What’s Left?
I had a favorite t-shirt in the 1980s, one I owned several of and wore frequently. It was red with a stylized black silkscreened image of Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Ernesto “Che” Guevara printed above his popular quote: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” Korda’s image of Che with military beret and solemn expression was taken during a Cuban state funeral; handsome, heroic, and seemingly immortal. I wore the t-shirt around the UC San Diego campus without incident or even much notice, but I liked pushing the envelope by wearing it all around the very conservative city of San Diego.
While wearing the shirt and eating my customary grease-, carb- and meat-heavy breakfast washed down with several bottles of Negra Modelo beer outside Harry’s Coffee Shop in La Jolla circa 1985, I noticed a young man glaring at me. Harry’s was a local favorite, so I assumed he was a surfer because of his shaggy haircut, Quiksilver Hawaiian shirt, colorful board shorts, and leather huarache sandals. He frowned at me over a decimated plate of food next to which rested a russet guampa, a hollow calabash gourd lipped with silver from which a silver bombilla straw protruded. A waitress poured more hot water into his maté gourd before bussing his dishes and leaving the check.
“You realize Che was not Cuban,” the man said after taking a sip, his Spanish accent patrician.
“He was Argentinian,” I said. “But Castro’s revolutionary government granted Che Cuban citizenship by birth’ in 1959.”
“Bravo.” He raised the guampa in mock salute. “Not many yanquis, especially gabacho izquierdistas, know much about Guevara’s background.”
I nodded, then continued demolishing my breakfast. He counted out his money to pay for the meal and stood, cradling his gourd.
“I presume though you think Che is Third World. He certainly has been made into a symbol for Third World leftist revolution. But Argentina is not a Third World country, ethnically speaking. Spanish, Italian, and German migrants who completely wiped out the native indiano populations settled Argentina. There was no race-mixing. The Argentine population is almost pure European. Che Guevara was as white as you or I, so it is laughable to consider him Third World.”
I’ve mentioned Ernesto “Che” Guevara in relation to fellow Argentinian Juan PerÁ³n and his Third Positionist justicialismo ideology. Third Positionism—the myth of a politics that is neither left nor right—has one source in the Third World after the Second World War but another source in the First World before the first World War. Extreme Left movements first converged with ultranationalist authoritarian extreme Right movements between the revolutionary syndicalists influenced by Georges Sorel and the Action française of Charles Maurras in the early 20th century. This matured in Italy during and after the first World War with the ultranationalist, irredentist activities of Gabriele D’Annunzio which culminated in his seizure of the city of Fiume, as well as in the evolution of Benito Mussolini from the far-left wing of the Italian Socialist Party to the first Fascist seizure of power in 1922. The 1922 March on Rome shifted the development of Fascist Third Positionism from Italy to Germany with the proliferation of right-wing antisemitic organizations and movements alternate to the Nazis like Conservative Revolutionism, Strasserism, National Bolshevism, etc. Even Ernst Röhm’s tenure in the NSDAP’s Sturmabteilung (SA) constituted Third Positionism in its claim to be the vanguard of the “National Socialist revolution,” with Röhm calling for an overtly anti-capitalist “second revolution.” When Hitler assassinated Röhm and Gregor Strasser on the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, orthodox Nazism was consolidated and the move to Third Positionism was curtailed during the Second World War.
Cross-contamination was inevitable given the violent antagonism between Marxism and Fascism. Taking on Marxism’s class-based schema, Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini developed the concept of the “proletarian nation” in 1910 which transposed the class struggle to the struggle between nations. D’Annunzio, Mussolini, and the Strasser brothers among others defended this notion. But it gained little traction until the defeat of classical Fascism in Italy and Germany, the instigation of the Cold War between the Soviet bloc’s “socialism in one country” and the American-led “free world,” and the upsurge of anti-colonial struggles in the Third World after the Second World War. Third World anti-imperialism didn’t just take the form of socialist struggles for national liberation, or even the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of underdeveloped and developing nations not formally aligned with either of the two Cold War superpowers. It often took a reactionary anti-imperialist turn that talked about going beyond Left and Right. In a phrase, it was Third World Third Positionism where proletarian nations struggled internationally against bourgeois nations.
