The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

This work was originally published in 2001 and author Norling, a historian and lawyer, is a native Swede who now resides in Spain. Norling observes that throughout the entirety of his early life, from childhood until World War One, Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.

When World War One began in 1914, Mussolini initially held to the Italian Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but in the ensuing months switched to a pro-war position which earned him an expulsion from the party. He then enlisted in the Italian army and was wounded in combat. The reasons for Mussolini’s shift to a pro-war position are essential to understanding the true origins and nature of fascism and its place within the context of twentieth century political and intellectual history. Mussolini came to see the war as an anti-imperialist struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary. Further, he regarded the war as an anti-monarchist struggle against conservative forces such as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, and the Hohenzollern’s of Germany and attacked these regimes as reactionary enemies who had repressed socialism. Mussolini also prophetically believed that Russia’s participation in the war would weaken that nation to the point where it was susceptible to socialist revolution (which is precisely what happened). In other words, Mussolini regarded the war as an opportunity to advance leftist revolutionary struggles in Italy and elsewhere.

When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?

The answer appears to be a combination of three primary factors: Marxist propaganda that has regrettably found its way into the mainstream historiography, the revision of leftist revolutionary doctrine itself by Fascist leaders, and the inevitable compromises and accommodations made by Fascism upon the achievement of actual state power. Regarding the first these, David Ramsay Steele described the standard Marxist interpretation of Fascism in an important article on Fascism’s history:

In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism" in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:

Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.

This perception continues to be the standard leftist “analysis” of Fascism even in present times, and goes a long way towards explaining why, for instance, American political movements or figures that have absolutely nothing to do with historic Fascism, such as the Tea Party or the neocon mouthpieces of FOX News or “conservative” talk radio, continue to be recipients of the “fascist” label by atavistic liberals and leftists.

The reality of Fascism’s origins was quite different. Its creators were an assortment of leftist intellectuals and political figures whose common reference point was their realization that Marxism was a failed ideology. As Steele observed:

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.

The early Fascists were former Marxists who had come to doubt the revolutionary potential of class struggle, but had simultaneously come to regard revolutionary nationalism as showing considerable promise. As Mussolini remarked in a speech on December 5, 1914:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!...Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. The class struggle is a vain formula, with effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate.

Fascism subsequently abandoned class struggle for a revolutionary nationalist outlook that stood for class collaboration under the leadership of a strong state that was capable of unifying the nation and accelerating industrial development. Indeed, Steele made an interesting observation concerning the similarities between Italian and Third World Marxist “national liberation” movements of the second half of the twentieth century:

The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.

During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.

After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.

It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else. As Steele noted:

Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism. The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.

A new title issued by the Portuguese publishing firm Finis Mundi Press, Welf Herfurth’s, A Life in the Political Wilderness, is unquestionably one of the most interesting politically oriented books I have encountered in quite some time. It is the work of a remarkable individual whom I am also pleased to call a friend. This book, which includes an introduction by Troy Southgate and a preface by Dr. Tomislav Sunic, is partly autobiographical, partly analytical and partly polemical. Welf is a thirty-year veteran of radical nationalist political activism, and has collected a treasure trove of insights from his many varied experiences over the decades.

Welf Herfurth was born in West Germany and grew up in a small rural community until his family relocated to Iran when he was a teenager. As a 17-year-old, Welf witnessed the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and subsequently returned with his family to Germany. He became politically active with the NPD not long afterward because of his interest in the cause of German reunification. From the start of his political life onward, Welf experienced persecution by left-wing fanatics, even having eggs thrown at him during the very first political rally he ever attended. While traveling in South America during the early 1980s, Herfurth became aware of the pernicious effect of U.S. foreign policy in that region and throughout much of the globe and abandoned his previous pro-American sentiments. He was dismissed from three different jobs in West Germany because of his political activities. Eventually settling in Australia and becoming a successful businessman, Welf has been involved in dissident politics in that country for a quarter century, even achieving high level positions in party politics and working in parliament. Along the way, he has also continued to travel extensively, having visited nearly seventy different countries.

A Life in the Political Wilderness is a collection of thirteen essays discussing many of the major issues of our time from a decidedly politically incorrect perspective. These issues include the mass media, economics, international relations, political repression, culture, women, questions of political strategy, immigration and race. An aspect of Hefurth’s political odyssey that I predictably find to be the most fascinating is his embrace of the philosophy of National-Anarchism after more than twenty years of participation in party politics, even to the point of spending six figure amounts of his own money on his partisan activities. Indeed, his hard-earned insights into the futility of participation in the “democratic process” reminds me a bit of similar insights gained by the classical anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Johann Most after having served in the French and German parliaments, respectively.

