“social democracy is the objectively the left-wing of fascism”
What I don’t get about this one is that we generally protest when liberals call Putin a fascist/Russia a fascist country (for example, there are other situations where we raise these protests) and say that “calling things that arent overt fascism fascism waters down the definition”. But then we say this? It just seems to muddy the waters. Either all liberal democracies are fascist or liberal democracy is a separate but still bad thing. I would lean the later.
Like maybe I’m missing something here, but my objection to “social democracy is objectively the left-wing of fascism” has always been that it waters down the definition of fascism. Not that I disagree that socdems will cape for facism when it suits them, or that they will use fascists against us when it suits them. Just that its still separate from fascism definitionally.
Yeah frankly I mostly agree with you. Like social-democrats themselves are not fascists ideologically or really in how they govern if we’re being really honest or empirically or historically precise, unless we do the post-modern logic move of expanding the definitions of our terms by association or connotation (which you see alot of people on this site do because it’s literally culturally an anarcho-stalinist site), which is poor scientific method and when people do it I either think they are still embedded in liberal thought, have read too much post-structuralism for their own good. Social democrats have aligned with the right and used proto-fascists or fascists when necessary, but neither that, nor simply sharing some means of governance, makes them equivalent as political structures.
I say semi-ironically because the grain of truth, in what is otherwise an extremely simplistic and reductionist statement, is that social-democrats have always come to set the stage, at times support, or offer no serious political opposition to fascism. But when people say that this literally makes them fascist, this needs to be explained or it’s just confused. Did the Soviet Union supporting the Guomingdang make them proto-fascist nationalists? Were the US Islamist once they funded the Mujahadeen? Obviously not. Some people say that because the US committed genocide against native Americans and used chattel slavery, that they are fascists. Well so have many societies previously in history. Was the Mongol Khanate fascist? No. Obviously not. That’s not what those terms ever meant and using them in this way dilutes their meaning, their analytical usefulness and breeds confusion. Fascism, liberalism, social democracy as political structures (of ideologies, behaviour and organizations) are all compatible with capitalism. You see people here sometimes make extremely confused analogies saying things like ‘well stage 1 cancer and stage 3 cancer are both cancer, therefore we can say that liberal capitalism and fascist capitalism are both the same thing, i.e fascism’, which when you write it out explicitly makes clear why it’s confused, because all that analogy establishes is a restatement of the obvious fact that both liberalism and fascism are coherent with capitalism. When the societies first identified as having similar properties and which were then grouped under the term ‘fascist’, it was done for a reason, i.e. to sharpen our understanding so that they could be better opposed. Marxism, as Lenin once put it, is the ‘science of the party’, it is scientific socialism and what distinguishes Marxism from the theoretical vagueness and lack of systematicity, and so lack of organizational adequacy, of, say, anarchism. Confusion is never revolutionary.
That being said, as capitalist societies enter into crisis the social democrats attempt stabilize it from the left, while fascists attempt to stabilize it from the right.
What I don’t get about this one is that we generally protest when liberals call Putin a fascist/Russia a fascist country (for example, there are other situations where we raise these protests) and say that “calling things that arent overt fascism fascism waters down the definition”. But then we say this? It just seems to muddy the waters. Either all liberal democracies are fascist or liberal democracy is a separate but still bad thing. I would lean the later.
Like maybe I’m missing something here, but my objection to “social democracy is objectively the left-wing of fascism” has always been that it waters down the definition of fascism. Not that I disagree that socdems will cape for facism when it suits them, or that they will use fascists against us when it suits them. Just that its still separate from fascism definitionally.
Yeah frankly I mostly agree with you. Like social-democrats themselves are not fascists ideologically or really in how they govern if we’re being really honest or empirically or historically precise, unless we do the post-modern logic move of expanding the definitions of our terms by association or connotation (which you see alot of people on this site do because it’s literally culturally an anarcho-stalinist site), which is poor scientific method and when people do it I either think they are still embedded in liberal thought, have read too much post-structuralism for their own good. Social democrats have aligned with the right and used proto-fascists or fascists when necessary, but neither that, nor simply sharing some means of governance, makes them equivalent as political structures.
I say semi-ironically because the grain of truth, in what is otherwise an extremely simplistic and reductionist statement, is that social-democrats have always come to set the stage, at times support, or offer no serious political opposition to fascism. But when people say that this literally makes them fascist, this needs to be explained or it’s just confused. Did the Soviet Union supporting the Guomingdang make them proto-fascist nationalists? Were the US Islamist once they funded the Mujahadeen? Obviously not. Some people say that because the US committed genocide against native Americans and used chattel slavery, that they are fascists. Well so have many societies previously in history. Was the Mongol Khanate fascist? No. Obviously not. That’s not what those terms ever meant and using them in this way dilutes their meaning, their analytical usefulness and breeds confusion. Fascism, liberalism, social democracy as political structures (of ideologies, behaviour and organizations) are all compatible with capitalism. You see people here sometimes make extremely confused analogies saying things like ‘well stage 1 cancer and stage 3 cancer are both cancer, therefore we can say that liberal capitalism and fascist capitalism are both the same thing, i.e fascism’, which when you write it out explicitly makes clear why it’s confused, because all that analogy establishes is a restatement of the obvious fact that both liberalism and fascism are coherent with capitalism. When the societies first identified as having similar properties and which were then grouped under the term ‘fascist’, it was done for a reason, i.e. to sharpen our understanding so that they could be better opposed. Marxism, as Lenin once put it, is the ‘science of the party’, it is scientific socialism and what distinguishes Marxism from the theoretical vagueness and lack of systematicity, and so lack of organizational adequacy, of, say, anarchism. Confusion is never revolutionary.
That being said, as capitalist societies enter into crisis the social democrats attempt stabilize it from the left, while fascists attempt to stabilize it from the right.