Social fascism's legitimate. It's why the left in the imperial core keeps getting bogged down by SocDems and opportunists/careerists. Remember that person in a Indie game "union" organization who didn't want workers to form unions? Or that No Evil Foods vegan company busted their union. Or Extinction Rebellion? Or every single person who supported Biden in the last election?
Edit: I'm just gunna' leave. This site has shown itself to be incapable of any actual discussion, it's just endless Reddit-tier dunkings. There's a reason no one bothers making posts with effort here, you just get a bunch of rad-libs who try to poke holes in it rather than really interface with it or do any research or learning. Complete waste of time that could be better spent doing anything else.
No Evil Foods markets itself as a left-wing, “revolutionary” food company.
This is what I'm referring to, you fucking morons. Literally refuse to learn from history.
Genzedong and informedtankie on reddit too as sadly lemmy isn't doing so hot at the moment due to this site cannibalizing a large chunk of what might have been its userbase.
Fuck the meme liberals who are an epidemic over here. They've taken the worst of the ironic detachment and unwillingness to seriously or intellectually engage with ideas that was endemic on the sub and without reddit liberals to dunk on and distract them have turned it on well meaning, theory-read communists trying to engage with in good faith and educate them and correct their liberalism. It's like shouting at a fucking wall with so many of these liberals, you can make point after well made logical point and they just reply with "but muh feels" or other subjective bullshit that cannot be directly attacked because it isn't a fucking point or even attempted rebuttal of yours and you know what? It means I'm less inclined to do it. This whole thread. OP is a fucking tool. Ignorantly and uncharitably cherry picking and distorting things you said with precise meaning into cheap, shrill liberal click bait sensationalism with an attempt to harass and intimidate people with nuanced takes and real criticism of America instead of the increasingly popular "America gud, just need socialism" takes I'm seeing here.
Nuanced takes? Saying BLM is representative of "social fascism," as laid out in theory that was subject to contemporary criticism in the 1930's and seems 100% incorrect in retrospect, is not a nuanced take. It's shoehorning a spontaneous antiracist movement, with no clear leadership (much less social democratic leadership), into a bullshit theory that analyzed organized social democratic politics, which is not even the same phenomenon as the spontaneous mass BLM protests.
How seriously do you want me to engage with these ideas? They're truly awful, reactionary garbage in my sincere opinion. It has nothing to do with feels beyond that I don't like to see people pretend to do marxist analysis to prop up hack, reactionary takes on US class politics.
There is zero actual analysis of the conditions that the movement came from, zero analysis of the role racism plays in US capitalism, zero analysis of the multiple and competing forces at play, zero analysis of the course of development, zero analysis of perspectives for intervention by marxists, zero Marxist analysis in any sense. Purely mechanical, categorical thinking, and no semblance of dialectical analysis. Just plug and play with the "theory" of social fascism.
If you think that is serious Marxism, I don't know what to tell you, besides you need to go back and start from the basics.
Genzedong and informedtankie on reddit too as sadly lemmy isn’t doing so hot at the moment due to this site cannibalizing a large chunk of what might have been its userbase.
As a note: the Lemmy devs explicitly expressed a preference for this site to be spun off instead of a Chapo instance being made on the Lemmy.
They wanted to keep the Lemmy an explicitly ML space, and Chapo’s userbase wasn’t that.
We have a lot of MLs, and more and more since learning a few hard lessons of electoralism, but it’s different enough to warrant separate spaces. Ours is more conducive to reforming liberals.
Hopefully the Lemmy gets more activity after federation. Dessa has put in a lot of work into both the code base and resource compiling. Even if we aren’t on the same site, there’s a lot of respect for them here.
