I'm reading Dante's Inferno, and the first people Dante meets in hell are the fence-sitters. Fascists and liberals didn't exist in medieval Florence since they come with the capitalist mode of production rather than the feudal one used by Italian city-states (fight me on this one motherfuckers I dare ya!), but when I read that I was like, damn, it's easy to tell that Dante was heavily involved in politics because it's the fence-sitters (an extremely loose and unscientific definition for libs) who drive everybody else completely nuts. In the Global South, communists and liberals can team up to take on fascists and compradors, but in the imperial core the difference between liberals and fascists seems to be purely aesthetic. It is exceptionally rare, these days, for libs to "get things done," so long as those things are unrelated to the maintenance of the status quo.
Like, I have a white boomer neighbor I just talked to this morning about bullet trains. This guy, who just got back from a monthlong vacation in Florida, told me he had never even heard of them. He's a Vietnam vet who basically introduced himself to my dad by talking about all the people he killed in Vietnam. He's the nicest guy. He's extremely helpful in ways that materially impact my life—far more helpful than the vast majority of libs I have ever met. Aside from that encounter with my dad, he never talks about the Vietnam War and doesn't display anything related to his military service on any of the twenty different vehicles he owns. My spouse and kids are visibly minority (I am minority but pass as white) and this guy has never said a racist word about any of us or anyone at all actually. He is a great neighbor (standards are low in the USA). But it took me such a long time to understand that liberals and even fascists can be nice to your face in one context and utterly bloodthirsty in another—when their treats get threatened. If a revolution came to where I live, the local dedicated reactionaries—the much more obvious Nazis—would either flee the area or possibly lynch me and my family because we are obviously the traitors within. Much as I like my boomer neighbor, I can't depend on him to stand with me in a situation like this. Too many times I've seen fence-sitters keep out of the way when the time came to put their bodies or jobs on the line to help me or people I know in tough situations which were still much less tough than the one I'm imagining here.
The same is true for Rogan and pretty much all so-called "normies." They will either stand aside or join the fascists when the chips are down, if you'll forgive the cliché. I (hate to) think of it like The Matrix—anyone who isn't unplugged can turn into an agent instantly. The only people you can depend on are your closest friends or family, and even then, there are plenty of stories of people like this turning out to be traitors because they thought—even unconsciously—that a few scraps from the capitalist table was better than a successful communist revolution. Aside from friends or family, all we have are comrades, and I currently know of exactly zero in my actual personal life, which is why I am actively working on getting the fuck out of here and moving to another country, but that's another story.
I'm a simple but contradictory comrade. I see references to Dante's, I upvote.
Love it but damn that dude was whack.
Yeah totally agree with all the points you make. I'm also intimately familiar with these kinds of liberals and cryto-fash and the key role they play in normalizing and hiding fascism. Also, just from experience, like a third of my family are basically fash. Some of them know my opinions and don't argue with me because they know I'll either ignore them or embarass them by demonstrating how ignorant they are in front of their children, so they keep their opinions on immigrants and Muslims to themselves.
Hegemonic liberal culture forgets that fascism doesn't require an army of open fanatics who believe every word of some leader they try to surrender their autonomy to. Most people who will vote for fascists probably don't think that they're fascist. Alot, maybe most, prob still think of themselves as modern, progressive individuals, and think that it is the 'Other' they dehumanize that is regressive and backward.
As you note though, while they always play an active role to soome degree, including as fence-sitters, the really consciously radicalized right pose a more direct, active, existential threat. Once they are crushed the rest of the cowardly liberals will get in line and accept the dictatorship of the proletariat.
I also think its important to make the distinction for the following reason: there are many normal, working class people who are drifting towards or have incoherent but right-pseudopopulist- sympathetic views like Rogan. These people, as opposed to the conscious fascists, are more open to socialist radicalization.
This comes back to a debate on here a few weeks ago in response to a Chris Hedges article where from what I gather he argues that an alliance of the left and the 'populist' far right is necessary, which I was shocked to hear from Hedges of all people honestly.
On one interpretation of what that means, which seems to have been Chris's, that should be dismissed out of hand for obvious reasons (it would basically amount to pat-soc positions and would permanently harm the legitimacy of the far left; it's also ironic because Hedges accuses many people in the antifa black block of being cops, and there are some agents provocateurs, but he himself is basically suggesting something here that sounds like it was cooked up in a CIA or FBI lab to deligitimize us).
But on another interpretation, namely that we are going to need, as a left, to work with and try to mobilize and organize alot of people whose views, lifestyles and actions we find reprehensible, its true. That's going to be a necessary part of the political process.
