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.  

Putinism and Russian national greatness refuted - in one 4Chan post

I recently came across a thread at 4Chan / Pol, 'How do we make Russia great again?', started by a well-educated Russian poster living in rather impoverished circumstances.

 How do we make Russia great again? Anonymous (ID: yTBLaVHt) 11/25/16(Fri)17:50:01 No.100151762 ▶

I just spend 1/10 of my month salary to buy food for a couple of days. I work as an engineer in a water supply company.

(You can click on this link to read the post, but after one week, a thread on 4Chan is deleted, so it won't be there for very long).

Putinistas, and Putin's hired propaganda troll army, didn't put in an appearance in this thread, which is what makes it so valuable; we hear, from ordinary Russians, what life in Russia under Little Vladimir Putin is actually like. Yekaterinburg sounds particularly bad:

Anonymous(ID: HtaGyGqU)

11/25/16(Fri)19:51:32 No.100160791▶

>>100160999

>>100159151
>What about everything East of the Urals?
Drunk Criminalland.

The only places that are not totally bad are Moscow and St.-Petersburg. Ekaterinburg, probably the third largest city, is a polluted criminal shithole with like 3 subway stations and broken roads in the city center. The rest is worse.

The cops are universally as bad as criminals. Medicine outside Moscow and St.-Petersburg is utter shit, and inside it's mostly pretty bad. The median wage is like $4000/year. The economy outside pumping oil is virtually non-existent. And so on, and so forth - you probably get the idea.

A picture can speak a thousand words, and in this thread, we have plenty of pictures, which don't exactly give a positive impression:

The Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev wrote a book called Homo Sovieticus (1986), which Tomislav Sunic summarises here. According to Zinoviev, you find laziness, slothfulness, at the heart of Soviet communism. When people think of communism, they think of gulags, famines, purges, five-year plans and the rest, but really they should associate it with a certain mode of life - one which entails mediocrity, slothfulness and taking it easy. Workers in communist countries receive half the pay as their counterparts in the West, but do half the work; you can't be fired from a job and you can't be unemployed (at least not for long). You receive very little, but you learn to make do - and enjoy life - with very little.

The Slavic mentality - in particular, the Russian mentality - finds this way of life congenial. Stagnation - especially under Brezhnev - reigned, but to a citizen of the USSR, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Russians have always had a reputation for slovenliness, laziness and complacency, even before the advent of Bolshevism, and in 2016, they are more or less the same people as they were a hundred, two hundred, years ago.

Some ambitious Russians seek to escape 'Russianism' by fleeing the country; others stay and achieve spectacular success, mainly through graft and kickbacks. Little Putin - who is one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest - provides an example of the latter. Here you can see his palaces, super yachts, air fleets and watches.

After reading that 4Chan post, I actually feel a little sympathy for Putin, who grew up in impoverished circumstances and whose family shared communal housing with ten families. Any intelligent and ambitious person would want to pull themselves out of the Russian mire by any means necessary - even if that means stealing from one's own people, as Putin does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Plea to Nationalists: Read Louis Althusser

'I am a fascist intellectual', wrote Maurice Bardèche in his classic work, 'Qu'est-ce que le fascisme?' (1961), which sought to outline a theory of European neofascism. Bardèche's statement raises a number of questions, one of which is: what are the theoretical tasks of the neofascist intellectual?

One of them is directly related to Western nationalist and Far Right activism, and that is to recreate the successful fascist formula of the 1930s and 1940s (the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, Codreanu, Primo de Rivera, Degrelle and others). The neofascist intellectual is a revivalist. He is like a chemist who has discovered a magnificent formula in a laboratory. But the laboratory is destroyed in a fire, and so are all his notes. So he spends his time trying to work out how to recreate that formula - a process of discovery that can take years.

