So, Heimbach, you want to be a commie?

I. 

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.  

The lowdown on why we need the lumpenproletariat-nationalist

I've written a good many polemics against skinheads, 'chavs', 'bogans', lumpenproles and antisocial misanthropes in the nationalist and racialist movement over the years and I've sounded off against them in private conversation as well. I've gone through periods where I thought that skinheads - and 'bogans' - could be of some use to the movement, only to be disappointed afterwards (usually when such-and-such a prominent representative member of the nationalist-lumpenprole class has gone and done something really, well, lumpenprole, usually something criminal and destructive (and self-destructive) after a prolonged drinking bout). How wonderful it would be, then - and this has been my thinking - if one could wave a magic wand and make them all drop out of the movement, or at least grow hair, dress normally, remove their tattoos and start behaving like decent, respectable racial comrades (volksgenossen). An outcome which would follow from this would be that decent, respectable, educated middle-class folk (not to mention the working class blue-collars who have the discipline to hold down a job) would want to join us - in fact, they'd flock to us.

If you think that the above line of reasoning sounds like Joe Owens or Nick Griffin c. 2008, you're right, except that the problem doesn't lie strictly with the 'Nazis' in the movement but with all the freaks, misfits, criminals, eccentrics, alcoholics and lumpenproles in general. The trouble is, however, that this point of view starts from the ideal and works towards the actual, and not the other way around; it takes a position - on how things ought to be - and runs the risk of turning into a dogma, and then ignores or attempts to excise any part of reality that doesn't fit in with that dogma. Neo-Nazi skinheads and 'patriot' anti-Islamist 'bogans' make up at least 50% of the Far Right activists outside of those populist and civic nationalist Far Right parties which have enjoyed success in recent elections (Rise Up Australia, Australian Liberty Alliance, Pauline Hanson's One Nation, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party, Katter's Australian Party). Politics - especially Far Right politics - doesn't consist solely of running in elections, and if you are to participate in that politics, you are going to come across, sooner or latter, a 'skin' or a 'patriot'.

An old article in the British Weekly Worker tabloid, 'What the EDL is and how not to combat it' by the Trotskyite Eddie Ford, makes more or less the same point, in a roundabout way:

 The organisation’s main financial backing comes from the 45-year-old businessman, Alan Lake, a computer entrepreneur - who helped set up the EDL’s website and runs a whole series of far-right sites including 4freedoms.com. Significantly, he has talked about turning the EDL into a “street army” to strike against the what he and his supporters perceive as the “rising Islamisation” of Britain. To this end he recently addressed the far-right Swedish Democrats group, telling them of the urgent need to build an “anti-Jihad” movement across Europe.

Lake boasted in Sweden that he and his friends had begun to build alliances with “football supporters”. Expounding more on this point to a, no doubt horrified, Guardian reporter, Lake declared that “we are catching a baby at the start of a gestation”, and went to state: “We have a problem with numbers. We have an army of bloggers, but that’s not going to get things done. Football fans are a potential source of support. They are a hoi-polloi that gets off their backsides and travels to a city and they are available before and after matches”.

We nationalist activists need to redefine the political and expand its scope. Political activism can include, not just campaigning in elections, but marches, demonstrations, meetings in meeting halls, concerts, even barbeques. And, as Selznick writes in his Organizational Weapon (1952), it's those who show up to these events who determine the politics there. Imagine it were nice, decent, well-behaved and respectable folk who were the ones attending the skinhead concerts and the 'patriot' demonstrations in droves: they'd determine the character of the politics there fairly quickly, and the lumpenprole elements would be forced out by sheer weight of numbers.

But, as we know, the 'decent folk' in the main can't be found at these events, nor can they be coaxed into doing so in larger numbers. But the lumpenproles, and the weird, eccentric, misanthropic and anti-social types, are nearly always there: they can be counted upon, just like the hooligans who used to attend the EDL marches when that organisation was in its prime.

But one has to draw a distinction between the politically active and inactive lumpenproles. Plenty of skinheads, for example, are content to put on a concert once or twice a year or form a prison gang, and that's it; they would not dream of showing up to a demonstration. Likewise, many of the attendees of the 'patriot' rallies in Australia from 2015 to 2016 lost interest and dropped out - perhaps they followed Joe Owens' advice and stayed home and voted for One Nation. But apathy and inertia tends to separate the wheat from the chaff, so far as radical politics is concerned. The vast majority of young students who joined Trotskyite sects such as Socialist Alternative drop out after six months or so - this is what the American ex-communist Frank S. Meyer called 'churn' - but those who remain become hardened commies, the 'cadre'. We can find equivalents in the sphere of nationalist politics: those activists who deign to merely show up to a UPF or True Blue Crew event, or even to an Australia Day nationalist barbeque, and invest the time, energy and effort required for these events, go on to form a nucleus. You could say that they metamorphose into 'cadre'.

But one might say: what a 'cadre'! These are men who look like the two fellows in the photo above (in fact, these two men are perfectly representative: the one on the left is a 'chav', the one on the right a 'skin'). That fact, when you think about it at length, can prove to be depressing. Every high-minded and decent Australian ought to be concerned with the future of the white race, or at least the well-being of their immediate community, and so should be participating in nationalist (and racialist) politics; but that brand of politics only seems to attract misfits, losers, lumpenproles... These 'bad' people in turn scare away the decent folk, and so the nationalist scene, over time, encompasses a narrower and narrower sphere.

One then, by logic, is forced to choose between two options: one can either drop out, and join the ranks of the hundreds? thousands? of Australians who have burned out (mainly because of the antics of the time-serving misfits and lumpenproles in the nationalist movement) and left; or one can stay on and attempt, futilely, to use whatever power and influence one has in the movement to purge the ranks of the freaks, eccentrics and lumpenproles.

But a third alternative exists: one can accept the reality, learn to live with it and try and work with it. Firstly we need to acknowledge that lumpenproles, inside and outside the nationalist movement, exist, and that there is a fine line between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. In the comments section of an old article (from 2013) on the EDL, one commentator writes:

Tommy Robinson comes across pretty much as he seems.

A bit of a football hooligan who is ”fed up” with certain sections of people in the country taking the micky. And he and his followers react in that lumpen bone-headed way. Why people get so upset about the EDL I really have no idea. They are part of the lumpen working class. Maybe if you never mix with such people they seem so alien and horrid. But if you’ve ever worked on a building site (for example) you would have come across a lot of these kinds of people. Or if you went to football matches or went to the bookmakers shop.

They are Sun and Daily Star readers. We might wish they ceased to exist – but they have always been with us.

Indeed. But then, those of us in the nationalist movement who are inclined towards socialism and anti-capitalism ought to be happy. After all, record numbers of the European working classes are voting for Le Pen and Wilders, and in the UK, members of the British working classes are joining anti-Islamic groups (which are the equivalent of our own Australian 'patriot' gangs) such as the North-West Infidels, the South East Alliance and the Pie and Mash Squad. Doesn't this make our nationalism socialist? National socialist?