I discussed Juan PerÁ³n at length and mentioned Bolivia’s National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in passing in a past column. Of the MNR’s reactionary anti-imperialism Loren Goldner had this to say:
In the case of Bolivia, the multi-class nationalism epitomized by MNR intellectual Carlos Montenegro, with its problematic of the “nation” versus the “foreign,” combined in practice with the corporatist models attempted by 1936-1940 “military socialism” and the 1943-1946 Villaroel regime, and influenced to different degrees by Mussolini’s Italy, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain, Nazi Germany, Vargas’s Brazil, Peron’s Argentina and the Mexico of Cardenas. Though the standing bourgeois army in Bolivia (in contrast to these other experiences) simply dissolved and had to be rebuilt (as it quickly was), theoretical disarmament set the stage for the practical disarmament of the worker militias. (“Anti-Capitalism or Anti-Imperialism? Interwar Authoritarian and Fascist Sources of A Reactionary Ideology: The Case of the Bolivian MNR”)
Goldner clearly defines a Latin American Third World Third Positionist bloc.
Another Third World Third Positionist bloc emerged in the Middle East, determined by the rise of pan-Arab nationalism. Reacting to Western imperialism and Zionist colonialism, the pan-Arabic nationalist response was unsteady and uneven between the two world wars, going so far as to court “the enemy of my enemy” in the case of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s collaboration with Nazi Germany in Mandatory Palestine. Reactionary Arab anti-imperialism after the second World War—as exemplified by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, various Ba’athist parties and regimes in Syria and Iraq, and the short-lived Egyptian/Syrian United Arab Republic—was explicitly national-socialist. Arab Third Positionism took inspiration from European Fascism, suppressed socialist and communist unions and parties while seeking Soviet aid, adopted corporatist economic models, promoted modernization and state nationalization of foreign and domestic assets, and engaged in “military socialism.” This reached a pinnacle in the Libya of Muammar Gaddafi, whose Green Book rejected representative democracy and promised a third path between capitalism and communism. Gaddafi’s Jamhariyah system embodied the true “state of the masses” funded by Libya’s oil reserves. Combine Arab Third Positionism with a virulent anti-Zionist opposition to Israel that readily spilled over into anti-Jewish anti-semitism and you have the closest approximation to orthodox Nazism to date.
I don’t have space to discuss the leftist ethnic nationalism of Labor Zionism’s “socialism for one people” in Palestine or Nyerere’s ujamaa socialism in Tanzania, nor of Third World Third Positionism in sub-Saharan Africa (Idi Amin’s Uganda) or Asia (the Juche regime in North Korea). Maoism’s repurposing of the concept of “proletarian nation” is also beyond our scope. The defining characteristic of Third World ultranationalist resistance to capitalist neo-colonialism and Western imperialism is not racial identity, but rather a reactionary Third Positionist anti-imperialism that seeks to substitute a struggle between nations internationally for the classic Marxist international class struggle.
White “First World” adherents to Third Positionism, in turn, have adopted a Third Worldist view of international affairs. This has meant overt solidarity with Third Positionist Third World regimes and movements on the grounds they make up non-white racial nationalist resistance to Western multiculturalism, multiracialism, and Zionism. Decrying the creep of non-white cultural influences into white Western nations from the colonies and vice-versa, First World Third Positionists nevertheless consider their Third World counterparts kindred spirits to white nationalist movements in the developed West. The European Nouvelle Droite has cultivated ties with Islamist groups, and US Third Positionists have sought common cause with the Nation of Islam and other Black Nationalist groups over anti-Semitism and racial separatism. That doyen of ultraright high idiocy, Troy Southgate, fleshed out Third Positionism from his faux guerrilla National Revolutionary Faction to National-Anarchism, his bastard ideology of decentralized racial/ethnic tribal autonomy. The move from white power and white supremacy to white nationalism and a white ethnostate, in fact, has Third Positionist ethnopluralist ramifications in implying that non-whites can pursue racial/ethnic separatism and nationalism as well. The loosely organized far-right populist Posse Comitatus movement has even proposed extending white ethnonationalism down to the county level.
Despite the Third Positionist claim to “go beyond Left and Right,” it’s wise to remember Upton Sinclair’s sentiment that: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”