so Zig Forums, at what age did you grow out of ultraleftism?
for me it was around 19 when I realized most leftcoms are just edgy first worlders who criticize third world countries for making necessary compromises to survive imperialism instead of organizing to fight their own country's imperialism that caused these compromises
also when I read Bordiga was spied on and then let go when intelligence assessed he was no threat to the state lol
not long before growing out of the idea that every act of opportunism a ruling party can commit is "historically necessary"
This. The fact that some unsavoury activity is sometimes necessary to preserve a revolution doesn’t justify any and all repressive or undemocratic actions. In fact it should be kept to the lowest level possible.
If you weren't blinded by your utopian vision of socialism magically coming in during one fell swoop, you'd understand that "opportunism" is what 1st world leftcoms use to describe the struggle socialist countries take on against their imperialist countries.
That’s not what he said. He’s saying that historical necessity isn’t always a valid reason to betray socialist principles. In other words it’s not always as necessary as some make it seem.
and who's making these judgment calls? armchair leftcoms?
Tankies and Dengists BTFO
History. Enjoy your actually-existing-socialism world much?
The fact that we still live under capitalism. You can’t use “historical necessity” to justify socialist projects that ultimately failed.
So developing communal property, cooperative business and moving towards more communal and involved living and governance like direct democracy is the way forward.
A socialist project that allows people to flourish in areas that capitalism has rendered into wasteland might be viable. So instead of working towards Detroit commune, there could be work towards a Detroit Co-Op. As one possible example.
In this light, syndicalism is the way to go. One could imagine that capital that is accumulating without a billionaire leeching on top might be more effective at this accumulation, and the reluctance of capitalists to give up their profit to keep up with the accumulation as such means that they sabotage their own capital.
Put the memes down and actually read Bordiga.
libcom.org
Unironically last year when I started following Phil Greaves on twitter
Phil "everything is fascist" Greaves
Phil “Iran didn’t hang any communists and if they did they were probably trots” Greaves.
OBSESSED
Most of Western "culture" is fascist
t. Karl "everything is fascist" Marx
Well we can't be right about everything.
Poor Marx, being used as an excuse for the sheer stupidity of Phil Greaves
The whole "everything is fascist" meme is more of an Adorno thing. Ruling class ideas are not necessarily fascist, because capitalist society is not necessarily fascist.
Actually existing capitalist societies in the year 2018 depend on fascism for their continued existence, and the global empire that makes their existence possible is fascist.
What do you think fascism is? Also propping up a fascist regime in the third world doesn't make the first world fascist. The USSR propped up Ba'athist governments, that didn't make them Ba'athists.
Any globe spanning militaristic empire that genocides opponents and has a massive propaganda industry is fascist. I don't care about extinct countries, American already has its lebensraum and subcontracted the slave labor to client states in the global south.
Most major states in history were fascist by that definition. Fascism is a specific ideology, with specific philosophical bases, political mechanisms, and relationships to other ideologies. It's not a blanket statement for any imperialist or authoritarian regime that ever was.
Not really, it's incoherent and morphs to suit whatever the ruling elite need done at the time. If you think the rule of law or the separation of powers exist in a meaningful sense in 2018 America I'm not sure what to say.
Like murdering millions of communists and waging a generational struggle against the very idea of communism? Like holding the entire world hostage with doomsday weapons? That doesn't rate as fascism? It's like you think the concept of fascism went extinct in 1945.
Exactly who is fascist then, if America in 2018 doesn't count.
No it isn't, it's based on a solid foundation of western philosophical thought including Aristotle and Nietzche. It has a number of consistent rhetorical and ideological components, including the supremacy of the state, the sacrilization of politics (ie emphasizing irrationalism in politics, turning it into a kind of secular religion), a particular aesthetic, nationalism, militant anti-communism and anti-democracy (both bourgeois and proletarian), class collaboration, calls to re-create an idealized past, social darwinism, and explicit merging of state and corporate power, anti-individualism. Lots of liberal states have had some of these ideas sure, but they typically lack in key areas including rejecting the totalitarian state, endorsing individualism and bourgeois democracy, and operating under a rationalist conception of politics. In addition there are plenty of liberal states that are bourgeois dictatorships, but aren't particularly expansionist or militaristic. It's ridiculous to suggest that there is no meaningful difference between the government's of modern day Sweden and Fascist Italy.
