The far-right populist Alternative for Germany party rejects a values-based foreign policy, just as much as it rejects NATO and the US. That approach has attracted the attention of Beijing.
Sure. As a matter of historicaly development, we know, as Marxists, that liberal capitalist societies, whether they have the formal institutions of representative democracy or not, tend to develop due to the tendencies of economic development the social consequences of the later and the political conjunctures, into fascistic or fascist political regimes and societies. But these are tendencies, they aren’t metaphysical or mathematical necessities. Even if we always saw every liberal democracy transform into outright into fascism, this doesn’t make them the same thing. If you were actually under a fascist government you would quickly realise the difference.
Fascism is partly characterized by it’s ideological and other superstructural features, but this is only a partial understanding. A fuller understanding notes that such states have only emerged in contexts of capitalist decay and crisis and act as a safety valve through which the capitalist class reestablishes political supremacy over the workings classes. However, I would point out that while capitalists are generally key parts of an any fascist state, the relationship between a powerful fascist state and individual enterprises (such as in Nazi Germany) does tip more and more towards the arbitrary power of the central executive government, to the point where they are more eager than capitalists to jeopardize profits for political objectives.
I’m obviously not saying that liberals have not engaged in extreme racism, colonialism, and genocide. Actually, from a historical point of view, they have been the best at it. It also isn’t wrong to say that in many respects fascism is also charaterized by the turning inward, the domestic usage, of the coercive, violent means of political repression which are innovated and developed in colonies. As Aimé Cesaire pointed out, fascism is like imperialism turned inwards. Modern America often treats many people internally in a fascistic way, embodied by the prison-industrial complex, especially if you are a very active, radical activist, or were or are in the past or present a member of a revolutionary group like the Black Panthers, or more generally a poor immigrant, a racial minority interacting with cops, or many other scenarios. The American state, like the British and French states, their political and economic elites, have already partly fascicized, are undergoing the process. But I really don’t think we’re passed the point of the nature of the political regime changing sufficiently to call them all fully fascist states. After Ukraine, the USA is the closest.
This is also why it is so weird and unnecessary to me when people just say that liberal democracy is the same thing as fascism. The fact that two things are linked or that one has tendencies that lead it to transform into, produce, be replaced by the other does not mean that they’re the same. Actually it implies the opposite, otherwise there would be no transformation to begin with. Take the Italian government. It is filled with realy, ideologically convinced fascists. But it does not find itself in a situation where, even as a unified coalition of Mussolini fans, they cannot actually find any means to exert fully fascist politics in defiance of the EU’s neoliberal economic agenda, nor NATO’s political agenda. Meloni does actually use the classic fascist technique of appealing to leftist sounding points. She recently went on Italian television and shit all over Macron and the French for enganging in neocolonialism against Françafrique, explaining the monetary system on tv and how most gold a child will mine in the period will end up in the French central bank.
The difference with the Ukrainian government is that the material conditions of Ukraine allow, actually force, the government to fascicize beyond the confines of it’s own ideology and extend this to society more broadly and more radically. There is not even the pretence of liberal democracy in Ukraine amongst actual Ukrainians, let alone the Russophone Ukrainians or Russians of the east.
We have different words for a reason: to refer to different things. In this case, different types of political regimes. A liberal political regime is different to fascist political regime. The transition might be gradual or appear relatively continuous, but so was the emergence of feudalism and capitalism.
This is also why it is so weird and unnecessary to me when people just say that liberal democracy is the same thing as fascism. The fact that two things are linked or that one has tendencies that lead it to transform into, produce, be replaced by the other does not mean that they’re the same. Actually it implies the opposite, otherwise there would be no transformation to begin with.
Would you prefer “liberal democracy nearly inevitably leads to fascism”? Stage 1 cancer and stage 4 cancer are both cancer.
Except that that is a completely logically confused example.
By this reasoning feudalism is the same thing as capitalism. Nonsense.
