For the first 30 years of my life, I was a “David Barton” American Christian … raised as a Baptist YEC … Air Force pilot “defending America against Communism” … etc etc. Beginning at about Age 30, I began to question the policy of making the US Military into “The World’s Globocop” and in 1996, I separated from the military. I was happy to see “The Fall of Communism” in 1989 but I continued to be discontent with the US Govt but couldn’t put my finger on the problem. Finally — just a few months ago — I’ve figured it out, thanks to Prof. Michael Hudson and long story short, things have never been more clear for me. The fog has lifted.
I now understand that Fascism did not die with Hitler and Mussolini — it moved — to Washington DC — to the Pentagon / US State Dept and it became more powerful and sophisticated and tricky than Hitler and Goebbels could have ever dreamed possible. Prof. Hudson was an unwitting enabler of this New Fascism with his book “Super Imperialism” originally published back in the seventies (I think) while Hudson was employed by Herman Kahn at the massively influential Hudson Institute. Hudson is an “Adam Smith / John Stuart Mill / Karl Marx” type Economist in favor of “Good Socialism” and he now believes that the best example of this in the world is China and he teaches “Good Marxism” at a university in China. He observes that the Fascist US / NATO Global Empire is now dying and this death is being accelerated by NATO’s stupid proxy was in Ukraine in which the actual Nazis running things in Ukraine are finally being dealt with by Putin. If you want a quick intro to Prof. Hudson — who I now think is the only Economist worth listening to — I recommend as a starting point his interviews by Chris Hedges of which I’m aware of 3. This one (2016) is the first … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ylSG54i-A … Here’s the second (also 2016 I believe) … https://youtu.be/cMuIoIidVWI … and here’s a more recent one (2022) … https://youtu.be/RqaSOyFauhk … Enjoy!
I don’t think this qualifies as an “observation”.
It’s an observation from his perspective of Economics, which I have learned drives everything else. He has also studied ancient history (Harvard Peabody Museum) and found that every nation in history that followed the same economic model that the US has adopted (Rentier Capitalism / Financial Capitalism) has eventually failed. He has been watching the indicators for decades.
You have fallen in love. This is the exact opposite of the fog lifting. Now, I observe that every detail of the paragraph I quoted is wildly, flagrantly false. Almost cartoonishly false. The difference is, I observe by looking, rather than forcing selected details through an ideological filter.
Even so, it should be clear that every nation in history not currently extant has failed. This includes nations following an impressively wide variety of economic models, from pure free market to pure managed economies, from democracies to republics to oligarchies to strongman dictatorships. All have failed except those currently around all of which WILL fail, given time.
Even if some nation blundered onto the best of all possible worlds, it would still SEEM to most of its citizens that there is room for improvement, and they would tinker it to death.
So what you are saying is that this war was forced on Russia by NATO, coercing it’s proxy Ukraine into launching a full-scale invasion across it’s eastern border against a neighboring state with a land area 28 times bigger and an economy 10 times larger than tha of the invaders, completely ignoring what happened to the previous two attempts to invade Russia by powers with vastly greater resources?
This is like saying that, in the First World War, France invaded Germany, the invasion was brought to a halt only after it had penetrated deep inside German territory and was fought out on German soil with devastating effects on the German nation.
Maybe that actually happened in some alternative Universe but – apart from the devastation caused by all wars – not in this one, unless you believe in last-Thursdayism in which case all bets are off.
As for President Xi’s China being the best thing since sliced bread there were apologists saying the same thing about Nazi Germany if I remember. I wonder if Professor Hudson would be occupying the position he does currently in Chinese academia if he were Uyghur?
I’m saying that (a) Fascism didn’t die with Hitler / Mussolini … (b) It just moved to the US State Dept / DoD and has been terrorizing the world ever since but in a different, more clever way than any empire had ever before devised in history — Hudson describes it as “Super Imperialism” (one of his book titles in it’s 3rd printing) (there are several YouTubes on it) … (c) This new “Super Imperialist” US Empire has been using the Dollar, the IMF and the World Bank to manipulate / control other countries including China and Russia, but that is changing now, and the change is accelerating thanks to the US / NATO’s recent stupid operations in Ukraine. We have basically been trying to balkanize Russia so we can more easily control them, but Putin and his nationalists got wise to this, gained power and are pushing back. They will succeed. Watch Col Douglas MacGregor interviews for details of how and when this will happen. Xi and Putin have no ambitions like Hitler’s. That’s nonsense to anyone who actually studies these two countries. And you’ve been fed a load of crap about the Uyghurs. Get on Twitter (which is now free) and get some balance in your follows. I can suggest some follows for you if you want. Good luck!
Just out of curiosity, is Hudson a member of the secret Illuminati, funded by George Soros?
