PART FOUR
Read here PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE
The Red-Brown Thread: Why Do Fascists Love Stalin?
As we near the end of our essay, we want to address the connection between socialism in one country and antisemitism. We need to be careful here and be precise about what our argument is. We are not claiming that antisemitism is a necessary component of such a policy, nor that it can be directly deduced from Stalinism itself. However, there is a structural risk of it, and it is no coincidence that far-right antisemites have found Stalin congenial to their own worldview. We have demonstrated above that the consequences of socialism in one country were disastrous for world revolution. But we want to go further and explain why so many fascists have fallen in love with “Uncle Joe”, and how the seemingly abstract and antiquarian debate between Stalin and Trotsky over foreign policy planted the seeds of nationalism, chauvinism, and other retrograde political phenomena. In this faction fight within the Russian Communist Party, fascists clearly and overwhelmingly favoured one side over the other.
First, let us clarify again what socialism in one country is. Originally developed jointly by Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in the mid-1920s, this theory argued that the Soviet Union could develop socialism on its own without waiting for a proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. Socialism in one country also served as a mobilising slogan for the bureaucracy by stoking latent nationalism among party cadres and encouraging the belief that Russia had a special messianic destiny. Trotsky’s rejection of this policy was portrayed by Stalin as “defeatism” and pessimism, since he allegedly lacked confidence in the Russian people to go out on their own. When Trotsky spoke of backwardness and the need to overcome it, Stalin explained it away, unwilling to hurt Russian national pride. He could then depict Trotsky’s position as “permanent hopelessness” and a repudiation of socialism.[1] In the abstract, socialism in one country did not abandon world revolution and often paid lip service to it. But, in practice, global revolution was always subordinated to the immediate needs of the Soviet bureaucracy, a priority Stalin justified with the constant refrain of “the primacy of practice”.
Under the period of high Stalinism in the 1930s onward, Soviet ideology became more explicitly nationalist and socially conservative.[2] If the main political unit was no longer the international working class but the Soviet bureaucracy masquerading as “the nation”, then genuine internationalism could only appear as a threat. Once reality was conceived as “multipolar”, or as a pluriverse of nations in brutal competition with one another, any group or party such as the Fourth International or the POUM that laid claim to internationalism was seen as automatically suspect. Real Internationalism was unmasked as “rootless cosmopolitanism”, supposedly in the service of fascism, imperialism, and foreign powers. The late Stalinist denunciation of “Zionist cosmopolitanism”, peaking in the antisemitic Doctors’ Plot of 1952, gave Stalin’s campaign a disturbing resonance with Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat”.[3]
If, for fascists, Jewish people represented a subversive and destabilising force to national cultures, then for Stalin “Trotskyism” functioned as a parallel threat. Jean-Paul Sartre noticed this affinity between antisemitism and anti-Trotskyism in What Is Literature?: “For the Stalinist a Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like the Jew for Maurras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad”.[4] Beyond Sartre, fascists also saw in Joseph Stalin something that reflected their own politics. After the last major Show Trial in 1938, Benito Mussolini could not help but express admiration for the General Secretary. He saluted him as a figure who had finally abandoned Bolshevism for fascism: “Stalin has secretly become a Fascist… Stalin has rendered a praiseworthy service to fascism by tossing out its declared enemies, however impotent they may be”.[5]
Despite the insistence on “Trotskyite-Fascist” collusion alleged by Moscow during the 1930s, the Nazis themselves seemed to approve of the purges. According to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, Hitler believed that Stalin was “a typical Asiatic Russian” but that he had “removed the West European leadership” in the USSR.[6] By “West European”, Hitler meant the Jews in the party leadership. In fact, Goebbels reported that Hitler believed Stalin was liquidating the Jews under the name of Trotskyism. Goebbels quoted the Führer: “Will Stalin gradually liquidate the Jews? Perhaps he only calls them Trotskyists to fool the world”.[7] Thus, even though Hitler still saw the USSR as his main ideological and racial adversary, there was a note of approval in his view of Stalin’s purge of “Trotskyists”.
Going back to the 1920s, Hitler saw Stalin as the representative of “Jewish Bolshevism”, calling any proposed alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia a deadly trap.[8] The idea of “National Bolshevism”, which was gaining popularity among far-right intellectuals like the Jünger brothers and Ernst Niekisch, was anathema to Hitler, appearing to him as a potential Trojan horse for “Jewish” influence. Nevertheless, Hitler admired Stalin as a strongman and envied his tactical ruthlessness in crushing internal factions.
During Operation Barbarossa, when the Soviets hardened their resistance against the Nazi invasion of Russia, Hitler showed a measure of respect for his adversary. In January 1942, at the height of the German war against the Soviet Union, Hitler claimed that Stalin only pretended to be a Bolshevik:
Stalin pretends to have been the herald of the Bolshevik revolution. In actual fact, he identifies himself with the Russia of the Tsars, and he has merely resurrected the tradition of Pan-Slavism. For him Bolshevism is only a means, a disguise designed to trick the Germanic and Latin peoples.[9]
A few months later, in August, Hitler saw fit to praise Stalin for mercilessly crushing all political rivals. He went so far as to say “Stalin is half beast, half giant. To the social side of life he is utterly indifferent. The people can rot, for all he cares. If we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as it was at the time of the Huns”.[10] The way Hitler admires Stalin brings to mind Nietzsche’s statement in the Genealogy of Morals about Napoleon being a synthesis of superman and monster. At a deeper ideological level, what Hitler, Stalin, and Nietzsche all share is a “Bonapartist” politics, i.e., a politics centred on authoritarian rule.[11]
In fascist discourse, when Stalin is not denounced as an agent of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, he is praised for his Russian nationalism, which supposedly destroyed “Jewish Marxism”. As we noted before, Stalin became a hero for a strange far-right current labelled “National Bolshevism”. A political oxymoron, Bolshevism for these fascists could be reclaimed on national chauvinist grounds to oppose cosmopolitanism. The archenemy of National Bolshevism was international globalism and its main political leader, Leon Trotsky.
