For those who don’t seem to get it:
No, this meme does not mean that you can’t temporarily halt fascist electoral victory, but rather that fighting symptoms and portraying that as a “victory over fascism” completely disregard the root cause (as liberalism often does)…Tho I’m ngl, the NFP seems to be pretty based, at least relative to the usual neolib bs
ie.: Fascism is a built-in function of capitalism and thus bourgeois “democracy”. Capitalism turns to fascism when threatened, so as long as you aren’t ready to give up the private ownership of the economy, you will not be able to get rid of fascism (paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht here)
sheesh, I often forget, that libs and revisionists actually believe in bourgeois democracy. If you are open to changing your mind I can recommend “Reform or Revolution” by Rosa Luxenburg
- link to wikipedia
- link to book at marxists.org (should also be available as an ebook on there, as well as in different languages
EDIT: @[email protected] made me aware of an ebook-specific link
I had to read that a couple of times before I understood what you are trying to say. At first glance, it seemed like you were calling democracy itself bourgeois, but I think you meant it as a specific thing that isn’t actual democracy… e.g. it’s an illusion of democracy because capitalism gives the wealthy the ability to steer the whole ship, as it were. Please correct me if my understanding is wrong.
I’m glad you took the time to read and understand it in good faith!
And yes, under bourgeois “democracy” (be it multiparty or bi/mono party dominant) you only get to choose between various representatives of capital
The system and it’s laws are inherently designed in such a way, that no matter whom you elect, you still live under the dictatorship of capital
Exactly that. Capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
It seems so. Capitalism fundamentally unequal, which is opposite of real democracy.
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1st of all there is no such thing as a communist country, as communism describes a state-, money- and classless society.
Then I think you are conflating two very different things: what I think you are alluring to, simply describes a more centralised and ruthless approach at achieving and keeping alive a revolution. (and arguably betraying it, but that does not constitute fascism)
Fascism is a very different thing. Basically it’s the act of “unifying” a group of people or nation against a caricature of a “common enemy”. It seeks the suppression of proletarian class struggle by forcing collaboration and integrating society into one “corpus”. Corporatism is a core tenant of fascism, which is (imo) very well depicted through unions being forced to merge with (or be disbanded into) private companies, because “such distinctions are obsolete when we stand united as one Volk”. Those class distinctions never disappear, but the whole charade is basically based on that premise.
Ofc this all serves the protection of capital by fooling the working masses and suppressing labour or simply “undesirable” elements of society…
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fascism is secretly coded into capitalism
It isn’t exactly a secret, comrade. It’s just that the term “fascist” is still out of style, so they call themselves “conservatives” instead.
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Communism involves, almost by definition, a centrally planned economy. That isn’t really possible without a state.
Socialism can involve that (decentralised planning is possible)
In communism - as there is no need for the suppression of reactionary classes anymore - the socialist state ceases to exist in terms of what we know as a “state”
Administration of the economy can and will still exist in the post-“socialist world republic” (ie. communist) world
A Leninist would tell you that the “state” is defined by class suppression, so in a truly classless society the “state” ceases to exist and becomes simply the bureaucracy by which the production of society is organized an allocated.
An Anarchist would tell you that communism doesn’t require a centrally planned economy at all, and that small groups that own and control their own means of production are capable of spontaneously organizing at a mass scale and distributing their production without a central authority.
A Leninist would tell you that the “state” is defined by class suppression
A Leninist should perhaps open a dictionary instead of trying to redefine words.
small groups that own and control their own means of production are capable of spontaneously organizing at a mass scale
An Anarchist has clearly never worked in any group setting I’m familiar with.
Found it If you click on author name it only gives you the web version, for epub you need to go to this page:
thx for providing the link!
(I don’t frequent marxists.org, since I get all my ebooks through Anna’s archive)
I’ve learned that using the term “bourgeois” just confuses half of liberals and convinces the other half that you must be a tankie - I just call it liberal democracy and they get it (it does send them into reactionary fits, though).
That just exposes them as being politically illiterate reactionaries and staunch defenders of capital
Those who are open-minded will interact in good faith and ask for clarification (the thread of my overarching comment might be an example)
Wait, so are you trying to clown on the fact that France managed to stop their neofascist party from gaining any real hold on power?
I’m clowning on thee idea that you thinks anything was “stopped”
We know that fighting fascism requires constant vigilance. But you don’t have to be an asshole about it. Nor do you have to shit on a country’s electorate for, you know, doing the right thing and voting against fascism.
doing the right thing and voting against fascism.
You can’t vote against fascism. The French fascists are still there, gaining power - the voting didn’t weaken them in any way whatsoever. And they’ll keep on gaining strength until they figure out how to get into power despite so-called “liberal democracy.”
All the voting in the world isn’t going to change that.
