The Baleful Last Days of Leon Trotsky

By the time that Leon Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 after nearly four years of exile in Mexico, the largest concentration of his followers was to be found in the US in the wake of the New Deal.

Why Did American Leftists Love Trotsky?

Why this should be so is partly derivative of the fact that interwar fascism and Stalinist aggression 'did for' most Trotskyists in Europe but it also represented something in the state of the American Far Left that drew it towards the Old Man (as he was called).

We might cite the anarcho-syndicalist legacy of the IWW, the collapse of Eugene Debs' democratic challenge to the system in 1918 and the fact that Roosevelt had created a form of socially aware liberal capitalism that made authoritarian communism a non-starter amongst the American working class.

From the beginning of American Trotskyism, we can see tension (present in all Left movements in the democratic West) between the horny-handed sons of soil, authoritarian, often mid-Western, quite prepared to put fists in the service of change and intellectuals telling them what to think and do.

The attraction of Trotskyism to cosmopolitan New York liberal and Jewish intellectuals lay in part in the fact that Trotsky could combine the attributes of proletarian war hero with ostensible free thinker and modernist for the libertarian and machismo culture of the American Left of the day.

It was, however, what Marx had referred to as an 'internal contradiction' of the first order and one whose eventual resolution reverberates down to our own day. Our budding Hemingways with a social conscience were not constitutionally fitted to bow to any authority in the long run.

Trotsky certainly had a remarkable ability to seem a tad more liberal than he actually was. Stalin's brutal and obviously manufactured war on the Russian Left Opposition (the Purges) made Trotsky the underdog. American 'bourgeois' progressive liberals made a career out of defending the underdog.

Meanwhile, operating in a milieu where surrealists and muralists found Trotskyism a more amenable artistic model than Stalin's simplistic socialist realism (essentially, offering art as mass propaganda), Trotsky's writings on art implied an openness to modernism (probably more apparent than real).

Bertrand M. Patenaude refers in his recent book (see below) to a certain snobbisme and orientalism that may be relevant - "[Trotsky was] the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, Asiatic and nationalistic Stalin".

Trotsky - Flawed 'Hero'

Intellectuals like to have heroes that are reflections of themselves. Although you can certainly buy intellectuals with cash as the State Department discovered in the 1950s, flattery is much cheaper.

The illusion that you could be both free and Left in Trotsky's world (especially as news emerged of the growing repression within Russia itself and the vicious assault on the POUM in Catalonia by Communist operatives) drew in what can only be described as worshippers.

But let's make it clear - Trotsky was only a hero if a hero can be a narcissist of exceptional moral blindness who would probably have been a disaster for Russia, probably worse than Stalin if civil war and chaos in a peasant society are worse than internal tyranny and the gulag in an industrialising one.

The two men were two peas in a pod. Trotsky consistently lacked judgement during the revolutionary period despite his dynamism in the execution of policy (and of opponents) and he possessed an ego the size of the Kremlin.

The fact that a brutal choice lay between the Man of Steel and this over-intellectual egotist suggests just what a wrong turn the Bolshevik Revolution proved to be.

Kerensky's blind refusal to bring Russia out of the war and mobilise workers and peasants for democratic socialism led to an unnecessary revolution that gave Russia the eventual choice between two monsters.

Perhaps we only had the chance to consider Stalin the worse monster because Trotsky failed to get his chance to show what he could do with the full force of the State.

His treatment of the Kronstadt mutineers alone tells us what Russian workers, peasants and intellectuals had to fear from this man - a round of executions without trial to 'save the revolution'.

Trans-National Ideological Gang War

What we have though in Trotsky's last years is not a story of ideology and politics so much as one of trans-national gang warfare in which our hero is a defeated don, holed up in a near-fortress, with inexperienced young political hoodlums.

By 1940, this group was facing a direct murderous assault on its compound and, eventually, the most brutal and fanatic personal attack imaginable on the Old Man himself. Only in Mexico would a leading artist launch a murderous attack by an assault team on a political figure!

And only Soviet Communism could find a killer like Mercader to do the deed and take the rap in the way that he did - subsequently awarded great honours in the Soviet Union after many years in a Mexican jail.

The fact that this war was conducted over the supply of ideas and power rather than guns, contraband, drugs or prostitutes does not change the essential manner in which business was being conducted. Trotsky was just a less competent gangster than his rival.

What Stalin had was the massive reserves of Russian state power to ensure the eventual elimination of not only Trotsky but of any future leaders with his 'brand'.

Despite the existence of the Fourth International, Trotskyism effectively died with Trotsky in 1940 as anything more than an irritant and pot-stirrer to capitalists and communists alike. It is now just a convenenient bugaboo for the Right of the Left and natural 'splitter' amongst advocates of real change.

Ideology As Biological Dead-End

Having successfully disposed of one dynasty, the Romanovs, Stalin certainly seemed determined not to allow a new Soviet one to appear, the Trotskys - anyone connected to Trotsky within reach of Stalin simply disappeared.

Trotsky was proof positive of ideological obsession as a biological dead end as his gene pool was systematically wiped out by his opponent. At a human level, the story of the killing and disappearances of Trotsky's family is heart-rending and he was by no means immune to the pain of loss.

