/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2179416
In a sense, socialism in practice amounts to feudal lords managing massive factories and mines instead of massive collections of serfs and artisans.

To make the socialist mode that Marx and Engels described possible, the principles of fascism would be realized. These principles are

The total subordination to a state
The respect for an established and realized hierarchy
Militarization

You might be wondering why I believe these things. I believe that socialism in its application forces all these ideas to materialize in order to reach its goal for greater productivity. Simply put, to organize people to work better, you want to make sure that people understand their roles, capacities, and to make sure that people actually work for the collective then for themsleves. Obviously, this obedience should only be transient given how efficient the socialist model is. Finally, a socialist state obviously isn’t going to be embraced with open arms without resistance. Just look at how hard it was for people to embrace mechanized labour when luddist nonsense and religious ostracism was rampant along with abolitionism. If we’re being mature, having a massive military to protect socialist assets is a must to ensure the movement’s survival.

Does this suddenly that the reds really were the true fascists? No. However, I think that the new generation that has read the MECW or at least the theory of dialectal history should be conscious of the realities implicit to a socialist model or even quasi socialist model.

would you say this relates to why state capitalism became dominant in the USSR and china?

>>2179426
Yup. Me, I think state capitalism exists as a dialectal response to the constraints of a socialist government formed prematurely. Simply put, you can’t organize a proper socialist movement without the industry or the decentralized supply chains of a society that would be in need of one. Other dialectal historians already said this and have for years.

State capitalism exists as a reaction to existing limits. It’s not a system that people just “get” to decide on.

>>2179428
so is fascism then "progressive" in the light of history, or regressive from the "real movement" of labour?

>>2179444
It was historically thought of as being progressive and to an extent is relative to feudal history. However, it is still highly reactionary and suffers from all the problems the feudal system left behind (land ownership drama, tribalism, patriarchy, religious zealotry depending on which strain of fsscism you’re dealing with)

>>2179423
Marxist-leninist socialism is much closer to slave mode of production than feudal mode of production.

>>2179561
Actually retarded take

>>2179566
I was being facetious anon… if /pol/ rightoids did do enough research to find out they would be better off just randomly spamming ultra and revisionist at random people than ranting abt muh migrants and muh trans but I suppose thats for the better

>>2179580
Maybe double check your own shitty takes first.

>>2179423
>fascism is when military and idpol
Great material analysis!

>>2179597
To be frank, it actually does amount to this in its application—and also giving the idiotic supporters’ money over to the rich

>>2179423
>To make the socialist mode that Marx and Engels described possible, the principles of fascism would be realized. These principles are

>The total subordination to a state

Okay so assuming this is the definition you want to use for fascism, what is it that you think is "the socialist mode that Marx and Engels described"? because if you want to say that the primary stage of socialism involves this "total subordination to a state" i dont see a reason to disagree, but this is not the final stage, and socialism is meant to be a process not a static set of objectives. So what about the full communism? what about the withering away of the state? do you think this state subordination, hierarchies and militarization still exist with a means of production capable of creating abundance, in a world where all countries have reached that level of development and are politically aligned? at that point work doesn't have to be coerced, and there is not competition for resources, why war?

>>2179610
Hey I said that the subordination was transient as it becomes less necessary with abundance. However, trying to believe that anything productive will get done with dissidence is irresponsible and horribly naive

>The total subordination to a state
>The respect for an established and realized hierarchy
>Militarization
These are in no way isolated or unique to fascism, nor are the primary principles of fascism. Not only has no fascist state or program ever truly necessitated full subordination of private corporate power to the state, but respect for the "established and realized hierarchy" is applicable to quite literally every political and economic system of the modern day, it's part of the social legitimation of the monopoly on violence. "Militarization" fluctuates in regards to the system and its current national and global context, but even in its most plain and "earnest" form, existing liberal structures are perfectly able to engage in the militarization alluded to in your post at all points of time (both early and late in its development). Your post, imo, feels myopic, and confuses qualities of political systems and politics in general with that of specific political/economic programs in order to conflate them.

>>2180020
Alright. But I think it’s still important to call out these qualities as specific to fascism otherwise we reach an “ego death” for all politics if we stop differentiating systems in how they’re applied

>>2179416
You are entirely illiterate. Have you learned Marxism from memes and youtube? You don't know what feudalism means. Please read a book, it's not hard.

