How do we seriously define fascism?
<Anti-communism
Liberals do it.
<Anti-organized labor
Liberals do it.
<Colonialism
Liberals do it.
<Genocide
Liberals do it.
What, instead of the police beating your ass, it's paramilitary thugs? Instead of parliamentary elections, you have a fascist party dictatorship? But is this really a meaningful difference to liberalism?
How do we seriously define fascism?
125 posts and 8 image replies omitted.>2267480
Well, the problem is that for starters, it's unclear if the Holocaust refers to only Jewish victims or non-Jewish victims as well. The Western historian consensus seems to be that the different genocides shouldn't be "lumped together" due to different methods and different Nazi groups being responsible. However, the problem is that the Jewish Holocaust itself involved multiple different methods and was conducted by different Nazi groups. It just feels like Western historians want to downplay the genocide of Eastern Europeans. Also no, I don't think it's antisemitic to point out that Jewish people were not the only victims of Nazis.
Looking it up, about 2.7 million civilian ethnic Poles were killed by Nazis.
About anywhere from from 10 to 15 million non-Jewish Soviet civilians were killed by Nazis. This excludes the 3 million Soviet POWs killed by Nazis.
It's interesting that as far as I've noticed the Soviet POWs are more likely to be mentioned by Westerners than the Soviet civilians.
Admittedly, there has been difficulty with historiography of the genocide of Eastern Europeans from the Westerner side due to lack of access to historical archives and documents. But I still can't shake the feeling there is an ideological bias or prerogative to downplay the Eastern European genocide. Generalplan Ost and the so-called Hunger Plan were not the schizo dreams of Himmler, but active Nazi policy: Eastern Europe was to be literally colonized and settled by Germans, Eastern Europeans, like Jews, were to be either enslaved if they were "fit for work" or exterminated. The Eastern Front was basically a genocidal conquest. Once you realize that, it adds a whole chilling dimension to the Eastern Front. Soviet soldiers were literally fighting to save their families.
>>2267469>people are arguing whether fascism is led by the petty borg and middle classes(trotsky position) Trotsky never said fascism is led by the petty bourgeoisie. He clearly states that fascism is a tool of monopoly capital, directed by the big bourgeoisie, but mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie as its mass base.
"German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is LEAST of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, IT IS the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital. "
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com >>2267514>Well, the problem is that for starters, it's unclear if the Holocaust refers to only Jewish victims or non-Jewish victims as well. The way I remember it being taught in school, the Holocaust referred also to the killing of disabled people, gypsies, and homosexuals. But you're right that it doesn't tend to include the killing of non-Jewish ethnic Poles and other Slavs.
>But I still can't shake the feeling there is an ideological bias or prerogative to downplay the Eastern European genocide.It doesn't take a big leap to conclude that deaths of non-Jewish Soviet civilians was downplayed in the West because the Cold War. On the flip side, the Soviet deemphasis of a certain special or unique Jewish story of the Holocaust seems wrong at some level and also political.
The way the Nazis looked at Jews as not just targets but the ultimate enemy feels qualitatively different. The rapid acceleration of the Holocaust where whole Jewish populations were being carted off into industrialized death camps very late in the war was really psychotic.
>>2267488>>2267488>the US and NATO preserved Krupp and IG Farbin with the nuremburg sham condemning soldiers instead of their capitalist backersthis is what Gravity's Rainbow is
really about, beneath all the pretentious prose and whacky shenanigans
Fascism is not so complicated as people make it out to be.
…
The leftist view of Fascism is vindicated.Leftist view of Fascism is that Fascism is merely the dictatorship & absolutism of the bourgeoisie.Rightwingers don't prescribe to Fascism as Italian Fascists laid down anyways.
Evola even makes fun of Fascism, calling himself a super-fascist (meaning, the stress on transcendence over immanentism / actual idealism of Gentile), & rightwingers hate the Statism / unitary politics of Fascism.
>>2262528<How do we seriously define fascism?Leftist definition.
1. Fascism is merely the dictatorship & absolutism of the bourgeoisie.
Fascist definition.
2. State Corporatism / totalitarianism with the immanentism of Actual Idealism.
If we take Fascism as Fascists describe it:Fascism is State Corporatism / totalitarianism with the immanentism of Actual Idealism.
>What is State Corporatism?i.e. like Hobbes' Leviathan, the State as a Corporation of One Person.
It is a unitary mode of politics, generally with a one-party state.
Historically, this unitary mode of politics goes with Plato's Republic & maxims like,
>The state is unitary, supports the idea of many in one or working as one body / corporatism.>political & economical having the same science>one party or one estate (one-party regime or absolute monarchy) in unitary fashion<one party (fascism) or one estate (absolute monarchy) for State Corporatism, an arbitrary or unilateral authority – as opposed to Aristotle's concord of hosts / independent partnership of clans & their convention / virtue, representing multi-parties (multi-party democracy) or multi-estates (neofeudalism).
>TotalitarianismHolistic view of the State concerned with the life and consciousness of the citizens.
Fascism is mobilized & an active politics, totalitarian and Statist thanks to Actual Idealism.
The immanentism makes the consciousness of citizens and participation in politics worthwhile. It is another reason why they are Statists and not esoterics or like the traditionalists do place Church over State.
>Actual Idealismhttps://philosophyball.miraheze.org/wiki/Actual_Idealism>Gentile believes that the only true reality is the dynamic act of thinking itself — the thinking that thinks. Reality is not found in static entities or separated objects but in the active process of self-consciousness, where thought manifests as a pure act. This pure act is inherently self-referential, as it constitutes the unity of subject and object within the spirit.>emphasizing that spirit and matter are inseparably united in the act of thinking. Reality is thus entirely immanent, rejecting external or transcendent presuppositions.
