Initial date (it’s an ongoing list/resource): 03.01.2023.
By definition RedBrown politics, or confusionism (a similar term I know from/used in France), is an amorphous and creeping tendency rather than a clearly delimitated political current. There are therefore multiple things that can be said to constitute it, although I don’t think we need to care too much about having a fixed typology. In a way, it’s similar to transphobic pseudo-feminism – or TERFism – insofar as it’s better to think of it as a transversal reactionary populism rather than strictly defined political camps. And like TERFism (or ‘homonationalism’ etc), no matter if it comes from “the Left” it always represents a drift to the far right in sociopolitical terms.
a) Some elements like NazBols (from ‘National Bolsheviks’), despite their rhetoric and aesthetic (borrowing some stalinist symbols etc), are pretty clearly just a far right current, which is pretty close to the so-called “revolutionary” and populist part of classical fascism (especially Mussolini from WWI to coming to power; and then the populism of the Republic of Salò).
b) Another part of it is far right intellectuals and discourse/ideology appropriating leftwing authors (like Marx or Gramsci), ideas or rhetoric (e.g. anti-imperialism). This of course goes back to Mussolini and Hitler (although I don’t think clerical and conservative fascists in the rest of Europe did this to the same extent), but it expanded greatly after WWII.
c) Conspiracist and denialist ideologues, including those claiming to be leftist or socialist (or “anti-imperialist”), are arguably the most active forces trying to unite and link the various reactionary elements in this confusionist swamp. Conspiracism and denialism is often one of the sites of ‘convergence’ between groups that wouldn’t usually cross paths.
d) On the Left (socdems or authcoms, usually but exclusively), there are also reactionary and chauvinistic elements (these are of course general issues on the Left, but here I’m referring to the ones that stand out in making this part of their project/politics) that actively pander to the far right, or even call for allying with them. Usually they combine leftist or socialist pretensions with nationalism, xenophobia, and conservatism (e.g. patriarchal traditionalism)
In this post I want to make a list of examples, notes and resources for the European context (so I’m excluding Russia, but including evrth up to its borders and up to Greece; UK is also part of it obviously). This is either resources or specific stuff I’ve come across.
The Aufstehen movement: Sahra Wagenknecht and Wolfgang Streeck [Germany]
Streeck’s “neo-romanticism”:
“it was always the clear implication of adopting a Polanyian approach, according to which the problem with capitalism is invariably characterised as that of the movement of people beyond their purportedly proper and ‘traditional’ boundaries, where assertions of ‘tradition’ does the work of a mythic, idealised history in which ‘social cohesion’ existed but is now lost and should be retrieved, and Marx’s critique of political economy is twisted into an argument for that most conservative of tendencies in political economy, namely: moral economy”
“For Polanyians, ‘traditionalism’ is rendered as the only proper anti-capitalist strategy because Polanyians systematically redescribe ‘capitalism’ as the erosion of ‘tradition’ (that is, ‘traditional’ concepts of property law and right). By that view, those who do not serve the restoration of ‘tradition’—or the reproduction of ‘the social’ in the face of uncertainty—are implicitly cast as traitors to the cause.”
“Streeck’s militant neo-romanticism illustrates the recurrent impasse of social democracy when confronted with class conflicts that cannot be tempered through elections, which register on the books as ‘financial crises,’ and fall outside the frame of cultural-nationalist definitions of class. As to how Streeck brought ‘critical theory’ to this point: the harnessing of Marx-esque phraseology to a politics at odds with Marxism has been a hallmark of both Polanyian conservatism and Sorelian fascism for well over a century. Streeck is simply one of the most recent practitioners of the craft, adept at using fragments whose meaning is the inverse of that which he ascribes to them.”
Read more: Angela Mitropoulos, “Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘neo-romantic’ sociology“
They oppose immigration (into West-European countries) misusing Marx’s notion of ‘surplus population’ (cf. Pietro Basso’s paper cited below)
Francis Cousin’s’s primitivist chauvinism [France]
His theories are conspiracist/paranoid, racist/xenophobic, pro-patriarchy, etc…
His worldview is based on a kind of volkish primitivism, manifested in his glorification of “Christian primitivism” and an obsession for ‘organic communities’ (if you feel like this guy just believes in the same shit as the far right but rationalizes it in a weird way with a distorted Marx, you’d be right)
Unsurprisingly influenced/relying on Nietzsche and Heidegger
He opposes immigration (into West-European countries) misusing Marx’s notion of ‘surplus population’
He is against abortion and immigration because he sees them as a conspiracy by big/global capital to weaken/undermine the white male proletariat which he sees as “radical”
His racism is (unsurprisingly) characterized by islamophobia and antisemitism
He instrumentalizes Marx and Debord (and exploits some of the limitations in their ideas) to turn their ideas into far right idealist theories
Friend of Alain De Benoist, Pierre Guillaume, Emmanuel Ratier (all far right figures)
Resources/links:
Sortir du capitalisme: Une analyse critique des théories de Francis Cousin.
