Tendency is all I was ever talking about. I explicitly said I don't think Social Democracy is Fascism, was just explaining why Stalin used the term. Again, WW2 doesn't disprove the fact that in revolutionary moments they tend to side with the reactionaries/fascists. War time is obviously a different scenario.
War time is "when push comes to shove," right? It doesn't make sense to claim that "when push comes to shove, social democrats will side with fascists" when we've seen push come to shove come to invading other countries, and the reaction of social democrats in that situation was to side with communists against fascists.
Of course, you can point to (smaller, more muddled) counterexamples, but all that means is that there isn't really a noticeable tendency.
This appears to me as SocDems reacting in a nationalist manner to Germany as a threat and a rival rather than SocDems reacting in a specifically antifascist manner, though they attempted to take those aesthetics. The second the bigger threat to their nationalist interests ended they sided once again against communism and communists.
Within Germany as the Nazis were rising the SocDems kept viewing the Nazis as a far lesser threat than the communists, who they just over a decade ago had literally slaughtered during the German revolution using the proto-fascist militias.
That reading of how non-German socdems responded to the rise of Nazi Germany sounds reasonable, but I think it's pretty far from Stalin's idea that socdems were anticommunist above all else, to the point where they operated basically hand-in-hand with fascists. If fascism can become such a big threat that your social democracy sides with communists against it, your social democracy is doing something closer to conventional geopolitical maneuvering than to picking sides based on ideology.
Bringing up nationalism as another distinct ideological factor is also a good point. There's more to these situations (especially in the imperial periphery) than just fascism vs. communism.
I've stated that I'm referring to revolution several times no? If you're trying to claim that periods of war and revolution are indistinguishable in the incentives/conditions they create I completely disagree. Even the Nationalists allied with the Communists during the war against Japan, and we all know the course of history after that. There's no denying that SocDems alongside liberals, conservatives, and Communists, fought against Nazi Germany I'm not saying otherwise.
Stalin's original comment was not limited to revolutions (it was from 1924, before the vast majority of communist revolutions got off the ground), and your original comment in this thread mentioned nothing about revolutions. And as many revolutions involve war, there isn't a clean distinction between the two concepts, anyway.
It's not a good take if you have to ignore the largest conflict of the 20th century to make it sensible, and if you have to assume a statement made in the 1920s was meant to apply to the Cold War but not the larger hot conflict that came before it.
It's a socialist forum, I assumed people would know what I meant when I said "when push comes to shove" in relation to SocDems. It's not specific enough, my mistake. For the 748373th time, I don't agree with Stalin I'm just giving my take on why someone would link Social Democracy with Fascism.
And as many revolutions involve war, there isn’t a clean distinction between the two anyway.
There's a clear distinction in the war between a country's revolutionaries and counterevolutionaries and a war between a country and some foreign invader let's not be silly here. The times where the two overalp only prove my point.
How is the largest conflict in human history not "when push comes to shove" as much as anything? It doesn't make any sense to write off WWII when considering the accuracy of such a big, bold claim. It doesn't make any sense to write off the most direct, dire threat social democratic countries have ever faced -- that involved open war between fascists and communists -- when making sweeping predictions about who they're likely to side with in a contest between fascists and communists.
Even making the much more limited claim that "in a revolutionary context, social democrats are more likely to side with fascists than communists" runs into a fair amount of historical trouble. For starters, many revolutionary contexts don't fit neatly into fascism vs. communism. Fidel Castro didn't hold himself out as a communist until months (if not years) after the Cuban Revolution, and when he did it was primarily because the U.S. had made its hostility clear. Ho Chi Minh famously modeled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the American Declaration of Independence and sought an alliance with the U.S. after WWII. You have situations like Chile, where Allende's government was better described as social democracy than communism. You have situations like Venezuela, where Chavismo isn't exactly communism, and where the stooge backed by the U.S. is pretty close to social democracy. You have situations like Jamaica and Sierra Leone where a social democracy granted independence to former colonies in a situation where independence was popular but there was no movement worth calling a revolution.
