With Strasserism becoming a common accusation made towards various political trends on the left, K. T. Jamieson makes a historical investigation of Strasserism and its ideology and argues that it creates more confusion than clarity to label the right wing of social democracy as ‘Strasserism.’

Strasserism, the “Red-Brown Alliance,” and the Online Left  

Orwell, the conservative’s favorite socialist, famously once opined in 1944, during the peak of actually existing fascism, that “fascism,” in the pens and mouths of the literati, had been voided of all content and transformed into a floating signifier attached to foes of all kinds. The right has been grateful ever since for Orwell’s equivocation, as their own genealogy contains some shameful relatives they’d rather forget. He declined to provide any original definition of fascism, but he did correctly perceive that its emotional payload made it a useful label for ideologists.

Recently, a related label has bubbled up into left online chatter, a close kin of so-called National Bolshevism—Strasserism. In the majority of instances, this use of “Strasserism” should not be taken literally, but as shorthand for a defiantly edgy brand of populism, whether nominally left or right. This has not stopped, however, a slew of thinkpieces and Twitter “analysis” dedicated to turning over every rock, no matter how seemingly innocuous, in the search for “red-brownism.” For the most part, this discourse treats Strasserism and National Bolshevism as functionally equivalent, rarely actually interrogating their historical content. The former has, for whatever reason, recently trended over the latter, perhaps because of its novelty.

“Strasserism” as a polemical category has become part of the tedious dialectic between two camps within the left over identity politics. It is rare that genuinely Marxist perspectives find themselves represented in this argument; it is a (mostly online) dispute between, on the one hand, a right-opportunist and workerist social-democratic tendency, and on the other, a “common sense” activist leftism, in which class is merely one identity among others in an intersectional coalition. What both sides share is a conviction, conscious or not, that is a denial that the proletariat represents a universal class.

It is within this discourse that Strasserism has been applied to the former by the latter, and then by the former to themselves in an act of ironic appropriation. A common target is Angela Nagle, whose Kill All Normies—essentially a Dummy’s Guide to 4chan—first brought her public attention. The book’s thesis, supported by research which consisted mostly of Wikipedia and many nights spent lurking on various internet fora, was perceived as “SJWs created the Alt-Right.” This naturally opened up an audience which clamored for “normie socialism,” which is social democracy minus the sorts who might appear on a Youtube cringe compilation, or as Kate Griffiths defined it, “an assertion of electoral politics, and specifically those within the Democratic Party, as the horizon of the socialist movement today as opposed to direct action and working class self activity.”¹ Nagle followed up this hit with an essay misusing Marx to argue against open borders and reprised it in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News slot. Carlson made an obvious choice, as with shifting winds he has exchanged his bow-tie libertarianism for a brand of Laschian populism that looks backward to Fordism and its single-income nuclear family. “Strasserite” has also been reserved for the subreddit r/stupidpol, who with dubious humor titled their podcast feed (an aggregation of other podcast episodes) “Strasserites in Pooperville” after a clumsy Twitter clapback. Other targets include Aimee Terese (formerly of Dead Pundits Society), Michael Tracey, Benjamin Studebaker, The eXile, and Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare.²

The most recent fusillade in this mirror-universe culture war is Peter Soeller’s recent Medium two-parter, which warns of a “merger of nationalism with socialist welfare policies to strengthen a mythologized white working class.”³ Mostly, though, it consists of screencaps and bizarrely elaborate analytics of Twitter networks that relate in some way to r/stupidpol.⁴. Strasserism is here viewed as a possible consequence of “class reductionism.” Conveniently, Soeller rejects the Marxist notion that fascism has a class dimension, instead embracing a non-explanation: fascism is an “autonomous outgrowth of internalized reactionary ideas.” This interpretation of fascism as a mind-virus that infects Twitter accounts is not only silly, but self-serving. As I will argue later, this kind of unprincipled Nazi-hunting is driven by an implicit acceptance of the category of “social fascism,” which in its sensationalism crowds out genuine Marxist criticism of social democracy.

There are other examples. Black Socialists of America, a small organization mostly known for its social media presence, tweeted a thread in March which claimed that Strasserism manipulated anti-liberalism to trick leftists into supporting nationalism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. It included several incorrect claims, such as that Otto Strasser saw Marxism-Leninism as “a softer, Russian form of National Socialism,” or that the Strasser brothers sought cooperation with the Soviet Union.⁵ This thread more or less baited Marxists, especially Leninists, with the smear of Strasserism. BSA’s own leanings are vaguely Proudhonist. Accordingly, the thread was capped off with a warning that, among other things, “decentralization” should be a sticking point for leftists, lest they fall prey to the wiles of fascists in red clothing.

Alexander Reid Ross has made something of a minor career out of “red-brown” investigation. He has written multiple essays and a full-length book on the subject. Ross has long maintained a presence online as an anarchist whose foreign policy views conveniently line up with that of the American state department. It is not surprising that this “CIAnarchist,” whose Russia obsessions often fail to separate him from the average boomer liberal, manages to place Chapo Trap House, The eXile, and the “dirtbag left” (a marketing neologism for a brand of leftist humor) in the same Venn diagram as Alexander Dugin, who most agree is a literal fascist.⁶ The title of Against the Fascist Creep, his 2017 book on the subject, refers to “the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism.”⁷ This is clearly a nod to liberal horseshoe theory, and Ross positions Strasserism between the ends of the horseshoe, with the (trivially obvious) caveat that the Strasser duo were not leftists. To prevent this red-brown menace, Ross calls for leftists to “abandon the geopolitics of edgelords, and build a public reputation as… defenders of the commonweal.” Translated, we might say this equates to siding with Western NGOs on global conflicts, just to be sure you won’t be lumped in with fascists.

Of course, sincere (or merely half-ironic) Strasserites exist, particularly online. Any foray into the murky corners of Frog Twitter or the Chans will reveal a buffet of ideologies for the taxonomist. It is here where one will most likely encounter the syncretism of which Strasserism is a subtype. Of course, this syncretism is not exactly a fusion of left and right, but mostly rightist ideas in an unfamiliar, and superficially “left,” package. Cold War stereotypes of Actually Existing Socialism, morally inverted and divested of any content too meaningful to capture in Youtube compilations of military parades are joined to the standard grievances of the far right—the collapse of family, race, and nation. John Paul Cupp, the white nationalist who idolized Juche and Iraqi Ba’athism before converting to Islam, probably best exemplifies the lunatic edge of this spectrum, on which one can find every sort of pathology.⁸

This pseudo-syncretism is a product of a unipolar world in which a victorious liberalism, having defeated all alternatives, drives its reactionary critics into cooperation and coalition with any forces of resistance. Indeed, this is the basic premise of Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory—a popular frontism of the far right. Dugin wishes to constrain what he calls the “monotonic process” through a global realignment informed by a dichotomy between, among other things, land and sea powers (in Dugin’s jargon, Eurasian and Atlanticist). This monotonic process is akin to Hegel’s concept of bad infinity, a linear series of self-referrals which progresses continually along one axis, without ever becoming “total” and all-embracing. It is grouped in with the ideas of Enlightenment, progress, and the West as a whole, which only a coalition of particularisms can combat effectively. One could say that this is not so much syncretism as the right-wing of post-modernism, which takes the incommensurability of groups and identities for granted.

There may also be an element of novelty, as this sort of syncretic or post-modern fascism can surprise those who expect that fascism is incapable of evolution, stuck permanently in a dead-end of Nazi LARPing.  Individuals like Cupp demonstrate that the far right is willing to experiment, but also that without a mass base the political elides into the aesthetic—it retreats into what Carl Schmitt, in his self-critique Political Romanticism, calls the “cathedral of the personality.” Given the personalities involved, we might rather call them basements.