Either that or he’s a reptilian shapeshifter in which case you’d need to check with David Icke who’s a reputable expert in the field.
I, for one, would be fascinated to know what Twitter feeds you recommend.
Also, is there a newsletter that I should subscribe to?
No, Hudson is not a member of the Illuminati or funded by Soros. He was raised in Chicago, son of a Trotskyite and he thus became familiar with the works of Karl Marx (Das Kapital) and of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill — he calls all three “Classical Economists” which to him roughly means they advocated “Industrial Capitalism” (in contrast to Financial / Rentier Capitalism) which would (in their minds) naturally evolve into (good) Socialism. He originally wanted to study music in college, but switched to Economics, got a PhD then went to work for Citibank analyzing “Third World Balance of Payments” … during this time he realized one of his foundational principles — “Debt that Cannot be Paid … Will not be Paid” and this led to a Fellowship with the Harvard Peabody Museum studying the “History of Debt Forgiveness” from Sumerian / Babylonian times through Jewish times, Greece, Rome and all the way down to the present. He was picked by the famous Herman Kahn of the massively influential Hudson Institute to be Herman’s right hand man (equal salary, etc) and while there wrote his first blockbuster book “Super Imperialism” which was intended to teach what NOT to do, but to his surprise was widely read by members of the US Gov’t as a “How to” manual to enslave the Third World under a clever new system using the IMF / World Bank in a way that had never before in history been done before. This fascist US / NATO Global Empire greatly extended it’s power after WW2 and as everyone knows, the USD has been the de facto global reserve currency for decades which has given the (now fascist) US Gov’t global hegemony. But that is now changing and Hudson sees the US Empire in decline now (he says ALL nations decline and fail under “Financial / Rentier Capitalism”). Hudson is now 84 years old, resides in NY but is still active giving video interviews and writing. He has a decent following in the US and now I will give you some key resources to learn about him. My first recommendation is to watch the 3 video interviews with Chris Hedges mentioned in the OP. Then you can Google his name as desired and you will find interview with various other ones including a young guy named Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton who has almost 250,000 followers. Other “Hudsonian” follows include Kathleen Tyson in the UK @Kathleen_Tyson_, a former central banker with about 7500 followers, S.L Kanthan in India @Kanthan2030 with about 60,000 followers, Pepe Escobar in Brazil @RealPepeEscobar with about 100,000 followers, and Arnaud Bertrand in France / China @RnaudBertrand with about 100,000 followers. These folks will keep you up to speed with the ongoing “Multipolar Transition” that is occurring from a “Hudsonian” perspective. HTH
While I’m at it, I might as well share my other list of experts in various areas of study (I jokingly call them “Saints”)
1) 1986 – 1990 … “Saint” Josh McDowell added to Dave’s “pantheon” – Christian Apologetics
2) 1990 … “Saint” Henry Morris added – Young Earth Creationism
3) 1993 … “Saint” Joel Salatin added – Heal the Land
4) 1995 … “Saint” Allan Savory added – Holistic Management
5) 2004 … “Saint” David Rohl – Egyptology, New Chronology
6) 2012 … “Saint” Ken Nair – Marriage / Ancient Hebrew
7) 2015 … “Saint” Frank Seekins – Ancient Hebrew
8) 2016 … “Saint” Dr. Ted Naiman – Food Health
9) 2020 … “Saint” Douglas Petrovich – Ancient Hebrew Alphabet
10) 2021 … “Saint” Peter McCullough – COVID 19
11) 2022 … “Saint” Elon Musk added – Free Speech / Twitter
12) 2023 … “Saint” Michael Hudson added – Global Economics
Putin is likely to die this year (although news of his illness might be disinformation).
Russia has coveted Ukraine for centuries, and invades almost on a schedule.
I am painfully aware of America’s sins, having participated in one. But I note that people will literally scale walls to get into the US. The same can’t be said for Russia or China.
Europeans once clamored to immigrate to America. That urge declined when Europe approached income parity. One can hope this trend continues and includes the rest of the world. I know this seems unlikely, but world per capita income is rising.
Superinteresting topic. Superwrong topic starter.
Now that RT is gone, it’s still astonishing to observe what legacy and offshoots it has left behind.
Erik,
Why do you like the topic? Why don’t you like the topic starter?
Of course this has been true in the past, but the situation is changing and now that change is accelerating, thanks to the US / NATO stupidity in Ukraine, US stealing Russia’s $300 billion FX reserves, etc.
HMGuy,
For instance, my impression of current Trump and MAGA supporters, as more details emerge of the connections around events in Washington on 6th January, 2001, is that use of the word fascism fits that context.
OK, now to address Flint’s post … which will take many days … probably months … but I’m willing to spend the time, because as of this year, I suddenly realized that this is one of THE most important topics of our times … FAR more important than the Evo / Creo debate. People are lamenting the good old days of bashing creos … UD is dead, etc. Well true, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t super important topics to replace “Evo / Creo” … there ARE. And this in my opinion outranks many others in importance.