Fascism is a weed and power is a vacuum. It’s always going to crop back up and we stop it with any means necessary.
Unfortunately for the US, we’re kinda fucked and being pushed towards the more extreme removal methods.
At some point one has to wonder why that weed finds such fertile ground to grow instead of spending all their time weeding.
Wouldn’t them losing the election handedly in this case imply the ground is less fertile than polling numbers and online content would have you believe?
The US ruling class always collectively benefits from being right-wing. It’s why we no longer have a true leftist party in the US and instead are stuck with hard-right and center-right. I always ask people to give me a valid reason as to why the ruling class would willingly divide itself when they all benefit from the same things and are ultimately from the same realm. It’s why you see things like AOC marching with pro-Palestine marches, followed up by candid photo ops with Joe Biden—the current figurehead pushing the genocide. It’s all theatrics.
It’s like George Carlin always said:
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
Not that it was stopped by waging an actual war against them and toppling their governments. It’s a never ending thing, no matter what you do.
Welcome to a two party system. It gets worse from here.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the fascists lost, but this is literally how you end up with two parties. Every election from now on, you’ll have two giant camps and eventually they’ll just coalesce in to two monolithic parties. Then you get tribalism. And as much as I love the French for their propensity to fuck shit up when the government does something stupid, that might actually cause problems going forward.
I wish them the best, and maybe I’m wrong. I sure hope I am for their sake. But this looks an awful lot like the beginnings of a two party system.
This is not America dude WTF are you talking about two party?
The US used to have between 4 and 6 parties, depending on how you counted. That gradually worked it’s way down to 2. The election of 1860 had one Republican running against 4 different Democrats, all with their own little micro party. What Republican and Democrat mean in this context doesn’t mean what it means today, and that’s really not the point. What the point is is, that was the last time.
That election saw the Republican take more than 50 percent. We had some “issues” for a few years, and so elections prior to 1877 won’t really have much to draw a comparison here, and the election of 1880 we had two parties and no more. No little factions trying to gain power, no off shoots quarreling and splitting the vote. Two massive parties of people that mostly agreed with each other.
Prior to that we had a number of elections which were arguably two party, more than one where out of spite everyone ran under the same party regardless. But none since have had a reasonable showing of any significant third party. With two major exceptions, so major they each get their own blurb in the text books as unique elections. When Theodore Roosevelt decided he didn’t like who replaced him, lost the nomination and started his own party knowing full well it would give the office to the Democrats, and 1992, when Ross Perot decided he didn’t like Bush that much and ran against him as an independent, splitting off just enough votes to give the office to the Democrats and causing both parties to literally change the rules on who could conceivably run without their blessing.
You don’t have two parties now.
What you have is a coalition, effectively a party, and I’m response, because apart they lost, another coalition.
This is how you get two parties.
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Europe is not homogenous in political landscapes, and “coalition government” means very different things depending on where you are.
There are countries like France where most elections are first past the post, with a very strong culture of “a single party must have an absolute majority in order to govern” and a system that leads to 2-3 heavily dominant parties. Coalitions like NFP are therefore devised before the elections, so they basically function as a single party with diverging internal ideologies.
There are also a lot of counties where most elections are some kind of proportional representation, where a single party almost never gets an absolute majority. Coalitions are negotiated after the elections, often made of parties with widely diverging ideologies but still trying to work together. I believe that it’s a more democratic system as there is better representation, governing parties keep each other in check and consensus culture helps taming the most radical elements despite its inherent instability.
As we are, we are in a Northern European situation with no majority despite ou electoral system, but we would need a massive shift in political culture in order to get there. Our tankies (LFI mostly) and neolibs (Ens) spent so much time in the last years shitting on each other that they refuse to work together despite it being the only way to get an absolute majority and actually get shit done and make the fascists irrelevant.
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Coalitions are literally the primary way the rest of the world avoids devolving into the US’s corrupt two-party system. It’s proven quite effective.
If that could be combined with RCV in more countries (or US states), then it could far more strongly prevent the consolidation of political parties and return more power to the people themselves.
Welcome to a two party system
France doesn’t have a two-party system. There are five major party coalitions spread across dozens of niche socio-economic and regional party blocks.
Every election from now on, you’ll have two giant camps and eventually they’ll just coalesce in to two monolithic parties.
French politics is far more complex than that, on account of their democratic system having much smaller districts and more ethnically diverse regions than their American peers.
tribalism
Shitty term, try “sectarianism” instead. Also your analysis is incredibly idealistic and shallow.
Fuck, dude, don’t remind me :(
France managed to stop their neofascist party from gaining any real hold on power?
They didn’t stop them - the fascists were already powerful enough to be an election away from the top spot, see? So no… so-called “liberal democracy” has never stopped fascism and never will.
