The Marxist-to-Nazi Pipeline

Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory. - Ayn Rand

*Ahem.* Now that I have your attention…

It’s been said that fascism is nothing more than honest socialism. For every socialist who insists that socialism is anarchist, another will admit that it is totalitarian. Among the former, some are naïve idealists, others merely dishonest. Among the latter, there is neither naivety nor dishonesty about their beliefs, but an ignorance of history that, when corrected, leads to either denial followed by eventual de-conversion, or defence. There are several different stages to this, and given that this topic has been covered ad nauseam, there are plenty of memes out there to illustrate the point. What follows is an explanation of what these memes actually mean. Some historical context is needed, but I promise that I won’t spend too much time on it, as the pipeline still exists in the modern day.

The first stage is something called the ancom-to-tankie pipeline.

The “inevitably adopts Chad’s beliefs” bit is of particular import

“Tankie,” for those who don’t know, is a derogatory term for “Soviet” that originated during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. These days, however, it is short-hand for “the people we don’t like to talk about” in Marxist circles; among ancoms, it means “authoritarian internationalist,” among revisionists, it means “revolutionary,” and among the woke, it means “Orthodox Marxist.” Only among socialists who love to dunk on utopians, specifically those who are more fond of Stalin than Kropotkin, is “tankie” ever used as a term of endearment.

Socialism, like liberalism, started out as a system of emancipation from monarchy. One focuses on negative liberty, a.k.a. natural rights, the other focuses on positive liberty, a.k.a. entitlements. One question asked from the very beginning was “why can’t we have both?” Well, the English liberals had already answered that question: prioritising positive liberty over negative liberty yields neither, prioritising negative liberty over positive liberty yields a high degree of both. The French got it wrong, hence their “emancipation” leading directly to the Reign of Terror, during which plenty of heads were liberated from shoulders. In order to avoid this happening again, the concept of “libertarian socialism” was invented via dialectical synthesis, the logical conclusion of which is anarcho-communism. All the material benefits of socialism, but all the freedoms of libertarianism. A stateless, classless, moneyless utopia in which everyone is allowed to do whatever they want but somehow choose to voluntarily work for each other and everything is owned collectively… imposed on all of human civilisation. What could possibly go wrong?

While I could go over the entire history of how socialist thought evolved over the decades, this entire series isn’t meant to be about history, but about how people think. People are usually attracted to socialism precisely because they are utopian thinkers. “If only,” goes their thinking, “we could eliminate this single great problem with society, things would be perfect for everyone.” A shoutout to Substack’s favourite cartoon rodent is in order for pointing this out:

For Marxists, that single problem is economic class.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

However, Marx did not see class in the same terms as a feudal society (peasants, merchants, nobles, and royalty), nor in the terms of lower, middle, and upper, but in the terms of labour and property. There was the labouring class (proletariat) and owner class (bourgeoisie). Well, what about labourers who own property? Here’s where the first contradiction arises. Communism is defined as the abolition of private property, but a lot of Communists will attempt to obfuscate, as the CPUSA did here:

The phrase from Marx that you cite has been twisted and misinterpreted to serve the ends of the ruling class. The private property that Marx is talking about is private ownership of things like factories, banks, and railroads, which allow their owners to make money from the work of other people.  He has (and we have) no problem with working people accumulating  the sort of stuff needed for a comfortable life.  In fact, making life better for working people is what we're all about.  As Marx says, under capitalism, "private property has already been abolished for nine-tenths of the population."

Source

This obfuscation comes directly from Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto:

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

So, a self-employed tradesman who owns all the tools he uses, like me or my plumber, has nothing to worry about, right? Wrong! Karl Marx himself referred to people like us not as “proletariat,” but as “petite bourgeoisie,” partly because he predicted we would become “reactionaries” due to contra-revolutionary propaganda from the bourgeoisie who oppress us as well. Besides, as

Karlyn Borysenko

has pointed out numerous times, centuries-old theory means absolutely nothing to revolutionary socialists, and they are happy to twist Marx’s own words around in order to satisfy their own agenda. What Karly B fails to mention is that this dishonest bait-and-switch is something that revolutionaries have been doing since day fucking one, case in point: liquidation of the kulaks. Violence against ordinary people is no mere aberration, but a logical conclusion of revolutionary socialism, and missing misrepresenting the point as usual is good old friend of the soliloquies

Bracing Views

, which had this to say:

As a college professor, I taught a course on the Holocaust. In my research, I recall finding a two-volume encyclopedia on genocides throughout human history. A two-volume encyclopedia! When will it ever end?

