Oh, they’re absolutely shit (even the furthest left of them) but, the system is rigged with FPTP and other “features” to give us either a neoliberal party or a fascist party. Neither is a good choice though I find equating them to be a false equivalency. My personal ethics require that I take what action that I can to reduce harm, especially to those must vulnerable and historically oppressed. Data shows anti-electoralism and third parties in FPTP to be functionally equivalent to voting for fascists, so, garbage neoliberals who at least aren’t trying to string up trans people while robbing the working class is my option.
I agree, although I would also argue that in the specific case of the US, the situation is a bit more drastic since in most (specially oppressed countries) the liberals/moderate fascists/national bourgeoisie have a somewhat “revolutionary” role since they generally oppose the international bourgeoisie and do win some concessions for the working class, as you mention, or help with industrialisation and so on. In the case of the US, though, both parties represent the international bourgeoisie, and the international political agenda of both countries is essentially the same, interventionism, imperialism, economic blockades, and so on, so the difference is radically different in that the number of concessions the liberals/moderate fascists can give the working class, specially the working class of oppressed countries, is much smaller than in other places. I too critically support the left wing liberals in my country because the option is total deindustrialisation and selling everything to the lowest bidder otherwise, so I totally get your point but wanted to make a small distinction.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Hexbear, they’re a pan-leftists instance who will be federating with us and a couple of other instances by the end of the month luckily, they have a pretty active anarchist community so you might have a better time there than on a general purpose liberal instance.
Definitely agreed and thank you for the solid discourse. My contention is that nominal support of a liberal/moderate international bourgeoise still tends towards reduction of harm, compared to fascists. They still practice imperialism and exploitation but tend to do so when softer gloves more frequently by compare. Additionally, their constituents tend to be more likely to urge further harm reduction, when they are unable to remain ignorant of it. My loyalties being to those groups that have been, from my perspective, most harmed throughout recorded human (indigenous peoples, minorities, and general non-combatants), I still have to make that choice in the artificial binary.
My ideal societal organization (mostly in-line with anachro-syndicalism) is something that I hold no illusion of being achievable in my lifetime, if it ever is, at least not without unacceptable suffering and loss of life (nor do I pretend that my non-violent path is the only one necessary to achieve positive change - the labor and civil rights movements being excellent examples contrary). So, I do what is within my means and abilities to corrode these systems by cultivating curiosity and kindness while mitigating harms in hope that this continues our species’ social and psychological evolution towards something compatible with my ideals.
Thank you for recommending Hexbear! I hope that they federate with my home instance as well, which seems to skew more towards anarchism, in my experience, but is more topically aligned with free and open knowledge and creativity.
I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it’s also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
Thank you for this. The historical and current colonial exploitation of the global South and indigenous peoples around the globe is absolutely something that is overlooked far too much in these conversations. A large part of this, I suspect is due to controlling narratives allowed in education and subverting factual accounts and analyses. A good recent example being the portrayal of The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a sectarian conflict.
I agree that most people, ourselves included, have vulgarized the concept of fascism and use it as a crude synonym for capitalist tyranny. Strictly speaking, régimes such as Imperial America and the Zionist neocolony are not, nor are they turning, fascist… but even so I do not feel the need to speak up every time we characterize our oppressors as such. That we recognize our oppression and struggle against it matters more to me than our imprecise categorization of it. If we need to characterize the ongoing superexploitation of the Southern world as ‘fascism’, even if that is not the correct term for it, then so be it.
Rather than explicitly disapproving of leftists for vulgarizing fascism, we can—and maybe we should—instead take it as an opportunity to show them how the most effective way to prevent neofascism is by abolishing capitalism; we can take it as an opportunity to show them how European colonialism inspired fascism. Take, for example, this extract from German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945:
Hitler continued, ‘if we speak of new lands, we are bound to think first of Russia and her border states’.2
His favourite analogy in this connection was a comparison of the future German East with British India.3 To him, India provided an object lesson of colonial exploitation and Machiavellian virtuosity; he used it to buttress his conviction that the population of ‘Germany’s India’ — the Soviet Union — was likewise no more than ‘white slaves’ destined to serve the master race. Characteristic of his landlocked outlook, he proclaimed that Germany’s primary colonies were to be found not overseas but in Russia.4 Along with its manpower, the resources of the East were to assure the material well‐being of the German people.
(Emphasis added.)
We are less aware of how the status quo—with or without (neo)fascism—already superexploits the South, and that is a problem. It is frustrating how many are more concerned with the possible rise of neofascism at home than with the superexploitation already going on right now, but the two concerns need not be antagonistic at all.
