tears posted:

thirdplace posted:
its romantic, militaristic, and usually revanchist reactionary ideology that rejects liberalism because there are threats to the bourgeoisie state which liberalism is perceived as not being equipped to defeat.


This is what im trying to address here...we see a rise in as u say reactionary ideology that rejects liberalism, and yet *looking around wildly* where are the threats to the bourgioise state that it is not equiped to defeat that are aparently ment to be the trigger for the booj turning to fascism?

for fascists in the 20's and 30's, it was a combination of 1) the existence USSR and the various local communist and social democratic parties and 2) the crash of '29 and the resulting Depression

for today's fascists, it's 1) the 2008 crash and the resulting Recession and 2) the rise of various left-liberal groups like Occupy, Syriza, Corbyn heading Labour, Bernie Sander's surprising success, etc.

like... it's easy to be a hardline Marxist-Leninist and scoff at those things as being any kind of actual threat to the bourgeois (believe me, i know!). but the point isn't whether they ACTUALLY are, but whether they're PERCEIVED to be threats. and in an era where the USSR is gone and "the end of history" was supposed to occur around '91 or thereabouts, any talks about inequality and wealth distribution, however tame, are going to be seen as a threat by an order that was used to operating completely unopposed

a lot of what was posted in this thread is good, the only thing that i would add is that liberals (in general) tend to deny the existence of class struggle. fascists are not unaware of class struggle, but they tend to see it a) in Social Darwinist terms and b) as something that can be overcome not through elimination of classes altogether, but by uniting the classes and turning the struggle outwards. since this is a world of nation-states, this usually takes the form of international warfare, but it's not difficult to imagine it assuming other forms

swampman posted:

tears posted:

*looking around wildly* where are the threats to the bourgioise state that it is not equiped to defeat that are aparently ment to be the trigger for the booj turning to fascism?

the holocene is one

If it was as simple as that then the expectation would be that we would be seing fascism arise in non core states as well, as those in the core are actually the most well equiped to mitigate holocene related problems... but this is not the case.

Imo there is an interesting discussion to be had here about how climate change denial is an almost exclusivly core nation phenomenon which is simultaniously promoted and financed by sections of capital but also rabidly anti sectikns of the ruling class...almost like... fascism


Also i think its important to say that theres this undercuŕrent liberal tendency to assume that if its not fascism its not that bad and that attempts to say that something isnt fascist is somehow downplaying how bad something is. As i think bhpm touched on in the settlers thread sertlerism, imperialism, fascism are different things, this doesnt detract from how bad something is just because u apply a specific definition of fascism rather than a catch all useage.

Edited by tears (Jan. 10, 2017 08:00:16)

tears posted:

If it was as simple as that then the expectation would be that we would be seing fascism arise in non core states as well, as those in the core are actually the most well equiped to mitigate holocene related problems... but this is not the case.

Imo there is an interesting discussion to be had here about how climate change denial is an almost exclusivly core nation phenomenon which is simultaniously promoted and financed by sections of capital but also rabidly anti sectikns of the ruling class...almost like... fascism

"threats to the bourgeois state" aren't like, direct moose attacks on bourgeois people, but rather, the threat of losing class status, the threat to global supply chains, and the threat to the massive reserve of foreign labor.* Holocene-denial is only possible because huge numbers of Americans are completely disconnected from the land. But even if denial got so bad that we banned thermometers, it would still be obvious that the works are gumming up with dead foreign slaves and mud floods at a rate that may cause the rate of profit to tend to fall...

*(How to achieve mass asceticism instead of fascism Please answer in 100000 words or more)

Urbandale posted:

tears posted:

This is what im trying to address here...we see a rise in as u say reactionary ideology that rejects liberalism, and yet *looking around wildly* where are the threats to the bourgioise state that it is not equiped to defeat that are aparently ment to be the trigger for the booj turning to fascism?

the unipolar world wont continue if france and germany and russia and china keep standing up and advancing perpendicular goals. its arguably been over since the second iraq war and the need to build the 'coalition of the willing'.

