If you don’t get the joke, congratulations, you’re a much purer soul than I.

Disclaimer: This won’t be an exhaustive source on the NazBols. Rather, this will be an attempt to create a counter-strategy to the NazBols, given their strange and relatively unique flavor of neo-fascism.

For the blissfully unaware, National Bolshevism is a form of neo-fascism, perhaps the oldest form of it in existence. It originated in Weimar Germany as a syncretic movement between the right-wing of the Communist Party, and the left-wing of what would become the Nazi Party. As the name suggests, the aim was to fuse ultranationalist, antisemitic politics with Leninism. It died off quickly in its native Germany, but quickly spread amongst the conservative sections of the USSR, where it came to form proper.

Although National Bolshevism didn’t find large support during the days of the Soviet Union – member states were one-party by law, and support of outright fascism was effectively a death sentence – the basic idea crystallized during Stalin’s regime. During this period, social conservatism and Soviet nationalism (styled as “Soviet socialist patriotism”) found itself on the rise, and with it came the formation of the right-wing of the CPSU. But even that was only really the seed of the National Bolshevik movement as it exists today.

After the fall of the USSR, Russian fascism became legal again. And with a dispossessed mass base that had internalized certain talking points of fascism, it was ripe for exploitation. However, Russian neo-fascists found themselves with an interesting task: It was impossible to pull Russian nationalism away from the legacy of communism, since ideologically it was under the CPSU that the average Russian was doing better, and Russia had far more territory by way of the hierarchical, imperialist relations of Moscow with the rest of the Soviet Union. It’s no coincidence that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has a leader who is himself a nationalist. Enter: Aleksandr Dugin, easily the most influential neo-fascist of the last 20 years.

This won’t be an overall look at Dugin’s political theory and strange neo-fascism, but he is worth pointing out. He’s been an advisor to prominent Russian politicians, he co-founded the National Bolshevik Party, he remains influential on the global far-right, and his anti-American rhetoric found him friends in the “Communist” Party of China. Consequently, National Bolshevism has become one of the leading strains of fascist theory in the modern day.

So why the hell are we talking about this? There’s plenty of leftist critiques about fascism, and discussing how to fight it, and it’s history. And frankly with regards to what we’ve discussed and what we’re going to discuss in brief, I want to take a sideline here to recommend An Investigation Into Red-Brown Alliances from Ravings Of A Radical Vagabond, which is going to discuss a lot of the same subject matter in depth. What differs this from that piece is a brief discussion of praxis.

National Bolshevism is a unique strain of fascism. Unlike the other “left” forms of fascism – National Syndicalism, Strasserism, National Anarchism, Eco-Fascism – National Bolshevism is actually capable of building a cross-class base. This is not because the NazBols are being at all serious in their opposition to capitalism. Even the National Bolsheviks in Russia admit that they’re OK with private property. This is rather because the NazBols have such a strange history that they not only know how to dupe working class people the same way their Nazi cousins did, but also that they can worm their way into collaboration with actual communist movements (Vagabond’s article goes much deeper into this, and for the sake of brevity we will not reiterate the article here).

It’s not simply that National Bolsheviks can be dealt with the same way ordinary fascists can. It’s more that they are an infestation which can not only produce a mass base on it’s own terms – reactionary mythology, populism, direct action, etc; – but also that it functions for the purpose of the inverted revolution of fascism a different way: By directly siphoning off the revolutionary movement of socialism itself, and doing so with a veneer of far more credibility than any of it’s counterparts, or from the other “left” sections of fascism (and I use the word “left” in very relative terms in case that wasn’t obvious).

What is it we can actually do against the NazBols? Well, if you’re outside Russia, it’s actually fairly simple: Smash nationalism. To the ground.* Not simply the reactionary capitalist nationalism that so many of us are proud opponents of – smash the nationalism found in our ranks that gives rise to the black-and-white view of geopolitics. Smash the view that allows you to get comfy with reactionary and pseudo-socialist movements because they are not friends of the West. Smash the devotion to the state on the grounds that it is a state unfriendly to the US. Smash this out of your head.

I am not even asking you to become anarchists. You can be a Marxist-Leninist and have this be completely in line with your thinking. We cannot simply cheer someone on because the enemy of our enemy is our friend. As it’s well known, the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is a ruthless piece of shit who so happened to piss off the people who you also find to be ruthless pieces of shit. And if you don’t have that attitude, both as a socialist and as an organizer, the NazBols and their ilk will continue to be a threat. Do not simply smash the NazBols – smash their entire mindset and ideological ecosystem. The workers of the world have no country.

*Ordinarily, many people preface this by distinguishing the nationalism of the state vs. the nationalism of the oppressed. I should hope everyone’s reading comprehension is well tuned enough that that obvious distinction doesn’t need to be made. For everyone else, I reiterate my urging of people to read Ashanti Alston’s Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It.