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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
Capitalism is decaying, and fascism is its inevitable conclusion. This isn’t news, either: The Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay
Is it decaying or is it in full bloom? I assumed that rampant inequality was an acceptable feature of capitalism.
Inequality is a feature. Decay is when it’s running out of runway and starts to turn catabolic. They eat each other, starting with the smaller ones.
A fascist regime helps to guarantee inequality. As capitalism decays, it gets worse for everyone who’s not rich, leading to more inequality. But there are feedback loops, people rise up, workers form unions and go on strike, and so on. Fascism is there to make sure that the “right people” are getting the benefits from the economy, they police this social hierarchy. The racism and other bullshit is there to draw those contrasting lines between classes. It’s always about exclusion. Economically, fascism embraces selective austerity. A middle class life for me, a miserable slave life for thee. So they align great with capitalism and liberalism in this economic sense. GDP 📈.
Them eating each other is a feature of capitalism. Can’t maximize growth if you have competition driving down prices.
I don’t mean just business “war”, I mean violent takeover, assassinations, corrupt officials doing big favors, mafia shit. Fewer lawyers, more goons.
Being an acceptable feature to those removed from the harm they’re causing doesn’t give their perspective any validity - nothing about the current state of affairs is sustainable, that’s the point.
Oh, I completely agree. Just curious whether people see this a capitalism ‘decaying’ vs ‘working as intended’.
I’m not sure I understand, since the two don’t contradict - the system working as intended for capitalists, doesn’t stop it from also being decaying, it is a literal inevitability of an unsustainable system that only ever works for a tiny fragment of a percent of the population.
I don’t think I understand either :) If capitalism is decaying, how will it continue to work as intended for capitalists?
I don’t think it necessarily will in their eyes, but as I see it, they view it in two ways that aren’t mutually exclusive. Firstly, as capitalism decays, it could give rise to a system that allows them to exploit others even more mercilessly than they already do, and they’re eager to reap the benefit of this development. Secondly, they think that their riches will allow them to escape the negative impacts of capitalism, regardless of what happens. Look at the billionaires buying up islands or building remote doomsday bunkers to escape to in the event things really go south. They fully expect that in the worst case scenario of extensive warfare, environmental crises and societal collapse, they’ll be able to retreat into their castles, pull up the draw bridge over the moats, and live out the rest of their days in comfort while the rest of us suffer and perish.
At some point it won’t anymore, but for many different reasons, they can’t see/don’t care.
First of all, as we mentioned, capitalism decays in to fascism, at which point (and why they actively working towards it) they will have even more power and less human rights to get in the way of the exploitation oppression and resource accumulation.
Then there’s also the fact that, being so far removed from the rest of society and being the ones who make the rules, they don’t feel like those should apply to them, not even rules of nature like “infinite growth is impossible in a finite world”.
This also means that their view of reality is so warped they think they’ll always be on top/secure. For example - they’re all spending millions even billions on bunkers, but never stop to consider who will serve and protect them in that bunker and why anyone would still be willing to (when things get bad enough, their money will be useless), as well as what world they might come out to if they do survive. Never mind stop what they’re doing to prevent the need for a bunker in the first place (to them, being equal to everyone else seems like a worse fate than global destruction).
The problem is that capitalism is a global cancer, and one fascist coming to their end doesn’t mean the system that got them there has been destroyed, or even “fixed” (you can see this in the failures to de-nazify Germany after the war, or to de-racist America after it’s founding, or de-monarchize? the UK for example), and that is why we say “workers of the world unite”, because it will take a global effort, not only in revolution, but in creating an equitable, just, and inclusive foundation for something better to be built on out of the void (this will require mass deprogramming and unlearning of the social structures imposed by the kyriarchy, and re-learning solidarity, compassion, community, cooperation, and so on - all things that actually come naturally to us, but are beaten out of us by life under capitalism).
And now I’ve lost my train of thought, and I’ve probably rambled on enough, so I’m going to leave it there lol
Rampant inequality is deemed acceptable in return for rising living standards of the general population. The top is getting greedy and refused to give a penny to living standards, and standards are going down, so of course the population is getting agitated.
That 1935 piece surely seems prophetic. For example this part:
For the last five or so years, I’ve been noticing a surge of anti-intellectualism. People are not any longer ashamed to publicly dismiss “smart alecks” and “know-it-alls”.
Those types of people used to be exceptions and now they feel like the norm.
It really is an incredible read, but to be fair, it was already the case back in the day, and even earlier, off the top of my head:
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/ye-olde-anti-vaxxers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Francisco
Difference is we now have instant global mass media, so it all spreads much further, much faster.
But anti-intellectualism has always been a core feature of fascism