Peter Porcupine wonders wether I was correct to call the BNP a party of the left. He makes reasonable points (noting, for example, their populist leanings, rather like the Poujadistes) but perhaps I should explain more about what I mean by the left.
The Nazis, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar: all were leftists by my (admittedly very odd) measuring stick. Enforced collectivism is left wing, as they all, along with socialists of other stripes, believed in such, they were all left wing.
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The BNP seem to me to be a sort of authoritarian centrist group. They’ll help you out unless you’re black, jewish etc. Perhaps we should get Nick Griffin to take the Political Compass test?
The common theme of collectivists is the group to be victimised and made to pay.
I think the BNP are coerced collectivist with a different victim group to the MSM left.
BNP Socialists – Foreigners.
National Socialism – Jews etc.
International Socialism – Owners.
TransNational Socialism – WASPs.
It’s not an odd measuring stick. You find yourself in august company in holding it (Friedrich Hayek quite explicitly remarked on the similarities of national socialism and international socialism in The Road to Serfdom—in fact he described the viciousness of their enmity towards each other as being characteristic of a turf war).
Not that odd, but not one which is liked by leftists…
The far right and far left are pretty much the same, they just adopt different labels so they can attack each other.
The right/left designations hold little meaning. The left used to be progressive, pro-free trade, pro-individual freedom, anti-big government. The right used to be the opposite.
The BNP are collectivist authoritarians, that puts them in the same basket as communists and fascists.
The political compass is useless, right-wing means pro-free trade, but the BNP are put on the far right when they’re anti-free trade.
“Friedrich Hayek quite explicitly remarked on the similarities of national socialism and international socialism in The Road to Serfdom”
And not just Hayek. Try these direct quotes from recent texts by eminently respectable academics:
“‘In the long run, the Nazis aimed essentially at an economic system which would be an alternative to capitalism and communism, supporting neither a laissez-faire attitude nor total planning.’ [quoting: Hardach: The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century; University of California Press (1980), p.66 ] They introduced administrative controls over investment through licensing and direct allocation of raw materials. But their brand of socialism emphasised central control over economic activity rather than public ownership of firms. Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could make choices by currency controls, taxes on profits and direct allocation measures of the state.”
Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression: The Lionel Robbins Lectures for 1989 (MIT Press (1989)), p.117. The author is a professor of economics at the MIT.
“The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realise that pure racial anti-semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-semitic, and ultranationalist groups that abounded in post-1918 Germany. Instead, I would suggest, the Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party’s programs, which in an uncanny fashion integrated elements of 18th and 19th century nationalist-etatist philosophy with Keynesian economics. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life including the economy.”
William Brustein: The Logic of Evil – The Social Origins of the Nazi Party 1925-33 (Yale UP (1996)), p.51
For biographical details about Brustein and why he was motivated to write the book, see:
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0497web/policy.html
The problem is that Mussolini (and other prominent fascists) referred to fascism as being right wing. My sense is that this is because their primary beef was with the communists. In addition, Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party and went to particular effort to denounce them along with the others. Again, this was the norm rather than the exception. It is worth noting that Syndicalism is probably the biggest influence on nazi and fascist thought. Nonetheless, you are quite clearly wrong, along with Hayek et. al., as the Oxford English Dictionary says that Fascists are right wing and allows for no debate.
No, it’s not an odd measuring stick at all. They were Nat Socialists. That’s left. Many similarities with today’s ‘left’.
Nazism is not left wing, I am surprised that anybody should even toy with the idea.
Nazism was not concerned with such trivia as who had how much of what, nor where it came from.
Nazism was a brutal kind of natural-selectionist philosophy of life that had little in common with such ideologies as we are familiar with today.
Leftwingery is at core “social”, nazism was not “social”. Leftwingery seeks primacy of the state for “social” ends. Nazism sought primacy of the state to pursue violent ends.
Nazism was a violent doctrine of violence, that glorified violence and saw violence as an END IN ITSELF.
Nazism was not leftwingery, it was much worse than that, a lawless world of the violent and the strong – definitely opposite to leftwingery.
Tim adds: I’ve just finished “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” and their economic policies were very much both left wing and national.
Whilst this is an interesting debate, it doesn’t really drive the critical matter of marginalising the BNP through mainstream politics any further forward.
Wiki has quite a good article on the left-right spectrum. Here are the headers, for those who won’t click.
