I’m not on Twitter, so I get my news elsewhere, but most of the actual pictures I see are from here. So is there some kind of bias where only the fascist imagery gets posted here in the the dunk tank? Or do the libs scrolling through Ukrainian posts on Twitter literally see and ignore fascist imagery on every single post? Like, if they see 1000 Ukrainian soldiers, will they see 1000 fascist symbols?
A lot don’t because they’re just ordinary people in a shit war, and I don’t blame them for fighting any more that some french or german dumbass volunteering in ww1. Even if you know the theory and are socialist, Revolutionary Defeatism is a hard road to follow in a real war, especially at first.
But pretty much every elite or regular army unit does. And as militia get hardened by these cadre more and more take on their fash ideology, much as German proto fascists infiltrated the units that would become the freicorps.
It’s fucked and Ukraine is gonna be a hotbed of not just Fascism but full Nazism if it survives, win or lose. Of course this war continues to strengthen the Fash opposition to Putin (who sucks, but isn’t a fascist) in Russia as well. Only silver lining is that the communist rank and file is increasingly agitated as well.
I struggle to see a clean argument that Putin isn’t fascist. Russia’s economic system looks fascist; the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
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Isn’t Russia’s economic system basically normal as hell neoliberalism? I won’t argue about it being fascist, but since the west is also neoliberalized, there may be some questions you need to grapple with.
Tbf, what we think of as neoliberalism (in this case, referring to post-Reagan/Thatcher US/UK) is closer in practice to fascism than anarchocapitalism. Anarchocapitalism at least doesn’t have the government picking winners, working with tech companies to spy on its citizens, and corporate welfare. Not to say that anarchocapitalism is viable, but Neoliberalism (which is supposed to be like diet anarchocapitalism), is definitely not what we have in the US and Russia. There’s far, far, far too much intermingling of power between government and big corporations for that. So, yeah, in pure economic terms, both Russia and the US are fascist economies, and that should be a pretty uncontroversial statement.
When did capitalist states practice anarcho-capitalism?
That’s only because anarcho-capitalism is only possible in fantasy
Or even bring up “anarcho”-capitalism at all lol
I’m not saying they did, but the neoliberals fashion themselves as sort of diet anarchocapitalists. At least, that’s how they present their policies. In practice, I wouldn’t be amazed if Ronald “less government” Reagan put more people in jail than Stalin.
I think you’re pretty much right and the only reason the upvote ratio doesn’t reflect that is that you seem not to understand that capitalism necessitates “the government picking winners, working with tech companies to spy on its citizens, and corporate welfare.” You will never have capitalism without those things, and that’s why people are pointing out that anarchocapitalism is a nonsense fantasy, because it is. So using that as a point to counter something (and I’m not sure what) in the comment you responded to above makes no sense.
Neoliberalism does like to paint itself as a more “pure” capitalism, so I don’t think calling it “diet anarchocapitalism” is wrong, but that’s just their branding. There never was or ever will be a non-diet version of capitalism in that sense, where the bourgeoisie and government don’t collaborate and reinforce each other. If anything, fascism is the non-diet version. That is to say, you’re also correct that neoliberalism does incorporate some fascist elements. Maoo’s response to ChrisLicht in this very thread explains that better than I could hope to, so refer to that.
There is a ton of centralized control of the economy (gazprom, 99% of the media, etc) though which is more fasc than neolib
I’m sorry, centralized economic control of industry is fascist? What?
Liberals saying everything that’s not liberalism is fascism again.
Illiberalism ≠ fascist.
This is why you see liberals that are as afraid of antifa as they are of Nazis.
Everything unlike them is the same to them the same way they can’t tell the faces of non-white people apart lol.
I don’t even know why I respond to federated liberals to be honest, they never get the picture and I usually just give up
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TIL social democracy is fascist
It is indeed the left wing of fascism
lol they literally invented privatization but we can just ignore that because all the things i don’t like are the same
It’s not a command economy like you’re interpreting here. It’s a grift economy. Basically, it’s a freak hybrid of public/private company structure that functionally allows Putin to reward his favorite cronies with high-rolling executive positions while also providing shitty, expensive service to the Russian people. It’s really not all that far removed from a lot of what we’ve got going on in the US.
