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Remember, the social Democrats sided with the Nazis over the socialists. They’ve done it every time they’ve been given the opportunity, and will continue to do so as many times as people fall for their shtick.
“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
-Audre Lorde
Yeah, that's not true is it? The SPD fought against the Nazis all the way up until the end and were the largest force against them in the Reichstag. It was the communist that refused to ally with them against the Nazis as the Stalin enforced policy was to not collaborate with "social fascists" (i.e. any party not taking orders from Moscow) and directed far more opposition to them than to the Nazis until it was too late.
The SPD voted for WWI, betraying the communists. The government, with the support of the SPD, then dismissed the chief of police and had the GKSD murder dissidents and communists, including Rosa Luxemburg, among other Spartacist members, in cold blood.
The murder had been ordered by Waldemar Pabst, first general staff officer of the GKSD, who claimed responsibility for the killings in a series of notorious 1960s interviews, stating that “times of civil war have their own laws” and that the Germans should thank both him and Gustav Noske, the SPD defence minister, “on their knees for it, build monuments to us and name streets and public squares after us!”
The SPD betrayed the people, sided with the bourgeoisie, and then led Germany straight into the material conditions that produced the Nazis while still playing at reformism in the face of literal fascism.
Sort of like how Social-Democrats like Bernie and AOC are playing at reform in the face of literal fascism today. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
All I'm getting out of this is that the German communists didn't oppose the Nazis because of grudges and spite, instead of swallowing their pride to prevent actual fascists from seizing power. Typical accelerationist ends-justify-the-means bullshit. No wonder the United States had to bankroll the Soviet war effort, communists can't accomplish a damn thing without purity testing everyone who could help, doing their best to cut off the nose because it will at least spite the face.
Have you not heard, first they came for the communists? They were literally the first people taken out, specifically because they violently opposed both the traitorous social democrats who sent thousands of working class men to die in a rich man’s war, and the later developed Nazi party. It was social democrats, which are by definition capitalist and not communists, who murdered their Allies and sided with the nationalists.
Are you trying to refute my point by agreeing with me? Bold move.
I think the difference is, you’re saying the communists were infighting. The communists were United, they had their internal conflicts, (direct action vs parliamentarianism) but they were together. It was the CAPITALIST Social Democratic Party that murdered them. CAPITALISTS murdered them. Not other communists. Bernie Sanders isn’t a communist. AOC isn’t a communist. Neither was the SPD.
In other words, yes, you are. I almost wish you could see how funny this is from the outside. You just don't get it at all, do you?
Gustav Noske, the "Bloodhound of the SPD", used Freikorps (proto-fascist and/or monarchist) militias to kidnap and murder communists, who at the time were more influential than the SPD in many parts of the country.
And this should inform modern political theory because?
They were taken out first because they were easier
I think it’s because they were more dangerous. There’s a reason the Nazis kept the socialism in their party name. Communism and socialism were immensely popular in Germany. Without that corruption, or with a more informed working class, it’s unlikely the Nazis would have been govern the opportunity they needed to consolidate power under their rule.
I’ve heard your theory, too, for sure. I’ve just never seen a book to back it up. Do you have one? I’m always looking for more books about German pre-WWII history, it’s one of my favorite topics.
Communists were easier because they were further out to the left. Easier to destroy the extreme first
Stop spreading false narratives, the social democrats did NOT side with the Nazis, they were one of the final frontiers against them, and many of them died for their efforts of trying to keep the german republic alive.
The SPD used the Proto-fascists to murder their enemies. This is undebatable. It happened.
Yeah remember, democracy can only exist in a single party state
That's leninism not communism.
No. Social Democrats protected democracy again both nazis and communists. Communists don't want democracy. They want dictatorship of workers over everybody else. Nazis want the dictatorship of their people iver everybody else. Social democrats want a democracy of free and equal people.
As much as Lorde didn't like capitalism, she was talking about the idea of using division and difference in minority movements, enforcing a rigged view of a shared black experience or a shared woman experience. White feminists were the majority of feminists, and often left little room for minoritized women to share the way their racial identity and gender identity intersected. Lorde didn't want Black feminists to be relegated to their own groups and separated from the white feminists. She wanted them to have a voice in the feminist movement. To work with her white peers on liberation from patriarchy. She just wanted them to acknowledge that the experience shared by the majority of white feminists didn't speak for all of them. She wanted them to no longer look at differences in their midst as vice, but as a virtue. Setting one experience as the norm is the master's tool, and it would never dismantle the master's house.