But how does that explain the acually emerging fascist forces in france, germany and the rest of europe that are currently burning down refugee centres? Imo we will see the emergence of new fascist states in europe in reaction to the effect the large influx of refugees fleeing both imperialist wars and the global wage prison, as the booj will have access to a large new pool of labour undermining the cushy positions of the european labour aristocracy causing them to revolt in a degenerate fashion to size imperialist power for themselves. The influx of refugees isnt undermining capitalism in europe, infact it provides a large new force of exploitable labour in the core to undercut the labour aristocracy and reinvigorate capitalism boosting rate of profit in the core. Its the labour aristocracy that is threatened in europe, not the ruling class... really atm it is a crapshoot whether the bourgioisie od europe bow to the wishes of the LA promising to protect them at the expense of periphery (doubling down on authoritarian imperialism), or if the LA takes this into their own hands (fascism), or possibly the core bourgiousie will be successful in destroying their own labour aristocracy in order to combat the declining rate of profit (somwthing new?)

tears posted:

If it was as simple as that then the expectation would be that we would be seing fascism arise in non core states as well, as those in the core are actually the most well equiped to mitigate holocene related problems... but this is not the case.

there are plenty of fascists in the periphery. ukraine and russia, the philippines, even brazil:

http://www.ft.com/content/f9ee01ca-ce49-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

(kudos to badgamer user gaule for having a subscription to the FT so we don't have to)

When Brazilian police investigator Paulo César Jardim launched a series of raids on the homes of alleged neo-Nazis in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, he unveiled a bizarre plot.

The country’s simmering neo-Nazi movement, with its secret world of swastikas, hate propaganda and street violence, was being recruited by rightwing extremists in Ukraine to fight against pro-Russian rebels in the European country’s civil war.

Ukraine’s Misanthropic Division, an extreme right group aligned with the Azov Battalion, an ultranationalist paramilitary group aligned with Kiev, was behind the recruitment drive, Mr Jardim, Brazil’s foremost neo-Nazi hunter, alleged.

One person was detained along with 47 9mm pistol shells in the December raids. He was later released. Police were still investigating whether any Brazilians had already joined the fighting in Ukraine, he said, declining to elaborate further on the probe. A spokesman for the Azov Battalion — now incorporated into the National Guard — said no Brazilians had fought for it.

“We became aware that someone had come from Europe . . . an Italian . . . had come to Brazil to recruit people for Ukraine,” Mr Jardim told the FT.

The revelation, if proven, that Brazil’s underground ultranationalist movements are seeking combat experience overseas is a worrying development in a phenomenon that has shocked a country that considers itself a racial melting pot.

The rise of neo-Nazis in Brazil has challenged a popular myth that racism, at least the overt variety on display in the US and other western countries, does not exist there. With more than half the population claiming at least some African heritage, Brazilians pride themselves on the relaxed relations between the country’s different racial groups. But there has been a steady stream of attacks in recent years. Just last year, neo-Nazis attacked a punk band that championed gay and equal rights with knives and tomahawks.

While the far-right is still regarded as the fringe of politics in a country that freed itself from two decades of military dictatorship only in the mid-1980s, ultra-conservative politicians and their supporters are keen to fill a political vacuum that has developed after the August impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, analysts say.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right congressman and former Brazilian army captain, grabbed headlines last year for praising a known torturer from the dictatorship era. Also last year, a group of ultraconservatives invaded Congress and unveiled banners calling for the return of military rule.

Mr Bolsonaro has denied he is a neo-Nazi but critics accuse him of sharing many of the movement’s views, such as racism and intolerance.

“I never imagined that could be possible in Brazil because this is the country of football, the country of carnival . . . we are a happy people,” Mr Jardim said.

The stronghold of neo-Nazism in Brazil is the country’s south and south-east, from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to Rio Grande do Sul, the regions that received the bulk of Brazil’s German, Italian and Polish immigrants.

While South America was also known for receiving Nazis fleeing from the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in the second world war, the neo-Nazi movements are unrelated to these individuals and mostly grew out of hate sites on the internet, experts say.