I think the general point is that socdems are not the left, they are next to the true center and support capitalism. Over here in the UK we regard socdem as the center at least that's how I hear most people in the labour party speak. The true center being the dividing line between capitalism and socialism. More of a chasm than a line though.
they are next to the true center and support capitalism. Over here in the UK we regard socdem as the center
In the U.S., the people you're describing are at the leftmost edge of mainstream politics. Can you see how absurd it would seem to start out as a standard lib, then start moving left, then get as far left as any mainstream politician in the country, then get called a fascist by some ML? It's impossible to say that helps grow the left. Practically speaking, it's a loser of a strategy. Even from a purely theoretical standpoint it's silly -- it's just saying capitalism = fascism, which destroys all meaning of the term fascism.
Understanding that you've started within fascism and just moved to friendlier fascism is the appropriate way to look at it. America is a horredously right wing country. Liberals are not left. They are not centre. They are centre right given a charitable reading.
Judging left vs right based on what currently exists in a country rather than based on the academic interpretation is silly and just another method the bourgeousie hoodwink the population into believing things absurd to follow.
which destroys all meaning of the term fascism.
No it doesn't. There's a dozen different interpretations of fascism. The marxist interpretation of what people traditionally view as fascism is that it is just the bourgeoisie's reactionary attempt under capitalism to keep its grip on power in the face of threats from communists. "Fascism" in its form under Mussolini or Hitler or Pinochet or any of the other well known fascists is simply capitalism preventing the emergence of socialism through ruthless force. Marxists thus interpret this to not be a separate thing to capitalism, it IS capitalism. It is all fascism to the varying degrees necessary based on the present threat of the left to its power. When you understand this you can then see where the logic follows -- social democracy is not something that comes about because the bourgeoisie earnestly want a friendlier capitalism. Social democracy is, much like the ruthless fascisms above, an emergent reaction to communists by the bourgeoisie intended to be used to prevent the threat of their power being taken, in this sense, it is social-fascism.
The problem is viewing fascism with the liberal interpretation that it is an independent ideology from capitalism. It is not. Liberal Democracy is its standard state where the rich are in comfort with no threats and can rob the working class as they see fit, the two reactions to this are fascism -- fascism is a reaction intended to prevent the bourgeoisie from losing their grip on power. With this understanding of the marxist interpretation of fascism both reactions, the ruthless and the social, are fascist.
Apologies if this is poorly worded or I repeat myself, it's very late and I'm very tired.
The marxist interpretation of what people traditionally view as fascism is that it is just the bourgeoisie’s reactionary attempt under capitalism to keep its grip on power in the face of threats from communists. “Fascism” in its form under Mussolini or Hitler or Pinochet or any of the other well known fascists is simply capitalism preventing the emergence of socialism through ruthless force.
This is a better way of phrasing what I was trying to get at. Fascism isn't just regular-old capitalism. It's capitalism in crisis, or a reactionary social movement to maintain capitalism in the face of socialist opposition. It's a particular strain of capitalism or a particular type of political justification for capitalism, but the entirety of capitalism is much broader. There are also legal differences (e.g., the strength of the rule of law, how much dissent is permitted), differences in the scale and audacity of state violence, and differences in how easy it is to remove political leaders. It's just sloppy to say "it's all fascism," especially when you already have a word for all the similarities: capitalism.
And again, the immediate, practical cost of calling people a step away from abandoning capitalism "fascists" is enormous, and the practical benefits of the theoretical discussion we've having are near zero.
I wasn't trying to say it's all fascism. What I mean to say is that capitalist reaction is fascism. Whether it is reaction leftwards (social fascism) or reaction rightwards (boots on neck fascism). That is the argument Stalin makes. Part of this concept is important because it gives us a question -- Does the next fascism have to look like either of them? No.
Fascism in this concept is simply put "bourgeoise reaction to communists to prevent their power from being taken" and becomes an exceptionally simple way to label the most dangerous tactics to prevent socialism that we must resist.
Fascists are reaction to communists to uphold capitalism, in all formats.