With that intro, let’s go back to Lizzie’s definition of “fascism” from Merriam-Webster …
What I am going to try to demonstrate to you — and this may take months — is that Fascism did not die with Hitler. It’s HQ simply moved — to Washington DC. THAT is the statement that I want to defend … or if you like … try to disprove as a scientist might try to disprove his own hypothesis.
I started my “online career” in about 2005 or so with “AF Dave’s Creator God Hypothesis” and at that time, I really did not speak your language very well, thus I don’t think I was very effective at defending it. NOW I understand better how you think and I’m more fluent in your language, so hopefully I can do a better job of helping us all “become less wrong” on the topic of “Global Fascism” which I believe is one of THE most important topics there is because it affects us all every day, every month, every year. OTOH, the topic of how the universe came to be is interesting to talk about, but it doesn’t affect our lives in the same way.
The “Evo / Creo Debate” is in the category “How Things Came to Be – IN THE PAST” … the “Global Fascism Debate” covers “How Things Are – NOW.
Wasn’t this thread supposed to be over in three days?
I thought that was Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
I am not against talking about politics at TSZ, though usually we’ve shied away from it for the sake of peace in the family.
And I am by no means opposed to the general thesis that there is a prominent strain of fascism in contemporary American culture, nor to the thesis that there is something fascistic about what passes for the Beltway consensus.
But, any serious discussion of what is (and what is not) fascistic about what goes in the corridors of power in and around Washington DC would need to begin with a solid understanding of what fascism is. I would recommend Paxton’s classic The Anatomy of Fascism or the more recent How Fascism Works by Stanley.
Perhaps the Ukraine will supplant Afghanistan (the “graveyard of empires”) as the “Soviet’s Vietnam.” Forgive the anachronism, but it will always be the USSR to me.
I believe it was George Santayana the said that “those who do not heed history are doomed to repeat it.” Of course, not to be confused with Carlos Santana’s epic performance at Woodstock…….
OK, let’s start here. This is what I was trying to say is “starting with your conclusions.” So let’s back up a bit. “Neo-nazi” needs to be assigned some meaningful definition. If you apply it generally to politicians who do not wish to share power, then it applies to nearly all of them, and thus loses meaning.
NATO is a mutual-assistance treaty which has rarely been invoked, and even then in very limited and temporary ways. NATO membership has had little or no influence on the peoples or the governments of member nations. It rarely gets mentioned in the political life and debates within the member nations, and is never the most important issue. It was created to discourage the Soviet Union from attempting to expand further west, and I suppose you could say that it sort of succeeded, in that the Soviet Union is now disbanded and no NATO member nation has been attacked. For most of its lifetime, NATO has been like the United Nations – a good idea on paper, but in reality each nation’s individual interests are what matter to them.
I have wondered about the founders of NATO, and of the UN, and of the League of Nations, and other attempts at international peace. Such organizations and treaties, with rare exceptions, are unimportant in practice. The founders were/are hardly tricky. I think some of them were dreamers in the John Lennon sense, and some of them had personal goals and used the chimera of international unity as a vehicle for their own personal interests. Scratch the surface of any of these efforts, and you find serious disagreements among the members as to what their goals are, when the organization should be used, even who should pay for it.
If there has ever been any sort of “NATO propaganda” beyond stating the (rather unrealistic) goals of eternal peace love and chumship, I haven’t ever found it. Maybe people in Finland will consider their long border with Russia to be more secure with NATO membership? But certainly Turkey doesn’t concern itself with Finland’s border. This simply illustrates the futility of such organizations – each member nation pursues its own perceived interests regardless.
Certainly the US doesn’t seek NATO permission to invade Iraq or Afghanistan whenever that sort of thing suits the political interests of the leadership of the day – and they never say they’re invading in the interest of NATO, they say they’re defending US national security. Their immediate goal is exercise of power, their secondary goal is re-election. National security is at best a distant third. NATO isn’t even an afterthought.
Finally, you need to realize that while human nature hasn’t changed in any important way for the last million years or so, WWII is over. The Yellow Peril has been retired, the German Reich is long gone. Perhaps the lunatic fringe is still in thrall to the Hitler and Goebbels and other WWII characters haunting their imaginations, but I think it’s more realistic to regard the white supremacist militias as a symptom of some temporary cultural malady locally, and pay more attention today to people like Georgia Meloni internationally.
The foremost US propagandist today is Fox News. They are unquestionably skilled in the art of misrepresentation, both in their selection of events and topics to cover, and their selective (and often inaccurate) presentations of (some of) the details. But you don’t have to watch Fox News for very long to figure out that the enemy they present to their viewers isn’t NATO, it’s people who are NOT conservative white Christian rural less-educated English-speaking people. Which makes all those people (the brown menace, the atheists, the antifas, the Jews, etc.) threatening and scary and dangerous and out to get you!
