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.
I appreciate the discussion. I still don't think "social fascism" is a worthwhile term, but you've made it sound as plausible as anything I've heard on the subject.
Whether it is reaction leftwards (social fascism) or reaction rightwards (boots on neck fascism). That is the argument Stalin makes.
That makes a little bit of sense, but it quickly becomes "anything capitalists do is fascism," because they're always trying to pacify popular pressures in some way. What capitalist activities wouldn't be fascism under this definition? So we're back to capitalism = fascism, which makes fascism and empty, redundant term. I don't think it's theoretically sound, and that's before you consider the differences in the law, state violence, how easy it is to remove political leaders, etc.
And I still see no practical argument whatsoever for calling social democrats "social fascists." That's poison to any attempt to bring them to our side, and they very well may be the most likely people to come to our side. Most people here used to be libs.
It must be resisted at all costs because it will literally stop what we want
Also on the practical side of things, I don't see any way this is workable. I don't see any way to build a working class movement by telling the working class: "You get zero immediate relief. No Medicare for All, no job guarantee, no student debt forgiveness -- nothing. But despite giving you nothing, you need to support us in the gargantuan struggle to end capitalism, something that's never been done in the imperial core."
Didn't we just criticize Democrats for months over not offering voters anything? We have to deliver something to get support in return. We have to show proof of concept before people fully commit (especially if we're talking about anything more involved than electoralism). We have to take the boot off the neck of the working class if we're asking them to give time and energy to a long-term struggle. I don't see people rejecting something like a jobs guarantee because they're holding out for the end of capitalism, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the path to socialism in the imperial core doesn't run through something like a jobs guarantee. No one knows how to build socialism here, and observations from a century ago in vastly different material conditions don't necessarily have predictive power.
I think you do as much as you can for workers and then use the strengthened working class to push for even more. The reason PMC libs run so much of the Global North is that they're financially secure enough to dedicate serious attention to politics. It's a hobby to them, like golf. If you have one job that's not too taxing and it takes care of all of your material needs, you have the time and energy to organize and figure out how the levers of power work. If you have multiple jobs and are still just scraping by, that's much harder.
Socdems are just liberals that have moved left a bit. They are reformists and they uphold the status quo. Don't confuse socdems with socialists who are compromising with liberalism for the sake of the working class. The socdems want capitalism and will do whatever they can to uphold it including murdering Rosa.
The left must not fall into the same trap of thinking we can ally with them and pull them left like we did with liberals. Their intention is to uphold capitalism and suck the energy out of our movement.
Their intention is to deradicalise the left move US right and they have succeeded every single time in the past.
It is absolutely but it MUST be discussed among leftists.
When we move into the phases that involve us actually being a real threat all the liberals will become socdems. They will not be more convertable as socdems than they were as liberals. They will be just as untrustworthy, snakey and dangerous as they are as liberals. Remember how much they hate us, that will not change when they shift leftwards in the reaction.
Calling people the murderers of someone who lived a century ago and a continent away is laughable. Ascribing murderous intentions to modern-day people over that event (instead of, you know, talking to those people) is laughable. It's just wrecker shit.
I'm not calling people murderers. I'm calling an ideology very likely to do it again if it has to in order to prevent communism. It is a reaction to us, its goal is to prevent communism, they advocate for friendly capitalism but they will if they have to. It's not wrecker shit because we are anti-capitalists and they absolutely are not.
It's wrecker shit because the people who today think "man, capitalism has so many big failings that we need enormous public programs to fix them all" will be anti-capitalists tomorrow. Laying a century-old murder at their feet poisons that well.
I don't really see them as actual socdems and they rarely ever label themselves as such in my opinion. They're baby leftists. The actual socdems are all liberal slime.
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.
I appreciate the discussion. I still don't think "social fascism" is a worthwhile term, but you've made it sound as plausible as anything I've heard on the subject.
That makes a little bit of sense, but it quickly becomes "anything capitalists do is fascism," because they're always trying to pacify popular pressures in some way. What capitalist activities wouldn't be fascism under this definition? So we're back to capitalism = fascism, which makes fascism and empty, redundant term. I don't think it's theoretically sound, and that's before you consider the differences in the law, state violence, how easy it is to remove political leaders, etc.
And I still see no practical argument whatsoever for calling social democrats "social fascists." That's poison to any attempt to bring them to our side, and they very well may be the most likely people to come to our side. Most people here used to be libs.
Also on the practical side of things, I don't see any way this is workable. I don't see any way to build a working class movement by telling the working class: "You get zero immediate relief. No Medicare for All, no job guarantee, no student debt forgiveness -- nothing. But despite giving you nothing, you need to support us in the gargantuan struggle to end capitalism, something that's never been done in the imperial core."
Didn't we just criticize Democrats for months over not offering voters anything? We have to deliver something to get support in return. We have to show proof of concept before people fully commit (especially if we're talking about anything more involved than electoralism). We have to take the boot off the neck of the working class if we're asking them to give time and energy to a long-term struggle. I don't see people rejecting something like a jobs guarantee because they're holding out for the end of capitalism, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the path to socialism in the imperial core doesn't run through something like a jobs guarantee. No one knows how to build socialism here, and observations from a century ago in vastly different material conditions don't necessarily have predictive power.
I think you do as much as you can for workers and then use the strengthened working class to push for even more. The reason PMC libs run so much of the Global North is that they're financially secure enough to dedicate serious attention to politics. It's a hobby to them, like golf. If you have one job that's not too taxing and it takes care of all of your material needs, you have the time and energy to organize and figure out how the levers of power work. If you have multiple jobs and are still just scraping by, that's much harder.
I think you're being too nice to socdems.
Socdems are just liberals that have moved left a bit. They are reformists and they uphold the status quo. Don't confuse socdems with socialists who are compromising with liberalism for the sake of the working class. The socdems want capitalism and will do whatever they can to uphold it including murdering Rosa.
The left must not fall into the same trap of thinking we can ally with them and pull them left like we did with liberals. Their intention is to uphold capitalism and suck the energy out of our movement.
Their intention is to deradicalise the left move US right and they have succeeded every single time in the past.
Throwing this stuff at anyone living today is beyond counterproductive.
It is absolutely but it MUST be discussed among leftists.
When we move into the phases that involve us actually being a real threat all the liberals will become socdems. They will not be more convertable as socdems than they were as liberals. They will be just as untrustworthy, snakey and dangerous as they are as liberals. Remember how much they hate us, that will not change when they shift leftwards in the reaction.
Calling people the murderers of someone who lived a century ago and a continent away is laughable. Ascribing murderous intentions to modern-day people over that event (instead of, you know, talking to those people) is laughable. It's just wrecker shit.
I'm not calling people murderers. I'm calling an ideology very likely to do it again if it has to in order to prevent communism. It is a reaction to us, its goal is to prevent communism, they advocate for friendly capitalism but they will if they have to. It's not wrecker shit because we are anti-capitalists and they absolutely are not.
It's wrecker shit because the people who today think "man, capitalism has so many big failings that we need enormous public programs to fix them all" will be anti-capitalists tomorrow. Laying a century-old murder at their feet poisons that well.
I don't really see them as actual socdems and they rarely ever label themselves as such in my opinion. They're baby leftists. The actual socdems are all liberal slime.