If we have sympathy it is rendered a little less likely to cause a sleepless night by the sure knowledge that he seems to have had few such nights himself over those he had murdered for equally valid reasons of state in the Civil War.

Perhaps Trotsky might only have survived if the US had permitted him entry. To murder a political opponent in Mexico is one thing, to do so within the rising superpower is another - poison would probably have had to have been substituted for an icepick.

However, the Old Man being an acquired taste for only a small section of American political society, there was no official interest in giving him sanctuary or creating a centre for revolutionary subversion to the Left of the New Deal settlement or unnecessary diplomatic problems at a time of global instability.

The Trajectory of American Trotskyism

But it is American Trotskyists who must interest us. Their numbers may have been small but the ideological squabbles of the late 1930s, taking place while the British Left was preoccupied with the very immediate threat of fascism, proved to have unintended consequences many decades later.

The hatred of Stalin and Communism within America may be associated with the American Right but it was often at its most virulent in the disappointed American Left. Communist bureaucratism deeply offended American values.

In Europe, the challenge of fascism was so immediate that it put many radical socialists firmly into the Communist camp despite repeated political monstrosities (the purge trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, later, the systematic colonisation of Eastern Europe).

In the US, a combination of free worker resentment of Communist practice and Trotskyist rage against Stalin placed much of the American Left in a position of an aggressive universalism which was to privilege the export of American values against the claims of what came to be called the 'evil empire'.

There may be another factor not often recognised. American East Coast WASP 'progressive bureaucratism' was resented by many working people and the claims that Roosevelt was moving towards 'capitalist' dictatorship appeared credible in the context of the time.

The American Left was operating (outside New York) in an inherited context of worker and small farmer populism and Feds tended to break strikes while characters like the wobbies and Al Capone could produce more social benefits than history often likes to record.

American federalism is a form of 'bureaucratic collectivism' (this term will become relevant in a moment) and it is a force that is felt oppressively in London today as the extraterritorial claims of the Department of Justice and Treasury.

To move from a critique of Soviet 'bureaucratic collectivism' to concerns about US 'bureaucratic collectivism' in a populist context may well be at the very core of the trajectory, so puzzling to Europeans, by which Far Left American intelligentsiya ended up as part of the Reaganite claque.

In Extremis - James Burnham and Anti-Sovietism

The key figure, of course, is James Burnham who argued as early as 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a caste (as Trotsky suggested) but a new exploiting class so that the Soviet Union was not a degenerate workers' state but represented this 'bureaucratic collectivism'.

He was almost certainly right but this revisionism, which caused major splits in the Movement, showed how Trotsky's use value in America was not as independent Marxist thinker at all but as an anti-Communist.

If you condemn bureaucratic collectivism, it soon gets to mean that you are inclined to prefer individualism and certainly free trades unions and pluralism - that is, if you cannot de-bureaucratise collectivism.

The trajectory to free market internationalism which is central to the post-war Western project was embedded even at this very early stage in the thinking of the American Marxist revisionists of the late 1930s.

Pragmatism And Dialectical Materialism

To understand the seeds of the shift, we have, regrettably, to revert to Marxist philosophy - in particular the inability of Trotsky's European followers to get Americans to take the philosophical core of Marxism, dialectical materialism (as developed by Engels), seriously.

Dialectical materialism, already intellectually under severe pressure to Trotsky's dismay during his last years amongst his US followers, crumbled quickly under liberal pressure and anti-Communist virulence in America.

Max Eastman represented the tendency, you might call it romantic-radical, to be moved deeply by the Russian Revolution itself but to hold great doubts not only about its results but about the German Idealist theory of dialectical materialism, especially that of Engels, that underpinned it.

As Trotsky understood things, there was no Marxist-Leninist revolution without dialectical materialism and perhaps that's why the Kronstadt mutineers had to be executed. But Eastman must be seen as operating in a different context, that of Dewey and American pragmatism and progressivism.

Trotsky intellectually feared American pragmatism with great justification. Trotsky was trying to be a better Communist than the Communists when history wanted him to be a better anti-Communist.

In the end, we have a problem for Trotsky that could not be resolved in his favour - the largest number of Trotskyists were in the US, Americans were indelibly pragmatist, ergo Trotskyism could either be dialectical materialist or it could be at the heart of the American Left but it could not be both.

The struggle went on for some years (most notably in the debates between Eastman and Sidney Hook) but, with dialectical materialism captured for the global Communist Party, Trotskyism did not stand a chance as a credible political movement in the American century.

In the end, Eastman, Hook, Burnham, Dewey, Wilson, Shachtman - all those leading thinkers of the American Left of Trotsky's last years who were opposed to the Stalinist capture of the Revolution from their different perspectives - rejected dialectical materialism as a credible philosophy.

End of game for Trotsky intellectually. The Old Man was past it!

Anti-Sovietism And Small Nations

The debates surrounding the purge trials, the invasion of Poland and Finland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact (and around Marxist philosophy), led to a Minority breakaway and to the eventual trajectory of key intellectuals all the way across to what would become the hardest form of Republican anti-Sovietism.

