Yeah when Trump got elected it was like everyone and their dog was talking about his analysis of fascism trying to make sense of the situation. Which was good. I mean, he does line up some good points and says it in a way that average people can parse. Lord knows my brain is so politics poisoned I can lose touch trying to explain things to normies
It’s just Liberalism and its idealist conception. Liberalism and idealism is the default that everyone is born into and mired in and so will start out as in the west and where it has spread, unless they’re raised by erudite and disciplined Marxists. So the reason all of those appeal to them easily is because it’s simple tidy idealist pictures and boxes to neatly put things in from a surface-perspective that requires no deeper work. It maps over the visible tangible fascistic expressions they see, the ‘ideas that fascists must personally believe, and so make from the ideas of these individuals writ large collectively into a movement’ because otherwise, ‘where would those expressions be coming from?’
The reason it’s difficult to explain fascism in materialist terms to the masses of liberals or ‘normies’ (I think ‘masses’ or ‘liberals’ is more effective and conducive to maintain Marxist perspective and not straying into insularity, or opportunist or reactionary territory. Remember it is these ‘masses’ who make history that we need to act as the most advanced segments of; they are not something ‘other’ from us, they are the backward portions of us to be brought forward with our guidance); the reason it’s difficult is because you really do have to deconstruct their entire worldview and rebuild it upside down — which also means they have to be willing to participate in that with you, whether one-on-one in person or in a broader struggle. It’s truly a “to bake a cake, first you must create the universe” scenario.
One can’t understand fascism and its actual material basis without understanding that the material both comes first and is always last, which requires deconstructing idealism while simultaneously replacing it with materialism. And then one needs to from there understand the material conditions and material interests from which fascism arises and the class character of the movement; or the class-strata from which it draws both its membership and its material support. This requires an explanatory breaking down of classes and a deconstruction of class society, which itself requires a historical materialist lesson on the evolution of human society and history, around and around the relationships to the means of production and subsistence; and cultivating an understanding of the dialectical relationship between things from a materialist perspective (ie dialectical materialism).
And from there it then requires a historical lesson on previous fascist movements from these materialist perspectives, with first-and-lastmost regard to these material aspects and class characters and economic realities of these past fascist projects and the contradictions in the previous order from which they arose; which also includes necessarily learning about fascism’s material antithesis in this framework; Marxism and communism — understanding the sharpening of (inherent) capitalist contradiction in (inevitable) economic crises creating intolerable conditions for the working class and also crunching the false-consciousness “middle class” and dropping more and more of the petty bourgeois into precarity and fall into the working class; and the produced ‘disappearance of the center’ and opposing reactions of the masses of society to this fact — toward this contradiction of the current material conditions against their own material interest as groups of individuals and as a class; whether seeking to violently reassert and further entrench and deepen the pre-existing bourgeois social relations as the “natural order of things” or otherwise seeking to organize a working-class overthrow of these social relations and create a new “order of things”; of which these reactions of the masses to the crises are a mutually-interdependent and irreconcilably antagonistic dialectical-materialist expression of class struggle at the sharpest point — Fascism being an antithesis to a new (communist) thesis as the old way becomes too unstable to continue as it had.
You really have to do the whole “turning Hegel on his head” with their entire worldview — which is why Marx and Engels’ most serious and important texts are also gargantuan and borderline labyrinthine at times, like the German Ideology, Anti-Duhring, and Capital. Thankfully those can be built up to because they also created smaller breakdowns in pamphlets and lectures that were published. One can get a basis to tackle the economics of Capital by first reading Wage Labor and Capital; and Value, Price, and Profit and the Origin of Private Property, Family, and the State — and one can get a basis to tackle the philosophy of the German Ideology or Anti-Duhring by reading some of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and by reading (one of Engels’ most important contributions to get in peoples hands in my opinion) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; which acted as a truncated version of Anti-Duhring. One obviously doesn’t need to be able to recite all information in all these texts to engage in Marxist movement-building but it’s meant to illustrate the LEGWORK that Marx and Engels themselves had to go through to deconstruct this nosense in their own societies, which was required to then build up a materialist (and communist) perspective on the reality they lived in. And it’s arguably harder for us these days because of omnipresent mass media which reproduces liberal ideology constantly. It is why it is important for us all to read theory, and really struggle with the theory, until we can both internalize the methodologies and undertake materialist analyses and critiques and engage in accurate and decisive practice in real-time, as well as explain in clear terms these concepts in active motion, in the context of and relations to modern events and struggles; and not just treat-as-static-fact previous analyses removed from their living nature and development, simply copy/pasting them onto the new era and its circumstances, which is vulgar materialism.
That’s why just as much as propaganda telling it like it is is important, even more important is the material practice — it is of most importance that communists engage in the struggle and prove they are right in action visibly and undeniably, and lead the mass movements into tackling contradictions in ways that their rupture prove our propaganda and analyses right, opening more receptivity to our understanding.
Excellent post, comrade. This should have its own thread to further discuss it. Because you are absolutely correct that the task of re-educating liberals is monumental and requires breaking their previously held beliefs and building new dialectical ones for them to use instead. Fascism is a liberal ideology and it shares too much DNA with liberalism for them to fully understand and condemn it except when they see its most egregious misanthropic examples like death camps or race war.