It goes without saying that a historical link exists between today's 'national socialists' and the German variety. In the aforementioned article by Eddie Ford, he writes: 'It is an eminently reasonable assessment of the EDL that it has steadily becomes less ‘respectable’ and developed more of the traits of a street-fighting paramilitary outfit, whose goal - no matter how far-fetched - is to physically, violently, smash the organised left and the working class movement [that is to say, the communist movement] as a whole'. He adds hopefully: 'Though, it is vital to add, at present the EDL is a pathetic piss-pot organisation with no more than a few hundred - thoroughly disorientated - members nationally'. The Left saw the connections between the EDL and the BUF, the Brownshirts, the Blackshirts, and sees the connections between today's 'patriot' and anti-Islamist gangs and those same fascist brawlers. (The fact that our civic nationalist and anti-Islamic friends furiously deny that such a connection exists makes no difference). The social base of the NSDAP itself rested on, at the outset, two groups: university-educated youth and 'hard men' (who were more often than not returned soldiers or dropouts from the German Communist Party (the KPD) or both). The Marxists have always alleged that the latter group formed part of the lumpenproletariat. Who knows. As stated before, a fine line exists between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. In defining the lumpenproletariat, today's Marxists rely on Marx's book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) which was written a hundred and seventy years ago and may (one might think) have become outmoded.

In all respects - in all but one (which I shall detail in a moment) - the 'patriot' and 'skin' movements resemble the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. This isn't to say, however, that both of them can't be criticised from a nationalist point of view. They direct most of their fire at what many of us in Australia consider to be the wrong targets. The 'patriots' concentrate overly much on Islam: the real threat to the white man's racial survival on this continent comes, not from the Middle Eastern countries (or even Islamic-Asian countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia) but from India and China. Likewise, the 'skins' and other Neo-Nazis (especially the American ones) are preoccupied almost solely with the Jewish question, whereas the Jew - while being no friend of the white man in Australia - doesn't here make himself as much of a nuisance (socially, politically, culturally, economically) as he did in the Germany of Hitler's time.

But all that can be debated later. The most glaring deficiency of both the 'skin' and 'patriot' movements is that, while both subscribe to fascist practice, if not fascist theory, both lack strong leaders, 'great men'. The NSDAP and the PNF were conceived as, among other things, a means of catapulting their respective leaders Hitler and Mussolini into power. The expectation of all the fascist movements of the time was that their leaders were prepared for, and sought, absolute political power - that they would not settle for being mere leaders of a cult (i.e., William Pierce) or a trend in popular music (i.e., Ian Stuart). We in the nationalist movement today lack men of action - the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Mosleys, Degrelles... I compare a fascism without a leader to an Islam without a Muhammad.

Having said that, in conclusion, we nationalists, especially those of us of a 'fascistic' and 'Nazi' bent, should be grateful to the lumpenproletarians among us; they alone in the seventy years since the war have kept the flame of nationalism alive.

Is it socialism? Socialism and the Civics, Patriots and the Pie and Mash Squad

A nationalist comrade sent me the following - from a Facebook thread - recently and asked if the below account of NSDAP social and economic policies was 'true':

Multi-national industries in occupied territory were particularly targeted for state ownership

* Large public works programs supported by deficit spending

* Disbanding of all private welfare institutions, in an effort to socially engineer society by selecting who was to receive social benefits

* The National Socialists provided a plethora of social welfare programs under Nazi’s concept of Volksgemeinschaft which promoted the collectivity of a “people’s community” where citizens would sacrifice themselves for the greater good. The NSV operated “8,000 day-nurseries” by 1939, and funded holiday homes for mothers, distributed additional food for large families, and was involved with a “wide variety of other facilities.”

* During the 12 years of the Third Reich, government ownership expanded greatly into formerly private sectors of strategic industries: aviation, synthetic oil and rubber, aluminium, chemicals, iron and steel, and army equipment. The capital assets of state-owned industry doubled during this same period, whereby the nationalization caused state-ownership of companies to increase to over 500 businesses.

* By the late 1930s, taxation, regulations and general hostility towards the business community were becoming so onerous that one German businessman wrote: "These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth,'

A particularly interesting one for you history deniers:

* The Nazi social welfare provisions included old age insurance, rent supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes, interest-free loans for married couples, along with healthcare insurance, which was not decreed mandatory until 1941.

Yes, I can say that all the above was true.

I came across my first account of German Nationalist policies in a beginner's textbook on Keynes, which described how Sweden and National Socialist Germany flourished throughout the Great Depression because of (what the author believed) was Keynesian policy.

At the time I read the book - the mid-1990s - rural and regional Australia was afflicted with great unemployment as a holdover from the recession of the early 1990s, a slump which was compared by many to that of the 1930s. So the German National Socialist and Swedish Social Democrat fiscal and monetary remedies proved to be attractive to me. (But I wasn't a fascist sympathiser at the time: I still believed in the Holocaust, and found Hitler, National Socialism and fascism abhorrent).

Another friend has added, to the above Facebook exchange:

The fact the Nationalist Socialist Germany is considered economically Left by many today, shows how far to the economic right we are.

Ive heard these before, they are more or less true (with important caveats, that being the intent of government ownership). This was the way the world was then. Before neo-liberalism and deregulated lassez-faire capitalism, these kind of policies were normal. Look at Post WWII tax rates in America. Positively wealth redistibutionary.

On the subject of high taxes: the Great Depression was caused by tax and tariff increases. It all started in the US:  Herbert Hoover imposed the 60% Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1929-1930 and then raised the top rate of income tax from 25% to 63% in 1932, and countries all across the world - including the UK, Australia, Japan and Germany - responded with their own Hoover-style super-tax and tariff hikes. The US recession went global as a result.

On coming into office, Hitler didn't cut income taxes, but he did, according to supply-side doyen Jude Wanniski, exempt shares in the top German companies from capital gains tax; he also cut taxes for companies that reinvested their profits. On the trade front, he negotiated trade agreements - or barter agreements, rather - with thirty countries, which circumvented the huge Smoot-Hawley tariff blocking off international trade. (His autarchy policies, which encouraged self-sufficiency, were intended to be another way of getting around Smoot-Hawley).

The West - and Japan - recovered after the war because of cuts to the enormously high Depression and wartime tax rates. Those post-war rates do look high to us today - the top rate of income tax in the US, even by 1980, was 70% for anyone making over $USD100,000 - but because of generous loopholes, rebates and deductions, hardly anyone paid them. In addition, by 1950, the gold standard and fixed exchange rates had been reintroduced. As for the tariff walls of the 1930s, these were knocked down after a series of free trade agreements, including the much-aligned GATT.

But I digress; I'm leading into a discussion of supply-side economics, when what I want to write about here is Hitler's socialism. The above Facebook quotation raises the question: what leads us to characterise certain politicians as socialist, even Marxist? Is it their social policies - like those of Hitler's, listed above - or is it something deeper... I believe the latter. What makes a politician socialist, even Marxist is his championing the cause of a particular class - the working class. For this reason, I view Trump as the most socialist - even Marxist - American president in the last hundred or so years. He has donned the mantle of saviour and protector of the (white) American working class, and so should rightly be considered socialist even if he doesn't see himself that way. The fact that Trump does not endorse Marxist-Leninism, and most likely never has read a word of Marx or any other socialist intellectual, doesn't matter; what does is that he has managed to present himself to the American workers as their representative.

