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Corbyn, Brexit, And "Red-Brown" Confusionism Of EU Opponents



With the second rise of UKIP, the toxic rallies for Tommy Robinson, and the normalisation of genuine fascists like Steve Bannon by British radio shows and Gammon-baiter Piers Morgan, the far-right is seemingly gaining more ground in Britain than ever, and – in a moment of “literal communism” and manifestations against Trump – the tone of the Brexit debate has thus become increasingly – how would I put it? – divisive. The battle flags have been unfurled, and, especially after the release of convincing reports on fraud by Team Leave during the referendum, it is becoming seemingly impossible for a left-winger to approve of Brexit publicly, let alone make a case for it.

Which is why Jeremy Corbyn’s speech last week saw comments across the board that he was echoing the language of UKIP and Trump, and even becoming the “far-right’s new hero.” Combined with the scare over anti-Semitism (a reactionary tradition), one could be forgiven for believing that the leader of the opposition was an “existential threat,” not just for Britain’s Jews but progressivism in the country as a whole.

To start this off, let me say that I strongly oppose the Brexit deal proposed by Theresa May, let alone the ultra-Thatcherite vision of Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson. Calls for remaining or a second referendum should be fully seen as part of the discourse, and the chilling accusations that supporting the EU is “treasonous” must be interpreted as the fascist rhetoric that it is. And the idea that “the British people have had their say” is dumbfounding when applied to restricting immigration, as polls show increasing support for migrants as much as they show revulsion towards the free-market nightmare Tory leavers demand.

That being said, there is indeed a left-wing tradition of opposition to the EU. We don’t even need to look at the handful of current (in some cases ex) Labour members like George Galloway or Dennis Skinner. Tony Benn himself was an opponent of the bloc, as are many European communist and socialist parties and organisations.

Furthermore, Corbyn’s speech, while undeniably containing some ugly phrases (“Build it in Britain” and “British workers first” were not the ideal bits for the party to highlight on social media) was overall a blend of standard social democratic rhetoric and Lexit arguments (a bigger controversy could be voiced over the fact that it was his second in front of the corporate lobby shop EEF this year).

Outbursts that Labour is turning towards “left fascism” either due to its Brexit rhetoric or its alleged anti-Semitism, are not just harmful but part of an overall greater and highly toxic narrative promoted more than ever by the mainstream media and centrist politicians – that the extreme right and left are the same. The “red-brown theory” is increasingly being used to attack communism and, worst of all, the alter-Europeanist left like France Insoumise and DiEM25. Nobody who considers themselves a socialist, communist, or anarchist should support these ideas.

To further the debate on this topic, I have posted below a translated version of a book review on the subject from Communist Initiative, a French website run by the anti-EU Pole of Communist Revival In France, a political movement that is pro-refugee and anti-racist, as well as staunchly against Brussels.



In April 2018, a book was published by Bernard Bruneteau, a historian of ideas and professor of contemporary history at the University of Rennes. The title of the book? "Against Europe: Lenin to Le Pen." You are not hallucinating: a "historian" somehow achieves the feat of including the communist thinker who implemented Marx's ideas with the heiress of the manor of Montretout and a party founded by fascists in 1972 in the same title. We have a better grasp of history!

This odious amalgamation, more appropriate for a popular writer than of an academic historian, is not an accident. Indeed, Bruneteau has specialised in promoting the concept of "totalitarianism," which has been used by anti-communists on all sides to justify the conflation of Nazism and communism.

Thus, he published in 1999 "Totalitarianism," a later updated in 2014. In this latest version, he opens the book with a quote from the work of Boris Souvarine - a man known as an "unrivalled anti-communist specialist" according to the historian Ariane Chebel of Apollonia - published in 1935 and titled "Stalin, Historical Picture of Bolshevism": "It took new words, such as Bolshevism or fascism, to designate unknown social movements and their empirical ideologies, movements that in the long run exhibit so many similarities, engage in so many mutual practices, with so much exchange of ideas that the same word, "totalitarian" suits them both perfectly."