Francis Cousin: Idéologue d’extrême-droite.
Francis Cousin: Auteur raciste et fasciste.
Diego Fusaro [Italy]
“Fusaro embodies red-brown thinking in nuce, exports it and interprets it: class struggle and internationalism are considered secondary appendages to the defence of ethos, the ethical (and moralistic) state and national sovereignty. Economic-social improvement and civil progress are experienced almost as a stumbling block, within a new autarchic and ethnocentric corporatism, threatened by variations on the socio-normed concept of man and woman, the traditional family and immigration, components of the plutocracies’ design for ethnic replacement and the lowering of wages (in theory). In all of this, Togliatti, Marx, and Gramsci, with the complex system of thought and praxis they produced, are reduced to caretakers of the status quo ante and anti-globalism, of the interests of an unidentified ‘people’, destined to a national teleology that nullifies their differences and distracts their aspirations, and thus, essentially, bourgeois and nationalist.This is the ideology of Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and Vladimir Putin. A new pauperistic, anti-scientific and reactionary ‘third way’, grafted between liberalism and socialism. A Frankenstein’s monster that, in order to keep itself alive, haphazardly assembles the ideological parts of one and the other, stitching them together through social malaise and disorientation with respect to social change.” [Luigi Iannonne, translated from Italian]
He opposes immigration (into West-European countries) misusing Marx’s notion of ‘surplus population’ (cf. Pietro Basso’s paper cited below)
And just like Cousin has been directly in touch/collaborating with far right publishers and milieus, Fusaro has apparently even collaborated with the notorious far right group CasaPound https://www.liberoquotidiano.it/news/sfoglio/13335190/diego-fusaro-filosofo-comunista-scrivera-primato-nazionale-estrema-destra.html
Resources/links:
Fusaro, poco rosso molto bruno
Il rossobrunismo di Diego Fusaro.
Salvo Lo Galbo: Del rossobrunismo di Diego Fusaro.
Raffale Alberto Ventura: Che cosa abbiamo fatto per meritarci Diego Fusaro?
Gudio Giuliani: Un filosofo fascista: Diego Fusaro.
Luigi Iannone: Fusaro è una pericolosa macchietta rossobruna, altro che il nuovo Togliatti.
Simone Cosimi: Diego Fusaro è l’intellettuale di cui non avevamo bisogno.
Maurizio Mascitti: Come funziona la propaganda di Diego Fusaro.
Institut Homme Total (with the likes of Loïc Chagneau and Aurélien Bähler) [France]
“Patriotic communist” speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
Widely mocked and dismissed by vast majority of French leftists on twitter.
Their own grift model includes selling very expensive philosophy “courses” supposed to turn you into a good and pure revolutionary 🤣 (Chagneau, the head of IHT, is apparently a philosophy teacher)
Razon Comunista [Spain]
Celebrating 1492, saying: “Desde La Razón Comunista celebramos hoy el aniversario de la Toma de Granada, el éxito de la Reconquista, la expulsión del Islam y la Sharía, y el triunfo de los Reyes Católicos que, por ello, fundamos una gran civilización Hispana sobre la que trabajar políticamente.”
One of their heroes is Martin Licata, “who published antisemitic Soros conspiracy theories and who wasn’t assassinated but died of auto-erotic asphyxiation while having sex with an underage sex worker.”
Elena Louisa Lange [Germany/Switzerland]
“Elena Louisa Lange is one of the newest Spiked/Zero Books podcast celebrities who rose from obscurity to a middle rung on the nationalist anti-left scene.”
“Elena Louisa Lange mixes demands to expose workers to Covid, and dehumanize trans people in with her Marxism. Her virulent Covid Denialism/ Right-anti-idpol put her to the Right of most liberals and conservatives, close to Spiked’s James Heartfield on the political spectrum.”
Transphobia, COVID and vaccine denialism/conspiracism, climate change denialism, geopolitical conspiracism, …
Fan of the likes of Jordan Peterson, Jimmie Dore, Matt Walsh, …
See more here.
