Socialism |OT| The Dawn of a Red Era

Rosejamie95 said:

Socialism world

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Comrade Sparkster said:

I kinda don't get this

The failures of communism is because the limits of Marxist vision...?

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Eylos said:

(Its from march)

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There's no such thing as Stalinism, just Marxism Leninism

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Mezentine said:

Hbomberguy the YouTuber just posted what I think basically is a coherent compilation of all of my messy thoughts about modern day Stalin/fascist apologia:
https://curiouscat.me/Hbomberguy/post/454882379?1525532668

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To read Marx is to wrestle with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America — especially modern America. Because the US is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world's most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego.

And indeed, Marx often had the United States on his mind. Some of his grandest ideas were formed with the United States in view, and some of America's greatest thinkers later drew on his rich work to give their own accounts of capitalism and American life. Two hundred years after Marx's birth, delving into the relationship between the famed radical and the United States provides us with a deeper, more intimate portrait of Marx and his ideas.

The United States began playing an outsized role in Marx's thinking in the 1850s, when he was hired as the European correspondent for the New York Tribune, a paper that at the time boasted more subscribers than any other in the world. Writing for an American audience compelled Marx to focus his attention on events across the Atlantic, a task made easier by his ongoing correspondence with several comrades who had emigrated to the US following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe. With the help of fellow radicals like Joseph Wedemeyer — later a general in the Union Army — Marx furnished insights for Tribune readers through much of the 1850s.

Marx lost his spot with the Tribune amid the crisis of the Civil War. Impoverished and in desperate need of another means of income, the exiled revolutionary sought out journalism work elsewhere. He found it in a Vienna-based newspaper, which hired him to write about the Civil War. Marx's Civil War writings would prove influential not only in shaping European radicals' attitudes towards the titanic conflict, but in how Marx himself thought about capitalism.

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Marx's stance was at once moral and strategic: he abhorred slavery full stop, while also seeing the Union cause as an important step towards working-class emancipation. A nation built entirely on free labor, he reasoned, would create more favorable conditions for organizing workers.

It was through this lens — the close connection between the abolition of slavery and working-class struggle — that Marx viewed Lincoln, at least in his writings for public consumption. As he commented in a letter to Lincoln on behalf of the International: "The workingmen of Europe consider it an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of the social world."

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Marx carried his views on slavery and capitalism into his more theoretical works. In Capital — first published in 1867, two years after the Union victory — Marx used the rise and fall of American slavery as a metaphor for the rise and what he assumed would be the eventual fall of capitalism. The Civil War, Marx argued in the introduction, was a "harbinger of socialist revolutions to come."

In thinking about the impact the Civil War had on Capital, some Marx scholars have gone a step further, focusing on how it structured Marx's most famous book at a deeper level. The slaves who freed themselves during the Civil War, and the English workers who supported emancipation, recognized that control over time was central to autonomy. And autonomy was the ultimate aim for the working class — the precondition for living the good life.

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....Marx carried his views on slavery and capitalism into his more theoretical works. In Capital — first published in 1867, two years after the Union victory — Marx used the rise and fall of American slavery as a metaphor for the rise and what he assumed would be the eventual fall of capitalism. The Civil War, Marx argued in the introduction, was a "harbinger of socialist revolutions to come."

In thinking about the impact the Civil War had on Capital, some Marx scholars have gone a step further, focusing on how it structured Marx's most famous book at a deeper level. The slaves who freed themselves during the Civil War, and the English workers who supported emancipation, recognized that control over time was central to autonomy. And autonomy was the ultimate aim for the working class — the precondition for living the good life.

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To Marx's critics, America has often served as proof that his theory of capitalism does not stand up to the weight of evidence. How can one look at American history and find confirmation of Marx's theory that everyone in a capitalist society would become either a member of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?

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Turning Alexis de Tocqueville's formulation on its head, Marx argued that Europe was America's future, not vice versa. American exceptionalism was a temporary condition. Unlike in Europe, there was not yet a surplus population. But with the onset of massive European migration — a persistent fact for much of Marx's life — the United States would soon gain its own surplus population.

