The United States is and always has been a fascist nation, the head of imperialism the world over. Even if Mao rose from the dead and was elected president tomorrow that would not change one bit.
That's historically reductive. America was founded as a progressive step forwards from the sanguine class rule of late-stage feudalism to bougeoise capitalism. Of course as it matured and cemented itself as the dominant class system it moved towards conservative and later reactionary stances as the next stages of socio-economic class relates were developed.
Additionally, colonialism predates fascism by centuries and influenced the growth of the internal ideological underpinnings of fascism. To use an allegory, it would be like calling a Tyrannosaurus rex a chicken. There's evolutionary connections between the two yet they are distinct from one another in character and form. To wrap it up without writing an essay, America is still an imperialist state in the Leninist sense and has not yet degerarated into a fascist state. The evidence for this is that we, communists-anarchists-socialists-trade unionists, are neither dead in unmarked graves nor in hiding from the state, unions are able to and are growing stronger, and there are no fascist vanguard or mass parties in charge of the state.
I'd actually argue we have devolved into a fascist state. You have things like suggesting sending in the National Guard to relieve labor shortages (not just break a strike), Biden asking truckers and dockworkers to go 24/7 out of "patriotic duty", you have airline CEOs openly influencing public health bodies to lower COVID quarantine times for purely business reasons, you have private media companies taking stories directly from the DoD and intelligence community press releases. You have the massive US prison system with widespread forced labor, much of which is in private prisons. You have the overseas adventures justified by flimsy reasons that boil down to "we deserve it/they don't". Anarchists and M-Ls aren't in literal concentration camps, but look at the Steven Donzegar case (contempt of court charge from a corporate judge just for winning a judgement against Chevron). We all know about Gitmo and the Supermax prison system, and we've all heard the stern warnings about the coming crackdown on "domestic terror".
There's historical precedent for all of those happening before the creation of fascism.
Are you going to tell me that Louis the sun king (can't be bothered to look up which number) was a fascist because the prison system under his rule used prisoners as free penal labor?
That the free newspapers under that whiny walrus mustached Prussian dipshit Bismark didn't push state propaganda handed to then?
Go name a handful of countries that hasn't used the soldiery as labor in their nation, its a common occurrence through history. Shit even the Rus.Fed used their military as cops sometimes.
I'm not knowledgeable about history of capitalist fuckery during pandemics since that's not my usual field of study therefore I can not say either way, but I'm going to be a debatebro and say if
airline CEOs openly influencing public health bodies to lower COVID quarantine times for purely business reasons
is a quantifiable mark of a fascist state, then by your logic actual fascist states that existed fail to meet that standard.
I'll also apply that as well to the Steven Donzegar case, since as far as I'm aware that precedent wasn't made in nazi Germany or fascist italy.
The point I'm making is that unless you're planning to make a historical blanket statement that everything is fascism, then you should probably spend some time analyzing the differences between fascist states and imperialist states. Portugal and Spain would be excellent studies since they lasted years longer than their more infamous counterparts.
Slavery started in America after an early attempt at labor organization in Jamestown. In response to striking white workers, they began importing slaves from Africa.
I feel like this is a loaded question, but it was when America was a set of colonies. Some of them were British. Others were French, or German, or Dutch.
Indeed therefore it was an implementation by the British establishment, which the American bougeoise inherited after their revolution, with portions of the new bougeoise state taking measures to abolish slavery while other portions sustained it.
But the British establishment really didn't have a say in whether or not Jamestown started importing slaves. It was the Virginian bourgeoisie who made that choice. Had they acted to prevent it (unlikely considering there wasn't really an abolitionist movement to speak of) the revolution would have started much differently.
That's liberal historical revisionism that proposes that the British Empire, which continued it's historical support for slavery well after the American Revolution, such as materially supporting the Confederate slavers in their rebellion against the U.S, was somehow more progressive in its economic and political system.
Gerald Horne is a right-revisionist anti-marxist who cherry picks and selectively quotes his sources to present his case for historical revisionism. That is to say he does not look at sources and writes his historical thesis to fit the sources, he writes his historical thesis and then makes the sources fit it.