For National Bolsheviks, Stalin’s real and esoteric purpose was not to spread international Marxism, but to crush it. This turn towards Stalin on the German far right started with the work of the Jünger brothers and Ernst Niekisch, who often preferred the USSR to Western imperialism.[12] The völkisch thinker Artur Dinter expressed the main idea of National Bolshevism when he proposed a military alliance between Germany and Russia. Since Stalin had already purged Trotsky and the “internationalist Jews”, Dinter concluded that the USSR had effectively become a country of “national socialism”.[13]
These German fascists were not alone in their love for Stalin. Similar sentiments appeared on the French far right, notably in the writings of the novelist and Vichy collaborator Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. In 1941, Drieu wrote in his diary that, if Nietzsche had lived to the age of eighty, he would recognise Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as “his sons … according to the first order of the spirit, they are his [spiritual] sons”.[14] By August 1944, as Germany’s defeat became inevitable, Drieu believed that Nietzschean aristocratic principles were no longer adequately embodied in Nazism, but were now incarnated in the victorious Soviet Union. He even contemplated surrendering to the Communists in order to declare that Stalin had been right before facing his own execution.[15]
Following the Second World War, the American neo-Nazi Francis Parker Yockey looked favourably upon the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the USSR and the anti-Tito purges in Eastern Europe. In December 1952, Yockey wrote an article entitled “What Is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague?” about the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia. The trial involved fourteen high-ranking Czech communists and had overt antisemitic overtones, as eleven of the defendants were Jewish. According to Yockey, the Slánský trial signalled that the Eastern Bloc was embracing nationalism by removing “Jewish cosmopolitans”:
The Stalin regime began its inner policy of dropping numerous Jews from the highest governmental positions, then slowly purging them from the lesser positions as well… The Prague Trials have gone off with an explosive roar to waken this European fascist elite to active resistance against the death plans being hatched for European Culture in Washington by American Jewry. The fact is: The Russian leadership is killing Jews for treason to Russia, for service to the Jewish entity [i.e., Israel]. Nothing can gainsay or reverse this fact.[16]
Before dealing with more contemporary far-right admirers of Stalin, we should highlight two fascists in the post-war scene. One example is the “former” Nazi Major-General Otto E. Remer and his Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which advocated a neutralist line for West Germany against the Allied Occupation. Officially, Remer presented himself as supporting Europe as an independent “third force”, equally opposed to capitalism and communism. However, in practice, the SRP was working with both Soviet intelligence and the KPD. According to former SRP member and Remer confidant, Bela Ewald Althans: “It’s one of those funny parts of German history after the war…For a while in the early 1950s, the Socialist Reich Party was funded by Russia, the KPD was not”.[17] In the United States, there was also the case of Fred Farrel, a leading columnist of an anti-communist newspaper called Common Sense. Farrel adopted a pro-Soviet stance, remarking in 1974 that “the best anti-Communists I have ever known were the Stalinists. They fought Communism with a cold deadly, remorseless, realistic efficiency”.[18]
By the late Brezhnev-era USSR, “Marxism-Leninism” remained the guiding ideology, but, among many Soviet propagandists, it increasingly assumed a National Bolshevik form. Under the banner of “anti-Zionism”, Soviet ideologues began espousing overt antisemitism and racism. They miscast the American-Israeli relationship where the tail wags the dog. In other words, they believed that Israelis (i.e., “the Jews”) were calling the shots of the US government and not the other way around. For instance, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Youth League, lifted antisemitic passages from a neo-Nazi pamphlet entitled America — A Zionist Colony written by Johann von Leers. Other authors attacked Free Masons and claimed the Russians were an Aryan people. Such Soviet antisemitism and racial mythmaking found a receptive audience among segments of the far right in Europe.[19]
In the final days of the Soviet Union, there was a growing convergence between the Russian far right and elements of the Communist Party, as both believed their society was being destroyed by cosmopolitan Jews. In 1988, party member Nina Andreyeva blamed Gorbachev’s Perestroika reforms for creating ideological confusion and “national nihilism”. In an essay “I Cannot Waive Principles”, she defended traditional Stalinism while indulging in open antisemitism, condemning Trotsky as a cosmopolitan who rejected the Russian nation:
Another peculiarity of the views held by the “left-wing liberals” is an overt or covert cosmopolitan tendency, some kind of non-national “internationalism”. I read somewhere about an incident after the revolution when a delegation of merchants and factory owners called on Trotsky “as a Jew” at the Petrograd soviet to complain about the oppression by the Red Guards, and he declared that he was “not a Jew but an internationalist”, which really puzzled the petitioners… I am also convinced that any denigration of the importance of [national] consciousness produces a pacifist erosion of defense and patriotic consciousness as well as a desire to categorise the slightest expressions of Great Russian national pride as manifestations of the chauvinism of a great power.[20]
As the monolithic rule of the Communist Party began to disintegrate, far right and antisemitic groups such as Pamyat (Memory) emerged. Originally formed by Dmitri Vasiliev in the early 1980s as “The Society for the Lovers of History and Literature,” Pamyat started to promote Czarism while attacking Jews and Freemasons. Its members adopted fascist-style black uniforms and jackboots, and in line with Stalinist hardliners, they opposed Gorbachev’s reforms. In many respects this moment marked the beginning of the “Red-Brown” alliance, in which Russian nationalism and Soviet nostalgia fused to challenge the United States and “Zionist” globalists.[21]
One of Pamyat’s members was Alexander Dugin, a translator of Martin Heidegger and Julius Evola. By the early 1990s, Dugin had broken from Pamyat and adopted National-Bolshevik style politics. He collaborated closely with one of the largest components of the defunct Soviet Communist Party – the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) led by Gennady Zyuganov. In fact, Dugin was one of the authors of the CPRF’s political programme.[22] Despite its communist label, the CPRF rarely invokes Marx and Lenin; instead, it combines Stalin nostalgia with avowedly nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric. Zyuganov sees the Russian nation as the last barrier to global cosmopolitan rule: “We [Russians] are the last power on this planet that is capable of mounting a challenge to the New World Order — the global cosmopolitan dictatorship”.[23] It is worth noting here Rockhill believes that the CPRF is part of a “very powerful communist movement” which plays a leading role in Putin’s project of “national restoration”.[24]
Dugin later worked with Eduard Limonov to found the National-Bolshevik Party in 1993. Over the decades, he has been involved with a number of National-Bolshevik and Eurasian organisations. In 1997, Dugin openly proclaimed that Russia required a “Russian national socialism” that would constitute “an authentic, real, radically revolutionary and consistent fascism, a fascist fascism”.[25] He believed that National Bolshevism would transcend the “left-right” dichotomy by combining ultranationalism and revolutionary communist élan:
National Bolshevism can be most successfully and completely defined as follows:
“National Bolshevism is a super-ideology shared by all enemies of the open society”. That is to say, it is not simply one of the ideologies inimical to such a society, but rather it is that society’s total, deliberate, and essential antithesis… In other words, the National Bolsheviks, reaching into the beyond of ideologies, grasped the essence both of the enemy camp and of their own metaphysical position…[26]
For Dugin, National Bolshevism champions the Russian people against globalism and the US-led Atlantic bloc. He also claims that Stalin exemplified National Bolshevism and pragmatism in defence of the Russian nation: “For its own part, Right National Bolshevism is bound with the figure of Joseph Stalin… And even though Stalin, in his inner-party struggle with Trotsky, had initially formed a bloc with Zinoviev and Bukharin, he would gradually defeat the two of them precisely with the support of the conservative, Right National Bolshevik sector in the Party, cultivated by Stalin through ‘Lenin’s call’ for new national cadres that had preserved a link with the essence of the people and a feeling for the state”.[27] By contrast, the internationalists around Trotsky are portrayed as alien to the Russian soil or people – Dugin’s “Narod” – and are even linked to more nefarious forces such as Freemasonry.[28]
Beyond Russia, Dugin sees the Trotsky-Stalin conflict reappearing in American politics between progressives and conservatives. In his view, modern “progressives” resemble Trotskyists advocating global revolution, whereas conservatives represent defenders of national order against cosmopolitan elites:
In the USA, there is a real war between ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’. However, it is unequal: conservatives believe that progressives, although mistaken, have the right to exist, while progressives brand all conservatives as ‘fascists’ and insist that they have no right to life and their ideas have no right to exist. They are the ‘enemies of the open society’ (Popper) who must be destroyed preemptively — before they can destroy the open society. Thus, progressives are about [being] woke and cancelling. The core of progressives are Trotskyists — both direct (the left wing of the Democratic Party) and those who have become neocons (such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Victoria Nuland, etc.). Essentially, progressives are proponents of the liberal and globalist World Revolution and Jacobin terror.[29]
Alexander Dugin elaborated his version of multipolarity in Foundations of Geopolitics (1997). There, he argues that world politics is structured by a global conflict between a US-led Atlantic bloc and a Eurasian bloc centred on Russia. According to Dugin, American-style capitalism homogenises the world by undermining traditional values and local cultures. Russia, by contrast, supposedly represents nationally rooted peoples resisting cosmopolitan elites. Borrowing from Schmitt, Dugin recasts this clash between modernity and tradition as a struggle between commercialist “sea” empires and traditionalist “land” civilisations – another way of expressing the same National Bolshevism in geographical form.[30]
Dugin has proven to be an influential thinker for far-right organisations and figures globally. In the US, one of the more unusual followers of Dugin is Caleb Maupin, a journalist for Russia Today and leader of the Center for Political Innovation. Originally a member of the WWP, Maupin left around 2015, and although he dropped formal adherence to Marxism-Leninism, he has repurposed many of its key components and themes for his own syncretic ideology. Over the following years, Maupin embraced conspiracist populism and aligned himself with figures such as Trump, LaRouche, Putin, and Dugin. In 2018, Maupin travelled to Russia, where he spoke alongside Dugin at the Alternatives to Globalisation Conference. In his remarks, Maupin identified himself as a populist who supported Trump’s attacks on “international bankers” disloyal to the United States, while also praising Stalin’s social conservatism.[31]
In one of Maupin’s latest books entitled Mystical Stalinism, he adopts Dugin’s geopolitical metaphysics to attack Trotskyism. According to Maupin, Dugin makes a distinction between “land Marxism” and “sea Marxism”. Politics of the land are supposedly correct, while the politics of the sea just promote imperialism and globalism:
Alexander Dugin … has emphasised geopolitics, contrasting thalassocracy (empire of the sea) and tellurocracy (empires of the land). He interprets Stalin’s defeat of Trotsky as the “land” civilisation asserting itself within communism and defeating the “sea” Marxism of Trotsky and Lenin. Stalin is believed, by Dugin and many other Russian anti-Western thinkers, to be an expression of the “civilisation of the land” repelling the “empires of the sea”.[32]
Maupin further associates Trotskyism with what he regards as degenerate forms of Western Marxism, conflating both with “cosmopolitan” Jewish intellectuals. As he puts it, “in the work of Adorno, Arendt, Sontag, and so many of these CIA-funded “New Left” academics, we find longstanding sentiments among the Jewish community, rooted perhaps in the Talmudic belief system itself”.[33] Maupin goes on to argue how these Jewish intellectuals cultivated a victim mentality and a sense of chosenness rooted in their “Talmudic” attitude: “As a result, they will always become targets of gentiles who seek to disobey God and live according to their own desires, and want to exterminate Jews in order to protect their “freedom” from divine authority”.[34]
For Maupin, this sense of Jewish intellectuals as permanently marginal – or being outside of gentile society – makes them automatically elitist and anti-populist. According to him:
[In] the anti-populism of the ‘New Left’ thinkers, most of them Trotskyites and New York Intellectuals, funded by American intelligence to oppose the Soviet Union in leftist terms, we see a revival of “the spirit of the ghetto”. The masses of people are presented as a vulgar mob of hateful bigots, to be manipulated by demagogues and tyrants who would suppress freedom. Joe McCarthy, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler are all just representatives of the evil found within the hearts of mankind (or perhaps in the hearts of goyim).
“The people” for Maupin and Dugin are not the masses; they are closer to Dugin’s Narod, or what German fascists refer to as the Volk. When Thomas Mann still stood on the conservative Right, he put the distinction this way: “The individualistic mass is democratic, the Volk is aristocratic”.[35] The Volk are not the atomised, uprooted, and materialist masses of urban civilisation, but the blood and soil, God-fearing, and traditional people of authentic culture. In Maupin’s narrative, Stalin was born of the people, a true son of Mother Russia. He was not like Lenin the son of an intellectual, nor was he like Trotsky, the son of a wealthy Jewish landlord. Instead, he was from humble stock and thus possessed a deeper connection to the Russian peasantry.
Moreover, according to Maupin, the relationship between Stalin and the Russian people was a mystical one. The framework he adopts to understand this connection is lifted from Evola. In Men Among the Ruins, the Italian fascist argues that “primitive man essentially obeyed not the strongest members of society, but those in whom he perceived a saturation of mana (i.e., a sacred energy and life force) and who, for this reason seemed to him best qualified to perform activities usually precluded to others … to depend on such leaders constituted not the subjugation but rather the elevation of a person”.[36] Maupin claims that Stalin’s cult of personality relied on this form of “mana”. It was the kind of “sacred energy and life force” that Stalin supposedly shared in common with figures like Mao and Abraham Lincoln, enabling them to “repel the empires of the sea”. But to understand Stalin in this way, Maupin argues, we must go beyond the limits of original “Marxism-Leninism and Dialectical Materialism”.