Yeah when Trump got elected it was like everyone and their dog was talking about his analysis of fascism trying to make sense of the situation. Which was good. I mean, he does line up some good points and says it in a way that average people can parse. Lord knows my brain is so politics poisoned I can lose touch trying to explain things to normies
It’s just Liberalism and its idealist conception. Liberalism and idealism is the default that everyone is born into and mired in and so will start out as in the west and where it has spread, unless they’re raised by erudite and disciplined Marxists. So the reason all of those appeal to them easily is because it’s simple tidy idealist pictures and boxes to neatly put things in from a surface-perspective that requires no deeper work. It maps over the visible tangible fascistic expressions they see, the ‘ideas that fascists must personally believe, and so make from the ideas of these individuals writ large collectively into a movement’ because otherwise, ‘where would those expressions be coming from?’
The reason it’s difficult to explain fascism in materialist terms to the masses of liberals or ‘normies’ (I think ‘masses’ or ‘liberals’ is more effective and conducive to maintain Marxist perspective and not straying into insularity, or opportunist or reactionary territory. Remember it is these ‘masses’ who make history that we need to act as the most advanced segments of; they are not something ‘other’ from us, they are the backward portions of us to be brought forward with our guidance); the reason it’s difficult is because you really do have to deconstruct their entire worldview and rebuild it upside down — which also means they have to be willing to participate in that with you, whether one-on-one in person or in a broader struggle. It’s truly a “to bake a cake, first you must create the universe” scenario.
One can’t understand fascism and its actual material basis without understanding that the material both comes first and is always last, which requires deconstructing idealism while simultaneously replacing it with materialism. And then one needs to from there understand the material conditions and material interests from which fascism arises and the class character of the movement; or the class-strata from which it draws both its membership and its material support. This requires an explanatory breaking down of classes and a deconstruction of class society, which itself requires a historical materialist lesson on the evolution of human society and history, around and around the relationships to the means of production and subsistence; and cultivating an understanding of the dialectical relationship between things from a materialist perspective (ie dialectical materialism).
And from there it then requires a historical lesson on previous fascist movements from these materialist perspectives, with first-and-lastmost regard to these material aspects and class characters and economic realities of these past fascist projects and the contradictions in the previous order from which they arose; which also includes necessarily learning about fascism’s material antithesis in this framework; Marxism and communism — understanding the sharpening of (inherent) capitalist contradiction in (inevitable) economic crises creating intolerable conditions for the working class and also crunching the false-consciousness “middle class” and dropping more and more of the petty bourgeois into precarity and fall into the working class; and the produced ‘disappearance of the center’ and opposing reactions of the masses of society to this fact — toward this contradiction of the current material conditions against their own material interest as groups of individuals and as a class; whether seeking to violently reassert and further entrench and deepen the pre-existing bourgeois social relations as the “natural order of things” or otherwise seeking to organize a working-class overthrow of these social relations and create a new “order of things”; of which these reactions of the masses to the crises are a mutually-interdependent and irreconcilably antagonistic dialectical-materialist expression of class struggle at the sharpest point — Fascism being an antithesis to a new (communist) thesis as the old way becomes too unstable to continue as it had.
You really have to do the whole “turning Hegel on his head” with their entire worldview — which is why Marx and Engels’ most serious and important texts are also gargantuan and borderline labyrinthine at times, like the German Ideology, Anti-Duhring, and Capital. Thankfully those can be built up to because they also created smaller breakdowns in pamphlets and lectures that were published. One can get a basis to tackle the economics of Capital by first reading Wage Labor and Capital; and Value, Price, and Profit and the Origin of Private Property, Family, and the State — and one can get a basis to tackle the philosophy of the German Ideology or Anti-Duhring by reading some of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and by reading (one of Engels’ most important contributions to get in peoples hands in my opinion) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; which acted as a truncated version of Anti-Duhring. One obviously doesn’t need to be able to recite all information in all these texts to engage in Marxist movement-building but it’s meant to illustrate the LEGWORK that Marx and Engels themselves had to go through to deconstruct this nosense in their own societies, which was required to then build up a materialist (and communist) perspective on the reality they lived in. And it’s arguably harder for us these days because of omnipresent mass media which reproduces liberal ideology constantly. It is why it is important for us all to read theory, and really struggle with the theory, until we can both internalize the methodologies and undertake materialist analyses and critiques and engage in accurate and decisive practice in real-time, as well as explain in clear terms these concepts in active motion, in the context of and relations to modern events and struggles; and not just treat-as-static-fact previous analyses removed from their living nature and development, simply copy/pasting them onto the new era and its circumstances, which is vulgar materialism.
That’s why just as much as propaganda telling it like it is is important, even more important is the material practice — it is of most importance that communists engage in the struggle and prove they are right in action visibly and undeniably, and lead the mass movements into tackling contradictions in ways that their rupture prove our propaganda and analyses right, opening more receptivity to our understanding.
Excellent post, comrade. This should have its own thread to further discuss it. Because you are absolutely correct that the task of re-educating liberals is monumental and requires breaking their previously held beliefs and building new dialectical ones for them to use instead. Fascism is a liberal ideology and it shares too much DNA with liberalism for them to fully understand and condemn it except when they see its most egregious misanthropic examples like death camps or race war.