The support for petty nationalist rights against Soviet pretensions is not unimportant in this context because a key part of the Republican anti-Soviet model would come to be support for the often fascist-inclined small states of Europe and for the 'progressive' state of Israel.

Zionism entered into the American Left as a powerful force and thence across to the Republican Right because it 'felt right' as a counter to the Soviet imperial approach to the 'national question' on which Stalin was an expert.

This issue of nationalism and internationalism would require another full posting in itself but it is critical. Trotsky himself was highly 'cosmopolitan' - Jewish in origin but secular and with an anti-nationalist belief in the need to spread Marxism-Leninism as a universal creed.

Stalin was intent on building socialism in one country but not as a Russian nationalist - the sheer force of a strong super state could 'liberate' workers opportunistically from strength, relying on loyal blunt instruments in the Red Army and the Party rather than Napoleonic romanticism.

One can see more 'internal contradictions' immediately. The universalism of Trotsky must support Soviet external strategies despite Stalin. American Trotskyists, raised on wars of national liberation and migrant resentments and aspirations, could not.

In the end, as we shall see, the intellectual Trotskyists created a hybrid in which universal values included the rights to self-determination of small nations with, in the small print, the caveat that they must be 'progressive' (i.e. liberal or socialist) in their values.

The consonance of this hybridisation of American values and Trotskyist universalism with the ideology underpinning the hight point of the post-war American imperium is not accidental. Trotskyism logically led to liberal internationalism's alliance with neo-conservatism simply because of 'how it thought'.

Towards The Republican Right

Not all the 'Partisan Review' mob of the 1930s ceased to be socialists but the trajectory was clearly from late 1930s Trotskyism through Cold War Liberalism to the origins of neo-conservatism for many - and the common denominator in all these positions was anti-Stalinism and anti-'bad' nationalism.

If the ideology of the modern Anglo-American imperium was born to a surprising degree out of Trotsky's circle in those last years of his life, the key factor in this was the differentiation between types of nationalism.

True self-determination had elided from being a workers' state under the dictatorship of the proletariat to being a free workers' state and thence a democratic state. The point was that small nations (like Israel) that were progressive had greater rights of protection against tyranny than others.

James Burnham, for example, the most extreme example, moved from a central position in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party across to Reaganite groupie over thirty or forty years and the move seems, in retrospect, surprisingly natural.

Often but not always Jewish East Coast intellectuals, filled with righteous indignation at Stalin's crimes and replacing the inevitable victory of the proletariat with the inevitable victory of liberal capitalism and 'freedom', many on the Left moved sharply cross the political spectrum.

They influenced eventually, and alongside European conservative nationalists, the circles that eventually coalesced as neo-conservatism or became the base of a more moderate urban Democrat Right represented today by very conservative trades unions and by Senator Lieberman.

Ironically, the high point of that grim European Idealism in politics that started with the French Revolution was probably not the furthest extent of the Nazi or Soviet Empires but the furthest extent of the Anglo-American Imperial tradition in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq.

If you consider that Saddam Hussein consciously modelled his methods in Stalin, then the Iraq War might be regarded as the Marxist struggle of the 1930s replayed once again as both tragedy and farce! If you really are determined on black humour, you can see the funny side of this.

Two sides without the nonsensical philosophy of their ancestors playing radical internationalist and nationalist roles little different from those of Trotsky and Stalin during the struggle for policy and power in Russia in the 1920s. As before, so later - the one with the most firepower wins.

An American Story

But we should not exaggerate the importance of Anglo-Saxon intellectual Trotskyists as representatives of the international revolutionary Left globally. The numbers active in the Minority Trotskyist Movement were always very small. But, in American intellectual history, these were 'players'!

The opposing Majority Fourth International continues to this day with a strong base in France. The French Trotskyists, who hold to the faith, have inherited opportunities created by the collapse of Communism as ideological home for the left trades unions - but this is France.

The revolutionary vanguardism inherited from Lenin (which Trotsky had actually opposed at the time) and the intellectualism of the circle around the Partisan Review created a fairly vibrant politically active set who came to live their hates and anger.

They redirected their universalism and idealism into forms that were imbued with a typically American pragmatism.

The numbers of former Trotskyists who supported the Iraq adventure and who have underpinned the transformation of New Labour (a deeply transtlantic project) is far more than chance would permit. The mentality is consistent.

Trotsky himself gives us a clue to the origins of this thinking when he stubbornly insisted, against the evidence, that the Soviet Union was a progressive state, refusing to condemn the Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland and advocating full American support for Britain against the Nazi threat.

It would not have taken much, once Trotsky was murdered, for increasing numbers of former followers who disagreed with him on the Soviet invasions to shift that 'tide of history' commitment to a different state power as vector for global revolution - the United States.

And The Man?

Trotsky was a political Einstein in some respects - but this was not a man to be followed unless you were prepared for your bones to whiten on some far off plain.

This was a man, like Napoleon or Hitler, who saw other persons as adjuncts to his ideas, expendable in a cause in which he, supreme egotist, must live regardless of others because of the values and beliefs he embodied.

British intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart cruelly wrote of Trotsky in full-on revolutionary mode: "He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it."