Even that more limited claim has some pretty major shortcomings, and that's before we get to how little application it has to any sort of movement towards American socialism.
For the 748373th time
We've had a pretty short exchange where we've been clarifying our points. There's no reason to pretend you've had to repeat the same exact thing over and over and over and over again.
We’ve had a pretty short exchange where we’ve been clarifying our points. There’s no reason to pretend you’ve had to repeat the same exact thing over and over and over and over again.
One would think you would understand them by now then. Done engaging with you.
yeah they are pissed at you because you are pinning them to "when push comes to shove", a phrase they only used once and which, once contested, they immediately, repeatedly clarified towards a more nuanced position talking about revolutionary context. In that light YOU are refusing to engage with their argument in a miserably pedantic, sniping way. It's a testament to their character that you got as much text out of them as you did before they gave up on you.
Even making the much more limited claim that “in a revolutionary context, social democrats are more likely to side with fascists than communists” runs into a fair amount of historical trouble.
This is a claim
For starters, many revolutionary contexts don’t fit neatly into fascism vs. communism.
This seems to be the beginning of you reinforcing that claim.
Fidel Castro didn’t hold himself out as a communist until months (if not years) after the Cuban Revolution, and when he did it was primarily because the U.S. had made its hostility clear. Ho Chi Minh famously modeled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the American Declaration of Independence and sought an alliance with the U.S. after WWII. You have situations like Chile, where Allende’s government was better described as social democracy than communism. You have situations like Venezuela, where Chavismo isn’t exactly communism, and where the stooge backed by the U.S. is pretty close to social democracy. You have situations like Jamaica and Sierra Leone where a social democracy granted independence to former colonies in a situation where independence was popular but there was no movement worth calling a revolution.
This is basically a bulleted list of extremely different places with extremely different circumstances, linked vaguely under the umbrella of revolutionary action. You don't even use the words social democracy until you insinuate that Juan Guaido, a LITERAL CIA OPERATION, is somehow an example of how social democracy is NOT at least tentatively linked with fascism. It's trash.
YTA. fix your engagement style. Moreover, get over the part of yourself that gets frustrated to be argued against.
I addressed the "in a revolutionary context" qualifier at length after first pointing out that it's not part of the Stalin comment OP asked about. Rather than discuss any of that, they got pissy about how exhausting it is to have a short conversation.
your whole attitude throughout the exchange oozes undeserved self-superiority
Hysterical coming from someone who just dropped an unsolicited, reddit-tier YTA comment.
Except they did. Socdems took up positions aligned with fascists before the war was even over. Greece is the best example imo. The British Labour Party and then the Truman era USA continued to arm literal nazis to continue the fight fight away against the communist factions of the Greek Resistance. Socdems broadly did not protest the western powers assuming an immediate militant stance against the Soviet Union. Even the socdem successes like the welfare state in the UK or France are built specifically to keep workers sated due to the USSR being right there on the other side of the curtain. They instituted policies with the intent of giving the workers enough that they had something to lose. All the while continuing undeniably fascistic wars in Asia and Africa, where they didn't have to appeal to a base of their own supporters of citizens.
Attlee was a committed social democrat and did some fantastic shit on the homefront, and also backed literal Nazis before the decade was out. Also I think "when push comes to shove" can be outside of war time tbf. In war it is easier to form an alliance like that, but when it is over and actually making peace and accepting one another is when push comes to shove, the other shoe dropped and they chose fascist collaborators rather than share a world with the Soviets.
Nothing socdems did to help fascists after the war (or before it) matters half as much as actually aligning with the USSR and actually fighting Nazi Germany. If you had read Stalin's statement on the eve of WWII (it was originally made in 1924) you would have thought he'd expect the social democratic countries to align with the fascists against the communists. They did the exact opposite.
This doesn't mean that social democrats are BFFs with communists, but it does substantially weaken the argument that "when the chips are down, social democrats tend to side with fascists," and it disproves the type of absolutist claim Stalin made in his original comment. We can't claim to have politics informed by history and then ignore the most obvious, most relevant bit of history just because accounting for it would make something Stalin said look like a bad take.