Now, there’s no question this works. Fox News viewers are the single largest body of “news” consumers, and they tend to watch nothing else. You’d probably be better advised to forget the “fascists” and pay more attention to what’s happening to public education, especially in Florida. And pay attention to the debt limit debate, because this is what you get from politicians being elected to such safe seats they face no threat of losing, which in turn is the outcome of gerrymandering, which in turn derives from technology (redmap is a computer program) and the failure of the legal system to protect the “one person one vote” principle. There’s plenty of real problems to consider.
I’m not going to give you a list of fascists, HMguy. The way you identify a fascist is by whether they are promoting fascism, not by referring to some pre-chewed blacklist.
YOU need to evaluate your sources and decide whether they are fascist propaganda sources. It isn’t difficult.
HMGuy,
Lizzie only quoted the basic dictionary definition of “fascism.” It is not her arbitrary invention.
Dictionary definitions are fine for establishing a baseline, though it’s job of experts in the relevant fields to go fare beyond what a mere dictionary definition can provide.
I also think it’s crucial to distinguish between the different modes and types of capitalist society, and how economics will interact with governance, the various ways in which cultural politics and ideological superstructure (e.g. arts, entertainment, religion) can contain, displace, conceal, and distract from the contradictions of capitalism, and how other hierarchies (class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity) get re-arranged and reorganized based on what crises of capitalism need to be managed in the interests of the ruling class at any given moment.
Elizabeth,
The anti-Semitic history behind “cultural Marxism” is really fascinating. I got into a nice little dust-up with a few folks at Uncommon Descent over the term. Wikipedia does an unusually good job of conveying the narrative here.
That said, I would very much take issue with the idea of “left-wing fascism”. The historian Robert Paxton in his Anatomy of Fascism defines fascism as follows:
I cannot see how that is compatible with any left-wing political project.
Granted, leftist politics pursue goals that would require a revolution in order to be achieved, and revolutions can involve violence. But if we were to use “fascism” to refer to any political project that people in the “center” would dub “extreme”, then we wash these terms of all substance and meaning.
Well, using the Merriam-Webster definition above, it would apply to a number of economically “left” systems, the poster child being “National Socialism”, but also including authoritarian communist regimes as the old Iron Curtain regimes, and communist China.
The Authoritarian-Libertarian axis isn’t quite orthogonal to the left-right axis, but it’s not very strongly aligned either.
I find it interesting to note how easily Putin shifted from the Soviet project to one rooted in the idea of Holy Rus.
Elizabeth,
Agreed, but to my mind, that reinforces my main point from above: that dictionary definitions are crude and simplistic, fine for establishing a minimum baseline of understanding, but no substitute for genuine explanation.
For one thing, it’s fairly well understood that the Nazis understood that they needed to present themselves as socialists in order to win elections, given the popularity of socialism at the time. But the Nazis were also quick to realize that the Communists were their only real political rival, which is why they blamed the Reichstag fire on the Communists and used that to demand emergency powers, which they then used to destroy all dissent, strip political and civil rights from Jews and other groups, etc.
So I would be very hesitant to say that the National Socialists were really socialist in any meaningful sense.
And for the many considerable crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, they do not satisfy Paxton’s definition of fascism:
That fits Hitler, Mussolini, and Trump — but not Stalin or Mao. (It’s a nice question whether Kemal Atatruk satisfies all these conditions or just a few of them.)
This is not, it should be stressed, to justify, apologize, deny, or minimize the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, Communist China, or any of their imitators throughout Southeast Asia and Middle East. One can walk and chew gum at the same time, and one can oppose different forms of evil on different grounds.
Isms tend to paint themselves as do-gooders. I don’t know any manefestation of activism that doesn’t portray itself as doing good.
So I tend to focus on the means used or promoted.
Authoritarians tend to focus on behavior, and totalitarians add an additional element of control over thought. My personal definition of fascism is authoritarian plus a focus on inborn characteristics, such as race, gender, or ethnicity. When I see activists framing other people by inborn features, I want to back away.
Flint,
Hi Flint–
You seem like a calm thinker, not given to flying into a tizzy over “fash” bogeymen. That’s good! Maybe I can have some stimulating discussion here which would be nice because TR has gone down the toilet AFAICT.