People seem to really like the "it was just to/even significantly about" stopping the abolition of slavery narrative. Like even if you wanna make that case, the audacity of saying it was the "principle motivation" is just a fabrication. I think it was the director of the Freestate of Jones who, when 1619 pulled this bullshit, said very simply that if colonies like the Carolinas wanted independence for that reason the evidence would be in the historical record. They wouldn't hide it.
Beyond that, the record and iirc the very declaration outright states that the tyranny of the British had in part to do with dictating terms on their behalf with natives, ie the British crown didn't want to keep paying for expansion at a haphazard rate, so they made pacts which settlers hated.
I don't dislike Horne at all, but I swear he better not become the next Furr
I think Horne's heart is genuinely in the right place, and enjoy his writing. Outside of the glaring issues he has, the history he writes about is outstandingly educational and touches on aspects of history commonly left out, namely his application of historical materialism through ensuring the reader has context of global powers in that moment of history in order to understand the decisions regional groups would make.
I really wanna read his work on sailors. Been on my list for a while. 'Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica'
It just sucks that people eat up essentialist takes wholesale
So, what I'm going to say is oral history from old communist party members who were in the Party at the same time as Gerald Horne and knew him. It also relates to the party commission known as the "committee of correspondence", of whom famous names such as Angela Davis, Pete Seeger, were members of or closely associated to. The CoC during the 70s and 80s was home of the CPUSA's communist intelligentsia and upper members being prepared for leadership roles (meaning that a lot of them were working directly for the Party on the payroll as cadre)
So in 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CPUSA was called into a national congress to hash out what the fuck to do now that the international communist movement collapsed along with the Soviets. That is to say, the Communists found themselves isolated in a newly born world where the capitalists had won the cold war - leaving them rudderless and directionless. This congress was to decide the new direction of the Party.
To put it briefly, the majority of the Party under comrade Gus Hall voted to continue as the Communist Party and follow the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. 1/3 of the Party under the Committee of correspondence voted to abandon Marxism-Leninism and the organizational framework of the leninist party, and adopt a multi-tendency democratic-socialist ideology. After being defeated they staged a symbolic walkout, splitting from the party all together. They then left the building the party was holding the congress and crossed the street to a different building and held the first inaugural meeting of the newly formed "Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism".
That is to say the CoC knew they didn't have enough votes to oust the Communists and distort the CPUSA into a social fascist party formation, and planned out their loss and subsequent walk-out as a public stunt to undermine party unity and sew the seeds of doubt within the remaining members.
I'll have to ask the old timers again for a direct answer on whether or not he was a member, but they stated Horne was a close associate and friend to many of the CoC splitters before the split and shared their ideological strains more often than the party ideology. I'll stress again this is oral history as a lot of this wasn't recorded history normally, and while I trust the word of my comrades - this is unverifiable in the usual intellectual methods.
Read history. The US was built on a mass genocide so epic it inspired the Nazis, just so that they could start slavery so epic it made the Spanish blush, to create a military so epic that it made China sweat, so they could export fascism so epic that no country compares. If you think there's anything good about the US, you are a chauvinist who buys into the myth of American Exceptionalism, plain and simple. It's an illegitimate state.
The belief that America is so exceptional that it is impossible to liberate it through Revolution, to undialectically think the American people are so completely unredeemable, to think that Capitalism in America is so entrenched that it is impossible to dislodged is the position that goes against the analysis' Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and all the historical leaders of the Communist movement.
The chauvinists for whom the term Stalin in 1929 coined "heresy of American exceptionalism", being Jay Lovestone's clique, believed exactly that and were appropriately ridiculed for thinking that America somehow falls outside of reality as the Great Depression illustrated.
The storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism and the whole system of opportunistic theories and illusions that had been built upon American capitalist 'prosperity.'"
Tell me then, who is the exceptionalist? Was Lenin a Russian exceptionalist - for looking upon the history of the genocidal Tsarist empire whom subjugated and annihilated entire nations and tribes in it'd blood-filled eastward conquest, an empire who's people, to demonstrate the power of their firearms, would lined up scores of Alaskan native men then shot through them with a single round to terrorize them into submission - for wishing to liberate his motherland from the clutches of the imperial mongrels? Why didn't he simply "Read history" of the Russian Empire
and think it was so completely irredeemable that the only thing he should do nothing else but shout "Death to Russia".