Returning to Strasserism more specifically, it is known to the English-speaking fascist world primarily through A. K. Chesterton, who met Otto Strasser in 1955, during his post-war return journey to West Germany via Ireland. A. K. Chesterton was the cousin of Catholic traditionalist and witticism-generator G. K. Chesterton, whose distributism (and that of Hilaire Belloc’s) bears more than some resemblance to Otto’s own system, as we shall see later. A. K. Chesterton shared with Strasser his medievalism, ruralism, and opposition to Hitler, although this is mostly where the similarities end. However, he is seen as a foundational figure for the British fascist organization the National Front, and it is through him that Strasserism became, if in a muddled form, almost an official ideology of the National Front, particularly during the 1980s. ⁹ It was in this period that the edgelord neofolk band Death in June formed, taking its moniker from the infamous Night of the Long Knives, in which Otto Strasser’s brother Gregor was executed. A former member of Death in June, Tony Wakeford, joined the National Front for a time, and lyrics he composed during this time demonstrate the flavor of the NF’s “Strasserism”:

All the same height and all the same weight

All the same voice and much the same shape

Pressed to a pattern and shoved into a line

Bled by the rich and led by the blind

Progress, progress—there’s progress!

Such is the joining of people to state

The state is the father, the mother and mate

It knows how you think, it says what you need

With total conviction it prints what you read

Progress, progress—there’s progress!

This criticism of the state-as-leveler is, as will be discussed later, certainly present in the mature ideology of Otto Strasser. There is no doubt it made him especially amenable to Troy Southgate, the originator of so-called “National Anarchism,” who wrote a biography of Otto Strasser (Otto Strasser: The Life & Times of a German Socialist) and praised the Strassers for engaging in “a war of ideology with Hitler himself, a man who refused to advocate the decentralization of State power.”¹⁰ Groups in America like White Aryan Resistance, which hosts English translations of Otto Strasser on its website, also claim Strasserism as an influence. While it’s doubtful that there is a strict lineage from the Strassers to these groups, it provides an aesthetic packaging suited to the lumpenized base of the white nationalist movement.

Marxists have always acknowledged that fascism is often anti-bourgeois, if not anti-capitalist, and as such is not merely a dupe of the establishment. As early as 1934, Bukharin acknowledged that fascism was often anti-capitalist in its sloganeering, while (in his view) at the same time seeking to strengthen capitalism by a “speedy reorganisation of the bourgeois ranks,” which he analogizes to the development of absolute monarchy out of feudalism, which delayed the end of the feudal order precisely by introducing uniformity and discipline into what had been a confusing web of private loyalties. ¹¹ J. Sakai, among others, rejects the vulgar Marxist opinion that fascists were merely puppets of big capitalists, and portrays them as part of a movement of “failed men”—declassed professionals, disgraced officers, and immiserated farmers and small craftsmen—who, in their victimized chauvinism, sought to replace the businessman and politician with the soldier.¹² Sakai goes so far as to say that fascism can be anti-imperialist, insofar as imperialism functions to stabilize a bourgeois global order which is at odds with settler particularism (which characterizes the imperative of the former as “invade the world, invite the world”).

We should certainly not dismiss the possibility of a rightward drift within the broader socialist movement, or the need for correcting chauvinist attitudes within the left. Nor should we deny that there is an “anti-imperialism of fools,” which has found its way into the left on some occasions. However, the recent revival of this term provides an occasion for an investigation into historical Strasserism, and the evidence will make it clear that it shares boundaries with other ideologies—but not necessarily socialism. Unpacking its logic will reveal that its usage in the context of internecine leftist spats is fundamentally wrongheaded and that we should be cautious about hyping up the threat of “red-brownism.” Moreover, it will vindicate the central importance of class struggle in understanding the development of reactionary ideology, and in particular the proletariat as a revolutionary subject.

To begin with, most histories of fascism touch on the Strasser brothers only in passing. When they are mentioned, it is in connection with Otto Strasser’s paramilitary “resistance” organization, the Black Front, and with the purge of late June, 1934, known as the Night of the Long Knives, in which Gregor Strasser was assassinated.

The brothers are mostly absent from A. James Gregor’s oeuvre, surprising given his project of rehabilitating the “totalitarianism” thesis of Hannah Arendt and others in which fascism and Marxism are interpenetrative and linked by a hatred for liberal civil society (they are not mentioned once in his best-known work, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism). Roger Griffin’s account in The Nature of Fascism is typical, asserting that the brothers were divided on the question of loyalty to the NSDAP (“… Gregor Strasser remained faithful to Nazism while his brother Otto was its bitter critic”) and folding into the “instrinsically vague term” of Strasserism-related concepts like National Bolshevism and Third Positionism.¹³ Robert Paxton refers to Gregor Strasser as “a leader of [the NSDAP’s] anticapitalist current” and to both brothers as economic “radicals,” while also repeating the claim that Otto was the more radical of the two.¹⁴ Though he does not mention them by name, Eric Hobsbawm’s characterization of Strasserism in The Age of Extremes cuts closer to the matter:

“… [A] utopia of a return to some kind of little man’s Middle Ages, full of hereditary peasant-proprietors, artisan craftsmen … and girls in blonde plaits … a programme that could [not] be realized in major twentieth-century states.”¹⁵

Peter Stachura takes this further and asserts, against the conventional view, that a “left-wing” of Nazism does not exist “as a coherent ideological, organizational, or political entity” and that Gregor Strasser’s “socialism” was “…vacuous, amounting to no more than an emotionally-based, superficial, petty-bourgeois anticapitalism.”¹⁶

A Biographical Sketch of the Strasser Duo 

Gregor and Otto were born in 1890s Bavaria to Peter Strasser, a lifelong civil servant and devout Catholic. The two brothers inherited more than their father’s faith and appreciation for civil service. According to a third brother, Bernhard, their father was a polemical advocate of a form of “German socialism” under his pen name, Paul Weger. In their father’s book, Der Neue Weg or “The New Way,” he describes the “curing of ills brought about by international, liberal capitalism by the introduction of a form of socialism at the same time nationalist and Christian.”¹⁷ Peter Strasser was not alone in his beliefs during this period. An entire generation dedicated to “conservative revolution” grew up in the fading shadow of Bismarck’s legacy, molded by the experiences of the First World War. Both brothers would later enlist at the earliest opportunity.

Strasserism was a product of sibling synergy, but it should be noted that most of the details of Strasserism were worked out primarily by Otto. Partly this is because Gregor was executed in 1933, while Otto continued writing into the 1960s. It is also, however, attributable to a difference in temperament between the brothers. Gregor was a man of deeds more than words and lacked the literary and theoretical bent which Otto exhibited during his literary career. Fittingly, Otto entered the profession of law (Gregor ran a pharmacy for most of his adult life). Otto was prolific, particularly during his period of exile, writing more than 6 books between 1930 and 1955. Many of these were published in English, sometimes even with separate American and British printings. The reasons for this will soon become clear.

For his literacy, Otto occasionally received casual abuse from his superiors, particularly in military service. A corporal targeted Otto, then a teenage volunteer in the First World War, for his intellectualism and commanded him to perform humiliating tasks such as cleaning filthy stable hay with his bare hands, and this hazing was continued later in the war by a staff sergeant who attempted to have him court-martialed after a series of escalating incidents. Hitler himself, during his first meeting with Otto in the fall of 1920, dismissed him as an Intellektbestie—an “intellectual crank.”

Unlike Otto, Gregor’s contributions were not independent from the activities of the NSDAP. Along with Goebbels, he authored the so-called Strasser Program of 1925, but its content provoked a backlash from Hitler and was swiftly abandoned. Apart from this, Gregor’s writings are scanty and poorly known. However, he was an able speaker, a talent which propelled him to the top of the party ranks. In tenor and content, these speeches are tailored to the NSDAP’s need for expanded recruitment in northern Germany, with its large populations of industrial workers, particularly in the Ruhr. A typical example is his speech of June 15, 1926, referred to as “Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future.” Here, socialism is presented as a moralizing mystification, an idea-mood. There is a sentimental appeal to spirit over “materialism” and the need for an economic system replacing the “immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement,” or more succinctly, ‘work above property.”¹⁸ In fact, for all its putative socialism, Gregor’s speech sounds at times meritocratic. His argument for a state which rewards achievement rests precisely on natural inequality, but he rejects “blood tests, Nordicization, and so forth” as dubious to his “practical mind.” Rather, Gregor says, we ought to have compulsory trade apprenticeship for a period of one year, with two years of voluntary military service reserved for the best candidates. The result, so he concludes, would be that such individuals would “be the best of their people, the racial best.” After Gregor’s death, Otto would expand and re-work these themes, particularly in Germany Tomorrow, written in 1940.