1. Economic interventionism is left; laissez-faire is right.
2. Preference for a “larger” government is left; preference for a “smaller” government is right.
3. Relativism is left; Universality is right. [citation needed]
4. Equality of outcome is left; equality of opportunity is right.
5. A secular government is left; a religious government is right.
6. Collectivism is left; individualism is right.[citation needed]
7. Innovation is left; conservatism is right.
8. The idea that law dictates culture is left; the idea that culture dictates law is right.
9. Support for national self-determination, autonomy and sovereignty, especially for smaller groups, is left; support only for established states and governments is right.[citation needed]
10. Internationalism and cosmopolitan attitudes are left; national interests are right.[citation needed]
11. The idea that human nature and society are malleable is left; the idea that they are fixed is right.
Going through their different definitions for the BNP and Green Parties:
1. Left. The Greens and BNP have largely the same policies here, which are hardcore interventionalist. Import substitution, punitive taxation and criminalisation of activities deemed unsuitable (note in particular the BNP’s “crimes against the land”).
2. Left. The BNP make a rare departure from the Greens in that they want a Sales Tax to replace Income Tax, but they wish to add considerably to our regulation, along with the Greens.
3. Right. As an aside, I think that the BNP are of the “old left” primarily, not concerned with feminism, identity politics, et. al. (at least not in the way that the “new left” are), but rather with the welfare of the (white) workers. Think the unions of the 70s (and many unions today). Still, to the extent that it does apply, I think that the double standards of the Greens, who advocate spending of money in the UK on cleaner tech when it could be much more efficiently spent in, say, Mozambique where the power stations are much less clean and the upgrades would make much more difference, is somewhat relativist. Likewise, from the BNP manifesto: “We will encourage black and ethnic minority schools and religious schools run by parents and staff that educate those children as to their ancestral heritage and instil pride in their culture and ethnicity”. Still, Marx was not a relativist and the BNP and Green parties seem to join him on the right by this measure.
4. Left. Although neither party’s manifesto addresses this directly, both are in favour of enlarging the NHS, state pensions, state education, and so on.
5. Ambiguous. Neither party has an explicit stance on religion. Both parties have religious and non-religious wings. Both parties find the Church of England to be the most amenable denomination (just saying).
6. Left. Duh. See above. I think my favourite sentence from the manifesto is “We believe in respect for property rights, subject to the understanding that property owners have duties, too.” Points for correct guesses about which party manifesto that is. The other party has “A modern welfare system must do more than mitigate absolute poverty. The XXXX will rebuild the welfare state through the introduction of universal benefits.”
7. Ambiguous. Both parties want to radically turn back time. The green party doesn’t go quite as far as the BNP’s desire to teach the Manx to speak Manx, although their ’03 conference seemed to be supportive of the speaking of Welsh. I don’t know if radical and innovative steps to avoid progress are right or left wing under this rule.
8. Ambiguous. This is way too vague for me to make a serious assessment.
9. Left. I was actually surprised by this. Apparently the BNP “wish to end the conflict in Ireland by welcoming Eire as well as Ulster as equal partners in a federation of the nations of the British Isles.” Who knew? The Greens are also devolutionist, with both parties being non-interventionist abroad.
10. Right. Neither party wants to be involved in foreign war, although the BNP make an exception for retaliation against terrorist attacks. Neither party wants to trade with foreigners. The Green party does want to be involved in lots of international talking shops and is interested in funding said talking shops, as well as offering more aid. Also, one of the few serious differences between the Greens and the BNP is that the Greens are very pro-immigration, which is a kind of passive interventionalism that would allow us to profit from the misery of others (in a manner that reduces their misery, too).
11. Left-ish. My sister in law to be works for the Green party on Neo-Imperialism, which is slightly awkward since my work is pretty precisely the stuff that she works to prevent (setting up western companies in India). I think that both the BNP and the Greens have a view of authentic culture (fixed) and foreign culture (malleable) and feel that without protection authentic culture dies. Ergo, it is changeable, if only for something inferior.
JohnnyBonk: Perhaps the violence was just an end in itself (although I think that you will find more Nazi writings suggesting that it was a route to power than an end). Nonetheless, there were many Nazi policies and beliefs that were not particularly attached to violence. Why is this post particularly concerned with those policies?