Should we also discuss whether or not Mao was a Chinese Exceptionalist - for thinking that a country who's creation as a unified region of common language and culture was formed from centuries of wars of subjugation and cultural genocides - for his yearning to break the yoke round the neck of his countrymen? Should he have simply "Read history" of the bloody past of China and completely write off his countrymen as completely irredeemable philistines and instead of writing the book Combating Liberalism choose to engage in it instead?
I'll finish off with a simple phrase. Before you can learn to truely accept, care for, and love others you must learn to accept, care for, and love yourself - which itself is also a balancing act to avoid narcissism and servicing. This is the same for the international proletariat and the proletariat within your own nation.
The belief that America is so exceptional that it is impossible to liberate it through Revolution, to undialectically think the American people are so completely unredeemable, to think that Capitalism in America is so entrenched that it is impossible to dislodged is the position that goes against the analysis’ Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and all the historical leaders of the Communist movement.
This reminds me of a paragraph I read in Rosa Luxemburg's "Reform or Revolution" recently.
Revisionist theory thus places itself in a dilemma. Either the socialist transformation is, as was admitted up to now, the consequence of the internal contradictions of capitalism, and with the growth of capitalism will develop its inner contradictions, resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse, (in that case the “means of adaptation” are ineffective and the theory of collapse is correct); or the “means of adaptation” will really stop the collapse of the capitalist system and thereby enable capitalism to maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions. In that case socialism ceases to be an historic necessity. It then becomes anything you want to call it, but it is no longer the result of the material development of society.
That's a fascinating passage. I haven't had a chance to read through any of Luxembourg's works yet so every time I come across a bit of her work in the wild makes me move her works up my reading list.
Sorry I don't align myself with genocidal regimes. I don't care if you see good in it, that speaks of a moral failing within yourself, not with me. When I look at pro-America leftists, all I see are progressive Nazis.
The United States is and always has been a fascist nation, the head of imperialism the world over. Even if Mao rose from the dead and was elected president tomorrow that would not change one bit.
That's historically reductive. America was founded as a progressive step forwards from the sanguine class rule of late-stage feudalism to bougeoise capitalism. Of course as it matured and cemented itself as the dominant class system it moved towards conservative and later reactionary stances as the next stages of socio-economic class relates were developed.
Additionally, colonialism predates fascism by centuries and influenced the growth of the internal ideological underpinnings of fascism. To use an allegory, it would be like calling a Tyrannosaurus rex a chicken. There's evolutionary connections between the two yet they are distinct from one another in character and form. To wrap it up without writing an essay, America is still an imperialist state in the Leninist sense and has not yet degerarated into a fascist state. The evidence for this is that we, communists-anarchists-socialists-trade unionists, are neither dead in unmarked graves nor in hiding from the state, unions are able to and are growing stronger, and there are no fascist vanguard or mass parties in charge of the state.
I'd actually argue we have devolved into a fascist state. You have things like suggesting sending in the National Guard to relieve labor shortages (not just break a strike), Biden asking truckers and dockworkers to go 24/7 out of "patriotic duty", you have airline CEOs openly influencing public health bodies to lower COVID quarantine times for purely business reasons, you have private media companies taking stories directly from the DoD and intelligence community press releases. You have the massive US prison system with widespread forced labor, much of which is in private prisons. You have the overseas adventures justified by flimsy reasons that boil down to "we deserve it/they don't". Anarchists and M-Ls aren't in literal concentration camps, but look at the Steven Donzegar case (contempt of court charge from a corporate judge just for winning a judgement against Chevron). We all know about Gitmo and the Supermax prison system, and we've all heard the stern warnings about the coming crackdown on "domestic terror".
What's the argument that America isn't fascist?
There's historical precedent for all of those happening before the creation of fascism.
Are you going to tell me that Louis the sun king (can't be bothered to look up which number) was a fascist because the prison system under his rule used prisoners as free penal labor?
