"MAGA Communism?" No, right-wing social democracy with Soviet trappings

A reply to Carl Beijer's "Don't call them tankies"

A few days ago, I saw a blog post by Carl Beijer, an American socialist blogger/Twitter personality, on a curious little grouping terming themselves as "MAGA Communists", ie. people claiming to be doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists but distinguishing themselves mainly by aggressive attacks on most of the rest of the American left and sympathy towards parts of American conservatism, chiefly Trump.

Many of these types have previously been active in efforts like “patriotic socialists” – this group gained a bit of infamy even in Finnish social medias for organizing a LARPy event where awkward weirdoes wielded Soviet flags, Z symbols and American flags in a happy mix.

Like Beijer says, these guys are often called tankies, but they seem different from more traditional “tankies", a word used to describe supporters of Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and after that various pro-Soviet (and later, pro-PRC and at the very least anti-anti-Putin) causes.

They combine Soviet-style trappings to agendas that aren't all that radical when you look at them - China-style state-oriented capitalist economics, anti-interventionism, and anti-liberalism of the sort that leads to them issue appeals to the right-wingers for cooperation (who, of course, are usually flabbergasted why someone claiming to be a communist would want to associate with them).

When someone adopts a melange of views that looks like odd or contradictory, it's usually about creating one’s own niche and self-representation within a certain ideological movement. I think that it's important to try to figure out what what the Soviet trappings - and sympathy for countries like China, Russia etc. - specifically represents here. Some of the intended meanings seem to be:

MASCULINITY: Whereas traditional socialist imagery was highly masculine, representing buff workers rhytmically hitting anvils with big mallets in a steel factory, aggressive strikes, guerrillas fighting imperialism with a rifle in hand etc., modern left-wing imagery is rather more feminine, more likely to use pastel tones, images of care and such. People who wish to return to a more manly left find Soviet imagery a good point of reference.

GROWTHISM: Whatever the later developments, one thing that attracted people powerfully to communism in the 50s was the idea that it would create more growth than capitalism. References to Soviet Union (or modern China) thus become a rebuke to "degrowth" mentalities among the modern left, and an ideation of a return to an industrial, material-goods-oriented model of development; this is also why the MAGA Communist types seem to be enchanted with the LaRouche movement, which likewise talks a lot about reindustrialization and vast, Promethean projects like the Global Land Bridge.

ANTI-ANARCHISM: Modern leftist movements often refer implicitly or explicitly to anarchist goals and ideas (ie. Occupy was replete with anarchist symbology, the whole police abolitionist agenda is straight out of anarchism etc.) This reference to anarchism originated in the 90s as an explicit rebuke of Soviet times. People who don't like anarchism and anarchist movements for ideological, organizational or aesthetic reasons, perhaps because they just see it as utopian and unworkable, then refer back to the Soviet imagery to try to "banish" this anarchist influence.

ANTI-LIBERALISM: Many if not most of the people in the radical left have started as liberals and have then explicitly gravitate towards sterner stuff. Maybe it's the technocratic, there-is-no-alternative rhetoric often associated with modern liberalism, which appreciates only careful, expert-approved, human-rights-consistent reform, not revolutionary changes. Soviet imagery then represents a country that “got things done”, “wasn’t afraid to get its hands dirty” and so on. It may, of course, just also be contrarianism vis-à-vis the current hegemonic ideology.

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM… OF SORTS: Of course, this anti-liberal impulse also might imply a social conservative streak its bearer doesn’t even recognize themselves. This unrecognized social conservatism often channels itself towards movements that could be called “ossified progressivism”; the idea that it’s progressive movements in themselves that have lost their way and need to return to some previous line they had decades ago. There's a certain conservative impulse in this attempt to preserve "the wisdom of the earlier movement", and thus it's not a wonder there's also an unstated felt connection to actual conservatives here.

ISOLATIONISM: People whose political understanding was formed in the Iraq War era are often left with a considerable isolationist strain, as a reaction to the lies and bloodshed associated with the Iraq War. If one ends up on the socialist far left, this can then often be represented as principled anti-imperialism. However, what marks it as isolationism is how often it is argued precisely from the viewpoint of American interest, such as through constant references to costs to American taxpayer or lost opportunities for trade etc. above other concerns.

It strikes me that in many cases the whole Soviet imagery – surely offputting to the great majority of Westerners, outside small circles – is not all that necessary. The things advocated here are *mostly* not that radical; for instance, it’s hard to see the “patriotic socialists” and “MAGA Communists” offering large concrete revisions to the economic system, beyond an attitude that the state should do more stuff.

There is already a more established Western left movement that offers "traditional" left-wing causes like welfare state, trade unions, managed capitalism etc. while being more masculine than the current progressive left, patriotic, pro-economic-growth, sort of appealing to social conservative tendencies (less in the sense of religious conservatism and more in the sense of "why are we talking about gays and stuff when we could we talking about actually important things like economy and foreign policy?"), willing to "get hands dirty to get things done" etc, willing to work with the right and so on.

That’s just traditional right-wing social democracy! People supporting such things could historically be found in great numbers in the Social Democratic parties of Europe. For instance, in Finland, such right-wing social democrats were the bulwark of Cold War era municipal governance in major industrial cities, forming "brothers-in-arms" coalitions (referring to the idea of class cooperation arising from the conditions of WW2 struggles) with the Finnish right wing on the shared cause of car-friendly, "YIMBY" urban policies designed for housing the newly urbanizing workers and give them the comforts of modern life while also ensuring that businesses got their piece of the pie.

Of course, one thing that makes it unappealing for the tankies who might find it otherwise more to their liking is that the traditional right-wing social democracy was strongly pro-Western, pro-NATO and anti-Soviet, serving an important role in the Cold War coalition. In the US, these ideas were found in the part of SPUSA that eventually became Social Democrats, USA, which, as far as I've understood, was then basically killed by Vietnam War making it toxic among American left. Many right-wing social democrats eventually became neoconservatives.

Likewise, this right-wing social democracy still conceived itself as, well, democratic - in other words, it’s still too close to the reviled liberalism for people whose politics are often largely based on kneejerk rejection of the said liberalism. What the issue for these people is that, for one reason or another, conservatism is not an alternative for them either - perhaps because it’s too religious, perhaps because Western conservatism is often just a variety of liberalism in itself.

This "traditional right" social democracy is sort of an ephemeral phenomenon now, one of the victims of the Third Way, which subsumed it to general technocratic neoliberalism which, while sharing many similarities, was still different in many essential aspects, particularly in class composition. The conservative parts of the working class that had found traditional social democracy much to their liking started shifting to right-wing populism, which has often recast itself as the new defenders of the welfare state and the working man (gendered term very much intended).

As such, while the “patriotic socialists” may be a minor fringe movement that is more likely to cause befuddlement and laughter in those following it than lead to any social change, it serves as a good example of how confused many parts of the current left-wing are due to the erosion of the working class base of the left. I expect that insofar as the activists in these little fringe movements are able to continue their political career, they’ll eventually pivot to other movements – populist conservatism, yes, but one might even expect some Damascene conversions back to muscular liberalism on the way.