Otto began his political life on the right wing of social democracy—incidentally, where contemporary “Strasserites” like Angela Nagle belong today. He was a member of the SPD and supported the Weimar government until possibly 1920. In his 1940 autobiography, which bears the incongruously twee title Hitler and I, he recounts his break with the SPD as a consequence of the perceived betrayal of the Bielefeld Agreement, which seems to have disillusioned him. Though he did not participate in the Ruhr uprising, he took an active role in the defense of the government against the Kapp putschists Erhardt and Luttwitz, claiming to have led “three squads of Berlin workingmen,” and apparently sided with the view of so-called moderates in the USPD that the Bielefeld compromise was a fitting reward for services rendered. When it was abrogated by the independent initiative of the Reichswehr and, of course, the Freikorps, Otto was “disheartened … and felt like a ship without a rudder.”¹⁹

Another incident may shed light on Otto’s break with the SPD. One biographer reports that he was present at a speech given by Kurt Eisner in Bad Eibling, November 1918. Desperate to conceal his identity as an ex-officer, he nevertheless was drawn by curiosity to the crowd of attendees, described as mostly peasantry. When Eisner railed against the officer class that “went whoring and boozing” while sending their subordinates to die, Strasser hotly delivered a rebuke: casualties among officers were three times that of ordinary soldiers! “Where were you,” he interrogated, “in the war, Herr Eisner? I was at the front … ask these loudmouthed gentlemen here where they were, and if they only had sixpence a day, like us.”²⁰ His wounded pride revealed himself to be an officer, and the attendees carried him out in a ruckus. In style this incident resembles a parable (or perhaps an email forward from your ex-marine uncle) and is possibly apocryphal, but it demonstrates the real martyr complex that military service had created in the Strasser brothers, like other fascists of their generation.

Thus it was insufficient nationalism, insufficient veneration of the officer class, and not their hypocrisy, that likely led Otto to break with the SPD. If it was merely the latter, he should have been driven into the arms of the KPD. Instead, only months later in October 1920, he decided to accept his brother’s invitation to dinner with Hitler and General Ludendorff.

Otto’s own recounting of this meeting evinces a journalist’s eye for characterization. While he was impressed by Ludendorff’s stolid and even-keeled temperament, which he seemed to see reflected in his physiognomy (one “sensed his will-power immediately”), Hitler appeared to be “trying to occupy as small a place upon his chair as possible … to shelter under the redoubtable general’s wing.” Hitler’s pallor “indicated lack of fresh air and physical exercise”; his manner was “both obsequious and sullen.” When Hitler interrogated Otto for his role in opposing the Kapp putsch, he shot back that his faction of “Reds” were “not rebels, but patriots … trying to check the rebellious followers of a few reactionary generals,” accusing Kapp of being “hand-in-glove with Tirpitz, the Prussian reactionaries, the Junkers, heavy industry, Thyssen and Krupp.”²¹

Given that this is Otto’s own account, it is likely he exaggerates his boldness here. In any event, the meeting did not immediately convince him: Otto would not join the NSDAP until 1925. His brother, on the other hand, was a convinced National Socialist by the time of this meeting and had even participated in the suppression of the Ruhr uprising which had taken place alongside the Kapp putsch. His sympathies were clearly with the “reactionary generals” whom his brother had excoriated at the dinner table.

In fact, Gregor Strasser never turned fully renegade and was essential to the formation and development of National Socialist ideology. His closest collaborator was none other than Goebbels. During the period of “factional” struggle between northern and southern party organizers in 1925, Goebbels and Gregor—along with Otto—were allies in the “socialist” northern faction, and, as we have seen, would together draft the November 22, 1925, Strasser Program in Hanover.

This program was in most ways not a radical departure from party orthodoxy, but a clarification and expansion of the 25-Point Program drafted by Hitler, Anton Drexler, and debt-crank Gottfried Feder in 1920. The 25-Point Program called for, among other things, the nationalization of trusts, a “division of profits” from heavy industry, abolition of “unearned” income and “rent-slavery,” and expropriation of land property “for the purposes of public utility.”²² It was the interpretation of Point 17 that generated the most controversy: the expropriation of the princes deposed in the German Revolution.

More than anything, it was this issue—the expropriation of the princes—which created the split between the left and right wings of the NSDAP. The alternative of the “right” faction was to expropriate Jewish immigrants who had arrived after the start of August 1914. Hitler responded to the Hanover meeting with a conference in Bamberg on February 14, 1926, and was unequivocal in his opposition to the expropriation of the princes, stating that “there are no princes, only Germans.” Aside from this disagreement, the main aim of the Bamberg Conference was to rally both the northern and southern sectors of the NSDAP around his charismatic leadership. Disputes over program could only be resolved through appeal to the Fuhrerprinzip. All present, including Gregor Strasser, eventually accepted this resolution.

The Strassers continued to operate their printing press, distributing newspapers in several major cities. However, these operations would be steadily disrupted. Finally, in a proclamation entitled “The Socialists are Leaving the NSDAP,” issued by Otto on July 4th, 1930, he announced his final break with Hitler and his party. Here he proclaims that national socialism was intended as a republican movement against hereditary monarchy, and decries the “exaggerated worship of the fascist authoritarian state.” He draws a direct comparison between the NSDAP of this period, and that of the SPD after 1918, citing their cooperation and coalition with bourgeois parties—in the case of the former, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP, whose head was the wealthy industrialist Alfred Hugenberg. ²³ The immediate catalyst of this memo, however, was Hitler’s earlier order on June 30 to the Berlin Gauleiter to purge, in his words, the “salon Bolsheviks.” In a sense, Otto had quit before he could be fired. His brother Gregor, whether from resignation and despair, or blind loyalty, persisted in the party. An attempted intervention by Otto during a May 9, 1933 meeting in Munich was apparently unsuccessful. Less than a year later on June 30, 1934, he was rounded into a cell and shot to death, a casualty of the infamous Night of the Long Knives.

It was shortly after Otto‘s proclamation in 1930 that he founded, that same year, the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists (KGRNS)—better known by its paramilitary designation, the Black Front. Otto Strasser and the Black Front have become so closely identified that the Black Front, along with the Night of the Long Knives, are the two most familiar elements of Strasserite mythology to the layman. Its fighting strength and overall relevance to the German situation then unfolding was doubtless inflated by Otto, however. It had only around six thousand members in May 1931, two thousand of which were former SA who had been expunged from NDSAP, or quit in sympathy, after the so-called Stennes Revolt of April 1, 1931. This was an attempted coup of Hitler from within the NSDAP: a certain SA leader in Berlin, Walther Stennes, attempted to occupy the party’s offices and was swiftly expelled by local police. Stennes continued to work with Otto Strasser, although he never joined the Black Front. The ranks of the Black Front within the KGRNS numbered, at most, only three hundred.

After the KGRNS was banned in February 1933, the Black Front continued to operate via underground cells, although it is not certain what, if anything, they accomplished. In fact, some have interpreted it as a farcical public relations stunt, especially after its ban, consisting of “a small circle of personal friends, who found it useful to hang onto Strasser’s febrile journalistic coattail … [No ex-Black Fronters] within Germany … were in contact with Strasser.” ²⁴

Here we have an explanation for the connection between Otto Strasser and the British far right, and why so many of his works have been translated into English and distributed across the English-speaking world. Otto’s strategy during his period of exile revolved around obtaining recognition as a “resistance” leader, puffing up his irrelevant grouplet so as to attract notice from overseas Allied intelligence. This strategy, if not a resounding success, did meet with some approval, particularly with the British Foreign Office, and later with Canadian officials.