A refreshing aspect of Welf’s outlook is its positive and optimistic nature. Unlike many nationalists, he refrains from denigrating or attacking other races and cultures, and indeed expresses a profound respect for the many variations of human culture that he has experienced during the course of his travels. Welf writes disdainfully of the effect of American cultural imperialism on the world’s historic cultures and civilizations. One of the illustrations he is fond of using involves his experience of observing a McDonald’s in Saigon and Vietnamese kids imitating American “gangsta” rappers. One of the book’s essays, “The Paris Hilton Syndrome,” provides a powerful Evola-influenced critique of American popular culture symbolized as it is by the nation’s reigning bimbo-supremo. While sharply observant and critical of the effect of mass Third World immigration on Western nations, Herfurth avoids falling into the trap of the “kill ‘em all, send ‘em back” fantasies and deification of past “radical right” movements common to some within the white nationalist milieu. His proposed solutions to the immigration crisis are instead nuanced, practical, forward-looking, and heavily influenced by the “ethnic federalism” concept advanced by Alain De Benoist.

Indeed, Welf Herfurth’s suggestions to contemporary “alternative right” movements might be summarized to a large degree with the slogan, “Go left, young man!” He advises activists of the present day radical Right to adopt the symbolism, style and many of the issues of the radical Left. He asks the question of why, for instance, the Left should have a monopoly on environmentalism? On many economic questions, he follows the lead of many of the nationalist parties of Europe in taking essentially left-wing positions. Aside from their immigration restrictionist views, the BNP, National Front, and NPD are arguably the most left-wing parties in their respective nations on economic matters.

Herfurth likewise points to the struggle of the Tibetans and the Palestinians to preserve their traditional ethno-cultures and national sovereignties in the face of political and demographic aggression by the Chinese Communist Party or the Zionist state. He notices the similarities between their struggle and the situation of those of us in the West and asks why the Left should dominate the “Free Tibet” or Palestinian statehood movements in Western countries. Welf and his fellow New Right and National-Anarchist activists in Australia have participated in left-wing demonstrations and activities, much to the frustration of the more conventional Left. This approach has likewise been utilized by the “free nationalist” or “autonomous nationalist” groups in Germany.

A particularly insightful aspect of Welf’s writing involves his critique of modern systems of “liberal democracy.” His ideas on this question are heavily influenced by Carl Schmitt and he discusses how the meaning of “democracy” in political discourse has shifted over time. Previously, “democracy” was principally a synonym for party politics, elections, and parliamentary debate. Herfurth notes that Iran has all of these things but is not regarded as a “democracy.” Free speech was once considered a core component of democracy, yet Germany is considered to be a democratic regime despite having as many political prisoners as some Middle Eastern autocracies. Welf examines the heretical question of why this is so.

He concludes that the meaning of “democracy” in the West has shifted from its previous emphasis on parliamentary politics and the classical liberal ideal of achieving the good society through political competition and open debate and has instead become synonymous with mere personal hedonism. A nation is judged to be “democratic” not on the basis of its institutional procedures or protection of political rights but according to such criteria as the frequency of its Pride Marches, the amount of public nudity it permits, and its efforts to eradicate “hate.” By this standard, a state could exhibit the legal norms and level of toleration of political dissent of Enver Hoxha’s Albania while still maintaining its status as a “democracy” so long as hate speech is prohibited, abortion on demand is permitted, and spectacles such as the Folsom Street Fair are allowed to flourish.

While reading this book, I was amazed by the fact that Welf and I have come to nearly identical conclusions on so many questions but from opposite ends of the political spectrum. During the years of the 1980s and 1990s while Welf was involved with the NPD or One Nation, I was involved with CISPES, the IWW, the WSA-IWA, the Greens, the ACLU, the U.S. Libertarian Party, and other not exactly rightist organizations. Then as now, my primary areas of interest were the growth of plutocracy in the United States and the declining economic condition of the working to middle classes, aggressive war carried out by the American empire, the ongoing expansion of the police state in the name of fighting crime, drugs, or guns (and, subsequently, terrorism), and the all-pervasive statism endemic to modern societies which seemingly has no end. My experience of coming from the far Left to the New Right, National-Anarchism and other overlapping perspectives was triggered by my realization that the “far Left” in its present incarnation is actually the mirror image of the ruling class it claims to oppose.

The values of the present day hard left are a kind of caricature of the norms of the liberal establishment that approaches the level of parody. A particularly obvious example is the antifa phenomena. The antifa ideology differs in no particularly significant way from that of the establishment in the sense that both regard differentiation along the lines of race, gender and other taboo areas to be the ultimate moral transgression, and that fighting discrimination and “hate” is the principal social and political value. Further, I became aware that this radical egalitarian ideology was in fact being used to justify the ever-expanding statism and aggressive warfare (what the Marxists call a “superstructure”) of which I was so critical. Additionally, I came to realize that my own ideals were essentially an outgrowth of the wider cultural and intellectual heritage of the West and that the unrestrained importation of immigrants with no similar cultural heritage was not compatible with those ideals. Finally, I came to understand the role of mass immigration as a weapon being utilized for the sake of strengthening the state and the plutocracy at the cost of the dispossession of the working to middle classes and the lower proletariat and lumpenproletarian orders alike.

