Welcome back to
@Izucrisis's Incredible Internationales Iexhibition, once again here to delight and dazzle the posters of ElectionBetting.co.au
while I procrastinate on my thesis. First things first, you may notice a change in format. That's right, I've moved the previous entries to my sig instead of posting them at the top, which considering the chaos of doing the Third (goddamn you PKH for finally splitting just after I finished my post on the South-east Asian parties) was a long time coming.
Luckily for sad people, we're now out of a long stretch of functioning and relevant Internationales, and we can settle in for a good stretch of irrelevant oddballs with outsized egos from here...but we gotta cover this luverly bunch first. Sigh.
Member Parties of the Fifth Internationale (The Parisian One)
Defined in opposition to both the Worker Pluralism of the Third Internationale, and the more orthodox Leninism of the Fourth, the first of the Fifth Internationales perhaps should have received a different name, considering its opposition to internationalist ideals. Nevertheless, it remains an Internationale, and so I'm bound to cover it. As much as I wish I wasn't.
You can't really talk about this Fifth Internationale without talking about the Popular Rally of France. Marcel Déat's hissy fit over the Third Internationale's 1928 affirmation of the necessity of soviets (and also probably over letting the Labour Zionists join), and his subsequent walkout from the SFIO was what started the whole sorry enterprise.
Déat's main political theory was called "neosocialism", which despite initially seeming much more moderate than regular socialism with its talk of "revolution from above", was far more hostile to democracy (hence the walkout). He was weirdly schizo about the whole thing, though, considering how he lent on Marianne and other forms of republican symbolism, as opposed to most of the French far-right who were still jerking it to the Sun King. As for economics, it's a little unclear; he claimed to be 'socialist' because he still wanted a system of (technocratic) economic planning, but directly disavowed class conflict and worker's self-government in favour of "class collaboration", which in practice worked out to mean "the boss still treats you like shit but he pinky promises not to". On the social front...yeah, you all know this bit already.
Unfortunately to everyone in Europe, we got to see how this awful mess worked out in practice. I won't bother going over every last little detail--propping up de la Rocque, the Reclaim Alsace speech, the chaos after Déat's little friends in La Cagoule faked a communist attack[1]--but by 1936, Déat and his national revolution were in the French driving seat, and ready to avenge over 20 years of hurt by aiming his new war machine at Germany. And Spain. And Britain. And everyone else around. And also most of the people in his own country. Four years and several million deaths later, someone caught the Marshal hiding in the back of a train to Turin, and the Popular Rally's only major thinker was deservedly executed for his crimes against humanity. The party itself was banned by the Fourth Republic.
I'm doing the Union of Belgian Labourers and the Councils of the Neosocialist Offensive at once like this because from a theoretical and practical perspective, they were both mini-me's of the Rally. Sure, there were a few differences between them. The JoN's political history made it act more similarly to the Italian chunk of the Parisian Internationale, with their attempts at union outreach, and de Man's work on what he called planisme gives him a legitimate case that he was doing neosocialism before it was cool. On the other hand, at the end of the day they worked out quite similar in practice because they were both being propped up by French guns and so their only possible response to Paris saying "Jump" was "how high?". It turns out selling out your country doesn't give you the best platform to explain your personal take on socialism. Shocker.
This is in contrast to the German National Worker's Party who might have got a chance to be powerless puppets of the Rally if the July Offensive had worked out a bit better, but very much had their own thing going on before that. Technically older than the Rally if you count the bit when they were called something else, the party and its leader Eric Niekisch also had a more complex ideological justification for their bullshit. The bourgeoisie act as the enemy of nationalism because of their internationalism and dabbling in the financial markets [2], so a proletarian revolution is the only hope to form a nationalist state, end the docility of liberal European values, and restore the Prussian-Spartan spirit of hard labour and iron discipline. What, better working conditions? Are you a liberal? Ironically, Niekisch's life would only become harsh and Spartan once he got imprisoned for sympathising with France when the Revanchist War broke out, and without him the Party collapsed. RIP.
Another party that predated the Paris Declaration, the League of Proletarian Fascisti were, as the name somewhat suggests, working from a similar theoretical basis to the JoN, having taken Maurras' idea of "what if syndicalism but racist" and ran with it.