Otto was, in fact, a known quantity to English speakers, especially in Britain. A sympathetic Englishman and correspondent for the London Times, Douglas Reed, considerably aided his blitz of publications, even publishing several biographies of Strasser. One of these, Nemesis? The Story of Otto Strasser and the Black Front, was referenced by George Orwell in a review of a separate Reed book in The Observer, in which he characterizes Strasser’s program as “simply a modification of Hitler’s … Nazism was to be more or less retained, the Jews were to be persecuted, but a little less viciously, and Britain and Germany were to gang up for an attack on the U.S.S.R.”²⁵ Then there is the curious trivia that, while in Bermuda, Otto was interviewed by none other than H.G. Wells, who had traveled there for that purpose, later publishing a scathing article entitled “Otto Strasser: An Ally We Don’t Want” ²⁶. “Ally” here is intended quite literally.

Otto certainly strove to make himself more palatable to the English. He is careful to never, or rarely, criticize England in the works of his exile period while reserving plenty of scorn for “Prussianism,” a bête noire still haunting the memories of English generation of the First World War. His personal retellings of the struggle with Hitler are highly dramatized, at times reading more like an adventure novel than an autobiography—again and again, Otto eludes the clutches of the “Black Guards,” Hitler’s henchmen, and lives to fight another day. Thus he portrayed himself as a plucky resister who was, moreover, even sympathetic to England and English culture.

The reason for Otto’s self-marketing was self-preservation. As early as 1939, he believed that England would resolve the war. A dispatch to the Black Front in May of that year reads in part:

…[E]ven if Italy should fight at Germany’s side the French and British fleets will quickly secure mastery of the Mediterranean. With the collapse of Poland a new political and military stage in the war will be reached. … We must overthrow Hitler through a domestic revolution in Germany, in order to save Germany. The whole strategy of our campaign, from the first hour of the war on, must be ruled by the principle: ‘Only the rapid overthrow of Hitler can save Germany from partitioning.’¹⁷

Otto had clearly predicted that Hitler would bring ruin to Germany. However, he probably knew that a domestic revolution was not possible in 1939 Germany, let alone with the handful of sympathetic contacts he maintained. As one scholar puts it:

In November 1942 the Foreign Office could still write the Canadians that “his (Strasser’s) organization seemed to provide to some extent a rallying point for anti-Nazi feeling in a number of countries and as such it may to some extent have served a useful purpose.” Furthermore, he was a Bavarian who demonstrated a deep distaste for Prussians and the old German ruling castes, promising that if he had anything to do with it, they would lose all their power after the war and be severely punished for their shabby role in aiding the Nazi regime and Hitler’s war. Strasser’s own early Nazi activities were willingly overlooked, for he had broken with Hitler and his brother Gregor in 1930, struggled against Hitler since then, and was willing to put his knowledge of the Nazi mentality and character at the allies’ service. Thus he appeared to be well equipped to fight the Nazis and hit their true weaknesses. As a leading Foreign Office official put it in 1941, “We are, and have been using for this purpose (propaganda to Germany) several Germans with whose ultimate aims I totally disagree, but who are thought useful to go on with.” Because Strasser seemed to believe in the “socialist” rather than the nationalist side of Nazism, perhaps Strasser could appeal to the non-Prussian, non-elite members of German society against their rulers. Most importantly, Strasser claimed that thousands of secret Black Front members still existed within Germany awaiting his signal to bring down Hitler through revolt.²⁶

There were not, as anyone could tell, thousands of Black Front cells waiting to be activated for the revolution. However, this did not stop the British from assisting Strasser’s exile to Bermuda by arranging transport from Lisbon to Bermuda in 1940 after a series of travails across Europe: Austria and Prague in 1933, and Paris via Switzerland in 1938. Sympathetic Canadian officials then arranged to settle Strasser within its borders, reportedly for “humanitarian” reasons. Shortly thereafter they realized he was a liability who had ceased to be useful to the Allies’ strategy for Hitler and eventually ordered him to cease writing (his primary means of support). He then eked out a pathetic existence on a small farm in rural Nova Scotia, dependent on charity from his brother Paul who was at that time living as a Benedictine monk in the United States. When he finally won repatriation to West Germany in 1955, he re-invented himself as a “Solidarist” (while retaining all of his former beliefs). His last political effort of note was the short-lived party Deutsch-Soziale Union (1956-1962), which failed to field a single candidate.

It is therefore with little exaggeration that we can say Strasser is known to the English-speaking world through his cooperation with Allied intelligence. Without it, Strasser would have had little motivation to write and publish so frequently in English, and possibly would have been captured and executed by the advancing Germans. The phenomenon of a marginal and mostly powerless group which promotes itself to Western governments and NGOs as righteous resistance has not disappeared either—witness, for example, the West’s re-appraisal of the MEK, the cult-like proxy organization that lobbies itself as the most capable opposition to Tehran. With this in mind, Alexander Reid Ross’s dalliances with Western intelligence agencies today appears in an ironic light, given the role of such agencies in advancing actual “creeping fascism.” It was not the Soviet Union which aided Strasser, but liberal, democratic Britain—and had saner heads not prevailed, or if the Western Allies’ conventional warfare from without had encountered obstacles which made internal resistance efforts more plausible, Otto Strasser could have found himself installed as the head of a post-Hitler Germany.

The Reactionary Socialism of Strasserism 

From the foregoing we can see clearly how the class origins of the Strasser brothers influenced them toward what Engels, in The Principles of Communism, calls reactionary socialism. Such “socialists” were

…adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. … It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

As ex-officers, they were identified with the class that led millions to their deaths by tank, machine gun, or chemical weapons, their pretensions to cockaded chivalry increasingly mocked and at odds with the perceptions of average Germans. Ernst Jünger, a writer whose political ideals bear some family resemblance to Strasserism, highlights the disappearance of “honorable” warfare in his dystopian parable The Glass Bees, in which a cunning industrialist replaces the officer corps, and indeed all soldiers, with deadly automatons. Similarly, their petty-bourgeois origins—Gregor a pharmacist, Otto a lawyer—created an instinctive sympathy for their class, squeezed as it was from both sides and fated to disappear, as their Marxist contemporaries reminded them. Their Bavarian faith in Catholicism only furthered their nostalgia for feudalism.

However, it is worth noting the contradictions which led to deviation from this formula. The Strassers wanted a utopian form of feudalism without monarchs or nobles, and opposed hereditary privileges where they actually existed. They also, for the most part, came to despise the Junker officer class which they saw as embodying a kind of aristocratic decadence, wrapped up in the defense of an order which was dying, and indeed must die. Hostility to the Prussian establishment can be partially explained by Bavarian chauvinism, as well as Otto Strasser’s canny appeal to English prejudices during his period of exile. But regardless, this contradiction, in which anti-aristocratic and anti-bourgeois attitudes continually canceled each other out, was resolved by a coalitionist appeal to German workers as a mass base for what was, in reality, a movement for feudalism, in which workers would be “rescued” from their proletarian misery by becoming landed peasants and craftsmen. In reality, theirs was not a rescue mission, but an effort to pin the restless proletariat in place, like insects in a display box. The old feudal mold was to be reshaped and fitted over a re-agrarianized Germany.