Marx also predicted that another aspect of American exceptionalism — the frontier — would eventually wither. Anticipating Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," Marx argued that European immigrants would no longer be welcomed with land, and more importantly, the autonomy that came with land ownership. This, he divined, would mark the death of the nineteenth-century American dream. New immigrants would be obligated to work for wages, thrown into the blossoming American proletariat.

With this, Marx negated the view of the United States as an exception to his rule — he negated the negation — and elevated the United States to the center of his famous dialectal mode of thought.

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House_Of_Lightning said:

I don't think they're using this properly but otherwise I don't have much else to say about the article.

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In his State and Revolution, a kind of preparatory theoretical work for the October Revolution, Lenin (1917) outlined his vision of the workers' state where every kukharka (not simply a cook, especially not a great chef, but more a modest woman-servant in the kitchen of a wealthy family) will have to learn how to rule the state, where everyone, even the highest administrators, will be paid the same worker's wages, where all administrators will be directly elected by their local constituencies which will have the right to recall them at any moment, where there will be no standing army. How this vision turned into its opposite immediately after the October Revolution is the stuff of numerous critical analyses; but what is perhaps much more interesting is the fact that Lenin proposes as the normative ground of this "utopian" vision an almost Habermasian notion of "the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims" (Lenin 1917, 467) – in Communism, this permanent normative base of human intercourse will finally rule in a non-distorted way: only in a Communist society,

"freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state". (Lenin 1917, 467)

Two pages later, Lenin (1917, 469) again states that "we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people" – does this mean that revolution is normatively grounded in some kind of universal rules which function as eternal "human nature"? And maybe we find an echo of Lenin's preoccupation with "elementary rules of social intercourse" even in his critical remarks on Stalin's brutal manners from the last months of his life. But the reference to human nature is not Lenin's last word – in another passage of State and Revolution, he seems to claim almost the opposite: he surprisingly grounds the (in)famous difference between the lower and higher state of Communism in a different relation to human nature: in the first, lower, stage, we are still dealing with the same "human nature" as in the entire history of exploitation and class struggle, while what will happen in the second, higher, state is that "human nature" itself will be changed:

"We are not utopians, we do not 'dream' of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams […] serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control and 'foremen and accountants'. […] A beginning can and must be made at once, overnight, to replace the specific 'bossing' of state officials by the simple functions of 'foremen and accountants', functions which are already fully within the ability of the average town dweller and can well be performed for 'workmen's wages'". (Lenin 1917, 430; 431)

The interesting point here is that the passage from the lower to the higher stage (of Communism) does not primarily rely on the development of productive forces (beyond scarcity) but on the changing human nature. In this sense Chinese Communists (in their most radical moment) were right: there can be a Communism of poverty (if we change human nature) and a Socialism of (relative) prosperity ("goulash Communism"). When the situation is most desperate (as it was in Russia during the civil war of 1918-1920), there is always the millenarian temptation to see in this utter misery a unique chance to directly pass to Communism; Platonov's (1978) Chevengur has to be read against this background… Lenin thus seems to oscillate between a Habermasian reference to eternal natural rules of social exchange and a change in human nature itself, the rising of a New Man – in what are Lenin's oscillations and tensions grounded?

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To justify this claim to absolute power, the role of proverbs is significant in the Communist tradition, from Mao's "revolution is not a dinner party" to the legendary Stalinist "You cannot make an omelette without breaking the eggs". The preferred saying among the Yugoslav Communists was a more obscene one: "You cannot sleep with a girl without leaving some traces". But the point made is always the same: endorsing brutality with no constraints. For those for whom God (in the guise of the big Other of History whose instruments they are) exists, everything is permitted… However, theological reference can also function in the opposite way: not in the fundamentalist sense of directly legitimizing political measures as the imposition of the divine will whose instruments are revolutionaries but in the sense that the theological dimension serves as a kind of safety valve, a mark of the openness and uncertainty of the situation which prevents the political agents to conceive of their acts in the terms of self-transparency – "god" means we should always bear in mind that the outcome of our acts will never fit our expectations. This "mind the gap" does not only refer to the complexity of the situation into which we intervene; it concerns above all the utter ambiguity of the exercise of our own will.