Source:

Ethnic and Ethic Cleansing

“When will it ever end?” When you and your utopian ilk STFU, Comrade Commissar. Also, funny how he doesn’t mention Is the Holocaust Unique? by Alan S Rosenbaum, a book which he loaned me while I was taking that course. Why, pray tell, would he not want his audience to know about it? No, seriously, if the comments are still open (they close on his WordPress articles after a few days, I don’t know if he set up his Substack the same way), ask him why he didn’t mention it. Don’t even bother to check if anyone already has, since his comments section tends to be spammed with walls of text longer than the original article post, just ask the question, and remember two things:

1. Go out of your way to be polite

2. Do not tell him I sent you

Of course, I can already answer that question: the book I mentioned is quite concise in its summations as to not be particularly voluminous, and one of the genocides mentioned therein is the Holodomor. The closeted Trotskiist can’t very well expose his core audience of radical leftists to something like that! While there are entire books on the Holodomor, such as The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest and Red Famine by

Anne Applebaum

, the single chapter in Rosenbaum’s book does a sufficient job at explaining the motive behind it, and why we know that the CPUSA is full of shit when they say “that someone comes to your house with a bag and a gun and collects your jewelry, or whatever” isn’t what they mean by “abolition of private property.” That is to say nothing of all the modern-day communists advocating for and engaging in rampant looting and even burglary. I won’t bother posting receipts here, but if you are curious, I can provide several sources from people who have collected them. Communists are thieves, simple as. But enough about BV’s problem with plagiarism.

Thieves can become quite wealthy, and eventually, the Communists have enough wealth and power that they are stealing from people poorer than them. We’ve all seen the “eat the rich” signs being carried about by a bunch of spoiled rich kids, right? All that an anarcho-communist need do to show their true colours as an authoritarian is advocate for the use of force against people who have not directly oppressed them. Should this be their position for after they have seized control of the State, this becomes the revolutionary-to-tyrant pipeline.

I, as well as many like me, have unironically called myself a “kulak.” I also come from a family of kulaks (partially, only three of my grandparents were peasants), and while I could rant on the subject of how they fared under both Nazi and Soviet occupation, I think I’ll save it for the next instalment, since my own de-conversion from Bolshevism will be particularly relevant there. Anyway, “kulak” (Cyr. «кулак») is the Russian word for “fist,” and was the word used for “wealthy peasants” by the Soviets. There were two other classes of peasants, the “serednyaki,” (Cyr. «середняки») or “middle peasants,” and “bednyaki,” (Cyr. «бедняки») or “destitute peasants,” derived from the Russian words for “middle” and “woe,” respectively (“bednyak” literally means “poor person”). Anyway, before I turn this into a Russian language lesson, Rosenbaum touches on the exact differences between the three classes of peasants, and the original source of the distinction is Development of Capitalism in Russia by Vladimir Ulyanov. This book was written in 1899, three years before Ulyanov adopted the name “Lenin,” and anyone who knows anything about the latter years of Imperial Russia can tell you that it wasn’t remotely capitalist, especially not according to Marx’s definition of the term (consider this your weekly reminder that Karl Marx invented the word “capitalism,” so he is the authority on what it means, not your dictionary). However, Ulyanov wanted a revolution, and in order for a revolution to take place, the proletariat would have to become conscious of the fact that their labour was being exploited by the bourgeoisie, that their property was being taken from them. In reality, the opposite was happening in Russia, as the emancipation of the serfs had begun in 1861, more and more peasants owned land, growing prosperous off of it, and were even beginning to industrialise to some degree. What was happening in Russia was the exact opposite of what Marx said had happened in western Europe by 1848. Therefore, Ulyanov re-defined Marxian terms to fit his own agenda, such that some peasants were now “capitalists,” were “tight-fisted” with their property, and “held entire villages in their grip.” When Marxists tell you that they are trying to unify the common people against their bourgeois slave-masters, they are lying. The Marxists are, instead, trying to turn neighbour against neighbour over trivial differences so that the professional revolutionaries can seize and later consolidate power. Lenin was, fundamentally, no different from modern revolutionary socialists.