Edmondo Rossoni, the founder, started as an actual no-shit IWW member, who even helped Haywood flee to the Soviet Union and stalled the police while he packed in the upstairs of the
Proletario offices. According to him, though, the anti-Italian discrimination he experienced in New York from other comrades would cause him to reject internationalism, and when he returned to Italy he altered his ideas accordingly. Unlike most of the other parties here, though, he kept with a recognisably left-wing economic policy. Déat is even on record condemning him for "overambitious revolutionary doctrines that throttle national productivity" like *checks notes* a minimum wage. I mean, we all know he was a hypocrite, but it's still a little surprising to see the Maintainer of National Solidarity using the same arguments as our PM, noted socialist radical Campbell Newman.
In case you're starting to think he sounds hopped and/or red-mirrored, he also advocated Italian control of most of the Adriatic coast (claiming that the nation would already possess this if they'd taken part in the Great War [3]), and colonising most of North Africa and using the resources to enrich Italy, which as a "proletarian nation" that had been oppressed by the plutocratic ones needed building up. The irony here seems to have been lost on him. There was also the usual Sorelian bull about violence as the engine of history iron fists of revolution thrusting as one bloodshed makes me hard yadda yadda, which got him into a little trouble when he tried to marshal his followers into a mob to march on Rome in 1941. The military put down the protest with extreme prejudice, Rossoni himself being killed while "resisting arrest", and the party was banned as part of Victor Emmanuel's ascension to direct rule. A few of the survivors kept a sad little Continuity League going in Paris before the Germans shot them all.
Somehow the odd one out in an Internationale of odd ones out, the International Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist-Bordigist), again as the name suggests, were working from a far more orthodox approach to Communism than anyone else in the locality. I already did Bordiga's split from the PCI in the first Fourth Internationale post--popular front bad armchair good yadda yadda--so you're probably wondering how we got here from there. Well, the problem was that the OG Fourth Internationale wouldn't let him back in, and he couldn't form his own because Bordiga was in general impossible to work with. Why the Fifth? Well, rejecting elections and being completely unable to do armed rebellion drives the mind to strange places. Bordiga's latest and greatest Armchair Brainwave (as of 1938) was that Déat was going to overthrow capitalism and then collapse[4], achieving the greatest of Bordigist dreams--a revolution where they had to do absolutely nothing!
In practice, joining the Fifth Internationale meant absolutely nothing for these guys, because they refused to actually work with the rest of the organisation unless the League of Proletarian Fascisti were disaffiliated for *spit* having a revisionist ideological basis. Since the League actually had money and influence, and more importantly were more similar to the Rally, this was met with "lol no mate", so they left immediately. Ironically, this then led to Bordigist militias fighting League redshirts during Iron April...alongside the Popular Front they split from. I hate Italy so much it's unreal.
Anyway after 1944 the ICP claimed they'd never supported the Fifth Internationale at all, and in fact had never so much as heard of this "Paris", and even if that were so they'd done nothing wrong other than enjoying a succulent lasagne, thus avoiding being banned any more so than any of the other Communist parties were banned. Probably less so, given how they kept shopping Communists they disagreed with to the Carabinieri [5].
The story behind the Comrades of the Silver Badge is pretty convoluted. The party started out as the National Association of Discharged Soldiers, a group intended to safeguard the interests of British veterans of the Great War, who in the 1915 election backed a bunch of Labour and other independent candidates, nicknamed after the silver pin demobbed soldiers received. The fallout from the HMS Centurion mutiny ended up splitting the group, with the right-wingers who wanted the "Sailors and Workers Council" shot or at least discharged leaving[6]. Ironically, it was the left-wing bit that ended up more right-wing overall, because of Infantryman John Beckett's (discharged for heart trouble, but don't mention that) holiday to Belgium. After deciding that planisme and by extension neosocialism was the wave of the future, Beckett went home and, since the rump NADS (ooo-er matron!) consisted of three men and a dog, had no trouble changing course.
Despite being ostensibly still just a veteran's rights movement, the new Comrades' main policy would be one supported by basically no former soldiers--going back to war again, this time on France's side. Well, they were on France's side for some of the war, just--you know what I mean. Anyway the actual proper British far-right were concentrated around various smoking clubs filled with men with more weird racial subcategories than chins, so the reformed Silver Badge failed to find any money and wound down by the Forties after losing a frankly improbable number of deposits. Beckett went on to write a contrafact novel about a reality where Déat embraced Popular Credit and conquered the world, so I'm sure @SortEng will get in touch with his estate very soon w/r/t publication.
