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?
So you’d like to damn them for murdering the communists, but also damn modern social democrats for not dealing with fascists in an extra-legal fashion? I understand you’ll never accept the communists weren’t exactly shining paragons, but you must see the irony here.
Lmao. They murdered their political opponents that were fighting for the working class, and collaborated with the ones who were destroying it. Hmm.. sounds kinda familiar. Which party put more money into policing than any other in history when they were most recently elected?
Which party released a memo (that thankfully leaked or we wouldn’t know) telling journalists and officials not to call for Israel to stop their genocide?
It’s almost as if they both serve capital and use us as pawns while they make money and kill people both domestically and abroad.
Communists famously improved the quality of life for every russian/russian citizen, how silly of me to forget.
Are you trying to equate american democrats to social democrats of europe? We hate our democrats, they’re just the best option under the first past the post voting system.
Very nearly, yes. Unironically, look up life expectancy for citizens of the Russian Czardom pre-revolution. It literally more than doubled under Soviet rule. The Soviets had many problems, at least 40 big ones, but they succeeded in turning a peasant and slave society into an industrial society, doubled life expectancy, provided homes to everyone, provided vacations to everyone, and more.
They had issues, certainly. The criticisms that apply to them often apply to the US also though, and other liberal democracies. For example, the USSR couldn’t have dreamed of having a surveillance state even half as effective or powerful as the one in the United States. The gulag system at its peak, wasn’t even close to the current American prison system, either in terms of per capita or total numbers. And 40% of the population was freed every year. Most of the things we’ve been taught to fear about the Soviets we experience far more viscerally than they did. We have secret police, we just call them “undercover” or “plainclothes”. Hell, in 2020 people were literally being grabbed off the streets by un-uniformed police and stuffed into unmarked black cars. I could literally go on for hours, and provide hundreds of pages of books with data verifying, just the ways that the US is definitively more totalitarian and more violent than the Soviet Union at even its height of oppressive action.
We couldn’t strive to replicate the errors of the Soviets, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect the successes, either.
The idea of the USSR being an objectively better entity than what came before and after itself is a hard pill for many to swallow. Even from a cold, pragmatic, and critical position it can be hard to reconcile, even decades after the Cold War proper.
The USSR was better for Russia than what came before, for all the satellite states they annexed and stole resources from they were worse.
If the US is disappearing people into forced labor camps and working them either close to death or to death now doesn't make it a good thing when the USSR did it.
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.
That’s not what you claimed. You claimed they worked with the Nazis, which they absolutely did not.
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.
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.
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.
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
I thought regulated capitalism and market socialism were the same thing
What about all the non-USA countries? They are all mostly capitalist but are more regulated (like Canada in NA and most of the European Union) while also having true healthy démocraties?
Oh, I didn’t realize it was the will of the people to fail to meet their climate commitments. I was pretty sure the majority of people thought that governments should be doing more. Was it also the will of the people to raise the pension age in France? And the people of Canada support the slow privatization of their public health system? That’s kosher to them?
You should look at polling more deeply. If you chuck an easy question like 'Are humans responsible for climate change?'' you'll barely get 50%. But if you then actually pose a piece of actionable policy like 'Would you support banning the sale of ICE cars in 2035?' You'll get 30%. So no. The will of the people is not meeting their climate commitment.
This will probably be the case for your other examples too. Public opinion is never as unified as you're making it seem.
So what? You think the people are the good ones and the political class are the bad ones? Who did you think voted them into office and who's responsible for the rise of right wing power? That just materialized itself? Get a grip of yourself and stop trying to divide the world just so you can have an easy time understanding. The world is complicated and not black and white. Stop dividing.
they do not have healthy democracies.
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)
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
What is true democracy anyway? The government always doing the will of the people? I don't think that can really happen under any circumstances.
The people directly controlling the society collectively, rather than private ownership of said societies social wealth.
True democracy requires democracy at all levels of society. Workplace democracy, state democracy, community democracy, etc. Democratizing the electoral system but maintaining private ownership of production merely results in exactly the situation we are in now, with an illusion of democracy, where we choose from a pool of candidates selected by the elites in control of production in order to maintain control of their production.
There are different elites, and they have differing goals, but one thing they all have in common is they believe in the subjugation of the working class and the hoarding of the products of the labor of the working class. That’s why imperialism is non-partisan in the US. It serves capital.
That’s why there’s no meaningful changes to the status quo for the working class unless on the back of a social movement. They don’t serve us, they keep us placated while they serve the people who pay them.
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