Karl Marx spoke of, but not to the conditions in Russia, which was still a feudal state in 1848, only began transitioning away in 1861, and still hadn’t achieved what Marx would recognise as capitalism in 1899. Again, to re-iterate what Karlyn Borysenko keeps beating into everyone’s heads, the revolutionaries don’t care. They don’t care what Marx actually wrote, and even if you quote Marx at them, they will either ignore you, try to gaslight you into thinking that you don’t understand…

Not a single Marxist has understood Marx! - Vladimir Lenin

…or denounce your argument as “Orthodox Marxism,” and thus “behind the times.” Billy Bum-Boy’s own audience did exactly this to me once. Oh, wait! That was Greg Laxative, Astore’s sock puppet who did that! And that idiot wonders why people consider his blog “toxic,” and keep unsubscribing. No, seriously, he pisses and moans about exactly that here, and I had noticed this pattern long before that article was even written! Looks like I was right yet again.¹ So, which is it,

June Querques

? Are Marx’s words not to be taken literally, is my interpretation simply outdated, or are you just lying as your cult leader has instructed? Of course, I doubt I’ll get an answer, given that she was already smoked by several other people in subsequent replies. There is no decency, much less consistency to be found within Marxist circles, and trying to agree on the best course for society is like beating your head against a brick wall. Marxism is all about oppressor-victim dichotomies, and so constantly re-identifying those relationships ends up taking priority over actually building a functioning (and more importantly, sustainable) system. Enter the third positionists.

I have previously referred to Iosif Stalin as “the original third positionist,” just as I have referred to Leon Trotsky as “the original neo-Marxist.” There is a common narrative that Trotsky was beloved by the Bolsheviks and Stalin thoroughly loathed. This is the opposite of true, as only Lenin hated Stalin, and most of the Bolsheviks hated Trotsky. He was, after all, a former Menshevik, a warmonger, willing to work with “capitalists,” and completely blind to the machinations within the Bolshevik Party. Yevgeniy Zamyatin famously tried to warn Trotsky (along with everyone else) about Stalin’s impending rise to power when he wrote We in 1921. He was ignored, and despite a fairly common narrative that Trotsky “saw the writing on the wall and got out while he still could,” that was true only of Zamyatin, who went into self-imposed exile in France in 1931. Trotsky, Lenin’s right-hand man and heir apparent, had the rug pulled out from under him in 1924, was exiled to Siberia in 1927, and deported from the Soviet Union in 1928. While I suspect that this narrative of Trotsky being the measured, erudite one and Stalin being a vicious idiot originated with Trotsky himself, so did the narrative that he was beloved by his own party and was totally blind-sided by Stalin’s schemes. Trotskiists have pivoted from painting Trotsky as shrewd to being an innocent victim because it suits modern western victim culture. However, this is where we are done talking about Trotsky, as we are leaving the internationalists behind. Stalin, of course, promoted “socialism in one country,” rather than trying to bring the revolution to the entire world. Third positionism is, in essence, socialism plus nationalism.² While Stalin wisely kept the names “Communist Party” and “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” the latter of which he absolutely hated (as did quite a few of the Bolsheviks, incidentally, partly because it was a Menshevik invention³), it would be more accurate to classify Stalinism as Russian National Bolshevism than as Soviet Communism. Unlike the German Nazbols and the modern post-Soviet Nazbols⁴, Stalin simply did not adopt the trappings of nationalism for the purpose of political expediency. He was the shrewd one, Trotsky was a fool. Furthermore, the existence of Stalin’s book, On Dialectical and Historical Materialism, demonstrates that he was no mere cynical politician, but a true ideologue, and that is what made him so murderous.

At the same time (1919-21) that Stalin began his ascent, three other third positionist factions emerged farther west: fascism in Italy, and National Socialism as well as National Bolshevism in Germany. Despite their many differences, there is something they all have in common:

All socialism is antisemitism. - Josef Goebbels

And he is right. One of the funniest things you can do online is troll sock-Nazis⁵ in the comments section of BitChute by quoting Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question at them. According to Marx, capitalism is Judaism… and Nazis don’t exactly argue with that statement, they just follow it up with “capitalism is a Jewish trick, but communism is also a Jewish trick, a fake revolution staged by Jews so that they can hold on to power once capitalism collapses.” Communism is, to them, the revolution betrayed, and the irony is not lost on me that Trotsky wrote a book with that title. According to Hitler and the National Socialists, Marxism is “not real socialism,” but is instead “Jewish Bolshevism,” and fair enough, a lot of Marxists, as well as Marx himself, were Jewish… ethnically speaking, as Karl Marx never practiced Judaism. Fascists have a similar view, believing that capitalism and communism are two sides of the same liberal materialist coin, that “real socialism” requires a rejection of materialism and an embrace a higher philosophy. Where their antisemitism comes in is the placement of the blame for radical individualism and liberal materialism on Judeo-Christianity. The difference between Marxism, fascism, National Bolshevism, and National Socialism is the type of antisemitism they hold to, with the Marxists and the fascists practicing a strictly religious antisemitism, and the National Socialists practicing a racial antisemitism. National Bolsheviks can go either way, and Stalin himself was notoriously racist against non-Russians. This included Jews, by the way, which is another fun thing you can point out to BitChute sock-Nazis:

Trotsky was a Joo!