Was this short-circuit between truth and exactitude not Stalin's basic axiom (which, of course, had to remain unspoken)? Truth is not only allowed to ignore exactitude, it is allowed to refashion it arbitrarily.

At a certain level, Stalin's break with Lenin was purely discursive, violently imposing a radically different subjective economy. The gap between general principles ("historical laws") regulating reality and pragmatic improvised decisions still palpable in Lenin is simply disavowed, and the two extremes directly coincide: on the one hand, we get total pragmatic opportunism; on the other hand, this pragmatic opportunism is legitimized by a new Marxist orthodoxy which proposes a general ontology. What this means is that Lenin himself was not a "Leninist": "Leninism" is a retroactive construction of Stalinist discourse.

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This was the truth of Soviet Leninism: Lenin served as the ultimate reference, a quote from his legitimized any political, economic, cultural measure, but in a totally pragmatic and arbitrary way (incidentally, exactly in the same way that the Catholic Church referred to the Bible). One should also raise the question to what extent Lenin himself sometimes referred to Marx in a similar way. In other words, the reference to Lenin posed no boundaries whatsoever: any political measure was acceptable if legitimized by a quote from Lenin. Marxism thus becomes a "world-view" allowing us the access to objective reality and its laws, and this operation brings a new false sense of security: our acts are "ontologically" covered, part of "objective reality" regulated by laws known to us, Communists. However, the price paid for this ontological security is terrible: exactitude (in the sense of truth about facts) to which Lenin was still committed disappears, facts can be voluntarily manipulated and retroactively changed, events and persons become non-events and non-persons. In other words, in Stalinism the Real of politics, brutal subjective interventions which violate the texture of reality, returns with a vengeance, although in the form of its opposite, of the respect for objective knowledge.1

Following the Stalinist turn, Communist revolutions were grounded in a clear vision of historical reality ("scientific socialism"), its laws and tendencies, so that, in spite of all its unpredictable turn, the revolution was fully located into this process of historical reality – as they liked to say: Socialism should be built in each country according to its particular conditions, but in accordance with general laws of history. In theory, revolution was thus deprived of the dimension of subjectivity proper, of radical cuts of the real into the texture of "objective reality" – in clear contrast to the French Revolution whose most radical figures perceived it as an open process lacking any support in a higher Necessity. Saint-Just wrote in 1794: "Ceux qui font des révolutions ressemblent au premier navigateur instruit par son audace. / Those who make revolutions resemble a first navigator, who has audacity alone as a guide" (de Saint-Just 2004/1794, 695).

Today, even more than in Lenin's time, we navigate in uncharted territories, where there is no global cognitive mapping. But what if this lack of clear cognitive mapping is what gives us hope that there is a way to avoid totalitarian closure (see Milner 2016b)?

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In what precise sense was the electoral victory of Syriza a mistake? In accepting the electoral game, in winning at the wrong moment or...? The second round of the French presidential elections in May 2017 confronted us even more strongly with this old dilemma of the radical Left: vote or not (in the parliamentary elections)? The miserable choice le Pen / Macron exposed us to the temptation of ceasing to vote altogether, of refusing to participate in this more and more meaningless ritual. To make a decision in such situations is full of ambiguities.

The argumentation against voting subtly (or openly) oscillates between two versions, the "soft" one and the "strong" one. The "soft" version specifically targets the multiparty democracy in capitalist countries, with two main arguments: (1) media controlled by the ruling class manipulate the majority of voters and do not allow them to make rational decisions in their interest; (2) elections are a ritual that occurs every four years and its main function is to passivise voters in the long periods between the two elections. The ideal that underlies this critique is that of a non-representative "direct" democracy with continuous direct participation of the majority.