Maupin is not alone in appreciating Stalin through the lens of fascist philosophy. The internet personality Haz Al-Din (Ali Hammound) is the founder of the National-Bolshevik “American Communist Party” (ACP) and the originator of the oxymoronic concept of “MAGA Communism”. He believes that Stalin and Marxism-Leninism can best be understood with the philosophies of Dugin and Martin Heidegger. In this way, Haz defends “socialism in one country” as an expression of a rooted people and a civilisation purged of universalism.[37]
The well-known American shock jock and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has also gone on record praising Stalin. He claims that Trotsky is one of the principal sources of evil in the modern world: “The modern leftist movement and the modern neo-con movement hails to Trotsky. That is a fact. Trotsky did not have the regular communist model. He had another model”.[38] Like Dugin, Jones also believes that Trotskyism is the hidden hand behind the major political forces in the United States: “The ghost of Trotsky controls Barack Obama, it controls the Bushes, it controls the Republican leadership, the Mitch McConnells, the Mike Johnsons of the world”.[39]
Despite his anti-communism, Jones expressed deep regret that Stalin did not succeed in killing all Trotskyists within the Soviet Union: “Stalin kicks them out. They come over here and now they are the Republican Party. Hardcore Trotskyites! Hardcore! They give you the Patriot Act and everything else. We’re in deep trouble. We are in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep trouble. I only wish Stalin would’ve got all of them. I got to be quite honest”.[40] In addition, Jones has promoted the online commentator and ACP member Jackson Hinkle, who also claims that Trotskyists control the world: “The world is run by Trotskyites… These are the most evil sick human beings on the planet. It’s the Clintonites, the Bushites, the World Economic Forum, and Klaus Schwab. It’s everyone who stands opposed to the American working class”.[41]
Another frequent guest on The Alex Jones Show is the white nationalist agitator Nick Fuentes. A Holocaust denier and leader of the so-called “Groyper movement”, Fuentes has sought to pressure the Trump administration from the Right. However, many observers on the Right were surprised when he expressed a particular admiration for Joseph Stalin. As he told the conservative host Tucker Carlson, he always remembers the date December 18th, Stalin’s birthday. He told Carlson “he’s a fan” and “an admirer” of the General Secretary.[42] On Fuentes’ own programme, he praised Stalin as a giant of history, who built his country into a superpower. He even told his audience that he has been reading the work of Grover Furr:
I’m getting into some of the revisionist history by Grover Furr. I got put onto that by Academic Agent [a Traditionalist supporter of Julius Evola]. Just interesting from an academic point of view. I always thought Stalin was far more fascinating than Hitler and Napoleon, but that’s just me personally… Somebody says this dude’s admiration for Stalin is fucked up. Dude, you wouldn’t get it. It’s like anything. I mean, are we intelligent? Are we mature? Are we grown-ups? I feel the same way about Hitler.[43]
Fuentes may acknowledge that Stalin did some evil things, but, to him, that pales in comparison with Stalin’s nationalist achievements. At times, Fuentes even sounds like a vulgar “productive forces” Marxist in praising Stalin’s drive to industrialise Russia no matter the cost. Yet Fuentes’ fascist appropriation of Stalinism does not end here. He also identifies a common enemy when speaking about Trotskyism. It is instructive to examine Fuentes’ historical narrative of how American politics – and especially the Left – was supposedly shaped by Trotskyism, neoconservatism, and the CIA.
Fuentes’ narrative starts in New York City, circa the 1930s:
Back then, you have in New York City … in the major intellectual hubs … these small journals and they didn’t have a big readership at all … these were not mass circulation magazines but they reached a very core audience of the most influential intellectual types, taste makers, opinion makers…you had these small magazines mostly in New York City and they’re written by Jewish left-wingers and they actually call themselves Trotskyites, and it’s debated whether they’re really Trotskyists, or you know to what extent they were really communist but this is in the [later] milieu of the 50s and 60s where we’re in the Cold War [in] the US…[44]
Fuentes soon points out that these New York leftists of Jewish background, sympathetic to Trotsky, were allegedly weaponised by US intelligence to undermine Stalinism. Further, according to this narrative, these “Trotskyite” elements later became Zionists after the creation of Israel in 1948 and its territorial consolidation in the wars of 1967 and 1973:
So it’s the basis of cold war strategic thinking, and the CIA, and CIA cultural strategy, and Cold War media influence, [and] the State Department, that we have to undermine communism, Stalinism… And so what they start to do in the 50s is they start to invest in these types of [“Trotskyite”] magazines. They invest in radio… Various intellectual figures give them stipends and grants at universities. And they’re not all right-wing. They’re not all sponsoring like free market neoliberalism [which] wasn’t really a thing yet. But they weren’t really sponsoring all conservatives. They’re sponsoring a lot of liberals and they’re sponsoring a lot of non-Stalinist non-communist left-wingers. They’re okay with a left-wing party coming to power, as long as they’re not going to be Stalinist [or] communist, aligned with the Soviet Union. So in the 50s and 60s they’re backing all these different very well-known publications and intellectuals through a group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is really where it starts. And it’s important to understand that in the 50s and 60s you had all these Jews in America. They all came from Russia at the turn of the previous century. And they came here fleeing the pale of settlement from the pogroms, the antisemitism of the Czar. They also fled communism at various stages over the course of the life of the Soviet Union. And so many of them are deeply sympathetic to socialism. Many of them are very left-wing and they have these idealistic views about the Soviet Union that it might be a socialist paradise, that it might be like the solution. And so all of this thinking changes between Israel, Arab states, and Cold War realignment, the ‘67 and ‘73 war in Israel.[45]
Let us reconstruct this conspiracy theory so far: the CIA, through its cultural programmes, used Jewish intellectuals and Jewish “Trotskyites” (or “Trotskyite Zionists”) to infiltrate the Left and undermine Soviet influence. What is missing from this hackneyed rant so typical of the far right? The Frankfurt School, of course. While Adorno and Marcuse are missing in this podcast episode, Fuentes adds them to his rogues’ gallery elsewhere. As he declares, and with all the verve of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer: “The Left was created by Jews –who do you think made the Left? Karl Marx himself was Jewish, The Bolsheviks were Jewish. The Frankfurt School was Jewish. Who do you think funds the modern Left: Jewish billionaires”.[46]
If you have been reading up to this point, you will have noticed that between the Stalinist conspiracy theory of rootless cosmopolitanism and fascist narratives, there are disturbing parallels and affinities. What both share is the idea that a global cabal of intellectuals – either Trotskyist, Jewish, or both – funded by the CIA, is hellbent on destroying the world. This is not a materialist analysis, but something phantasmagorical and Manichean. Of course, any Marxist should be critical of imperialism and “socialists” who collaborate with it (this includes the Soviet-aligned Communist Parties). But we must also be clear on how these phenomena arise historically, rather than becoming trapped in the dualisms of East and West, or of “land” and “sea”. Already in the case of Sam Marcy, we saw how such a static version of politics – reified as “Global Class War” – turned into an apologetic for nationalism. Nationalist politics is not inherently progressive but easily falls prey to xenophobia. The internationalist is demonised as an inauthentic interloper and an agent of hidden conspiracies at work. Ironically, it is the genuine internationalist Marxist that becomes public enemy number one for both the Stalinist and the fascist. Thus, Stalinism uses “Trotskyism” as the signifier for what it really disavows in practice.