This post is not about the German Nazis. It is about the BNP. You will note that (aside from the section on national service and perhaps a sentence on retaliation to terrorist attacks) the BNP manifesto is manifestly uninterested in violence. Thus we are primarily looking at the non-violent portions of Nazi ideology, where we are even looking at the Nazis at all.
Furthermore, if you think about the assertion that violent conflict as an end has no place on the left, which is concerned only with human welfare, then I urge you to read more about the Maoist doctrine of “worse is better”. There you will see that it can be good to worsen social conditions as this will bring about a violent struggle. I agree, however, that no movement associated with St. Che could ever be fairly tarnished with the suggestion of an interest in violence for its own sake.
Martin: Although I saw this as a descriptive, rather than a normative, debate, even if it were a normative debate I am not certain that we want the BNP destroyed by mainstream political movements. The only weapons they have to destroy a minority party are inclusion and debate and they tend to prefer inclusion. Better to have them defeated by debate. Indeed, my fear of mainstream parties adopting platforms from the BNP is considerably greater than my fear of any likely BNP successes, since they aren’t terribly successful.
In fact, looking at your blog a moment, I gather that you share some of the BNP’s key beliefs and thus probably would rather Labour stole their platforms than that they were debated more prominently and defeated.
To those who are really serious about preventing trade (unless your attack on “offshoring” was an exception to a general preference for trade) and preventing immigration, I’d have thought that the BNP was a perfectly sensible way to vote, if only to persuade other parties to take those positions.
Just to clarify, that last was to Martin.
I guess it depends what you mean by “right” and “left”. Unfortuantely as with a lot of political words people tend to ue them to mean whatever they want to mean, which is fine for rhetoric but not good for understanding stuff.
Enforced collectivism is left wing
All governments are into enforecement — they all use violence and threats of violence to get people to do things, such as pay taxes, not break the law, etc. And all governments are collective. So by your criteria, all governments are left wing.
Martin,
Thanks for the link to wiki. I find it odd however, that many “right wing” parties seem to be the party of big government. How does that work in their definition?
Cheers,
David Rotor
“Leftwingery is at core ‘social”, nazism was not ‘social’.”
That’s demonstrably untrue. The Nazis certainly saw themselves as “social”, hence the official posters to encourage donations to welfare charities such as Winter Aid to help the poor and needy:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters2.htm
Note also the poster in the collection famously linking Hitler and the growth of the German automobile industry. Volkswagen (literally: People’s Car) was started as a public enterprise venture to manufacture cars for the people during the Nazi era.
And try this direct quote of a official working for the Association of Industrialists in the Third Reich:
“The tax department chief of the Association of Industrialists (Reichsgruppe Industrie) emphasized that it was useless to attempt precise comparisons between the new and old tax regulations because the important issue was ‘the new spirit of the reform, the spirit of national Socialism. The principle of the common good precedes the good of the individual stands above everything else. In the interests of the whole nation, everyone has to pay the taxes he owes according to the new tax law.’”
Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics (Berg Publisher Ltd (1990)) p.183. Mr Barkai is a research fellow at the Institute of German History, Tel Aviv.
The facts may be unpalatable but the Nazis clearly regarded themselves as “socialists” as well as “nationalists”. Hitler denounced “Bolshevism”, but not “Socialism”. The official party name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Note typical “Socialist” objectives in the Party’s “fundamental” programme or manifesto launched by Hitler in 1920 and which was retained unamended thereafter. The programme contains many basic “leftist” commitments such as items 13 through 17 which can be typically found also in the manifestos of other European socialist parties then and since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program
This is a very interesting line of comments.
On the whole, they reinforce my pre-existing idea that – while left-right distinctions can be made an defended – these are subordinated to a pro- and anti-modernization distinction; in which modernizatin includes market economies, science and technology, liberal democracy and other ‘Western’ values.
Mainstream politics revolves around the disagreements between the technocratic modernizers (who favour a larger element of centralized command economy) and the more market-oriented modernizers.
The minority of anti-modernizers are forced to collaborate in order to get a hearing, and this leads to apparently bizarre alliances such as the ideological left embracing of radical Islam, and their (otherwise inexplicable) adoption of the ‘Palestinian cause’ as the thing they regard as the primary topic of importance in the whole world.
Indeed, I tend to use the attitude to Palestine as a quick marker of a person or party’s pro- or anti-modernization status.
