Its more like a coin with liberal values on one side and fascism on the other. And when we hold it up to look at one side and describe what we see to someone with different beliefs, all they see is the other side.
Hm, I’m not sure. I was thinking more like this post was a piece of propaganda or discourse, so the coin would also be a piece of propaganda.
I think part of the problem in our analysis is a problem of abstraction. Capitalism is actually the treasury that mints the coin, the social relations that turn the coin into profit. But it’s true that the appearances of capitalism is fundamentally different than its actual function.
I like the comparison of chattel slavery as a contra example. Chattel slavery was an institution that was morally reprehensible, even to the founders of the US. It shocked the conscience of virtually anyone who considered it (although a good lesson in social humanity is the tendency to just not consider it, as a defense) meanwhile it was true that some slaves lived somewhat better cared for materially than many white workers, whose destitution was necessary to uphold the practice of mass subjugation of the slaves. The severe cruelty of the ownership of one person over another somewhat hides the material reality of slavery. The historic matetial basis for the abolition of slavery was the fact that northern industrialists were better at getting more labor our of workers and paying them an individual wage much less than the cost of maintaining the life of a slave, which often included the old and young who could not work.
On the contrary, capitalism has all the appeals of freedom, democracy, self a actualization, when it is actually itself a form of part-time slavery. We consent, via contract, to sell our time and energy to a boss who pays us a wage that is worth less than the commodities that are produced using the tools the boss “owns”.
Liberal ideals give rights to everyone on paper but capitalism denies rights to most people in practice. The capitalist state manages the political contradictions that arise, since the cold industrialized reality that pits worker against owner is fundamentally unstable. A middle class is an ideological project that stabilizes the contradictions, splitting the masses of people between a mass who aren’t willing to give up their individual privileges even if they hold " liberal" values, and the masses who are so exploited they lack the time and energy to fight for the liberation of all workers. All these groups are split further, of course, along lines of race, gender, etc., the illusions are sustained by having people’s direct experience contradict narratives of oppression and resemble the liberal values that capitalism heralds.
The two sides of capitalism are, objectively, the exploited workers and the owning capitalists. That relation is the base, but the superstructure creates the illusions and social relations that facilitate the base.
Back to the coin, the two-sidedness of the discourse can be expanded to practically any polemic, propaganda, rhetoric, etc., so that only one “side” of the coin is apparent to the people on each side of the discourse.
How this relates to the original meme, as leftists we can see our side of the Maduro discourse, we see the fascism of red and blue MAGA, but they don’t see that part even when they express views that are objectively fascist. Their side of the coin doesn’t have a coherent perspective on what fascism even is, they arent able to self-criticize in a way that shows them what we see.
So the coin as an objective thing works better as an allegory for a piece of propaganda rather than the thing itself. Once we start considering the actual qualities of the people who hold certain views, and how this all relates to production of capitalist relations among the masses, I think the example starts to fall apart since it deals with individuals projecting our desires and expectations, which are based on feedback we get from an objective system whose essential nature the system has to hide from those of us the system exploits.
Sorry got carried away there, I appreciate your context because it opens up the subject quite a bit more than my comment did.
Please don’t apologize. I was going more for the “social democracy is the left wing of fascism” point. I was thinking of the sides of the coin as being the ideologies of each, not necessarily their version of the propaganda in the meme. I particularly enjoyed the way you reiterated your point in the paragraph beginning “How this relates”
That is a really good example. I think about it all the time. The way it is used today is so much different than the very specific context in which it was written. But it is as much a polemic as it was then.
“Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.”
Germany, 1924. The radical German working class had been defeated, but so was the German bourgeoisie. The spartacist uprising began with the split in the SPD in 1914. Over the course of 10 years, fierce political, national, military struggle had led to the splitting or purging of all radical elements. The SPD, what was left of German social democracy as a movement, was objectively opportunistic and fascistic. Not because of ideology, but because of civil war. What we might consider a politically active progressive in our day, would not have been a German social democrat in 1924. It would be like taking the Democrat party and splitting it again and again until all that were left were the most openly bloodthirsty moderates.