Now turning to the Strassers’ primary writings, we see that the feudal character of Strasserite “socialism” is clear and unmistakable. Otto Strasser reveals it explicitly when he writes that “…capitalism is ideologically linked with liberalism, prior to the dominion of which there was an entirely different economic system ideologically akin to socialism, though of course differing from socialism in form.”²⁷

The watchword, and main task, of the supposedly socialist and pro-worker Strasserite project, is de-proletarianization. The urgency of this task is justified on the grounds that the proletarian condition is incompatible with independence, and is only made possible by “finding possessions for every German,” to give him “independence of thought and development.” Strasser does not mean by this private property, however, which is to be turned over to collective feudal self-management—for ownership belongs to “the whole of the German people”—but rather the land and tools required for small production.²⁷

In order to accomplish this, Strasser proposes the apportioning of land and means of production on the basis of Erblehen, which can be translated as “hereditary fief” or “inheritance loan.” In agriculture, the state’s role is to loan land as usufruct, through peasant councils, which are passed down to male offspring after death, or else are re-allotted if no male offspring can be found. It is worth mentioning that this was implemented as National Socialist policy, if in a more limited form, with the Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, which had as its goal the preservation of the peasantry through the “ancient German method of inheritance as the blood source of the German people.”²⁸

In the case of an industrial enterprise, workers and managers are assigned from their respective vocational councils in fief to a “factory fellowship.” The managers would constitute a “functionary aristocracy” that, Strasser assures us, is much different than a class of capitalists, since it cannot buy shares of any industry, but only inherit their portion from the state. Naturally, the manager’s share of the profits is much lower than that of the workers, since such “copious profit-sharing may foster [an] … overdriving of the means of production and the neglect of improvements.”²⁷ Agricultural workers were to be converted into peasants, and workers not assigned to “factory fellowships” will join the ranks of petty proprietors, craftsmen, and professionals, who are organized into guilds.

Strasser meets the objection that a return to small production would create massive grain shortages by proposing de-urbanization as a complement to de-proletarianization: urban workers from the cities would be resettled as peasant-producers, particularly along the eastern frontier, while the capital of Germany would be relocated to a small town in the central part of the country; Strasser suggests Regensburg or Goslar (population in 1940: about 40,000). For, Strasser adds, “life in our huge tentacular towns is a danger to the human race.”²⁷

To this de-urbanization and de-proletarianization, Strasser rounds out the trifecta with de-centralization. In Germany Tomorrow, Otto Strasser states that administration will be subdivided into 12-14 regions and adds that “the recognition of the necessarily unified character of the German State is not an acceptance of the ideal of liberal unitarism,” and that the German state is “not to be ruled centrally from one spot,” as to reflect the “geopolitical, religious, and cultural differences within the German people.” This reflects the earlier program developed at Hanover, which specifies that only financial and cultural policies were to be pursued uniformly at all levels of government, with all other policies to be implemented at the regional level, comprising 12-14 regions “according to their particular historical and tribal traditions.” As a general rule, the Strasser Program concludes that there should be “division of authority between centralism and federalism with … an organically structure system of corporations.”²⁹

This principle of balancing difference with unity by devolving responsibility to the lowest competent strata of authority is known in Catholic circles as “subsidiarity,” and it is likely Strasser, a Catholic, was familiar with it. Strasser’s agricultural policy is also driven by the principle of subsidiarity: the size of farms shall be no larger than one tenant can farm unaided. In industry, Strasser seeks a balance between what he sees as three essential factors: management, workers, and the state. Where capitalism, communism, and fascism make “totalitarian claims” to each factor respectively, Strasser’s German socialism seeks to share the responsibility of industrial enterprise equally among them.

He is quick to emphasize that his system of Erblehen, hereditary tenure, is an “emphatic rejection of any form of state capitalism, euphemistically termed state socialism.” For Strasser, the state is nothing more than the self-government of the national community. He rejects a “national planned economy” if this means the “carrying on of enterprises by the state or its organs,” as this would inhibit creativity, the joy of responsibility, and the cultivation of “mental de-proletarianization”—more so, in fact, than under the “private capitalist system.” German socialism, he says, “gives expression both to a … conservative skepticism of organization and to the popular dislike for bureaucracy.” Strasser reproduces liberal (and anarchist) arguments against Marxism, asserting that “their state” would and only ever could be the rule of the “official class” over the workers.

More shockingly, he—a fascist, and an erstwhile Nazi at that—seems to embrace the same horseshoe theory beloved by Alexander Reid Ross. After citing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Strasser writes:

The fascists and the communists rival one another in glorifying the state, in suppressing economic and personal independence, in unduly extolling power and the successes of organization, of decrees, of planning, and – as a last requisite – the police.²⁷

Behold the comic spectacle of a supposed red-brown fascist, making equivalencies between fascism and communism! Toward the end of his life, Strasser was even more unequivocal in his anti-statism, penning the following words in 1965:

Whoever praises and wishes to strengthen the state, he is a fascist; whoever wants to give the state new tools and to make its bureaucracy mightier, he is a fascist. ³⁰

Moreover, Strasser was not the only fascist to rebuke Hitler for his supposed centralism. We find in Evola’s critique, Fascism as Viewed from the Right, a similar concern for “organic” balance and subsidiarity with regard to the state. For Evola, the ideal regime is not a “legal dictatorship,” but an “authoritarian constitutionalism,” a monarchy which overcomes the “fetish and mythology of … rule of law.” This regime would be “organic and unified” without being totalitarian, and would allow for a “large margin of decentralization.” Liberty and loyalty, autonomy and responsibility, are fixed in a reciprocal relation according to eternal and immutable laws of nature. When these laws are transgressed, the “power that is concentrated at the center … will therefore intervene with a severity and harshness in proportion to the liberty that was conceded.”³¹

The mutuality which Strasser, Evola, et al perceive between possessions and liberty, and between individual freedom and responsibility, are strikingly liberal, as is their preference for a devolved state which strives to balance order and difference. Moreover, Strasser’s distinction between “possession” and private property could have been lifted directly from Proudhon, that most liberal of classical anarchists:

Individual possession is the condition of social life … property is the suicide of society. Possession is within right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize the law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth. ³²

Such a system would, far from doing away with capital, in fact anchor it more firmly in social existence: “…a system which, better than property, assures the formation of capital and maintains the morale of everyone.”

In fact, many of the features of Strasserism are found in Proudhon, features they share with classical or vulgar liberalism. He denounced suffrage in the name of the self-rule of civil society, sought to reconcile monopoly to small production, exalted war as an immutable and necessary feature of human life, opposed Marxism and communism with a passionate hatred, advocated devolution on the basis of subsidiarity, and was unrepentantly misogynist and antisemitic. These views would in fact directly influence the development of fascism. Drawing upon these reactionary elements of Proudhon (along with Sorel), the “Cercle Proudhon” in the pre-war period gathered together followers of the French fascist Charles Maurras, who rallied against the substitution of “the law of gold for the law of blood.”³³

It can even be argued that Strasserism was not so divergent from the “orthodoxy” of classical fascism in these respects. The centralism of actually existing Nazism is debated by some scholars, especially those of the so-called functionalist school. Robert Koehl cites a revealing remark by Hitler during a 1933 speech, in which he retorts, to an imagined interlocutor, that there is no one dictator, but ‘ten thousand, each in his own place‘, and adds:

In legislation, in jurisprudence, police practice and administrative policy they tried to substitute men for laws, personal judgment and responsibility for the rule-book and anonymity. They did away with the power of the old constitutional organs like the cabinet and the Reichstag and erected a system of Reichsleiter and Gauleiter whose positions depended, of course, on the Fuhrer’s goodwill and loyalty to them, but also on their ability to get things done and to command the loyalty and respect of their underlings and of the German people entrusted to their care…The oath of personal loyalty to Hitler of February 1934 was exacted precisely because Hitler did not It was the aim of the Nazis to develop both the institutions and the political atmosphere conducive to furthering the exercise of power. Rejecting the modern bureaucratic state with its elaborate channels, they wished to simplify the exercise of power, to pin down the responsibility for decisions, and to encourage independence and aggressive problem-solving. Not strangely, the military analogy seemed to offer a substitute for the bureaucratic state. At least the soldier could always be brought to account by his superior. But here, too, lay a danger that “artificial hierarchies” and “paper structures” would get in the way of on-the-spot action. The solution? Fuhrerprinzip! But the doctrine that a leader must be allowed full freedom to solve a problem meant in effect a neo-feudal system.³⁴

Ian Krenshaw, closer to the functionalist camp of interpretation, sums up the NSDAP’s rule in Germany as “feudal anarchy,” where “bonds of personal loyalty were from the beginning the crucial determinants of power.”³⁵ Hitler parceled out tasks to delegated authorities answerable only to him, with no consideration given to how these authorities might cooperate or communicate with each other. In effect, they were a jungle of competing fiefdoms, vying for the Fuhrer’s approval like puppies at their mother’s teat. It is no accident that Gau, a word with medieval-feudal echoes similar to “shire” in English, was chosen to designate political subdivisions within Germany and its annexed territories. The animating principle of the Nazi state was charismatic authority, which negated any universal, consistent application of procedure. In fact, Nazi policy was “bottom-up” as much as it was “top-down.” Krenshaw cites a speech from 1934 which exhorts underlings to “work toward the Fuhrer” rather than await directions from above. What this precisely meant was ambiguous, and could not be otherwise; this ambiguity provided latitude for those who controlled parts of the Nazi apparatus to pursue their own idiosyncratic objectives or merely empower and enrich themselves, so long as their activities could be posed under Hitler’s aura.

