The British left's red-brown problem (Part 2)

The role of the "useful idiot savant", then and now...

[In Part 1 I outlined the role of Stalinism, pro-Putin groups and US confusionism in creating a ready-mix ideology for red-brown conspiracy theorists in the UK. In Part 2 I ask: how did we get there and what can be done?]

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How did we get here?

Reactionary left forces in the Anglosphere have converged fitfully over the past decade. The catalyst was Syria, where “left” figures like Max Blumenthal and George Galloway combined with the US far right to whitewash the Assad regime, deny its crimes, slander its victims and stigmatise rescuers as a CIA plot.

Then came the 2014 Crimea annexation and the Donbas war, which saw parts of the campist left come together to form the pro-LNR/DNR separatist campaignL Solidarity with the Anti-fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU). Via SARU the RMT’s Eddie Dempsey (now the union’s assistant general secretary) travelled to the LNR/DNR to pose for selfies with, and later eulogise, a reactionary left-nationalist Russian warlord.

Brexit, and the collapse of Labour’s vote in small-town ex-industrial heartlands pushed a whole section of Corbyn-supporting activists into “class-first” politics: denigrating identity politics, liberalism and the pro-EU left. Some collaborated with populist right-wingers in a campaign called The Full Brexit. It was at a Full Brexit meeting that Dempsey famously declared in 2019 that people who turn up on Tommy Robinson demos are “right to hate” the liberal left.

Then, with the defeat of Labour in December that year, absent any convincing political account of the cause from Corbyn himself, the myth grew among sections of the left that “someone” must have sabotaged them. That “someone” was, first, identified as the Labour staffers whose damaging activities were exposed in a leaked document. Then, in a steady stream of Zoom calls during the lockdown years, it morphed into the myth being propounded in the Big Lie film - that a mixture of covert state action plus Jewish and Israeli “orchestration” was to blame.

The most rational explanation – that Corbynism disintegrated due to incompetence, bureaucratism, failure to deal with left-wing anti-Semitism, key activists dabbling in alliances with right-wing nationalists, and deep splits over Brexit – could not be countenanced.

Finally, the Ukraine war has been the trigger for a fusion process. Whether because of their historic role as Russian media proxies (Galloway), their apologism for Russian territorial claims (Murray), or their campist theory of imperialism (Stop The War) a substantial part of the far left converged on the idea that the Ukraine invasion war was triggered by “NATO aggression”.

Their goal, outlined explicitly in the Morning Star, was to turn justified unrest over inflation into a mass movement to disarm Ukraine. After the Prague demo, where far-right nationalists led such protests, the Morning Star remained adamant:

Czech communists were right to dismiss claims that because the far right were mobilising for protests the left should sit them out — instead rallying under their own banners and promoting their own, socialist solutions.

As a result of this political evolution, there is now a “default” ideology that revolves around the insistence that Starmer is “a Tory” and a state agent; hostility to Ukraine’s struggle for existence; promotion of Russian disinformation; slavish support for left-authoritarian governments in Latin America; and conspiracy theories about Israel and Zionism.

This, on its own, does not constitute a true red-brown politics in the historic sense (see below). But here’s how it looks to me: parts of the Leninist left in Britain resemble a red LEGO piece perfectly shaped to fit into the brown LEGO piece that is being fashioned by Russian influence operations.

At every stage of this evolution, of course, there were far-left activists, MPs, newspapers, campaigns and journalists who argued the opposite: they supported the Syrian revolution, supported Ukraine, opposed Brexit and alliances with its far-right promoters, defended alliances with liberalism. What did they get? I’m one of them so I can tell you: relentless harassment, opprobrium and even intimidation from the forces outlined above.

Putin’s goals

Putin’s clear aim is to promote Trump’s re-election in 2024 and the subsequent fragmentation of NATO. The means to it are a repeat of the Jill Stein experience in 2016: to split the Democratic vote, this time with Robert F Kennedy, Cornel West and wellness influencer Marianne Williamson setting out their stalls as potential rival candidates to Biden.