I agree with NOT starting with your desired conclusions. For me the arrival at the tentative conclusion that “Fascism didn’t disappear … it moved … to the US DoD / DoS” began with Observations and Questions … why was America such a great powerhouse in the past, but now not so much? Why did it feel like I was lied to about China (I visited Shenzhen in 2012 and half expected to be arrested for being an Evil Capitalist or something). I certainly would have never dreamed that I could openly attend a big Christian church on Sunday and the place was packed out and sang the same hymns I sing here in America. I was also pleasantly surprised at how clean and safe the city seemed, compared to dirty American cities. Long before 2012 I was bothered by the fact that the US has military bases all over the world – why? Why us? Why doesn’t Russia or China have military bases all over the world? What’s special about us that we do that? In the 90s I became more aware of the “Rust Belt” in the US … why did this happen? Then I began hearing more about “good” socialism even though I had always heard that “Socialism is Bad”. I never could connect all these dots in my head but I kept them in their little “waffle compartments” in my brain and finally, this year, Prof. Hudson connected these dots for me in a very convincing way. Of course he’s human like all of us and thus subject to being wrong about the hypotheses he puts forward, but I gotta tell ya, his hypothesis about how Global Economics works does indeed explain a lot of data. I’ll pause for now.
Well, plenty of room for discussion here, so…
I suspect that your Observations and Questions have led you to a place I don’t find entirely tenable. Hard to know where to start, but kind of at random — I think “fascism” has two problems. First, it’s a loaded term which tends to lend more heat than light to any discussion, and second, it’s being applied so broadly to such a wide variety of Observations as to lose any meaning you might intend. So as a suggestion, let’s not use that term at all. Instead, let’s describe policies and particulars. Otherwise, you could describe as “fascist” any government that does things like employ police, raise taxes, or follow policies that don’t affect everyone equally..
Have you stopped beating your wife? Your question presumes a premise not everyone might agree with. America was considered at best a second rate power at the start of WWII, but had the wherewithal to ramp up a significant military in a fairly short time, so that by the time the war ended, America was a pre-eminent power. I wonder about America “losing” powerhouse status in light of what you say here subsequently about international military bases. If you are saying that American leadership has little or no clue about effective application military power, I agree.
I guess a great deal depends on who was lying to you, what lies they told you, and what sort of experience you had in China. Was it Fox News? However, I remember a lot of the coverage, from multiple sources, of the Olympics in (and around) Beijing. The Western press were highly restricted in where they were allowed to go. There seems to have been a great deal of “Potemkin village” going on – fake skylines, fake air conditions, etc. Certainly Chinese citizens who come to America speak of restricted speech, restricted internet access, pollution so bad you can walk on the Yellow River. We read reports of imprisonment and kangaroo “trials” of political dissidents.
So if your glowing description of a wonderful, free, safe, Christian nation applies to all of China (and by extension, its leadership), something is way wrong. I personally suspect China is a complex place with some of what dissidents describe and some of what you describe. Neither of which is a lie.
Much of that is a hangover from WWII. (Incidentally, one of the aspects of America being a great powerhouse is that it CAN have these bases all over the world and it CAN prohibit anyone else from doing the same). From what I have read, these bases are not uniformly popular or unpopular; local attitudes toward them are ambiguous. For some people, they represent a threat or something to be resented; for others they represent a reliable source of income.
Economics, basically. For many decades, the US was the world’s producer of quality goods – but production of that sort, even assembly line production, depended on a fairly well-educated workforce – at least a workforce able to read and understand written instructions. But over time, two things happened. First, other competing nations boosted the level of their public education so fewer foreign workers were totally illiterate, and second production technology became sophsticated enough so higher levels of literacy weren’t required. The result was structural displacement – workers who lost repetitive unskilled assembly line jobs as their industries moved to China, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Philippines where workers worked for a dollar a day, couldn’t just sort of up and take open jobs at JPL or wherever. The employment landscape left assembly line workers behind and moved to knowledge workers – computer programmers, scientists, technical people of all sorts. Now, that’s been a very general trend, and there are still many jobs for unskilled labor in the US. There are plenty of profitable factories in the “rust belt” today.
Socialism, to some degree, is practiced wherever there is a working government – you know, one that collects taxes and issues (and enforces) regulations and maintains prisons. But to be effective, socialism needs to be a hybrid, a tradeoff. Pure capitalism (or near enough) has been tried, and we had robber barons and company towns and profound corruption in business and all branches of government. But at the opposite extreme, planned economies have failed convincingly – and produce as much if not more corruption.
Socialist systems seem to work well in Scandanavia, but even there, the system rests on history and public expectations in important ways. I agree that in America, “socialism” is a Bad Word, while socialist policies (like Medicare, and public education, and many others) are popular and successful. As the joke has it, the American conservative says “keep your socialist government hands off of my social security!”
Everything in moderation.
This is the “government does stuff” kind of definition of socialism. It is as wrong as when “fascism” is used as a blanket term for “people I hate”.
If the common things every government does, such as collecting taxes, issuing and enforcing laws, were socialism, it would mean that capitalist countries should not have rule of law or any government whatsoever.