The "strong" version makes a crucial step forward and relies (explicitly or not) on a profound distrust of the majority of people: the long history of universal suffrage in the West shows that the vast majority is as a rule passive, caught in the inertia of survival, not ready to be mobilised for a Cause. That's why every radical movement is always constrained to a vanguard minority, and in order for it to gain hegemony, it has to wait patiently for a crisis (usually war) which provides a narrow window of opportunity. In such moments, an authentic vanguard can seize the day, mobilise the people (even if not the actual majority) and take over.

(My note: It now segues into the part that Eylos posted)

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The most visible aspect of "popular presence" is thus the assemblage (in the sense of gathering of large groups in central public spaces, like the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians on Tahrir Square who forced Mubarak to resign). And an important open question is: How does cyberspace presence/pressure operate? What are its potentials? Popular presence is precisely what the term says – presence as opposed to representation, a direct pressure directed at representative organs of power; it is what defines populism in all its guises, and (as a rule, although not always) it has to rely on a charismatic leader. Examples abound: the crowd outside the Louisiana Congress that supported Huey Long and assured his victory in a key vote, crowds exerting pressure on behalf of Milošević in Serbia, crowds persisting for days in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring or in Istanbul during protests against Erdoğan, etc.

In such a popular presence, "people themselves" make palpable their force beyond representation, but this direct presence is simultaneously people's radical self-alienation or, rather, transubstantiation in another mode of being. In a short poem written apropos the GDR workers' uprising in 1953, Brecht quotes a contemporary party functionary as saying that the people have lost the trust of the government: "Would it not be easier", Brecht slyly asks, to "dissolve the people and elect another?" (Brecht 1953). Instead of reading this poem as a case of Brecht's irony, one should take it seriously: yes, in a situation of popular mobilisation, the "people" is in a way replaced, transubstantiated – the inert mass of ordinary people is transubstantiated into a politically engaged united force.

One should always bear in mind that the people's permanent presence equals a permanent state of exception. So what happens when people get tired, when they are no longer able to sustain the tension? Communists in power had two solutions (or, rather, two sides of one and the same solution): the party reign over the passive population and a fake popular mobilisation. Trotsky himself, the theorist of the permanent revolution, was well aware that people "cannot live for years in an uninterrupted state of high tension and intense activity" (Mandel 1995, 81), and he turned this fact into an argument for the need of the vanguard party: the self-organisation in councils cannot take over the role of the party which should run things when the people get tired. And, to amuse the people and to maintain appearances, an occasional big spectacle of pseudo-mobilisation can be of some use, from Stalinist parades up to today's North Korea. In capitalist countries there is, of course, another way to dispel popular pressure: (more or less) free elections – recently in Egypt and Turkey, but it worked also in 1968 in France. One should never forget that the agent of popular pressure is always a minority – even Occupy Wall Street was, with regard to its active participants, much closer to 1% than to 99% from its big slogan.

Should we then just ignore elections? Whatever (secret) elections are, they measure something in a purely numeric way – the percentage of the population which stands behind the main publicly presented political options. That's why Communists in power unconditionally have to stick to the form of free secret elections even if the outcome is a totally predictable 90% or more of votes (after 2 years of their reign, even the Khmer Rouge performed this ritual), or, even more, to the form of multi-party democracy, as in Poland and the GDR. And how many people are aware that even China is today a multi-party democracy with seats allotted to other "patriotic" forces apart from the Communist Party? Plus are some kind of elections not necessary to form the leading body of the ruling party itself? This was the great problem already in early Bolshevism: is it possible to have an inner-party democracy without some kind of democracy in the society outside the party? So how to keep the space open for an authentic feedback from the people outside the party circle? The problem was never that the Party nomenklatura didn't know what the people really thought – through their secret services they were always all too well informed about it.