The tone is set, and Bruneteau spends the rest of his time indulging in the most boring confusionism, derived from the classical liberal tradition of Hannah Arendt and François Furet, that Nazism and communism are the same. For proof of this, let us recall that Furet, who saw in the French Revolution the birth of "totalitarianism" (!), wrote in "Le Passé d'une illusion" that "Stalinist Bolshevism and National Socialism are two examples of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Not only are they comparable, but they sort of form a political category. I do not see a more fitting term that has been suggested to define regimes in which an atomized society, made up of individuals systematically deprived of political participation, is subject to the "total" power of an ideological party and its leader."

The idea of totalitarianism has continued to be criticised and challenged, and is increasingly considered - rightly so - as totally unfounded by many historians. Thus in 1991, Denis Peschanski - a man difficult to discount as a communist sympathizer - wrote in a series called Political History and Social Sciences : "Totalitarianism is both a descriptive and ideological concept, based on politics and therefore a purely symbolic idea that does not help us understand history, as it is based on morality and emotion, not scientific objectivity."

In the same vein, the American historian Michael Scott Christofferson published a book in 2003 (translated into French in 2009) with the unambiguous title, "Intellectuals Against The Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Ideology in France (1968-1981), where he states in the introduction that,

"During the second half of the 1970s, a vigorous offensive against "left-wing totalitarianism" roiled French politics. In their books and controversial articles, in newspapers and on television, antitotalitarian intellectuals loudly denounced, in a hysterical fashion, a link between Marxist and revolutionary ideas and totalitarianism. Themselves former leftists, facing weak opposition, antitotalitarians soon marginalised Marxist thought and succeeded in undermining the legitimacy of the French revolutionary tradition. They paved the way for postmodern centrism: the liberal and conservative politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Antitotalitarianism also radically changed the political priorities of the intellectuals of the non-communist left, who launched into a crusade against communism in the 1990s. These debates reached an international audience, and, at the national level, led to the further deterioration of the already difficult relationships between these intellectuals and the PS and PC."

Never mind, despite this (hardly exhaustive) duo of books- to which we can add the Slavoj Zizek's "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions On The (Mis)use Of A Notion," published in 2004, and Michael Parent's "The Myth Of The Totalitarian Twins," published by Delga in 2013, Bruneteau continues to promote this idea, becoming enraged when historian Johann Chapoutot dares to say that "there is no totalitarian project in itself" in the journal "Texts And Documents For The Class" in January 2013. Bruneteau writes: "We note in particular a distressing commentary of the historian Johann Chapoutot who, out of ignorance or a desire for gratuitous provocation, asserts that "there is no totalitarian project in itself!"" For Bruneteau, the idea of totalitarianism is an indispensable requirement for historians. We might concur with him, but the rest of this article will show the ideological biases of this historian.

One thing is certain: "totalitarianism" becomes a useful tool for Bruneteau, who has turned it into his "intellectual" obsession. Thus he published "Totalitarianism. Origin Of A Concept, Genesis Of A Debate (1930-1942) at the Editions du Cerf in 2010, a year later, he returned with "The Totalitarian Age: Thoughts About Totalitarianism," where he exploits all his "talents" by not hesitating to extend the use of "totalitarianism" to other historical periods in a comparative logic that is based more on ideological intent than historical truth. Thus, a box is devoted to the following question: "Totalitarian Plato?" (And without quotation marks around the word totalitarian, of course).

Quoting the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, Bruneteau writes: "Plato is credited by Karl Popper with the dark merit of having invented the first totalitarian organisation"; he goes on to qualify this by saying that "The Republic has of course nothing to do with Mein Kampf. One can nonetheless wonder about the fact that certain works lend themselves more than others to the logic of deformation." The order of the sentences, the instillation of suspicion in the form of "scientific questioning," the reference to Plato which, let us recall, inspired much the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - a favourite author of Robespierre, and also of Marx and Lenin: a simple coincidence, or desire to amalgamate Nazism and communism?