In contrast, Sanders - who campaigned as a self-conscious socialist, that is, a socialist who recognised himself as such - did not succeed in winning the votes of the blue-collars in the Democrat primaries; he only managed to attract the middle-classes - the white collars - and the bohemians. That seems paradoxical, to be sure, but modern politics is filled with paradoxes.

Sometimes what a politician says matters more than what he does. Lenin claimed to be 'for' the working classes and the peasantry and yet starved them to the death and executed them in the millions; but we should still - in my opinion - see Lenin as a genuine Marxist and socialist and class warrior... By that criteria, Hitler, too, should be regarded as a genuine socialist - and even Marxist - regardless of whether his policies were, objectively viewed, 'for' or 'against' the working class and their interests (and in the end, who is it that judges, we may ask).

Fascism finds its political center in the working classes, just as Trumpism does (but this is not to say that both fascism and Trumpism are the same thing). Back in the 2000s, when the English Defence League first appeared, it succeeded in enrolling many British working class men; its base was located in the British working class. It was this element, in combination with others, that gave the EDL its 'fascist' character. The EDL leadership may have protested that the EDL was a multi-culti, philo-Semitic, 'pro-Israel' organisation, but this rhetoric hardly fooled anyone. The resemblances between it and earlier, overtly fascist formations - such as Mosley's BUF - were blindingly obvious to students of history. The doctrinal purists of the Far Right who opposed the EDL pointed, like the EDL leadership, to the 'Zionism' of the EDL and its multi-cultism, and they raised suspicions that the EDL may have been formed by agents of the British 'secret state', but all this ignored the implicit whiteness of the EDL and the implicit fascism.

In fascism, practice precedes theory, and part of that practice is the cultivation of a working-class base - doctrinal purity comes later. And so does any other form of purity. We must acknowledge that many of the followers of the EDL, and the Neo-Nazi 'skin' movements, came from the ranks of the lumpenproletariat, not the proletariat (but a fine line exists between the two). How much more beneficial, for the Far Right, it would be if these uncouth types could be discouraged from entering the movement and more clean-cut and well-presented types (like those overall-wearing, cloth-cap wearing proletarians in Soviet iconography) could be persuaded to join. But alas, in politics, things don't work out that way. You can't pick and choose; nor can you isolate and segregate certain factions of the Far Right from the other. Nor can you say that you only want 'good' working class people to join. (For the past thirty or so years, the Far Left has been keeping out of its ranks what it regards as the 'bad' members of the working class; as a result, it has gutted whatever working class membership it had and turned itself into a bourgeois, non-working class and non-socialist (in the true sense of the word) movement).

The EDL seems to have waned, but several anti-Islamist offshoots - such as the North West Infidels and the South West Alliance linger, and so do the Australian equivalents: the UPF, Reclaim Australia, True Blue Crew... This so-called Australian 'patriot' movement does boast a sizeable working class following, and could be said to be quasi-fascistic in some respects. Like the EDL, it has been corrupted by Zionism and civic nationalism, but, on the other hand, it does show fascist potential - more so than the political parties with which it is aligned (Rise Up! and Australian Liberty Alliance). In other words, they stand close to the socialism of the NSDAP variety, about as close as the skinhead formations. Ideological proximity to the tenets of the NSDAP doesn't equal identity, of course, but the skins and the patriots are the closest we'll get - for the time being - to an Australian neo-fascism.

The interesting thing about the UK scene is that the civic nationalist and the overtly fascist groups are prepared to work together: see an account of a 2016 Liverpool demonstration here, which saw the civic-nationalist, 'hooligan' outfits NW Infidels, SW Alliance and the Pie and Mash Squad standing alongside the (now banned) National Action, which was a self-proclaimed 'national socialist' group. I take this as evidence that the gap dividing the two tendencies in Britain has been bridged. Likewise, that gap could be surmounted here in Australia.

The Left changes its tune on Trump

With such vehement opposition from Big Business - and I mean really Big Business - to Trump's travel ban, the fiction that Trump is a 'neoliberal' and a tool of the capitalist class becomes harder to sustain; so too does the notion that Trump's 'racist' immigration policies are caused by 'capitalism'.

One could oppose immigration on socialist, and not racialist, grounds. Marx writes that capital needs as big a population as possible, because the more 'variable capital' - i.e., labour - there is, the more surplus value the capitalist can extract. A lot of Marxism is true, but today's Left chooses to ignore it.

Trump will soon be cracking down on H-1B visas:

As the article tells us, H-1B enables 'tech' companies to dump American workers and exploit foreign ones:

There are signs that the Left is beginning to wake up to reality, and is seeing that what Trump wants and what the 'capitalist class' wants are two different things. A communist called Marvin Gandall wrote this and uploaded it to the Marxist PEN-L list, and reposted it at the Marxmail list:

(posted to PEN-L by Marvin Gandall)

Unlike Trump’s base in the petty bourgeoisie and declining sectors of the working class, the dominant multinational corporations require the free flow of labour, capital, goods and services.

The business breach with the anti-immigrant position of the Trump administration extends across the spectrum from the liberal capitalists of Silicon Valley to the right-wing libertarians aligned with the Koch brothers.

He includes a link to the Washington Post article, 'Backlash from big business grows over Trump travel ban'.

The death of the sect and the birth of the mass movement

I haven't been posting here for the past few months because I've been busy - busy engaged in the world of real politics. I've been participating in (and to a certain extent, helping to organise) the Reclaim Australia rallies, and will be attending one tomorrow - one which will be perhaps the biggest nationalist event in Australian history.

 Reclaim Australia was organised - like so many other mass movements today - primarily on social media; it held its first nationwide rally in April 2015. It managed to succeed in doing what no other Far Right, nationalist and patriot movement has done in Australia: bring together hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians out on to the streets - Australians of all ages, all classes, both genders and of all political persuasions. I myself had seen nothing like it, and made more contacts and did more networking for my particular group in one day than in fifteen years.

 One simple idea stood behind Reclaim: anti-Islam. Anyone of any race, any creed was welcome to the rallies, so long as they were opposed to Islam. Reclaim can't be categorised as a white nationalist or neo-Nazi movement at all, and its openness - and the absence of any racial aspect to its ideology - helps explain its success. 'Bogans' - that is, working-class Australians (who make up the majority of the Reclaim attendees) - won't attend a rally in the name of Australian nationalism or white nationalism (i.e., a 'Worldwide White People's Day'), but they will attend something that purports to be 'patriotic'. And for Aussies, Islam provides a focus and a starting point and serves many a useful purpose. For one, as we are told, over and over, 'Islam is a religion, not a race', and anti-Islamists can't be accused of 'racism'. Secondly, no-one can deny - after reading Bill Warner's works - that Islam preaches values which are antithetical to Western values (or, for that matter, anyone's values). Third, a connection exists between Islamic jihad and violence - a connection which is undeniable. (On the Friday before the Reclaim rally in April, Islamic 'extremists' massacred around 150 Kenyan schoolchildren). These three points, I think, suffice to put anti-Islam and the anti-Islamic political movement on a higher level than any other 'Far Right' and nationalist political movement out there, in Australia at least; anti-Islam excels in terms of efficacy and sheer usefulness.