The thing is, social democrats weren't a step away from abandoning capitalism to Stalin. In fact, before they took hold in Europe socialism was spreading like fire across the continent. Then social democracy rose up to prevent its spread, did they take the one step needed? No. It must be resisted at all costs because it will literally stop what we want, the outcome will be the same. They will not cross the line and have to be opposed relentlessly in order to get that to happen.
Social fascism's legitimate. It's why the left in the imperial core keeps getting bogged down by SocDems and opportunists/careerists. Remember that person in a Indie game "union" organization who didn't want workers to form unions? Or that No Evil Foods vegan company busted their union. Or Extinction Rebellion? Or every single person who supported Biden in the last election?
Edit: I'm just gunna' leave. This site has shown itself to be incapable of any actual discussion, it's just endless Reddit-tier dunkings. There's a reason no one bothers making posts with effort here, you just get a bunch of rad-libs who try to poke holes in it rather than really interface with it or do any research or learning. Complete waste of time that could be better spent doing anything else.
Almost as if veganism isn't a fucking substitute for left politics? There are goddamn vegan fascists, dude.
Branding by a company lied? How shocking.
If you are sick of the shitlibs on here plz checkout https://lemmygrad.ml comrade
Would join but I'm probably to lib
Genzedong and informedtankie on reddit too as sadly lemmy isn't doing so hot at the moment due to this site cannibalizing a large chunk of what might have been its userbase.
Fuck the meme liberals who are an epidemic over here. They've taken the worst of the ironic detachment and unwillingness to seriously or intellectually engage with ideas that was endemic on the sub and without reddit liberals to dunk on and distract them have turned it on well meaning, theory-read communists trying to engage with in good faith and educate them and correct their liberalism. It's like shouting at a fucking wall with so many of these liberals, you can make point after well made logical point and they just reply with "but muh feels" or other subjective bullshit that cannot be directly attacked because it isn't a fucking point or even attempted rebuttal of yours and you know what? It means I'm less inclined to do it. This whole thread. OP is a fucking tool. Ignorantly and uncharitably cherry picking and distorting things you said with precise meaning into cheap, shrill liberal click bait sensationalism with an attempt to harass and intimidate people with nuanced takes and real criticism of America instead of the increasingly popular "America gud, just need socialism" takes I'm seeing here.
Nuanced takes? Saying BLM is representative of "social fascism," as laid out in theory that was subject to contemporary criticism in the 1930's and seems 100% incorrect in retrospect, is not a nuanced take. It's shoehorning a spontaneous antiracist movement, with no clear leadership (much less social democratic leadership), into a bullshit theory that analyzed organized social democratic politics, which is not even the same phenomenon as the spontaneous mass BLM protests.
How seriously do you want me to engage with these ideas? They're truly awful, reactionary garbage in my sincere opinion. It has nothing to do with feels beyond that I don't like to see people pretend to do marxist analysis to prop up hack, reactionary takes on US class politics.
There is zero actual analysis of the conditions that the movement came from, zero analysis of the role racism plays in US capitalism, zero analysis of the multiple and competing forces at play, zero analysis of the course of development, zero analysis of perspectives for intervention by marxists, zero Marxist analysis in any sense. Purely mechanical, categorical thinking, and no semblance of dialectical analysis. Just plug and play with the "theory" of social fascism.
If you think that is serious Marxism, I don't know what to tell you, besides you need to go back and start from the basics.
deleted by creator
As a note: the Lemmy devs explicitly expressed a preference for this site to be spun off instead of a Chapo instance being made on the Lemmy.
They wanted to keep the Lemmy an explicitly ML space, and Chapo’s userbase wasn’t that.
We have a lot of MLs, and more and more since learning a few hard lessons of electoralism, but it’s different enough to warrant separate spaces. Ours is more conducive to reforming liberals.
Hopefully the Lemmy gets more activity after federation. Dessa has put in a lot of work into both the code base and resource compiling. Even if we aren’t on the same site, there’s a lot of respect for them here.