Russia 1924. Lenin has died after years of sickness, Stalin is transitioning to power, Russia has not recovered from the civil war that utterly destroyed their entire productive apparatus, nor the disastrous NEP and banning of factions. Russia was in the 18th c. socially, the 16th c. productively, and , in theory, 21st(TBD) c. in socialist governance. Hitler was def a concern but compared to the invading west and white armies, and the mass destruction and active regression of social conditions, for a myriad of different reasons, little could be done either way. Russia would not, could not, invade Germany to carry out the actual first step of Lenin’s plan for international revolution. Uprisings were a constant, urgent threat to the Bolshevik government. Stalin’s Comintern had a part to play, maybe, in the failure to overthrow the German bourgeoisie, but what’s done is done, and success in revolutionary times is, in part, measured in survivors.
Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy.
This definitely rings true to us, but I think the category of “social democracy” is much more broad in our time than in Stalin’s. Social Democracy was more like “German political legitimacy” than a definition of a vaguely left liberal ideology. The lies and failures of the SPD were 1000x more obvious than, for example, the USAmerican Democrats. Regular people today are just now waking up to the two-faced nature of mainstream liberalism, which surely functions as a moderate, legitimizing wing of the bourgeoisie. The actual source of social democracy’s intrinsic link to fascism, is its bourgeois character, rather than something inherent to the abstract ideas of social democracy. But for the Social Democrats, the fecklessness and utter betrayal was painfully obvious to the masses, there was no doubt.
These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront
Its important to recognize that Stalin is being pretty specific in the social forces he is critiquing. He defines fascism as having emerged out of postwar Europe, a definition that differs drastically from our own iteration of fascism. He also says that the bourgeoisie need the political legitimacy of social democracy to carry out the agenda of fascism, that is, “combating the proletarian revolution.” I would argue this is also different, as fascism has, on its own, attained political legitimacy under its own policies. Our bourgeoisie do not need social democracy to legitimize fascism, as far as I can tell, the international bourg are fucking done with social democracy as a liberalizing force. In 1924, the social democrats are more like moderate republicans, than liberal progressives.
When I see the phrase deployed today, it is 99% online. I have hours and hours of political discussion per week, and I have for years, and ive never seen this phrase used in person, except maybe against the status quo Dems. Online however, its deployed against any confused progressive liberal for even hesitating on the question of revolution. The phrase is applied broad-brush to slander anyone to the left of the sect.
Is a coherent historical critique of reformism, as a social movement that abandons the workers for opportunistic and historically contingent reasons, as prevalent as the deployment of this phrase? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Its a nice simple formula to win ingroup points when an underdeveloped leftist (often arguing with just a different kind of underdeveloped leftist) starts to lose a debate. In this situation, we dont need a break from the right, we need further development of prolonged political struggle, in order to reshuffle the groups, over and over, until the reformists can no longer hide from the masses.
We can definitely see the fascism in, say, European social democracy, where a large part of GDP is generated by arms sales and exploitation of the third world, but we often confuse a bourgeois ideology, and its deadly dual nature, for the individual views of depoliticized subjects.
One thing that I think we do now, much more than people in 1924, in particular a Bolshevik like Stalin, is that we are much more abstract in our thinking. We apply broad, and not always appropriate, generalizations without even thinking about it that way. This reduces huge swaths of the organic discourse happening among working people, into bitter epistemic squabbling. We dont know that we need to be concrete. We dont even know how to concretize something objectively.
So all we know is the two sided coin, with the truths that we recognize on our side, and the lies that we can’t see projected toward the other. Rather than engage with people and meet them where they are as goes the traditional wisdom of communists, we instead abstract the working class itself as an ideal. Marx called this out in 1844 in Theses on Feuerbach, saying that bourgeois materialism can recognize the individual, or the society (or social movement in this case), but not both, we can’t conceive of how a movement is made up of people, rather than ideology.
When we center human experience in our analysis, which is one of the primary contributions of Marxism and an oft-neglected condition of dialectical materialist thought, when we make our analysis practical and dynamic rather than categorical and static, then we can begin assessing conditions. But a comprehensive method of how to concretize conditions so that a movement or society can change them still eludes the left; most of all online. I think it is an objective social condition that facilitates this developmental stuntedness, rather than ideological difference and error, but we gotta fix that shit quick. A counter cultural movement against unnecessary abstraction, able to link our ideas with the specificities of workers lives, would be a welcome improvement. However it makes me wonder if I am in fact still too abstract to be practical or relatable. I probably am, but fortunately I can’t do the revolution on my own, and I have comrades to support my development, through the collective development of political struggle in our local conditions.
Its more like a coin with liberal values on one side and fascism on the other. And when we hold it up to look at one side and describe what we see to someone with different beliefs, all they see is the other side.