If there's one thing we don't need when fighting fascism, it's leftists purity testing people who use the levers of power at their disposal. I don't give a fuck if a person thinks capitalism just needs limits and liberal democracy is a great system. If you stand with me in opposing fascists, I'm not going to say that you can never be my ally.
I don't like people like you who think current day China is great. Lorde certainly wouldn't like a queerphobic authoritarian state that paves over cultural divisions and crushes dissent. However, if you actually stand with me in defeating fascists, and won't use this fight as an excuse to mandate your ML agenda, I will work with you. I will stand with you against our common enemy. I will not ignore our disagreements, but fascism is an existential threat. Everyone from Joe Biden to Noam Chomsky must work together to defeat these fuckers.
If you refuse to work with capitalists because you think you can also grab a chunk of a country the fascists are taking, don't be surprised when they invade you and kill of most of a generation. Fascists must die.
No I feel you entirely. I think what you’re missing is that a country is a product of its material conditions. The Chinese government isn’t forcing anti gay laws onto the Chinese people. It’s reacting to the citizens, who are homophobic and transphobic. China also doesn’t pave over dissent, they have one of the most robust protest movements in the world. There are literally nearly constantly protests taking place in China. Hell, it literally only took TWO weeks of protest to entirely end Zero-Covid(which has lead to thousands of excess deaths, but if the people prefer that over zero-covid, that is their right). What I would give to have protest movements succeed in two weeks haha. We had the largest protests in the history of the world after George Floyd, and an absolute majority of the population supported defunding the police, and yet both the federal and local governments put record amounts of funding into police. We are not the constituency of the Us government. We are merely the cattle used to feed their real constituency, corporations and oligarchs.
I appreciate your info on Audre Lorde, that all jives with what I know about her also. I just thought it was a great quote, and I like to share quotes when I post here :)
Also, I agree, fascists must die. Trying to play respectability politics while they’re rigging the game won’t kill them though, and it seems that’s all the non-fascist elements of our government are capable of doing.
You can live in a made up reality that uses lies and half truths to justify regimes. It's really annoying and disgusting, but it's not the biggest problem right now. What is even less tolerable is you using those strategies to divide the resistance to fascism for the purpose of growing your tankie movement. Not all people on the liberal spectrum will side with fascism. Many side with leftists over fascists throughout history. If anything, Stalin trying to take part of Poland, only siding against the Nazis after getting stabbed in the back, shows just how hollow your arguments in favor of MLs and against social democrats are.
I can provide documents from both western and eastern sources that verify what I said about China. Harvard University itself found well over 90% approval by the people of the Chinese government. If we want to talk about appeasement, we can talk about how the USSR tried to form a three way defense pact over Poland with Britain and France, but instead the western nations refused. It was only after that that they signed a non-aggression pact, and that pact only lasted long enough for them to build up their industry to prepare for the inevitable invasion by the Nazis. You can read the letters between Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Hitler, they’re available online. You can see how western leaders preferred appeasement to defense. You can see how many western leaders not only didn’t dislike the Nazis or Mussolinis fascists, but admired them for their privatization and suppression of working class movements. If Hitler would have kept his genocide to Germany, the west would never have cared. They really didn’t even care about it during either, as evidenced by the wests refusal to take Jewish refugees, a large majority of which were taken in by the Soviet Union.
So, what definition of Capitalism are you working with here?
If you're basing this on the theoretical concepts of capitalism and communism, remember to also base it on the theoretical concept of democracy. It's kind of stupid otherwise
Great idea to not align yourself with the social democrats - the closest thing we've ever gotten to a functional communistic society.
Yeah, if I believe in the march of progress it seems like I would be aiming at social democracy. I feel like in europe, this is just vibes btw, they have more social governments but the people in power are sort of pissed about all of these checks and balances and protections. Like they just want to rule the way the US does and be evil and vitriolic, or maybe even worse than in the US, but they can't. So theoretically you could have people in power who aren't really social democrats? But OP probably knows the history better than I do.
If you heavily regulated companies, nationalize every major public service, place an upper cap to overall wealth for any one individual, eliminate inherited wealth and redirect all available resources to public education, health care, housing and UBI .... then democracy could exist in a capitalist system.
But chances are we'll more likely start WWIII with nuclear weapons than do any of that.
If you picture the political compass, where the y axis is how how democratic the society is(where the top is tyranny and the bottom is anarchy) and the x axis is how socialized it is (where the left is communism and the right is capitalism), OP claimed that ancap (the bottom right quadrant) doesn't exist, and that those who claim to be ancap tend to be authoritarian right instead. You argued that democracy could exist in a socialist (leftist) society. You are not disagreeing with OP, because what you described is not a capitalist (right leaning) society.