Polemically, Bruneteau adopts the outlook of a "concept" which, as he admits himself in an article published in 2014, "Instrumentalised during the cold war, [totalitarianism] works towards the aims of liberal democracy by forcing us to think inside its value system." But despite this, he considers it a valid idea, to the point of taking to the defense of Ernst Nolte, a right-wing reactionary historian who sees Nazism as a rational reaction to Bolshevism. Bruneteau deplores the fact that in history textbooks, "the USSR is not mentioned at all: the dehumanisation of the class enemy, ethnic cleansing ("former people"), the Ukrainian genocide famine of 1933, the extermination of the Polish elites of the Eastern Zone in 1939-1941 (killed for class reasons or because they were Polish?).... Let us note in passing how much Bruneteau wants to focus heavily on the claim that the famine in Ukraine was a "genocide" - the controversy over the Holodomor is a specialty of anticommunists intended on smearing the USSR and thus equating Stalin and Hitler - as well as "extermination."

This intellectual argument is utilised to demonstrate the case that Bernard Bruneteau wishes to enshrine in his book "Against Europe: From Lenin to Le Pen," and one can now easily see why the author manages to unite in a single title the political philosopher Lenin with the impostor Le Pen. The European Union is not a new subject of analysis for Bruneteau, who already wrote in 1996 a history of European unification before his further publishing two books on the idea of Europe in the twentieth century, anthologies of texts in the Europeanist tradition.

An unconditional defender of the European project, Bruneteau, exasperated by oppositions to the capitalist, anti-communist and anti-democratic EU, wrote a pamphlet whose cover blurb set the tone "In a demanding and incisive essay, Bernard Bruneteau shows that this hostility is part of a long history... from Lenin to Marine Le Pen, from communist internationalism to identarian populism. In the name of the class struggle anti-capitalism, the International was violently opposed to the projects of European federalism which flourished in the inter-war period. At the same time, on the other side, nationalists came to attack the dream of a supranational Europe devised by a handful of liberal thinkers. The modern incarnations of these two tendencies continue to inspire anti-EU discourse, and increasingly tend to mix their arguments."

In his introduction, Bruneteau lists works including "The End of Europe" (Eric Juillot), "The End of the European Union" (Coralie Delaume and David Cayla) or "Thirty Good Reasons To Leave The EU" (Olivier Delorme), denouncing them as pessimistic. "The media are just as obsessed with the idea that the EU is in decline or facing the apocalypse." One wonders how Bernard Bruneteau could have missed the enormous amount of pro-EU propaganda served up daily by the political, economic and media oligarchy (OPEM) to justify European federalism, the privatisation of public services, the destruction of the Republic, etc. All of this is ignored as this "historian" of ideas lists the various opponents of a united Europe, which he subsumes under the three ideological matrixes internationalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Thus, Bruneteau brings together globalised liberalism, fascism and communism and conflates they based on their opposition to "Europe," saying "some [ideologies] already thwarted the success of the European idea at the end of the nineteenth century, feeding into the world views of the totalitarian mystics who rendered the European federation inoperative in the inter-war period."

We do not expect Bruneteau to show how the crisis of the 1930s was the main force behind the failure of European unity and the rise of Nazism, or that the pan-European ideologies of the time were not great defenders of the democracies - Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, maniac defender of supranationalism and author of a book entitled "Hero or Saint" in 1929, described Italian fascism as a "semi-democracy" in Paneurope, a regulat publication published in 1923, or that many of the the partisans of European played a major part in the collaboration with Nazism to fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism."

Bruneteau says curiously little about these (pseudo) contradictions that want many advocates of the European idea to join German Europe, the hatred of communism becoming the major cement of united Europe since the 1920s (while remaining so today): think of Francis Delaisi, author of Les Deux Europe in 1929, who wants a united Europe around France and Germany based on the principle of " freedom for everyone" to be or not fascist or democrat, anti-semite or philosemite ", or to Gaston Riou who publishes Unite or die in 1929 and joined Vichy on July 10, 1940.