For clarification’s sake, the coin is capitalism.
Hm, I’m not sure. I was thinking more like this post was a piece of propaganda or discourse, so the coin would also be a piece of propaganda.
I think part of the problem in our analysis is a problem of abstraction. Capitalism is actually the treasury that mints the coin, the social relations that turn the coin into profit. But it’s true that the appearances of capitalism is fundamentally different than its actual function.
I like the comparison of chattel slavery as a contra example. Chattel slavery was an institution that was morally reprehensible, even to the founders of the US. It shocked the conscience of virtually anyone who considered it (although a good lesson in social humanity is the tendency to just not consider it, as a defense) meanwhile it was true that some slaves lived somewhat better cared for materially than many white workers, whose destitution was necessary to uphold the practice of mass subjugation of the slaves. The severe cruelty of the ownership of one person over another somewhat hides the material reality of slavery. The historic matetial basis for the abolition of slavery was the fact that northern industrialists were better at getting more labor our of workers and paying them an individual wage much less than the cost of maintaining the life of a slave, which often included the old and young who could not work.
On the contrary, capitalism has all the appeals of freedom, democracy, self a actualization, when it is actually itself a form of part-time slavery. We consent, via contract, to sell our time and energy to a boss who pays us a wage that is worth less than the commodities that are produced using the tools the boss “owns”.
Liberal ideals give rights to everyone on paper but capitalism denies rights to most people in practice. The capitalist state manages the political contradictions that arise, since the cold industrialized reality that pits worker against owner is fundamentally unstable. A middle class is an ideological project that stabilizes the contradictions, splitting the masses of people between a mass who aren’t willing to give up their individual privileges even if they hold " liberal" values, and the masses who are so exploited they lack the time and energy to fight for the liberation of all workers. All these groups are split further, of course, along lines of race, gender, etc., the illusions are sustained by having people’s direct experience contradict narratives of oppression and resemble the liberal values that capitalism heralds.
The two sides of capitalism are, objectively, the exploited workers and the owning capitalists. That relation is the base, but the superstructure creates the illusions and social relations that facilitate the base.
Back to the coin, the two-sidedness of the discourse can be expanded to practically any polemic, propaganda, rhetoric, etc., so that only one “side” of the coin is apparent to the people on each side of the discourse.
How this relates to the original meme, as leftists we can see our side of the Maduro discourse, we see the fascism of red and blue MAGA, but they don’t see that part even when they express views that are objectively fascist. Their side of the coin doesn’t have a coherent perspective on what fascism even is, they arent able to self-criticize in a way that shows them what we see.
So the coin as an objective thing works better as an allegory for a piece of propaganda rather than the thing itself. Once we start considering the actual qualities of the people who hold certain views, and how this all relates to production of capitalist relations among the masses, I think the example starts to fall apart since it deals with individuals projecting our desires and expectations, which are based on feedback we get from an objective system whose essential nature the system has to hide from those of us the system exploits.
Sorry got carried away there, I appreciate your context because it opens up the subject quite a bit more than my comment did.
Please don’t apologize. I was going more for the “social democracy is the left wing of fascism” point. I was thinking of the sides of the coin as being the ideologies of each, not necessarily their version of the propaganda in the meme. I particularly enjoyed the way you reiterated your point in the paragraph beginning “How this relates”
That is a really good example. I think about it all the time. The way it is used today is so much different than the very specific context in which it was written. But it is as much a polemic as it was then.
It’s an extremely thought provoking subject!
Yeah, I butchered it also.
“Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.”
Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/09/20.htm
I am interested in your perspective on differences between the original writing and the use of the phrase today.
Germany, 1924. The radical German working class had been defeated, but so was the German bourgeoisie. The spartacist uprising began with the split in the SPD in 1914. Over the course of 10 years, fierce political, national, military struggle had led to the splitting or purging of all radical elements. The SPD, what was left of German social democracy as a movement, was objectively opportunistic and fascistic. Not because of ideology, but because of civil war. What we might consider a politically active progressive in our day, would not have been a German social democrat in 1924. It would be like taking the Democrat party and splitting it again and again until all that were left were the most openly bloodthirsty moderates.