For the hardcore fascist, Stalinism is not the real enemy, but “Trotskyism” or international Marxism is. This was clearly the case for the most infamous leader of American neo-Nazism, “First Commander” George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell revealed who the true enemy of National Socialism was in his sprawling manifesto, White Power (1967). There, Rockwell checks all the typical boxes of the far-right conspiracy theory; that “Trotskyites” have captured the American State Department; that they are behind the Civil Rights movement, and are even looking to undermine “White” Russia.
… It should be pointed out here that vast numbers of American Communists, particularly Trotskyites and Reds in our State Department, feel that the Soviets have “betrayed” the Communist Revolution by re-creating the necessary institutions of society – authority, the family, marriage, discipline, etc. – which these Marxist fanatics consider to be “Fascist” perversions of “pure Communism”. The Trotskyite Communists, which include most of the Jew Communists, are becoming racist Communists like the yellow Chinese Communists…all Negro Black Communists in Africa, and the mongrel Negro Communists like Castro and the Cubans. These are the “way-out”, “leftist” Communists who favor Jewish Trotsky’s bloody doctrines against the more moderate policies of Russia…(It is also interesting to note that, right after the [JFK] assassination, in a printed report, I called attention to the fact, in connection with the fight between the Trotskyites and Red Chinese on one side, and Russians on the other, that “White, Gentile Khrushchev is finding himself more and more at odds with the dark, racial Communists of the World and the Jew Trotskyites who lead them”. – Within months after I wrote this, Khrushchev was dumped.)[47]
Rockwell did not stop there in trying to defend “white, gentile” Soviet society from international Trotskyism. After the Bay of Pigs Invasion on 15 April 1961, Rockwell defended Castro as the “rarest of rare birds, a communist who is not crazy about Jews… Castro is anathema to all the Zionist-Wall Street Jews for grabbing their business interests”. In fact, Rockwell predicted the downfall of Castro, and the installation of a “Jewish-Trotskyist” puppet government: “… It is my belief … [that] Castro will be out, and a new, more Jew-loving, Trotskyite red will be installed”.[48] Like many of his fellow fascists, Rockwell attempted to realign the political landscape away from Marxist ideas about class struggle in favour of race struggle. The Stalinist bureaucracy, acting on its own nationalist and narrow-minded interests could be a potential ally for Rockwell against international Jews.
From Mussolini to Yockey to Dugin to Fuentes, there is a sneaking admiration for Stalinism within far-right circles. The origins of this fascist fascination with the General Secretary lie in the nationalist kernel beneath the Communist shell. By downplaying – if not outright dismissing – the perspective of world revolution, Stalinism opened the door to national chauvinism, antisemitism, and other reactionary ideas. By this measure, Stalinism made itself appealing to the far right. Again, this does not mean that antisemitism can be deduced a priori from socialism in one country. But the structural risk is always present, ready to be activated under periods of historical stress and crisis.
The Unhappy Stalinist Consciousness
The stakes of Rockhill’s critique of the Frankfurt School extend well beyond the confines of his own book. As we discussed, while there is much in the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse we cannot accept – whether their Nietzschean influences, their historical pessimism, their rejection of mass society and popular culture, or their political accommodations and collaborations to both Stalinism and imperialism – the methodological framework Rockhill employs to condemn them is deeply flawed and cannot be separated from his own commitment to an unreconstructed Stalinism.
There is too much in Rockhill’s pages that resemble a conspiracy theory. Instead of acknowledging the historical situation of the Frankfurt School – that they were a body of thinkers victimised by fascism, forced into exile, and pressured to conform to American McCarthyism and the reactionary climate of the Cold War, we are given a melodramatic conspiracy theory of a Machiavellian cabal hellbent on destroying “Actually Existing Socialism”.[49] While Adorno and Horkheimer certainly turned to the Right, and supported imperialist actions, the historical, political, and theoretical reasons for this shift are never seriously examined. Instead, the explanation collapses into the simplistic charge that they rejected Marxism-Leninism.
For Rockhill, the problem is not limited to Adorno, Horkheimer, or Marcuse, but extends to an entire academic – military – industrial – theory complex, which he portrays as operating in concert with Trotskyism, the mass media, and the financial power brokers of the Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon families. To transform this into a proper right-wing narrative, all that is missing are the Rothschilds. Like other dubious articles he cites, Rockhill does not subject his sources from the Progressive Labor Party to careful scrutiny, even though similar claims have long circulated among right-wing conspiracy theorists such as Lyndon LaRouche. A thorough-going critique of the Frankfurt School carried out along Marxist lines is certainly necessary. But a Stalinist method cannot provide that assessment.
It might be surprising to hear that there is some theoretical and political overlap between Stalinism and the first generation of the Frankfurt School, which Rockhill fails to explicitly acknowledge. They both share a deep-rooted pessimism about proletarian revolution, and, while they criticise dialectical reason in different ways, each ultimately narrows the horizon of Marxism. For the Frankfurt School, this narrowing accompanies the rejection of ontological materialism, the dialectics of nature, and other key aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy. There are also important strands of neo-Kantianism and Nietzscheanism in the Frankfurt School that require proper engagement, which Rockhill largely neglects to do. Instead of a Marxist critique, Rockhill mixes facts with lurid gossip, and evaluates Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse with the dull empiricism of a police investigator. This is especially the case with Marcuse, who is pegged and insinuated as a state intelligence asset even after his break with those organisations and his later embrace of the social movements and political struggles of the 1960s. Rockhill’s categorical statement that Marcuse always remained an anti-communist until his dying day is just categorically false.[50]
Under Stalinism, one can often pay lip service to dialectics and materialism, but the real emphasis falls on “the primacy of practice”. While this phrase seems “concrete” and ultrarealistic, it is the shibboleth of an opportunist bureaucracy that does not ground its actions in theory, but grounds its theory in its own narrow-minded interests. The narrowing of dialectical reason is often the herald of pessimism and betrayal, and it is no coincidence that Stalin’s purge of political opposition was accompanied by a wholesale slaughter of Marxist intellectuals, philosophers, and scholars.
Throughout Pipers, and in numerous conferences, Rockhill repeatedly emphasises “dialectical hermeneutics”, “totality”, and the need to be “non-reductive”. This rhetoric is also coupled with appeals to being “concrete”, experimental, and learning from history through a “trial-and-error” approach. By contrast, the “abstract” is viewed as empty talk, moralism, and something divorced from the working class. On the surface, this language sounds very Marxist, nuanced, and sophisticated. Yet, as we have seen throughout this essay, Rockhill oscillates between sounding like the later Lukács and John Dewey. While the form – or mere appearance – sounds Marxist, Rockhill’s underlying approach is one-sided, vulgar, and pragmatist.