So, at first sight, his activity may consist of answering a question: 'What were the components of fascism?'. But that is the wrong question to ask. For one thing, it is trivial - too easy enough to answer. By studying the history, the intellectual lineage, of fascism, one can give a list: the components of fascism were nationalism, corporatism, racialism, socialism, a theory of authoritarian politics, and a series of 'anti-s' (anti-liberal democracy, anti-Masonry, anti-Semitism, anti-communism...). The more interesting, profitable, question is: in what proportion was fascism corporatist, racialist, socialist, nationalist, etc.? That is, how much, or how little, was it (for example) socialist? If we get the proportions right, we have successfully recreated (what academics call) the 'fascist minimum', and have 'built' a fascism.

That fascism has a great deal of Marxist socialism in it is well-known, and even some on the Left admit this fact. As proof of it, we only have to look at Mein Kampf (which is inflected, heavily, with Marxist language: proletariat, bourgeois, capitalist, exploitation, struggle (in the very title itself); the class composition of the fascist movement (with many coming from a working-class, and/or Marxist background); the symbols, uniforms, organisation, discipline, etc., of fascism... Critics of the Right (e.g., the great neoliberal thinker, Hayek) allege that fascism was a brother of communism. The two are not related in the way that Maoism and Stalinism were, for example, or Castroism or Ho Chi Minh-ism; but they are related.

In Mein Kampf, we find many ideas which seem to come second-hand, or even third-hand, from Marx. For one of (many examples) there is the famous chapter, 'Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna', which has social analyses similar to those in Das Kapital. The musings on the proletarianisation of rural German youth, in that chapter, are almost pure Marx. This is despite the fact that, of course, Hitler's attitude towards Marxism, communism and the German Social Democratic Party is one of pure enmity; and that the left-wing, socialist and anti-capitalist elements of the book are mixed, bizarrely, with other things - e.g., racialism, or an admiration for the role of the German army in preserving the German state... The example of Mein Kampf is proof that ideas have a capacity to escape their inventors. Marx's ideas ran away Marx and ended up forming the hybrid of ideas, taken from various places, which make up German (and European) fascism.

Which is not to say, of course, that the state between the two is not one of enmity. It was, and ever shall be: communism and fascism have an undying enmity for the other. Which raises another question: what were the intellectual grounds for that enmity, today and in the past?

The first reason for the enmity involves race and immigration. The West is being overrun by non-white immigration, and in Britain, for example, white British in working-class towns such as Bradford and Leicester are becoming minorities. Possibly, in the coming decades, the white British will be reduced to a minority, in a country of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and India. Is this, in the view of today's Left, a bad thing? Not at all: the Left only see classes and class struggle. The only thing of concern to them, in this future non-white Britain, is the class divide between capitalist, Muslims, Africans and Indians on the one hand and the Muslims, Africans and Indians (who don't own property) on the other. The main thing is to get the proletarian non-whites to revolt against their capitalist non-white masters, and then introduce a Soviet-style communist state. (The fact that many of the non-white British are Muslim is of concern, but only because Islamists are anti-communist, and will make short work of communists. Under Islamist rule (and Sharia law), communists won't have a hope).


The other main difference is regarding (what Yockey calls) the economic method. Communists want to abolish property 100%: everything must be nationalised, and farmers won't even be able to sell produce at a stall by the side of the road. What is more, all economic production must be planned, all prices regulated, and so forth. This, to the communists, is the only 'pure' socialism, and a communist would rather spend seventy years in a communist Albania, for example, than one day in a capitalist Albania. One is qualitively better than the other. Cuba and North Korea are better than Australia, because there is no property, no 'exploitation of man by man', etc.

So the main communist criticism of Hitler, Mussolini and the other fascists was that they didn't go far enough: that is, they did not abolish property, they took what was a genuinely working-class mass movement and then 'sold out' to German and Italian capitalists. This criticism (from the communists) is identical to that of the 'Left' National Socialists, the Strasserites. (One could then ask: why did the Strasserites then, go the whole hog and embrace East German-style communism?).