While it is true that Germany under Hitler did centralize some functions, even when it did so, it often merely absorbed private entities without modifying their structure, as it did with charities and mutual aid programs which became part of the Reich‘s social welfare organ (the National Socialist People’s Welfare, or NSV). Moreover, the power allocated to central Nazi authorities was not necessarily seen as conflicting with self-government at the Gau level. Wilhelm Stuckhart, a secretary with the Reich Interior Ministry, asserted in 1941 that an “organic synthesis” between these two modes of organization was possible. He proposed what one author calls a “totalitarian subsidiarity principle,” which would delegate responsibilities at the lowest strata of government which could plausibly accept them, thereby reducing the burden of the higher-ups.³⁵

This “totalitarian subsidiarity principle” is a hallmark of the Strassers’ plan for the “second revolution,” as they called it. Nor were they alone in seizing on some form of it. Perhaps nobody elaborated this subsidiarity principle more than Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, who together championed a petty-bourgeois, feudal-religious ideology known as distributism. It has already been mentioned that Otto Strasser met G. K.’s cousin, A. K. Chesterton, in Ireland in 1955. It cannot be confirmed whether he was therefore also familiar with G. K. Chesterton, or with the works of Belloc, but nonetheless, there are striking similarities between Strasserism and distributism. The ur-text for distributism is perhaps Belloc’s The Servile State, a plea for the conversion of all classes into petty proprietors and small landowners. F.A. Hayek praised it in Road to Serfdom for explaining “more of what has happened since in [Nazi] Germany than most works written after the event.”³⁶

In this work, Belloc compares the proletariat to a patient whose limbs are atrophied from disuse. “Collectivists,” Belloc‘s term for Marxists and social democrats, are like a doctor who counsels this patient to accept his condition. Those, however, who like Belloc seek to “re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens” are like a doctor who prescribes to this same patient exercise and physical therapy. Possession of property appears as a vital principle, necessary for freedom of movement, indeed literally analogized to arms and legs. This society of small proprietors that Belloc calls the Distributive State is essentially a society which existed once before, in the feudal era. He describes it as:

..an agglomeration in which … stability … was guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same craft or of the same village together; guaranteeing the small proprietor against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time it guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat. … The restraints upon liberty were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty; and every action of Medieval Society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to the approach of their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment of a State in which men should be economically free through the possession of capital and of land.³⁷

By “co-operative bodies” Belloc means the medieval guilds, in which competition between members, and between apprentices and masters, was checked and held in place; but also the “cooperation” between serf and lord, who both had a mutual stake in, and ownership over, productive land holdings.

In Belloc, Proudhon, and the Strassers we find an intermingling of feudal-reactionary and petty-bourgeois—liberal rhetoric. We find similar themes surrounding so-called “Prussian socialism,” developed by the likes of Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Moeller van den Bruck, who originated the concept of the Third Reich, and whom Otto Strasser calls the “Rousseau of the German Revolution,” saw Prussian socialism as a continuation of Bismarck’s Empire, whose statecraft rested upon a project of permanent order, which would “put revolution beyond the bounds of possibility.” Yet, as Domenico Lorsurdo points out, Bismarck was not hostile to liberalism, or at least what Marx and Engels called “vulgar liberalism.” Bismarck, Losurdo says, reacted to waves of worker unrest by making “…a profession of liberalism [against those who would] interfere in the relationship between masters and servants and hence to ride roughshod over the principle of self government by civil society, hegemonized … by feudal property.” Bismarck acknowledged two kinds of liberalism:

The first was characterized by ‘repugnance at the power of bureaucracy’, on the basis of ‘liberal caste sentiments’ widely diffused among the Junkers and nobility of pre-revolutionary Prussia; the second, utterly odious in Bismarck’s view, was ‘Rhineland French liberalism’, or the ‘liberalism of civil servants’ (Geheimratsliberalismus), inclined to incisive anti-feudal reforms from above, which inspired an oppressive, suffocating state bureaucracy with its ‘tendency … to levelling and centralization’ and even ‘bureaucratic omnipotence’ (geheimrätliche Allgewalt).³⁸

Returning to Moeller van den Bruck, we find that he took fault with Marxism for precisely what Ross and others claim offers a Trojan Horse for fascism, its emphasis on class. Prussian socialism should be the advocate for the justice of nations, not classes, for “men can only live if their nations live also.”³⁹ Rather than Hitler’s expansionist ultranationalism, the Strassers interpreted this nation-first socialism to mean the creation of a United States of Europe which would reconcile the contradiction between the chauvinism of national and regional particularities, and the consciousness of belonging to a broader civilization, of a European identity.

We find this idea present in the Strasser Program of 1925, which seeks to create a “United States of Europe as a European league of nations with a uniform system of measurement and currency”²⁹ It is elaborated in Otto Strasser’s Germany Tomorrow, where he envisions his New Germany as the crown jewel of a European Federation, with a universal currency much like the current EU, although he suggests using the Swiss franc.  He also calls for reciprocal disarmament after the conclusion of the war, culminating in a supranational European army. Even more strikingly, he includes other features already implemented in the European Union: free movement and the abolition of customs barriers. Such proposals for a European Federation, or a proto-EU, coming from a figure on the far right should not be surprising: Oswald Mosley, Francis Parker Yockey, and Jean Thiriart also proposed pan-Europeanism that would make Europe a third superpower to rival the US and the Soviet Union.

Needless to say, this is not anything like proper internationalism. A justification for such a united federal Europe is that it would solve the “colonial problem,” which meant not the striving of colonial nations for liberation and self-determination, but the competition among European nations for the spoils of the periphery. He proposes a collaborative European administration of all colonies and a power-sharing scheme in which nations which have no colonies receive them in proportion to those of established imperial powers. This scheme involves the creation of a “European Colonial Company,” jointly managed and funded by non-colonial powers in proportion to their population. This “enlightened” European chauvinism is the meaning of the Strassers’ supposed anti-imperialism, which has been falsely likened to Leninist support for national liberation movements in order to “prove” a red-brown connection.

Misinterpretations and Misunderstandings 

Having provided a historical investigation into the actual content of Strasserism, we can now provide a picture free of tendentious misinterpretations. Strasserism is not the right wing of social democracy, nor does it exhibit crossover with anti-imperialist, “top-down,” and/or anti-liberal strains within Marxism. The crossed hammer and sword of the Black Front’s flag with its pseudo-revolutionary red and black, may be an attempted claim to the legacy of revolutionary worker movements, but it is not a genuine one.

What has happened is this: the distortion field of social media has led a particular clique of “red-brownism” Cassandras to “discover” within the annals of fascist mutation—or, more probably, Wikipedia—a cudgel against a counter-clique of self-professed “normie socialists.” We grant that this counter-clique, centered around a prickly defense of bread-and-butter social reforms, deserves harsh critique. But generally, the fulcrum of this critique has not been their opportunism, which by framing voter opinion (real or imagined) as the horizon of possibility, denies proletarian intervention in, and rupture with, the current bourgeois order and its political economy.

