Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he’s a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn’t fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn’t materialist, but it’s a good start.
To paraphrase, his definition is “a suppression of the left among popular sentiment.” By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like “Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding.”
Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin’s era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That’s why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn’t want anything to threaten them.
Also, what does it matter if there’s one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn’t use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone’s officially an independent in the National Assembly.
Westerners deciding who’s doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.
Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.
Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don’t give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he’d be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.
Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn’t relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky’s work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky’s feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.
Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.
I’d recommend ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’ as Althusser’s foundational text. His essay ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ is the one where he talks about what I brought up. It can be tricky to understand if you haven’t read much dialectic theory before Althusser, but he basically argues that there’s a plurality of economic classes and activities, each with some degree of autonomy, but all of them depend on one another to a degree that they shape the boundaries of the other.
I will point out that in very clear terms that Althusser’s own battle with mental illness shaped much of his philosophical work. He was very interested in structure and how various people were slotted into formations completely outside of themselves. He had a lifelong battle with schizophrenia that had him institutionalized at various points and in one very severe episode he accidentally killed his own wife.
Thank you. And well that’s all fine and good to hope and imagine, but I’ve been trying to actively change things for the past 20 years through socialist organizing. Goes well sometimes, goes poorly most of the time, gotta keep trying anyway .
I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but it’s not like communists have never heard of capitalists who also do some kind of labor. There aren’t two classes, but rather, there are two very big classes that have contradictory interests and people will be filtered into one of those two. That’s where the fight of capitalism is. Notice how peasantry has almost ceased to exist and most monarchs are ceremonial. Mao Zedong identified 5 classes within Chinese society in 1926: landlords, proletariat, peasantry, urban petite-bourgeoise, and national bourgeoisie. And that’s actually what 4 of the stars on the Chinese flag symbolize, with the largest representing the CPC.
You sound like you’re what’s called petite bourgeois and you identify with the cause and ideology of the bourgeoisie because that’s either something you aspire to or it’s a structure you’re able to take advantage of. Marx identified a transitional faction of capitalists precisely within his essay The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, and there’s a brief mention within the Communist Manifesto.
Basically, Marx said the capitalist class has separate factions who are not all in concert with one another, since not all capitalists have intrinsically similar goals. Some capitalists have contradictory interests to others and want the other abolished. In comparison, the working class have no such contradictory interests, all workers benefit from the same concerns: higher wages, fewer hours, more control over their workplace.
I’d really recommend reading the Marxist theorist Althusser on this one too. To summarize, he was one of the theorists who proposed class systems are more of an action one takes and the subsequent ideological formations within it than necessarily a strict divide of class hierarchy.
Nothing about the way everything’s going is designed to let me feel like a person. Money’s a requirement to simply exist. Everything’s a race to get enough money to sustain myself. I’m simply a worker who generates profit so my parasite of a boss and the associated shareholders can hang out on yachts. My job is nonsense too that doesn’t help anyone. I’m estranged from my family for gender and lifestyle reasons, can’t make friends because I’m always exhausted from work, can’t go to therapy except sparingly because it’s too expensive.
No matter how much validity my humanity holds, none of it really matters if none of it can be expressed due to a combination of alienation and dead eyed pessimism about climate change.
And no, we all aren’t on the same journey together. The economic strata that sits above mine has nothing in common with me.
at first I thought you said elders of Zeon and I imagined accidentally dating Char Aznable in disguise
but yeah I’m gonna have to start asking basic questions about the moon landing, validity of trans people, and even if humans evolved from earlier primates
I don’t have a lot of experience with dating and I’m kind of a loner, so I’ve had a problem over the past decade of jumping at whoever expresses interest in me. It’s a bad habit. The last two people I dated ended up being deep transphobes, both laughed when I told them I’m non-binary. With the last one, we had already been on like 3 dates or so and had gotten a little intimate, so that really made me ashamed of myself.
The last person revealed themselves to be a Raëlian too, the UFO cult. A lot of other conspiracy theory junk bouncing around their brain too. They must have known all of this stuff would turn me away, because none of it came out until I had known them for two months and we’d already considered ourselves close. Advice for the future: Ask anyone you’re gonna date important questions about their view of the world before doing anything further, it’ll save time. Figure out their religion, politics, stance on trans/gay people, everything, because for me it was a little devastating. I thought I had finally found someone. Oh well.
The external imperialism of western countries far outweighs the danger, threat, and damage to human life than even the most cartoonish and absurd claims about the alleged internal authoritarianism in countries like Cuba, China, and the DPRK. It’s such a massive disconnect and it’s also not even a dialectical comparison.
The external imperialism of western nations is precisely what generates the security apparatuses that are developed within modern socialist countries. Most of the time what you regard as gross and needless authoritarianism is in fact socialist states defending themselves from external aggression. Go listen to Parenti talking about the measures Nicaragua had to take in regards to capitalist encirclement.
And furthermore, the decision to not use the term authoritarian to describe western nations constantly confuses me. Is it because the term imperialism is more accurate? If you want my gut feeling on this: authoritarian, totalitarian, and related terms were all cooked up by liberal historians like Hannah Arendt to make the USSR sound like the same type of thing as Nazi Germany, which is frankly Holocaust trivialization.
Yeah they do fit the definition, because the distinction between external and international policy you’re making is arbitrary and meaningless. I’m a communist. My nation is the working class.
If invasions, sanctions, assassinations, and complete immiseration of other nations isn’t authoritarian then what is it? Why are we arbitrarily deciding there’s a distinction with how a country’s internal and external policies? These things inform one another. If a nation like America is doing far worse things than authoritarianism, except externally, why can’t we say that’s what it is?
Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it’s more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.
That makes no sense. Joseph Biden is not my dad and my shared nationality with him means nothing because he represents an economic class at war with my own. Was Hitler the father of German Jews? What the fuck are you talking about
You are however disregarding how a nation conducts itself internationally, instead focusing entirely on domestic policy. Should we not consider how a nation acts towards people outside of its own borders as this authoritarianism? If we include a country’s imperialism, you’ll find the overwhelmingly most violent, brutal and authoritarian nations are the USA, the EU, and the west in general.