The aim is to promote cynicism about democracy and division within Western society. And once you understand this, you can read almost everything – from the masked-up Red Bloc tactic, to the Grayzone appearances on Tucker Carlson, to OCISA – as (being charitable) recklessly susceptible to, and aligned with, Russian manipulation.

It is true that the pro-Russian far right promotes ideologies that no leftist could sign up to: QAnon and its progeny; anti-woke obsessions about drag queens; book bans and anti-abortion legislation; and the mythology of Day X – the collapse of the global system into an ethnic civil war that ends modernity, for which the Capitol Hill insurrection was just a dry run.

But historically, the critical point in the emergence of red-brown politics has come when fascists and Leninist ultra-lefts start to believe they have a common enemy, and that they should sideline their differences (while respecting each-other’s heroic resistance to the global order) and fight the liberal-democratic state.

Comintern leader Karl Radek

The first red-browns

It is a matter of historical record that the first fascists included Italian socialists and syndicalists turned revolutionary nationalists. Though Mussolini’s party quickly became a tool in the hands of the Italian landlords and capitalists, we should never forget that, both in Germany and Italy, the earliest nuclei of fascism proclaimed themselves socialists with nationalist objectives.

In Germany in the early, 1920s, red-brown leftism emerged from a syndicalist wing of the KPD, where intellectuals Heinrich Lauffenberg and Fritz Wolffheim argued that the party should make common cause with far-right nationalists in resisting the Versailles Treaty. They were defeated and expelled, even earning a vitriolic attack from Lenin himself.

But in 1923, during the struggle against the French occupation of the Ruhr, the Comintern itself ordered the KPD to seek a tactical alliance with the emerging volkisch far right. Comintern leader Karl Radek eulogised a far-right militant who had been executed by the French (a former Freikorps member named Schlageter who had actually boasted of massacring left-wing workers):

“We believe that he great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to those masses. We shall see to it that men like Schlageter who are pre- pared to die for a common cause, will become not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind”.

High-profile far-right thinkers were invited to reply to Radek’s offer, and did so in the pages of its newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). They said, essentially, fine let’s unite – but the communists have to first declare war on the Jews and then subordinate class politics to the volksgemeinschaft – the mythic national community around Nazism would be built. The KPD could not agree to such demands, but went on trying to form a united front with the far right for much of 1923.

There were numerous “left” excrescences from Nazism itself, but red-brown politics from the left reached its high-point in Germany during the Comintern’s “Third Period,” in the final years of the Weimar Republic. In 1931 Stalin’s German supporters made common cause with the Nazis in an attempt to bring down the socialist regional government of Brandenburg. In the intervening period, the KPD had voted with the NSDAP in the Reichstag no fewer than 145 times (ie in 2/3 of all parliamentary votes), while declaring its main enemy to be the social-democratic SPD.

Daniel Guerin’s first hand account of Nazism: The Brown Plague

What were the results in the minds of rank-and-file activists? The anarchist writer Daniel Guerin, who toured the Weimar Republic in its final year, recounts seeing Nazi and KPD youth groups share the same space in a youth hostel. They sang rival songs but didn’t actually fight. After lights-out, one young communist whispered to Guerin:

“Occasionally we kill each other but deep down we want the same thing… a new world radically different from today’s… a new system. But some believe adamantly that Hitler will provide this, while others believe it will be Stalin. That’s the only difference between us.”
(Daniel Guerin, The Brown Plague, 1933)

I’ve come to value this anecdote because it’s one of the few contemporary examples of text/subtext observation in left-wing writing about the KPD. No communist leader could have said this out loud, but what they did say out loud produced the subculture Guerin recorded.

It confirms the observation in Erich Fromm’s 1929 survey of working-class attitudes that there was a group inside the German far left which, while professing to hate fascism, actually shared its moral values, and very likely provided that section of young leftists who flipped voluntarily to the Sturmabteilung after Hitler seized power.

At the end of the Second World War, of course, the USSR cemented its anti-Semitic credentials by suppressing the Black Book of Soviet Jewry, drawn up by Jewish journalists Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenberg, detailing the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. The manuscript and entire print run was destroyed, and the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee forcibly dissolved.

