Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

Leon also explained how the Nazi Party, having witnessed the successful workers’ revolution in Russia, and seeing communism gaining political power in Germany, set out to deliberately weaken the importance of class in the minds of German workers. This was done by replacing class solidarity with racial solidarity, supplanting the common interests shared by all workers with the pleasures and rewards that flowed from belonging to the Aryan race, a bond that claimed to unite the poorest Christian workers with the wealthiest industrialists. But because workers and owners actually have starkly different interests under capitalism, that maneuver required a shadow, an evil twin. “Just as it is necessary to cast the different classes [of Aryans] into one single race,” Leon wrote, “so is it also necessary that this ‘race’ have only a single enemy: ‘the international Jew.’ The myth of race is necessarily accompanied by its ‘negative’—the antirace, the Jew.” This was a highly incisive analysis of the dialectical relationship between race and class within a white supremacist regime—Leon was arguing that class solidarity between workers, across ethnic lines, was the primary competition and threat to the Nazi project.