Stasserism, National Bolshevism, Right Wing Social Democracy

[Ya' Cousin Cleon]

Strasserism, the “Red-Brown Alliance,” and the Online Left
Orwell, the conservative’s favorite socialist, famously once opined in 1944, during the peak of actually existing fascism, that “fascism,” in the pens and mouths of the literati, had been voided of all content and transformed into a floating signifier attached to foes of all kinds. The right has been grateful ever since for Orwell’s equivocation, as their own genealogy contains some shameful relatives they’d rather forget. He declined to provide any original definition of fascism, but he did correctly perceive that its emotional payload made it a useful label for ideologists.

Recently, a related label has bubbled up into left online chatter, a close kin of so-called National Bolshevism—Strasserism. In the majority of instances, this use of “Strasserism” should not be taken literally, but as shorthand for a defiantly edgy brand of populism, whether nominally left or right. This has not stopped, however, a slew of thinkpieces and Twitter “analysis” dedicated to turning over every rock, no matter how seemingly innocuous, in the search for “red-brownism.” For the most part, this discourse treats Strasserism and National Bolshevism as functionally equivalent, rarely actually interrogating their historical content. The former has, for whatever reason, recently trended over the latter, perhaps because of its novelty.

“Strasserism” as a polemical category has become part of the tedious dialectic between two camps within the left over identity politics. It is rare that genuinely Marxist perspectives find themselves represented in this argument; it is a (mostly online) dispute between, on the one hand, a right-opportunist and workerist social-democratic tendency, and on the other, a “common sense” activist leftism, in which class is merely one identity among others in an intersectional coalition. What both sides share is a conviction, conscious or not, that is a denial that the proletariat represents a universal class.

It is within this discourse that Strasserism has been applied to the former by the latter, and then by the former to themselves in an act of ironic appropriation. A common target is Angela Nagle, whose Kill All Normies—essentially a Dummy’s Guide to *****—first brought her public attention. The book’s thesis, supported by research which consisted mostly of Wikipedia and many nights spent lurking on various internet fora, was perceived as “SJWs created the Alt-Right.” This naturally opened up an audience which clamored for “normie socialism,” which is social democracy minus the sorts who might appear on a Youtube cringe compilation, or as Kate Griffiths defined it, “an assertion of electoral politics, and specifically those within the Democratic Party, as the horizon of the socialist movement today as opposed to direct action and working class self activity. Normie Socialism or Communist Transgression.” Red Wedge. September 27, 2018. Accesse Nagle followed up this hit with an essay misusing Marx to argue against open borders and reprised it in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News slot. Carlson made an obvious choice, as with shifting winds he has exchanged his bow-tie libertarianism for a brand of Laschian populism that looks backward to Fordism and its single-income nuclear family. “Strasserite” has also been reserved for the subreddit r/stupidpol, who with dubious humor titled their podcast feed (an aggregation of other podcast episodes) “Strasserites in Pooperville” after a clumsy Twitter clapback. Other targets include Aimee Terese (formerly of Dead Pundits Society), Michael Tracey, Benjamin Studebaker, The eXile, and Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare.2

The most recent fusillade in this mirror-universe culture war is Peter Soeller’s recent Medium two-parter, which warns of a “merger of nationalism with socialist welfare policies to strengthen a mythologized white working class.”“The Rightwing of the DSA Left.” Medium, 29 Mar. 2019. " . Strasserism is here viewed as a possible consequence of “class reductionism.” Conveniently, Soeller rejects the Marxist notion that fascism has a class dimension, instead embracing a non-explanation: fascism is an “autonomous outgrowth of internalized reactionary ideas.” This interpretation of fascism as a mind-virus that infects Twitter accounts is not only silly, but self-serving. As I will argue later, this kind of unprincipled Nazi-hunting is driven by an implicit acceptance of the category of “social fascism,” which in its sensationalism crowds out genuine Marxist criticism of social democracy.

There are other examples. Black Socialists of America, a small organization mostly known for its social media presence, tweeted a thread in March which claimed that Strasserism manipulated anti-liberalism to trick leftists into supporting nationalism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. It included several incorrect claims, such as that Otto Strasser saw Marxism-Leninism as “a softer, Russian form of National Socialism,” or that the Strasser brothers sought cooperation with the Soviet Union.Black Socialists of America. This thread more or less baited Marxists, especially Leninists, with the smear of Strasserism. BSA’s own leanings are vaguely Proudhonist. Accordingly, the thread was capped off with a warning that, among other things, “decentralization” should be a sticking point for leftists, lest they fall prey to the wiles of fascists in red clothing.