Ah yes, calling someone on the left a fascist is a sure sign you're engaging in good faith
I think the general point is that socdems are not the left, they are next to the true center and support capitalism. Over here in the UK we regard socdem as the center at least that's how I hear most people in the labour party speak. The true center being the dividing line between capitalism and socialism. More of a chasm than a line though.
In the U.S., the people you're describing are at the leftmost edge of mainstream politics. Can you see how absurd it would seem to start out as a standard lib, then start moving left, then get as far left as any mainstream politician in the country, then get called a fascist by some ML? It's impossible to say that helps grow the left. Practically speaking, it's a loser of a strategy. Even from a purely theoretical standpoint it's silly -- it's just saying capitalism = fascism, which destroys all meaning of the term fascism.
Understanding that you've started within fascism and just moved to friendlier fascism is the appropriate way to look at it. America is a horredously right wing country. Liberals are not left. They are not centre. They are centre right given a charitable reading.
Judging left vs right based on what currently exists in a country rather than based on the academic interpretation is silly and just another method the bourgeousie hoodwink the population into believing things absurd to follow.
No it doesn't. There's a dozen different interpretations of fascism. The marxist interpretation of what people traditionally view as fascism is that it is just the bourgeoisie's reactionary attempt under capitalism to keep its grip on power in the face of threats from communists. "Fascism" in its form under Mussolini or Hitler or Pinochet or any of the other well known fascists is simply capitalism preventing the emergence of socialism through ruthless force. Marxists thus interpret this to not be a separate thing to capitalism, it IS capitalism. It is all fascism to the varying degrees necessary based on the present threat of the left to its power. When you understand this you can then see where the logic follows -- social democracy is not something that comes about because the bourgeoisie earnestly want a friendlier capitalism. Social democracy is, much like the ruthless fascisms above, an emergent reaction to communists by the bourgeoisie intended to be used to prevent the threat of their power being taken, in this sense, it is social-fascism.
The problem is viewing fascism with the liberal interpretation that it is an independent ideology from capitalism. It is not. Liberal Democracy is its standard state where the rich are in comfort with no threats and can rob the working class as they see fit, the two reactions to this are fascism -- fascism is a reaction intended to prevent the bourgeoisie from losing their grip on power. With this understanding of the marxist interpretation of fascism both reactions, the ruthless and the social, are fascist.
Apologies if this is poorly worded or I repeat myself, it's very late and I'm very tired.
This is a better way of phrasing what I was trying to get at. Fascism isn't just regular-old capitalism. It's capitalism in crisis, or a reactionary social movement to maintain capitalism in the face of socialist opposition. It's a particular strain of capitalism or a particular type of political justification for capitalism, but the entirety of capitalism is much broader. There are also legal differences (e.g., the strength of the rule of law, how much dissent is permitted), differences in the scale and audacity of state violence, and differences in how easy it is to remove political leaders. It's just sloppy to say "it's all fascism," especially when you already have a word for all the similarities: capitalism.
And again, the immediate, practical cost of calling people a step away from abandoning capitalism "fascists" is enormous, and the practical benefits of the theoretical discussion we've having are near zero.
I wasn't trying to say it's all fascism. What I mean to say is that capitalist reaction is fascism. Whether it is reaction leftwards (social fascism) or reaction rightwards (boots on neck fascism). That is the argument Stalin makes. Part of this concept is important because it gives us a question -- Does the next fascism have to look like either of them? No.
Fascism in this concept is simply put "bourgeoise reaction to communists to prevent their power from being taken" and becomes an exceptionally simple way to label the most dangerous tactics to prevent socialism that we must resist.
Fascists are reaction to communists to uphold capitalism, in all formats.
The thing is, social democrats weren't a step away from abandoning capitalism to Stalin. In fact, before they took hold in Europe socialism was spreading like fire across the continent. Then social democracy rose up to prevent its spread, did they take the one step needed? No. It must be resisted at all costs because it will literally stop what we want, the outcome will be the same. They will not cross the line and have to be opposed relentlessly in order to get that to happen.