Brazil, with a population of 200m, has 150,000 “sympathisers” involved in neo-Nazi movements, according to a paper by anthropologist Andriana Dias of Unicamp, a university.

“The violence expressed by these groups, whether in physical attacks on blacks, Jews or homosexuals, or the dissemination of their hate literature . . . has in recent years demanded a lot of work . . . in terms of investigation and convictions,” she wrote.

One of the landmark cases occurred in Porto Alegre in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust when a group of neo-Nazis armed with knives attacked Jews commemorating the event, seriously injuring several of their victims.

In more recent cases, skinheads have targeted gays on Avenida Paulista, the main thoroughfare in São Paulo. In 2011, three skinheads were convicted for trying to kill four people, including a black person with a prosthetic limb, with clubs and knives.

Since the 2005 attack in Porto Alegre, police in Rio Grande do Sul had adopted a more preventive approach, arresting and questioning suspects before they could hatch their plots, Mr Jardim said. There had been up to 50 indictments over the past 15 years, he added.

This was the approach used in the Ukraine investigation — called Operation Azov after the alleged involvement of the eastern European paramilitary group.

Mr Jardim said that when he brought suspects in for questioning, as he did during Operation Azov, he often tried to convince them that their creed was out of place in a country whose heroes included World Cup footballers Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and Romário — all of them black. But they rarely changed their minds.

“These are not common criminals or robbers, they have an ideology. They are people who believe in ethnic cleansing, in racial purity,” he said.

Beyond Patience and Fortitude. Patience is nice, but civic action is better. Or at least that's the attitude of this aptly named event which aims to educate and empower you. Get hands on at a button making station so you can make a "Civic New Yorker" button...Also, fill your your eyeholes with William Santen's 16mm remix of Obama's first inauguration.

And we have a winner.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Liberals have seriously lost their goddamn minds. No material analysis of fascism + media telling you trump is a fascist for a year straight = we're about a week from the holocaust. I'm not even saying Trump isn't fascist, rather liberals don't have a clue what that means and think they'll be the victims instead of the passive collaborators.

I've been reading Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy and the above remark has inspired me to share a couple of long passages, as I think I undersold the extent to which the book considers the question of fascism. The first is from chapter 2, mostly a detailed definition of social democracy (all bolding mine)

In 1914, the Second International, then comprising all Socialist Parties whether "right" or "left", split over whether or not to support "one's own" bourgeoisie in "the war to end war". Those who stayed with the Second International turned nationalist and chauvinist, indulging in an orgy of "patriotism". Typically, the "patriots" wound up at war's end vastly improved in their material conditions. After the formation of the Third International, those who practiced "proletarian internationalism" began calling themselves "Communists", leaving the title "Social Democracy" to those who had discredited it.

...

Lenin analysed the labor aristocracy itself, whom he called "the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class", as "the labor leaders and upper stratum" of workers in metropolitan countries, those

"bourgeoisifed workers ... who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings, and in their entire outlook."3

These particular workers, he went on, form

"the principal prop of the Second International and the principal SOCIAL (not military) PROP OF THE BOURGEOISIE."3

{T}he economic base of Social Democracy is the labor aristocracy in industrialised countries. Even more specifically, it is those who, in one way or another, keep the Second International alive. Hence, organizations, ideology or individuals who serve such a group must be included in Social Democracy's armory.

Conversely, Social Democracy's main function must be to serve the interests of metropolitan labor aristocracies within the bounds of the capitalist system, a service clearly of primary value to the ruling class.

...

Labor aristocracy support for its own main class enemy has successfully put off revolution in industrialized areas – and elsewhere – many times. Far from being the result of individuals or misleaders, this has rather come about because the system itself, of which Social Democracy is an inseparable part, has evoked a new, inner but subordinate, contradiction inside the imperialist system. This is a temporary contradiction. Nevertheless, for the time being, the internal systemic main contradiction between the working class in metropolitan areas and their "own" ruling class has been obscured by this artificially-induced but no less real contradiction between the working class in imperialist nations and those who fundamentally are really their class brothers in the world's subjugated areas. This has occurred to the great cost of the "lower stratum" of the world proletariat ... and eventually, to that of the bribed, as well.