Alexander Reid Ross has made something of a minor career out of “red-brown” investigation. He has written multiple essays and a full-length book on the subject. Ross has long maintained a presence online as an anarchist whose foreign policy views conveniently line up with that of the American state department. It is not surprising that this “CIAnarchist,” whose Russia obsessions often fail to separate him from the average boomer liberal, manages to place Chapo Trap House, The eXile, and the “dirtbag left” (a marketing neologism for a brand of leftist humor) in the same Venn diagram as Alexander Dugin, who most agree is a literal fascist. ease-in-out 0s;">6 The title of Against the Fascist Creep, his 2017 book on the subject, refers to “the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism. This is clearly a nod to liberal horseshoe theory, and Ross positions Strasserism between the ends of the horseshoe, with the (trivially obvious) caveat that the Strasser duo were not leftists. To prevent this red-brown menace, Ross calls for leftists to “abandon the geopolitics of edgelords, and build a public reputation as… defenders of the commonweal.” Translated, we might say this equates to siding with Western NGOs on global conflicts, just to be sure you won’t be lumped in with fascists.

Of course, sincere (or merely half-ironic) Strasserites exist, particularly online. Any foray into the murky corners of Frog Twitter or the Chans will reveal a buffet of ideologies for the taxonomist. It is here where one will most likely encounter the syncretism of which Strasserism is a subtype. Of course, this syncretism is not exactly a fusion of left and right, but mostly rightist ideas in an unfamiliar, and superficially “left,” package. Cold War stereotypes of Actually Existing Socialism, morally inverted and divested of any content too meaningful to capture in Youtube compilations of military parades are joined to the standard grievances of the far right—the collapse of family, race, and nation. John Paul Cupp, the white nationalist who idolized Juche and Iraqi Ba’athism before converting to Islam, probably best exemplifies the lunatic edge of this spectrum, on which one can find every sort of pathology.;White Power and Apocalyptic Cults: Pro-DPRK Americans Revealed.

This pseudo-syncretism is a product of a unipolar world in which a victorious liberalism, having defeated all alternatives, drives its reactionary critics into cooperation and coalition with any forces of resistance. Indeed, this is the basic premise of Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory—a popular frontism of the far right. Dugin wishes to constrain what he calls the “monotonic process” through a global realignment informed by a dichotomy between, among other things, land and sea powers (in Dugin’s jargon, Eurasian and Atlanticist). This monotonic process is akin to Hegel’s concept of bad infinity, a linear series of self-referrals which progresses continually along one axis, without ever becoming “total” and all-embracing. It is grouped in with the ideas of Enlightenment, progress, and the West as a whole, which only a coalition of particularisms can combat effectively. One could say that this is not so much syncretism as the right-wing of post-modernism, which takes the incommensurability of groups and identities for granted.

There may also be an element of novelty, as this sort of syncretic or post-modern fascism can surprise those who expect that fascism is incapable of evolution, stuck permanently in a dead-end of Nazi LARPing. Individuals like Cupp demonstrate that the far right is willing to experiment, but also that without a mass base the political elides into the aesthetic—it retreats into what Carl Schmitt, in his self-critique Political Romanticism, calls the “cathedral of the personality.” Given the personalities involved, we might rather call them basements.

Returning to Strasserism more specifically, it is known to the English-speaking fascist world primarily through A. K. Chesterton, who met Otto Strasser in 1955, during his post-war return journey to West Germany via Ireland. A. K. Chesterton was the cousin of Catholic traditionalist and witticism-generator G. K. Chesterton, whose distributism (and that of Hilaire Belloc’s) bears more than some resemblance to Otto’s own system, as we shall see later. A. K. Chesterton shared with Strasser his medievalism, ruralism, and opposition to Hitler, although this is mostly where the similarities end. However, he is seen as a foundational figure for the British fascist organization the National Front, and it is through him that Strasserism became, if in a muddled form, almost an official ideology of the National Front, particularly during the 1980s. 9 It was in this period that the edgelord neofolk band Death in June formed, taking its moniker from the infamous Night of the Long Knives, in which Otto Strasser’s brother Gregor was executed. A former member of Death in June, Tony Wakeford, joined the National Front for a time, and lyrics he composed during this time demonstrate the flavor of the NF’s “Strasserism”:

 

[Ya' Cousin Cleon]

This criticism of the state-as-leveler is, as will be discussed later, certainly present in the mature ideology of Otto Strasser. There is no doubt it made him especially amenable to Troy Southgate, the originator of so-called “National Anarchism,” who wrote a biography of Otto Strasser (Otto Strasser: The Life & Times of a German Socialist) and praised the Strassers for engaging in “a war of ideology with Hitler himself, a man who refused to advocate the decentralization of State power.”Groups in America like White Aryan Resistance, which hosts English translations of Otto Strasser on its website, also claim Strasserism as an influence. While it’s doubtful that there is a strict lineage from the Strassers to these groups, it provides an aesthetic packaging suited to the lumpenized base of the white nationalist movement.