Protip: America isn't the whole world, there are far more stable and less explicitly authoritarian bourgeois democracies elsewhere. Also I would say that while America is well on the road to fascism, it hasn't gotten there yet, given the presence of bourgeois democracy and some limits on state power.
Those things are certainly elements of fascism, but they aren't the only elements. You might as well say the USSR was fascist because it had a strong state and was highly militaristic like Nazi Germany.
I didn't say that, I said that bourgeois democracies and fascist dictatorships are not the same thing. Fascism existed well after the end of the war, it was just mainly contained to the third world.
Countries which exhibit the traits I described above. Even if you want to dispute the definition, any definition which could consider the Mongol Empire as fascist is obviously a bad one.
Taking fascists at their word and ascribing them intellectual weight is a mistake. Judge them by their actions, not their self flattering propaganda.
America has every one of those and has for some time. The Washington consensus era is full blown fascism.
A hollowed out shell of legalized bribery and a military/security apparatus that's effectively above the law does not qualify as a democracy in any sense.
They're stable and less authoritarian because they're integrated into the global empire, and in return they remain obedient to American military dominance and are reliably anticommunist. A critical number of them are in NATO and are therefore obliged to participate in it's protection racket and perhaps even participate in neo-colonial wars. They're silent partners who know better than to complain about their cut.
Ridiculous, fascism is a feature of capitalism. Come off it mate.
Even by their actions there are numerous traits that we could discern as specifically fascistic, including a totalitarian state, militaristic expansion, anti-democratic and anti-communist repression, and dictatorial governance. Again, many of these things are lacking in liberal democracies.
First of all, that isn't true. I can stand on a street corner and proclaim my love of communism and not get arrested, that wouldn't fly in Nazi Germany. Even if I did get arrested, it would likely get thrown out of court on the basis of the first amendment. Second, even if America were fascist, that doesn't mean that liberalism and fascism are the same thing.
It does for the bourgeoisie, which is what bourgeois democracy means.
Imperialism isn't fascism, being part of NATO isn't fascism. Regardless of the reasons why they may be less internally authoritarian, the fact is that they are, making them fundamentally different than fascist states in their domestic politics.
Again, anti-communism isnt fascism, it's only one aspect of it.
Exactly, which is why its stupid to give a definition like
Because that includes basically every state from Alexander's Empire to the Umyyad Caliphate.
do not listen to this hothead
How do you get swayed by Phil Greaves while being a big brain leftcom or something? He's a fucking dumbass from a actual ML perspective.
Jej, you're the same slime that was defending zionism in that other thread. Fascism is the explicit control of society by the bourgeoisie, the only difference between any other capitalist society is their mask.
"Liberalism" only exists when things are good, fascism is liberalism when things turn bad.
Spotted the mad circus freak aka tranny.
...
What would it fucking take for dumb amerifats on this board to recognize their shit country as fascist? Must the world be transformed into a cartoon where everyone can be easily read and there exist no nuances?
Uh yeah, that's the whole point of the statement "fascism is capitalism in decay". However that doesn't mean they are the same ideology or that their governments behave or work in the same way.
Get a load of this brainlet. Fascism is explicitly the abandonment of liberal democracy in the face of socialist revolution, to suggest that fascism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, instead of a particular form of bourgeois dictatorship is entirely ahistorical. The "mask" that you refer to is more than a mask, its an actual political mechanism by which a state operates, and one that in the case if liberalism is obviously different from fascism. Liberal democracy are full of state violence and anti-democratic tendencies, however workers under liberalism can and do organize, they can and do openly advocate for socialism, they can and do openly criticize and dissent, they can and do limit the power of the state via constitutions and courts. None of these things happen under fascism.
Ironic from somebody who seems to think that modern Italy is exactly the same as fascist Italy.
I was actually a medium brain anarchist. And to be honest I don't think he has amazing insights into Marxism, he just cuts through bullshit and says things very clearly, and his predictions typically turn out to be correct.
Grow up, you jim profit wanna be idiot
Not the other tank itt, but a way I can perceive is that while he goes on a schizophernic rant against some chapotard, he'll occasionally will link an article from the Marxist Internet archive, which a lurker might read. Of course the latter part is more important in how one might be swayed. But this is only what I think happened, as I don't go on twitter.
What do you mean by "failed"?
There is a difference between never give a try (US), tried but failed (Germany and other Western Europe countries), and tried but capital ists comes back (Russia and China).
Failed as in it failed to achieve the ultimate goal of proletarian revolution, the permenant, global overthrow of capitalism. Anything less is a failure in the grand scheme of things.