>The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
>18th Brumaire, Chapter 7

>>2180038
From the MECW volume 3 I got something completely different. Besides, my description of feudalism came from that book. I didn’t make it myself

>>2180045
>From the MECW volume 3
what part of it
>>>/edu/22663

open that PDF, ctrl+f, find the part you're referencing

>>2180242
From volume 3 in some section of it

>>2180366
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific isn't in volume 3 of MECW, it's in volume 24.
That being said… here's everything Engels says about Feudalism Proper in that work:

<But the great international center of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedian countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successively attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed.

<The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.

< Before profane feudalism could be successively attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed. Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion. The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal. The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles. The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns–an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs. But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers: and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centers were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith–the value of gold and silver–began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland. In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the _plebeian_ element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I. to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further–exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society. Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily followed the inevitable reaction which in its turn went beyond the point where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations, the new center of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point. The grand period of English history, known to respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion," and the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the comparatively puny event entitled by Liberal historians, "the Glorious Revolution." The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period, "the first bourgeois of the kingdom." Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during the Wars of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them by sheep. Henry VIII., while squandering the Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VII., the English "aristocracy," far from counteracting the development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689 was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and place" were left to the great land-owning families, provided the economic interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class were sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class. From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized component of the ruling classes of England.

<In the meantime materialism passed from England to France, where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively aristocratic doctrine. But soon its revolutionary character asserted itself. The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their doctrine to universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named–the _Encyclopédie_. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms–avowed materialism or deism–it became the creed of the whole cultured youth of France; so much so that, when the great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The great French Revolution was the third uprising of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the first, too, that was really fought out to the destruction of one of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary institutions, and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France the Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the _Code Civil_ a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law–that almost perfect expression of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the production of commodities–to modern capitalistic conditions; so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to express the economic relations of capitalistic society in that barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation–_vous écrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople_, said a Frenchman–that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and transmitted to America and the Colonies the best part of that old Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from all interference but that of the law courts, which on the Continent has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been as yet fully recovered. To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies, to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry.

<Even in France, where feudalism was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie, as a whole, has held full possession of the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom; by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification. Under the second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled, but for three years only; their incapacity brought on the second Empire. It is only now, in the third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the helm for more than twenty years; and they are already showing lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already knocking at the door. In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the wealthy middle-class submitted to this, remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal manufacturer, Mr. W.A. Forster, in a public speech implored the young men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business sharpness.

< For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way in the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering. We saw how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government. But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational.

so what about any of this contradicts the content of >>2180038 in your opinion?

>>2180672
Either I misread of misremembered man

>>2180023
well i mean fascism is just anti-communism so that kind of throws a wrench in the idea that communism is somehow secretly fascism

to know specifically what fascism is you need to do a material analysis on how it is socially produced, which is from a combination of failed imperialist expansion and failed communist revolution. due to the tendency of capitalism to consolidate into monopoly and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as technology increases, capitalists must expand extraterritorially in order to remain profitable, resulting in imperialist division of the world. when this expansion fails capital cant gain profit from building new productive forces and must turn inward and enact brutal austerity on the working class by lowering wages and cutting benefits. if this is rejected and communists fail to take power but threaten it, capital transitions to open terroristic dictatorship to discipline the working class and maintain their profits, which ultimately results in the enslavement of a scapegoat section of surplus reserve army of labor and working them to death. communists dont even make it to the first part because they aren't driven by profits. motivating or even coercing people to work for the sake of increasing the rate of production results in full employment and an improvement in quality of life for everyone, not an antagonism between workers and the state.

>>2179444
Maybe things are neither simply progressive or regressive. Maybe the ultimate trvthnvke is that dialectics are not teleological at all, either in the idealist Hegelian way (driving toward the Absolute) or in the materialist Marxist way (working through contradictions until they are all resolved). Maybe instead all new historical developments entail both resolving contradictions and creating new ones. And maybe we should not be utopian dreamers trying to fit real-world developments into our pre-conceived notions of good or bad and instead take them as they are, building our theory according to what happens in practice.