Common themes
Xenophobia in populist and marxist/socialist guise
The notion of ‘surplus population’ and/or ‘industrial reserve army’ (from Marx) is misused as an economic (but it never ends at this, racism never does) argument against immigration
On this, see Pietro Basso’s “Marx on Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army: Not to Be Misused!“. Not only is the racist and moralising contempt for the unemployed and the ‘surplus population’ disgusting, as Basso writes this is all based on conflating migrant workers with the ‘industrial reserve army’ (unemployed), which is completely inaccurate:
“it remains the case that the great majority of immigrant workers in the EU are within the active army of labour, not the industrial reserve army. The fact is that the independent variable regulating the scale of unemployment and underemployment is not the openness or closure of borders and migration policy, but the course of capital accumulation. And if migration policies are to be seriously challenged for what they really are, we would have to say that for decades in Italy and Europe they have been discriminatory, repressive, and selective – the opposite of the ‘no borders’ approach that left and right ‘sovereignists’ jabber on about. That is the type of policy that often drives millions of working men and women into conditions of forced irregularity, and almost always of economic, juridical, political, and symbolic inferiority.” (p. 223-224)
(To be continued – conspiracism, antisemitism, etc)
(Temporary) cartography of red-brown currents, by Sortir du capitalisme [libcom/critical theory podcast and group; translated from the French]
note: this is largely France-centric, but still useful
We provisionally identify numerous red-brown currents, despite convergences between certain currents, each with a very particular historical genealogy, despite figures common to several currents:
The ecological-neopagan red-brown current, embodied today by personalities such as Alain de Benoist, with a genealogy ranging from the reactionary German anti-industrial romantics to the anti-conformists of the 1930s (Pelletier).
The anti-industrial red-brown current, embodied today by a personality like Yannick Blanc of the Grenoble anti-industrial group Pièces-et-main-d’oeuvre, and its anti-migrant, Islamophobic, chauvinist, transphobic, homophobic, anti-feminist, natalist writings, pro-moral order and conspiracy theorists, with a reference figure like Jacques Ellul, an anarchistic techno-critic who is also homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and minimises the importance of capitalism as a category for analysing modern societies.
The neo-Proudhonian red-brown current, with Thibault Isabel (editor-in-chief of Krisis, and author of L’anarchie sans le désordre) as an emblematic figure and Proudhon (and his anti-feminism), Le cercle Proudhon (an amalgam of the anti-Semitic “social monarchism” of Charles Maurras and the anti-rationalist revolutionary syndicalism of Edouard Berth) and Alain de Benoist as reference authors.
The ‘national-anarchist‘ red-brown current, advocating a post-state world based on racial separatism of ‘anarchist’ communities.
The Stalinist red-brown current, with as a contemporary figure Annie Lacroix-Riz, a Stalinist denier of the Holodomor (famine organised in Ukraine under Stalin) and a conspiracy theorist, a “Gaullist-Thorézienne” nationalist in favour of state capitalism and a pro-Russian “anti-imperialist”, with as a reference figure Michel Clouscard, a Stalinist partisan of the moral order, nostalgic for traditional authority He is a statist, anti-68, confusionist (amalgamating liberals and libertarians, and qualifying this “liberal-libertarian” as “neo-fascism”), homophobic and anti-feminist, and as a publisher, Delga, a veritable revisionist rehabilitation of the USSR and Stalin, a negationist of his crimes and an anti-Trotskyist conspiracist (tendentially anti-Semite).
The anti-Zionist-anti-Semitic red-brown current, making Israel a purely colonialist or even outright fascist creation, equating it with Nazism, making it a super-imperialism manipulating all Western states and responsible for all the wars in the Middle East, in a rhetoric characteristic of anti-Semitism.
The conspiracist red-brown current, explaining all historical events – and especially the ravages of capitalism – as the product of global conspiracies that it attributes to the secret organisations of a cosmopolitan financial liberal oligarchy, in a rhetoric characteristic of structural anti-Semitism, since it is to the Jews that historically the whole of these ravages of capitalism have been systematically attributed (Postone).
The national-bolshevik red-brown current, with the national-bolsheviks of the 1920s as a historical reference, Ernst Niekisch (founder of national-bolshevism), Stalin, Otto Strasser (a ‘left-wing’ Nazi) and certain members of the German intellectual ‘conservative revolution’ of the 1920s (notably Spengler).