That the free newspapers under that whiny walrus mustached Prussian dipshit Bismark didn't push state propaganda handed to then?
Go name a handful of countries that hasn't used the soldiery as labor in their nation, its a common occurrence through history. Shit even the Rus.Fed used their military as cops sometimes.
I'm not knowledgeable about history of capitalist fuckery during pandemics since that's not my usual field of study therefore I can not say either way, but I'm going to be a debatebro and say if
is a quantifiable mark of a fascist state, then by your logic actual fascist states that existed fail to meet that standard.
I'll also apply that as well to the Steven Donzegar case, since as far as I'm aware that precedent wasn't made in nazi Germany or fascist italy.
The point I'm making is that unless you're planning to make a historical blanket statement that everything is fascism, then you should probably spend some time analyzing the differences between fascist states and imperialist states. Portugal and Spain would be excellent studies since they lasted years longer than their more infamous counterparts.
Ultimately, I'd argue that "fascism" is a unique historical moment, but the US absolutely meets a lot of the criteria.
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Slavery started in America after an early attempt at labor organization in Jamestown. In response to striking white workers, they began importing slaves from Africa.
Was that when america was an independent country, or a British colony.
I feel like this is a loaded question, but it was when America was a set of colonies. Some of them were British. Others were French, or German, or Dutch.
Colony
Indeed therefore it was an implementation by the British establishment, which the American bougeoise inherited after their revolution, with portions of the new bougeoise state taking measures to abolish slavery while other portions sustained it.
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Thank you, I'll try to remember it.
Bourgeois bourgeoisie burger berger, thankfully my autocorrect thingy doesn't "fix" it lol
But the British establishment really didn't have a say in whether or not Jamestown started importing slaves. It was the Virginian bourgeoisie who made that choice. Had they acted to prevent it (unlikely considering there wasn't really an abolitionist movement to speak of) the revolution would have started much differently.
That's liberal historical revisionism that proposes that the British Empire, which continued it's historical support for slavery well after the American Revolution, such as materially supporting the Confederate slavers in their rebellion against the U.S, was somehow more progressive in its economic and political system.
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Gerald Horne is a right-revisionist anti-marxist who cherry picks and selectively quotes his sources to present his case for historical revisionism. That is to say he does not look at sources and writes his historical thesis to fit the sources, he writes his historical thesis and then makes the sources fit it.
I know it because I own the book and read it and looked at the sources he drew from. To save us both time, I'll recommend this article from some silly Trot that did came to the same conclusion
People seem to really like the "it was just to/even significantly about" stopping the abolition of slavery narrative. Like even if you wanna make that case, the audacity of saying it was the "principle motivation" is just a fabrication. I think it was the director of the Freestate of Jones who, when 1619 pulled this bullshit, said very simply that if colonies like the Carolinas wanted independence for that reason the evidence would be in the historical record. They wouldn't hide it.
Beyond that, the record and iirc the very declaration outright states that the tyranny of the British had in part to do with dictating terms on their behalf with natives, ie the British crown didn't want to keep paying for expansion at a haphazard rate, so they made pacts which settlers hated.
I don't dislike Horne at all, but I swear he better not become the next Furr
I think Horne's heart is genuinely in the right place, and enjoy his writing. Outside of the glaring issues he has, the history he writes about is outstandingly educational and touches on aspects of history commonly left out, namely his application of historical materialism through ensuring the reader has context of global powers in that moment of history in order to understand the decisions regional groups would make.
I really wanna read his work on sailors. Been on my list for a while. 'Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica'
It just sucks that people eat up essentialist takes wholesale
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Already responded to someone who said read horne
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So, what I'm going to say is oral history from old communist party members who were in the Party at the same time as Gerald Horne and knew him. It also relates to the party commission known as the "committee of correspondence", of whom famous names such as Angela Davis, Pete Seeger, were members of or closely associated to. The CoC during the 70s and 80s was home of the CPUSA's communist intelligentsia and upper members being prepared for leadership roles (meaning that a lot of them were working directly for the Party on the payroll as cadre)
So in 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CPUSA was called into a national congress to hash out what the fuck to do now that the international communist movement collapsed along with the Soviets. That is to say, the Communists found themselves isolated in a newly born world where the capitalists had won the cold war - leaving them rudderless and directionless. This congress was to decide the new direction of the Party.