Social Democracy's aim is to make this situation "permanent".

...

In the foregoing context, it is now possible to examine specific features of Social Democracy:

1. Class collaboration. Obviously, as induced by Social Democracy, this occurs between the labor aristocracy and the imperialist bourgeoisie of the industrialised countries.

Is this all there is to it?

It is a fully-documented matter of record that Social Democracy is inseparable from the rise of Fascism. In various countries, the leading spokesmen of Social Democracy have either paved the path to power for Fascism, or have themselves taken part in Fascist governments. In either case, Social Democratic Parties have "when necessary" shot down "their own" workers.

For definitive purposes, it need only be noted here that Social Democracy, via its policy of class collaboration, is invariably connected with Fascism.

2. Reformism. Palmiro Togliatti, late head of the Italian Communist Party, used the terms "Social Democracy" and "reformism" interchangeably. For example:

"… the basis for the development of reformism in the ranks of the working class is to be found in the fact that the bourgeoisie ... is in a position to corrupt a section of the working class."

That "corrupt" or bribed "section of the working class" is, of course, the labor aristocracy. But is reformism confined to Social Democracy?

In capitalist countries like the U.S., aren't there out-and-out bourgeoisie parties which espouse reformism? What about the U.S. Democratic Party under Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Was it also "Social Democratic"?

First, such bourgeois parties of reform do not directly fulfill Lenin's qualification of "prop" for the Second International.

Second, and more important: bourgeois reform parties are based upon and run by a section of the bourgeoisie itself in its own class interests. This is so whether or not their platforms make promises to or "in the interests of" workers. In this case, gains for workers are by-products of activities and aims.

On the other hand, Social Democratic parties, whose memberships always consist mainly of workers, are operated by the labor aristocracy in the name of labor. In their case, support for the bourgeoisie is the (indispensable) by-product.

Reformism, therefore, is an element of Social Democracy, but not its totality. To take it as its totality would blur the basic motive for its specific support for colonialism. Similarly, reformism is not the same as, but only one form of, class collaboration: another is the one where Social Democracy shoots down "its own" workers. In general, the latter type is more broadly expressed in aiding Fascism to power under some conditions and/or participating in Fascist rule.

3. The mass base. Must its ideology have a mass political base in order for the whole phenomenon to qualify as Social Democracy?

While the answer is negative, Social Democracy and its function cannot be understood until the TEST is applied whether a given situation produces a mass base for Social Democracy or not.

Applying that test will be shown to clear up a number of questions never before examined, yet of close relevance to the meaning and purpose of Social Democracy and its relationship to colonialism.

Furthermore, our analysis will bring out the following facts, which must be included in any definition of Social Democracy:

– If there is NO mass base, one of TWO possibilities is indicated:

a) Confrontation: the given labor aristocracy is enjoying the benefits of a colonialism whose subjects are in its midst, in which case RACISM emerges openly, and Social Democracy ceases to be organisationally needed; or

b) Colonialism or Semi-Colonialism: the territory under consideration has, from having served as a source of super-profits, produced no labor aristocracy of its own, leaving no suitable soil in which to cultivate a LOCAL mass base for Social Democracy.

– If there IS a mass base, it proves the existence of colonialism without confrontation. That is, the given labor aristocracy is enjoying the benefits of a colonialism NOT IN ITS MIDST.

So, the test of a mass base acts as a water-shed between those sectors of world labor for whom organized Social Democracy is necessary and those for whom it is either a frill (Racists) or a foreign export designed to serve alien interests (colonial or semi-colonial peoples).

The test of a mass base is inextricable from the definition of Social Democracy, despite the fact that a mass base is not, per se, a criterion for Social Democracy.

4. The mantle of Karl Marx. Mass parties of Social Democracy in industrialized countries arose in an ideological atmosphere where the name of Karl Marx as always invoked as the ultimate authority for policy. Yet today, most such parties have discarded this custom. In fact, the only avowed supports of the Second International still claiming to be Marxists live in colonial or semi-colonial areas.