We can show others, through their crude antifascism, how the superexploitation of the South was not only similar to but also inspired fascism, and how we can prevent more neofascism by ending the South’s superexploitation once and for all. Let us invite them to learn more, and dare them to upgrade their antifascism.
Respect. Although I’m curious what problem you as an anarchist would have with calling democrats blue maga lol
Oh, they’re absolutely shit (even the furthest left of them) but, the system is rigged with FPTP and other “features” to give us either a neoliberal party or a fascist party. Neither is a good choice though I find equating them to be a false equivalency. My personal ethics require that I take what action that I can to reduce harm, especially to those must vulnerable and historically oppressed. Data shows anti-electoralism and third parties in FPTP to be functionally equivalent to voting for fascists, so, garbage neoliberals who at least aren’t trying to string up trans people while robbing the working class is my option.
I agree, although I would also argue that in the specific case of the US, the situation is a bit more drastic since in most (specially oppressed countries) the liberals/moderate fascists/national bourgeoisie have a somewhat “revolutionary” role since they generally oppose the international bourgeoisie and do win some concessions for the working class, as you mention, or help with industrialisation and so on. In the case of the US, though, both parties represent the international bourgeoisie, and the international political agenda of both countries is essentially the same, interventionism, imperialism, economic blockades, and so on, so the difference is radically different in that the number of concessions the liberals/moderate fascists can give the working class, specially the working class of oppressed countries, is much smaller than in other places. I too critically support the left wing liberals in my country because the option is total deindustrialisation and selling everything to the lowest bidder otherwise, so I totally get your point but wanted to make a small distinction.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Hexbear, they’re a pan-leftists instance who will be federating with us and a couple of other instances by the end of the month luckily, they have a pretty active anarchist community so you might have a better time there than on a general purpose liberal instance.
Definitely agreed and thank you for the solid discourse. My contention is that nominal support of a liberal/moderate international bourgeoise still tends towards reduction of harm, compared to fascists. They still practice imperialism and exploitation but tend to do so when softer gloves more frequently by compare. Additionally, their constituents tend to be more likely to urge further harm reduction, when they are unable to remain ignorant of it. My loyalties being to those groups that have been, from my perspective, most harmed throughout recorded human (indigenous peoples, minorities, and general non-combatants), I still have to make that choice in the artificial binary.
My ideal societal organization (mostly in-line with anachro-syndicalism) is something that I hold no illusion of being achievable in my lifetime, if it ever is, at least not without unacceptable suffering and loss of life (nor do I pretend that my non-violent path is the only one necessary to achieve positive change - the labor and civil rights movements being excellent examples contrary). So, I do what is within my means and abilities to corrode these systems by cultivating curiosity and kindness while mitigating harms in hope that this continues our species’ social and psychological evolution towards something compatible with my ideals.
Thank you for recommending Hexbear! I hope that they federate with my home instance as well, which seems to skew more towards anarchism, in my experience, but is more topically aligned with free and open knowledge and creativity.
I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it’s also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
Thank you for this. The historical and current colonial exploitation of the global South and indigenous peoples around the globe is absolutely something that is overlooked far too much in these conversations. A large part of this, I suspect is due to controlling narratives allowed in education and subverting factual accounts and analyses. A good recent example being the portrayal of The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a sectarian conflict.
I agree that most people, ourselves included, have vulgarized the concept of fascism and use it as a crude synonym for capitalist tyranny. Strictly speaking, régimes such as Imperial America and the Zionist neocolony are not, nor are they turning, fascist… but even so I do not feel the need to speak up every time we characterize our oppressors as such. That we recognize our oppression and struggle against it matters more to me than our imprecise categorization of it. If we need to characterize the ongoing superexploitation of the Southern world as ‘fascism’, even if that is not the correct term for it, then so be it.
Rather than explicitly disapproving of leftists for vulgarizing fascism, we can—and maybe we should—instead take it as an opportunity to show them how the most effective way to prevent neofascism is by abolishing capitalism; we can take it as an opportunity to show them how European colonialism inspired fascism. Take, for example, this extract from German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945:
(Emphasis added.)
We are less aware of how the status quo—with or without (neo)fascism—already superexploits the South, and that is a problem. It is frustrating how many are more concerned with the possible rise of neofascism at home than with the superexploitation already going on right now, but the two concerns need not be antagonistic at all.
We can show others, through their crude antifascism, how the superexploitation of the South was not only similar to but also inspired fascism, and how we can prevent more neofascism by ending the South’s superexploitation once and for all. Let us invite them to learn more, and dare them to upgrade their antifascism.