Europe needs to elect socialist leaders 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?
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.
Europe had socialist leaders. It set half of it at least 50 years back in terms of social and economic progress, put up barbed wires around the borders, banned and imprissoned the oposition. Never more!
Socialism is not communism.
It is when at the same time capitalism is demonized with comments like this:
Capitalism cannot be reformed
Much of Europe is social democratic, and that actually works very well by regulating capitalism to prevent exploitation.
Much of Europe is social democratic, and that actually works very well by regulating capitalism to prevent exploitation.
As a European, lmao, no. It’s better than fascist America, no doubt, but there is still plenty of exploitation under social democracy. Things have only gotten worse as social democracy has eroded and given way to neoliberalism.
European society is also sliding towards fascism, with the exact same causes as in America. The far right is on the rise everywhere because of cost of living outpacing wages, public services increasingly under more and more pressure with less and less funding, and massive, rampant inequality caused by the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
When half of Europe had socialist leaders, that half of Europe was total shit authoritarian countries that oppressed the population, and prevented progress.
Deafboy said the exact same thing 13 hours before you did. You even replied. You can read my reply there.
Your link doesn’t work.
Which one? They all work for me
The one where you write I can read it here.
Ah, I see, you’re struggling to debate my ideas on the merits, so you’re resorting to wasting my time. I’m not interested in childish games, I am trying to save lives here. I can lead you to water, whether you drink or not is entirely your prerogative. All the best!
That’s because they were authoritarian, not socialist. Just like the Nazis called themselves socialist, despite being obviously authoritarian. Same way that American fascists love to co-opt and redefine words like “liberty, freedom, grooming,” etc.
Socialist of what kind? Socialist communism is as close to fascism as you can get without being explicitly fascist.
I am an anarchist. 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.
I’m plenty familiar with anarchy but it’s not a valid strategy for large systems. Some systems are better for small scales some for big ones, it’s not a single shoe fit all.