Yes, and Stalin had him killed.

Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, killed over a hundred thousand people during the Great Purge, was a Joo!

Yes, and Stalin had him killed.

447 of the 545 members of the Bolshevik Party were Jooz!

Yes, and Stalin… do I even need to say it?

The point about seizure of property is also held by the National Socialists. According to them, just as according to Marx, the Jews are the bourgeoisie, and Hitler himself stated plainly that he was not in favour of abolishing property generally, only of bourgeois property, i.e. Jewish property. The Great Enemy of National Socialism has always been “international Jewish finance,” and therefore, the seizure of the banks, which are owned and operated mostly by Jews (that’s not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, that’s an objective fact), is entirely justified according to them.

Spicy… but is it wrong? Neo-Marxists can’t (or won’t) answer that question.

The only difference, and I do mean the only difference between Marxism and National Socialism when it comes to the Jewish Question is the final solution. Karl Marx was a Lamarckist, believing that human nature was infinitely malleable, and in turn thought that the abolition of Judaism would cause the Jews to assimilate into the species-being, or “New Soviet Man,” as Lenin called it. Adolf Hitler was a creationist (though not of the Christian variety⁶), and believed the nature of the Jew to be immutable. Therefore, where Marx believed that the removal of Judaism would abolish the Jew, Hitler believed that only the removal of the Jew would abolish Judaism. There is a lot of this flip-flopping, as Marx believed that the nuclear family was a bourgeois construct, and that abolishing capitalism would abolish the family. Neo-Marxists believe the opposite, believing that abolishing the family is a necessary step to abolish capitalism. I told you they weren’t the same. They are the same to people who have to live under their boot…

…but vastly different in the various minutiae of their theories, which is why ideologues will never stop arguing, compounding the difficulties faced by historians and political scientists alike in trying to sort these factions out.

The final similarity between Marxism and all forms of third positionism is their warmongering. A lot of leftists like to say that “if you’re pro-war, you’re not a real leftist.” They have it backwards. There is no such thing as “the anti-war left,” just as there is no such thing as “the anti-authoritarian left.” There never was. Socialism requires authoritarianism and perpetual war in order to function.

War is the health of the State. - Randolph Bourne, The State (1918)

Even in “peacetime,” socialist nations are run on a war economy, even if that means war against innocent people. People living in socialist countries rejoice when they go to war against foreign nations, for it means a reprieve from their own government waging war against them… usually. An exception would be the current de-kulakisation of merry old England, perpetrated by the same wanker who wants a nuclear war with Russia:

This is why I say, fucking repeatedly, that the Bum-Boy is not really anti-war, despite making it his entire online persona to the point of sickening boredom with whatever portion of his audience isn’t part of his cult. The same goes for

Caitlin Johnstone

. If you’re subscribed to either and are seriously considering unsubscribing to remove the spam from your inbox, do it, because you won’t be missing anything. Neither will ever concede error because they aren’t merely wrong, they’re lying, if perhaps only to themselves; both are pro-war whether they want to admit it or not, as their ideology demands the State wage war against its own citizens subjects in order to sustain itself. Genocide is not a mistake, as James Lindsay has erroneously stated, but a requirement in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie and create a new order. Those who do not fit the mould of the “new socialist man” must be systematically eliminated in order to homogenise the population in a twisted Lysenkoist selective breeding program. Astore knows this, by the way, but I don’t know if Johnstone does, as her cynicism goes in a different direction, she is much more utopian, and I’m not nearly as familiar with her work, but I am aware that she’s one of the most infamous looneys on Substack who isn’t among the usual suspects. Either way, both of them are grifters, regardless of their true position on war. If they are truly anti-war, then they are grifting off the revolutionary socialists cheering them on. If they are true revolutionaries, then they are grifting off their pro-peace readers. If they are serious about “ending global capitalism” that drives the war machine (or is it the other way round?), why will neither take the final step and admit that they are, indeed, anti-Semitic? Because they can’t. They hate the billionaires, the career politicians, the Israeli government, white privilege, rugged individualism, me, an ethnically Jewish anti-Zionist⁷, and have perpetuated the claim that “Israelis are the real anti-Semites because they are white Europeans and Arabs are a Semitic people,” but the programming of “antisemitism bad” is just that powerful. Remember, neither of these what-I-have-a-hard-time-calling “people” believe in truth (despite endless bleating about exactly that), they believe what they have been told is acceptable to believe: war bad, capitalism bad, colonialism bad, racism bad, whites bad, inequality bad, guns bad, government good, Jews good. Only now is that last bit starting to come into question.