Marxists have always acknowledged that fascism is often anti-bourgeois, if not anti-capitalist, and as such is not merely a dupe of the establishment. As early as 1934, Bukharin acknowledged that fascism was often anti-capitalist in its sloganeering, while (in his view) at the same time seeking to strengthen capitalism by a “speedy reorganisation of the bourgeois ranks,” which he analogizes to the development of absolute monarchy out of feudalism, which delayed the end of the feudal order precisely by introducing uniformity and discipline into what had been a confusing web of private loyalties. J. Sakai, among others, rejects the vulgar Marxist opinion that fascists were merely puppets of big capitalists, and portrays them as part of a movement of “failed men”—declassed professionals, disgraced officers, and immiserated farmers and small craftsmen—who, in their victimized chauvinism, sought to replace the businessman and politician with the soldier.Sakai goes so far as to say that fascism can be anti-imperialist, insofar as imperialism functions to stabilize a bourgeois global order which is at odds with settler particularism (which characterizes the imperative of the former as “invade the world, invite the world”).

We should certainly not dismiss the possibility of a rightward drift within the broader socialist movement, or the need for correcting chauvinist attitudes within the left. Nor should we deny that there is an “anti-imperialism of fools,” which has found its way into the left on some occasions. However, the recent revival of this term provides an occasion for an investigation into historical Strasserism, and the evidence will make it clear that it shares boundaries with other ideologies—but not necessarily socialism. Unpacking its logic will reveal that its usage in the context of internecine leftist spats is fundamentally wrongheaded and that we should be cautious about hyping up the threat of “red-brownism.” Moreover, it will vindicate the central importance of class struggle in understanding the development of reactionary ideology, and in particular the proletariat as a revolutionary subject.

To begin with, most histories of fascism touch on the Strasser brothers only in passing. When they are mentioned, it is in connection with Otto Strasser’s paramilitary “resistance” organization, the Black Front, and with the purge of late June, 1934, known as the Night of the Long Knives, in which Gregor Strasser was assassinated.

The brothers are mostly absent from A. James Gregor’s oeuvre, surprising given his project of rehabilitating the “totalitarianism” thesis of Hannah Arendt and others in which fascism and Marxism are interpenetrative and linked by a hatred for liberal civil society (they are not mentioned once in his best-known work, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism). Roger Griffin’s account in The Nature of Fascism is typical, asserting that the brothers were divided on the question of loyalty to the NSDAP (“… Gregor Strasser remained faithful to Nazism while his brother Otto was its bitter critic”) and folding into the “instrinsically vague term” of Strasserism-related concepts like National Bolshevism and Third Positionism.13 Robert Paxton refers to Gregor Strasser as “a leader of [the NSDAP’s] anticapitalist current” and to both brothers as economic “radicals,” while also repeating the claim that Otto was the more radical of the two Though he does not mention them by name, Eric Hobsbawm’s characterization of Strasserism in The Age of Extremes cuts closer to the matter:

“… [A] utopia of a return to some kind of little man’s Middle Ages, full of hereditary peasant-proprietors, artisan craftsmen … and girls in blonde plaits … a programme that could [not] be realized in major twentieth-century states.”15

Peter Stachura takes this further and asserts, against the conventional view, that a “left-wing” of Nazism does not exist “as a coherent ideological, organizational, or political entity” and that Gregor Strasser’s “socialism” was “…vacuous, amounting to no more than an emotionally-based, superficial, petty-bourgeois anticapitalism.”16

The Reactionary Socialism of Strasserism
From the foregoing we can see clearly how the class origins of the Strasser brothers influenced them toward what Engels, in The Principles of Communism, calls reactionary socialism. Such “socialists” were

…adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. … It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

As ex-officers, they were identified with the class that led millions to their deaths by tank, machine gun, or chemical weapons, their pretensions to cockaded chivalry increasingly mocked and at odds with the perceptions of average Germans. Ernst Jünger, a writer whose political ideals bear some family resemblance to Strasserism, highlights the disappearance of “honorable” warfare in his dystopian parable The Glass Bees, in which a cunning industrialist replaces the officer corps, and indeed all soldiers, with deadly automatons. Similarly, their petty-bourgeois origins—Gregor a pharmacist, Otto a lawyer—created an instinctive sympathy for their class, squeezed as it was from both sides and fated to disappear, as their Marxist contemporaries reminded them. Their Bavarian faith in Catholicism only furthered their nostalgia for feudalism.