What is common between historically existing fascism and liberalism as political regimes, is the capitalist economic structure that they have existed upon. But this does not uniquely determine the form of the society or the political regime, even if it restricts the range of political regimes which are possible or likely. Otherwise we are engaging in economism and economic determinism and fatalism, which are not Marxist. The difference consists in the real differences in how those political regimes govern, how they organize the economic surplus, how they conduct social policy, how they legislate, and what kind of power relations the executive, legislature and judiciary have to each other. Republican Rome and modern America are both dictatorships of certain classes, but they still had a type of internal hierarchy within the socio-economic and political elite that aimed ensured certain balances of power within their class. Put it this way for example: Israel is highly fascicized society. It is deeply socially and culturally conservative and reactionary. It has been taking steps away from the internal domestic remnants of liberal political structures in order to allow the executive to take control over the legislature. This is a further step towards even more full on fascism.
What is common between 1st and 4th stage cancer is the cancer.
What is common between liberal capitalism and historically existing fascism is capitalism (private property, wage labor, commodity production, attendant social relations, etc.), the existence of a state, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism. In the sense fascism continues and intensifies this, but this does not make them the same. It’s honestly insane to me that this point has to be made: different things are not the same, same things are not different. We use the term fascist to distinguish changes
The Third Reich’s governance was different in a variety of ways to the Weimar’s Republic’s.
I’d agree that in, say, neoliberalism, there is a particularly strong pull towards fascism, and that you already see these tendencies emerging strongly in neoliberal societies’ politics and social relations, ideology and foreign policy. But saying that because the tendencies that lead to a future society are present in an earlier type of society, makes them the same, would again reduce capitalism to feudalism.
Otherwise this is just obfuscation and mystification that gets in the way of properly analyzing things politically and makes Marxists look ridiculous.
that’s a lot of text for someone who’s wrong. neoliberal governments worship their leaders, capitalism captures the state apparatus, and minorities are violently suppressed. Fascism.
Like. Just no. Interesting you didn’t actually response to anything tho. If all you can critique in is the time and effort put into some analysis and then make an immature, incoherent and confused comment then kindly don’t interact with me until that changes.
You’re also just using a couple of the superstructural features of fascism. No-one is saying those don’t characterize (partially) fascism. But by this analysis England was fascist by the 18th century, which is obviously absurb. Capitalism has already captured the state in liberalism. Sure. Obviously. This is trivial. But the state itself starts to take on new and, to a point, autonomous power distinct from its dependence on the bourgeoisie, because the fascist state starts to engage in hardcore forms of state capitalism which it directs. The later you go, the less the Nazis gave a fuck about what the German bourgeoisie thought. They were themselves there, in the eyes of the Nazis, to exploit the workers to maximize national production and output. But the Nazis did not govern as the liberal bourgeoisie does based on some amount of consensus and compromise amongst the bourgeois. They did not pursue or decide or craft policy based first and foremost on whether their bourgeois backers would allow them to run for posts again. They were concerned with national power and production, not profit first and foremost. Just as nationalization does not equal socialism, privatization does not equal liberalism, though it does imply a movement closer to pure capitalism. Fascism is both the highest state of imperialism, thus neoliberalism, thus capitalism, as the final solution to its crises, and also its death-knell, because it produces a self-destructive contradiction within itself between the bourgeois class and their interests at large on the one hand, and the fascist state on the other. Every single example of unambiguous fascism confirms this. Just look at Ukraine.