Every country has a government. All of them. No exception. Very few of them could be called socialist, and I do not know which. Scandinavian countries are quite emphatically welfare countries, but even so it is dubious to call them socialist. Most of them are formally kingdoms, go figure.
Broad welfare as government policy does not mean the country is socialist. Socialism would be collective ownership of means of production or something like that. This is not in effect even in China. In Soviet Union it meant everything of consequence was state-owned, which may look like collective ownership, but is not from the people’s point of view. The best examples of collective ownership of means of production are in hunter-gatherer cultures, spotwise in the Middle Ages, and occasionally tried in some experimental communities and corporations, also occasionally by some local initiatives during times of war and anarchy.
State-level socialism is exceedingly rare, probably more rare than fascism. In my opinion, the best one can do at this time is to say that socialism (as in Warsaw bloc countries, China, North Korea and Vietnam) is mostly in the past. It’s hardly meaningful to present Scandinavia as socialism, good or otherwise.
You may say that you are not interested continuing the “flame war”, HMguy, but it is EXACTLY what you are doing, repeatedly, in this thread.
I’m not interested either, but if you bring it up in reference to the rules HERE, then I will respond.
And I will repeat AGAIN, as you seem to be missing the point: I will not allow this site to be used to publish fascist propaganda. It is up to YOU to check that any sources you post are not from fascist propaganda sites, not me.
And as you seem incapable of recognising fascist propaganda yourself I’ve given you two examples WHICH YOU BROUGHT UP, and a hint as to how you can tell that that is what they are.
OK I’m going to respond in order to the comments …
First Flint …
I have always loved “Word Art” and “lend more heat than light to a discussion” is a great example of good word art and I’m stealing it! (Unless you’ve copyrighted it) Paints a perfect picture and says it much better than I was able to over at TR. MUCH heat was generated over there in the past couple months, yes indeed. And yes, indeed, all governments do the things you mention so what key items distinguish “fash” from “non-fash”? Now everyone does seem to accept Hitler and the Nazis as the archetypal “fash” regime, but I for one would like to go beyond “fash” = “not-Hitler” or “non-Nazi” which is what I’ve heard a lot of these past couple of months. As you say, I want to “describe policies and particulars.”
And that’s all I have time for at the moment … but I will return to your post and keep working through it point by point.
And earlier I mentioned RT, meaning Russia Today. This outfit wreaked quite some havoc among both the right and left in the West. I believe some brainwashedness of HMGuy is attributable to it.
The adage about “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” was never truer. I’m not a huge Dawkins fan, but his concept of “memes” was probably his greatest. Amazing that the word is no part of the English language!
Although the key thing about Dawkins’ concept is that the properties that make a “meme” hyperspreadable have very little to do with truth or even plausibility, but features that make them easily “spreadable” – soundbites, catchy phrases, shocking pictures (real or fake), simplistic explanations, things that make the reader feel like one of the good guys, or the imposed-on guys etc.
And of course, like any process of natural selection, the ones that spread most widely are the ones most easily spread. And unfortunately, a simplistic falsehood spreads far more easily than a complex truth.
It’s impossible to check everything you read on twitter, but we can check what kind of critter it is – dogwhistles, bullhorns, what the retweet network looks like.
And of course we can check for known propaganda narratives.
I was attempting to describe socialism as a spectrum along a scale of how much a government does and how much is left to a private sector. As you point out, NO socialism means anarchy. I think of socialism as the degree to which any government assumes responsibility for a public benefit, rather than permitting individuals to fend for themselves in those ways. The canonical example is national defense, though governments commonly assume responsibility for enforcing laws (rather than leaving “justice” to individuals), and enforcing the adoption of a common currency, and construction common infrastructure (compare public roads with private toll roads or railroads) and public education and so on. Note that not every nation has done all these things.
But “creeping socialism” extends beyond this, and basically means that tax money is collected unevenly (progressive taxation) and spent unevenly (so that some people benefit more than others). What sorts of things, and to what extent, should government subsidize anything? The more subsidies the more socialism. So social security is socialistic, as are things like medicare, and food stamps, and various aids to higher education (the more socialist politicians want all colleges to be paid for by government just like K-12). The underlying question is, if our goal is the greatest good for the greatest number, how should this be achieved?
There is also the guns/butter issue – lots of tradeoffs. Is socialized medicine where all medical care is paid for by the government BUT for many ailments there’s a very long waiting list, better or worse than those ailments getting immediate attention but only for those who can pay high prices? The US has achieved the dubious result of having the lowest quality of medical care among developed nations according to most metrics, while at the same time being far and away the most expensive. Does this mean medicine in the US needs more socialism, or less?