What is the differentiation between grift and profit maximization for the individual participants of the free market economy?
no you don’t get it I externalized that aspect of capitalism by calling it a derogatory name
Yeah they are just doing another version of the US has billionaires and Russia has oligarchs thing. Its basically the same system
Or, put another way,
neoliberalism
Libs always lying to themselves that what there seeing isn’t the inevitable endpoint for liberal capitalism
What are they going to do, command the economy not to do that?
The inevitable next step now that capitalism has outlived it’s usefulness and can no longer produce utility without being commanded?
Marxism-Leninism also has an inevitable endpoint once production is sufficiently developed that the state is no longer necessary as the conditions of reaction (such that create the grounds for rival classes to arise) have been abolished.
Leftists differ from their political rivals by recognizing the inevitability of history. Even social democrats think they can keep going indefinitely.
Radical liberals are conservatives the same way that monarchists hung on to the immortality of political systems that have nothing left to contribute.
To be fair, they did close with “It’s really not all that far removed from a lot of what we’ve got going on in the US.” I think this person is pretty much on the right track, they just haven’t been exposed yet to enough actual theory to rid them of the more pernicious liberal brainworms.
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Nope, fascism involves privatization. Nationalization is a communist/socialist/social democratic move.
The word privatization was invented to describe the actions of the Nazi government. The biggest lie you have ever been sold by Liberals is that Fascism is “when big scary state” exists. Fascism is the domination of the petty capitalists, the complete freedom of them to act with impunity. “Free Market” and “Small Government” are synonymous with fascism, not antithetical to it.
The intermixing of the capitalists and the state happened in Nazi Germany not because private capital was being nationalized, but because national capital was being privatized and sold off. Private industrial barons became warlords. Notice how all the big German war production companies were private companies making massive profits (Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porshe, etc.) while all the USSR war production companies were 100% soviet controlled?
lmao
Russia’s economic system looks like typical industrial-ish capitalism.
Targeting internal minorities has been America’s playbook since the response to Bacon’s Rebellion and is a key tenet of every European country’s history. You’ll still find huge numbers of Europeans justifying the modern and historical persecution of Roma.
Targeting gay people has been the policy of The West for centuries. The colonizers wrote all about their disgust at “savage” people that embedded spectra of sexualities into their societies. The US only adopted a rainbow capitalist “acceptance” in the last decade.
Fascism is rooted in a particular approach to anti-left reaction. A series of methods by which to co-opt and oppose groundswells of anti-capitalist sentiment. The primary goal is to disseminate a false consciousness that redirects frustrations away from capitalism itself and instead to reactionary scapegoats, and a key part of doing so is the destruction of communists and others on the left.
Like all Western-installed capitalist regimes, whether it’s France or Russia or Japan, there are fascistic elements to the existing systems of control. Fascism was never fully defeated. The West incorporated it into their own societies. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascisms were the prototypes. The red scare, genocidal anticommunist campaigns, the cold war, the anti-civil rights campaigns, mass incarceration, the police state are all the modern incorporations, and every single one of them justified through nationalist, nativist, white supremacist rationales.
So yes you’ll find some fascistic elements in the Russian state.
But you won’t find that it’s run by the ham-fisted Hitlerite fascism that’s taken over large swaths of Ukrainian power structures. As a head capitalist of an existing order that has no fear of an organized left, Putin has no need to stoke outright ham-fisted fascism in his own country, as the whole point of it is to deputize a violent anti-left paramilitary. He doesn’t want one of those, he already has the army and is doing the opposite by consolidating Wagner. In addition, fascist false consciousness tends to target some of the bourgeoisie. Putin is the symbol of the system that fascists claim to oppose.
This does not make Putin a good guy. He’s as fascist as any US president. But he’s not like Sonnenrad-tatted white supremacists looking to create a neo-Bandyerite society on top of the mass graves of Russian-speakers.
Fascism isn’t when homophobia
For comparison, Ukraine also has many anti-homosexual and anti-trans laws, while also having a history of attacking ethnic minorities and having doctrinally Nazi military brigades, along with a persistent campaign of whitewashing and lionizing Holocaust collaborators like Bandera, and has a ton of ethnonationalist policy (with its President openly declaring wanting to emulate Israel, an exterminationist ethnostate).
