For decades, we have been in the streets in defense of the Palestinian people, and will continue to fight until the total liberation of Palestine!
For decades, we have been in the streets in defense of the Palestinian people, and will continue to fight until the total liberation of Palestine!
The vast majority of antifascist partisans in Nazi-occupied countries were socialists. We actually organize and fight while liberals create the conditions for movements like fascism.
For example, the partisans in what became Yugoslavia took back their country through their militant organizing.
Though we should not forget the antifascist force that defeated the Nazis and gave those partisans more room to operate: The Soviet Union. While Western liberal powers were sitting back hoping for the Nazis to take out Eastern Eurooe, the USSR was rapidly developing its infrastructure and productive capacity so that could fight an existential war against the fascists.
That isn’t a thing. Those words don’t make sense together.
Fascism was a specific development in countries, specifically Germany and Italy, that wanted to become imperial powers as a new set of post-WWI great capitalist powers had basically carved the world up into pieces for themselves to plunder and had left out both. The fascists built on the prevailing conditions in those countries.
German and Italian liberals could only offer the same degrading conditions available to imperialized countries. Instead of being the vampires getting fat off the blood of others, they were trying to navigate the country as a blood-bags.
Socialists understood this and organized against it, but this, of course, threatened capital. Socialists would organize and take over exploitative factories, neighborhoods, municipalities, and run them for and by workers. Capitalists promoted the opponents of socialists, and fascists emerged as this opposition. They began as violent gangs of nationalist thugs supported by capitalists to “protect businesses” and go after socialists. Liberals supported these fascists. So did social democrars once they gained electoral power. All of the mealy-mouthed reformers empowered fascists materially against socialists.
And that is how fascists developed, in a time of crisis for how to resolve the competing forces of imperialized liberalism and socialist organization. Their angle was to develop a hyper-nationalist program against the socialist one and (on paper) against the liberal one, to explain why the common person’s (Volk) conditions were degrading without actually materially addressing the capitalist system as it actually was, but through mythologies about scapegoated minorities, betrayal, and not doing capitalism well enough or for the interests of the people. Where they did have a material analysis it was in their expansionism, they understood how the imperialist equation looked, but instead of trying to destroy imperialism they just wanted to sit at its head.
And at every step of the way, socialists fought them. They were, and are, complete enemies.
There is no liberation without organization. And organization will not produce the outcomes we need without having a correct understanding and analysis of oppression and how to combat it. Therefore, we need socialist organizing.
This does not mean it is easy.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write such a well written and thorough response! My ignorance shows, and I’ve definitely gained some knowledge of both the definition and history of fascism.
Not knowing this topic I’d the norm! Schools do not teach the actual political context in these countries, it is all filtered through simplistic narratives that were crafted by anticommunist propagandists (McCarthyites, e.g.) that wanted to thread the needle of presenting Nazis as people to be opposed without giving socialists the credit for doing 80% of the opposing. And the issues related to capitalism are glossed over at all costs because, of course, those same writers (1) are big fans of capitalism while (2) not understanding it very well themselves. The most powerful tool in propaganda is emphasis. To take a topic and seemingly discuss it while neglecting inconvenient aspects and nailing the ones you care about. We are constantly bombarded with this exact form of propaganda, it has become self-sustaining. People don’t even know they’re doing it, the narratives have calcified.
And then, shock! They open up a history book, they read the old German papers, they see the Soviet Archives, and the realities disagree almost completely with what the Texas Board of Education approved textbook said.
Anyways, give yourself a break, none if us are immune to propaganda. Just keep that spark of humility alive and read thoroughly. I recommend reading critical materials, like media criticism and left theory and histories, as these provide very useful tools for tackling mainstream sources critically.
If you would like a (short) book recommendation, you might appreciate Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, which actually covers the exact topic of fascists vs. socialists from a critical historical perspective.
Thanks again for the nice response and thanks for the book tip. I’ll see if I can find some time and a copy, and read it.
Just be wary of anyone conflating a simple vote for a 3rd party candidate for president every 4 years with the hard work of actually organizing a socialist movement. They are very different things. A 3rd party that has zero mathematical chance of success and crawls out of the woodwork every 4 years is a spoiler, not serious, and only benefits the fascist. This is just accelerationism.
PSL does plenty of organizing. They’re clearly one of the better socialist orgs in the US.
Also that’s not what accelerationism means
Is that why PSL has a grand total of zero members in office? I thought surely there must be a few, but nope - zero. It’s literally a joke to run a candidate for president when you don’t have a single member serving in any elected office in the entire country. It’s laughable.
And sure, maybe it’s not “true accelerationism” but it’s a common term to describe leftists that embrace people like Trump because they are deluded into thinking it will somehow break the system and a communist utopia can magically rise from the ashes. Call it whatever you want, but it will never be a good idea.
It’s not “embracing Trump”, that’s what liberals like to frame it as for rhetorical effect. Calling it accelerationism is just willful ignorance towards what the intentions of the approach are. It’s a strategy oriented around timescale that is more than just this election (in stark contrast to the alarmist “Most important election of our lifetime” rhetoric of liberals) because there will be more elections and unconditional subservience to the dems in this election will encourage their lurching still further to the right in future elections.
The purpose is to make the Democrats choose between concessions to the left or letting the Republicans win. It’s not difficult to understand.
Nobody said it was difficult to understand. I agree it’s a dead simple idea, and like most dead simple ideas it’s not actually a good idea. There’s a reason Bernie Sanders wholeheartedly endorsed Kamala (and Hillary), but sure, all the .ml folks must know better. If you think Bernie is too centrist then you need to understand that your cohort is so laughably out of step with the populace that you’ll never get anywhere. Kind of like where PSL is at with zero seats (ever, btw, not just currently).
Real people will be harmed by another Trump term. Immigrants, women, POC, LGBT, basically anyone other than healthy white men. It says a lot when you think they’re all disposable enough to help Trump to win in the hopes of a future socialist movement that won’t ever happen because the movement can’t even win a single seat anywhere in the country. AOC correctly called the green party “not serious” and they’ve actually won a small handful of elections, unlike PSL. Movements start from the bottom up, not the top down.