite unpalatable.
I will be resisting the temptation to write another anti-communist polemic - we have enough of those. The fact of the matter is that right-wing polemics cannot approach communism in a detached, analytic manner because they cannot consider a single tenet or thesis of communism in isolation from the whole. A nationalist writer cannot examine, say, Lenin's political position in the year 1905 or 1917 as a subject in itself because he knows what happened after 1905 or 1917, and he feels compelled to draw a connection between Lenin's position at that time particular point in time and communism's subsequent history. It is difficult to write from a neutral, detached perspective when one is anti-communist: one feels a moral obligation to lecture the reader on the evils of communism, and so, when one writes an abstract article on (for example) Che Guevara's theory of the foco, one will turn it - almost without intending to - into a sermon on the misery of life in communist Cuba.
For the purposes of exposition, then, one must shut out or excise large sections of communist reality. I will concede that the reader may think that this is an evasion, as the Marxist Left itself believes only in looking at politics as a whole, not in parts.
In communism and leftism, the connections that exist cannot be avoided. If you support Marxism in 2020, you must support, for example, 1) the Greta Thunberg-type radical environmentalism, 2) the mass non-white immigration into white countries, 3) the anti-covid 19 lockdown measures, and 4) the rioting, looting and arson underway at present win America's cities. Heimbach may be labouring under the delusion that one can take up a Marxist position and at the same time oppose 1), 2), 3) and 4). But Marxism does not allow you to pick and choose. One must go the whole hog, and that is the price of admission to the Marxist fraternity.
II.
Before we proceed, we must define our terms. Until Lenin and the Russian Revolution, 'Marxist' referred to an adherent of the theories of Marx and Engels, nothing more. Hitler, in the first sections of Mein Kampf, uses the word in this sense and applies it to his opponents on the Left - the Social Democrats and their affiliates. Later in the book, after the November Revolution of 1918 and the formation of the German Communist Party (KPD), Marxism takes on its 20th century meaning: it is a form of socialism founded on principles laid down by Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) - what we know today as communism. (In 1917, Lenin insisted that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) change its name to the Communist Party, as a means of differentiating itself from other parties of the Left). Some anti-Soviet left-wingers have attempted to recover Marx from Lenin, but after 1917, in the public consciousness, Marxism and Soviet communism became inextricably linked: Marxism was transformed into Bolshevism, (what the Maoists call) Marxism-Leninism.
Heimbach, the Naz Bols, the Wignats, have stated that they are sympathetic to the Bernie Sanders Left. The question is, how far to the Left does the 'democratic socialism' of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) extend? Are the Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, the DSA, Marxist? And if so, which Marx is it: the Marx of the 'democratic socialists' or the Marx of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao? The lines between the two forms of Marxism have, after Sanders, become increasingly blurred, and this is no accident, as Lenin would say: the result has been brought about by the Left deliberately. The communist Left wants to use 'democratic socialism' as a Trojan horse and as a gateway drug to Bolshevism.
In order to expand on the subject, we need to turn our attention to the interaction between Marxist theory of old and the post-communist practice of the present. Our story starts after the fall of communism in Europe, thirty years ago, and here I will give some of my reminisces of the immediate post-communist era.
Many intellectuals and bohemians in the West became indoctrinated with Marxism after attending university in their youth. I was fortunate in that, by the time I got to university and began reading books on politics, economics, philosophy and other weighty subjects, the Soviet Union had been extinct for two years. Without the example of 'really existing socialism' before me, communism (and anti-communism) lacked immediacy, relevance. In my browsing of the local library, I happened upon Marx Refuted: The Verdict of History (1987), an anthology of anti-communist writings by Soviet dissidents and Anglo intellectuals. Its arguments against Marx as a thinker, and its hardline, uncompromising stance against Marx and socialism, impressed me so powerfully that I could never look at Marx the same way again; the book turned me away from Marxism for all time. Interestingly, the authors by and large did not take a free-market liberal position so much as an anti-socialist one; indeed, they often strike an anti-political, post-communist chord, one which almost anticipates Fukuyama's 'End of History' essay published two years later. Marxism has been found wanting, its long reign is over, and now that we are on the verge of finishing with it, we can get on with our lives... The book's theme was reinforced when, in my wanderings around campus, I came across Trotskyists running a stall, hawking copies of Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936). I asked myself who cared if Stalin betrayed the ideals of the Russian revolution, given that communism had imploded in the former states, had vanished in Eastern Europe, and had fallen out of fashion (as an economic-developmental model) in Africa and Asia. The conclusion I drew was that the Trotskyists and their pamphlets and books belonged in the past. If I opened up the Trotskyist newspaper the Green Left Weekly, then on sale at university campuses, I would see an illustration of the profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in a row - the 'gallery of men with beards', I called it. One could almost smell, in the pages of that newspaper, musty air left over from the 19th century. Trotskyism evoked the politics, culture, ideas of the turn of the turn of the century in a nostalgic fashion; in fact, like the genre of Steampunk, it aimed at recreating the atmosphere of the Victorian and Edwardian era, the difference being that it situated itself in the Central and Eastern European cultural context, not the British and Anglo-Saxon.