This does not mean that all the supporters of the European idea were obviously fascist, but a common feature of many of them was hatred of democracy and the superiority of aristocracies, two world views that sum up the "father of Europe" Coudenhove-Kalergi, who advocated an "erotic eugenics" in Id practical realism (published in 1925)

"Only the alliance of the noblest men with the noblest women will be free, and conversely, people of lesser value will have to be satisfied with people of lesser value (...) The new nobility of reproduction of the future will not emerge. artificial standards of human caste culture, but rather divine laws of erotic eugenics. The natural classification of human perfection will replace the artificial classification of feudalism and capitalism."

At least Bruneteau has the merit of recalling (in an incomplete way) Lenin's very lucid observation in "The Word of the United States of Europe" published on August 23, 1915: "From the point of view the economic conditions of imperialism, that is, capital exports and the division of the world by the "advanced" and "civilized" colonial powers, the United States of Europe is, under capitalism, very impossible, or else reactionary.” 

"Europe's chance is to be a third antitotalitarian way"

For Bruneteau, the opportunity is too good to fall into ideological confusionism through his holy struggle for the rescue of a European "Union" that continues to crush the peoples of Europe (ask the Greeks what they think of the EU ...), to destroy social and democratic victories, etc. The publication of this book could not leave insensitive the OPEM, and it is Liberation which opens the door it by giving the floor to Bruneteau on April 3 in an article entitled neither more nor less: "The luck of Europe is to be a third antitotalitarian way." The circle is complete: on one hand, the kind EU that "gives money to the regions ", develops "a European humanitarian diplomacy" and brings together "the centre," be they liberals, Christian Democrats or social democrats"; on the other, "far-right and left populisms "which are the counterparts of two totalitarian projects."

The interview is a model caricature of media treatment and pseudo-scientific EU: while the "journalist" asks a question taking up the ideas of Bruneteau - " In your opinion, the criticism of Europe begins with Lenin on the left, and with Maurras on the right - he launches into analyzes that leave him speechless:

"In France, the tradition will be divided between a weakened FN, the party of Florian Philippot, which advocates an exit of the euro, that of Dupont-Aignan, rising in the polls, and The Republicans (LR), whose president Laurent Wauquiez has developed a more eurosceptic rhetoric to counter Macron "the European." Not to mention the alter-Europeanist posture of France Insoumise, the leader of which defines himself as a "French independenceist" against a Europe "close to the model of the Holy Roman Empire."

Or :

"If the current situation is perfectible, the process in oligarchy is unfair: all member states are democracies, and the EU itself has reduced this deficit: codecision and control power of the European Parliament, citizen initiative ... In parallel, institutions consult interest groups to motivate their decisions in a competitive deliberation process. Some find this lobbying obscene, but in the United States, it is quite acceptable. "

Thus, we have not learned anything about what the EU actually is. Fortunately a "historian" explains a real democratic system where citizens decide (as we saw during the referendums!), with similar lobbying practices as the United States (Monsanto, Google, Facebook and all the multinationals fond of tax and social dumping will appreciate this unexpected support, in the same way as Jean-Claude "LuxLeaks" Juncker), all the member states are democracies ... even though Jean-Claude Juncker declared at the end of January 2015 that "there can be no democratic choice against the already ratified European treaties" etc. And all while maintaining the eternal ideological and political confusionism by grouping all the (more or less real) oppositions to this under the term of "populism".

Despite this, Buneteau's propaganda work has three positive merits. First, it shows the fear and weaknesses of the Europeanist propaganda. Not knowing to where to turn to defend its project, it relies more than ever on pushing a crude and deceptive amalgamation of fascism and communism under the term "totalitarianism," Second, to encourage anyone wishing to truly understand the history of the European Union to turn to books that are otherwise more instructive, such as Annie Lacroix-Riz's "The Origins of the European Shackles, 1900-1960," and finally, above all, to give reason to the PRCF in its fight to reconstitute a powerful Marxist-Leninist party combining the red and the tricolor flags, to form a broad antifascist Front, patriotic, popular and ecological - a open call to all the communist forces, progressive and democratic against the destruction of social and democratic conquests - and the FOUR OUTPOSTS: the euro, the EU, NATO and capitalism!