Somehow this wasn't as sad as the Union of Young Russia, whose combination of socialism and monarchism managed to throw simping into an already pathetic ideology. I'm not speaking ironically here, they sent so many letters to Olga Romanov her secretary built a bonfire with them. As you can imagine, their Glorious Protector of the Russian People not wanting to get within five feet of you was somewhat of a blow to the movement, given that the Tsar as infallible manifestation of the revolutionary will was sort of their whole thing. They did put up a decent showing at the 1932 Soviet elections, and even managed to attract some opposition from Kollontai. Specifically, a speech (more aimed at the Nardoniks, but it did mention them) about being dinosaurs left behind by history. While her loss did lead to them making a few funny posters and even a song [7], it kind of turns out she was right--by the time the Soviets joined the Anti-Revanchist War, there weren't even enough of them left to ban.
There were technically a few other major parties that were included. Most notably, the All-India Forward Bloc of Subhas Chandra Bose had a brief flirtation with them after being kicked out of the original Fourth Internationale (posts passim). It got quite affectionate on both sides, with Déat posing for photos with the Netaji and praising his rebuilding of Kolkata, and Bose crediting the Marshal with being a light of decolonisation, something that was probably news to the inhabitants of Algeria. Of course, this Internationale's whole thing was racism, so even if Bose's developmentalist centralism kind of lined up with their ideas, France's promised military support against the other Indian states never materialised. Bose got his own back by doing the diplomatic equivalent of pretending his phone was out of battery when Déat asked him for military support.
Finally, the most doubtfully included of any party on this list, the Labour Party of Ireland! No really. You see, despite being a regular-ass social democratic party, Ireland's deep Catholicism and the party's more workerist stance meant that a significant element of the party were cheering on the Kingdom of Spain during their civil war against the atheistic People's Republic. The pro-Nationalist faction managed to get supporting the Kingdom through as party policy because most of the rest of the party were scared of being accused of Communism, and since at this time Paris was desperately fishing for allies they sent a very ambiguously-worded letter to Irish Labour asking for their support for all Catholic workers against the Red Menace. Unsurprisingly, since they weren't crazy people, Labour didn't do much in their new club, but we did get a hilariously awkward photo of William Norton shaking hands with Déat and slowly realising that he's on the baddies' side.
There were of course other minor members, but I don't really feel like trawling through a bunch of ancient newspaper scans to track down the unique Swiss form of What if Leninism but Racist, so we're ending the post here for tonight lads. It's fascinating how, despite representing a theoretically vast body of opinion and recurring time and again throughout European politics, this form of centralised racist socialism never really took off, always weighed down by the theoretical baggage created to hide its own internal contradictions. It could certainly do some damage, but in the end it always petered out from chugging its own fumes.
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[1] Yes it was a fake attack, Deloncle literally went to that steelworks a week before and its owner was a massive donor to Déat. I'm not having this argument again @Hosslin, but if you want another kick? Shoot your shot.
[2] It's weird how many of these people don't want to just say "Jews". There's really no need to dress it up like this, guys. We all know.
[3] [Self-promotion voice] Something which doesn't happen in @Anders68's excellent TL Triple Ententes and Three Emperors, updating weekly on our beloved sister site WargameJournalling.co.au, expertly moderated by (among others) myself! [/Self-promotion voice]
[4] The weird "revolutionary foreign-policy" blog I found described this as coming from "the Kong-vs-Hundun school of international relations". I was tempted to steal that for this review, but the background was so janky I'm genuinely concerned the site put a hidden curse on me.
[5] Amadeo Bordiga Will Return, in...The Revitalised Fourth Internationale (available in forum posts Probably Some Time In April Maybe)
[6] I don't have to cover what happened to the rest because, thank kami, none of them joined an Internationale! If you're lucky maybe @Angry Mayo will find a low-quality library scan of their manifesto and/or the autobiography of the guy who did the tea at their meetings, and he'll somehow wring fifty thousand words of quality content out of it.
[7] Some mad fashy Soviet motherfucker managed to upload a recording of Who Must Go, Kollontai? and it's actually kind of a bop. If your interested, the link is here.