☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 14.1K Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Duty calls
    4·
    3 days ago

    What actually happened in Germany was that capitalists funded the nazis, and social democrats sided with them against the communists.

    After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

    To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

    To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

    In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.

    In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

    During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

    In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

    In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.

    True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.

    https://welshundergroundnetwork.cymru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoEconomics@lemmy.ml•The U.S.-China decoupling arrives
    1·
    3 days ago

    Trump is forcing decoupling, but he clearly hasn’t thought through the consequences. We’ve already seen him backtrack on electronics tariffs which are the most critical import from China. And with companies stockpiling inventory, the real shock hasn’t hit yet. Once those stockpiles run out, the picture will look very different.

    The most likely outcome is a US recession triggered by collapsing consumption. Many Americans were already relying on credit just to afford essentials which means they can’t absorb even higher prices. Debt defaults will follow, potentially spiraling into another 2008-style crisis.

    Another problem with this strategy is that consumption is America’s only real leverage in global negotiations. The entire pitch for siding with the US over China hinges on its consumer market. But if that market shrinks, the argument falls apart. If Trump forces a binary choice, China simply has more to offer. Even the EU now sees China as a more rational partner.

    Meanwhile, the idea that tariffs alone will revive US manufacturing is pure fantasy. No rational investor will pour money into a shrinking economy. Rebuilding factories, supply chains, and skilled labor would take billions and decades, it’s far too much risk for far too little reward. That’s why financial capital abandoned US industry in the first place. Tariffs just function as a stealth tax on consumers. If Trump was serious about reshoring, there would need to be capital controls or massive public investment, but nobody’s even discussing that.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoSocialism@lemmy.ml•The Ineffectiveness of Anarchism Under Capitalism and the Authoritarian Nature of Revolution
    2·
    3 days ago

    That’s what I find appealing about anarchism - focusing on organizing people and building the new world now, in your community, in whatever ways you can.

    I don’t see how that’s exclusive to anarchism, communists do the exact same thing and that’s a prerequisite for having any sort of a revolution. The difference is that communists organize with this greater goal in mind and they accept the necessary power structures from the start. That’s why communists have managed to achieve many successful revolutions around the world.

    We’re at a point where we need to get people organized at all, and the best way to do that is to start making their lives tangibly better.

    Sure, the west is no where close to a revolutionary moment right now, and any kind of organizing is ultimately better than no organizing. We can agree on that.

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