Political opportunists have often justified their abandonment of Marxist principles by invoking the demands of the “conjuncture”. Somehow the conjuncture always means that political principles must be set aside and that one must simply adapt to the world as it is given. For Marcyites such as Rockhill, this logic justifies the abandonment of proletarian politics in favour of lesser-evilism on the global stage. The PSL and similar organisations have acted as cheerleaders for reactionary nationalists in Iran, Russia, and elsewhere. Even though Marcyite lesser-evilism abroad is rationalised as necessary to combat imperialism, the irony is that it boomerangs back home. Without the anchor of proletarian politics and Marxist principles, the leap to supporting “lesser evil” bourgeois liberalism becomes much easier. Indeed, both the WWP and PSL have at times supported the Democratic Party, despite its very long and well-established record of imperialism.
Almost a century ago, in the 1930s, this type of logic led many socialists to rally around Stalin and to justify every twist and turn of the party line. Supposedly, such sacrifices would lead to a better future, even as the cause is betrayed in the here and now. But we have seen throughout how the “historical necessity” of Stalinism did not advance the struggle for communism. Rather, it proved a calamity for the prospects of world revolution – in Germany, Spain, China, France, and many other places. The tragedy is that many devoted and sincere militants supported both Stalin and the Communist Parties in the belief that they were instruments of human emancipation. One can understand – but not justify – that rationalisation. Despite the benefit of historical hindsight, however, Rockhill posits a false narrative about the history of Stalinism. Like Stalinism in general, his politics rest on a deep pessimism about working-class emancipation, looking instead to benevolent strongmen for salvation – whether in China, Iran, or Russia. Ultimately, this kind of politics mirrors the very defeatism that he claims to oppose in the Frankfurt School.
Rockhill’s approach to global revolution almost appears Augustinian. Like Bernstein, he never openly disavows the final goal of communism. But he insists that we must not be wide-eyed dreamers and instead focus on the world that we are given. For Rockhill, the present age is terrible and fallen – marked by relentless violence and a kind of bourgeois hellfire that threatens to destroy the world. To put it in an eschatological register, if Marxism is an optimistic creed, and offers the path toward the kingdom of freedom, Rockhill instead presents us with an impending Armageddon without a millennium. The working class and Marxist politics play no meaningful role in escaping this imminent apocalypse. Instead, Rockhill argues we should rally around nation-states, despots, and reactionaries – so long as they wave the flag of “anti-imperialism”. Despite his caveats to the contrary, the practical implication is the indefinite postponement of communism. Rockhill’s outlook thus takes on a strangely (and stereotypically) Christian form: we must do our best in this fallen world in the hope that we will be rewarded in the hereafter with a “red” heaven. This kind of religious thinking was famously mocked by the Wobbly poet Joe Hill in his song “The Preacher and the Slave” which was directed against the Salvation Army:
Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye)
In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high)
Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay)
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (That’s a lie)[51]
As with Augustine of Hippo, for Rockhill the City of Man cannot reach the City of God. We must be content with existing robber states and make our peace with our fallen situation. Anyone who attempts to bring heaven to earth – to immanentise the eschaton – is denounced as being ultraleft, sectarian, and a “Trotskyite”. Further, such figures may be anathematised as the worst of heretics, in league with Satan, or, in the Stalinist register, with fascism and American intelligence. This Stalinist worldview is thus simultaneously Manichaean toward the Left (“Trotskyites”) while remaining accommodationist toward the Right.[52]
Rockhill argues things are so dire that we must form the broadest of all possible fronts with the liberal bourgeoisie at home and with bourgeois forces abroad. Within the party itself, Rockhill calls for “cross-class” alliances. In a vulgar misreading of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, he calls for a “united front” between the bourgeois intelligentsia and the workers. But this is not what Lenin argued: the petty-bourgeois intellectual does not get an equal rein on power along with the workers in the party. The party is meant to dissolve the difference between them, and not to preserve them in a distinct “front”. As Lenin himself put it: “The role of the intelligentsia is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary”.[53] Rockhill’s vision of global class collaborationism – from inside the party to alliances abroad – sounds far closer to the reformist bureaucratic socialism of Kautsky than it does to Lenin’s Bolshevism.[54]
Conclusion: Philosophy, Programme, Party
For Marxists, the question is always the same: What is to be done? But the answer, in its essentials, is also the same. What is needed today is not fundamentally different from what was needed more than a century ago. The class struggle cannot advance without certain tools: a Marxist philosophy, a political programme, and an independent socialist party. When it comes to philosophy, the struggle for a better future requires that we understand the world and how to change it. To carry out this task, we need a dialectical-materialist philosophy that grasps reality in its totality. Dialectics applies to both nature and society, and unlike Kant, we do not limit dialectics to make room for faith or superstition.
This dialectical conception informs the programme we develop concerning the nature of society, the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, and the historical agent capable of overcoming them – i.e. the global working class. Yet philosophy and programme cannot remain abstract; they must take on concrete form in the shape of a revolutionary party. The party acts as the organisation of the conscious proletariat in its struggle to overcome bourgeois conditions and seize power. Only through the Marxist party can philosophy become reality. These three instruments – philosophy, programme, and party – are indispensable in the struggle for socialism.
However, as Brecht would say, it is the simple thing that is so hard to do. One can be clear-eyed about what is to be done in theory, but practice is an exceptionally messy business. We do not underestimate the fact that the struggle against the international bourgeoisie is, to quote Lenin, “a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complicated than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states…”[55] But the real contradictions of capitalism are what give us the concrete hope of revolution. The crisis of capitalism cannot be overcome by capital itself; it is constantly prone to breakdown, and with all the morbid phenomena of this dying system, there will always be a deep yearning for a different society. There are more people today globally – West, East, North, and South – than in recent memory motivated to fight capitalism and are curious and interested in socialism. But without the right theory and political orientation, the inevitable struggles can be premature, co-opted, run aground, and betrayed.
This essay serves more as a critique and polemic than as a positive alternative. But if we want to avoid the tragedies and farces of the twentieth century for the rest of the twenty-first we must break decisively with the legacy of Stalinism. Despite the many historical problems of Trotskyism – and of “Actually Existing Trotskyism” – there is still no better guide to our present political dispensation than Leon Trotsky. He represented the best in the revolutionary experience and was keenly aware of the need to fight for Marxist philosophy and an independent programme. His theoretical insights and his political writings provide essential tools in the struggle against the greatest foes the working class faces in bourgeois society, in fascism, and in Stalinism.
