• Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      because to fascists, neoliberals are “the left.” To fascists, the neoliberals are a cabal of “globalists” eroding national interests, the family unit, the traditional culture, religion, etc. Because whatever Capitalism as a system does, fascists attribute to “the left.”

      Marx said:

      The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ―“natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ―cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

      The fascists see “the left” as responsible for this because capitalist neoliberals are “the left” from their twisted perspective. Fascists often posture as anti-capitalist on this basis.

      Mussolini said in his last testament:

      When it is written that we are the white guard for the bourgeoisie, it is the vilest of lies. I defended, and I state this with full conviction, workers’ progress. Amongst the principal causes for the fall of Fascism I blame the deaf and merciless fight of certain financial and industrial groups who, in their mad egoism, feared and hated Fascism as the worst enemy of their inhuman interests.

      So fascists often see themselves as the “true champions of the working class”. Obviously they aren’t, but that doesn’t stop them from seeing themselves that way. You see it with Trump ranting about the “forgotten man and woman” of the “flyover states.”

      In 1847, long before fascism ever existed as a named doctrine, Engels described “reactionary socialists” in his work “Principles of Communism”:

      [Reactionary socialists are] adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end. This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons:

      (i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible.

      (ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

      (iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.