The world needs to move towards socialism to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.
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.
But the Soviet Union was really oppressive!
Yeah, the soviet union had a lot of problems, Stalin was a psycho. Let’s not do that, but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
I’d encourage you to check out an anarchist FAQ to learn more - If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, 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.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
America needs to pivot from a Trickle Down Economy to Trickle Up Economy, or it’s going naturally pivot to Robin Hood Economics, and that often comes accompanied by revolution and guillotines. The wealthy won’t like that one bit.
The USSR was a dictatorship under a mask of communism and socialism. It was literally the opposite side of a coin, where mostly the top of a country had all the goods, while ordinary citizens were used as cheap working labor. Basically, the same thing what happens in the US, but with less freedom. It was never a true socialism/communism system in a first place.
but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
No you can’t. Your country has spent more than the last 200 years glorifying and giving power to whatever sociopath was crazy enough to amass the most money at the expense of everything. You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with? If you truly believe the people you’ve willingly given the keys to will do nothing and watch the world screw them over, I’m sorry to say you’re more gullible than optimistic.
You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with?
I’m sure they’ll try, but there’s more of us than there are of them, and we can fight them every step of the way. There are all sorts of ideas in anarchist theory of how we can mitigate these threats.
Are you saying we should just give up, and not try to build a better world, because we have no hope of defeating the ruling class? That’s just nihilism. May as well just give up and make the billionaires emperors if that’s what you truly believe.
Japan got “modernised” at the end of the Edo period, bringing about the abolition of classes and a forced transition to democracy. You would think that this resulted in commoners taking back the power, but all it really changed was daimyo adjacent people becoming politicians and samurais trading their sword for a CEO seat. No major shift in influence occurred, because social ties are immune to sudden changes in governance like this.
It’s all about who you know, and people with heaps of money know just the right people to corrupt whatever utopia you can come up with. The problem runs deeper than the system of governance, as we’ve forstered a system that strongly correlates power with sociopathic behaviour for too long to be able to just overturn it like that. I don’t want to say you should give up, but looking at things in perspective, I can’t responsibly say that’s a good plan either.
So we can learn from that, too. You’re 100% just saying “we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past”. Brother, capitalism is failing NOW. I can share examples of socialism succeeding.
That’s very intellectually dishonest of you to reduce my argument to “100% just saying ‘we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past.’” That’s what we call a strawman argument, and that’s not what I’m saying if you read what I wrote. What I’m saying is:
The way power and influence has been handed out in the past 200+ years, is mostly giving it to who was able to get the richest.
Getting richer than 99% of the population around you strongly correlates with sociopathic tendencies, aka not caring about your fellow humans and sacrificing everything for money.
People with capital and influence, and people with legislative power have social ties that run at a deeper level than just “capitalism,” and a system change would not sever or alter these in a significant way.
As long as “the influent” know the right people, they will try, and mostly succeed at, corrupting whatever new system has been brought upon.
Even if you somehow magically imprison or wipe out all these people, which is morally more than questionable, as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew.
I’m not a nihilist, I’m providing an observation based on human behaviour and our current system. I’m not saying nothing can be done about it, but oh boy you’re going to need way more that socialism. You’ll need a grassroots, global (aka, almost every country on board with it) movement, involving a complete overhaul of the education and values system across at least 100 years (to give time for people from the old world to be replaced), and at the same time have the current people in power somehow relinquish all their advantages and sit back to look at it. People who’ve been educated to believe the world is their oyster and a zero-sum game, sit down and do nothing while they see others thrive.
OK, through the magic of using two browsers, I can now re-read your comments.
You’re right, I completely misunderstood your comment. I apologize for that. I was on my phone and not properly paying enough attention.
I actually completely agree with you. The issue is that we need to actually abolish all forms of unjustifiable hierarchy - as you perfectly put it, “as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew.” This is, obviously, a very difficult task, which will undeniably require a great deal of effort. A “social revolution”, as I would put it - where not the ruling class are overthrown, but the entire vertical structure, where people are in positions of power over others.
This is actually the foundation stone of my entire political philosophy - which is anarchism. If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, 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.
The term “anarchy” actually comes from Greek, basically translating to “without rulers”, or “against hierarchy”.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism (and hierarchy) makes inevitable.