That second group (the non-LGBT stuff) are things that Russia notably does not have. It is literally “just” a modern liberal state with homophobic policy, revanchist rhetoric, and, depending on how you define it, expansionism (here I am thinking of Georgia rather than Ukraine). It is by no means a good country or a moral country, but it is not fascist in the sense that liberal darlings like Navalny are fascist
Russia having the same anti-LGBT policies as 1970s West Virginia is fascist (they are oriental and primitive)
(Please do not mention 1960s liberal America not allowing black people to vote)
The same anti-LGBT policies as …checks notes… 2023 Florida. (Is Florida worse than RF right now? IDK)
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That’s a good question, it genuinely might be, though most of us agree Meatball is an aspiring fascist . . .
A few months ago Russian government banned transition for trans people, i.e. it’s impossible to change gender in passport, can’t get HRT officially (exceptions are people who was getting HRT before the law was passed) and etc. And there was literally NO ONE who voted against the law in the government. It’s awful.
It’s interesting that Putin’s fascist mistakes are normal to you, but Navalny’s are not.
Navalny’s explicitly a great Russian chauvinist though, right? He is anti-immigration and suspicious of the national minorities within the Russian Federation. I don’t know if Navalny has said he’s pro LGBTQ but his racism makes me suspect he’s categorically different than Putin. Putin may hold these less bigoted views for pragmatic or even cynical reasons, but that is a qualitative difference between the two.
And what conclusions does that interest draw you towards?
Do you think that contextualizing something to show how Navalny is exceptional equates to an endorsement of what Navalny is being compared to?
The only reason this comparison is being made is because of how often Navalny is promoted as an alternative to and preferable opposition candidate to Putin in liberal spaces.
Navalny? The cockroach guy?
I didn’t get a notification. Uh, he would probably let pogroms against Muslims, Jews, etc. run wild if you look at the groups behind him. Putin mostly fights gay rights organizations, which is bad but not on remotely the same level. Putin doesn’t say we should deny poor people welfare for being gay, Navalny marches in front of “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” banners.
Putin is a liberal, he is your guy not ours,
He was appointed by your Yeltsin clique that previous liberals openly appointed to liquidate socialism.
Instead of accepting him as one of your own you did a little orientalism and pushed Putin towards China.
Maybe you should support an alternative that is left-wing.
Nalvany is even more right-wing than Putin, calls immigrants cockroaches to be exterminated.
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fuck off, typical ableist liberal.
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Revolutionary defeatism = whatever weakens your own government makes your role as a revolutionary socialist easier
You are a socialist, your primary concern is the weakening of your own government so that a proletarian state can take its place
You can’t affect what’s happening in Russia, the only thing you can affect is sending less Ukrainians into certain death by forcing your government to the negotiating table and force your proxy to actually sign a ceasefire.
Let’s be clear here, we’re only talking about Putin in this thread because you wanted to know if he was fascist. No one here has been defending Putin, they’ve been explaining why your understanding of terms like fascism are not well formed and that it is far more accurate to label Putin as a liberal. Not in spite of all of the horrible things Putin stands for, but precisely because those horrible things are consistent with liberalism.
But the original post was about Ukraine. Putin is only relevant if you believe the conflict in Ukraine is between Putin and Ukraine. It is not.
The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war that has been ongoing for years before any Russian involvement. The sides in that conflict are the increasingly nationalistic government that came into power following a coup, and the people of the Donbas region who have been facing increasing levels of ethnic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and legal barriers to social and economic participation in society under that new increasingly nationalistic government. This elevated into the Donbas war, with the national government and private militias shelling civilian centers throughout the Donbas, resulting in a refugee crisis of people fleeing into Russia to seek asylum. This fighting had been ongoing for years, with Russia stepping in to negotiate a ceasefire in the form of the Minsk agreements long before any military intervention was considered. Ukraine ended up being the one to break the terms of the Minsk agreement and started hostilities back up, at which point the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic saw full separation from Ukraine as the only viable end to the war. They began petitioning for outside military assistance, and that was when Russian military intervention started in the Donbas war.