Today, even references to socialism are not necessary to qualify an ideology or party as Social Democratic. What is needed is an alleged tie to labor; or, at least, some type of demagogy.

5. Is Social Democracy an ideology? Since the labor aristocracy of industrialized nations economically active "overseas" is its material base, Social Democracy requires a policy of class collaboration as a by-product of its alleged support for "labor's interests".

On this basis, any ideology, espoused by labor aristocracies and/or their spokesmen in labor's ranks, which claims to be specifically in labor's interests, and which requires for this purpose collaboration with "its own" (or any other) bourgeoisie, is a Social Democratic ideology. Since such an ideology coincides with that of the Second International, whether or not the espousing body or spokesmen formally acknowledge the tie, it is necessarily a reinforcement for that organization and therefore qualifies as its "prop".

The role and/or function of such an ideology would be assessed through the test of a mass base.

The content of the ideology is petty-bourgeois. The essence of the latter is vacillation and "tailism". Lenin put it the following ways:

"The proletariat fights for the revolutionary overthrow of the imperialist bourgeoisie; the petty bourgeoisie fights for the reformist "improvement' of imperialism, for adaption and SUBMISSION to it."

"The main thing the Socialists fail to understand and what constitutes ... captivity to bourgeois prejudices and their political treachery to the proletariat, is that in capitalist society, as soon as there is any serious intensification of the class struggle on which it is based, there cannot be any middle course between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. All dreams about some third course are merely the reactionary lamentations of the petty bourgeoisie."

Social Democracy, which (whether this is revealed sooner or later) is inseparable from the development of Fascism, is a political entity post-dating the First World War, with ideas indistinguishable from those of the Second International, being espoused by "labor leaders" and/or their spokesmen in labor's ranks, and claiming to be primarily "in labor's interests".

haven't read Sakai's essay on this yet, but the "test" discussed above seems to tie in to what I gather is his thesis

anyway, chapter 7 discusses what went wrong with earlier Marxist analysis of the labor aristocracy, and why their predictions that bribed workers would eventually turn away from class collaboration went afoul

(at the risk of giving away the ending, they should have paid more goddamn attention to Lenin)

If the correctness of any analysis is measured by the accuracy of the predictions to which it gives rise, then it must be noted that neither the Communist-forecast "decisive struggles" nor its "united front of the working class" materialised after all.

...

What material factors had Dimitroff and Dutt omitted from their analyses to cause such an outcome?

When establishing his criteria for judging Fascism, Dutt had simply ignored imperialist parasitism, although he had noted:

"The 'democratic freedom' of Western imperialism has been built on the foundation of colonial slavery."

As general conditions favouring the growth of Fascism, Dutt has listed:

"1) intensification of the economic crisis and of the class struggle;

"2) widespread disillusionment with parliamentarism;

"3) the existence of a wide petit-bourgeoisie, intermediate strata, slum proletariat, and sections of the workers under capitalist influence;

"4) the absence of an independent class-conscious leadership of the main body of the working class."

Dutt documented these "general conditions", and concluded that Fascism was the

"characteristic instrument of finance-capital which can be brought into play in the most highly-developed industrialised countries when the stage of crisis and of the class struggle requires it."

Just when was that?

Dutt had an answer:

"Its success or failure, as in every country, depends on the degree of the preparedness and militant resistance of the proletariat."

At this contention, history has thumbed its nose. For instance, what better indication of the "degree of preparedness and militant resistance of the proletariat" can there be than its closeness to revolution? Don't facts suggest that revolution in that epoch was almost at hand in Italy and Spain, and that it certainly was closer in Germany, vanquished, than in Britain, the U.S. or even France. If Dutt were correct, why did Fascism not attain power where the proletariat was least "ready?" Obviously, the upheavals of the day did not have the content the Marxists attributed to them. Or else those Marxists were overlooking something big.

...

Marxists had proven that imperialist war was fought for division or division of colonial spoils. In 1918, the defeated – Germany, Austria, etc. – had been deprived of their colonies. More: those colonies had been redistributed. At the stroke of a pen in Versailles, the vanquished had thus been cut off completely from their former "stream of super-profits", while the "Allies" (who were, of course, the "great democracies") were cut in on a new, additional source. Military victory against Germany had thus ensured imperialism's top dogs of a new lease on life.