Original message follows:
I would really like to engage with you in good faith, but I’m struggling to keep up with this conversation because for some reason the comments aren’t loading, I can only reply to you through my inbox, and it’s really messing me up. Do you know what might be happening here? Kinda need to fix this to re-read our conversation, if I have been unreasonable then I will gladly apologize though. I want to be fair.
Hey, thank you for re-reading and engaging with what I actually wrote.
The one interrogation that was not solved for me is that such a change requires a tremendous amount of energy and dedication across all society’s decision-makers, and I fail to see where that energy would be sourced from when almost any forces able to institute change benefits from the status quo.
I don’t disagree that there are better theoretical systems, I just fail to understand by what miracle they would ever be realised from the starting position we find ourselves in. It isn’t just about how many of us vs how many of them it is, unfortunately. The entire world’s understanding of power dynamics, trust in money and institutions would need to shift, and after that, there’s little guarantee the same people wouldn’t come on top again to corrupt it all.
I guess my question is: how do you guard any system from human corruption, other than just honour, promises, and gentleman’s agreement?
If you make yourself a ruler and give yourself the power to stop such corruption (which fundamentally needs to be more power than it takes to instigate it), you’re effectively becoming « the good dictator », and then how can you guarantee that this amount of power will not be used for bad by yourself, or any of the people that will come after you? When power concentrates this much, it only takes one bad person to get it.
I’m using the Lemmy web app for my instance, basically it just shows up as if I have blocked you, but I haven’t - it just says “1 more reply” and loads forever when I click it. Do you see the same if you view it through my instance link?
What we need to do is basically have a movement to tell any politician that if they approve any military budget above 1b, we will not elect them next election. We need a movement of actually voting for sane people with sane policy. Everyone is all “crazy grandpa has a gun and hes trying to destroy everything”. Well, crazy grandpa just asked for 1.5 trillion dollars to buy more shit to mess more shit up. Don’t give him any money. If a crazy person walked up to you and said, “give me 1.5 trillion to mess everything up” no one would give them that money. Lets instead maybe invest in education? Healthcare? Social saftey nets?
Those in power are often there because of the donations of the wealthy and lobbyist groups. Without that money, they wouldn’t win their election campaigns. The wealthy are generally more comfortable with fascism than any kind of leftist politics, because leftist politics threaten their class interests - amassing maximal wealth and power - whereas fascism does not.
The world needs to move towards socialism to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
But the Soviet Union was really oppressive!
America needs to pivot from a Trickle Down Economy to Trickle Up Economy, or it’s going naturally pivot to Robin Hood Economics, and that often comes accompanied by revolution and guillotines. The wealthy won’t like that one bit.
The USSR was a dictatorship under a mask of communism and socialism. It was literally the opposite side of a coin, where mostly the top of a country had all the goods, while ordinary citizens were used as cheap working labor. Basically, the same thing what happens in the US, but with less freedom. It was never a true socialism/communism system in a first place.
No you can’t. Your country has spent more than the last 200 years glorifying and giving power to whatever sociopath was crazy enough to amass the most money at the expense of everything. You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with? If you truly believe the people you’ve willingly given the keys to will do nothing and watch the world screw them over, I’m sorry to say you’re more gullible than optimistic.
I’m sure they’ll try, but there’s more of us than there are of them, and we can fight them every step of the way. There are all sorts of ideas in anarchist theory of how we can mitigate these threats.
Are you saying we should just give up, and not try to build a better world, because we have no hope of defeating the ruling class? That’s just nihilism. May as well just give up and make the billionaires emperors if that’s what you truly believe.
Japan got “modernised” at the end of the Edo period, bringing about the abolition of classes and a forced transition to democracy. You would think that this resulted in commoners taking back the power, but all it really changed was daimyo adjacent people becoming politicians and samurais trading their sword for a CEO seat. No major shift in influence occurred, because social ties are immune to sudden changes in governance like this.
It’s all about who you know, and people with heaps of money know just the right people to corrupt whatever utopia you can come up with. The problem runs deeper than the system of governance, as we’ve forstered a system that strongly correlates power with sociopathic behaviour for too long to be able to just overturn it like that. I don’t want to say you should give up, but looking at things in perspective, I can’t responsibly say that’s a good plan either.
So we can learn from that, too. You’re 100% just saying “we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past”. Brother, capitalism is failing NOW. I can share examples of socialism succeeding.