Instead, the hyperbolic use of “Strasserism” aggravates this opportunism by embracing popular frontism, enlisting liberals as allies against edgy Berniecrats. At the same time, it obscures the true nature of fascism by reverse-engineering the thesis of “social fascism,” formulated by Stalin as the “moderate wing of fascism.” It is ironic, given the anti-“tankie” orientation of anarchists like Alexander Reid Ross, that this combination—popular frontism and the designation of social democracy as “social fascism”—folds into a single synthesis the zigzagging course of Stalinist opportunism.

But where the Third Period Comintern’s critique of “social fascism,” according to Nicos Poulantzas, stemmed in part from an “economistic perspective, which led it to undermine the importance of political and ideological factors,” the thesis of “red-brownism” is that Strasserism, and fascist creep, is a temptation of any class-centered socialism.⁴⁰ By rejecting both trade-unionism and social democracy on the one hand and Leninism on the other, these authors are driven by their own logic toward the activist-liberal NGO complex as the only solid and unassailable base from which to combat fascism.

We should not look for the true nature of fascism in faulty categories such as “totalitarianism,” which serves bourgeois interests by making the left and right ends of the horseshoe meet in their resistance to liberalism. Neither should we look for it in tasteless humor, callous memes, or critique of identity politics (however lacking in nuance). Even outright chauvinistic views on the left, while obviously condemnable, do not ipso facto belong on the fascist spectrum. The true nature of fascism, rather, is organized by a mobilization against the revolutionary subject of history—the proletariat. Because fascists understand, if hazily or even subconsciously, that class struggle is the motor of progress, this mobilization rallies around a reactionary utopia which would plug this motor, once and for all, through a double movement: first a cancellation of those conditions already existing which supply its fuel, and then to re-crystallize a stable order in which no forward motion is possible. Insofar as the fascist seeks to demolish the rotting timbers of the old order, they call themselves revolutionary, but this is only to rebuild upon a solid and permanent foundation. From the precipice of destruction, they rescue the threatened petty bourgeois and install them as supporting columns, consecrated by holy invocations—locality, heredity, duty, and all the values whose chain of transmission was interrupted, if not severed, by the train of changes which industrialization and an upstart bourgeois left in their wake.

More precisely, the fascist seeks through force and seduction to absorb the proletariat back into the soil, reversing the uprootedness which creates her relative indifference and detachment from occupation. In fact, the proletariat has no occupation; for it is only through the proletariat that labor itself becomes truly general, a “means to create wealth … [which] has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual,” to which we may add the particularity of land and race. As Engels puts it, the emergence of the proletariat coincided with the cutting of the “umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the past to the land.” This explains, for instance, the Strassers’ obsession with medieval craft guilds. As Marx writes in The German Ideology:

The patriarchal relationship existing between [journeymen] and their masters gave the latter a double power—on the one hand because of their influence on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and separated them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to the existing order by their simple interest in becoming masters themselves.

This quintessential feature of the proletariat, its alienation from the specific and particular which provides its labor with the stamp of universality, is why the proletarian cannot help but act outside of any closed identity, including that of the “worker.” The figure of the worker as conjured by proponents of “normie socialism” is perhaps the strongest connection to the logic of fascism, although it does not legitimate the label of “Strasserite.” This label has been applied to them, in part, for their hostility to identity politics, but it is, in fact, their own practice of identity politics—workerism—which at all carries the kernel of truth in the Strasserite libel.

This aspect of fascism, the negation of the proletarian condition as such, does not require a centralized state or hostility to individualism and liberalism. Spengler’s characterization of the rootless proletariat as the fourth estate, a formless mob of “nomad-like masses,” is a species of panic over the “massification” of society shared by liberals like Ortega y Gasset. To the dialectic of historical materialism, which sees individuals and society reconciled to each other in communism, the fear of mass society sets up a false dialectic whose opposite poles inevitably move toward each other. As Ishay Landa observes, the individual “comes first when confronted with mass society; but society will come first, when confronted with the demands of mass individuals.”⁴¹ This oscillation which we find in the liberalism of a Gasset or a Herbert Spencer is inherited by fascism. Thus the mass character of total war is accepted as a solution for “liberal” individualism, while the perfection of the individual through racial Darwinism becomes a solution for mass society.

Strasser, though a militarist and a racist, came to reject these “Hitlerite” solutions while proposing his own oscillation. He sought to engulf the mass individual, the proletariat as such, in a caste system instantiated by guilds and hereditary land holdings, and thereby make him into a cell of the social organism. Yet he cannot entrust to a “totalitarian” and “bureaucratic” state the management of this process, because with Bismarck, Proudhon, and Belloc, such a state inevitably creates a servile mass society, since its administrative decrees—which possess a universal and leveling force—ride roughshod over the peculiarities of culture and geography which create the “true”, “organic” individual.

There is a further contradiction. If the Strassers, in the Strasser Program, could claim to be republicans against “hereditary monarchy” and advocate the expropriation of princes, how can they then appeal to the feudal institutions which arose under hereditary monarchy—guilds, fiefs, and the like?

De Maistre provides a clue in Considerations on France. Here, while reflecting on the fact that it is the providence of God which alone determines the rise and fall of nations, he comes against an obvious objection: was not the French Revolution therefore according to the will of providence? De Maistre concludes that, yes it was, and for the reason that the ancien regime carried within it a weakness which God punished by the sword of revolution. However, he writes, it is here where “we can appreciate order in disorder,” for the ancien regime fell only so it could be raised again, purged of all faults. This is the “great purification,” as he calls it; the “French metal, cleared of its sour and impure dross, must become cleaner and more malleable to a future king.”⁴²

Charles Maurras, whose brand of fascism owes greatly to de Maistre and the counter-revolutionary tradition in France, carries over his argument, but supplants the will of God with that of Nature. Monarchy, a “regime of flesh and blood,” is thoroughly natural, but is threatened by something like a principle of “anti-nature,” a principle of the “infinite and absolute” which the philosophes and revolutionaries of the Enlightenment wielded as weapons against the old “natural order.” If a new monarchy is to be established that can withstand such weapons, it must partake of them in a limited way. Maurras saw the Catholic Church as this sort of synthesis of the natural and absolute, saying that the solution “is to be found in the establishment of terrestrial authorities whose task it is to channel, reactivate, and moderate [the] formidable intervention of the divine,” as Catholicism does. Therefore the new monarchy, to ward off its attackers, should be invested with the imprimatur of the divine; in essence, it should be raised to a monotheism.⁴³ Here we can perhaps compare the remarks of Bukharin cited earlier, that fascism seeks a “speedy reorganization” of the ranks in order to generate a more durable, and absolute, order.

So it is with the Strassers. Otto writes that “every sustaining stratum … must comply with the demands of the time.”²⁷. As the French nobility was slower to realize this than the English nobility, they fell before Danton, where the English nobility did not fall before Cromwell. The Prussian Junkers, being such a “sustaining stratum,” also failed to heed the demands of the time. As large landowners, they were social allies of the big factory bourgeoisie, and so together were the enemies of the shrinking petty bourgeoisie of the small farms and the Mittelstand. For Strasser, it is not monarchy as such which is raised to a monotheism, but organic self-rule of the national community as mediated through petty proprietors. This once existed in Christian, feudal Europe, but this state of affairs contained in it the poisonous seed of monopoly, whether in land or industry. To raise it again, and fix it permanently, therefore required the sacrifice of both the proletariat and the Prussian elites.

Finally, arriving at Strasser’s foreign policy, with its European federalism and rhetorical opposition to ‘militarism‘, we find no principled support of national liberation, but the same obsession with a stable and natural order transfigured and purified by the so-called second revolution. It is the same “anti-imperialism” of paleoconservatives, and their offspring in the alt-right, which opposes war only insofar as it mingles populations and disrupts the natural boundaries of the national community. It was not the stirring of independence in the colonies which roused Strasser’s sympathy, but the antagonism between imperialist nations. A united Europe should rule over the periphery together in harmony and cooperation; maintaining the colonies in this way would preserve order, as abolishing the proletariat would preserve order, since their independence would mean the expansion of open class struggle to a global scale.