Again, all you are saying is that there is capitalism. But again, capitalism can have several different types of political regimes. You can look at their differences in 2 seconds. End of. At a certain point this is a not a real substantive debate, but a purely semantic one over how the words should be used. But the word fascism was introduced to refer to a set of superstructural characteristics, notably of the political regime, which a new, fuller development of capitalist societies tends to produce in crisis. They are responses to crises of capitalist societies to keep producing sufficient profit to sustain themselves. There is a change in the political structure when this happens, and this substantially intenfies (no matter how present already) the nationalism, racism, xenophobia, active mass state repression, oppression and exploitation. But the difference here can be seen to partly reside in the fact that it allows for this intensification which is not as possible under liberal governments. If you think that a liberal government is identical to a fascist one, then go to Ukraine. The US government, nor the Italian government for instance, are mass jailing and death-pitting anyone and everyone who is a communist, socialist, leftist, anarchist etc, where as this happened in every historical case of fascism, precisely because of the nature of the new structure of governance. They are repressing us, they are jailing us, and they are happy to engage in limited bouts of extrajudicial killing and murder. But this is limited and is also a reason
I’m also not saying that the transition from liberalism to fascism may not see fairly continuous. But there are unlimited phenomena where that happens but there is still obviously a transition between two different states. There is continuity between colors but green is not blue or yellow. And, again, on this logic feudalism would be identical to capitalism and fascism, because the transitions might have been continuous. Just like feudalism can contain elements characteristic of capitalism and liberalism at the same time, yet it’s feudalism because it’s what dominants. That’s at the base-level. But the base-level does not fully characterize uniquely a society. Marxism proper have never done this kind of reductionism. At the superstructural level, we need to look in part at the dominant mode of governance. The fascist one is different to the liberal one.
If you read memoirs of what people experienced when Germany when Nazi, when Italy went Fascist, when Japan went fascist, when Spain went fascist, when Chile fell to Pinochet, you realize very quickly that there is a difference.
Macron, Liz Trus, Scholtz, Abe, Gordon Brown… I would go one. None of these people were worshiped. Like no politicians in the UK are worshiped lmao. Although more depraved conservatives still cream themselves over Thatcher. Again, it could possibly happen, but none of these cases have ever amounted to the Hitlerian cult of personality. You’re citing certain similarities and saying that therefore they are the same. But the whole point of having different words to to refer to different concepts because there are differences between the real things in the world we are talking about. The burden is on you to establish that these differences do not exist between the cases which we’re comparing, which you can’t because it’s obviously impossible.
Do you have an interpretation of the potential counterexamples to your thesis, like Portugal, Spain, Greece, Brasil, Chile, that went from Fascism back to liberal democracy?
Those are not strictly speaking counterexamples. I didn’t claim they couldn’t transition back. Capitalist systems have tendencies which lead to socio-economic and political crisis. These, pushed far enough, and without a socialist revolution, tend to culminate in something like fascism in the modern era. But these are just tendencies. Nothing says that these tendencies must absolutely always, in every circumstance, proceed to completion. That’s determines by the other casual factors, the other objective and subjective material conditions. In this case, it was the geopolitical and global economic context.
As a matter of time I’m going to focus on Spain and Portugal in my answer.
The original fascist states also all went back to liberal democracy at the end of WWII. They were crushed by the liberal capitalist states (and ofc by the Soviet Union) which correctly perceived them as geopolitical rivals of the first importance by the mid-late 30s. The other fascist states were also pressured into transition back into the liberal imperialst orbit of the Cold War. In both cases, they were reintegrated as they proved unable to fully complete a world fascist counter-revolution. You are right to bring these up as very interesting cases because they are examples of how you can transition back to liberal capitalist bourgeois democracies. But this does alter the fact that there were serious changes in the political structures of both Portugal and Spain and that the supposed continuity of these transitions are often overstated.