 After April, anti-communism was added to the Reclaim platform. As of now, the platform consists of three planks: 'patriotism', anti-Islam and anti-Communism. Why the latter? In Melbourne in April, hundreds of Trotskyite communists turned up and attempted to prevent the Reclaim rally from going ahead; they used coercion and violence, spat at and assaulted people (including the elderly), etc., etc., and did all the things that communists have been doing for the past hundred years. For many on the Australian Far Right, the events of April in Melbourne provided a wake-up call. Many patriots and nationalists must have thought, beforehand, that the state decided which political movements were allowed to march and to assemble in public; that wasn't the case. The communists decide it, and for forty years or more they have attempted to usurp the state's monopoly on violence and coercion. They decide who gets to march and who doesn't. That explains, in part, why the Far Right in this country hasn't succeeded in getting off the ground. A political movement that exists in the real world - as opposed to on the Internet - needs to rent halls and hold meetings, distribute literature, hold rallies, advertise itself, stand in elections, assemble in public. It can't do any of these if, for instance, three to four hundred communists line up outside a meeting hall rented by nationalists and use violence to prevent attendees from going in.

 As I said, for many patriots and nationalists in April, the veil dropped; communist violence awoke them to the reality of the political situation of nationalists in Australia. I like to think that, on an instinctive level, many of them began to understand what Mosley, Hitler, Mussolini were all about. The BUF, the Italian Fascists, the NSDAP Brownshirts, didn't engage in street brawls with commies for fun; they did so because they knew, as political movements, they wouldn't flourish, much less survive, if they allowed the communists to keep hold of the streets.

 Communists can't present a challenge to the state, and the existing political system, through the ballot box, but they can use violence and coercion to pick off any fringe political movements - and that includes Reclaim - and by doing so they challenge the liberal democratic state. Liberal democracy protects weak, small and fringe movements; it allows them to participate in political life and gives them a seat at the table, as it were. But if it fails to protect those movements from communist thugs, it fails, as it were. So, by attacking nationalists, communist manage to chip away, a small piece at a time, at the foundations of the liberal democratic state.

 The communist 'vanguard party' (or, as Trotsky calls it, the 'combat party') must be kept in condition; it must be used, constantly, or otherwise fall into a state of disuse and disrepair. The membership must be radicalised and be kept in fighting form; the leadership orders the members to participate in acts of political violence. If they don't do this, then, like any army which has been kept out of combat for a while, they will atrophy. Then their precious revolution won't come about.

 One can't debate a communist; he won't listen to reason. You can try and persuade him that his actions - at the April rally, for instance - were immoral and illegal; you can try and argue that communism doesn't work, didn't work in Russia or China, and has been rejected - and will continue to be rejected - by the Russians and Chinese themselves. But you're wasting your breath. Communism tends to brainwash its adherents, who become immune to proof or disproof. Trotskyism in practice seems to be much more cultish than the other communist subgroupings, and Australia boasts a large number of Trotskyite communist groups - around six or seven. The largest of these - Socialist Alternative - numbers, according to former member John Passant, only around 300. But, if you put all the Trotskyite subgroups together on the same day in Melbourne, you wind up with a sizeable force.

 (I don't want to give the impression that the communists here in Australia are made up of tough nuts; most of the communists I've encountered strike me as being physically weak and, what's more, confused - about their racial and sexual identity, among other things. Suffice to say that they do present a bigger political obstacle here than in many other Western countries. The Southern nationalist and pro-Confederate flag rallies in the US have met with little organised communist opposition, for instance).

 Reclaim resembles the German movement PEGIDA in several ways, and as we know, the communist opposition in Germany was unable to shut down PEGIDA - in Dresden at least. The Dresden marchers outnumbered the communists every time. The PEGIDA marchers didn't need to protect themselves from the communists, because the latter weren't large enough, and weren't willing to physically attack the big numbers of 'ordinary' Germans - the German equivalent of our 'mums and dads' and 'bogans'. The German communists tried to sell the public on the idea that PEGIDA were, like all Far Right movements in the West, 'Nazi' and 'fascist', but this didn't fly. Perhaps the example of PEGIDA offers a way forward for Reclaim.

 The question is, will Reclaim last, or will it fizzle out - like PEGIDA, like Occupy Wall Street, like the Tea Party, like so many other groups built on the back of a mass movement.

 The Jewish-American communist theorist Hal Draper wrote at length on the difference 'sects' (or 'micro-parties') on the Left and between real socialist mass movements. A man of libertarian-Marxist leanings, he regarded the mass movements of the Left as being more authentic than the sects and micro-parties. I agree with him on that point and think that his political model can be carried across to nationalist politics. If you look at nationalism in Australia and elsewhere, you'll find plenty of sects and micro-parties and very little in the way of a mass movement (which I define as an unorganised mass of people united around one central political idea). Australian nationalists (and I am one of the guilty ones) form groups with a small number of long-term activists (the 'hardcores', the 'cadre men') and then go to play a game of 'let's pretend' - let's pretend we're a political party (with tens of thousands of members, like the mainstream political parties) with a genuine mass base. These micro-parties and sects engage in frantic stickering, postering, pamphleteering, electioneering; they hold poorly attended political rallies, party meetings, lectures and socials; they write up constitutions, party platforms, and, for their meetings, agendas and minutes; they beat their breasts and make outrageous claims - claims to represent the great Australian nation and even the entire white race. But it turns out that hardly anyone out there in the Australian electorate is listening. In a strange way, the nationalist micro-parties turn into mirror images of the communist.

 Having said that, something can be said for the sect: it endures - many a mass movement doesn't. As Marx said, the left-wing sect proves its usefulness by keeping the flame of socialism flickering during lean times (lean times for socialism, when nobody is interested in it, least of all the workers). But during times of great political ferment, when the masses are moving towards socialism, the left-wing sect becomes an impediment - 'reactionary', in Marx's words, that is, an obstacle to progress. I categorise these times as ones of great ferment for nationalism: certainly more of the Australian masses than ever are becoming involved in nationalism or 'patriotism' or anti-Islam. The political sects on the Far Right - including my own - have become, to a certain extent, redundant, and it behoves any sect-monger at this time to get out of the way and not impede progress. But, on the other hand, Reclaim could easily fall apart. Mass movements don't last long, and the historical record shows this. If and when Reclaim - or any similar mass movement in Australian Far Right politics - ceases to exist, the little sects (including my own) will carry the torch.