But that's not capitalism, that's market socialism
socialism, by definition, means that "companies" are publicly owned. so while this would be a good start for a socal democratic society, its nowhere near democratic socialism or even communism
Under TRUE capitalism the market is free but regulated as needed.
We don't live in real capitalism, there is no regulation, the oligarchy has captured the agencies that were supposed to regulate the market.
I don't even know what to call what we have, plutocracy?
True capitalism is what we live in. Competition has winners, those winners gain outsized advantages. They use those advantages to purchase regulatory frameworks which benefit them. This is inevitable, and has happened in every single capitalist society in the history of the ideology. Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. (Actually, fascism is, but monopoly happens along the way also)
I found this interesting tidbit in Wikipedia trying to find where I read my source.
Capitalism 1.0 during the 19th century entailed largely unregulated markets with a minimal role for the state (aside from national defense, and protecting property rights)
Capitalism 2.0 during the post-World War II years entailed Keynesianism, a substantial role for the state in regulating markets, and strong welfare states
Capitalism 2.1 entailed a combination of unregulated markets, globalization, and various national obligations by states
You're right ... It sounds like we need another paradigm shift. Fuck web 3 ... we need Capitalism 3 ...
Or how about we just stop using capitalism?
If version 1.0 didn't work, version 2.0 didn't work and version 2.1 didn't work, then maybe the problem is capitalism itself.
Given Web 3 was a shithole of a collective delusion, maybe don't.
or we finally move past capitalism. It had 200 years, and it just keeps generating worse and worse crises, let's just finally accept it's not working.
Under TRUE capitalism the market is free but regulated as needed.
The market can't be free if it's regulated. Any intromission of the State in any voluntary exchange is stepping in the natural rights of its citizens.
We don’t live in real capitalism, there is no regulation, the oligarchy has captured the agencies that were supposed to regulate the market.
The agencies are the oligarchy. The politicians and lobbyists benefit each other by the existence of regulations, taxation, subsidies, FIAT money, intellectual property, public licenses, monopolical privileges, etc.
Yes, we don't live in "real capitalism" (that is, in a free-market setting), we live in a corporatocracy.
capitalism is a broad term. if the means of production and distribution are privately held, then its capitalism
It would appear that democracy benefits the rulers, as democracy alone has provided the most consistent means for those formerly in power to sleep and die in peace. And the same holds for the courtiers, nomenklatura, and apparatchiks. These sycophants need no longer dread midnight's knife and muffled cries, and the subsequent crowning of a new king. The elite and bureaucracy can retire to their farms and while away their passing years without fear — their riches and posterity intact. As I see it now, democracy is not to the advantage of the demos, it is to the advantage of the power elite. Something to think about.
Is this your thoughts or a part of a larger quote? I appreciate it, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
Part of a larger quote, but I agree with it.
I don't like representative democracy.
I like representative democracy in theory, our current implementation in the US‡ has a few major issues in that each representative doesn't represent the same amount of people. And we should have a lot more representatives for the people.
Not everyone can dedicate the necessary time to be fully engaged and informed about all the intricacies that come from running a government, so some form of representation is needed. But ~500 people representing around 300 million people is not nearly enough for the national stage IMO.
‡ I'm talking about the US here because that's where I live, but I'm sure other countries have similar issues though.
Agreed on your second sentence haha
more like there can never be true capitalism under democracy
Data says no what? That capitalism and democracy are incompatible? Or are you seriously applying the inherently flawed view that the US is a functional democracy? A country where it has been definitively been proven that the citizens support or lack of support for any policy has literally no effect on whether or not it will pass…. A country where literally 99% of our daily lives exists in dictatorships and oligarchies called corporations, who privately determine the use of all public goods and materials, and who have prioritized personal wealth generation over sustainability and the welfare of the population…
Where 70% of the population has no savings, 30% can’t read beyond a middle school level, almost a million people live on the streets… all while literally more food than is needed to feed all of Americas children every day three times a day is thrown away purely to ensure profit margins by corporations.
Anyone calling the US a Democracy is mistaken at best, deluded more likely.
Quibble: They use a definition of democracy which isn't all that democratic: Liberal democracy AKA dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It's the same trick neoliberals use with freedom (when they say freedom they mean "of markets" NOT "of people") because they know people will assume.
Which is why it's so fucking hilarious that when they don't use a heavily doctrinal definition of democracy the US manages to get their ass completely handed to them by the very countries that this marks as "Authoritarian regimes" because even they represent their people more.