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The basic problem is thus: how to move beyond multi-party democracy without falling into the trap of direct democracy? In other words: how to invent a different mode of passivity of the majority? How to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life? This alienation has to be taken at its strongest, as the excess constitutive of the functioning of an actual power, overlooked by liberalism as well as by Leftist proponents of direct democracy. Recall the traditional liberal notion of representative power: citizens transfer (part of) their power onto the state, but under precise conditions: this power is constrained by law, limited to very precise conditions of its exercise, since the people remain the ultimate source of sovereignty and can repeal power if they decide so. In short, the state with its power is the minor partner in a contract which the major partner (the people) can at any point repeal or change, basically in the same way each of us can change the contractor which takes care of our waste or health… However, the moment one takes a close look at an actual state power edifice, one can easily detect an implicit but unmistakable signal: "Forget about our limitations – ultimately, we can do whatever we want with you!" This excess is not a contingent supplement spoiling the purity of power but its necessary constituent – without it, without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence, state power is not a true power, it loses its authority.

The way to undermine the spell of power is thus not to succumb to the fantasy of a transparent power; one should rather hollow out the power edifice from within by way of performing the separation between the form of power edifice and its agent (the bearer of power). As it was developed decades ago by Claude Lefort (1981), therein resides the core of the "democratic invention": in the empty place of power, i.e., the constitutive gap between the place of power and the contingent agents who, for a limited period, can occupy that place. Paradoxically, the underlying premise of democracy is thus not only that there is no political agent which has a "natural" right to power, but, much more radically, that "the people" themselves, the ultimate source of the sovereign power in democracy, doesn't exist as a substantial entity. In the Kantian way, the democratic notion of "the people" is a negative concept, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit: it prohibits any determinate agent to rule with full sovereignty (The only moment when "the people exists" are the democratic elections, which are precisely the moments of the disintegration of the entire social edifice – in elections, the "people" are reduced to a mechanical collection of individuals). The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of "totalitarianism". And the mistake of "totalitarianism" is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse ("paralogism") of political reason: "the People exists" through a determinate political agent which acts as if it directly embodies (not only re-presents) the People, its true Will (the totalitarian Party and its Leader), i.e., in the terms of transcendental critique, as a direct phenomenal embodiment of the noumenal People…

Critics of representative democracy endlessly vary the motif of how, for a priori formal reasons and not just on account of accidental distortions, multiparty elections betray true democracy. But while accepting this critical point, one should not only accept it as the price to be paid for any actually functioning democracy. One should even add that it is because of such a minimal "alienation" signalled by the term "representative" that a democracy functions. That is to say, what this "alienation" points towards is the "performative" character of the (democratic) choice: in such a choice, people do not vote for what (they in advance know that) they want – it is through such a choice that they realise/discover what they want. A true leader does not just follow the wishes of the majority; s/he makes the people aware of what they want.

This is why democracy retains its meaning even if the choice given is the one between very similar programmes – precisely such an empty choice makes it clear that there is no predestined bearer of power. The logical implication of this premise is Kojin Karatani's (2003) idea of combining elections with lottery in the procedure of determining who will rule us. This idea is more traditional than it may appear (he himself mentions Ancient Greece) – paradoxically, it fulfils the same task as Hegel's theory of monarchy. Karatani takes here a heroic risk at proposing a crazy-sounding definition of the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat: "If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat" (Karatani 2003, 183). Wasn't this also the underlying idea of Lenin (1917) when, in his State and Revolution, he outlined his vision of the workers' state where every kukharka (not simply a cook, especially not a great chef, but more a modest woman-servant in the kitchen of a wealthy family) will have to learn how to rule the state? From (electoral) democracy to lotocracy…

Does this mean that expertise doesn't matter? No, since another separation enters the frame here: the separation between S1 and S2, between Master-Signifier and expert-knowledge. The Master (people through voting) decide, make the choice, but the experts suggest to them what to choose – people want the appearance of choice, not real choice-making. This is how our democracies function – with our consent: we act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. As Marx knew long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king – but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call "crisis of democracy" does not occur when people stop believing in their own power, but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience the anxiety signalling that "the (true) throne is empty", that the decision is now really theirs. There is thus in "free elections" always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to freely decide if we want to give them power – in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused.