 What differentiates a mass movement from a micro-party? The sect leader tends to draw up an party platform of, say, 30 or 40 ideas that everyone - no exceptions allowed! - must take on board if they decide to become a member of the sect. Now, in politics, disagreement constitutes the norm. In the interests of peace and harmony, a political movement should restrict itself to two or three points. The communist platform - for over a century - has consisted of two planks: the abolition of property and the dictatorship of the proletariat (that is to say, the dictatorship of the communist party). On those two points, the communist party will not bend. The simplicity of this platform explains much of communism's historical success.

 Likewise, the NSDAP platform could be summed up in three points. To be a German National Socialist, one had to be of the Germanic racial character; anti-Semitic; and cognisant of the absolute and unquestioned leadership of Adolf Hitler. Historians of the NSDAP may warble about the '25 points' of German National Socialism, but the three I've mentioned here make up the essentials. Again, we see here a simple party program.  The sect monger makes things unnecessarily complicated and by his actions encourages foment and discord. This explains why so many of the Trotskyite sects fall apart and splinter; they show a knack for encouraging disagreement - strong disagreement - amongst their members. The Trotskyite leadership takes one firm, uncompromising line on, for instance, far-off events in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan and expects all the party rank and file to submit to this line (that's 'democratic centralism'). This approach causes fractures. (The irony is that a Trotskyite micro-party in the West can do very little about events in, say, Iraq, but it will stake its political reputation on them). Far better to keep things simple, and to repeat, historical communist movements - such as the Chinese and the Russian - succeeded only by keeping things simple and tolerating a fair amount of disagreement over unessential points.

 I don't deny that dogmatism and rigidity have a place in a political movement. In communist lore, a distinction is drawn between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in the Russian communist party: the former followed the path of 'true' Marxism, the latter a liberal version. Communists call this the two-line struggle, and it's here - on the side of Marxism-Leninism in the Bolshevik versus Menshevik debate - that the communist theorist makes his stand. Even the most open-minded communist here can be dogmatic, exclusionary and sectarian with a clean conscience. I posit that a similar two-line struggle exists in the Australian nationalist and patriot movement. What are those lines? To me, the line exists between the neo-Nazis and the non-neo-Nazis. Undoubtedly, 'neo-Nazis' exist in the Reclaim movement and in the Australian nationalist scene; they are outnumbered - in the Reclaim movement, but not in Australian nationalism as a whole - by the non-neo-Nazis.

I'll give here a working definition of 'neo-Nazism'. We could say that German Nationalism consists of three main principles, as outlined by Hitler in his essay 'Road to Resurgence' (1927). These are: a) the importance of race and, furthermore, the quality of the race; b) a conception of life as struggle; c) the importance of 'personality' - the idea of greatness, in individual men and in nations. I think that the first explains itself. The other two, however, require explanation. Regarding the conception of life as struggle - Hitler and the National Socialists believed that good things came about only through struggle - that is to say, good political things. Unfortunately, if we want a good political result (especially in Australia), we will only arrive at it through struggle - struggle against the communists. We know that the communists need to be thoroughly defeated, defeated in detail, and driven in to the ground. It's only then that we can hold our meetings, rallies, conferences in public. As for 'personality', well, that's easy enough to understand. We need to recognise the differences, not only between races and between nations, but between men. Some men show a genius; they may be more talented - at music, painting, architecture, science - than others. The same applies in the political sphere: great political leaders exist. We can regard Hitler as one of those leaders. Without doubt, he made mistakes here and there but only God doesn't make mistakes. The crucial thing is that we must beware of the anti-Hitlerians - those in the 'nationalist movement' who constantly carp, criticise when it comes to Hitler and National Socialist Germany. These people, by attacking Hitler relentlessly, constantly, are in fact denying the idea of the greatness of Man - that Man can (especially in politics) be great. They don't want you to believe that there can be good and great politicians. (As I said, one can find many of these sceptics and scorners in our movement; they often masquerade as those who hold the interests of the Western peoples, and the white race, at heart).

 So, the 'neo-Nazi' activist needs to obey three precepts: defend the importance of race; defend the conception of 'life as struggle'; defend Hitler, National Socialism and Germany, especially against the charges of 'Holocausting' six million Jews in giant gas chambers in Auschwitz and other places.
 Obviously, one can't do this at all places, all times. One needs to bend a little here and there. In a mass movement, one will come across plenty of people who make foolish and fatuous statements about 'Nazism' and 'fascism': an ill-informed person may make comparisons between, say, Nazism and Islam or even Hitler and Obama. One has to let that pass. Likewise, if the organisers at a nationalist rally - such as the one being held tomorrow - bring in busloads of supporters who are not, in their racial provenance, white, well, one has to let that pass also. One must prioritise: communism in Australia must be defeated, so, ill-informed people - and, for that matter, non-whites - must be allowed into the movement, temporarily. After communism has been expunged, then we shall straighten people's thinking out. But, before we shall enforce any 'party line' - that is, any neo-Nazi (as I have defined it) party line - we must build a genuine mass movement, and from there, a real political party.

Strategy and Tactics for 2015: Winning Over the Left on Islam

I recently penned an article on the Charlie Hebdo massacre for another site. In it I played with a few ideas - booting them around as though they were footballs - and put forward an unusual one: an alliance between the Far Right and the Far Left against Islam.

Definitions are all-important in politics, and in order to clarify what I meant by an 'alliance', I have to define what the 'Far Left' and 'Far Right' (in the West) are. In the article, I analysed the main political tendencies in the West today and identified three: Islam (which has been brought to Western soil by millions of Muslim immigrants); the Far Right (a broad designation which includes everyone from neo-Nazi skinheads to Geert Wilders); and the liberal democrats (socialists, communists, anarchists, progressive liberals on the Left and libertarians, neoliberals and conservatives on the Right). The liberal democrats, or liberals, as I call them, act in partnership with Western and Israeli Jewry.

Both categories (Jewish and liberal) overlap, of course, and we find plenty of Jewish conservatives, neoconservatives, neoliberals, communists and anarchists. But there is a portion of the Jewish intelligentsia which preoccupies itself exclusively with (what Gilad Atzmon calls) 'Jewishness' and for this group within Jewry, 'Jewishness' overrides everything else - including politics. Think of Benjamin Netanyahu or Bernard-Henry Lévi. Even Atzmon himself, I would argue, hasn't managed to escape his 'Jewishness' - most of his writings are about it.

If we were to recap the political history of the West for the past 80 or so years, we would arrive at this summary. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Far Right (fascism and extreme conservatism of the Petain and Franco type) fought a pitched battle against liberals (Roosevelt and Churchill) who worked together, then as now, with Jewry (Roosevelt's and Churchill's political and financial backers). The liberal-Jewish partnership acted in concert with the third force, the communists (who, at the time, served the purposes of a foreign power - Russia). The liberal / Jewish and communist coalition managed to defeat the Far Right, although they couldn't destroy it entirely. As the years passed, the Soviet Union faded away and its followers in the West dispersed. The liberal / Jewish alliance became the winner, the sole power in Europe. But it made a crucial mistake: it allowed millions of Muslims to emigrate and thereby the formation of a new political power on European and Western soil. As we have seen from the Paris massacre, Islam in the West challenges the state's monopoly on coercion and violence; it has been doing so for quite some time and will be doing so for a long time into the future. As to whether or not the liberal opponents of Islam (and their Jewish coalition partners) will emerge victorious from a struggle against Islam, the answer is no, by my estimation. That bleak assessment is shared by many of the liberals, most of whom, of course, won't voice it publicly.