WW2 wouldn’t have even happened if SocDems hadn’t armed fascists to kill communists beforehand, so your notion that WW2 somehow disproves this is ridiculous.
Any statement beginning with "WWII wouldn't have happened if" is highly speculative at best. The Treaty of Versailles was a ticking time bomb right from the start, and that wasn't a controversial opinion even at the time.
But in any event, Stalin's claim is about who socdems will side with "when the chips are down," not who they'll opportunistically sell to in peacetime. And they sold to everyone, including the Soviet Union. You can say that socdems aren't reliably anti-fascist, but claiming that they're literally another wing of fascism is silly when a bunch of them went to war against fascists.
By “went to war against fascists” do you actually mean “fought back against a foreign country once it literally attacked them first”? That bar is so low it’s underground.
I didn’t say they sold weapons to anybody. I said they literally armed fascists to kill communists rather than allow communists to take power in Germany. Yes, WW2 would not have happened if they hadn’t done that. Your thesis is trash tbh.
They murdered Rosa, they murdered the Ruhr Red Army, they murdered Levine and the Bavarian Council Republic by aligning with the military, they wiped out the Bremen Soviet Republic, they carried out Blutmai, put down the March Action, among a shitload of other things.
I do really loath the "such and such war wouldn't have happened" thing, I especially try not to do it with WWI AND WWII, but if anything applies it is the literal creation of the Friekorps
Except it does matter about as much. They helped facilitate the Nazis getting power in the first place. They then continued the Nazis projects. The history shows that socdems align with and enable fascism. That Nazi Germany arising in the first place required the socdems to murder communists and create fascist militias. That is material to, and cannot be divorced from their later opposition to Hitler. You are acting like fighting against the Nazis exists in a vacuum, while aiding fascism does not and in fact is made null due to they helping mop up their mess.
They also do tend to side with fascists since before and after the big example, they have done so. We cannot make ww2 the singular case of fascism that matters. Socdem enabling of fascism in Latin America and elsewhere, or post-war Europe matters and is a stain on them that fighting the nazis for a time cannot clean away. You want to take some history and say that refutes the import or significance of other history before and after. The point is socdems can exist with fascism, they helped it become a thing in the first place. Fighting Hitler and then immediately protecting fascists' post-war does not somehow refute the point. It speaks to the ability of social democracy to facilitate fascism. It _can oppose fascism, but fascism also seems to rely on its help
Tendency is all I was ever talking about. I explicitly said I don't think Social Democracy is Fascism, was just explaining why Stalin used the term. Again, WW2 doesn't disprove the fact that in revolutionary moments they tend to side with the reactionaries/fascists. War time is obviously a different scenario.
War time is "when push comes to shove," right? It doesn't make sense to claim that "when push comes to shove, social democrats will side with fascists" when we've seen push come to shove come to invading other countries, and the reaction of social democrats in that situation was to side with communists against fascists.
Of course, you can point to (smaller, more muddled) counterexamples, but all that means is that there isn't really a noticeable tendency.
This appears to me as SocDems reacting in a nationalist manner to Germany as a threat and a rival rather than SocDems reacting in a specifically antifascist manner, though they attempted to take those aesthetics. The second the bigger threat to their nationalist interests ended they sided once again against communism and communists.
Within Germany as the Nazis were rising the SocDems kept viewing the Nazis as a far lesser threat than the communists, who they just over a decade ago had literally slaughtered during the German revolution using the proto-fascist militias.
That reading of how non-German socdems responded to the rise of Nazi Germany sounds reasonable, but I think it's pretty far from Stalin's idea that socdems were anticommunist above all else, to the point where they operated basically hand-in-hand with fascists. If fascism can become such a big threat that your social democracy sides with communists against it, your social democracy is doing something closer to conventional geopolitical maneuvering than to picking sides based on ideology.
Bringing up nationalism as another distinct ideological factor is also a good point. There's more to these situations (especially in the imperial periphery) than just fascism vs. communism.