The libs make a lot of classist mileage by accusing all (white) working class people of being racist, homophonic, transphobic and misogynistic. From their mouths it means nothing, but it is also unfortunately true that the far right have been waging a quite succesful propoganda war against us for the white working class, and they've done pretty well. Like or not we need the working class we're given, rather than the one we would like. Like if you're trying to organize with trade unions members, student bodies, or non-unionized workers in your workspace or others in order to carry out some action, you can't expect them all to have perfect pasts or perfect current opinions.That doesn't mean surrendering or compromising on any essential points. Many things are non-negotiable, and that is part of our strength as a left, which you note, because when the chips are down, its the real comrades that will be there.
As Ka (one of my fav rappers) says somewhere in Descendents of Cain: You never know whose loyal until you caught .
TLDR: I think we should the distinction in mind so we can track the degree of fascisation of a society and because we want to know which members of society are perhaps salvalgeable and which are not.
Unless you're right and they'll all side with the fascists, which I'm not ruling out either (even we couldn't win in Weimar Germany despite a powerful, organiazed mass movement with a history and Soviet support behind us then yeh things are looking way grimmer for my yank comrades, I'm deeply sad to say).
I think working class BIPOC are where most of the potential is. I won’t discount white workers, but I will discount vast numbers of them. I don’t think propaganda tells the whole story when it comes to their supposed vacillation. Settler colonialism and imperialism really does make a huge material difference in their everyday lives. I’m pretty nervous to bring up something like China with any of them for instance because I strongly suspect that they will immediately hit me with reactionary bullshit—even lots of people who would fully support someone like Bernie or perhaps someone even further left. That’s no accident. They know, even if they’ve barely ever thought about it before, that if China goes up, amerikkka comes down.
Yh alot of them are going to need to be discounted at some point, but I think that will be unfortunately true for alot of non-white people as well.
Giving psychological-like arguments that they know, even if they've never thought about it, is always difficult and sometimes veers off into unfalsifiability imo. It's always a difficult question demonstrating the exact relationship between the material benefits even most white working class westerners benefit from to some degree, how that determines their material interests and, in turn, how that influences their behaviour and ideology more broadly. Propaganda doesn't tell the whole but it's still an integral element, essential for determining how people think by interacting with the material conditions that benefit them materially due to imperialism (and which therefore strike them as 'making sense').
Like why do they perceive certain growing, developing economies as threats and others as not, including when they have relations of neo-colonial and imperialist or client-state dominance towards them?
Like if you tell a lib or even a conservative, 'country x in Africa/Asia/South America grew this year and reduced poverty by..' then they might say 'oh hwell i'll tel ya hwhat that's just fine now ain't it'. I think alot of them really don't think that what they think is supporting imperialism. Most couldn't define imperialism if they tried. The socio-economic and cultural conditions are there but I think it requires an actual intentional effort on the part of the ruling class to direct the hostility which, like you note, comes organically out of an imperialist society. A base structure still needs stabilization and direction from its superstructure.
Why during the 80s was Japan the main futuristic fear? Obvs Japan's economic development was important as it struck some members of the bourgeoisie as a threat to their interests, leading to actions in the financial sector which slowed down Japan into stagnation since the 90s. A heritage of xenophobia and racism obviously plays a part. All of these were mobilized in bourgeois media, which reflects the ruling ideas of the bourgeousie, indeed whose function is necessarily to determine and ensure the hegemony of the ideas of the hegemonic class.
With China, you don't just have a clear competitor who is now openly calling into question the US's status as global hegemon and whose influence is unavoidable, but also 24/7 warmongering and 'Yellow Peril' type shit all over almost every media source.
I'm normally sympathetic but also sometimes sceptical (like, how would we confirm or falsify this?) of how strongly some arguments attribute a conscious or unconscious desire on the part of western working classes to preserve an imperialist order which, lets be honest, the vast majority of people are ignorant of. I think it can be understood more clearly as the superstructure producing ideologies, of which those that serve and benefit the capitalist base structure will be more likely to survive, because they are in, and so their conditions of reproduction are those of, an imperialist-capitalist economy, and an anti-China one is clearly aligned with the interests of the western ruling class. Ordinary people are aware of their benefits relative to the vast majority of workers on this planet, and they attribute it to their own social, cultural, or (if they are white) sometimes their racial or ethnic superiority (obvs the former can bleed into the latter). They are told that this is due to the virtues of the place they live, and this is convenient, because people don't won't to hear that their quality of life depends on, for them, unimaginable levels of exploitation.