Today's unusual political situation has shaken up the status quo. The Jewish side of the Jewish / liberal partnership usually likes immigration of any sort, but Islamic immigration, and the formation of Muslim ghettoes in Europe, 'makes Jews nervous'. As for the liberals, the dominant faction of that group wants as many as immigrants - Muslim, African, Indian, Mestizo, you name it - as possible, but a minority within the liberal camp is beginning to have second thoughts about the Muslim.

As for the Far Right, the tide is beginning to shift in its favour. The decline of the American empire has led to a slackening of the liberals' grip on Europe; the European Far Right has managed to acquire itself some breathing space. On top of that, Far Right ideas - on race, immigration, Jewry, the Holocaust, WWII - have spread like wildfire. We can see this merely by looking at the comments sections in the online news every day: an establishment media article will appear denouncing PEGIDA, and the comments section will be bombarded by criticisms - from sometimes hundreds of different posters - tearing the article to shreds. The liberals, who organise the anti-PEGIDA, pro-Islam counter-demonstrations, don't compete against this and show no signs of wanting to do so.

Having said that, the Far Right hasn't yet taken power in any Western country, and among the reasons for that is that it lacks allies. Often it's the case that one political tendency will need the aid of another to attain power. The NSDAP needed Hugenberg's DVP (German People's Party) in 1933; the Czech communists, the Czech social democrats in 1948. Even the Bolsheviks relied upon the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for a time, and Lenin's brand of Marxism was built upon an alliance between the workers and the peasantry.

In order to compensate for its lack of allies, certain sections of the Far Right have - for at least 15 years - attempted to appeal to the Jewish side of the Jewish and liberal alliance. That is, they have tried to steal away Jewry from the liberals by offering them blandishments - more support for Israel, more protection for 'nervous' Jews from Muslims. The parties which take this route - Wilders' Party of Freedom, Åkesson's Swedish Democrats, Le Pen's Front National and others - seek to buy respectability. This has made the liberals furious, because the Zio-Populists are impinging on their territory: the Jews are their friends, not the friends of the right-wing radicals.

This 'Wilders strategy' is leading nationalists down the wrong path, however. The Zio-Populists do more good than harm, and even the professional anti-Islamic intellectuals and publicists (some of them Jews) such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Dr Bill Warner, Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes, Ibn Warraq do more good than harm - at the least, they raise the racial consciousness of Westerners. This is why the liberals despise them and accuse them of 'racism' (even though Islam is a religion, not a race). But, even though the Zio-types do raise awareness, and they do infuriate the liberals, we nationalists - especially those of us on the neofascist and neo-Nazi side - shouldn't feel obliged to follow their example. My argument is that, instead of trying to win over the Jewish side of the Jewish / liberal alliance, we could try another target: the radical Left. They, perhaps more than any political tendency, stand to lose the most under Sharia. They will come to a realisation of this, and, I predict, will eventually back away from Islam.

I make this prediction on the basis of Islam's past. During the Islamic invasion of North Africa, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Anatolia in the 7th and 8th centuries, there were, no doubt, some Christians in those countries who held that, because Islam and Christianity are 'Abrahamic' religions, Christians and Jews would be treated well under Islam; but hopes of a peaceful co-existence were dashed once Muslims achieved absolute power. The Left today belong in the same category as those Christians. Over time, they'll wake up - they'll have to. It's at that juncture that we on the Far Right can step in and offer our hand in friendship.

The Paris massacre constitutes a turning point, because most of the victims belonged
to the Left and the bourgeoisie - the Left's own class. As a result, the Left has begun to withdraw from Islam, albeit at a glacial pace. One can't see any changes yet. The Left keeps a tight lid on debate, if their websites are anything to go by: you don't see any leftists admitting, 'Perhaps we were wrong to invite Muslims to join our rainbow coalition' - no. They stick to the same line: 'The problem isn't Islam, it's Islamophobia'. Nevertheless, one can hear a few dissenting voices.

II.

We find ourselves far away from the tipping point - what the supply-side economist Jude Wanniski calls the 'margin'. The Left aren't going to distance themselves from Islam any time soon. The question is - given that Islam contradicts their doctrine - why they haven't already done so.

The answer lies in the leftist ideology. All followers of Marx to a man, the leftists believe that the capitalist system is exploitative, brutal, wicked and cruel. To them, it resembles the system we see in the classic movie, The Matrix (1999), in which robots - the former slaves of the humans - keep humanity captive in suspended animation and farm them for battery acid. That movie is an allegory of the Marxist view of capitalism, and leftists do really see themselves as being like the rebel heroes Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. Theirs is a righteous cause which sweeps all before it. They believe that the struggle for 'social justice' is the most important thing in the world and that class - and class war - override all ethnic, national and religious distinctions. They see humans as interchangeable, deindividualised and deracinated economic units. That's why they stand on the side opposite to nationalists, who in their eyes are, like Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), working to maintain a vile, inegalitarian and exploitative system. Racialism, nationalism, opposition to Islam, only serve to deceive the working classes and divert them from the only thing that matters - revolution.

It's here that we need to distinguish between Marxism and Marxist-Leninism. The former tells us that the revolution against the capitalist system is inevitable: the transition to socialism and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', and then to pure communism and the 'withering away of the state', constitutes a final progression - as final as the transition from the Cretaceous to the Palaeogene. The capitalist system, the bourgeoisie, opponents of socialism and the revolution, will all wind up in the dustbin of history. Marxist-Leninism improves upon Marxism insofar as that it contends that the Russian revolution of 1917, the Chinese revolution of 1949 and other revolutions stand as confirmations of Marx's theory - they serve as proof that unstoppable global Marxist revolution is on the way, first in the Third World, then the First.

But, in the late twentieth century, the Marxist doctrine suffered two blows: the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern bloc in the period 1989-1992, and the backsliding of China into capitalism after 1976. Marxist theory made no provision for those catastrophic events: according to the theory, socialism could no more de-evolve back into capitalism any more than the Palaeogene could revert back to the Cretaceous.

After the collapse of communism, orthodox Marxist-Leninism (that is, pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninism) in the West disappeared virtually overnight. But the Left today makes the claim that the events in Europe and the former USSR didn't affect it at all, because, according to the Left, many of the Marxist-Leninist regimes should never have been regarded as Marxist, or even Leninist, in the first place. Even before the collapse of the USSR, Marxist theorists such as Trotsky, Mao and Hoxha put forward the notion that, after some point in time - either after the ascent of Stalin or Khrushchev - the USSR had become 'Stalinist' and had 'degenerated' into a 'bureaucracy', or had turned 'revisionist', 'bourgeois' and 'state capitalist'. We recall how, at the end of Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), the pigs transform into humans - and capitalists. Orwell intended this to be a metaphor for the USSR after the death of Lenin, and Animal Farm, rightly considered, is a Maoist parable.