To put it briefly, the majority of the Party under comrade Gus Hall voted to continue as the Communist Party and follow the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. 1/3 of the Party under the Committee of correspondence voted to abandon Marxism-Leninism and the organizational framework of the leninist party, and adopt a multi-tendency democratic-socialist ideology. After being defeated they staged a symbolic walkout, splitting from the party all together. They then left the building the party was holding the congress and crossed the street to a different building and held the first inaugural meeting of the newly formed "Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism".
That is to say the CoC knew they didn't have enough votes to oust the Communists and distort the CPUSA into a social fascist party formation, and planned out their loss and subsequent walk-out as a public stunt to undermine party unity and sew the seeds of doubt within the remaining members.
I'll have to ask the old timers again for a direct answer on whether or not he was a member, but they stated Horne was a close associate and friend to many of the CoC splitters before the split and shared their ideological strains more often than the party ideology. I'll stress again this is oral history as a lot of this wasn't recorded history normally, and while I trust the word of my comrades - this is unverifiable in the usual intellectual methods.
Read history. The US was built on a mass genocide so epic it inspired the Nazis, just so that they could start slavery so epic it made the Spanish blush, to create a military so epic that it made China sweat, so they could export fascism so epic that no country compares. If you think there's anything good about the US, you are a chauvinist who buys into the myth of American Exceptionalism, plain and simple. It's an illegitimate state.
The belief that America is so exceptional that it is impossible to liberate it through Revolution, to undialectically think the American people are so completely unredeemable, to think that Capitalism in America is so entrenched that it is impossible to dislodged is the position that goes against the analysis' Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and all the historical leaders of the Communist movement.
The chauvinists for whom the term Stalin in 1929 coined "heresy of American exceptionalism", being Jay Lovestone's clique, believed exactly that and were appropriately ridiculed for thinking that America somehow falls outside of reality as the Great Depression illustrated.
Tell me then, who is the exceptionalist? Was Lenin a Russian exceptionalist - for looking upon the history of the genocidal Tsarist empire whom subjugated and annihilated entire nations and tribes in it'd blood-filled eastward conquest, an empire who's people, to demonstrate the power of their firearms, would lined up scores of Alaskan native men then shot through them with a single round to terrorize them into submission - for wishing to liberate his motherland from the clutches of the imperial mongrels? Why didn't he simply "Read history" of the Russian Empire and think it was so completely irredeemable that the only thing he should do nothing else but shout "Death to Russia".
Should we also discuss whether or not Mao was a Chinese Exceptionalist - for thinking that a country who's creation as a unified region of common language and culture was formed from centuries of wars of subjugation and cultural genocides - for his yearning to break the yoke round the neck of his countrymen? Should he have simply "Read history" of the bloody past of China and completely write off his countrymen as completely irredeemable philistines and instead of writing the book Combating Liberalism choose to engage in it instead?
I'll finish off with a simple phrase. Before you can learn to truely accept, care for, and love others you must learn to accept, care for, and love yourself - which itself is also a balancing act to avoid narcissism and servicing. This is the same for the international proletariat and the proletariat within your own nation.
This reminds me of a paragraph I read in Rosa Luxemburg's "Reform or Revolution" recently.
That's a fascinating passage. I haven't had a chance to read through any of Luxembourg's works yet so every time I come across a bit of her work in the wild makes me move her works up my reading list.
Sorry I don't align myself with genocidal regimes. I don't care if you see good in it, that speaks of a moral failing within yourself, not with me. When I look at pro-America leftists, all I see are progressive Nazis.
Equating the entirety of the American proletariat with the government itself is dumb and wrong. You're making up a guy to get mad at right now. Chill.
Last time I checked I wasn't the one conflating the American people and empire.
They are talking about liberation of the oppressed people within, you're the one that brought up the "support for the 'regime'"
What even is your point here?
I forced myself to read their drivel (it was painful) and they quite clearly were referring to the nation itself, not the people within it.
Uh huh, don't talk to me ever again.
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