The transition of Spain between the death of Franco in 1975 and 1978 was not as smooth or non-violent as it’s popularly imagined. It was a very violent period. Fascist regimes are inherently inefficient in the long-run from the POV of socio-economic and cultural development. Further, Franco had started to distance himself from a more aggressive fascism once it was clear by 1943 that the fascists would lose WWII into order to transition back, at least in appearance, into a traditionalist, Catholic, authoritarian one-party state. It was still fascistic, but to a lesser degree and I think it had also lost it’s dynamism. This was also reflected in the internal balance of power of the Spanish political regime. The more radical fascists lost influence and the Military and Church gained more influence. Instead of radical fascist mass mobilization and constant radicalizing of the populace, Franco betted on a gradual, partial de-fascicization in which the emphasis would be on technocratic governance and in which the population would be more depoliticized and deradicalized through economic growth and benefits. It remained fascistic in relation to ethnic and national minorities and especially towards the revolutionary left. But in general terms, and notably those of economic governance, it returned to a more conservative and liberal position, rather than outright radical fascist, were the latter implies a far more total, complete level of intervention in all aspects of society. Spain became heavily integrated into the Western European and Atlantic economy. It became an ultra-conservative client state of NATO in everything but name (it was not allowed to become a member). The Partido Popular are the continuation of this more liberalizing-trad-conservative wing of Falangists, wereas Vox are representative of the more radical fascist elements. It is not for nothing that they have been forming coalitions recently. But even if Vox came to power by itself, it is not clear that they would find themselves in a different situation to the Fratelli d’Italia at present, were many reactionary aspects of the country would certainly intensify, notably towards immigrants, Muslims, racial minorities and LGBT folks, but it would be limited because a fascist government, while not immediately inconsistent with fascism, does tend to contravene the liberal principles, as liberals are only one group of pro-capitalists, and there are many political positions which emphasize different forms of capitalism, notably through different governance structures over the economy, firms, capitalists, etc.
Another reason the transition was possible is because there was a recognized incentive to compromise in order to avoid another civil war, the terror of which was still very present in everyone’s minds, and this was made possible because, as noted above, the more radical elements of the falangists had been somewhat sidelined and Franco had also begun a process of deradicalizing his fascist government. Apartheid South Africa was similar in many respects, in terms of reasons for liberal transition, despite the context being extremely different in many ways, most obviously when it comes to the racial dynamics. Interestingly, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli doing that kind of liberal transition at this point. Imo Israel’s future may well be an extremely bloody one…
It’s also worth pointing out that the 70s was a far more radical time than today. There was a lot more pressure from the social-democrat European left that shaped the debates and ideological struggle in 70s Spain, again emphazing a need to transition. Also, Carter moved away somewhat from Nixon’s more active support of these regimes (the US supported their military by being their main weapon’s providers).
The Estado Novo was as strange type of fascism. It was not as aggressive in its foreign policy as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, which attempted to recreate mystical conceptions of their ancient empires in a way that directly conflicted with the interests of the other western imperialist powers. It was also pulled back into the orbit. Neither Franco nor Salazar were idiots when it came to how they needed to geopolitically and economically pivot in order to ensure their survival. Salazar did something very similar to Franco, as described above.
These other fascist states, which were tolerated because they did not pose as serious a threat to the imperial interests of the US, Britain and France, and because they were willing to accommodate these other powers’ interests and cooperate. However they were also undermined by their own inefficiencies, economic and political, and pressure from the external climate of a dynamic post-war trans-Atlantic economy to reintegrate themselves, at least economically, with the liberal powers.
We know that the socio-economic base transforms itself in such a way as to overcome disequilibrating forces that emerge in their social relations, especially once the latter are no longer sufficient to further developing the means of production, especially in a system of like capitalism whose basic functioning is premised on the fact of continued production of profit to incentivize production. But what about the transformations of the superstructure? My point is that as the base structure develops in this manner, it not only does so in conjunction with the the superstructure, but not only transforms the superstructure in order to reach new points of temporary stability. It is not only the base structure that evolves, moving gradually, continually and something revolutionarily into different overall dominant modes of production, but also the superstructure, in particular the political regime, which develops, and not only between base-level modes of production, but also within the same overall type of mode of production. In some cases liberal capitalism becomes fascist capitalism. In some case fascist capitalism can transition to liberal capitalism. In some cases fascist capitalism turns into outright mass-slave economies.
Being an engineer and a prodigious philosopher does not prevent anyone from making emotional mistakes when you just want to make a message say what you want.
What was said was (and I assume you also understood by your cancer stage examples): all liberal democracies die and turn fascist eventually. This is a very good point.
Going from there to saying they are the same is disingenuous and I couldn’t help but point that out after seeing how you butchered it.