But how is this different from "totalitarian" Communism where voters are also compelled to go through the empty ritual of freely choosing (voting for) what is imposed on them? The obvious answer is that in democratic elections there is a minimal free choice, a choice that minimally matters. But a more important difference is that in "totalitarian" Communism the gap between Master-Signifier and expert knowledge disappears – how? The distance between Lenin and Stalin concerns precisely this point. So where do we stand today with regard to this dilemma?

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Eylos said:

Discovered this game from the Atari 2600

Should be this thread logo

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History repeats itself and so do ideas, but never in exactly the same way. Bolshevik thinking in 2017 does not sound exactly the way it sounded in 1917. There are, it is true, still a few Marxists around. In Spain and Greece they have formed powerful political parties, though in Spain they have yet to win power and in Greece they have been forced by the realities of international markets, to quietly drop their "revolutionary" agenda. The current leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, also comes out of the old pro-Soviet far left. He has voiced anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Israel, and even anti-British (and pro-IRA) sentiments for decades — predictable views that no longer sound shocking to a generation that cannot remember who sponsored them in the past. Within his party there is a core of radicals who speak of overthrowing capitalism and bringing back nationalization.

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But so far, the new left, however fashionable it may be in some circles, is not in power, and thus has not managed to create a real revolution. In truth, the most influential contemporary Bolsheviks — the people who began, like Lenin and Trotsky, on the extremist fringes of political life and who are now in positions of power and real influence in several Western countries — come from a different political tradition altogether.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Jaroslaw Kaczynski: although they are often described as "far-right" or "alt-right," these neo-Bolsheviks have little to do with the right that has been part of Western politics since World War II, and they have no connection to existing conservative parties.

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By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right do not want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans but radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky, they offer a false and misleading vision of the past. They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts. They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use "Christianity" as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are "Christians" fighting against "Muslims" — or against "liberals" if there are no "Muslims" available.

To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin's refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his "illegitimate" opponents. Law and Justice, the illiberal nationalist ruling party in Poland, has sorted its compatriots into "true Poles" and "Poles of the worst sort." Trump speaks of "real" Americans, as opposed to the "elite." Stephen Miller, a Trump acolyte and speechwriter, recently used the word "cosmopolitan," an old Stalinist moniker for Jews (the full term was "rootless cosmopolitan"), to describe a reporter asking him tough questions. "Real" Americans are worth talking to; "cosmopolitans" need to be eliminated from public life.

Surprisingly, given its mild and pragmatic traditions, even British politics is now saturated with Leninist language. When British judges declared, in November 2016, that the Brexit referendum had to be confirmed by Parliament — a reasonable decision in a parliamentary democracy — the Daily Mail, a xenophobic pro-Brexit newspaper, ran a cover story with judges' photographs and the phrase "Enemies of the People." Later, the same paper called on the prime minister to "Crush the Saboteurs," choosing a word that was also favored by Lenin to describe legitimate political opposition.

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The historian Ronald Radosh has quoted Bannon's comparison of himself to the Bolshevik leader. "Lenin," Bannon told Radosh, "wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment." At a conservative gathering in Washington in 2013, Bannon also called for a "virulently anti-establishment" and "insurgent" movement that will "hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party."

And what gives a president who did not win the popular vote the right to do that? This, too, is a familiar idea: the "People." It is a mystical notion, quite different from the actually existing population of America, but strikingly similar to the "crowd" in whose name Trotsky spoke at the Petrograd Circus. In his dark, nihilistic inaugural address, much of it written by Bannon and Miller, the president announced that he was "transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People" — as if the capital city had until 2017 somehow belonged to foreign occupiers. This un-American idea of the "People" bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the force that scientific Marxism once predicted would run the world. It also sounds a lot like what Le Pen means by "the Nation," as opposed to the "globalist elite," or what the Law and Justice party in Poland mean when they talk about "suweren," the sovereign nation, as opposed to the majority of Polish voters, who actually oppose them.

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Eylos said:

This stinks anti communist neo-liberal think tank, probably the author is involved with one, because i already readed something here in the same line.

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