The Ukrainian national government is 100% the aggressor in this conflict, with their claim to acting in a defensive capacity based on nothing more than political borders and “blood and soil” rhetoric. That doesn’t mean that Putin is “the good guy,” he almost certainly has self serving goals that he is able to pursue that motivated his decision to provide the military support that the LPR and DPR asked for. But a critique of Putin doesn’t change the fact that the LPR and DPR are justified in fighting for their autonomy, and that justification doesn’t go away just because military assistance from Russia was the best option available to them out of a set of bad options. They shouldn’t have to roll over and submit to being second class citizens in a country that has been stripping their rights away and murdering them just because you don’t like the guy that responded to their request for assistance.
And as for Putin having self serving goals with regards to his involvement in this conflict, the same could be said of US/NATO involvement in this conflict. The government that came into power following the Euromaiden coup was propped up in part through US support, and US/NATO weapons were slowly being stockpiled in Kiev with missile silos being placed within striking distance of Moscow close enough that they could strike critical infrastructure and high value targets without having enough time to deploy defensive countermeasures once their early warning equipment has detected a missile has been launched. When taken in the context of the US and NATO’s consistent aggressive posturing towards Russia, Russia seems as if it has a legitimate national security motivating it’s involvement in Ukraine. Unless you think that “na na na na na I’m not touching you” is a legitimate geopolitical argument for why installing first strike capabilities on the doorstep of someone you have declared to be your adversary is actually completely neutral/defensive act and not a naked act of aggression.
Liberal nationalism does a fine job doing all that on its own, can’t just apologize for all the things that all variants of liberalism do by saying “all the bad stuff was actually fascist, not liberal”
Manifest Destiny and the extermination of native Americans was a liberal project, at minimum as bad as lebensraum? Yes.
Fascism is the immunological response of capital that manifests at the dawn of a socialist revolution, the death throes of capitalism where capitalists employ an unending wave of terror to destroy and murder socialist networks, and so thoroughly traumatize the population that it can never have the social cohesion again necessary for socialist organizing or construction.
This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps as ordered by the liberal wing of Weimar, and the rise of the Nazi party in its place.
Kissinger outlined and formalized this policy, widely recognized by social democratic and social democratic leaning liberals as “shock therapy”. Repeated and iterated upon as standard U.S policy from Korea, to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, etc.
Putin came out of the Russian national bourgeoisie’s resistance to shock therapy. Naturally, right-wing, anti-communist, and extremely reactionary, but from a project based around protectionism of Russian bourgeoise interests rather than breaking open the Russian market for Western capital (which would loot the oligarchs).
To add to your argument, this wasn’t even the first time. Marx himself described a form of pre-fascism in 18th Brumaire, decades earlier, with french cops freely executing anyone they thought could be associated to the workers movement, following a failed revolution
You can’t argue that he isn’t a fascist, you have to argue he is something, whether you think that thing is fascist or not.
Fascism is a European ideology as much as liberalism and socialism, and therefore has intellectual roots you can trace back. In finding out whether or not Putin’s a fascist, an analysis of his speeches and any written work would be needed to pin down his ideology. It’s not something that can be concluded from ticking all the boxes in a checklist
Just wait 'till you see the liberal “is it fascist” checklist - it’s short:
[ ] Is it a designated enemy of the hegemony?
Putin is a conservative Liberal, akin to Merkel, Assad or Singapore’s leadership. The difference between him and Merkel though is that he has been forced onto the anti-imperialist side of the world and shoved out of the core and pushed into the periphery, which has forced him to ally himself with AES nations and anti-imperialists.
It seems obvious when you’ve typed it out there, but it had never clicked in my brain that that was the mechanism happening here.
Nixon: I am a massive racist but am willing to work with the Chinese to undermine the Soviets
2023 liberals: I want to cleanse the world of the entire race of the Slavic Orient with nuclear fire
i mean , isnt it obvious…
Sorry babushka, this is the people’s washing machine now
It’s fairly easy by comparing the central factions of United Russia, which doesn’t even reach Salazar levels of Fascist organisation, to the actual “Black Hundreds were good actually” fascists to Putins right.
Putin started as a compromise candidate holding the collapsed remnants of the state together with duct tape, and his system while certainly nationalist is more like Peron or something similar. He just isn’t powerful enough even with the GRU on side to force class collaboration.
It doesn’t rise to corporatism since he can’t adequately control the oligarchs and force the workers into a cohesive whole. I’m not sure he even wants to.
This is not an endorsement of Putin who I dearly hope gets the wall when the Communist Party or one of it’s less cringe splinters undergoes backbone replacement surgery