May Day Fever

Yesterday was May Day, a celebration of spring, maypoles, and, of course, World Communism. In Russia, the Communist Party had its annual demonstration, though with a few changes—the slogan "Workers of the World Unite," for example, was replaced with the less stirring "We Want to Have a Worthy Life!" While The Moscow Times reports that Communist rallies usually feature "thousands of nostalgic pensioners," it adds that the Reds made a special effort this year to bring in younger marchers, with "humor and theatrical performance," plus a special march on hands and knees from Leningradsky Station to the Lenin statue on Kaluzhskaya Ploshchad.

Communism has undergone some odd mutations in these post-Cold War days. The creepiest species to emerge is National Bolshevism, the logical extension of the red-brown alliance between Communists and Nationalists in the Russian government. Advocates of this view are given to making statements like, "Beyond 'rights' and 'lefts,' there's one and indivisible Revolution, in the dialectical triad 'third Rome—third Reich—third International.'" Of course, left and right have always been fluid categories; today, at times, they seem to have been bulldozed away.

There's precedent for this, of course, from the Hitler-Stalin pact to Marcus "We Were the First Fascists" Garvey's alliance with the Ku Klux Klan. But the new developments seem particularly strange, and not just because some National Bolsheviks have also mixed occultism into their ideological brew. Outside Russia, influenced by the National Bolsheviks, some have taken to calling themselves "National Anarchists." To fuse the philosophies of the total state and no state at all—that takes a particularly creative madness. Interestingly, the most prominent such fusionist in the United States sometimes writes for Pravda.

There were May Day marches in France, too—not for Communism, but against the ultra-right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. According to The Washington Post, the French marchers included "Communists marching behind red banners, students, environmentalists, anarchists and even advocates of liberalized marijuana laws, who held a sign that said 'Le Pen Needs A Joint!'" Meanwhile, the French New Right's leading intellectual—Alain de Benoist, a somewhat more sophisticated thinker than the National Bolsheviks—talks of obliterating the old political spectrum, resisting consumerism, respecting the "national identities" of immigrants and former colonies, and challenging the Greens as the foremost opponents of globalization. He's broken with Le Pen over the issue of racism, but some admirers of his doctrines have nonetheless joined the National Front. One has even claimed that "the National Front is the movement in France that best defends multiculturalism."

Who knows? Ten years from now, on May Day, some of those French Communists may find themselves marching against…themselves.