Le Pen is an ignorant bigot but she isn’t acting like Trump so I actually do think NR is figuring out its next electoral strategy/how to capitalize on its seats vs. plotting to overthrow a legitimate election and install a dictator.
Make no mistake, the rise of right wing groups is a major problem in Western Europe and people need to be careful. But France is not on the brink like the US is. Le Pen is not Trump.
LePen is much smarter than Trump, she’s also very patient. She knows that given the current state of things, she will get there eventually. Her party gained recognition and the right wing propaganda works like a charm.
The victory of the left is good but, we have cancer and I don’t think they’ll be enough to properly fight it, especially since they have roughly 3 years to the next presidential elections and only a relative majority. The ruling party has already started getting in the way of them forming a government.
No argument here. Which is why I said America is on the brink and France is not but I also specifically said that they are not out of the woods and the right is clearly planning their next moves. What France just did we needed to do in 2016 as part of a larger effort to stop the rise of right wing nationalists. I feel like all of this was pretty clear in my previous comment.
My comment wasn’t a criticism of yours, more like additional information 😁.
Here we can really feel that something is really not right. Given that France follows the US with roughly a ten year delay, I fear that our next elections might see the rise of something similar to trumpism.
As you said, we’re definitely not out of the woods yet…
My bad I misread your intent
I don’t think 2016 is the right comparison actually. It was not a presidential election, but more something akin to midterms I guess?
The true question now is 2027, which is the next presidential election. Since 2017 (and even before I’d say) the far right has been gaining influence year after year. They have been in the second round of the last two presidential elections, and with a margin that’s getting lower and lower. And even in those elections, they had a majority in the european elections, and they have more seats in congress than they had before this election. (Previous one was in 2022).
Tldr: they are gaining weight, and the next big potential moment which will probably look a lot like 2016 in the US will be the 2027 presidential election
I don’t know France policies but Trump isn’t the problem. The far right will continue to push us that direction if they have any amount of power. Once Trump is gone (hopefully) we need to keep voting every time. Never stop never stopping.
I’m not saying Trump is the end all be all of the problem, but he is the central figure and clearly super on board with overthrowing the government. If if Le Pen plotting the same thing, then she and her co-conspirators are a lot quieter about it that’s for sure.
I think it is reasonable to assume that everybody on Lemmy knows that Trump is not the only source of the issue. It gets tiresome seeing people repeat this over and over again. We all know there is a much larger issue here and every time somebody “informs people” that there is a larger issue, it’s a needless sidebar that isn’t meant to inform but to correct somebody on the Internet for the sake of correcting somebody and contributing.
So we’re clear I was agreeing with you. I don’t agree it’s a needless sidebar though. There’s plenty of “trump bad”, and he is, but more importantly it’s “republican bad” and I’ll continue to repeat that until that party is dissolved.
ignorant bigot
Oily oil. Buttery butter. Watery water. They are synonyms. But ok.
Yeah, I’ve had it with all the redundant pleonasms!
She’s ignorant about a lot of other things too
Knowledge is the light in the darkness of ignorance
This is exactly how it’s supposed to work in a functioning democracy.
Where ideally everyone, but at least a critical percentage of citizens is educated enough to recognize the pattern of deceit and false, but easy answers to very complex questions from extremist parties.
Where established parties don’t feel the need to pander to the votes of extremist parties by cooperating and adapting points pushed by extremists.
Where the average citizen doesn’t feel left out by the system and is tempted to align themselves with extremist parties in order to protest the current reality of said system.
Where the system implements safeguards to not allow the system to be taken hostage by extremists.
Would be nice, eh?
May I introduce you to the idea of POSIWID?
There are more ways to structure a society democratically than with representational democracy. Other, less fundamentally hierarchichal ways of implementing democracy aren’t as prone to fascism developing.
Also fascism is ultimately the grand conclusion of capitalist neoliberal democracies. Fascists seek to amass, consolidate, and wield power. Liberal democracies fail to resist this amassment because the purpose of a system is what it does, and neoliberals ultimately want it to be possible to amass power in the hands of their wealthy corporate cronies. They are ultimately fascists not because they implement fascism but because they are willing to tolerate fascists implementing fascism as long as they get to benefit from it. Obviously this systems theory stuff is complicated. That’s the point of studying systems.
Anyway. This was a long comment when I fundamentally agree with you. I just want people to think about ur-fascism, where it comes from, and what to do about it
This was a long comment when I fundamentally agree with you.
No worries. This is a lefty space after all ;)
What they managed to do is pretty cool though. Like yeah all the structural issues remain but centrists working with leftists to keep fascist out of the gov? Pretty rad! Broad leftist unity on the ballot at least? Pretty rad!
I’m pretty sure the leftists know the stakes, don’t shit on solidarity.
centrists working with leftists to keep fascist out of the gov?
This was voters siding with left-liberals when faced with the choice of an unpopular centrist incumbent, an increasingly deranged nationalist movement, and a coalition of moderate progressives. Macron’s original stated gamble was to allow National Rally power to govern in order to prove their policies were unpopular. But he miscalculated how unpopular LePen’s movement actually was and handed a plurality to Melenchon instead by mistake.
I’m pretty sure the leftists know the stakes
People routinely vote on vibes. Hence the Obama-Trump voter or the wild swings between Tory and Labour in the UK. I would not bank against a momentary coalition falling apart as soon as Macron is asked to compromise on some pro-business policy or step towards increased at-cost domestic production.
I certainly would not bank on the largely right-wing owned domestic media whipping local French citizens into a hysterical lather over the advent of the Evil French Communists taking a few Parliamentary offices. Public opinion can turn hard right with even a marginal economic downturn if news media is there to scream blame at migrants, (((bad actors))), and brown people loudly enough.
Eh, I don’t really bother reading political takes by usasians.
usasians
Lolz
I mean, stopping fascists from gaining power is a pretty good way of stopping fascists from gaining power. If the government is to incompetent and/or uninterested in running the country to actually fix the issues people are pissed off about it’s only a stopgap solution, but a stopgap is better than nothing. If you have an actual plan for how to go about the process of creating an actual better system in the real world starting from where we are then by all means feel free to share, but until then voting will save lives.
I think this is where the accelerationists are coming from, and I don’t think they’re wrong, at least in terms of identifying a problem. From their point of view, the system is the problem; it both inevitably trends towards fascism and actively and forcefully resists reform due to a network of entrenched interests. Thus, whether it arrives today or tomorrow, fascism IS coming, and the net violence could be decreased by just ripping off the band-aid and letting the whole damnable thing burn so that something new can take its place.
I don’t think I agree with the solution; there’s no guarantee that what replaces it won’t be worse. The problem statement makes a lot of sense, though. It certainly feels truthy.
Sure, yeah, but there are two major problems I see with that. It is a plan that even if it worked correctly would result in the most deadly war in human history if it happened in the US today, and also it wouldn’t work. They’d loose.
It worked because the fascists weren’t actually in power yet.
Didn’t work with Putin
That’s just the first phase of the fight, in the second phase they get a lot more damage resistance and their moveset gets quicker. Much tougher fight.
Second phase of the fight is trying not to lose votes to fascists who pretend to be the democratic opposition while trying to enact socialist policies under neoliberal constraints and inevitably making a mess :(
Green Party cough
Is there a third phase? I HATE when there’s a third phase. I’m looking at you Elden Ring DLC spoiler.
It’s an underwater fight.
Ffs, how does that even work? I didn’t play much Sekiro.
Ackhually, this was phase 2.
Phase 1 was won by the far right last week.
Probably worth teasing this apart.
There are:
- Fascist political candidates
…which can be formally appointed or rejected by voting
- Fascist organized groups
…which may attempt to physical seize power regardless of political climate, if the physical conditions seem right, but have a much easier time if the political conditions are favorable too
- Fascist cultural concepts
…which proliferate regardless of political and physical conditions, and can really only be managed through social norms, which are themselves often reinforced at the ballot box
Just because voting only directly impacts the first problem doesn’t mean it has zero impact on the other two.
In fact, it’s really hard to win the cultural battle and cast fascism as a niche extremist philosophy if it keeps almost winning elections.
Fascist organised groups who tried to seize power can not be fought with voting but thankfully they still have breakable kneecaps
They can’t be defeated with voting, but they can be aided by not voting.
But yes, I also thank the level designers for putting in accessible weak points.
They do tend to do better when more mechanisms of the state are on their side, though. (But yes that doesn’t mean voting alone defeats them.)
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Tbh, I think the democrats are at least partly responsible for perpetuating this idea in the US, because they benefit from being the adults in the room relative to the republicans. Basically since '16, a huge chunk of their pitch has been “we’re not the republicans”. They’ve relied on the republicans being fascist to make the sell for them, and I think that the centrist auth Dems really love it because it means that they don’t have to really make any big, challenging promises that would piss off their corporate or billionaire donors, they don’t have to walk back any authoritarian power grabs, they just have to point at the fascists and say (correctly) “these psychos want to kill you, I don’t.”
If the democrats get elected, they get a mandate to just kick back and not implement fascism. If the Republicans get elected, then the democrats get a sudden boost of engagement and cash as the fear fatigue is replaced by real, actual fear. In either case, the centrist auth faction of the democratic party aren’t going to be rid of their fundraising cow, thank you very much, even if the cow is actively planning to murder them.
This has been the DNC playbook since Clinton.
aggressively mashes vote into box