I'm reading Dante's Inferno, and the first people Dante meets in hell are the fence-sitters. Fascists and liberals didn't exist in medieval Florence since they come with the capitalist mode of production rather than the feudal one used by Italian city-states (fight me on this one motherfuckers I dare ya!), but when I read that I was like, damn, it's easy to tell that Dante was heavily involved in politics because it's the fence-sitters (an extremely loose and unscientific definition for libs) who drive everybody else completely nuts. In the Global South, communists and liberals can team up to take on fascists and compradors, but in the imperial core the difference between liberals and fascists seems to be purely aesthetic. It is exceptionally rare, these days, for libs to "get things done," so long as those things are unrelated to the maintenance of the status quo.
Like, I have a white boomer neighbor I just talked to this morning about bullet trains. This guy, who just got back from a monthlong vacation in Florida, told me he had never even heard of them. He's a Vietnam vet who basically introduced himself to my dad by talking about all the people he killed in Vietnam. He's the nicest guy. He's extremely helpful in ways that materially impact my life—far more helpful than the vast majority of libs I have ever met. Aside from that encounter with my dad, he never talks about the Vietnam War and doesn't display anything related to his military service on any of the twenty different vehicles he owns. My spouse and kids are visibly minority (I am minority but pass as white) and this guy has never said a racist word about any of us or anyone at all actually. He is a great neighbor (standards are low in the USA). But it took me such a long time to understand that liberals and even fascists can be nice to your face in one context and utterly bloodthirsty in another—when their treats get threatened. If a revolution came to where I live, the local dedicated reactionaries—the much more obvious Nazis—would either flee the area or possibly lynch me and my family because we are obviously the traitors within. Much as I like my boomer neighbor, I can't depend on him to stand with me in a situation like this. Too many times I've seen fence-sitters keep out of the way when the time came to put their bodies or jobs on the line to help me or people I know in tough situations which were still much less tough than the one I'm imagining here.
The same is true for Rogan and pretty much all so-called "normies." They will either stand aside or join the fascists when the chips are down, if you'll forgive the cliché. I (hate to) think of it like The Matrix—anyone who isn't unplugged can turn into an agent instantly. The only people you can depend on are your closest friends or family, and even then, there are plenty of stories of people like this turning out to be traitors because they thought—even unconsciously—that a few scraps from the capitalist table was better than a successful communist revolution. Aside from friends or family, all we have are comrades, and I currently know of exactly zero in my actual personal life, which is why I am actively working on getting the fuck out of here and moving to another country, but that's another story.
I'm a simple but contradictory comrade. I see references to Dante's, I upvote. Love it but damn that dude was whack.
Yeah totally agree with all the points you make. I'm also intimately familiar with these kinds of liberals and cryto-fash and the key role they play in normalizing and hiding fascism. Also, just from experience, like a third of my family are basically fash. Some of them know my opinions and don't argue with me because they know I'll either ignore them or embarass them by demonstrating how ignorant they are in front of their children, so they keep their opinions on immigrants and Muslims to themselves. Hegemonic liberal culture forgets that fascism doesn't require an army of open fanatics who believe every word of some leader they try to surrender their autonomy to. Most people who will vote for fascists probably don't think that they're fascist. Alot, maybe most, prob still think of themselves as modern, progressive individuals, and think that it is the 'Other' they dehumanize that is regressive and backward. As you note though, while they always play an active role to soome degree, including as fence-sitters, the really consciously radicalized right pose a more direct, active, existential threat. Once they are crushed the rest of the cowardly liberals will get in line and accept the dictatorship of the proletariat.
I also think its important to make the distinction for the following reason: there are many normal, working class people who are drifting towards or have incoherent but right-pseudopopulist- sympathetic views like Rogan. These people, as opposed to the conscious fascists, are more open to socialist radicalization. This comes back to a debate on here a few weeks ago in response to a Chris Hedges article where from what I gather he argues that an alliance of the left and the 'populist' far right is necessary, which I was shocked to hear from Hedges of all people honestly. On one interpretation of what that means, which seems to have been Chris's, that should be dismissed out of hand for obvious reasons (it would basically amount to pat-soc positions and would permanently harm the legitimacy of the far left; it's also ironic because Hedges accuses many people in the antifa black block of being cops, and there are some agents provocateurs, but he himself is basically suggesting something here that sounds like it was cooked up in a CIA or FBI lab to deligitimize us). But on another interpretation, namely that we are going to need, as a left, to work with and try to mobilize and organize alot of people whose views, lifestyles and actions we find reprehensible, its true. That's going to be a necessary part of the political process. The libs make a lot of classist mileage by accusing all (white) working class people of being racist, homophonic, transphobic and misogynistic. From their mouths it means nothing, but it is also unfortunately true that the far right have been waging a quite succesful propoganda war against us for the white working class, and they've done pretty well. Like or not we need the working class we're given, rather than the one we would like. Like if you're trying to organize with trade unions members, student bodies, or non-unionized workers in your workspace or others in order to carry out some action, you can't expect them all to have perfect pasts or perfect current opinions.That doesn't mean surrendering or compromising on any essential points. Many things are non-negotiable, and that is part of our strength as a left, which you note, because when the chips are down, its the real comrades that will be there.
