“They had every advantage of state power. They had the high ground. And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children.” This sounds like the sort of loosely translated thing Lenin might have said about the Tsarist regime to a session of the Comintern, probably followed by:  “An ovation breaks out. All present rise to their feet and applaud. The speaker tries to begin, but the applause and cries in all languages continue. The ovation does not abate.”

It is actually Steve Bannon in an interview with the Sunday Times (30/11/24) in which he displays a laudable contempt for political opponents who he says are now “infesting the Cotswolds”, adding to the plague of Clarkson, Cameron and the man from Blur.

Bannon does have some external characteristics of the Leninist. His grasp of the importance of propaganda and patiently explaining are similar. Not for him though the 2000 words to a page without pictures of the Iskra or the Weekly Worker. He slogged through six days a week of a four hour broadcast which has had a significant impact in pulling together the coalition that got Trump elected.

The way he used his time in prison is exactly what a revolutionary activist would do. The article says he delivered classes to other inmates, who were mostly Black and Hispanic on the nature of global economic systems and structures of power. “I just taught capital markets and everything like that.” On his release he went straight back into the fight and presented an episode of his show rather than take a week on the beach.

Ideology condensed into slogans

Like Lenin, Bannon has a massive hinterland of ideology. But just as most copies of Materialism and Empirio-criticism sit unread, Bannon has replicated Lenin’s achievement of distilling a body of ideas into some easily understood slogans. Instead of “peace, land, bread” and “all power to the soviets” Bannon has condensed all the conspiracist, misogynist, replacement theory, white supremacist whackery to “America first” and “damned migrants”.

That is the basic programme on which Bannon created Trump’s alliance, and it demonstrates an impressive tactical flexibility in creating a vehicle which gives working class people of virtually every ethnic background the illusion of having something in common with billionaires and fascists. So long as you are persuaded by the two core ideas you are free to believe whatever you want about vaccination or Hitler. An alliance like this has explosive contradictions at its heart, not the least of which is his attitude to the super rich whom he believes should be heavily taxed, an opinion Musk, Trump and Thiel are willing to ignore for the moment.

There is a twisted, nationalist parody of Leninist class consciousness in some of Bannon’s ideas. “We have to institutionalise the populist nationalist revolution in this country, and you only do that by seizing the institutions, purging them, reforming them, and remaking them in the image and likeness of the American people, the working men and women in this country.” This is reminiscent of Lenin’s The State and Revolution  where he sets out the aim of “not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it,”

For Bannon the working class is a group which exists solely in its own nation state. His ideas are an utter repudiation of working class internationalism, and while his much of his cadre may be working class and lower middle class, he is putting them at the service of the most reactionary sections of the ruling class.

Bannon does have a version of internationalism. He predicts that Farage will be the next British prime minister and an idea that would have seemed ludicrous three years ago at least feels plausible as Labour adopt his positions on migration and nationalism while having a very weak electoral mandate. France and Germany are set to shift decisively to the right in the near future with parties proposing ideas which owe a big debt to Bannon.

The Trump project is too volatile to say with any certainty how or when it will unravel, but it is obvious that Bannon and his fellow travellers have successfully delivered on their promise to deliver a “populist nationalist revolution” and have left their opponents as bewildered as the Romanovs.

While last week Just Stop Oil invited me to an “eco-psychotherapist workshop and talk to explore why we are here with each other, why we are here as a species at this time and how we can resource ourselves to keep faith in this storm” Bannon is apparently steaming ahead with academy for the Judeo-Christian West  which is described as a “gladiator school”.

The radical left has forgotten the value of Leninist ruthlessness when dealing with the class enemy, as anyone who has ever listened to Jeremy Corbyn will appreciate and the Democrats, Labour and European social democrats haven’t a clue how to respond to Trump, Farage and Le Pen.