Theres definitely more nuance to it yeah.
I've stated that I'm referring to revolution several times no? If you're trying to claim that periods of war and revolution are indistinguishable in the incentives/conditions they create I completely disagree. Even the Nationalists allied with the Communists during the war against Japan, and we all know the course of history after that. There's no denying that SocDems alongside liberals, conservatives, and Communists, fought against Nazi Germany I'm not saying otherwise.
Stalin's original comment was not limited to revolutions (it was from 1924, before the vast majority of communist revolutions got off the ground), and your original comment in this thread mentioned nothing about revolutions. And as many revolutions involve war, there isn't a clean distinction between the two concepts, anyway.
It's not a good take if you have to ignore the largest conflict of the 20th century to make it sensible, and if you have to assume a statement made in the 1920s was meant to apply to the Cold War but not the larger hot conflict that came before it.
It's a socialist forum, I assumed people would know what I meant when I said "when push comes to shove" in relation to SocDems. It's not specific enough, my mistake. For the 748373th time, I don't agree with Stalin I'm just giving my take on why someone would link Social Democracy with Fascism.
There's a clear distinction in the war between a country's revolutionaries and counterevolutionaries and a war between a country and some foreign invader let's not be silly here. The times where the two overalp only prove my point.
How is the largest conflict in human history not "when push comes to shove" as much as anything? It doesn't make any sense to write off WWII when considering the accuracy of such a big, bold claim. It doesn't make any sense to write off the most direct, dire threat social democratic countries have ever faced -- that involved open war between fascists and communists -- when making sweeping predictions about who they're likely to side with in a contest between fascists and communists.
Even making the much more limited claim that "in a revolutionary context, social democrats are more likely to side with fascists than communists" runs into a fair amount of historical trouble. For starters, many revolutionary contexts don't fit neatly into fascism vs. communism. Fidel Castro didn't hold himself out as a communist until months (if not years) after the Cuban Revolution, and when he did it was primarily because the U.S. had made its hostility clear. Ho Chi Minh famously modeled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the American Declaration of Independence and sought an alliance with the U.S. after WWII. You have situations like Chile, where Allende's government was better described as social democracy than communism. You have situations like Venezuela, where Chavismo isn't exactly communism, and where the stooge backed by the U.S. is pretty close to social democracy. You have situations like Jamaica and Sierra Leone where a social democracy granted independence to former colonies in a situation where independence was popular but there was no movement worth calling a revolution.
Even that more limited claim has some pretty major shortcomings, and that's before we get to how little application it has to any sort of movement towards American socialism.
We've had a pretty short exchange where we've been clarifying our points. There's no reason to pretend you've had to repeat the same exact thing over and over and over and over again.
One would think you would understand them by now then. Done engaging with you.
OK, fuck off you condescending asshole.
yeah they are pissed at you because you are pinning them to "when push comes to shove", a phrase they only used once and which, once contested, they immediately, repeatedly clarified towards a more nuanced position talking about revolutionary context. In that light YOU are refusing to engage with their argument in a miserably pedantic, sniping way. It's a testament to their character that you got as much text out of them as you did before they gave up on you.
This is a claim
This seems to be the beginning of you reinforcing that claim.
This is basically a bulleted list of extremely different places with extremely different circumstances, linked vaguely under the umbrella of revolutionary action. You don't even use the words social democracy until you insinuate that Juan Guaido, a LITERAL CIA OPERATION, is somehow an example of how social democracy is NOT at least tentatively linked with fascism. It's trash.
YTA. fix your engagement style. Moreover, get over the part of yourself that gets frustrated to be argued against.
I addressed the "in a revolutionary context" qualifier at length after first pointing out that it's not part of the Stalin comment OP asked about. Rather than discuss any of that, they got pissy about how exhausting it is to have a short conversation.