The surprise is not that people like him exist but that there are so many mugs in the world prepared to subsume themselves under such people.

It's much more than the banality of evil expressed in Milgram's depressing experiments, it is also about the determination of many people to embody their myth of the world in a person (whether Pope or dictator) to whom they will give up their autonomy as an act of 'heroic' self denial.

In the end, there is only one justification for such 'faith' - that the ultimate vision of salvation (or in this case liberation) permits the cracking of eggs to make the omelette. Again, the similarity with the thought patterns of hard line liberal internationalists is striking. Something must be done (strike pose)!

For a man to sentence his children (in effect) to death for his ideals will strike many as wilfully stupid or inhuman, while for fit young men and women to throw themselves, their labour value and their lives at the feet of others in the way that they did for Trotsky as just plain stupid.

But is it any more stupid than joining the military for patriotic reasons? There may be a marginally greater reason in dying and killing (from a certain perspective) for a better world than the profits of Wall Street - but the rest of us ought to beware of such people!

By 1937, though he fought on gallantly, clinging to his already outmoded beliefs, Trotsky was already an utter political failure whose death in 1940 possibly came at the right time to maintain his credibility for his remaining supporters.

By 1940, he was running out of money, increasingly politically irrelevant, with supporters who were beginning to walk away from ideas honed in the struggle against feudalism at the turn of the century.

Had he lived through to the late 1940s, his fate might have been to have been picked up by the anti-communists of the Cold War era and be turned into a political Vlasov - a convenient tool to goad Stalin and split the Left.

Trotsky as an old and weak king with a subsidised court, a Jacobite in a world of Hanoverians? Maybe it was best that he was forced to move on and died a martyr to his cause.

[With thanks to Bernard M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (London, 2009) for the background. The opinions and judgements are TPPR's not his throughout this Posting. However, the book does manage to bring the man to life and is recommended. 

Patenaude is very good at interconnecting family concerns , the left-wing politics of Mexico, the distrust and espionage undermining the networks of Trotskyists in Europe and the often very young circles of workers and intellectuals in North America who provided money and muscle to his court in exile.]

The BNP and the Nazis - Being Sensible

An obsession with Nazi Germany has become almost a neurosis amongst Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. To some extent, this is understandable.

National socialism was central to a much wider political crisis that started with the great war for imperial advantage in 1914 and was only resolved (for Western Europe) with Hitler's defeat in 1945.

It is even more understandable when you consider the sheer scale of destruction, including the attempted deliberate extermination of at least two ethnic communities, and the fact that the crisis induced by the collapse of the old dynastic system was not resolved for Eastern Europe until 1989.

But interest in the Nazis has reached such absurd levels that the facetious Godwin's Law of 1990 (which states that, as a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1) is in daily operation on Facebook and in the blogosphere.

The reality is that the Nazi conservative revolution was limited in space and time and that it has been over-privileged in political theory. Hitler's hold on Germany lasted only as long as New Labour's over Britain and the war he initiated lasted fewer years than the War on Terror.

Similarly, Europe (excluding the British Isles and Iberia) and North Africa were held by the Nazis for less than half a decade and its 'culture' was wiped out within a quarter of a century of its initiation. Yet it has become a persistent meme like (say) the 'noble savage' for liberal intellectuals

What Was Nazism?

Nazism was dramatic vicious episode, worth studying as a pathology, but not one that truly crushed any competing culture, neither its primary ethnic target nor communism. It was based on bad science, was highly disorganised at its core and its economy was unsustainable in the long run.

It arose out of very peculiar historical conditions, in a crisis of modernisation, which are almost certainly unrepeatable. Its subsequent influence, in terms of the now widely ignored but high standard of the intellectual life that sustained it, has been wiped from the world for over sixty years.

In every respect, it was 'sui generis'. Yet it has become the instant comparator in any onslaught against any illiberal culture that is not avowedly communist. On the social networks anyone who stands up to Washington is a Hitler and anyone who fails to stand up to such 'Hitlers' is an appeaser.

This has taken on salience domestically as liberals rush to call our homegrown fascist Party, the BNP, Nazi when what they mean is neo-nationalist, corporatist, racist or fascist, all categories that extend far beyond 1930s German conditions to embrace many different phenomena.

The Hitler-Drexler Programme of 1920

Back in 1920, the NSDAP publicly presented its programme, drafted by Hitler and Anton Drexler. It is instructive to review it and see what was 'generic' (i.e. could apply to another time and place) and what was particular to its time - and how much of it matched the horror to come.

The horror to come was the crushing of dissent (including dissent from 'socialists' within the NSDAP itself), the war on the Jews and the mobilisation of a destructive general war that caused the deaths of tens of millions - all within twelve years.

To take contemporary British parallels, this is like a programme for a small party formed in 1984 which seizes power in 1996, enters a war in 2003 but sees utter crushing defeat in 2009. We may smile at the current parallel ...

Just as the trajectory of the Labour Right after 1996 cannot be understood without understanding the hold of Tony Blair so the trajectory of national socialism cannot be understood without understanding the ruthlessness of Adolf Hitler ...

