"What is needed in Alabama is a little kid to cry, "Daddy, the chairman has no brains, uh, [smack!] clothes..."

 

From TPM, this is the party former Congressman Artur Davis has embraced:

The head of the Alabama Republican Party this week threw his support behind one of the most far-fetched theories of the already bizarre birther movement. 

Speaking to a group of GOP diehards on Wednesday in Fairhope, Ala., party Chair Bill Armistead raved about a film called “Dreams From My Real Father.” The movie claims President Obama’s grandfather was a CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she’d been secretly impregnated by a communist.

The Mobile Press-Register reported that Armistead’s comments came after he was asked by someone in the group about another film, “2016: Obama’s Presidency,” which also weaves elaborate theories about the president’s upbringing.

“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” Armistead said, according to the newspaper. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it.”

Armistead’s comments were first posted to Twitter by the Press-Register’s political editor but quickly caught fire after being picked up by Right Wing Watch.

The 97-minute film, by director Joel Gilbert, has split the birther movement, which generally believes the president is not a natural born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president.

Instead of focusing on claims about the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate, the film is narrated by an Obama impersonator and claims the president is a closeted communist, bent on instilling a “classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad.” A disclaimer for the film notes that many of the scenes are “re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations.”

The film’s website does not list any upcoming screenings, but, according to the conspiracy site WND, Gilbert has said millions of copies were being sent to households in swing states this year.

Back in the bad old days of the worldwide communist conspiracy, you used to hear a lot of variations on the "classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda" from blowhards of all sorts.It sounds like the sort of think somebody who'd actually read the stuff would say, which was the point. "Marxist" was the more downmarket formulation; "Marxist-Leninist" was the stuff of those who came up when the Russians were the only non-theoretical game in town, nation-state-wise.The Cold War era sorts liked "Marxist-Stalinist" since Uncle Joe was the ally we bailed out and who then spurned us and took over all those little countries whose immigrants we didn't like because they had too many consonants in their names.

But the Alabama Republican Party chair's comments got me thinking, since Artus Davis is, above all things, a trimmer, and while he couldn't get elected governor as a Democrat, the Big Tent Party, desperate for another token, would doubtless love to elect him. So it makes sense to consider the views of the head of the party under whose standard Davis will run. Even if he doesn't, so fulsome was Davis' embrace of his new ideological home it makes a consideration of the man's intellectually gymnastics to imagine how he will explain away his party chair's views.

And that got me thinking about a more subtle point: just what is "classic" Marxism-Stalinism"? Has Marxism-Stalinism flavors, like Coke? By that measure, would Albania, whose past WW2 leader for life, Enver Hoxha, denounced both the Chinese and Soviet models of Communism as wimpy, and whose nation is now pretty wholly capitalist-embracing, be Coke Zero? Or would that be China, whose late leader Deng Tsiao-Peng, explained away the party's embrace of making money over ideology by saying, "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice?"

These things get pretty arcane, as this bulletin board comment from 2009 demonstrates:

 

The idea of an era of "classical Marxism" suggests that there was a time when Marxism flourished to potential, in way that its essence was clearly defined, typified or "branded" in an exemplary way, to the highest standard. This kind of Marxism would be an authentic continuation of the ideas of Marx and Engels. This then contrasts with other, later kinds of Marxisms, which contained innovations which were not consistent with what Deutscher called "the grammar of classical Marxism". For example, the innovation of "socialism in one country" was, according to Deutscher, not consistent with classical Marxism; Stalinism was a sort of mongrel Marxism in his view. 

Now, in point of historical fact, there is really very little historical evidence to support this sort of interpretation, and Deutscher's idea is essentially ideological and eschatological. He propagates a myth, in the same way that conservatives project a "golden age" in the past when things were supposedly so much better than they are today, an age to which we should return. It was impossible for a classical Marxism to exist, because most socialists had read mainly just Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Kautsky's The Class Struggle, or his Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, and possibly the Communist Manifesto (bear in mind that radical literature was banned in most countries). 

The function of the myth is essentially apologetic and inspirational: Deutscher wants to convey that originally Marxism had intellectual creativity and moral-political integrity, but then it took a "wrong turn" and became debased into an instrument of tyranny. Roughly speaking, "classical Marxism" supposedly existed from about 1847 to 1924, or, if you want to exclude the founders of the tradition, from 1896 to 1924, 1924 being the year Lenin died (you could possibly extend the turning point to 1926, when the era of working class militancy began to wane). 

So in this theory you had about two decades which were the "glory days" of Marxism, associated with the rapid growth of a unionized labour movement, which began to form its own political parties and engaged in militant action. After that things turned bad, and rational-scientific discussion became impossible. 

In the real world, in real history, the debate with Bernstein was at the time not really all that politically significant, and indeed not very widely known outside the middle class leftist intelligentsia. It is just that in the aftermath of the first world war, it became much more significant, because it seemed to say something about the intellectual roots of crucial decisions which had ended up affecting the lives of millions. 

In 1914, for example, there were few people who knew and read about the speeches of the Zimmerwald conference attended by Lenin and Trotsky. But in retrospect, their condemnation of the leadership of the Second International became highly significant. It was just that with the victory of the Russian revolution, the new Russian government could disseminate a lot of printed material casting things in a different light.

If you believe that Kautsky supported the vote for the war credits, you are simply WRONG. 

In reality, although Kautsky was himself not even a member of the Reichstag, he was invited in August 1914 by the Reichstag fraction of the SPD to attend a discussion about whether to vote for the war credits or not. Kautsky advised AGAINST it - with the suggestion of the possibility of an abstention from the vote - but he lost. Like Marx, Kautsky articulated the "conscience of the Left", but politically he was pretty useless. 

On 4th August 1914, the complete SPD parliamentary fraction with no exception, voted FOR the war credits. This in fact meant the end of the centrist political perspective Kautsky had elaborated in the previous 35 years, and the end of his political influence in the SPD. 

In reality, Kautsky TOGETHER with Hugo Haase and Eduard Bernstein in 1916 began to oppose the war policy of the SPD majority politically. 

This led to a split in the SPD in 1917, and the creation of the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party) which in turn meant that Kautsky also forfeited his position as chief editor of the SPD journal Die Neue Zeit, which he had held since 1901 (in fact he was sacked by the SPD bosses at the very moment he was editing the issue of 5 October 1917)...

In the case of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, though, the answer seems clearer: there's no such thing. A Google search, drawing on all the gazillions of docs in is maw, produced exactly nothing  answering to "classic Marxism-Stalinism"* . He's just blowing smoke out- well, maybe "all hat and no cattle" will be more apt.

Thus the state of intellectual ferment in Artur Davis' newfound ideological home.

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*It's not even a googlewhack.