But I’m gone, apologies if I bothered you with my brash quip.
Sure. As a matter of historicaly development, we know, as Marxists, that liberal capitalist societies, whether they have the formal institutions of representative democracy or not, tend to develop due to the tendencies of economic development the social consequences of the later and the political conjunctures, into fascistic or fascist political regimes and societies. But these are tendencies, they aren’t metaphysical or mathematical necessities. Even if we always saw every liberal democracy transform into outright into fascism, this doesn’t make them the same thing. If you were actually under a fascist government you would quickly realise the difference.
Fascism is partly characterized by it’s ideological and other superstructural features, but this is only a partial understanding. A fuller understanding notes that such states have only emerged in contexts of capitalist decay and crisis and act as a safety valve through which the capitalist class reestablishes political supremacy over the workings classes. However, I would point out that while capitalists are generally key parts of an any fascist state, the relationship between a powerful fascist state and individual enterprises (such as in Nazi Germany) does tip more and more towards the arbitrary power of the central executive government, to the point where they are more eager than capitalists to jeopardize profits for political objectives.
I’m obviously not saying that liberals have not engaged in extreme racism, colonialism, and genocide. Actually, from a historical point of view, they have been the best at it. It also isn’t wrong to say that in many respects fascism is also charaterized by the turning inward, the domestic usage, of the coercive, violent means of political repression which are innovated and developed in colonies. As Aimé Cesaire pointed out, fascism is like imperialism turned inwards. Modern America often treats many people internally in a fascistic way, embodied by the prison-industrial complex, especially if you are a very active, radical activist, or were or are in the past or present a member of a revolutionary group like the Black Panthers, or more generally a poor immigrant, a racial minority interacting with cops, or many other scenarios. The American state, like the British and French states, their political and economic elites, have already partly fascicized, are undergoing the process. But I really don’t think we’re passed the point of the nature of the political regime changing sufficiently to call them all fully fascist states. After Ukraine, the USA is the closest.
This is also why it is so weird and unnecessary to me when people just say that liberal democracy is the same thing as fascism. The fact that two things are linked or that one has tendencies that lead it to transform into, produce, be replaced by the other does not mean that they’re the same. Actually it implies the opposite, otherwise there would be no transformation to begin with. Take the Italian government. It is filled with realy, ideologically convinced fascists. But it does not find itself in a situation where, even as a unified coalition of Mussolini fans, they cannot actually find any means to exert fully fascist politics in defiance of the EU’s neoliberal economic agenda, nor NATO’s political agenda. Meloni does actually use the classic fascist technique of appealing to leftist sounding points. She recently went on Italian television and shit all over Macron and the French for enganging in neocolonialism against Françafrique, explaining the monetary system on tv and how most gold a child will mine in the period will end up in the French central bank. The difference with the Ukrainian government is that the material conditions of Ukraine allow, actually force, the government to fascicize beyond the confines of it’s own ideology and extend this to society more broadly and more radically. There is not even the pretence of liberal democracy in Ukraine amongst actual Ukrainians, let alone the Russophone Ukrainians or Russians of the east.
We have different words for a reason: to refer to different things. In this case, different types of political regimes. A liberal political regime is different to fascist political regime. The transition might be gradual or appear relatively continuous, but so was the emergence of feudalism and capitalism.
Would you prefer “liberal democracy nearly inevitably leads to fascism”? Stage 1 cancer and stage 4 cancer are both cancer.
Except that that is a completely logically confused example. By this reasoning feudalism is the same thing as capitalism. Nonsense.
What is common between historically existing fascism and liberalism as political regimes, is the capitalist economic structure that they have existed upon. But this does not uniquely determine the form of the society or the political regime, even if it restricts the range of political regimes which are possible or likely. Otherwise we are engaging in economism and economic determinism and fatalism, which are not Marxist. The difference consists in the real differences in how those political regimes govern, how they organize the economic surplus, how they conduct social policy, how they legislate, and what kind of power relations the executive, legislature and judiciary have to each other. Republican Rome and modern America are both dictatorships of certain classes, but they still had a type of internal hierarchy within the socio-economic and political elite that aimed ensured certain balances of power within their class. Put it this way for example: Israel is highly fascicized society. It is deeply socially and culturally conservative and reactionary. It has been taking steps away from the internal domestic remnants of liberal political structures in order to allow the executive to take control over the legislature. This is a further step towards even more full on fascism.