Equally, military defeat had forced German imperialism and its associates either to find new outlets for their export capital or to turn inward against "their own" working classes. Hitler's cry for "lebensraum" accurately recorded that, for imperialism, "room" in which to "live" was synonymous with "room" into which even -more- monopolised capital could expand – and that for German capital, expansion was indistinguishable from life itself. Somebody was going to have to supply the economically-choking vanquished with necessary "air". During the great depression, with the First World War too recent to be revived as the usual solution, only one obvious and available outlet existed: "one's own" working class.

Countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and their like offer examples of what happens when, having reached the stage where capital export has become essential, a capitalist country has no foreign outlet for it. Germany, Austria and Spain demonstrate a corollary: what happens when a developing capitalist economy is deprived of such an outlet. In both cases, the ruling classed did, in fact, turn inward as their "solution".

Yet, oddly enough, while these examples were actually arising, Lenin's warning was scarcely dead on the historical air:

"unless the economic roots of this phenomenon (that is, overseas financial activities as the specific source of imperialist parasitism - H.W.E.) are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step toward the solution of the practical problems of the Communist movement and of the impending social revolution can be taken."3

This prophecy has been fulfilled. Uttered in 1921, it had already indicated that "success or failure" for imperialism depended on the growth of parasitism, expressed as ever-widening polls of man-power and resources to be super-exploited by metropolitan monopolies.

If, then, Fascism was a specific stage of imperialism, where else could its "success or failure" lie?

History supports the observation that Fascism has in fact been exercised by imperialism against Western peoples only if they are about to be forced into the role of a "source of super-profit", either to replace a lost, or to substitute for a never-achieved, colonial empire. As long as real colonies, territorial or economic, exist, imperialism is "safe". For these reasons, any conclusion in 1935 about "imminent Fascism" which did not document this crucial factor was bound to come to grief. International imperialism in the "democracies" still has room to maneuver, to "solve" its difficulties at the expense of peoples in colonial or neo-colonial areas.* The system's central pillar remains hat vast colonial labor reservoir, available for super-exploitation.

Fascism's "success or failure" inside Western "democracies" could simply not be accurately forecast in the way the Marxists of the '30s tried to do it.

...

Although Marxist analyses of Fascism had dealt with social Democracy, they did not, in the writer's opinion, fully analyse the connection between the two. They merely chronicled it, showing that wherever Fascism triumphed, Social Democracy paved the way for it. As "explanation", they contented themselves with repeating Lenin's 1916 formula that Social Democracy was "the principal bulwark of the bourgeoisie"; without applying his criteria to the conditions of their own day, they could offer no satisfactory explanation for the failure of their predictions and simply dropped the whole subject.

...

Social Democracy did not undergo any major change, either in its "position in the bourgeois state" or in its "attitude toward the bourgeoisie". Nor could it. Moreover, Lenin had already predicted as much. "It may be argued", he had said,

"that of the (leaders of Social Democracy), some will return to the revolutionary socialism of Marx. This is possible, but it is an insignificant difference in degree, if we take the question in its political, i.e., in its mass aspect. Certain individuals among the present social-chauvinist leaders may return to the proletariat: but the TREND can neither disappear nor 'return' to the revolutionary proletariat ...

"We have not the slightest grounds for thinking that these (Social Democratic) parties can disappear BEFORE the social revolution. On the contrary, the nearer the revolution approaches, the stronger it flares up ... the greater will be the role in the labour movement of the struggle between the revolutionary mass stream and the opportunist-philistine stream."4

Those who did not know of, or forgot, such words missed the destruction that, because of its ties with colonialism (implicit in its need for super-wages), social Democracy had to change tactics when a colonial empire seemed in danger. Its eye remained where Marxists should have kept theirs: on the state of imperialism's "stream of super-profits". Social Democracy admirably adapted its tactics to the varying levels of that stream: as long as that kept flowing in, super-wages were sure to follow.