I’m largely with Phil Hunt.
I think what also happens is that people identify one or the other group is more associated with themselves and then use the alternative term as a form of insult for that which they are not.
People come to parties for different reasons. There are quite a lot of Conservatives who care nothing for markets, and are more interested in just defending traditional values. Read the opinions of Anne Widdecombe, and those of Alan Duncan.
The real problem with the “left-right” issue is that it is ambiguous. In terminology, it is a single axis, and yet, people use it to define multiple axes. And frequently, these are in conflict.
I see a direct philosophical conflict between someone believing in a religious government, and at the same time, laissez-faire economics.
If left-right should define a single axis, then I think that Tim’s “large/small government intervention” covers the lot. Whether it be government intervening in your pocket, your bed or your bookshelf.
So by your criteria, all governments are left wing.
In that sense you are right all governments are left-wing when it comes to their collectivist and statist belief systems. (This is especially the case since by nature bureaucracy seeks to expand itself and justify its existence.)
Tim: “If left-right should define a single axis, then I think that Tim’s ‘large/small government intervention’ covers the lot.”
That comes close, I think. There is this (amazingly favourable) article from the Daily Express by Lloyd George on 17 November 1936 on his return from Germany where he met with Hitler – and recall that Lloyd George was the last Liberal prime minister of Britain (1916-22) and certainly “an interventionist”:
http://www.history-of-the-holocaust.org/LIBARC/ARCHIVE/Chapters/Stabiliz/Foreign/LloydGeo.html
Apart from the National Socialists in Germany, Oswald Mosley was a cabinet minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929-31 until he resigned in 1930 complaining of the government’s failings in tackling mass unemployment and then going on to found the British Union of Fascists in 1932. In his speeches to promte the BUF, he took a “socialist angle” – according to an entry for 16 March 1936 in George Orwell’s research diary for the book eventually published as: The Road to Wigan Pier (1936). The diary entry reads in part:
“Last night to hear Mosley speak at the Public Hall [in Barnsley], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940 (Penguin Books) p.230.
The key sentence is: “After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers.”
Many years later, on 26 April 1968, Mosley wrote to The Times: “I am not and never have been a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.”
Bob that made for some fascinating reading thanks.
Interesting thread.
I think it worth adding that prior to the 1960s, the left was much more frequently racist than it would currently like to imagine. Support for Eugenics programs. The association of the Democratic party with the Ku Klux Klan.
The comment about the Nazi party being about violence is laughable – does he think the German communist party was any different?
It may be worth pointing out here that the Nazis hated the socialists. Many socialists ended up in camps.
Anyhow, whether the BNP is labeled left or right is utterly irrelevant.
Katherine,
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” –Adolf Hitler
They locked up communists because they locked up anyone who wasn’t a Nazi. Not much broad, consensus politics.
Enforced collectivism is a feature of totalitarianism rather than being distinctively left-wing or right-wing. It’s a way to keep the citizens controlled and under surveillance, and ultimately to ensure that there is no aspect of their lives that is independent of the state. The BNP are collectivist because they’re authoritarian, not because they’re “left” or “right”.
Andrew [Dodge] – The more I dug, the worse it got. The Labour Party is directly implicated in fascist economics since WW2. Try this:
“However it was with the idea of a state planning agency that [Stuart] Holland [Labour MP for Lambeth, Vauxhall 1979-89, political assistant in Downing St to the PM 1967/8, and shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1987-9] hoped to show the new possibilities open to a more just economy. He looked to the Italian example of the IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute), set up by Mussolini and used by subsequent Italian governments to develop the economy. This had, of course, already been tried through the IRC (the Industrial Reorganization Corporation) set up as part of [Britain’s] National Plan in 1966, but the IRC had been too small to have much effect on the British economy. A revamped IRC in the form of a National Enterprise Board would, however, have a major effect in stimulating the private sector through an active policy of state intervention and direction.”
Geoffrey Foote: The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (Palgrave 3rd edition (1997)) p.311.