As I shall explain later, it's necessary to examine the claims of the Trotskyists and the 'anti-revisionists' in detail. If we are to do so, we shall see that they are wrong (in Marxist terms, that is).

The Trotskyist / Maoist / Hoxhaist theory contradicts Marx and Engels, who never said that a socialist state, after a revolution, would suddenly and magically transform (or rather, de-evolve) back into capitalism as though the revolution had never happened: we've already covered that point. A bigger error is that the theory turns Marx on his head. Maoists and Hoxhaists argued that the USSR had devolved into a 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' state because of the ideas of its leadership. The 'bourgeois' ideas, the 'bourgeois' essence, of the CPSU leadership (and the leadership of sister communist parties) meant that the Soviet economy had become 'state capitalist'. In their view, the 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' Khrushchevs and Brezhnevs exploited the Soviet workers and extracted surplus value. But in Marxism, categories such as 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' are applied only in an economic context and pertain only to economic functioning. They don't refer to thoughts, ideas: one can't think oneself into being a bourgeois or a capitalist. Furthermore, ideas themselves only reflect the economic - consciousness springs from being, not the other way around. If the USSR really had turned 'state capitalist' and the CPSU 'bourgeois' in 1956 (after Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin), something dramatic must have happened to the Soviet economy: perhaps state enterprises were sold off to capitalist oligarchs, or capitalist enterprises were allowed to compete against state ones. But, as we know, nothing remotely like this happened in the USSR before Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

The 'anti-revisionist' theorists like to argue that even nationalisation of 99% of an economy doesn't equal Marxist-Leninism, which is true enough. But the converse is also true. Let's suppose a hypothetical Marxist-Leninist party could take power in some country and refused to abolish property - should such a country be regarded as socialist and Marxist-Leninist because of the Marxist-Leninist thoughts of its leadership? According to the 'anti-revisionist' theory, the answer is yes. But in reality, the Marxist-Leninist character of a state does depend on the extent of nationalisation, and even a bourgeois-ruled capitalist country which has nationalised 99%, or even 80%, of its economy is well and truly on the path towards some form of socialism or another. Likewise, if a country such as China privatises most of the state assets and allows competition, it can't rightly be characterised as Marxist-Leninist.

The conclusion to be drawn is that the 'anti-revisionist' theories don't hold water. Obviously, the Trotskyites, Maoists and Hoxhaists concocted these theories for political purposes - to argue that only their brand of communism deserved to be called Marxist and socialist.

As to why this so relevant to the political situation of the Left today, before 1991, a number of Western Marxists subscribed to the 'anti-revisionist' theories and formed little sects around them, and after the collapse of the USSR, these micro-parties and sects survived and flourished - they make up the bulk of the left-wing formations in 2015. They still hold to 'anti-Stalinist' or 'anti-revisionist' theories and still believe that they, and only they, are truly socialist, i.e., Marxist-Leninist. The Trotskyite or 'anti-revisionist' view is that, circa 1970, the governments of Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Hanoi, Belgrade, Tirana, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Berlin, Sofia, Warsaw may have christened themselves Marxist-Leninist, but they weren't really Marxist - they were 'Stalinist' or 'state capitalist' and 'bourgeois'; the parties in those respective countries may have had millions of members who believed that they were Marxist, but this was a delusion. An insignificant sect in the US or UK has more right to call itself Marxist-Leninist than the parties of Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Ceaușescu, Brezhnev.

Their position represents the height of arrogance. But in all fairness, it's the obtuseness of these sects which allowed them to survive the collapse of the USSR - the mainline communist parties didn't. Perhaps one could explain the one-eyedness of the Left as an evolutionary adaptation. That is, just as certain animals developed sharp teeth and claws to aid them in the struggle for existence, Marxists have learned to block out reality so as to survive. They forever pretend it's still 1972 or 1982, when communist regimes existed and the communist idea still had some validity, and that enables them to keep going. If they did yield to the dreadful facts of 1989-1991, they'd cease existing.

So, in 2015, the Left finds itself in the following quandary. It remains addicted to Marxism - it can't let go of the 19th century Marxist political and economic theory. In turn, it can't let go of the 20th century Leninist model, because, after 1917, a political activist can't not be a Marxist and Leninist at the same time. And that means that the Left is caught in a bind. It has lumbered itself with a theory which postulates the 'inevitability' of revolution, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat - the final (that is, no turning back) evolution from capitalism to socialism. In support of the theory and its apocalyptic predictions, it found confirming instances in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere. But then came along the events of 1989-91, which blew Marxist-Leninism out of the water. As a consequence, a radical left-winger today is restricted to two alternatives: either dump Marxist-Leninism or pretend that Maoism, Trotskyism, Hoxhaism and their variants represent 'true' Marxist-Leninism. Most left-wingers - especially those who have spent decades in the movement - would rather die than choose the first, so they opt for the second.

Surveying the leftist terrain today, then, we see that Marxist-Leninists bury their sands in the sand: they don't face up to reality. They don't answer the difficult questions - such as how would Trotsky have run the USSR differently from Stalin, how would Mao have run the USSR or East Germany in a 'non-revisionist' and 'non-bourgeois' way? How would today's Trotskyites, Maoists, Hoxhaists run a North Korea or Cuba any differently... It never occurs to them that perhaps the Stalins, Ho Chi Minhs, Titos, Kim il Sungs and Castros chose their respective paths out of necessity - that, the situation being what it was, there was no other way for a Marxist to proceed.

But they don't want to think along those lines, because that would require staring at their difficulties in the face and then coming to a realisation of the enormity of the task before them. That is, they would be forced to concede that they have their work cut out for them. This is why they tend to hash over the Russian revolution of 1917 over and over - they prefer to dwell on a time when revolution was easy. It's far more enjoyable to contemplate the Russia of the past than the present. That way, they don't have to ask the question, 'How is a second Bolshevik revolution to occur in Russia today?'. That's a question to which they have no answer, and to which, perhaps, there can be no answer. A return to communism in today's Russia seems unlikely, and one might say that if Bolshevism can't stage a comeback in the land of Lenin, it can't do it anywhere. Putin - a champion of state capitalism if there ever was one - may be a Stalin apologist, but Putin's Russia stands a long way away from communism, Bolshevism, Marxism.

The blinkered attitude of the Marxist Left goes some way to explaining why it can't reconcile with the Far Right on any point. The Left dwells permanently in the past. In regard to race relations in the US, the Left thinks that all of the USA is Alabama, 1963. As for immigration, the Left doesn't see what's happening in the West - wholesale demographic replacement - and persists in comparing the present wave of immigration to previous, far smaller ones, say, the immigration of Chinese labourers into California in the 19th century. On the topic of the Holocaust, the Left doesn't acknowledge that little to no hard forensic evidence for the existence of Hitler's WMDs - the gas chambers - has turned up since 1945. Finally, the Left can't reconcile itself to developments in its own history. It's an old joke on the Left that a Trotskyite is someone who doesn't understand that Stalin died sixty years ago; but all Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyite or not, have difficulty in recognising that there was a USSR after Lenin's death in 1924. After Lenin, the saint of Marxism, died, the USSR to them may as well not have existed - nothing of importance went on there. They likewise disregard the regimes of the Eastern bloc. According to them, communism was never tried in East Germany and Romania for forty years; those regimes were 'state capitalist' or 'bureaucratic' or 'Stalinist', not the socialism that Lenin intended, etc., etc.

Because of its isolation from reality and history, the radical Left has degenerated - it has become a sect. Many of its problems are due to the fact that the socialist idea itself hasn't much of a following since 1991: no mass movement stands behind it. Dramatic upsurges appear - in Seattle in 1999, in Wall Street in 2011 - only to then flicker and die. This represents a change from the past, when the masses found socialism to be a fresh and exciting idea. One could say with some justification that 'the workers' and 'the peasants' really may have wanted communism in Russia in 1917 or in China in 1949 (and more fool they). But hardly any of the 'working classes' in those countries today want communism. Unfortunately for the Left, socialism is an idea whose time has come and gone.

III.

Nevertheless, the Left endures, and one must reckon with it as a political force. The question is, how do we persuade them to join us? The difficulties of such a venture are compounded by the fact that the Left regards us on the Far Right as a race of demons. They dehumanise us. In part this reflects their frustration and pique: they know that the masses are on our side, or at least on the side of conservatives, when it comes to race, immigration and Islam. Whatever the reason, they don't want to talk to us - dialogue of any sort is impossible.

But they find dialogue even amongst themselves difficult. The Left admits that it could never put together a message board like Stormfront, a tremendously popular site where all the factions and tendencies of the Far can come together and engage in a civil (well, not always civil) conversation. The closest the Left have come to an all-encompassing forum is RevLeft, which is run by Trotskyites and sees more splits, quarrels and expulsions than probably any other message board in existence - RevLeft is a Trotskyite party in miniature. Administrative heavy-handedness, and an unwillingness to let any differences of opinion pass, mean that discussion is shut down before it begins.

On that topic, it is significant that many of the Far Left parties don't allow comments on their posts. Such a policy in this day and age - when websites have usurped newspapers - prevents any debate from getting off the ground. Today, participants in left-wing politics are treated as computers which need to be programmed with the 'right' Marxist-Leninist thinking; their role is a passive one. Which explains why so many left-wing sites seem dead.

But while many obstacles exist, there are still plenty of avenues from which to approach leftists for a discussion. As a word of warning (before one enters the strange world of the Left), one must remember that, when dealing with the Left, one can't pick and choose when it comes to the elements of the leftist ideology: leftism is a package deal. In theory, one could be a Marxist and a Holocaust denier at the same time; in practice, it doesn't work out that way. If one buys into leftism, one gets, not only socialism, but anti-racism, feminism, homosexualism and the rest. So a nationalist is not going to feel comfortable talking left-wing people.

(As part of the package deal, a leftist today must take up a hyper-leftism or anarchism on the question of US race relations. Soviet communism had long exploited the negro question in the US as a means of promoting discord and with the intent of recruiting disaffected Afro-Americans into the communist party; we now know the extent of the communist involvement in the civil rights struggle. But events have moved on since those days. Reality has not only caught up with the Soviet communist position on race, it has surpassed it. That is to say, politicians, the churches, the media, academia, entertainment and all the other institutions today stand far, far to the left of the communists at the time of Martin Luther King. The radical Left, then, finds itself made redundant in today's America, which is why it pushes a hyper-leftism. To judge by the Left's propaganda, the Left today demand a) the banning of all US police officers from carrying guns (so as to prevent shootings of Afro-Americans) and b) the release of all Afro-American offenders from jail. To the Left, this would be 'social justice'. But here Marxism has been transmuted into anarchism, and on the topic of race, as on many others, many on the Left have gone crazy).

As to what rhetorical techniques to use, Dr Bill Warner has written an excellent little book, Can We Talk? A Manual of Persuasion about Islam (2010), in which he outlines some strategies for bringing over others (especially progressive, liberal-minded people) to anti-Islam. If a nationalist manages to have a dialogue with a leftist on Islam, Dr Warner's recommendations should be followed. The problem is, however, getting a foot in the door and engaging in a conversation on Islam in the first place. The way to do that is to get the leftists to realise that, like it or not, Islam works against their interests. One simply has to hammer home the point, over and over that while leftism and Marxism believe in progress, Islam does not - that Islam is literally reactionary, perhaps the most reactionary ideology of all. Islam can't be reconciled with Marxist-Leninism. In that regard, an instruction in the finer points of Sharia - especially Sharia in relation to khaffirs - will prove to be revelatory.

IV.

In conclusion, then, I'm fairly certain that, if the Far Right and Far Left in any Western countries were to sit down together and engage in a dialogue - with a view to reaching some sort of political agreement - they would find (surprisingly enough) that they tally on a good many points. Over time the Far Left would grow to appreciate the nationalists' arguments. It seems that many on the Left may be halfway over to our side already. According to the pro-Israel agitators and publicists on the conservative Right, the Left has been infected with anti-Semitism. We on the Far Right are anti-Semitic and have been so for many, many years. So, if the characterisation of the Left as 'anti-Semitic' is correct, the Left is only now beginning to catch up with us. Our job then is to persuade the Left to go the whole hog and embrace anti-Islam as well as anti-Semitism; then they'll come around to our side almost entirely.

Given the commonalities that exist between the Far Left and Right, why is it that they haven't they engaged with us already? The reason is twofold. They have become, since 1991, pathologically quarrelsome, disputatious and sectarian; they can't even reach an understanding amongst themselves, let alone with the evil white supremacists and neo-Nazis, whom they abhor above all. As well as that, they have become cocky and arrogant - and why not, because, in many ways, they are winning - and don't feel the need to negotiate with the Far Right, or, for that matter, any other grouping on the political spectrum. They think that their rainbow coalition of Muslims, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, illegal immigrants, indigenous peoples and environmentalists is sufficient enough to catapult them to political power.

But the fault doesn't lie with them entirely: part of it lies with us. Like the Left, we've forgotten much of our own history. Something we nowadays fail to take note of is the fact that many NSDAP writings were devoted to the problem of how to win over the Left. Today's depiction of National Socialist Germany emphasises only the repressive and coercive measures used to subdue the Left - street brawls with communists, the internment of communists in concentration camps; it neglects the political and intellectual propagandising which was designed to entice the workers and intellectuals away from the communists. In Mein Kampf, we read how Marxist workers will attend a beer hall speech by Hitler with the intention of breaking it up, and coming away, if not wholly converted to National Socialism, at least more thoughtful. Such is the power of persuasion. I think that the Far Right today doesn't believe in itself, or at least, doesn't believe that it has the ability (of a Hitler or a Mussolini) to alter the opinions of its political opponents through oratory. Instead, it has withdrawn into its shell. It's become convinced, or half-convinced, that its views are untenable and ugly - that the entire world is against it and will never, never change its mind.