... and yet neither the Old Labour Right nor national socialism are entirely to be explained by the ultimate beneficiaries' full adoption of the 'Fuhrerprinzip'. They represent intellectual and ideological movements that could mobilise first hundreds, then tens of thousands, then millions of people.

The Contrast with Marxism

There are oddities in national socialism from the very beginning - the NSDAP is ostensibly a limited aims party that claims to anticipate its own dissolution once its aims had been achieved.

Its ideology is collectivist and nationalist, opposed to special interests whether of class or values. This is revolutionary and would have been appealing to many people now as then.

But all Hitler & Drexel had done was to replace the notion of proletariat with that of volk in a way not quite so far from Engels' German Idealism as we might like to think.

As Tristram Hunt in a recent talk pointed out, Engels was not the absolute egalitarian that some communists would like us to believe. Engels too accepted difference after the withering away of the State but this difference was to be based on attainment or talent not race or nationality.

The 'volkisch' ideology of national socialism merely drew up its new barriers between the squabbling French, Italian, English, Russian and German socialists of the previous half century whose management had created the authoritarian attitude that led to the vanguard revolutionary socialism of the Bolsheviks.

The Marxists had lost much of their humanity in trying to square very different cultures within socialism. Socialism then experienced a new crisis when internationalism amongst the working classes collapsed within days of the 1914 declarations of war.

Many natural socialists were further perplexed when the Russian Revolution created an aggressive militarised revolutionary force in the Red Army under Trotsky that actively sought (Germany was the primary target) a proletarian dictatorship across cultural barriers.

If the solution to squabbling on one side was centralised vanguard internationalism based inevitably on a locus in the first country to have a revolution (the Soviet Union), then the solution on the other side was to scrap the pretence to internationalism and have a national socialism.

The Horror, The Horror

In the six years before Drexler and Hitler started writing their programme, international socialism had already collapsed into a quasi-national socialism in the West, the soft pacifistic socialism of Jaures and Lansbury was in terminal decline and the threat from the East was militant and 'Jewish-materialist'.

The whole horror that is to come is embedded in one Clause (4) of the 1920 Programme where blood is linked to nation and it is baldly stated that 'no Jew may be a member of the nation'.

It stands out so much that the Jews need not be mentioned again - they are 'non-citizens' and quite literally alienated (5). In summary, from the beginning of the movement, aliens (not only Jews of course):-

• cannot vote or hold public office
• should be deported if there is not enough food for everyone (a grim precursor of what was to happen after 1940)
• cannot control or participate in the media

In fact, though harsh, the idea of non-citizens being limited in their rights may be radical but is not necessarily evil once you accept some degree of historic continuity in a community or resource limits.

What disturbs the modern mind is a) the association of blood (or genes in modern terminology) with the labelling of a whole component of existing society as alien and b) the refusal to permit migrants a say in the society they are joining. In addition, some migrants (since 1914) were to be forced to leave.

Make no bones about it - this is illiberal. There is an understandable fear that the BNP, even if it would not institute the extermination camp, would find it easy to consider some groups as non-citizens and follow a similar programme. There is no other party in the UK today that would advocate this approach.

'Jewish-Materialism'

The other direct reference is to the 'Jewish-materialistic' spirit as something to be fought. In hindsight, this seem obviously 'racist' but it is only the second direct reference to Judaism in 25 clauses and there is another ideological interpretation that is based on a distressing fact.

As Tony Judt has pointed out, Jewish intellectuals, for comprehensible reasons regarding their own status in society, played an inordinate role in the spread and intellectual development of Marxism and of materialism. If Marxism became the primary rival so must the Jews to national socialists.

To the national socialists, international socialism was (after 1917) wholly associated with a class-based rival essentialist philosophy whose birthplace had been from well within the German Idealist tradition and which privileged the intellectual and de-privileged the community or 'volk'.

General anti-semitism becomes linked to the reality of a particular Jewish intellectual tradition within Europe and to a perception of a new imbalance, because what Stalinists (in many ways quasi-national socialists within the Marxist tradition) later called 'rootless cosmopolitanism' had achieved dominance.

The defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a vacuum into which Marxist revolutionaries and urban intellectuals moved speedily, with short-lived international socialist revolts that seemed to have a disproportionate Jewish component.

In this fevered atmosphere, enormously intense over only two years of collapse, the vast mass of ordinary Jews who led wholly blameless existences as doctors, merchants, ordinary workers and peasants were tainted with this brush of the enemy within.

To many national socialists, the Jews thus represented a philosophical taint. To Hitler, the philosophical taint was embedded in the genes. An ideological war morphed quickly into a race war with dreadful consequences.

Back to the 1920 Programme

The first three demands are entirely of their time and place: union of the volk on the basis of national self-determination; renegotiation of the recent treaties on equal terms for Germany; and empire.

These are the demands which lead to war but, other than the fact that Germany had been defeated so that the demands were wholly unrealistic from that perspective, none of these demands was absurd from the perspective of the times.

Today, we would, rightly, baulk at demands for empire but imperialist attitudes were normal across European culture. Even international socialists could not be relied upon not to have some intrinsic racial attitudes that placed 'primitive' peoples below the 'civilised'.