>Arbitrary power / violenceThis usually comes with unitary / authoritarian politics because of the rejection of Aristotle's concord of hosts.
Think of it as the impossibility of all these factions to paint a canvas together.
Hobbes infamously makes a war of all against all and defers to an arbitrary / unilateral authority to reject this.
To really understand this view, think how well the most opposed political factions might agree or have concord – take the most ardent nationalists like the Nordicists and Pan-Slavists or Southern Europeans and ask them how they'd like to divide Europe, because inevitably they'd disagree on the boundaries and make deference to an arbitrary decision-making inevitable. Are the borders drawn by a concord of hosts or by the sword?
>>2305075>>2262541>>2262599Giovanni Genitle:>Far from being the negation of liberalism and democracy (which even the leaders of Fascism have regularly repeated for polemical reasons) [Fascism] actually aspires to be the most perfect form of liberalism and democracy.To be a liberal is to deviate from the Christian traditionalism.
Unless you are committed to returning to pre-Reformation Europe under Catholicism, you are basically somewhat of a liberal.
The only people who can claim to not be liberals are the most hardcore tradcaths / orthobros.
>>22625281. I just want to get out of the way the fact that fascism is both a historical political movement, and a word we use to try to describe a form of capitalism and the state in a way that assumes there's some kind of universality to it. I only care about the latter
2. In general capitalism is expressed socially and in the state in diverse ways; if there are discreet phases we should expect only that they express some characteristics more strongly and others more weakly, rather than being something completely new
In capitalist crisis, the bourgeoisie is looking for new markets to exploit, for cheaper material costs, and cheaper labor costs. This leads to such manifestations as the bourgeoisie pushing for wars, suppressing union activity, reaching for total control of the state in order to push it's agenda against the proletariat, working to divide the proletariat in furtherance of these goals, supporting slavery, as well as individual capitalists looking to control the state outside of normal bourgeois democracy and suspending bourgeois rights, in order to pillage and clear away other capitalists, meaning a movement away from bourgeois democracy and for clique/elite control of the state, away from any participation of other classes in any formal mechanisms of democracy left, etc.
So there we already basically have the general idea of fascism. Then on the side of the working class, they're looking for someone to blame for their economic issues, and someone to plunder to fix them. There are generally two possible (forward-looking) answers: plunder vertically (up) or plunder horizontally. Socialists say we can blame the bourgeoisie, and therefore restrict their rights and take from them to fix our economic woes. The Fascists say we can blame members of the working (including the unemployed) and small-owning classes on the basis of race, nationality, ability, gender, etc. and plunder from and restrict the rights of a portion of our own class in order to address the economic woes of one portion of the class. Obviously the latter works very well for capitalists, who see they will actually profit from any plundering, as well as the division of and support of their own reduction in rights and freedoms from the working class.
Therefore in times of crisis the bourgeoisie and a section of the working and small-owning classes (with the strongest impulse in the small-owners, since they are hit hardest and first by crisis) support: wars of plunder, rolling back rights of the working class as whole, removal of democracy, limited expropriation of some capitalists, etc. Since the bourgeoisie and part of the working class are united in bringing about these conditions, they will prevail before revolution is possible as an answer to the crisis. So, fascism is also the repressive stage that communism is incubated in.
Many of these things can happen under liberalism. The only difference is the form of the state, and that's also the real terrain of struggle that makes fascism seem like a huge deal. At some point some of the capitalists desire to openly take over the state in order to have a monopoly on the advantages it can confer, against all other capitalists. This causes infighting among the owning class, and requires a more or less visible power struggle and change of the form of the state. This is why fascism appears to be a large change. But all the other aspects can be present without the state changing its form.
In light of this, I think we should talk about degrees and specificities of capitalist response to crisis, as well as the working class's level of a sense of crisis and their response (socialist or fascist). While understanding that the state changing form is one aspect that deepens the capitalists' response and allows them more repressive and war-pursuing abilities, while not being a disconnected aspect or coming out of nowhere.
>>2344832you can easily observe with clarity that any one of those fourteen points pertaining to totalitarianism is fascism. All cut from the same cloth and
it is not insignificant to contemplate
how these points fundamentaly serve to subjugate the proletariat and bolstr the mercantile structures. We shall resist against such manifestations of this opressive
force, stalin himself faught against this horror.
I've thought about it more and I think the mistake is ascribing "fascism" as distinct from totalitarianism.
Fascism IS totalitarianism, they are one and the same.
This came to me when I was re-reading the opening chapters of Lenin's State and Revolution.
Lenin, citing Engels, is making three claims:
1. The state exists as a result of class antagonism
2. The power of the state intensifies with greater class antagonism
3. The state is alienated from society, it represents the interests of the ruling class in the sense that officials are literally bribed (or increasingly nowadays themselves bourgeois), or the state has financial incentives aligning with the ruling class through the stock market, etc., but the state exists above society and the alienation never ceases.
What I did not realize when I first read this text years ago that not only here do we have the ingredients for totalitarianism, we can literally also explain the "irrational" destructiveness of states seemingly destabilizing capitalism and going against bourgeois interests. The state is an autonomous actor, acting independent of the bourgeoisie. As the state's power grows, the contradiction of its autonomy on one hand and its defense of the social order intensifies. Destruction follows, by violation of liberal rights, by police terror, by war, and, in the case of Nazi Germany, by state-planned genocide.
In the final conclusion, one can debate if the USA is "fascist", but one cannot debate, knowing the facts, if it is totalitarian, because it absolutely meets the threshold.
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