I have spent much time recounting my experiences with Trotskyism because Trotskyism dominates the Far Left in Australia - of the dozen communist groups we have here, nine of them follow Trotskyism. But all of them share in common the belief that Soviet communism was good until, at some point, it turned bad. Three of the groups hold that Bolshevik revolution was 'betrayed' in 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the Secret Speech; for the other nine, the revolution was either 'betrayed' in 1924, when Lenin died and was succeeded by Stalin, or in the years 1927 to 1929, when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and the USSR.
But to return to the narrative. In the 1990s, I was exposed to many political ideas but never committed to any one of them; I would read Hayek and Friedman one day and vote Labor the next, and never felt strongly about communism one or the other. I looked at Marxism as an antique, and like Keynes - a centrist - I saw no need to abolish the entire system of free enterprise so as to prevent the evils of unemployment and inequality. But, after my exposure to white nationalism and Neo-Nazism, I threw my lot in with the radical Right, and as a result, I took communism far more seriously, and dedicated myself to the study of it.
I came to see that Lenin had attempted to come up with a solution to a problem - of how to apply Marxism in the Third World. The layman's understanding of Marxist theory of revolution is that it is a theory that only concerns industrialised nations such as England and Germany, and the white countries of Western Europe and its colonies. But Lenin wanted it applied to Russia and the black, brown and yellow countries - the 'oppressed nations'. Lenin believed that Russia was an oppressor nation, but understood (perhaps on an intuitive level), that while Russians are biologically white, Russia is not white all the way through - it is composed of over 180 different nationalities, the vast majority of them Asian or at least non-white. Russia, after the October Revolution, identified with its Asian side over its white: it became part of the rising tide of colour against white world supremacy, as Lothrop Stoddard argues in the book of the same name.
Lenin also needed to make a departure from orthodox Marxism so as to take into consideration the fact that Russia's social and economic system, unlike Germany's or England's, was geared to the past. Recognising this, Lenin rebuilt Marxism accordingly and turned it into a peasant doctrine. This explains why it is that Marxism-Leninism achieved its greatest successes in agrarian countries - Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam...
Surprisingly enough, Lenin agrees with Fukuyama on some points. Both declare that the transition from feudalism to capitalism is 'progressive', and thereby good; so is the transition from constitutional monarchy to bourgeois liberal democracy. Both grade fascist, colonialist, military, or imperialist rule as 'reactionary', and thereby bad, and both put these political forms in the same category as feudalism, medievalism and monarchy. Neither appreciate nationalism. (Lenin makes an exception for the nationalism of countries oppressed by wealthy and powerful Western European ones: Irish nationalism meets with his approval, as would have the later Third World nationalism, had he lived to see it). The main difference between Lenin and Fukuyama lies in their disagreement over socialism. To Fukuyama, history comes to an end with the arrival of 'free markets' and 'democracy', whereas to Lenin, history progresses past these. But both men follow Hegel in seeing a forward-moving motion in history.
Fukuyama's theories suited the post-communist era perfectly, Lenin's did not. Leninism, in its pure form, can only be applied in countries experiencing revolutionary upheaval. In what countries, in the post-communist era, can we find that upheaval?
None, you might say: but you are mistaken. It is only after an honest examination of the period that we are forced to admit that the answer was staring at us in the face all along: the upheaval can be found in the countries that went through the Colour Revolutions of 2000 to 2010, and then the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2011, and then the Maidan Square uprising in Ukraine in 2014.