Russia 1924. Lenin has died after years of sickness, Stalin is transitioning to power, Russia has not recovered from the civil war that utterly destroyed their entire productive apparatus, nor the disastrous NEP and banning of factions. Russia was in the 18th c. socially, the 16th c. productively, and , in theory, 21st(TBD) c. in socialist governance. Hitler was def a concern but compared to the invading west and white armies, and the mass destruction and active regression of social conditions, for a myriad of different reasons, little could be done either way. Russia would not, could not, invade Germany to carry out the actual first step of Lenin’s plan for international revolution. Uprisings were a constant, urgent threat to the Bolshevik government. Stalin’s Comintern had a part to play, maybe, in the failure to overthrow the German bourgeoisie, but what’s done is done, and success in revolutionary times is, in part, measured in survivors.
This definitely rings true to us, but I think the category of “social democracy” is much more broad in our time than in Stalin’s. Social Democracy was more like “German political legitimacy” than a definition of a vaguely left liberal ideology. The lies and failures of the SPD were 1000x more obvious than, for example, the USAmerican Democrats. Regular people today are just now waking up to the two-faced nature of mainstream liberalism, which surely functions as a moderate, legitimizing wing of the bourgeoisie. The actual source of social democracy’s intrinsic link to fascism, is its bourgeois character, rather than something inherent to the abstract ideas of social democracy. But for the Social Democrats, the fecklessness and utter betrayal was painfully obvious to the masses, there was no doubt.
Its important to recognize that Stalin is being pretty specific in the social forces he is critiquing. He defines fascism as having emerged out of postwar Europe, a definition that differs drastically from our own iteration of fascism. He also says that the bourgeoisie need the political legitimacy of social democracy to carry out the agenda of fascism, that is, “combating the proletarian revolution.” I would argue this is also different, as fascism has, on its own, attained political legitimacy under its own policies. Our bourgeoisie do not need social democracy to legitimize fascism, as far as I can tell, the international bourg are fucking done with social democracy as a liberalizing force. In 1924, the social democrats are more like moderate republicans, than liberal progressives.
When I see the phrase deployed today, it is 99% online. I have hours and hours of political discussion per week, and I have for years, and ive never seen this phrase used in person, except maybe against the status quo Dems. Online however, its deployed against any confused progressive liberal for even hesitating on the question of revolution. The phrase is applied broad-brush to slander anyone to the left of the sect.
Is a coherent historical critique of reformism, as a social movement that abandons the workers for opportunistic and historically contingent reasons, as prevalent as the deployment of this phrase? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Its a nice simple formula to win ingroup points when an underdeveloped leftist (often arguing with just a different kind of underdeveloped leftist) starts to lose a debate. In this situation, we dont need a break from the right, we need further development of prolonged political struggle, in order to reshuffle the groups, over and over, until the reformists can no longer hide from the masses.
We can definitely see the fascism in, say, European social democracy, where a large part of GDP is generated by arms sales and exploitation of the third world, but we often confuse a bourgeois ideology, and its deadly dual nature, for the individual views of depoliticized subjects.
One thing that I think we do now, much more than people in 1924, in particular a Bolshevik like Stalin, is that we are much more abstract in our thinking. We apply broad, and not always appropriate, generalizations without even thinking about it that way. This reduces huge swaths of the organic discourse happening among working people, into bitter epistemic squabbling. We dont know that we need to be concrete. We dont even know how to concretize something objectively.
So all we know is the two sided coin, with the truths that we recognize on our side, and the lies that we can’t see projected toward the other. Rather than engage with people and meet them where they are as goes the traditional wisdom of communists, we instead abstract the working class itself as an ideal. Marx called this out in 1844 in Theses on Feuerbach, saying that bourgeois materialism can recognize the individual, or the society (or social movement in this case), but not both, we can’t conceive of how a movement is made up of people, rather than ideology.
When we center human experience in our analysis, which is one of the primary contributions of Marxism and an oft-neglected condition of dialectical materialist thought, when we make our analysis practical and dynamic rather than categorical and static, then we can begin assessing conditions. But a comprehensive method of how to concretize conditions so that a movement or society can change them still eludes the left; most of all online. I think it is an objective social condition that facilitates this developmental stuntedness, rather than ideological difference and error, but we gotta fix that shit quick. A counter cultural movement against unnecessary abstraction, able to link our ideas with the specificities of workers lives, would be a welcome improvement. However it makes me wonder if I am in fact still too abstract to be practical or relatable. I probably am, but fortunately I can’t do the revolution on my own, and I have comrades to support my development, through the collective development of political struggle in our local conditions.