Let’s face it, the invisible hand cannot work its magic without careful supervision and regulation. Competition is fine when everyone is trying to win by producing superior products or services at lower prices. It’s not so fine when the winners are those who had the power to prevent competition and keep potential competitors out of the market (which is generally cheaper and more profitable). The pure capitalist approach does a very poor job of maintaining healthy competition or protecting the consumer. We take for granted the socialistic policy of requiring ingredients to be put on food products (and testing to ensure that’s what’s actually in the product).
Anyway, socialism is a matter of degree, not a yes-or-no condition. A matter of who pays, who benefits, and how much. You seem to be defining socialism as pretty much straight “classic” communism where governments own everything and there is no provision for advancement due to individual competence, where everything is a government monopoly and no incentive for improvement can get a toe in the door. I agree this is rare as hens’ teeth, and not workable in practice. I’m thinking more along the lines of Bernie Sanders.
And who chooses.
I wouldn’t say that, myself. No matter who chooses, no matter how the choosers are themselves selected, you end up with some allocation of resources. Who chooses will surely affect the allocation, but there WILL be an allocation regardless.
One of the long, long standing problems in all discussions of “socialism” and “communism” is that of navigating theory and practice.
There are also multiple competing historical influences: Marx was aware of his intellectual debt to Richard Owen, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon — as well as how different he was from them. Anarchists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman shared much of Marx’s worldview but parted ways from Marxism in crucial ways.
Nor is the history of Marxism monolithic: Rosa Luxembourg, for example, denounced reformers like Eduard Bernstein but she was also amongst the first to point out that Lenin had betrayed the revolution.
So it matters whether we’re talking about Stalinism, Maoism, social democracy, democratic socialism, or council communism — just as it matters whether one associates the word “socialism” with the name Pol Pot or the name Oscar Wilde.
Not paying attention to these details is precisely what leads us to confuse collective ownership of the means of production with state ownership of the means of production, and confusion of state ownership of some public good (schools, parks, museums, etc.) with state ownership of the means of production (farms, banks, railroads, mines, quarries, etc.).
One can quibble, if one wishes, about the point that states have been an endemic part of human societies for the past 10,000 years or so. Regardless, Marx very clearly believed (perhaps mistakenly) that a post-capitalist world would be a post-state world. The state under communism would become a mere administrator of things, not a ruler of men. (More specifically, Marx thought that capitalism was preventing the development of the level of technology that would be necessary for eliminating scarcity. Nevertheless there is no doubt that communism was the term he used to refer to a post-scarcity civilization.)
Bernie Sanders is, of course, no socialist at all. He’s a welfare state capitalist in the mode of FDR and Lyndon Johnson — he just thinks that there’s work to be done in building upon and improving the New Deal and the Great Society, Despite some influence from Eugene Debs, Sanders calls himself a socialist primarily because American political discourse is so reactionary that his opponents call him one. He isn’t, but his strategy is to embrace the term in order to advocate for welfare state policies, rather than waste time running away from the label. (This is probably true of DSA in general — even from the beginning with Harrington, DSA has been about social justice advocacy and strengthening the power of the people against the power of corporations — which is a very far cry from strategizing about how to bring about a socialist revolution.)
Sure, but those with power to allocate exercise it more legitimately when they have been fairly elected, chosen by a majority of the electorate.
I define it and talk about it more along the lines of KN. On the one side there is the textbook or encyclopedia definition, which in practice has only been implemented spotwise temporarily in small scale. Then there are actual countries that call themselves socialist. They appeared to the world arena late in history and have been mostly found unstable and self-discrediting, which should make us cautious about applying the term to anyone who does not fulfil the definition clearly or does not self-identify as such. Just like with fascism. Best apply it only to actual fascists. Capitalist countries with extensive welfare are still capitalist.
This approach – to not use the words socialism and fascism too liberally – makes also good sense in practical politology. The world is geopolitically divided along fairly clear lines that don’t allow to term the form of government and economic system of Scandinavian countries the same as that of China when they obviously do not have the same form of government and economic system.
OK, this makes sense. I guess to me, there’s an important distinction between ownership of the means of production, and regulation of the means of production. I find a philosophical difference exists when production is privately owned (even if it’s collective due to wide distribution of stock ownership), and when the total constellation of government regulation of that production seriously constrains how the production is organized and managed. If you own something in the sense that you can sell it, but if it’s entirely up to me what you DO with it while you own it, then whose is it really?
I do need to study what the real-world differences are between Scandanavia and China. KN has called Scandanavia “welfare state capitalism”, but clearly China and Russia have developed a thriving class of billionaires, but so does Scandanavia. I suppose the distinction is in the nature of their respective means of ownership? Wikipedia tells us:
Uh, right. That description covers a LOT of ground – a “wide range of social and economic systems” indeed. Maybe what’s missing in all that is any notion of economic competition?
Do you mean, as opposed to those who have gerrymandered themselves into such safe seats that legitimacy no longer matters? I think a benevolent king could allocate more fairly.