While not exhaustive, this treatment of Strasserism is sufficient to put to rest any notions that it was a synthesis of right and left, let alone that it was a reactionary workers’ movement. The Strassers attempted to seduce workers into abolishing themselves for the sake of a new feudalism, plying them with false sympathy. If the actual course of Nazism unfolded like the plot of Alien, with incomprehensible monsters from other worlds preying openly on its vulnerable victims, Strasserism is the titular villain from It, beguiling and entreating the proletariat from the gutter—where it devours them.

Beyond Left and Right in Silicon Valley 

The scope of this essay may seem excessive; after all, Strasserism is ultimately a marginal niche, even within the far right, and its recent reincarnation has come in the form of a pejorative for a politics that, as demonstrated, does not merit it. But by turning the logic of Strasserism inside-out, we can see revealed a rational kernel: that the proletariat and the threat of progress are linked together in the perception of the right. Of course, it is undeniable that the proletariat is not the only victim of fascism. But it is possible that racism, or at least genocidal racism, is not essential to fascism. In fact, with this kernel as our guide, we can see that the real left-right alliance may have been misidentified. It may be brewing within the very center and heart of neoliberal ideology—Silicon Valley.

In 1995, Richard Barbrook already identified a reactionary strain within the emerging professional subclass of computer engineers, programmers, and visionary digital entrepreneurs, which he termed the “Californian ideology.” He finds here a fusion of the new left, represented by the rhetoric of anti-consumerism and the liberation of desire through hippie-like tech gurus (think Burning Man), with the free market absolutism which, in that era, was adopted as the GOP brand.⁴⁴ For the members of this rising “virtual class,” the market was a natural force that, if not altered, could empower them to become entrepreneurial titans, their heads far above the clouds of society’s laws, with the freedom to innovate as they saw fit—while becoming fabulously rich in the process.

Today, there are a plethora of such titans, and their influence is immense. Some, like Elon Musk, have cultivated a cult following online, while others, like Peter Thiel, prefer to manipulate events behind the scenes. Schumpeter foresaw entrepreneurs of this type, ascribing to them the “dream and the will to found a private kingdom … the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.” For each entrepreneur that has ascended to the ranks of lordship, however, there are thousands still climbing, and many more who have failed. Prior to the Trump era, some of these strivers and losers went on to develop the ideology known as the “Dark Enlightenment” (or NRx for short). Nick Land, whose affiliation with NRx is long-standing, summarized the thrust of this ideology with a statement by Peter Thiel, delivered at a 2009 Cato Institute meeting: “Freedom and democracy, Thiel believes, are no longer compatible.” ⁴⁵

“Democracy” in this case signifies a kind of bribery, in which politicians “buy” the votes of the masses with false promises of equality. Liberty, or rather a bourgeois parody of liberty, suffocates beneath the weight of the mob as they rush headlong toward anyone who can promise them free goodies. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, appropriately the author of Democracy: The God That Failed, is explicit in identifying the extension of this democracy into the economic sphere with socialism.

Already we can see that this critique resembles the fear of mass society, as mentioned earlier. Confronted with this mass society, we see Barbrook’s “virtual class” turning to an exaltation of hierarchical individualism, embodied by the entrepreneur. But inevitably, this fear of mass society turns into the fear of mass individuals, and so we see again the turn toward an integral community which can absorb these mass individuals back into a functioning whole.

Curtis Yarvin, better known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, proposed precisely this. In a series of blog entries, he lays out his plan (in aggravatingly periphrastic prose) for a form of state which would swallow up the masses and spit out responsible and obligated citizens. He begins with the nationalization of all financial assets, public companies, and banks. This is the “left” element of the left-right synthesis. Moldbug then takes a step right: this nationalization is not public ownership of the means of production, however, but a new feudalism. Simply put, this new state would be a joint-stock corporation, with citizens as shareholders—literally. Citizenship would be tied to the amount of money in their portfolios. For homeowners, the state would buy out their home equity, turning them into renters, with the state as landlord. Then, the state triples the portfolio amount. If you were wealthy, you are now three times as wealthy; if you own no assets, three multiplied by zero is zero. However, all debt would be bought back by the state, as a kind of debt jubilee.

Moldbug realizes that this plan cannot be implemented under the current government; in so many words, it requires a one-party state. But not the one-party state of Hitler and Stalin—conveniently, these are “totalitarian democracies,” and democracy is clearly bad. His argument rests on the assumption that division of authority, rather than shrinking the size of government, enlarges it and makes it less accountable: “Big government is big because it is constantly competing with itself.”⁴⁶

This scheme would accomplish the same goals as that of the Strassers, a society of petty proprietors, but using libertarian market ideology as a halfway house for fascism. In fact, one plank in the Strasser Program is eerily similar to Moldbug’s joint-stock state. It states that all business employing over twenty-one employees will be converted to joint-stock companies, of which roughly half of all shares will belong to the public.

Since Moldbug shuns electoral “bribery,” his plan is dead in the water. However, others are not so dogmatic. Moldbug’s proposal to triple the portfolios of shareholder-citizens echoes the advocacy of universal basic income by Silicon Valley oligarchs, from Musk to Gates to Zuckerberg. These proposals for UBI are premised on the reality of increasing automation, which will unleash mass unemployment and create an immense strata of surplus population. Since this surplus population would be hypothetically locked out of employment, they would be unable to purchase consumer goods, setting off a crisis of underconsumption. UBI would convert this surplus population into lumpen-consumers, while at the same time excusing the dismantling of social protections guaranteed by the welfare state. Since it offers a “floor,” but no “ceiling,” and is distributed flatly without regard for pre-existing wealth (hence universal), it is a gesture of noblesse oblige from a neoliberal oligarchy, much like Plan Moldbug’s debt jubilee.

Of course, the surplus population is a subclass within the proletariat, insofar as they belong to that class which subsists only on its labor power, differing only in that there is no buyer to sell it to. But as Peter Frase points out in Four Futures, the surplus population is, for this reason, a toothless proletariat, since they are locked out of the struggle at the point of production. Some may leave the proletariat and join the ranks of the precariously self-employed, in the so-called gig economy. But it is possible that most may not, and so a “world where the ruling class no longer depends on the exploitation of working-class labor is a world where the poor are merely a danger and an inconvenience.”⁴⁷. Available options for reducing this danger range from increased policing and harassment to elimination, through neglect or more direct means.

The Trump era has accelerated a crisis of liberalism which renders most neoliberal UBI candidates unviable. One candidate, however, has broken through the noise. Andrew Yang’s meme candidacy exploited a loophole in the Democratic Party’s 2020 procedures for getting on the primary debate stage: 65,000 individual donors and you’re in. Yang met this threshold, and received a significant boost by disillusioned elements of Trump’s coalition, mostly nihilistic NEETs who realized that his administration hadn’t improved their lives in any tangible way—nothing so tangible at least as a free thousand bucks a month, or what Yang calls the “Freedom Dividend.” Whether they are sincere or merely bored is mostly moot. Some claim—again, with varying degrees of sincerity—that his promise to address opioid addiction, and his alarm about declining birthrates, is a dogwhistle for white nationalism. Yang summarizes his platform as “Human-Centered Capitalism,” mixing in now-standard social democratic expansions like Medicare-for-All with crankery like a circumcision ban (another dogwhistle) and year-round daylight savings.

Yang’s ideology is as plausibly red-brown as that of the DSA “Strasserites.” It remains to be framed in such a way, in part because of its aesthetic presentation, but also because Yang supporters do not engage in polemic with the likes of Alexander Reid Ross. Moreover, he has no plausible path to nomination. Yet it is obvious Yang represents a new and potentially popular synthesis, a mix of neoliberalism and social democracy with populist packaging. His recent book is appropriately titled The War on Normal People. Returning to Bismarck and his counter-revolutionary reforms, this book quotes him as saying “[i]f revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it, not undergo it.” Yang ominously adds: “Society will change either before or after the revolution. I choose before.”⁴⁸

As communists, we can only hope that this choice is left to the proletariat, the foundation of all revolutionary hopes.

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