That’s very intellectually dishonest of you to reduce my argument to “100% just saying ‘we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past.’” That’s what we call a strawman argument, and that’s not what I’m saying if you read what I wrote. What I’m saying is:
I’m not a nihilist, I’m providing an observation based on human behaviour and our current system. I’m not saying nothing can be done about it, but oh boy you’re going to need way more that socialism. You’ll need a grassroots, global (aka, almost every country on board with it) movement, involving a complete overhaul of the education and values system across at least 100 years (to give time for people from the old world to be replaced), and at the same time have the current people in power somehow relinquish all their advantages and sit back to look at it. People who’ve been educated to believe the world is their oyster and a zero-sum game, sit down and do nothing while they see others thrive.
… how am I the one who’s unreasonable?
Edit:
OK, through the magic of using two browsers, I can now re-read your comments.
You’re right, I completely misunderstood your comment. I apologize for that. I was on my phone and not properly paying enough attention.
I actually completely agree with you. The issue is that we need to actually abolish all forms of unjustifiable hierarchy - as you perfectly put it, “as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew.” This is, obviously, a very difficult task, which will undeniably require a great deal of effort. A “social revolution”, as I would put it - where not the ruling class are overthrown, but the entire vertical structure, where people are in positions of power over others.
This is actually the foundation stone of my entire political philosophy - which is anarchism. If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, 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.
The term “anarchy” actually comes from Greek, basically translating to “without rulers”, or “against hierarchy”.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism (and hierarchy) makes inevitable.
Original message follows:
I would really like to engage with you in good faith, but I’m struggling to keep up with this conversation because for some reason the comments aren’t loading, I can only reply to you through my inbox, and it’s really messing me up. Do you know what might be happening here? Kinda need to fix this to re-read our conversation, if I have been unreasonable then I will gladly apologize though. I want to be fair.
Hey, thank you for re-reading and engaging with what I actually wrote.
The one interrogation that was not solved for me is that such a change requires a tremendous amount of energy and dedication across all society’s decision-makers, and I fail to see where that energy would be sourced from when almost any forces able to institute change benefits from the status quo.
I don’t disagree that there are better theoretical systems, I just fail to understand by what miracle they would ever be realised from the starting position we find ourselves in. It isn’t just about how many of us vs how many of them it is, unfortunately. The entire world’s understanding of power dynamics, trust in money and institutions would need to shift, and after that, there’s little guarantee the same people wouldn’t come on top again to corrupt it all.
I guess my question is: how do you guard any system from human corruption, other than just honour, promises, and gentleman’s agreement?
If you make yourself a ruler and give yourself the power to stop such corruption (which fundamentally needs to be more power than it takes to instigate it), you’re effectively becoming « the good dictator », and then how can you guarantee that this amount of power will not be used for bad by yourself, or any of the people that will come after you? When power concentrates this much, it only takes one bad person to get it.
Thank you for that, this echoes my sentiment.
About technical difficulties, I don’t really know. My lemmy app doesn’t seem to be having any problems, so it may be a client-related problem.
I’m using the Lemmy web app for my instance, basically it just shows up as if I have blocked you, but I haven’t - it just says “1 more reply” and loads forever when I click it. Do you see the same if you view it through my instance link?
What we need to do is basically have a movement to tell any politician that if they approve any military budget above 1b, we will not elect them next election. We need a movement of actually voting for sane people with sane policy. Everyone is all “crazy grandpa has a gun and hes trying to destroy everything”. Well, crazy grandpa just asked for 1.5 trillion dollars to buy more shit to mess more shit up. Don’t give him any money. If a crazy person walked up to you and said, “give me 1.5 trillion to mess everything up” no one would give them that money. Lets instead maybe invest in education? Healthcare? Social saftey nets?
Why would anyone in power not see that as a very clear choice?
Those in power are often there because of the donations of the wealthy and lobbyist groups. Without that money, they wouldn’t win their election campaigns. The wealthy are generally more comfortable with fascism than any kind of leftist politics, because leftist politics threaten their class interests - amassing maximal wealth and power - whereas fascism does not.
That is what i was implying, yes. Go eat some fucking salmon.
Oh, sorry, I’m autistic and sometimes I struggle to read tone and implications and things like that. Sorry for preaching to the converted <3
Hahah! I like your style, but I’m actually a vegan bear! So I suppose I should go eat some bamboo shoots :p
It’s not you, they’re just being a wanker. Not your fault they’re a shit communicator.