Tomorrow morning I will continue working through Flint’s post, but for now the only thing I have time for is this from two prominent people (who I sincerely hope are not deemed “fash” by the powers that be here at TSZ) …
Also … wow … there are some deep thinkers here … love it!
Alan if you think this tweet by Elon Musk about Tucker hosting his new show on Twitter belongs somewhere else, then feel free to move it, I just want people here to be aware of it. Seems to me that free-speech ties in pretty well with this topic so that’s why I put it here.
Might be interesting to follow. But I have to laugh at the idea of Tucker and “not being misleading.” The very act of selecting something to talk about can be misleading, because of what was NOT selected. What’s more misleading, not reporting the mass shootings happening daily, or ONLY reporting those done by minorities?
Flint,
Also, his hypothetical example (of failing to report the six previous arrests for armed robbery) is a famously, hilariously, bad example. In Tucker world, a history of past arrests is always probative. He’s a terribly sheltered naive little child.
Tucker Carlson is of no great interest to me as he exerts little influence beyond the borders of the US (though some in the Russian media seem to appreciate his take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
I will note he has two attributes that he uses well: the ability to lie (one view expressed publicly while cynically admitting reality in private) and being utterly amoral.
I actually watched Carlson on Twitter. Had to have the sound off but there were subtitles. It amazes me that you or anyone sees any worth in this individual.
PS
When HMGuy talks about “free speech” in connection to Musk, Carlson, and Trump, is he promoting the freedom to make stuff up and lie in public, at length, without evidence, and without being challenged?
Flint,
Find me a benevolent king! Like genuine democracy, it hasn’t yet been tried.
I know it’s a bit trite to claim communism has never been properly implemented, though Cuba got close in some ways (literacy), but the idea of soviets from the basic local level forming a pyramid up to the supreme soviet doesn’t seem a terrible idea in principal.
We reasonable people are at risk from the sociopaths that are able to exploit the weaknesses of any social construct and end up in control or creating chaos.
The key element of the definition you quoted is “characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership”. This of course is abstract enough to yield “a wide range” of ideas how to pull it off practically and to what extent. But, as a practical policy example, social services like healthcare or help for the poor can be organised – by the state – either directly by the state or through private contractors.
E.g. healthcare can be organised as a “health insurance” system through private insurance companies yielding an expensive thicket of bureaucracy that has its costs. This is the way it is in USA, and the result is, if you have noticed, the world’s most expensive healthcare system, even though the capitalist theory is that organising this through private enterprises is a surefire way to make it affordable. So, even though USA has this social service, there is nothing socialist about it, but rather it is organised as per capitalist principles and even though it has been found unsustainable in practice, it is kept the way it is precisely to honour capitalist principles. USA hates socialism.
Another way to organise healthcare is through a state-managed pool of healthcare insurance fund. This is how about half or most European countries do it (though they keep introducing privatised aspects to it). A better example of a state-managed and centrally planned healthcare system along actual socialist principles would be where they drop the idea of “insurance”, focus on actual healthcare and reduce the bureacracy to a minimum, such as that the individual who needs healthcare goes to the doctor’s appointment, gets treated or referred to a specialist treatment and undergoes the treatment without any cost to the individual. The only bureacracy involved for the individual is agreeing and showing up for the treatment. The bureacracy involved for the doctor is getting his regular salary paid and arranging to get equipment and medication compensated by the state. This is how it worked in Soviet Union and continued to work for a while in post-Soviet countries. Incidentally, this is also how it works in probably every military in the world, because this is indeed most cost-effective and swift way to manage it. This was first implemented in the armies of the world as soon as armies grew big enough and needed efficient services on big scale, such as under Napoleon, Bismarck, and on from there.
Does not mean that Bismarck was ideologically socialist though. During Bismarck’s time, various socialists, Marxists and the like were in full swing and Bismarck deflated their political influence by stealing some of their policy ideas. For Bismarck it was a practical matter – a politically and economically advantageous idea worth implementing because it was good, nevermind its ideological origin.
From this practical mixture of socialism and conservatism there emerged (in continental Europe) the ideology of social democracy. Social democrats may call themselves socialists adhering to Marx’s doctrine, but they refrain from overthrowing capitalism. The truest socialists would want to revolutionise society and overthrow capitalism, but social democrats ever since Bismarck’s times have participated in the mainstream parliamentary process and satisfied themselves by achieving some social reforms along more or less socialist lines, while the overall social order remains capitalist, along with social strata by wealth and fundamental respect for private property, including private ownership of major strategically important production units. Social democrats worry about more welfare benefits for workers, but not getting rid of the capitalist class the way actual socialists would by definition: social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
So yes, it is a matter of degree, but there’s also a definitional core, according to which social democrats are more to the capitalist side of the equation.