Let’s pause for breath: anarcho-syndicalism produced the embryo of Italian fascism; the KPD repeatedly tried to make united fronts with fascism; the Soviet Union systematically denied the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. Since the mid-1970s, the academic study of fascism has unflinchingly engaged with this problem - but you know who hasn’t? The Leninist re-enactment groups that populate the British left. Ultra-leftism’s repeated ability to produce fascist offshoots is a non-problem, to be subsumed through ignorance.

In the post-war period, probably the most spectacular example of red-brownism was Lyndon LaRouche and his numerous cults, which in the 1970s transitioned from Trotskyism to pro-KKK anti-Semitic politics. LaRouche practised fascist-style violence against the left, promoted systematic disinformation and – allegedly – collaborated with Soviet intelligence. So he’s worth studying as a precursor.

But his was an analogue world. The digital world we live in is different.

You don’t need autocratic party leaders, cults or daily newspapers to produce red-brown politics: the dialogue between far right and far left ideas goes on in Facebook groups and Discord channels.

And, as I pointed out in How to Stop Fascism, the modern far right is not so much nationalist as internationalist – because its aim is to trigger a global, ethnic civil war that destroys modernity. As a result it is easier now to attach the red flag to the anti-humanist and anti-modernist project of totalitarianism.

The sentiment evident in Radek’s speech and Guerin’s after-dark conversation – “we are both groups of anti-capitalists who hate democracy and are prepared to die for a common cause” – is still the starting point for red-brown convergence, even in a networked and horizontal political landscape.

Is there really a danger?

One of the most logical materialist objections to the Horseshoe Theory is: “who would it serve for there to be a left fascism?” In all historical examples where fascism was a danger, its elite supporters were happy enough with the right-wing, ultranationalist version, and didn’t need a left one.

Today it’s fairly clear who would be served if a left-wing ideology emerged that was overtly anti-Semitic, socially conservative, immersed in conspiracy theories and supportive of Russian geopolitical aims: a) the Russian ruling elite and, b) that section of the American ruling class that supports Trump. That’s why the Trump supporting media have gone to considerable lengths to promote the US confusionists.

To understand the danger for the UK we need to look at the patterns that have already played out in the USA.

Emmi Bevensee, a researcher at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), argued in 2020 that confusionist left outlets like The Grayzone and MintPress News, though they appear to inhabit separate sphere from the pro-Trump far right, actually contribute a single information space that validates the far right.

They do so by publishing far-right themes, recycling authors from the right, and laundering fascist spokespeople into left-wing spaces, often by appearing alongside them at events, and seeing their own content spread on far-right channels. Bevensee writes:

An example is the way unflinching resistance to the possibility of Assad committing war-crimes – including using chemical weapons – in its desire to resist US intelligence agency propaganda, ends up holding the door open to Holocaust revisionism.

A critical tool for red-brown discourse is simplification: its online spaces are constructed to deny the possibility of multi-layered, complex arguments. Another absolutely critical component is disinformation.

What they want - and we increasingly see British broadcasters collaborate with this - is to create a discussion wherein far-right anti-wokeness combines with far-left “anti-imperialism” to attack the centre, liberalism, the rule of law and the legitimacy of the rules-based global order.

But the danger in the UK does not lie in pro-Putin groupuscules, no matter how many times they parade in balaclavas chanting the name of Josef Stalin. It lies in the broad swirl of online anti-globalist, anti-elite, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracism, whose vortex can more easily engulf people with a critique of capitalism if it has left-wing spokespeople, memes and slogans.

If we let an organic red-brown politics take root at the edges of the British left, there is every chance it will reproduce itself independently of the Stalinist-influenced groups described in Part 1.

Given the danger, the best that can be said about those groups is: they have constructed scant political defences against red-brown politics, and no defences against the Putin influence operations that are trying to manipulate them.

The useful idiot savant

If so, we would have to invent a new epithet, going beyond Lenin’s famous idea of the “useful idiot”. What we’re seeing is the emergence of the “useful idiot savant” – the political activist or leader who knows they’re in danger of being utilised in Russian/Chinese proxy operations, and knows there’s a danger of fuelling anti-Semitism, but doesn’t care.