What is common between 1st and 4th stage cancer is the cancer. What is common between liberal capitalism and historically existing fascism is capitalism (private property, wage labor, commodity production, attendant social relations, etc.), the existence of a state, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism. In the sense fascism continues and intensifies this, but this does not make them the same. It’s honestly insane to me that this point has to be made: different things are not the same, same things are not different. We use the term fascist to distinguish changes The Third Reich’s governance was different in a variety of ways to the Weimar’s Republic’s.
I’d agree that in, say, neoliberalism, there is a particularly strong pull towards fascism, and that you already see these tendencies emerging strongly in neoliberal societies’ politics and social relations, ideology and foreign policy. But saying that because the tendencies that lead to a future society are present in an earlier type of society, makes them the same, would again reduce capitalism to feudalism.
Otherwise this is just obfuscation and mystification that gets in the way of properly analyzing things politically and makes Marxists look ridiculous.
Like. Just no. Interesting you didn’t actually response to anything tho. If all you can critique in is the time and effort put into some analysis and then make an immature, incoherent and confused comment then kindly don’t interact with me until that changes.
You’re also just using a couple of the superstructural features of fascism. No-one is saying those don’t characterize (partially) fascism. But by this analysis England was fascist by the 18th century, which is obviously absurb. Capitalism has already captured the state in liberalism. Sure. Obviously. This is trivial. But the state itself starts to take on new and, to a point, autonomous power distinct from its dependence on the bourgeoisie, because the fascist state starts to engage in hardcore forms of state capitalism which it directs. The later you go, the less the Nazis gave a fuck about what the German bourgeoisie thought. They were themselves there, in the eyes of the Nazis, to exploit the workers to maximize national production and output. But the Nazis did not govern as the liberal bourgeoisie does based on some amount of consensus and compromise amongst the bourgeois. They did not pursue or decide or craft policy based first and foremost on whether their bourgeois backers would allow them to run for posts again. They were concerned with national power and production, not profit first and foremost. Just as nationalization does not equal socialism, privatization does not equal liberalism, though it does imply a movement closer to pure capitalism. Fascism is both the highest state of imperialism, thus neoliberalism, thus capitalism, as the final solution to its crises, and also its death-knell, because it produces a self-destructive contradiction within itself between the bourgeois class and their interests at large on the one hand, and the fascist state on the other. Every single example of unambiguous fascism confirms this. Just look at Ukraine.
Again, all you are saying is that there is capitalism. But again, capitalism can have several different types of political regimes. You can look at their differences in 2 seconds. End of. At a certain point this is a not a real substantive debate, but a purely semantic one over how the words should be used. But the word fascism was introduced to refer to a set of superstructural characteristics, notably of the political regime, which a new, fuller development of capitalist societies tends to produce in crisis. They are responses to crises of capitalist societies to keep producing sufficient profit to sustain themselves. There is a change in the political structure when this happens, and this substantially intenfies (no matter how present already) the nationalism, racism, xenophobia, active mass state repression, oppression and exploitation. But the difference here can be seen to partly reside in the fact that it allows for this intensification which is not as possible under liberal governments. If you think that a liberal government is identical to a fascist one, then go to Ukraine. The US government, nor the Italian government for instance, are mass jailing and death-pitting anyone and everyone who is a communist, socialist, leftist, anarchist etc, where as this happened in every historical case of fascism, precisely because of the nature of the new structure of governance. They are repressing us, they are jailing us, and they are happy to engage in limited bouts of extrajudicial killing and murder. But this is limited and is also a reason I’m also not saying that the transition from liberalism to fascism may not see fairly continuous. But there are unlimited phenomena where that happens but there is still obviously a transition between two different states. There is continuity between colors but green is not blue or yellow. And, again, on this logic feudalism would be identical to capitalism and fascism, because the transitions might have been continuous. Just like feudalism can contain elements characteristic of capitalism and liberalism at the same time, yet it’s feudalism because it’s what dominants. That’s at the base-level. But the base-level does not fully characterize uniquely a society. Marxism proper have never done this kind of reductionism. At the superstructural level, we need to look in part at the dominant mode of governance. The fascist one is different to the liberal one.