Contrary to Stalin’s claims that Trotsky worked hand in glove with Hitler, the German Führer was in fact deeply wary of the Russian revolutionary. In August 1939, mere days before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler speculated to the French ambassador that Trotsky might emerge as the victor. Trotsky reports on the exchange in one of his last articles:
In the French yellow book, a conversation is reported between the French ambassador, Couiondre, and Hitler, on August 25, nine days before diplomatic relations were severed. Hitler sputters and boasts about the pact which he concluded with Stalin: “not only a theoretical pact but, I would say, a positive one. I will vanquish, I believe, and you believe you will vanquish; but what is sure is that German blood and French blood will flow,” etc. The French ambassador answers: “If I actually believed that we would be victorious, I would also have the fear that as a result of the war, there would be only one real victor-Mr. Trotsky”. Interrupting the ambassador, Hitler shouted: ”Why do you then give Poland a blank check?” The personal name, here, of course bears a purely conventional character. But it is not accidental that both the democratic diplomat and the totalitarian dictator designated the specter of revolution by the name of the man whom the Kremlin considers its enemy number one. Both participants in the conversation agree, as if it were self-evident, that revolution will develop under a banner hostile to the Kremlin.[56]
For fascists and Stalinists alike, the fear of Trotsky and “Trotskyism” symbolised their genuine horror at the prospect of international proletarian revolution. That is why they hounded, slandered, and murdered communists who adhered to Trotsky. Trotsky himself argued how, in the long run, Stalinism inflicted more damage to revolutionary socialism than even Hitler:
No one, not excluding Hitler, has dealt socialism such deadly blows as Stalin. This is hardly astonishing, since Hitler has attacked the working class organisations from without, while Stalin does it from within. Hitler assaults Marxism. Stalin not only assaults it but prostitutes it. Not a single principle has remained unpolluted, not a single idea unsullied…Socialism signifies a pure and clear social system which is accommodated to the self-government of the toilers. Stalin’s regime is based on a conspiracy of the rulers against the ruled. Socialism implies an uninterrupted growth of universal equality. Stalin has erected a system of revolting privileges…Socialism would have no value apart from the unselfish, honest, and humane relations between human beings. The Stalin regime has permeated social and personal relationships with lies, careerism and treachery.[57]
Trotsky did not subscribe to the “great man” theory of history. He quoted Marx and Helvétius, that “[e]very social epoch demands its great men; when they do not exist, it invents them”.[58] The material conditions that created the bureaucracy transformed Stalin into a monster, and not the other way around. If a young Koba could see what he would become as The General Secretary – a pseudo-Marxist, Borgia-like despot – he would probably vomit in horror. As Trotsky writes in his biography of Stalin:
If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would have turned away from himself in disgust… If Stalin could have foreseen at the very beginning where his fight against Trotskyism would lead, he undoubtedly would have stopped short, in spite of the prospect of victory over all his opponents. But he did not foresee anything… The absence of a creative imagination, the inability to generalise and to foresee, killed the revolutionist in Stalin when he took over the helm on his own. But the very same traits, backed by his authority as a former revolutionist, enabled him to camouflage the rise of the Thermidorian bureaucracy.[59]
Trotsky in the 1930s was fond of quoting an aphorism from Baruch Spinoza: Do not laugh, do not weep, but understand. He repeated it during the darkest moments of his life, when Stalin’s agents were wiping out his political comrades, friends, and family. Trotsky remained steadfast in acknowledging historical necessity, even while recognising Stalin’s monstrosity:
We possess the knowledge of the objective causes which prepared the path for reaction in the USSR. But it is no accident that Stalin rode on the crest of the Thermidorian wave. He was able to invest the greedy appetites of the new caste with their most vicious expression. Stalin does not bear any responsibility for history. But he does bear responsibility for himself and for his role in history. It is a criminal role. It is so criminal that revulsion is multiplied by horror.[60]
Trotsky believed that, for the hubris of Stalinism, historical materialism would produce its own kind of nemesis. This nemesis was not a divine agent from mythology, but a material force with a name: proletarian revolution: “Revolution will unlock all the secret compartments, review all the trials, rehabilitate the slandered, raise memorials to the victims of wantonness, and cover with eternal infamy the names of the executioners. Stalin will depart from the scene laden with all the crimes which he has committed – not only as the gravedigger of the revolution but as the most sinister figure in the history of mankind”.[61]
As Marx and Engels understood, social revolutions are often preceded by revolutions in thought. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment heralded the social revolutions of the bourgeoisie, just as the birth of historical materialism heralds the workers’ revolutions to come. In this way, theory – when it captures the needs of the time – can anticipate practice. But historical betrayals are often foreshadowed by theoretical revisionism as well. Before Stalin consolidated power, he waged a war over ideology. His commentaries on Marx and Lenin were not antiquarian exercises, but part of a broader effort to justify the Thermidorian counterrevolution. If we wish to prevent future revolutions from being betrayed, we must guard against the betrayal of theory.
[1] Joseph V. Stalin, “The October Revolution and Tactics of Russian Communists”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/12.htm
[2] See Greene 2023, 306-10 and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 148-72.
[3] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 54. On the Doctor’s Plot, see Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 619-27.
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 257.
[5] Benito Mussolini, “5 Marzo 1938”, in Opera Omnia Benito Mussolini XXIX (Firenze: La Fenice, 1959), 64. [Our translation]
[6] Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 684.
[7] Ibid. 685.
[8] Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), 144-45.
[9] Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941 – 1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 182.
[10] Ibid. 624. See Nietzsche’s comments on Napoleon in On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33.
[11] For a thorough analysis on Nietzsche’s Bonapartism, see Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014).
[12] In 1939, Niekisch was imprisoned in a concentration camp by Nazi Germany. In 1945, he emerged in shattered health and blind. Afterward, Niekisch seemingly adopted orthodox Marxist politics and lived in East Germany until 1953. See Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 280.
[13] Quoted in Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 278.
[14] Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 191.
[15] See Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle: Journal 1939-1945, ed. Julien Hervier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 349-50 and 417-18. [Our translation]
[16] Quoted in Coogan 1999, 266-67. The antisemitic nature of the Czechoslovakian purges was noted by Artur London, one of the defendants. In his memoirs, London compares his interrogators to the Nazi SS: “What did this anti-Semitism, this pogrom spirit, have in common with Marx, Lenin and the Party? This was the first time in my adult life that I was insulted because I was a Jew and was held to be a criminal because of my race, and that by a man from the State Security of a Socialist country, a member of the Communist Party. Was it possible that the mentality of the SS had arisen in our own ranks? … Soon after my arrest, when I was confronted by a virulent, Nazi-type of antisemitism, I thought it was limited to a few individuals. The Security Services couldn’t be expected to recruit saints for such a dirty job. But I now realised that even if this mentality only appeared sporadically during the interrogations, it was nevertheless a systematic line”. Artur London, The Confession (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 173-74.
[17] Quoted in Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 74.