And here’s why it matters to mainstream politics.

First: if Corbyn stands as an independent in Islington (I hope he will not), the online constituency being built around the Big Lie film will flock to support him. The OCISA Facebook group already has a life of its own, and is attracting negative press attention. If you think Labour had problems dealing with this under Corbyn, wait until you see him try to handle it without the machinery of Labour HQ.

Second: the Russian state has adopted an overt strategy of creating red-brown alliances in Western democracies. When Russian Federation invites The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal to front its lying presentations to the UN Security Council, it doesn’t take a genius to understand the geopolitical function of red-brown “leftism”. The Russian state is intensely interested in, and its proxies fiercely defensive of, red-brown politics in Britain.

Third: at the next election Labour will form a government. The fiscal position it inherits will be dreadful: 100% debt/gdp with excruciating bond yields. The geopolitical position could be even worse. In a worst-case scenario Russian aggression could trigger an Article V crisis, confronting all European governments with the horrible prospect of mobilisation for war.

If that happens, its likely that most of the Stalinist and confusionist groupings described in Part 1 will push for the left to split from Labour and bring down the Labour government.

I have no doubt that the remnants of British Stalinism believe they will be in control of such developments. The danger is they won’t.

They seem oblivious of the danger of encouraging an organic red-brown politics among disorganised and embittered young people, who know nothing about Marxist theory but are experts in the fakeness of the Bucha massacre the Syrian White Helmets.

The international trends are clear: Jill Stein’s Green Party joined the pro-Trump far right in the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. Die Linke’s maverick MP Sara Wagenknecht jointly organised anti-Ukraine rallies with members of the far right AfD party.

Where this ends up is not clear, but certain lines of development are already closed off. It we do ever see a left party formed outside Labour, it is now impossible that it would promote internationalist, relatively democratic, pro-European politics. Plus, the Ukraine war has made it impossible for any left political formation to exist - within or outside Labour - in which radical social democrats and autonomists could co-exist with Stalinists, as happened during Corbynism between 2015 and 2019.

Several generations of left activists have been simultaneously brought face to face with what Edward Thompson wrote in The Poverty of Theory: there are two lefts and they are incompatible.

The future for the Labour left has to be social-democratic, green and internationalist – but also hard-headed on the geopolitical and systemic challenges that face us: we will need to defeat Putinism, resist the “Sinicisation of Marxism” and stand rock solid in defence of democracy and the rules based global order, flawed as it is. You can’t do this while ignoring the emergence of the red-brown political folklore evidenced here.

Refusal to Think

As I search for reasons why this is happening, beyond the stereotypes of the Horseshoe Theory, or Arendtian theories of totalitarianism, I think there are two lines of inquiry.

The first begins from Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, a study of the simultaneous radicalisation of the German left and right in the late 1920s. Mannheim observed that, when a pervasive ideology is shattered by events, some of its adherents go in search of a Utopian alternative. They construct an alternative reality in their heads, and then try to impose that reality on the world.

The attraction of red-brownism for the OCISA guy quoted in Part 1 is that it explains the collapse of Corbynism, and indeed the failure of all post-2011 anti-austerity leftism, in simple terms: it was all somebody else’s fault – MI5, Israel, Keir Starmer, Paul Mason…

The second, deeper conclusion is that we are paying an unforseen penalty for Stalinism’s theoretical collapse. Thompson, as early as 1978, described the split in Marxism over its attitude to the USSR (and to the anti-humanistic philosophy of “post-structuralism”) as:

“between idealist and materialist modes of thought…The first is a theology. The second a theory of active reason”.

There are two lefts and they should have nothing to do with each other, he argued. Indeed, the political task of the humanistic, rational, critical left should be to “drive out” its Stalinist opponent.

Sadly, the opposite has happened. Critical Marxist thinking is alive in academia but almost dead on the activist left. Until around 2015 I believed the overhead cost we would pay for this was simply Stalinism’s long, slow refusal to die. It would become a quaint, boring re-enactment group.

But Russian hybrid warfare has reanimated the zombie.