But the idea of national self-determination and of equality of nations was ostensibly Anglo-Saxon liberal so these 'demands', though idealistic and politically absurd, merely pointed out the hypocrisy of confused victors who could not decide whether they had ideals or were inclined to imperial vengeance.

This is the tragedy of the first three clauses - German national socialists were naively doing little more than taking the liberal wing of the West at face value. Much of the subsequent horror might (in theory) have been avoided if the West had imposed a stronger democracy on a Greater Germany.

This was politically impossible for a variety of reasons, mostly related to the fact that the victorious powers would not have been allowed by their own peoples to 'reward' an aggressor with territory, albeit territory that Hitler would later seize by force in any case and at greater cost.

Domestic National Socialism

However 21 of the 25 points of the 1920 Programme relate solely to domestic matters. This is where we have to try and find what makes a national socialist programme in its essence and whether it could apply to any rising party today (removing the particularity of it being German).

If we remove the foreign policy considerations and ideological war on 'Jewish-materialism', we still have the bulk of a programme related to domestic conditions, as you would expect in any Party seeking to appeal to a population that wanted jobs, respect and food on the plate.

Let us make the mental shift and de-Teutonise and de-racialise the programme, what would it say to the British if it was recast into '1984 terms'? It is avowedly Statist - party politics withers away, not the machinery of power. It is highly centralised and implicitly bureaucratic.

All citizens (once the exclusions have been made) are equal. Unlike the international socialists who see the middle classes as a barrier to the revolution, national socialism sees the middle classes as a central backbone for the nation.

There is also a 'liberal' attitude to religious freedom, though clearly with reserve powers given to the national-socialist State to decide what might or might not be acceptable. Interestingly, given its later history, the NSDAP advocates a 'positive' non-denominational Christianity.

Roman Law would be replaced with German 'volksrecht' and there would be capital punishment for the criminal classes, including 'usurers' and 'profiteers', with a specific charge that this would apply as much to pure blood Germans as Jews.

Press and cultural censorship is explicit with controls to ensure that the public could only read German newspapers owned by Germans. There would be a conscript people's army in place of reliance on a purely professionalised force.

The Socialism in National Socialism

So far, we have an authoritarian, corporartist and militaristic regime but not a socialist one but the socialist aspects soon come to the fore in a range of policy prescriptions that you do not find in most of the petty fascist regimes of the rest of Europe:

• The State has a duty to provide full employment
• No unearned income will be permitted - there is a specific reference to the 'slavery of interest'
• Confiscation of war profits
• Nationalisation of trusts (large conglomerates)
• Profit-sharing in large-scale industry
• Insurance for old age
• Transfer of the large department stores to small traders on low rents
• Preference in Government procurement to small business
• Land nationalisation without compensation, abolition of ground rent and an end to land speculation (this was later [1928] clarified as directed solely at special cases and 'Jewish' firms engaged in property dealing)
• Higher education for all directed at practical (implicitly technical) matters but also according to nationalist ideology.
• State funding of education for the gifted disadvantaged.
• A progressive health policy, directed especially at mothers and children
• Prohibition of child labour
• Compulsory fitness and sports aimed at youth

In return, citizens have a duty to work in employment for the general good and, presumably, serve in the people's army.

Stripped of the aggressive racism and foreign policies, much of the socialist aspect of national socialism, half of its programme perhaps, could be those of any traditional aspirant social democrat administration right up to the 1970s with perhaps only a little less emphasis on compulsion.

Nazis & Bolsheviks

The NSDAP is even more radical than any social democrat in its attitude to the capitalist (though this changed within a few years as Hitler needed money and friends in high places).

Its appreciation of the middle class gives it a couple of policies on small business that would sit happily in the modern Tory Party. The whole orientation against special interests and democracy gives it a peculiar stance that is not easily categorisable in post war left/right terms.

One common libertarian claim is that the Nazis and the Bolsheviks (at least under Stalin) are like two peas in a pod. There is some merit in the comparison, especially as both were trying to find a way to force through modernisation strategies on behalf of mass populations.

But the differences are important, if only to assess where one stands in the 'which-was-more-evil' debate that seems never-ending amongst competing left and right liberals.

Hitler removed much of the more obviously anti-capitalist platform of the Party, slaughtering the leading members of that faction in the Night of the Long Knives (1934), but the essence of national socialism has to be seen in its 1920s form if it is to be debated cogently.

The defeated faction still survives today as the various forms of National Bolshevism, a name indicating the original nature of the split between the NSDAP and international socialism. The argument was not with revolutionary vanguardism but with internationalism.

The essence of the difference lies in the idea of volk. If, in practice, Stalin behaved as if he was a nationalist socialist, his 'socialism in one country' like that of all national Marxists was always tactical.

When Hitler invaded a country, he treated it as subordinate at best and as plunder at worst. This was no better than the Aztecs.

Although not averse to a bit of tactical plundering, when Stalin invaded a country, he imposed a system that subordinated the country but it was also designed to function within a regime that was, at the end of the day, universalist. Indeed, the satrapies were often subsidised at the expense of the centre.