So these are two main points of difference: why nationalists object to communists (they object to the communist position on the race question) and why communists object to fascists (they differ when it comes to economic method).

Having said that, the communist economic method does not define what communism truly is. Communism, historically, has always been willing to back down when it comes to method. As we know from Soviet history, the USSR experimented with a number of economic methods - it went from 'war communism' to Lenin's 'New Economic Policy' (which was a class collaboration with the Russian capitalist class) to Stalinist collectivisation... At each turn, there were tortuous intellectual justifications for each change in policy. Likewise, China went through a number of permutations in its treatment of the economy, and now has abandoned, more or less, communism altogether. (Cuba, likewise, is "reforming" - that is, moving away from state ownership of the modes of production).

Which raises the thorny question: what is communism? What is true Marxism? This is no trivial thing. Interpreting Marx the "wrong" way could, in Stalin and Mao's time, lead to you being expelled from the communist party, arrested, tortured, and executed... Many Marxist intellectuals have attempted to answer this question, and it will not concern us here. For a working definition (for the purposes of this essay), we will say, Marxism is Marx's Das Kapital - Marx's definitive work.

Now, we stated previously, that fascism had a Marxist/socialist content. Assuming that this is true: is the case that today's Far Right, Western nationalism has a Marxist/socialist content, and, if so, does it have that content in the same proportions as the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s?

The answer is yes and no.

In terms of class composition, the nationalist skinheads are working-class, and blue-collar, almost to a man; so are the 'soccer hooligans' of Europe (affiliated with the Far Right, and making up the ranks of the English Defence League). Electorally, the Front National enjoys large support from the French working-class (and is stealing working-class voters away from the venerable French Communist Party); the same goes for the populist Swedish Democrats.

A political movement which has a large working-class membership, and electoral following, is not necessarily 'Marxist': look at (a hundred years ago) the Australian Labor Party or the British Labour Party. But that class composition is a necessity for a party that wants to be 'socialist', and, further, 'Marxist-socialist'. On that point, it is well known, many of the social democrat (or liberal-socialist) parties of the West have moved away from their working-class base. The British Labour Party, for instance, regarded (behind closed doors) its white, British working-class constituents as "racist", and recognised that, in order to carry its program of mass, non-white immigration into Britain, it would have to overcome white, British working-class opposition. (This is according to the British Labour party consultant Andrew Neather). We can safely assume that the Swedish Social Democrats, who are maniacally pro-immigrant (and pro-Muslim), take the same dim view of the "racism" of the Swedish working class.

So, in that regard - immigration and the racial question - the nationalist parties are more 'in tune' with the values, mores, needs of the working-classes of their respective Western countries than the mainstream social democrat, center-left parties. As for certain of the the non-party, 'extraparliamentary' nationalist organisations and groupings - the skinhead groups, the soccer hooligans, the EDL - they are white working-class.

But are today's nationalists armed with theories and concepts which are anti-capitalist, socialist, and quasi-Marxist - theories and concepts which are close cousins to those in both Mein Kampf and Das Kapital? Or, to put it more succinctly, are they as "Marxist" as Hitler and Mussolini were?

There have been attempts, by certain nationalist groupings, to steer nationalism back to its socialist and anti-capitalist roots - e.g., there are the Freie Nationalisten of Germany (who have imitators in Sweden, Greece and other European countries), nationalist anticapitalist sites such as the Norwegian http://www.antikap.nu website which is down at the time of writing), and others. Much of this, in my view, has been a shallow appropriation of left-wing tactics: getting at the surface, but not the essence.