If you read memoirs of what people experienced when Germany when Nazi, when Italy went Fascist, when Japan went fascist, when Spain went fascist, when Chile fell to Pinochet, you realize very quickly that there is a difference.
Macron, Liz Trus, Scholtz, Abe, Gordon Brown… I would go one. None of these people were worshiped. Like no politicians in the UK are worshiped lmao. Although more depraved conservatives still cream themselves over Thatcher. Again, it could possibly happen, but none of these cases have ever amounted to the Hitlerian cult of personality. You’re citing certain similarities and saying that therefore they are the same. But the whole point of having different words to to refer to different concepts because there are differences between the real things in the world we are talking about. The burden is on you to establish that these differences do not exist between the cases which we’re comparing, which you can’t because it’s obviously impossible.
I am going to disengage at this point.
Do you have an interpretation of the potential counterexamples to your thesis, like Portugal, Spain, Greece, Brasil, Chile, that went from Fascism back to liberal democracy?
Those are not strictly speaking counterexamples. I didn’t claim they couldn’t transition back. Capitalist systems have tendencies which lead to socio-economic and political crisis. These, pushed far enough, and without a socialist revolution, tend to culminate in something like fascism in the modern era. But these are just tendencies. Nothing says that these tendencies must absolutely always, in every circumstance, proceed to completion. That’s determines by the other casual factors, the other objective and subjective material conditions. In this case, it was the geopolitical and global economic context.
As a matter of time I’m going to focus on Spain and Portugal in my answer.
The original fascist states also all went back to liberal democracy at the end of WWII. They were crushed by the liberal capitalist states (and ofc by the Soviet Union) which correctly perceived them as geopolitical rivals of the first importance by the mid-late 30s. The other fascist states were also pressured into transition back into the liberal imperialst orbit of the Cold War. In both cases, they were reintegrated as they proved unable to fully complete a world fascist counter-revolution. You are right to bring these up as very interesting cases because they are examples of how you can transition back to liberal capitalist bourgeois democracies. But this does alter the fact that there were serious changes in the political structures of both Portugal and Spain and that the supposed continuity of these transitions are often overstated.
The transition of Spain between the death of Franco in 1975 and 1978 was not as smooth or non-violent as it’s popularly imagined. It was a very violent period. Fascist regimes are inherently inefficient in the long-run from the POV of socio-economic and cultural development. Further, Franco had started to distance himself from a more aggressive fascism once it was clear by 1943 that the fascists would lose WWII into order to transition back, at least in appearance, into a traditionalist, Catholic, authoritarian one-party state. It was still fascistic, but to a lesser degree and I think it had also lost it’s dynamism. This was also reflected in the internal balance of power of the Spanish political regime. The more radical fascists lost influence and the Military and Church gained more influence. Instead of radical fascist mass mobilization and constant radicalizing of the populace, Franco betted on a gradual, partial de-fascicization in which the emphasis would be on technocratic governance and in which the population would be more depoliticized and deradicalized through economic growth and benefits. It remained fascistic in relation to ethnic and national minorities and especially towards the revolutionary left. But in general terms, and notably those of economic governance, it returned to a more conservative and liberal position, rather than outright radical fascist, were the latter implies a far more total, complete level of intervention in all aspects of society. Spain became heavily integrated into the Western European and Atlantic economy. It became an ultra-conservative client state of NATO in everything but name (it was not allowed to become a member). The Partido Popular are the continuation of this more liberalizing-trad-conservative wing of Falangists, wereas Vox are representative of the more radical fascist elements. It is not for nothing that they have been forming coalitions recently. But even if Vox came to power by itself, it is not clear that they would find themselves in a different situation to the Fratelli d’Italia at present, were many reactionary aspects of the country would certainly intensify, notably towards immigrants, Muslims, racial minorities and LGBT folks, but it would be limited because a fascist government, while not immediately inconsistent with fascism, does tend to contravene the liberal principles, as liberals are only one group of pro-capitalists, and there are many political positions which emphasize different forms of capitalism, notably through different governance structures over the economy, firms, capitalists, etc.