Similarities between the BNP and the NSDAP

BNP figures are known to be as educated in 'Hitler lore' as their Trotskyist enemies are in the lore of Marx & Engels but Hitler's radical racism is no longer tenable even for these extremists. The BNP has shifted from blood or genes to culture, gone easy on the Jews and targeted the Muslims instead.

BNP concerns are not imperialist but survivalist. National sustainability within their ideological model is placed above the sort of strutting on the world stage that we would associate with New Labour. They fear the destruction of the volk rather than its simple containment.

But, although defensive because there is no political advantage in antisemitism or war for its own sake, the BNP is, like the NSDAP, both nationalist and socialist, trying to use the strong State to feed the needs of both workers and small businessmen at the same time.

If anything, we are missing the point by concentrating on its attenuated 'rassenpolitik', the real concern we should have is not its 'ideology' (which is a rather soft version of the really hard line fascisms of the 1930s) but its appeal to the authoritarian personality - and its own negative attitude to democracy.

Nazis Don't Win, Democracies Lose

In this context, there is a rather curious concern in the 1920 Programme with ensuring that all offices are filled with the best persons rather than loyal persons - ironic in view of the role of party membership in gaining state sector employment within a few years.

But this attitude strikes a chord today with the 'expenses' scandal and the growing distrust of the political class as a whole. Such discontent is not unique to the job-fixing environment of Weimar. It was at the root of resentment in the French Third Republic and is emerging as a force here in the UK.

It is a common symptom of distrust of any democratic State that has lost its way and it may be the most dangerous legacy of the New Labour Administration. It is certanly getting all too easy to be negative towards democracy in the UK at the moment.

The political class is increasingly degenerating into greed and ignorance and the Government it sustains seems to be riddled with confusion and incompetence. From that perspective, we should be concerned at the BNP's rise because such movements thrive on democratic failures.

In reality, there are also liberal and libertarian challenges to liberal democratic failure. The BNP are not the only natural alternative in the absence of a strong Marxist Left.

On the contrary, if I wanted to preserve the existing system, I would be worrying less at the rise of the BNP and more at the libertarian rage against the strengthening but incompetent State and at a revival of working class discontent when Government finally gets around to the necessary budget cuts.

As we have said in the past and will say again, the obsession with the Nazi-like characteristics of the BNP is misplaced, the sign of a liberal intelligentsiya in panic over its own loss of power.

Yes, the BNP are in a line of descent from Drexel and Hitler's programme of 1920 but, in the 85 years since its production, the social and technological conditions that permitted the rise of fascist and communist leaders of the type of Hitler and Stalin is past.

The real problem for liberal democracy is not the capture of the State by an authoritarian machine (after all, we've had that for the last twelve years) but the collapse in acceptance of the State by the population as a viable organiser of social and economic relations.

The BNP are an atavistic attempt to recreate state power as a tool of the popular will when, for technological reasons, the population will no longer accept that anyone can speak for it but itself as producer or consumer of resources and culture.

This is the problem to which 'bourgeois democrats' should address themselves ... their own loss of authority arising out of an inability to respond to public anger at their own incompetence and self-interest. The fascists are just an unpleasant side effect of a wider crisis.

Narrative Bugbears - Joe Stalin and Clap-o-mania

One of our bugbears is excessive narrative. What do we mean by this? The tendency for our species to construct stories, myths and tales that cease to explain our situation and start to displace and eventually overwhelm reality.

This happens at every level - the personal, the family, the community, within political parties, movements and religions. We touched on this last week in considering whether nations could be said to have minds.

This is not to argue against story-telling as a way of honing and creating our identities and giving cohesion to a community that gives functional benefits to its members. There are too many facts out there, many of them inconvenient, that tend to chaos - ordering them is how we humans survive.

Using Propp's analysis of motifs in Russian folk tales, Misia Landau (in Narratives of Human Evolution, Yale, 1991) showed how the great nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers in evolutionary studies, from Darwin onwards, wrote our 'human story' along folk story lines.

Scientists tell stories (though they try to deny it). Religious figures tell stories. Historians tell stories. Politicians tell stories. Hitler and Stalin told stories - and stories are told about Hitler and Stalin. But, like young children, we can listen too much in awe, accept too much authority.

Sometimes the way the story is told, the repetitions and exact wording, become more important than the content. It is not only that we forget to question the facts behind the story but we demand that the facts are set in a context that is also unquestioned. We like cohesion and cohesion is constructed.

We are talking here about ideology and these thoughts were triggered by a recent use in a modern business context of a story about Stalin. The story is an old chestnut. During the Yezhovschina, so Solzhenitsyn relates, a party meeting is held and the Great Tyrant is applauded but no-one dare stop.

The applause goes on and on until, eventually, the independent local paper factory manager stops and everyone else does. The factory manager is subsequently purged for showing too much independence of thought.

There is some truth behind the hysterical culture of clapping in Soviet Russia and certainly much truth surrounding the climate of fear. By 1944, a bell had been instituted to stop audiences clapping and it is said that Stalin was becoming increasingly irritated by the custom.

But we have to ask whether what really happened is becoming dangerously confused with exaggerations of single incidents for effect in order to make a narrative point.

By the time we reach Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, there are rumours of an eight disc recording of a Stalin speech that contains one disc entirely of applause. True or false? No-one has yet replied to the enquirer on the internet forum who asked for evidence.

Solzhenitsyn's story is brilliantly written. But it fails to mention the name of the hapless factory manager, the district in Moscow Province or the secretary of the local party.

And then he closes with a punch-line, "But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”" So, either the factory manager or the interrogator survived to tell the tale? Or did they?

And that's the point - the events may have happened precisely as Solzhenitsyn stated but this is not history, it is narrative, no, it is a parable with the deliberate structure of a joke with a punch-line. It is as analytical of real circumstances as a satirical routine at the Comedy Club.

It is certainly neat for the moral of the tale. The tragic hero is a practical man. The politician is a coward. The story is simple. The complexities of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s are swept away by an angry man with a different vision of Russia and many friends in the West.

Clapping must have been frequent under Stalin. Clapping must have stopped equally frequently eventually. We have seen no evidence yet that, like some dark game of musical chairs, factory managers across the Soviet Union were automatically removed every time Stalin visited.

At each visit, someone must have been the first to stop - or else they would have been clapping until he left the building every time, perhaps until 1953.

In fact, most factory managers (assuming basic competencies) were removed in a power struggle over industrial development policy in a climate of fear of subversion and of political collapse that may have been cruel and probably thoroughly wrong-headed but it was not irrational.

The Solzhenitsyn story pre-empts the hard work of thinking and enquiry. It allows us to avoid facing what we would have done during the Bolshevik experiment. As in any fairy story, the story is simplified into one of moral choices and horrified empathy looked at from outside.

As Whiteboard noted, this was a regime that is increasingly understood by historians to have been inconveniently popular because it delivered the goods for the many at the expense of the few. It managed, like the Nazis, to construct some very workable narratives of its own. 

There is the story of Stalin's cruel running joke with his wartime Head of Shipbuilding where he would look surprised that he thought he was still there because he thought he had sent him to the Gulag. This lasted for years, it is said. Terror through bullying black humour. The man, in fact, lived - but in fear.

Watchers of Season 7 of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' will know that Buffy says that narrative is not reality. She is right.

The 'clapping' story is often shifted today out of context to suggest that you will be harmed in conditions other than the extreme ones of Stalin's Russia if you stand out and even (like the boogy monster under the bed) that Stalinist techniques might somehow 'work'. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

The story, even if proven true (I suggest neutrality as to the truth-claim), as a parable, teaches down from on high as generality whereas life is learnt up from experience as a successions of particulars.

Is it true that 'not clapping' nowadays (which we take to mean not accepting, say, the general enthusiasm for this or that aspect of the new economy or some other unpopular stance) means exclusion from the 'system'?

Well, yes, to a degree but a modern free society permits dissidence. It is just that there is a more reasonable risk/reward ratio in compliance while the herd is hurtling in a certain direction and special interests soon emerge with a stake in defending a particular narrative against criticism.

The Kuhnian paradigm applicable to science is equally applicable to politics. The 'right' analysis is actually the one that works and forced change means the chance for a new model and new people, To take another concept from science, society changes in a process of punctuated equilibrium.

The dissident may well survive and prosper during a period of 'creative destruction' in a free society (once everything finally starts to unravel) whereas a dissenter in a closed system cannot easily survive a period of 'actual destruction'. This is why free societies are ultimately 'more effective'.

Why not just say all this more simply - if you go with the crowd in any stabilised culture or society and suspend your critical faculties and/or do not put a case for, say, caution or for another way, you may well survive, so long as the crowd and its leaders survive. The risks are actually quite calculable.

If you become a critic or show doubts about the direction that the crowd or its leaders are taking, you can expect to be sidelined - fatally in extreme circumstances.

But, in a free society, you can also marshal your resources, play a long game and come out ahead of the crowd. Indeed, as Alexandre Dugin showed, you can even do this if your timing is good when a closed system starts to break down.

The 'wisdom of crowds' and the 'wisdom of natural leaders' tends to make all those who have doubts and do not express them complicit in compounding error - whether invasion to the East, economic sclerosis, support for easy credit that results in a crash or overhyping of new media business models.

This is what we call 'group think' and its twin poles (perfectly symbolised in modern Western governments) are populism and control of patronage. Modern Western Governments create mass media narratives and then consolidate their hold through the redirection of taxed resources to allies.

The game is a gamble - can a busted system be kept going long enough to stash the cash and leave the problem to the next generation or will the point of crisis in our system of punctuated equilibrium come just when you are able to exploit it and leave the others standing or falling? It is all about timing.

In Western liberal culture, we behave no differently from Communist Party officials because it is the human condition to fear the consequences of defying convention and the crowd. The consequences are only far less brutal because of our level of economic development but the instincts are the same.

The 'game' does not suggest that one is 'right' to be brave at all times - at some times, it is honourable but very stupid to be brave. At other times, it becomes wise to exploit the 'stupidity' of others. Solzhenitsyn's story and similar narratives have little to teach us that is not sentimental.

It is about a place and a time - of its writing and not of the story's setting. By all means use narratives to find one's place in a stable system or to mobilise new forces to overturn the system but never ever confuse these with the 'truth of the matter'.