What are these left-wing tactics? The Left, as we know, was completely confused and demoralised by the collapse of the former Soviet Union (and the abandonment of Maoism in China). Attempts have been made, by left-wing intellectuals, to salvage Marxist, Leninist and communist theory: many books have appeared with the hopeful (and pathetic) titles along the lines of 'How Marx is still relevant in the 21st century' and which, of course, detect a Marxist 'crisis of capitalism' in the recent financial crisis. (Strangely, no 'crisis of communism' was ever detected in the economic downturns in the USSR, China, Cambodia and North Korea - which lead to famines claiming millions of lives...). One left-wing response to the post-1991 'crisis of Marxism' has been the revival of zany Situationist pranks (e.g., 'culture-jamming'), which are held up to be 'resistance to capitalism'. Often, however, such things end up being a strange and ironic commentary on capitalism and consumerism. This zaniness and irony is very much part of the contemporary Hipster subculture.
I do not mean to dismiss such things out of hand: it may be that this kind of 'Neo-Situationism' has a great deal of value in it. (Certainly, it is more constructive than smashing cars and shop windows, and assaulting police, which is what the "anti-globalist" anarchists of today do). But - in the Hipsters and anarchists of today - there is a genuineness, and a theoretical basis, which does not exist in the 'anti-cap' tendency. (A few intellectuals have linked Hipsterism to the ideas of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; which isn't to say that the Hipsters have read Bourdieu, only that this is another instance of ideas running away from their creators). That is, those in the 'anti-cap' tendency have not given sufficient evidence that they have taken socialism and quasi-Marxist ideas to heart, in the way that Hitler, Mussolini, Degrelle, did. Their tactics are just that - tactics - designed to 'confuse the Left' and scare them.

And, indeed, the Left is always very nervous, and was, initially, frightened that the Freie Nationalisten and 'anti-cap' types would lure left-leaning youth into their fold. They needn't have worried, however. The 'anti-cap' types have only done what Rockwell did with German National Socialism: they have put on a uniform (in this case, the Black Bloc uniform) but not assimilated, refined and adapted the actual Hitlerian and National Socialist ideas. (The same goes for the Trotskyite communists: take away the red flags, banners and Lenin busts, how much of contemporary Trotskyism is communist and Marxist? Is support for gay marriage, for instance, truly Marxist?). Were communists prepared to sit down, talk and exchange views with a few 'anti-cap' types of my acquaintance, they would have seen through them straight away. The 'anti-capitalism' would be revealed for what it is, just hot air, confusion, or worse, a deceptive tactic. 

In summary, the 'anti-cap' tendency of the last decade needed theoretical credentials. They needed intellectuals, theorists, and theorists who - if they were to develop a true understanding of capitalism, and to develop a left-wing, socialist opposition to it, and to develop the beginnings of a strategy for resisting it - were influenced by Marxism. What is more, they needed modern Marxist intellectuals - not intellectuals from the time of Trotsky and Mao in their heyday, but intellectuals from the time of the New Left and after... In short, they needed someone like a Pierre Bourdieu. That would have put their ideas on a contemporary theoretical, and truly socialist and anti-capitalist, basis.

At this point, nationalists may object: 'Marxism preaches class war and class struggle; nationalism, on the other hand, believes in racial and national unity...'. Yockey and Evola outlined this idea of 'horizontal' and 'vertical' differences in a nation. The 'vertical' differences were those inside a nation - the hierarchical differences between, say, German capitalist and German worker, or French king and French serf. The 'horizontal' differences, on the other hand, were differences expressed on the national, or racial level: white and non-white, French and German, Jew and non-Jew... Yockey protested that Marxism, and the socialisms that were variants on Marxism, divided up the nation (or the Culture) vertically, encouraging class-war and individualism (that is, individualism in the sense of one's not having any concern for one's nation or Culture).

