Hitler is anti-popular anarchism in disguise. He and his movement were nothing more than a rebranding of the individualistic, nihilistic, and idealistic trends within petty-bourgeois or lumpen politics; the kinds of radical liberal politics that oppose class struggle, on the basis that the working masses are too backward to deserve the respect of the enlightened intelligentsia. This is the mentality that produced Nazism; and this came through in how the Nazis systematically attacked the workers and the peasantry, thereby embodying the logical conclusion of all the anti-rural, anti-popular sentiments which come from radical liberals.
I’m drawing attention to this contradiction within Hitlerism because given how effective Nazism is coming to be at winning popular support, it’s apparent that the left has failed at guarding against a Hitlerite resurgence. As white nationalism gets boosted in the algorithms, leftists are utterly unable to provide an alternative radicalization path, because what we call leftism is itself antagonistic towards the bulk of the people. Particularly when it comes to the farmers and the rural workers, the left has lacked an interest in real popular outreach; this is because both the New Left and the far right share an ideological lineage within the anarchist, Trotskyist, and otherwise petty-bourgeois tendencies which view rural people as the enemy.
The far right is trying to sell itself as an ally of the rural and the workers, like it sold itself during the original era of fascism. But what it actually did was assail these groups, at the behest of Hitlerism’s backers in monopoly finance capital. One way that the Hitlerites attacked these masses was by disenfranchising them, as described by Georgi Dimitrov:
Fascism promised the ruined and impoverished peasants to put an end to debt bondage, to abolish rent and even to expropriate the landed estates without compensation, in the interests of the landless and ruined peasants. But actually it is placing the laboring peasants in a state of unprecedented servitude to the trusts and the fascist state apparatus, and pushes to the utmost limit the exploitation of the great mass of the peasantry by the big landowners, the banks and the usurers.
"Germany will be a peasant country, or will not be at all," Hitler solemnly declared. And what did the peasants of Germany get under Hitler? The moratorium, which has already been cancelled? Or the law on the inheritance of peasant property, which leads to millions of sons and daughters of peasants being squeezed out of the villages and reduced to paupers? Farm laborers have been transformed into semi-serfs, deprived even of the elementary right of free movement. The working peasants have been deprived of the opportunity of selling the produce of their farms in the market.
The other big anti-peasant act by the Nazis was when they vilified the USSR’s peasantry, and asserted that the Soviets had betrayed the urban workers by subordinating them to the rural masses. This was a core anti-communist narrative that the Nazis propagated, and it paralleled the resentment which radical liberals hold towards the rural. The core reasoning behind Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” dogma, in which the revolution supposedly needed to lean upon indefinite military expansion, was that the peasantry couldn’t be relied upon. Trotsky, and the others who held his mindset, saw the peasantry as irredeemably reactionary, meaning Russia wouldn’t be able to build socialism in one country.
Trotskyism is just one example of the phenomenon I’m describing; the same dismissive attitude towards the “backward” elements of the people, especially the ones from the countryside, is shared by the other idealist left currents. And to see what this attitude looks like on a practical level, we can look at the anti-peasant policies of the Hitlerites.
The underlying trend which leads to this mindset is a desire for negating the indeterminate, rather than the concrete. For waging a revolt not against the monopoly finance capitalist forces which actually represent today’s main contradiction; but for unleashing bloody, destructive spite against every part of society that the given individual views as an enemy.
Hitler’s desire to destroy the Jewish people came from an infantile, nebulous anger, where he put his own personal struggle at the center of everything. Jews, Romanis, class-conscious workers, and Nazism’s other targets were the ones he decided to direct this anger towards; and when somebody’s mindset is as petty as Hitler’s was, it makes sense that they would gravitate to the anti-social ideologies which view certain races as enemies, and seek to crush capital’s challengers through extreme violence. “Triumph of the will” is about giving this mentality’s proponents an outlet for acting out a temper tantrum, and pursuing violence as an achievement in itself.
These are the ideas that can very easily come out of the “bohemian” social element which Hitler was part of. Hitler was absolutely an anarchist; he lived an idealistic life of artistic and romantic pursuits, which combined with the infantile anger led him to promote an ideology which was very “punk rock” in nature. Nazism fits this category because it isn’t about tradition at all; it’s about tearing down everything that exists within society, which means unleashing the full, unrestrained violent power of the state.
Most self-identified anarchists don’t come to the same conclusion, but for practical purposes, this doesn’t matter much; especially during the present moment, the left-wing kind of anarchism lacks vitality as a historical driving force, with the anarchist movement now dying down even as popular discontent grows. Right now, the most effective promoters of anarchism are Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, who seek to bring back the version of anarchism as Hitler actually put it into practice. It’s no surprise that these “dissident right” figures are increasingly fusing with the most prominent proponents of neoconservatism, which has its origins in Trotsky’s military triumphalist fantasy.
The liberals who’ve been facilitating and defending the Gaza genocide, which is our present-day Holocaust, have made a tacit alliance with the Hitlerites. What unites them is a mission to crush the popular revolutionary forces, which are based within the proletariat and the modern equivalent of the peasantry. As finance capital backs a new Hitlerite current in trying to divert people towards destructive anarchism, we must expose the true character behind this ideology. We must show why the Hitlerites are enemies of the working-class people who they superficially posture as being allies of.
This won’t sway those within Hitlerism’s core class elements, these being the alienated lumpen and the opportunistic parts of the petty-bourgeoisie. But when it’s been sufficiently isolated to these elements, it will have already exposed itself as anti-popular, and will no longer be an effective tool of our ruling class.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment