Okay we all know that already. I’m not reinventing the wheel.
But I think I am realizing why fascism does certain things and it is rooted in the fact that as capitalism hollows everything out and destroys the society that hosts it the capitalism disjunctions the social fabrics, breaking the social reproduction, and ultimately destabilizing or undoing all the unpaid labors that make society work - the humming substructure that capitalism grafted super structurally into.
So that’s why fascism always obsesses over birth rates and trad shit. It’s them scrabbling to unfuck society from all the ways capitalism fucked society. It’s their mad-hatted dash to pick up the pieces of the delicate shit their bosses broke
I’m phone posting in a mall and it smells like cheap cologne and Starbucks. I’m in the nest of the beast and I’m stewing on shit.
But I think I finally get it and can articulate why someone once said fascism is the immune system of capitalism, fascism is the fever. And it stuck to me. And I think this is how I make sense of it. Christmas shopping the Saturday before the holiday like a big dumb dope who didn’t plan ahead.
But hey I’m having fun, edibles rule.
neoliberalism IS fascism. Fascism is not a distinct thing from capitalism, they are the same thing, fascism is hyper-capitalism. The more intense the capitalist relations and the more one-sided and unopposed the class domination, the more “fascist” it appears to us. This is why the Nazis privatized everything. It really is that simple. Capitalism doesn’t “lead” to fascism, fascism is just its bare expression unmitigated by ideology or social guardrails installed by socialists.
So when that libertarian says real capitalism hasn’t been tried yet…
Empathy is the profit killer. Any sign of empathy and investors pull out.
Then you have to ask why certain critical industries and services are made private and subject to “investor” whims and feelings?
Wdym?
My guess is they are referring to hospitals, medical care, end of life care, housing, rehabilitation facilities, schools, daycares, etc.
All necessary for human survival and require great empathy, all of which are driven by profit considerations in our society which makes them make unempathetic choices for the bottom line - such as evicting people onto the streets, denying necessary medical care, letting children, the elderly and differently-abled be neglected, letting people die in great pain, euthanizing undesirable people, allowing high levels of suicide and deaths of despair, etc.
There’s a paradoxical nature to this, as is typical with fascism. The “retvrn to tradition” shit is definitely a response to the erosion of social cohesion and reproduction that capitalism creates. But ultimately, fascism only ever serves to reinforce capital’s grip on society and the political economy, thus it sabotages its own goals of restoring social bonds.
I think there’s a variety of reasons this happens; some fascists are entirely cynical and are just looking to get the plebs to blame anything but the capitalist class. Some fascists crouch the social restoration in terms of purging “undesirables” and don’t understand where social bonds actually come from. Some just reflexively defend anything with “traditional” vibes and that ends up including the capitalist class.
As imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, fascism is the highest stage of imperialism, all part of pathology of the same deal. Neolibs boast about the ability of capital to abolish all barriers to itself but ignore about what physics among other things has to say about infinite growth and their attempts to combat falling rate of profit as they do.
Fascism is the bourgeois of a state violently taking over to preserve their power preemptively in response to what they view as something that’s gonna overthrow them.
It’s why in Europe in the 30s it was a response to failed socialist revolutions in Europe.
It’s why now, the us bourgeois are being fascist, it knows China is over taking the US.
It’s like when an animal is dying and starts violently lashing out, it’s a last ditch effort to preserve power for the bourgeoisie.
You aren’t wrong, but it’s not the main thing. Everything you’re talking about with the birth rate talks and trad shit is a response or the bourgeois trying to violently change the material conditions back to when they were better for them.
In 30s Germany in was pre WW1
In the US now they want it to be the 60s-80s again
I guess the question is if capitalism is “successful” does fascism mean that the desired outcome is a reversion to feudalism?
Kinda seems like it does.
Edit: maybe “desired” is the wrong word, perhaps “natural” is more appropriate.
Nah, today nobody actually has a memory of feudalism to return to, the past they’re hearkening back to is just slightly earlier in the history of capitalism. As far as I know, this was broadly true of post-ww1 Germany too. For the most part, any “memory” of feudal life was received wisdom and cultural memory.
And fascists, being enabled by capitalists, cannot confront that it is capitalism that has caused the decline they exist in response to. So it’s like trying to return a marble to a “resting” position halfway down a slope. Each attempt only makes them more frustrated, more likely to lash out violently.
What is fascism but a nostalgia for a past that never existed? They’re trying to return to a fairy tale.
I really like that marble analogy
Partially. I don’t think we’ll see a return to manorial economics, the peasants will not be getting generational rights to live on the lord’s estate. But there’s definitely been a move back towards a private law system within the modern “lords” realm (mandatory arbitration keeps creeping farther and farther), and the oligarchal nature of current capitalism is leading the capitalist class away from market competition and towards collusion and price fixing. Thus profits have ceased being signs of success at market competition and are now more akin to rents.
The problem with seeing the current process as a reversion to feudalism is that one of the key elements of that system was that the workforce was tied to its land and lord. Capitalism comes to change that fact, making the workforce flow freely between territories, masters and professions (all to an extent, of course). This is one of the main factors for such an historical increase in productivity and nowadays it still goes on.
Yep, capitalism is a more efficient exploitation machine. It does away with any social/production bonds of the lord to the peasant or slave to the master. Under fudalism and chattel slavery, the owners of capital had an incentive to know and tend to the basic needs of their subjects/slaves. Working everyone to death, not providing shelter, not allowing them any food or water, kinda kills people.
Under capitalism, capitalists don’t have to give a shit if their employees have their basic needs met. If they don’t show for their shift, they just fire them and hire a new cog for the machine.
Both arrangements are vile, but capitalism adds all these layers of obfuscation that hide what’s really going on and feels all the more insidious.
Both arrangements are vile, but capitalism adds all these layers of obfuscation that hide what’s really going on and feels all the more insidious.
Absolutely. Sometimes in the heat of the conversation I have a hard time explaining to other people why wage labour is just another form of slavery, they look at me like a weirdo and say “But we are free to choose, nobody’s making us do anything!” among other nonsensical reasoning for which my patience is lacking.
If anyone has some good strategies to deal with this situation I’d gladly welcome them.
"Oh, you’re free to choose? Okay, choose to just do your dream job… Tell you what, choose to be rich! Better yet, choose to retire right now, stop working today!..
If you stop working, sooner or later you lose your healthcare, your home, your food! If you don’t work you fucking die!"
Shuts them up pretty quick.