So, although the labor aristocracy was, for the time being "thoroughly shaken by the crisis", it was far from "revising its views" about class collaboration itself. Actually, Dimitroff had said only that the labor aristocracy was

"revising its views about the expediency of the policy of class collaboration."

The operating word was "expediency". If imperialism is forced to withdraw its bribes, polite class collaboration becomes, indeed, no longer expedient; some new form is required. This was where Fascism came in. And it served its purpose.

In noting that the bourgeoisie could no longer afford democracy at home, and so had turned to "the terroristic form of its dictatorship". Dimitroff had been reporting fact. But this had little to do with what became of Social Democracy. For, both he and Dutt, the latter in irrefutable detail, had proved that this dictatorship generally did not deprive Social Democracy of its "position in the political system" or even of its legal status except in individual cases. Dutt had documented instance after instance where Social Democracy took part in that "terroristic form" of imperialism's dictatorship.

In this, once it is admitted that its aim is to ensure the continued flow of super-wages to the labor aristocracy, Social Democracy were mere logical. That flow must come from whatever source is available.

In the light of current events, it can only be concluded that Dimitroff must have been motivated by an understandable wish when he suggested that Western workers had learned from the defeat of their class brothers in places like Germany. He was generalising too soon from working class actions of his day when he added that USSR success was revolutionizing Western Workers. If anything, his diagnosis was carried out in reverse.

Within a very short historical period thereafter, led by the shining example of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in victorious, soon-economically-rampant America, a veritable cascade of glittering bribes again began flowing into American working class pockets with effects soon to mock Dimitroff's theses. Restive workers in the U.S. were given on an increasingly grand scale a substantial stake in the status quo. The gift, accompanied by odes of virtually unchallenged praise for a system which makes such things possible, successfully, if temporarily, obscured the fact that even the bribed labor aristocracy is exploited. Marxists like Dimitroff had seen the exploitation, but had grievously underestimated how big a stake in the status quo could be raised, as well as the primacy, enormity and soporific effect "at home" of super-exploitation abroad. They had failed to foresee what a large sector of the Western proletariat were eventually to be brought over, to serve alien class aims, thereby to keep alive a system which the Marxist analysts of the 30s claimed was on its last legs.

...

The halcyon days of the Western labor aristocracy had been but briefly interrupted. That that interruption was ended at the expense of renewed and deepened colonial slavery was, at the time – and even now – of little concern to comfortable Western workers.

But the price that was to be exacted from Marxism for its miscalculations in this area was to be high, indeed.

Edited by Constantignoble (Feb. 1, 2017 16:37:52)

groundservices posted:

I think that's the right lne of questioning, colddays. A decline for white workers, real or imagined, the end of a unipolar phase of capitalism lead by a hyperpower, plus the social democratic model becoming unviable as a pressure release valve, in the context of internal colonization along both color/gender/national as well as geographic lines (the US south, especially south Louisiana, being an internal colony and really anything outside the major metrolpoles being a colony) as well as yet more labor competition on the global market even among skilled and specialized labor plus the influx of war/economic refugees intensifying competition for what jobs aren't yet automated is why relatively secure places like the US or France, who still have sources of super profits, become increasingly violent and draconian especially against internal colonies and refugees from nonwhite nations

I agree with this though it's important to note this is very different than the fundamental realignment of global imperialism that Hitler anticipated in the rise of the American economy. Inter-imperialist war was the only option for Germany to find a place in this new world order even if it didn't happen under fascism. The rise of China or whatever is pretty far from that. Perhaps this explains why the liberal bourgeoisie still has strong resistance to Trump's policies which have so far been pretty mild compared to the (overemphasized but still real) contradictions between the German bourgeoisie and the Nazis. Alternatively it could mean Trump is not actually fascist as the US is not a marginalized imperialist power. It's important to look at the mass base of fascism and the class form of fascist politics but it's also essential to remember the big picture and the fact that fascism is more than the aggregation of fascists but a form of capitalism itself in a certain situation. The only thing that's not important is to list the historical features of fascism, all that does is embarass the speaker when every feature can be found in the United States on every day of Obama's presidency.