As Ka (one of my fav rappers) says somewhere in Descendents of Cain: You never know whose loyal until you caught .
TLDR: I think we should the distinction in mind so we can track the degree of fascisation of a society and because we want to know which members of society are perhaps salvalgeable and which are not.
Unless you're right and they'll all side with the fascists, which I'm not ruling out either (even we couldn't win in Weimar Germany despite a powerful, organiazed mass movement with a history and Soviet support behind us then yeh things are looking way grimmer for my yank comrades, I'm deeply sad to say).
I think working class BIPOC are where most of the potential is. I won’t discount white workers, but I will discount vast numbers of them. I don’t think propaganda tells the whole story when it comes to their supposed vacillation. Settler colonialism and imperialism really does make a huge material difference in their everyday lives. I’m pretty nervous to bring up something like China with any of them for instance because I strongly suspect that they will immediately hit me with reactionary bullshit—even lots of people who would fully support someone like Bernie or perhaps someone even further left. That’s no accident. They know, even if they’ve barely ever thought about it before, that if China goes up, amerikkka comes down.
Also just practically, I don't see any successful revolution without a mass mobilization of the white working class.
Yh alot of them are going to need to be discounted at some point, but I think that will be unfortunately true for alot of non-white people as well.
Giving psychological-like arguments that they know, even if they've never thought about it, is always difficult and sometimes veers off into unfalsifiability imo. It's always a difficult question demonstrating the exact relationship between the material benefits even most white working class westerners benefit from to some degree, how that determines their material interests and, in turn, how that influences their behaviour and ideology more broadly. Propaganda doesn't tell the whole but it's still an integral element, essential for determining how people think by interacting with the material conditions that benefit them materially due to imperialism (and which therefore strike them as 'making sense').
Like why do they perceive certain growing, developing economies as threats and others as not, including when they have relations of neo-colonial and imperialist or client-state dominance towards them? Like if you tell a lib or even a conservative, 'country x in Africa/Asia/South America grew this year and reduced poverty by..' then they might say 'oh hwell i'll tel ya hwhat that's just fine now ain't it'. I think alot of them really don't think that what they think is supporting imperialism. Most couldn't define imperialism if they tried. The socio-economic and cultural conditions are there but I think it requires an actual intentional effort on the part of the ruling class to direct the hostility which, like you note, comes organically out of an imperialist society. A base structure still needs stabilization and direction from its superstructure. Why during the 80s was Japan the main futuristic fear? Obvs Japan's economic development was important as it struck some members of the bourgeoisie as a threat to their interests, leading to actions in the financial sector which slowed down Japan into stagnation since the 90s. A heritage of xenophobia and racism obviously plays a part. All of these were mobilized in bourgeois media, which reflects the ruling ideas of the bourgeousie, indeed whose function is necessarily to determine and ensure the hegemony of the ideas of the hegemonic class.
With China, you don't just have a clear competitor who is now openly calling into question the US's status as global hegemon and whose influence is unavoidable, but also 24/7 warmongering and 'Yellow Peril' type shit all over almost every media source.
I'm normally sympathetic but also sometimes sceptical (like, how would we confirm or falsify this?) of how strongly some arguments attribute a conscious or unconscious desire on the part of western working classes to preserve an imperialist order which, lets be honest, the vast majority of people are ignorant of. I think it can be understood more clearly as the superstructure producing ideologies, of which those that serve and benefit the capitalist base structure will be more likely to survive, because they are in, and so their conditions of reproduction are those of, an imperialist-capitalist economy, and an anti-China one is clearly aligned with the interests of the western ruling class. Ordinary people are aware of their benefits relative to the vast majority of workers on this planet, and they attribute it to their own social, cultural, or (if they are white) sometimes their racial or ethnic superiority (obvs the former can bleed into the latter). They are told that this is due to the virtues of the place they live, and this is convenient, because people don't won't to hear that their quality of life depends on, for them, unimaginable levels of exploitation.