We as a society have seen the resurgence of the National Bolshevist movement, with its adherents known more commonly as Nazbols. This movement has lain waiting in the dustbin of history for decades at a time, and only makes its appearance known at times when criticism of Capitalism is at its highest. This movement seeks to reconcile the intense contradictions between the ultranationalism central to many reactionary circles and the desire to see a socialist world. To do so, the National Bolshevist movement takes on the form of a highly reactionary, racist ideology which seeks to end the Bourgeoisie’s dominance in a singular national society, while forsaking the remaining world to either work in service of that chosen nationality, or to be exterminated in favor of a type of collectivist lebensraum. This movement has its origins in the larger German reactionary movements during the Weimar Republic, and seeks legitimacy from the national proletariat as opposed to the global working class. While naturally opposed to the National Socialist and other Fascist movements of the post-WWI era, it holds many ideological tenets that the Nazi party held as well. The National Bolshevist movement sought to establish a national worker’s state, which is contrary to the legitimate, real movement to demolish the current state of Capitalism.
The movement began with the SDP of Germany, as many revisionist paths often did. Members of the party, most notably Ernst Niekisch, sought to reunite the concept of the nation with the proletarian struggle, to disastrous effect during the Weimar era of German history. Niekisch, a believer in a form of non-Marxist socialism, derided the National Socialist movement for not including actual socialist policy. This is ironic, as his form of socialism was itself highly reactionary, sharing much with the Strasserist section of the Nazi Party and little with legitimate socialism. His views on the Soviet Union developed as time went on-originally opposed to the Soviet Union in its early internationalist period, Niekisch saw the increasingly nationalist Stalinist Russia as heirs to the Tsars’ nationalist project. To this end, Niekisch would argue that the Third Reich should ally with the Soviet Union to establish a proposed Third Way economic and societal structure, one which sought to raise a single nation through pseudo-socialist policy. This Third Way would be championed by many German and Russian reactionaries, from Otto Strasser, who sought to establish an anti-semitic, racist form of socialism, as opposed to the National Socialist movement proper.
The Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto, along with Ernst Rohm, would form the left wing of the Nazi party, which sought to be a pro-German working class variant of National Socialism. While being vehemently anti-Jewish, these men would also extol the virtues of the specifically German working class, placing them as the pinnacle of cultural and economic importance. While they were still Nazis and full members of the party, with Rohm being the founder of the SA, the precursor to the SS, they held beliefs that would go counter to the wider Nazi party, and were purged for this. While this marked the end of the first generation of German Nazbols, the ideology did not die.
In Russia, there were two major movements to take up the mantle of the National Bolshevist movement, The Mladorossi and the Eurasianists. The Mladorossi were originally anti-soviet, and sought to re-establish the Tsar as the foremost power in Russia, but would transition into a syncretic movement which sought to both keep the established Soviets along with the Tsar, seeing the formation of a type of Red Monarchy ruling over a racially Russian people. The movement, made up of White Movement remnants who left Russia for the United States, would take what can only be labeled as a schizophrenic stance, stating that the only way forward for Russia would be the acknowledgement of a so-called Russian Excellence within the Soviets, and the re-establishment of a central, dynastic head of state to lead it.
The second group, the Eurasianists, also held that the Soviets should be kept, but claimed that the Russian people were neither European or Asian, but Eurasian, and thus much more similar to the Tatars and other Turkic groups from the Eurasian Steppe. Founded by Lev Gumilev, this movement saw the people who inhabited the Russian Soviet, both ethnic Russians and other, more diverse groups, as a single Eurasian people that should be raised to the level of the supreme race. The Eurasianists were much less pragmatic than the Mladorossi movement, as they sought to reach a cultural peak as a Eurasian people, as opposed to an economic peak as an economic class. They believed that people as a nation were influenced by a natural force known as Passionarity, which would see the nation as a whole be pushed into what they consider great acts of history, such as colonization, conquest, and other actions of supremacy over other nations.
This would shift with the prominence of Aleksandr Dugin, a theorist who would push the Eurasianist movement West of the Urals. Dugin would introduce a concept that Heidegger spoke of, Dasein, or human existence, to the ideology of Eurasianism. This legitimized the movement somewhat, as Passionarity went from a concept of ethnogenesis and cultural growth to a pseudo-philosophical tenant of human nature. The concept, much like Jordan Peterson’s mistaken concept of philosophical Stoicism in America, would be adopted by the current Russian state as fact. Dasein, in the context of Dugin, means the distinct nature of humanity that drives us to unite with those who share similar existences, or more specifically, similar nationalities, and force conflict amongst the groups with differing experiences.
The Eurasianist movement, along with the National Bolshevist movement, would coalesce into a singular group in Russia, known as the National Bolshevik Party, which was founded in the 1990s in response to the failure of the State Capitalist regimes which followed Lenin in the Soviet Union. Along with Eduard Limonov, Dugin would establish the party as an anti-Western, pro-Russian group. The Party would extol the virtues of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as other distinctly Russian institutions, such as the resurgence of, strangely, long beards-once a status marker of pre-modern Russia. In this, we can see that the pretensions towards a singular, monolithic “Eurasian” people to be what it is-an attempt to hegemonize Russian cultural identity in a way the Tsarist regimes would find familiar. With the ascension of Putin to the preeminent ruler of Russia, the National Bolshevik Party derided him, that is, until he began the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, which would see the National Bolshevik Party, as well as another prominent National Bolshevist movement, The Other Russia, switch to supporting the dictator.
In the United States too, we have seen this movement rise multiple times, with the most recent iteration being the American Communist Party, a splinter of the CPUSA which seeks to see a brand of so called MAGA Communism. With a paranoid spread of Maoism, Stalinism, and Reactionary thought in general, the ACP is attempting to reconcile the same issues the Mladorossi saw. They wish to see a racially supreme god-king with ultimate power take a hold of the country to establish an American worker’s paradise. The two main proponents of this new party, Jackson Hinkle and Adam Tahir, better known online as Haz Al-din, have been hard at work over the past few years to establish themselves as the main thinkers of the Party. While they champion what they refer to as the “communist viewpoint” in America, their small party is obviously reactionary in nature, a stranger to the socialist politics they claim to adhere to. Both have stood behind Trump as a new American Vozhd, as opposed to a tyrant, and wish to see him establish a worker’s state, something he will not do. Trump is too heavily tied to the Bourgeois class, and it makes little sense to think he would change his position on this.
Another, stranger form of this synthesis would be the NAM movement, or the National Anarchist Movement. The NAM movement is another highly contradictory thought group, as Anarchism as an ideology is almost always pro-internationalist and anti-racist, which the NAM movement is not. This group, instead, believes in the anarchist coordination of nations as their primary form of community, which defeats the purpose of the community-led project in its totality. Anarchism as a community-led experience requires the abandonment of all forms of identity besides that of the neighbor, and by including national groups as the primary unit, the anarchist set up becomes a nationalist libertarian nightmare, much like the “Dark Renaissance” movement espoused by many tech billionaires in the United States, led by Curtis Yarvin.
Ultranationalism is inherently anti-communist, even when paired with pseudo-socialist policies. There is no way for the communist movement to include nationalism, as communism is a movement whose aim is to establish an international state of proletarian control. Nationalism itself is reactionary, and no level of supposed left-wing thought will change this fact. Communism requires the abolition of the nation as an identity, or rather rejects that schema as an illusion hiding the realities of class division. There is no identity to the proletariat more important than that of a worker. Movements such as the National Bolshevist Movement are, for all intents and purposes, conservative collectivist movements, and there’s no changing this.