However, it is worth noting the contradictions which led to deviation from this formula. The Strassers wanted a utopian form of feudalism without monarchs or nobles, and opposed hereditary privileges where they actually existed. They also, for the most part, came to despise the Junker officer class which they saw as embodying a kind of aristocratic decadence, wrapped up in the defense of an order which was dying, and indeed must die. Hostility to the Prussian establishment can be partially explained by Bavarian chauvinism, as well as Otto Strasser’s canny appeal to English prejudices during his period of exile. But regardless, this contradiction, in which anti-aristocratic and anti-bourgeois attitudes continually canceled each other out, was resolved by a coalitionist appeal to German workers as a mass base for what was, in reality, a movement for feudalism, in which workers would be “rescued” from their proletarian misery by becoming landed peasants and craftsmen. In reality, theirs was not a rescue mission, but an effort to pin the restless proletariat in place, like insects in a display box. The old feudal mold was to be reshaped and fitted over a re-agrarianized Germany.

Now turning to the Strassers’ primary writings, we see that the feudal character of Strasserite “socialism” is clear and unmistakable. Otto Strasser reveals it explicitly when he writes that “…capitalism is ideologically linked with liberalism, prior to the dominion of which there was an entirely different economic system ideologically akin to socialism, though of course differing from socialism in form.”29

The watchword, and main task, of the supposedly socialist and pro-worker Strasserite project, is de-proletarianization. The urgency of this task is justified on the grounds that the proletarian condition is incompatible with independence, and is only made possible by “finding possessions for every German,” to give him “independence of thought and development.” Strasser does not mean by this private property, however, which is to be turned over to collective feudal self-management—for ownership belongs to “the whole of the German people”—but rather the land and tools required for small production.30

In order to accomplish this, Strasser proposes the apportioning of land and means of production on the basis of Erblehen, which can be translated as “hereditary fief” or “inheritance loan.” In agriculture, the state’s role is to loan land as usufruct, through peasant councils, which are passed down to male offspring after death, or else are re-allotted if no male offspring can be found. It is worth mentioning that this was implemented as National Socialist policy, if in a more limited form, with the Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, which had as its goal the preservation of the peasantry through the “ancient German method of inheritance as the blood source of the German people.”1933)

In the case of an industrial enterprise, workers and managers are assigned from their respective vocational councils in fief to a “factory fellowship.” The managers would constitute a “functionary aristocracy” that, Strasser assures us, is much different than a class of capitalists, since it cannot buy shares of any industry, but only inherit their portion from the state. Naturally, the manager’s share of the profits is much lower than that of the workers, since such “copious profit-sharing may foster [an] … overdriving of the means of production and the neglect of improvements.”32 Agricultural workers were to be converted into peasants, and workers not assigned to “factory fellowships” will join the ranks of petty proprietors, craftsmen, and professionals, who are organized into guilds.

Strasser meets the objection that a return to small production would create massive grain shortages by proposing de-urbanization as a complement to de-proletarianization: urban workers from the cities would be resettled as peasant-producers, particularly along the eastern frontier, while the capital of Germany would be relocated to a small town in the central part of the country; Strasser suggests Regensburg or Goslar (population in 1940: about 40,000). For, Strasser adds, “life in our huge tentacular towns is a danger to the human race.”33

To this de-urbanization and de-proletarianization, Strasser rounds out the trifecta with de-centralization. In Germany Tomorrow, Otto Strasser states that administration will be subdivided into 12-14 regions and adds that “the recognition of the necessarily unified character of the German State is not an acceptance of the ideal of liberal unitarism,” and that the German state is “not to be ruled centrally from one spot,” as to reflect the “geopolitical, religious, and cultural differences within the German people.” This reflects the earlier program developed at Hanover, which specifies that only financial and cultural policies were to be pursued uniformly at all levels of government, with all other policies to be implemented at the regional level, comprising 12-14 regions “according to their particular historical and tribal traditions.” As a general rule, the Strasser Program concludes that there should be “division of authority between centralism and federalism with … an organically structure system of corporations.

This principle of balancing difference with unity by devolving responsibility to the lowest competent strata of authority is known in Catholic circles as “subsidiarity,” and it is likely Strasser, a Catholic, was familiar with it. Strasser’s agricultural policy is also driven by the principle of subsidiarity: the size of farms shall be no larger than one tenant can farm unaided. In industry, Strasser seeks a balance between what he sees as three essential factors: management, workers, and the state. Where capitalism, communism, and fascism make “totalitarian claims” to each factor respectively, Strasser’s German socialism seeks to share the responsibility of industrial enterprise equally among them.


Strasserism vs “Strasserism”: Turning Over the Right Rocks

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

They're just Nazis, kill 'em all.