But Sasha! They don’t hate Jews just for being Jews! There’s no way that modern internationalist anti-colonialists could become full-on mass-murdering Nazis! That just doesn’t happen!

I don’t know how to tell you this, but it already has:

Furthermore, I have two reasons to believe that Astore is secretly a creationist, despite publicly calling himself a “lapsed Catholic” and “agnostic” several times. First, he believes it morally wrong to say that humans are animals, even though that’s a scientific fact. Second, when I told Greg Laxative that humans didn’t evolve to be communists, his response was to insinuate that I was a creationist, which Astore knows I am not. Only creationists do that, as I have gone over here:

With all that said, now you know precisely why I warn people to beware a revolutionary movement that is nationalist in nature, as it will most likely be anti-Woke or more broadly anti-Marxist while still advancing some form of radical collectivism. Mind you, I don’t hold the position that there is nothing worse than a Nazi, so said nationalist revolution would be preferable to the alternative for several reasons. First of all, the death toll from the National Socialist regime, even including the casualties of the Great Patriotic War, is positively dwarfed by the death toll from Communist-engineered famines. Second, nationalism is better than internationalism or post-nationalism. Third, even though I hate dialectical materialism, I will concede that the dialectical method, when allowed to move to the right, will produce decent results in the long term, hence the massive overlap between Austro-libertarian thought and the Fourth Political Theory. My only regret is that hundreds of millions of people had to die for dialectical thinkers to arrive at the same positions that libertarians have held for centuries.

So, what is to be done? Well, you’ll have to wait three weeks for an answer to that question, as I’ve been alternating between constructive, positive articles discussing things like hobbies, projects, and spirituality, and negative articles de-constructing and relentlessly criticising terrible ideas. The final instalment of this series will be the Russian pipeline (go ahead, make your jokes), and an epilogue on the subject of rural anarchy and its interaction with hypothetical future cities will provide a possible solution at the national level. However, there is a spin-off I may publish before then on the liberal-to-fascist pipeline, as there is, in fact, a direct route from liberalism to fascism, and the writings of John Stuart Mill are, for some strange reason, the gateway drug. Seriously, every decidedly illiberal “progressive” that I’ve ever encountered, Astore included, is a big fan of Mill, and it’s time someone explained why, because most critics of liberalism, Austro-libertarians included, have read Mill’s work and are not impressed by it. Θα δούμε.

1. As in: I agree completely with the sentiment that Bracing Views is useless, that’s why I prefer to call it “Bollocks Views.” Furthermore, Astore is lying when he says that it is welcoming to all people; just TRY being an ancap or even a garden-variety libertarian in those comments section, you will not last long.

2. In some schools of thought, particularly in 19th century France, nationalism and socialism were synonyms. However, this is pre-Marxist socialism, and third positionism is decidedly post-Marxist in its entire philosophy, including its definition of both nationalism and socialism. I could write an entire article on the many definitions of nationalism, and I may very well do so, because it’s become a dirty word.

3. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the provisional government and the Mensheviks set up “workers’ councils,” or “soviets.” “Soviet” (Cyr. «совет») is the Russian word for “council,” the root of “sovyetnik,” meaning “advisor.”

4. A political party that has been banned in the Russian Federation. Twice.

5. I refuse to believe any of them are actual National Socialists and not just trolls on the payroll of the ADL

6. Hitler hated Christianity, and anyone who tries to tell you that National Socialism was German Christo-fascism cannot tell their own arse from a hole in the ground. In Hitler’s own words, “I myself have never come to terms with the Christian lie.” His many references to the All-Father suggest that he was a Wotanist, and other writings by German Nationalists confirm that Wotanism, a gnostic bastardisation of the Old Norse religion that worshipped Odin exclusively, was the over-arching faith of the National Socialists.

7. In the sense that I don’t support Israeli expansion, and while I understand the theological reason that a Jewish State should not currently exist, given the geopolitical situation, it must exist for practical reasons. Unsurprisingly, I am not remotely fond of jihad. I am not a self-hating Jew, and never have (nor ever will) advocated for the eradication of Jewish culture, much less the extermination of the Jewish people. The fact that such a clarification is even necessary annoys me. Also, no-one in my family has practiced Judaism in over a century, and spiritually speaking, I am best described as a classical Hermeticist, just in case anyone is curious.