Another reason the transition was possible is because there was a recognized incentive to compromise in order to avoid another civil war, the terror of which was still very present in everyone’s minds, and this was made possible because, as noted above, the more radical elements of the falangists had been somewhat sidelined and Franco had also begun a process of deradicalizing his fascist government. Apartheid South Africa was similar in many respects, in terms of reasons for liberal transition, despite the context being extremely different in many ways, most obviously when it comes to the racial dynamics. Interestingly, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli doing that kind of liberal transition at this point. Imo Israel’s future may well be an extremely bloody one…
It’s also worth pointing out that the 70s was a far more radical time than today. There was a lot more pressure from the social-democrat European left that shaped the debates and ideological struggle in 70s Spain, again emphazing a need to transition. Also, Carter moved away somewhat from Nixon’s more active support of these regimes (the US supported their military by being their main weapon’s providers).
The Estado Novo was as strange type of fascism. It was not as aggressive in its foreign policy as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, which attempted to recreate mystical conceptions of their ancient empires in a way that directly conflicted with the interests of the other western imperialist powers. It was also pulled back into the orbit. Neither Franco nor Salazar were idiots when it came to how they needed to geopolitically and economically pivot in order to ensure their survival. Salazar did something very similar to Franco, as described above.
These other fascist states, which were tolerated because they did not pose as serious a threat to the imperial interests of the US, Britain and France, and because they were willing to accommodate these other powers’ interests and cooperate. However they were also undermined by their own inefficiencies, economic and political, and pressure from the external climate of a dynamic post-war trans-Atlantic economy to reintegrate themselves, at least economically, with the liberal powers.
We know that the socio-economic base transforms itself in such a way as to overcome disequilibrating forces that emerge in their social relations, especially once the latter are no longer sufficient to further developing the means of production, especially in a system of like capitalism whose basic functioning is premised on the fact of continued production of profit to incentivize production. But what about the transformations of the superstructure? My point is that as the base structure develops in this manner, it not only does so in conjunction with the the superstructure, but not only transforms the superstructure in order to reach new points of temporary stability. It is not only the base structure that evolves, moving gradually, continually and something revolutionarily into different overall dominant modes of production, but also the superstructure, in particular the political regime, which develops, and not only between base-level modes of production, but also within the same overall type of mode of production. In some cases liberal capitalism becomes fascist capitalism. In some case fascist capitalism can transition to liberal capitalism. In some cases fascist capitalism turns into outright mass-slave economies.
You: Life leads to death, therefore life is death (in short)
Hey look, buddy. I’m an engineer, that means I solve problems.
Not problems like “What is beauty?”, 'cause that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of !philosophy@hexbear.net.
Being an engineer and a prodigious philosopher does not prevent anyone from making emotional mistakes when you just want to make a message say what you want.
What was said was (and I assume you also understood by your cancer stage examples): all liberal democracies die and turn fascist eventually. This is a very good point.
Going from there to saying they are the same is disingenuous and I couldn’t help but point that out after seeing how you butchered it.
But I’m gone, apologies if I bothered you with my brash quip.
Which framework is that analysis based on, Frankfurt school or something later?
Frankfurt School is a kind of Classwar asset Psy Op to remove Material Analysis from the Theory …
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=L0R7NVB2YVo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
No we use the Докторская колбаса school of analysis
Thanks for the well-reasoned and nuanced take