[18] Kerry Bolton, “Soviet anti-Zionism and the American Right”, Kerry Bolton. https://www.kerrybolton.com/soviet-anti-zionism-and-the-american-right/
[19] Lee 1997, 167-68.
[20] Nina Andreyeva, “I Cannot Waive Principles”, in Gorbachev and Glasnost: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, ed. Isaac J. Tarasulo (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1990), 286.
[21] See Lee 1997, 306-07; Coogan 1999, 557; Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 128, 180-82, 191, and 199.
[22] Lee 1997, 320.
[23] Ibid.
[24] See his remarks beginning at 27:00 in “Multipolarity and the Role of the Left–Gabriel Rockhill Compilation”. In the same video, Rockhill even claims that Russia is not a capitalist country.
[25] Aleksandr Dugin, “Fascism – Borderless and Red”, in Fascism Past and Present, West and East, ed. Roger Griffin, Werner Loh and Andreas Umland (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006), 510.
[26] Aleksandr Dugin, Templars of the Proletariat (London: Arktos, 2023), 8.
[27] Ibid. 64-5.
[28] Ibid. 66, 77, and 143.
[29] @Agdchan (Alexander Dugin), “The Tucker Carlson Interview: Terminology Explained”, Twitter, May 2, 2024, 2:47 p.m., www.twitter.com/Agdchan/status/1786105224509157429
[30] See John Dunlop, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics”, Demokratisatsiya 12 (2004): 43 – 44.
For more on Dugin and the Alt-Right generally, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right”, Salvage, December 21, 2017. https://salvage.zone/behemoth-and-leviathan-the-fascist-bestiary-of-the-alt-right/
[31] Socialism For All ☭ Intensify Class Struggle. “Caleb Maupin & Aleksandr Dugin at 2018 Conference: Nazbol, Populist, or What? S4A Investigates”. YouTube. November 9, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iArranse13M
[32] Caleb T. Maupin, Mystical Stalinism & The Struggle Against Revisionism in America (Center for Political Innovation, 2026), 139 and 145.
[33] Ibid. 186-87.
[34] Ibid. 210-11.
[35] Quoted in Landa 2018, 9.
[36] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 2002), 142.
[37] On the National-Bolshevik, if not outright fascist, politics of the misnamed American Communist Party, see Buffy Summers, “MAGA Communism?! The Reactionary Politics of the American Communist Party”, Firebrand, August 8, 2025. https://firebrand.red/2025/08/maga-communism-the-reactionary-politics-of-the-american-communist-party/
[38] Alex Jones, “Alex Jones Interviews Jackson Hinkle, The Mega-Viral ‘MAGA Communist’”, Infowars, November 9, 2023, (5:31-5:40). www.infowars.com/posts/alex-jones-interviews-jackson-hinkle-the-mega-viral-maga-communist
[39] @thebarrackslive (The Barracks ☭), “☭Alex Jones: “The ghost of Trotsky controls Barack Obama, it controls the Bushes, it controls the Republican leadership, the Mitch McConnells, the Mike Johnsons of the world”, Twitter, April 24, 2024, 9:19 a.m., www.twitter.com/thebarrackslive/ status/1783123476465021108
[40] YoureAllLosers0x0, “In which Alex Jones discovers post-Trotskyism (neoconservatism) and becomes a Stalinist”.
[41] Alex Jones, “Alex Jones Interviews Jackson Hinkle, the Mega-Viral ‘Maga-Communist.’” Banned.Video. 2022. https://banned.video/watch?id=654d6f8a668ba733e3d56648
[42] Tucker Carlson. “Tucker Carlson Interviews Nick Fuentes”. YouTube. October 27, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efBB0D4tf1Y.
[43] NXR Studios. “The Inner Workings of ‘World Jewry’ (W/Nick Fuentes) – EP2”. YouTube. January 7, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtC8mbV7M9U
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] @McguireFra75636 (Frankie McGuire), “The Left was created by J*ws -”, Twitter, Sep 20, 2025, 4:29 p.m. https://x.com/McguireFra75636/status/1969499156222746809
[47] George Lincoln Rockwell, White Power (1967), 44. [Online copy in authors’ possession]
[48] William H. Schmaltz, For Race and Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell & The American Nazi Party (William H. Schmaltz, 2013), 139. [Online copy in authors’ possession]
[49] For instance, Rockhill does not sufficiently address the FBI surveillance of the Frankfurt School during its early years in American exile. David Jenemann’s 2007 study Adorno in America examines these episodes in detail. Here is one anecdote from 1941 involving Horkheimer that reads almost like a scene from a Coen Brothers film in its darkly comic tone:
“Indeed, Horkheimer’s telegram would merit no special mention were it not for the fact that someone, perhaps the Western Union clerk, found Horkheimer’s activity and demeanor—or maybe just his German accent—suspicious and forwarded the telegram to the FBI. There, it joined hundreds of other documents concerning Horkheimer, his colleagues, and the Institute as part of the FBI’s ongoing and pervasive investigations into potentially “subversive” activities on the part of “enemy aliens”. The telegram was subjected to cryptographic analysis in an attempt to piece together any possible code it might contain. Horkheimer, who closed many of his correspondences to Pollock with the affirmative “Alright”, was given that name as an alias, as well as the name “Harkheimer”, a misspelling courtesy of Western Union. FBI agents tracked the Horkheimers across the country, interviewing hotel clerks along their route. Horkheimer’s driver was followed. The car registration was traced to Pollock. The proceedings of the investigation and all subsequent correspondence were filed under the heading “Internal Security””.
David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xii-xiii.
[50] Rockhill 2025, 330.
[51] Industrial Workers of the World, The Little Red Song Book (Ypsilanti, MI: Industrial Workers of the World, 1995), 49.
[52] On how Rockhill’s autobiographical sections in Pipers, which recount his conversion from French post-structuralism to Marxism-Leninism, resemble a postmodern version of Augustine’s Confessions, see Matt McManus and Damage Magazine, “Western Marxism through the Looking Glass.” Damage Magazine, April 8, 2026. https://www.damagemag.com/p/western-marxism-through-the-looking.
[53] V. I. Lenin, “What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/friends/08.htm
[54] Rockhill’s views on Lenin can be found at 128:36 in “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Lecture and Panel Discussion”. For a more accurate account of Lenin’s views on the party, see Greene 2024, 129-58.
[55] V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2025), 64.
[56] Leon Trotsky, “The Twin Stars: Hitler-Stalin”, in The Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-1940 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 121-22.
[57] Leon Trotsky, “The Beginning of the End”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/10/begin.htm
[58] Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, trans. Alan Woods (London: Wellred Books, 2016), 606.
[59] Ibid. 534 and 614.
[60] Trotsky, “The Beginning of the End”.
[61] Ibid.