To narrow our focus onto the Colour Revolutions (and to put the Arab Spring and Maidan to one side): years ago, I read of a left-wing activist who stated proudly that the Revolutions were applied Leninism, Leninism put into practice, but unfortunately, I never screencapped that quotation, and now I cannot find it anywhere on the Internet (I have found a throwaway line in a paper by the academic David Lane (not the white nationalist David Lane!), 'The strategy of the coloured revolutions is Leninist in conception', but Lane does not dig in here and go into detail). Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Leninist theory can understand what that left-wing activist meant. Lenin, like Fukuyama, throws 'authoritarian' leaders in the same bag as the feudalists, monarchists and medievalists: these systems are all reactionary, must all be overcome, and must all be overthrown and replaced with 'democracy'. (I dislike Fukuyama's (and Lenin's) habit of using simplistic, single-word political concepts - 'democracy', 'dictatorship', 'centralism', 'freedom', 'authoritarian', and the like - words which become more hazy and nebulous the more you look at them; but, one must recognise that neither man is inclined to complexity and subtlety, and if one writes on them, one must be willing to use their language). In the Leninist world-view, 'authoritarianism' is to be toppled in what is a liberal-bourgeois 'democratic' revolution - exactly the sort that Fukuyama applauds, and exactly the sort that the Coloured Revolutions sought to bring about.
As to why these 'democratic' revolutions did not flow and merge into 'socialist' (that is, communist) ones, the Leninist theory has its answers there as well: the proletariat, the working-classes, were defeated in a succession of class struggles, etc. Perhaps because of these failures, Western communists in the years 2000 to 2010 refused to acknowledge that the Coloured Revolutions could be considered to be revolutions as such, and so therefore could be accounted for by Leninist theory. In the 2000s, Communists scorned and reviled the Coloured Revolutions, and alleged that they were a put-up job, a scam. In their view, the perpetrators of this fraud were the CIA, George Soros, American neoconservatives, American think-tanks, the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission... In this the Far Left took the same line as the Far Right, remarkably enough.
One cannot have communism without Lenin - he is to communism what Muhammad is to Islam. The communists who oppose the Coloured Revolutions have departed from Lenin's teachings and strayed from the path of righteousness. But perhaps they were correct in doing so, as Lenin's model poses all sorts of questions.
Take the 2019 protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese communist government. China has denounced them as another instance of a CIA- and Gene Sharp-contrived Colour Revolution, as China, along with Russia, hates and fears Coloured Revolutions, but given that China is a socialist and Marxist state, is China not justified in condemning the Revolutions from a left-wing perspective? If the communists in China are on the Left, then the protesters in Hong Kong must be on the Right. In Marxist-speak, the Hong Kong protest movement could be described as reactionary, even counter-revolutionary.
Now Marxism's troubles begin. If a repressive and authoritarian communism in China were to incite a liberal and bourgeois revolution in Hong Kong (a revolution which, according to Lenin's theory, can progress into a communist revolution), then history must go around in a circle. We can solve that paradox by pointing out the obvious - that China ceased being socialist forty years ago, that it is now state-capitalist. But, the more one thinks about the implications of that truth, the more one sees that they upend Lenin's (and Marx's) theory altogether. The question then becomes: is Fukuyama right?
III.
Both the Far Right and Left share a disdain for the Coloured Revolutions (and the Revolutions' alleged architects Soros and Sharp). But a real communist understands the progressive potential in bourgeois revolutions and ought to throw his weight behind any of these, whenever they occur; he must support revolution by any means necessary. He must take this position if he wishes to follow Lenin and therefore Marx, as Lenin buttressed his arguments for the necessity of the bourgeois revolution and the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat' with copious quotations from Marx and Engels. Leninism incarnated Marxism in the 20th century - or so the Soviet Union and Red China wished us to believe.
Assuming that this claim of the Marxist-Leninists was correct, the difficulty faced by the wignats and Nazbols becomes apparent. If you want to be a socialist, you must be a Marxist; if you want to be a Marxist, after 1917 you have no choice but to be a Leninist; if you want to be a Leninist, then by all rights you ought to get behind the bourgeois democratic revolution, as it has manifested itself in the Coloured Revolutions, the Arab Spring, Maidan. And it is this consequence of socialism that the Heimbachs, Spencers, Wallaces, Strykers cannot abide.
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