At first sight, this is true. But matters are more complex than that. In Degrelle's hagiographic writings on Hitler, we see that Degrelle regards the Weimar Era German state (at the time when the aristocratic von Papen was chancellor) as being anti-democratic and based on pure brute force and rule by decree (that is, overriding of the German parliament, in order to get laws passed). What is more, the class composition of that government was aristocratic and traditional German ruling-class. On the other hand, the NSDAP was working-class, socialist, and Hitler had a popular mandate (and therefore, was the true democrat). In Degrelle, we have, in this instance, the Marxist view of the liberal democratic state as being a 'separation' from class struggle. That is, the Papen government, by recourse to authoritarianism and calls for 'national unity', kept out - tried to separate the state from - a genuine socialist German worker's movement. And the Hitler dictatorship represented a true dictatorship of the German working-class - a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'...

Communists will scream, of course, 'You have no right to use these words and phrases to describe a fascist regimé! Those words and phrases are ours...'; but no-one has a monopoly on ideas. The main thing is that political realities are complex. One can view fascism through the prism of Evola's Traditionalism; or Yockey and Spengler's 'Morphology of Civilisations'; or through Marxism... For the intellectual, it is never a case of only one thinker, and one school of thought, being right, and all the others wrong. Marxism, as a 'science' (or what Germans call Wissenschaft) is a way of making an incision into reality, of cutting into reality. It is one way of analysing the particular phenomenon of fascism - and one can do this without regurgitating the clichés of two of fascism's bitterest opponents, Stalin and Trotsky. But, aside from the analysis of history, it is a way of looking at contemporary political realities. The trouble in the 21st century is that, because Marxism, as a tool (and a basis for political action), has been so abused by contemporary communist activists (as a justification for gay marriage, or illegal immigration, or student rights, or whatever), Marxist theory has to blown up and reassembled. In other words, we nationalist intellectuals have to rediscover socialism - what it means to be socialist - and see how we can use it.

One cannot simply pick up a book, however, and read it: one needs to be disciplined in philology, the science of interpreting texts (Nietzsche, as we know, was a philologist, and took a philological approach to philosophy). Philology is, to Nietzsche, the 'fine art of reading'. In Marxism, the best interpreter (to me, at the present time) is the New Left French philosopher, Louis Althusser. He took a revisionist approach to Marxism, blowing it up and reassembling it again, through a precise analysis of the real meaning of Marx's work, and the demolishing of the myths and erroneous ideas built up around it by Marxists themselves.

I myself find Althusser exciting, but some on the Left decry Althusser's Marxism as a drab, dry, cold philosophy. I can understand such views, but obviously, those Leftist critics have never really read Marx - Kapital is not a scintillating read. Unfortunately, too, much of the writing in the social sciences is 'cold and drab'. There is none of the colour and excitement one finds in, for example, a Carl Schmitt or Oswald Spengler. But Althusser is good for orienting readers, for assisting them in navigating the terrain of the German philosophy (in particular, Hegel and Feuerbach) and 19th century German history which influenced Marx (and today's European Left, and, incidentally, today's German nationalism). Just as important is the fact that Althusser looks at Marx through 'modern ideas', through Nietzsche and Heidegger... Marxism is still Marxism, of course, but Althusser's Marxism is more modern than that of the tired old Trotskyist, Stalinist and Maoist variety.

Politically, Althusser was the standard, garden-variety French Communist Party member - an admirer of Lenin and Mao, a critic of Stalin, a supporter of the communist North in the Vietnam War, and obviously, there is nothing of interest to nationalists there. Nationalist readers of Althusser have to 'divide through' this and (strange as it sounds) just ignore Althusser's actual politics.

To sum up: now is a good time for nationalists to challenge the Left when it comes to anti-capitalism and socialism. The Left is disorganised, demoralised, confused (I am often surprised by how many left-wing Internet sites, purportedly representing 'hard-boiled', radical communist groups, have not been updated for months, even years... Which suggests to me that there is not a lot of real, serious activism and theoretical activity going on). It abandoned the white working-classes and diverted its energies into side-issues which have nothing to do with socialism (gay rights, immigrant rights, environmentalism, gay student rights, and so on). The Left has left a gap, a void, which is there for nationalists to fill.