cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/42620143

Their lives are blissful… free from the burden of self doubt.

Revolutionary Spain represents an example of extremely effective armed resistance to the rise of fascist forces backed by Hitler and Mussolini, surviving for years. By contrast, many established democracies collapsed relatively quickly when invaded.

For more information, you can check out an anarchist FAQ’s answer to the question, “Does revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice?”. For a more current example of an anarchist society working in practice, you could also check out the Zapatista movement, an anarchist society which today consists of at least 300,000 people.

If you’re unfamiliar with anarchism, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think.

  • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    Liberals can’t help falling over themselves to claim anarchism always fails despite the fact that anarchism resisted fascism more effectively than liberal nations and despite the fact that liberalism inevitably leads to fascism.

    Liberalism is collapsing into fascism right now. It always has, and it always will. It is inevitable.

    If we want to resist the rise of fascism, it would be good to learn from an example which was more successful at doing so than every other nation in mainland Europe, no?

    How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?

    Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.

    Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.

    The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.

    So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.

    To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.

    That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.

    But can't capitalism can be reformed?

    While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.

    Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.

    The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.

    • Fontasia@feddit.nl
      0·
      22 days ago

      So the system that lasted for less than 3 years before enabling Franco worked better than the system between Washington and Nixon? Fascism arises from popularism, someone giving three word answers to difficult questions, it’s always going to rise up and people like to unite under the idea they could get on with things witbout the world being messy and complicated. I quite like the idea of a head of state and cabinet being chosen by lottery, I believe it would have the exact same ebbs and flows of an elected person. but I know that eventually someone would come in and put a stop to it.

      And did Fidesz directly provide the crib notes or did they let you copy paste from r/politics directly?

      • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        So the system that lasted for less than 3 years before enabling Franco

        It fought tooth and nail for three years against a regime which was supported by Hitler and Mussolini.

        America was never invaded. If it had been, it would have folded like a paper bag. Heck, it still hasn’t been invaded, and yet it is fascist anyways.

        did Fidesz directly provide the crib notes or did they let you copy paste from r/politics directly?

        I wrote literally all of it myself. I haven’t been on Reddit for years. I notice you’d rather disparage me than actually address any of my arguments, and I prefer not to waste my time with people who argue in bad faith, so I will leave this here.

        Much love, solidarity forever!

      • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        With all due respect - I don’t really want to argue with a fellow leftist here while there are liberals attacking us all over the place - the CPC was hardly the only force in China fighting against Imperial Japan, the Second United Front also involved various nationalist forces, including the Kuomintang and various warlords. Were it not for Chinese nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment, the socialists would have been utterly crushed long before the Japanese invasion of China.

        • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
          0·
          22 days ago

          I don’t really want to argue with a fellow leftist here while there are liberals attacking us all over the place

          Me, an ML, defending my anarchist comrades from the liberals o7

          • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
            0·
            22 days ago

            Appreciate the support comrade! It’s not uncommon for me to defend communist states/leaders in much the same spirit, whenever I see them being unfairly maligned, such as recently where I defended Mao Zedong, my anti-imperialist goat. Stalin is a bit harder to defend. I’d defend Khrushchev, except I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone criticise him. Probably because most liberals don’t really know much about the USSR tbh.

            Anyways, solidarity!

      • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Both US mainstream parties were neoliberal, so… yeah? I’m not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. They enabled eachother. While the Republicans are much worse, the Democrats didn’t prevent the rise of fascism, because doing so would have required moving towards the left, which would have impacted the class interests of wealthy donors. If the Democratic party hadn’t gone around parading with Liz Cheney and denying the genocide, they’d have won, they literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with Harris/Biden.

        • REDACTED@infosec.pub
          0·
          22 days ago

          But in reality, the real reason why democrats lost is because the party and majority who support it are quite lazy people. In all stats/online pollings the democrats should have won, but they didn’t because only minority actually went to vote.

          If democrats had the same engagement as conservatives, it would have been an easy win.

          • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOPEnglish
            0·
            22 days ago

            The Democrats didn’t have a candidate who inspired people to get out and vote. They just keep trying to appeal to some moderate centrist vote which doesn’t actually ever materialize.

            If Harris didn’t peddle the exact same anti-immigrant, pro-israel, genocide supporting neoliberal shit and instead advocated for medicare for all, wealth tax, opposition to war, and bringing Israel to heel, she would have absolutely swept the election.

            That’s why the Republicans had a stronger turnout. Trump was offering his base all of the psychotic shit they love.

            You can’t blame voters for not being engaged and getting out to vote when the very best they can hope for is the not-quite-as-bad-as-Trump candidate. That shit does not work. They need to actually give their voters things they want, not just be the lesser evil.

            • REDACTED@infosec.pub
              0·
              22 days ago

              You cannot imagine how little people cared about the things you care about in US (Ie. Israel/Gaza). It was mostly social media being loud about it, but it didn’t affect the results. If you genuinely thought Harris would support Israel more than Trump, I have few bridges to sell you.