Like Professor Gottfried (see here and here), I consider the state itself to be the source of many of our present day problems. As I have written elsewhere:

The state by itself does not comprise the full body of the elite or the ruling class as a whole. Rather, the state is the core institution through which layered networks of systems of institutional power interact. The political class is merely the highest body of the ruling class, its top layer. The state contains within itself multiple layers and contending factions. It is the state through which the other core institutions of ruling class power such as banking and finance, international commerce, industrial corporations, systems of mass propaganda (i.e. education and the media), the legal caste, other professional castes such as medicine (“the white coat priesthood”), and military and police power are coordinated.

As a consequence of this viewpoint, I consider the eradication of the states that are imposing the twisted ideology of “totalitarian humanism” upon us to be the key to our civilization’s salvation. My pessimistic view of human nature leads me to the conclusion that systems of centralized authority are inherently dangerous and cannot be controlled simply by the ideological enlightenment of the political class. It must also be recognized that to at least some degree immigration is a done deal in the West and that cultural and ideological diversity is here to stay. Indeed, even among those of us who resist the reigning ideological paradigm there is a great deal of diversity (for instance, there seems to be about as many branches of the alternative right as there are adherents of the alternative right). Clearly, all of these things need to be considered when examining the question of what a “post-postmodern” political order in the West might look like. Hence, there is a need for smaller scale, less bureaucratic institutions that are capable of accommodating genuine irreconcilable differences among population groups.

Over the past decade, I have tried to promote and apply many of the same ideas that Welf Herfurth similarly advocates. Consequently, I have developed a kind of “alternative anarchism” that incorporates many of the core ideas of the present day radical right or alternative right into a wider anti-statist philosophical paradigm that also draws from the many different strands of anti-state thought and even aspects of the radical Left. To a great degree, the alternative right of today is in the same position as the classical socialists of the nineteenth century or the New Left during the 1950s in that the alternative right is now the true radicalism or true anti-establishmentarianism to be found in Western societies. Many amazing parallels exist along these lines.

My approach thus far seems to be working as I have achieved a fairly large audience for my own outlook not only among the many scattered elements of the “far right,” but also among conventional libertarians, some ordinary conservatives, some liberals, some antiwar leftists who take their anti-imperialism seriously, some left-wing anarchists who take their anti-statism seriously, some Green decentralist or bioregionalists, some nationalists or neo-tribalists among the racial and ethnic minority groups, and even some libertine-individualist types who oppose the puritanical moralism of PC and the therapeutic state.The end game of all of this is, of course, to build an opposition political movement that is large enough and powerful to eventually topple the entire institutional and ideological apparatus of totalitarian humanism. (Hear my recent interviews with Robert Stark on this question here and here.)

It may well be that the ideas advanced by National-Anarchism and related tendencies are the last hope for our civilization given the failures of conventional rightist politics. If so, Welf Herfurth’s A Life in the Political Wilderness is in many ways the handbook for approaching political activism in the twenty-first century.

 A video of a talk Welf gave in San Francisco last year concerning his ideas and experiences is available online. Likewise, his book may be purchased through either the publisher or from Amazon.Com. I also have a limited number of copies for sale as well. I may be contacted by means of the Contact page on AttacktheSystem.Com.

Richard Spencer joins Tom Sunic on The Voice of Reason radio network to discuss The National Policy Institute's upcoming conference, "Towards a New Nationalism."

Truth, Justice, and the American Way isn’t enough for Superman anymore, as the Man of Steel has officially renounced his American identity to become a “citizen of the universe.”  Rather than rage, the reaction among the American public and the right-wing blogosphere can best be described as resignation.  Michelle Malkin mocked that even Superman was abandoning “Hope” as our bumbling quasi-American President careens from one disaster to another, and Lew Rockwell, always ready to miss the point (willfully?), thought that this was a victory for his version of anti-American anti-statism rather than just another step in the march towards post-national progressivism.  It’s hard to feel shock; instead, one wonders what took them so long.

Superman had already essentially been retconned as a post-American in the latest revamp of the movie series, where Truth, Justice and the American Way was rephrased as “Truth, Justice, and… all that other stuff.”  Of course, Superman already having been killed, cloned, brought back to life, and re-imagined as a Communist ally of Stalin, most Americans under 20 don’t know what an all-American looks like anymore—much as they don’t know what America used to look like when it was still America. Superman is simply following the historical trend of traditional and even iconic American symbols renouncing any particular attachment to the United States.

Partially, this is because there is no longer a traditional America left for Superman to defend. While the Man of Steel was once mocked as the “big blue Boy Scout” because of his corny Americana, in the post-America of today the Boy Scouts are a homophobic hate group unworthy of public accommodation. The whole point of Superman was that he was an alien who had so totally assimilated into Middle American norms and values that he had become synonymous with the country itself. However, as Middle America is condemned as racist, sexist, fascist, and proto-Nazi, Superman cannot be seen as associated with reactionary values.