Holland’s own book, Socialist Challenge (1975), sets out in greater detail proposals for a Labour government modelled on the policies of Mussolini in the 1930s. His illuminating CV is here:
http://www.econ.uoa.gr/UA/files/1960985655..pdf
What motivated much of this research was reading a claim on the web in 1998 after Blair launched his “Third Way” vision which was that its provenance went back to Mussolini. I already knew about the entry in George Orwell’s diary but little about Mussolini and fascism then but thought the claim about the Mussolini-Third Way connection can’t be so, surely? But I thought it better to check. The second book I picked up was Martin Clark on: Modern Italy 1871-1995 (Longman 2nd ed. (1996)), p.250, where he writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government : “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. …”
As the book, by an academic historian at Edinburgh University, in its second edition, was published before the 1997 election which brought Blair to power, it can’t be said that the Mussolini connection was merely a retrospective attempt by the author to malign Blair. And what of all those academic gurus on the Third Way? They would have surely checked on the provenance, wouldn’t they? After all, Blair wasn’t compelled to dub his vision of the future as “the Third Way”.
We don’t need to dig far into Nazi economics to learn that even apart from its resort to slave labour, Nazi economics wasn’t remotely similar to notions of Hayekian, neo-Liberal or “free-market” capitalism. Prices, wages, investment spending by business and the exchange rate of the Reich Mark in the Nazi economy were all subject to extensive state controls. And we have this (delicious) insight from Goering about the functions of profits and costs in motivating business investment in the Nazi economy:
“We must not reckon profit and loss according to the book, but only according to political needs. There must be no calculation of cost. I require that you do all that you can and to prove that part of the national fortune is in your hands. Whether new investment can be written off in every case is a matter of indifference.”
Speech of Goering in 1936 quoted in John Hiden: Republican and Fascist Germany (Longman 1996), p.128.
OTOH Goering does sound remarkly like some of the things I’ve regularly heard in denunciations of business and profits in avowedly leftist rhetoric. What’s new?
Guess what? Stuart Holland wrote a pamphlet with Ken Coates MEP on: Full Employment for Europe (1995).
Who is Ken Coates?
“Ken Coates (born 1930) is a British Marxist. He chairs the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and edits The Spokesman, the BRPF managzine launched in March 1970.
“A former member of the Young Communist League (Britain), Coates became a Nottinghamshire coal miner rather than face conscription into the British army fighting in the Malayan Emergency. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain but left following the breach between Stalin and Tito, whom he defended. After the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary Coates and Pat Jordan became the focal point of a group of Marxists with a developing interest in Trotskyism. After attended the fifth world congress of the Fourth International in 1958, Coates played a central role in founding the International Group, forerunner of the International Marxist Group.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Coates
On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a Friendship Treaty when Britain and France were already at war with Germany.
Norman Davies: Europe (OUP 1996) p.1000.
Evidently, Stalin had no insuperable ideological objections to the Soviet Union contracting a Friendship Treaty with National Socialist Germany. Among the provisions of the treaty were arrangements for the exchange of military liaison officers between Germany and the Soviet Union across their new mutual border running through what had been Poland’s national territory.
Btw does that make Stalin left wing or right wing?
JamesofEngland – “JohnnyBonk: Perhaps the violence was just an end in itself (although I think that you will find more Nazi writings suggesting that it was a route to power than an end). ”
– yes, and what a surprise they got when the Nazi state made war, war, war.
Nazism was about passion, glory, war, warriors, pride, subjugation, victory, defeat, honour, slavery, mighty endeavour, blood, sweat, land, iron – war war war. It was NOT interested in economics, wealth creation, equality, fairness, civilised standards, welfare, the commonwealth etc. It was born of violence, and lived only in violence. The whole thing was like some kind of demented opera of warriors and fighting. It lived for passion and glory and did not seek peace or prosperity.
Johnnybonk, you know that full employment thing? It may not be an accurate myth (any more than Italian trains being punctual), but it was one of Hitler’s big interests. Which of your categories does that fall under? Was the development of Volkswagens and the whole Kraft durch Freude movement not about welfare? How about the massive expansion of the production of consumer goods? Are these not wealth creation? Was the Volksgemeinschaft not about a (wrongful) idea of what civilised standards were? Likewise the environmental stuff?
It’s close to what Volokh calls the reverse-mussolini fallacy. The Nazis were very bad. The worst government mankind has ever known, if you like. That doesn’t mean that everything they cared about or did was 100% bad. Having said that, I’m not a big fan of their environmental stuff, their welfare, their civilisation, or their statist forms of wealth creation. Because I’m not of the left, where those ideas belong (and because I’m not really into opera, which I concede belongs to the right almost as much as the left).
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