Hysterical coming from someone who just dropped an unsolicited, reddit-tier YTA comment.
you're not learning
Learn deez nuts
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
Now this is a synthesis we can agree on comrade
Right back at ya :gigachad:
Except they did. Socdems took up positions aligned with fascists before the war was even over. Greece is the best example imo. The British Labour Party and then the Truman era USA continued to arm literal nazis to continue the fight fight away against the communist factions of the Greek Resistance. Socdems broadly did not protest the western powers assuming an immediate militant stance against the Soviet Union. Even the socdem successes like the welfare state in the UK or France are built specifically to keep workers sated due to the USSR being right there on the other side of the curtain. They instituted policies with the intent of giving the workers enough that they had something to lose. All the while continuing undeniably fascistic wars in Asia and Africa, where they didn't have to appeal to a base of their own supporters of citizens.
Attlee was a committed social democrat and did some fantastic shit on the homefront, and also backed literal Nazis before the decade was out. Also I think "when push comes to shove" can be outside of war time tbf. In war it is easier to form an alliance like that, but when it is over and actually making peace and accepting one another is when push comes to shove, the other shoe dropped and they chose fascist collaborators rather than share a world with the Soviets.
Nothing socdems did to help fascists after the war (or before it) matters half as much as actually aligning with the USSR and actually fighting Nazi Germany. If you had read Stalin's statement on the eve of WWII (it was originally made in 1924) you would have thought he'd expect the social democratic countries to align with the fascists against the communists. They did the exact opposite.
This doesn't mean that social democrats are BFFs with communists, but it does substantially weaken the argument that "when the chips are down, social democrats tend to side with fascists," and it disproves the type of absolutist claim Stalin made in his original comment. We can't claim to have politics informed by history and then ignore the most obvious, most relevant bit of history just because accounting for it would make something Stalin said look like a bad take.
WW2 wouldn’t have even happened if SocDems hadn’t armed fascists to kill communists beforehand, so your notion that WW2 somehow disproves this is ridiculous.
Any statement beginning with "WWII wouldn't have happened if" is highly speculative at best. The Treaty of Versailles was a ticking time bomb right from the start, and that wasn't a controversial opinion even at the time.
But in any event, Stalin's claim is about who socdems will side with "when the chips are down," not who they'll opportunistically sell to in peacetime. And they sold to everyone, including the Soviet Union. You can say that socdems aren't reliably anti-fascist, but claiming that they're literally another wing of fascism is silly when a bunch of them went to war against fascists.
By “went to war against fascists” do you actually mean “fought back against a foreign country once it literally attacked them first”? That bar is so low it’s underground.
I didn’t say they sold weapons to anybody. I said they literally armed fascists to kill communists rather than allow communists to take power in Germany. Yes, WW2 would not have happened if they hadn’t done that. Your thesis is trash tbh.
They murdered Rosa, they murdered the Ruhr Red Army, they murdered Levine and the Bavarian Council Republic by aligning with the military, they wiped out the Bremen Soviet Republic, they carried out Blutmai, put down the March Action, among a shitload of other things.
I do really loath the "such and such war wouldn't have happened" thing, I especially try not to do it with WWI AND WWII, but if anything applies it is the literal creation of the Friekorps
Except it does matter about as much. They helped facilitate the Nazis getting power in the first place. They then continued the Nazis projects. The history shows that socdems align with and enable fascism. That Nazi Germany arising in the first place required the socdems to murder communists and create fascist militias. That is material to, and cannot be divorced from their later opposition to Hitler. You are acting like fighting against the Nazis exists in a vacuum, while aiding fascism does not and in fact is made null due to they helping mop up their mess.
They also do tend to side with fascists since before and after the big example, they have done so. We cannot make ww2 the singular case of fascism that matters. Socdem enabling of fascism in Latin America and elsewhere, or post-war Europe matters and is a stain on them that fighting the nazis for a time cannot clean away. You want to take some history and say that refutes the import or significance of other history before and after. The point is socdems can exist with fascism, they helped it become a thing in the first place. Fighting Hitler and then immediately protecting fascists' post-war does not somehow refute the point. It speaks to the ability of social democracy to facilitate fascism. It _can oppose fascism, but fascism also seems to rely on its help