Also, in b4 fascists start pretending like the Stalinist bootlicker Thalmann hadn’t spent the past half-decade backstabbing and burning bridges with the SPD, which had previously been cooperative with the KPD after the establishment of the Weimar Republic.
Collapse theory is fundamentally a privileged take. It is a position that is impossible to accept without either the assumption that you’d survive, or the assumption that the disproportionate harm to the disadvantaged is worth it for your end goals even if you die too.
Either way, you’re declaring that your paradise can and should be built over the bodies of the disemprivileged, and are automatically wrong and a horrible person for even being able to think that way.
You are the exact kind of monster that built the colonialist model of Israel, just insisting that your nation built on the bodies of the innocent will be a more moral one somehow.
Collapse theory is fundamentally a privileged take
It’s definitely a white-male-privileged take in the US.
It also just doesn’t make sense from a logistics sense – You want to address the current set of big problems by … creating more big problems to address with the same/less resources and organizations? Some that are more time sensitive than others?
What is this “collapse theory”? I’d like to learn more, but Google is only providing me links about quantum waves.
I think the usual term is Accelerationism?
it’s the idea that we should accelerate the collapse of society so “our” preferred system can replace it. Doesn’t matter who the “our” encompasses.
Honestly, the appeal of accelerationism to me is that it pretty much just requires me to give up.
I don’t think i’m the only one with a looming anxiety that capitalists are too entrenched to be defeated, that i can’t stop the ongoing collapse of society; well if i believe in accelerationism, then i don’t have to, the collapse becomes desireable if i can convince myself that a better world will emerge on the other side. It’s faster and easier to let society destroy itself than it is to built.
While my privilege is undeniable, subjectively, my emotional experience of accelerationism is one of giving up and relaxing. Which, you know, would feel nice sometimes.
So i know at least one source of accelerationist sentiment is rooted in fatigue and impatience, i know that because it’s the one i experience. The answer is an ongoing realization that progress is incremental.
You realize your life would be worse if society collapsed and then be vastly more stressful, right?
Then Thälmann was arrested and shot and killed in a death camp 11 years later…
Well he was in a DEATH camp. I can’t imagine he thought he would live through it.
Accelerationism is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of.
Right, because if there was enough support for your stance that you could ensure it would prevail in the post collapse struggle, then you could almost certainly achieve it with democratic support instead.
If half the country hadn’t been brainwashed to vote against their own best interests I’d agree with you.
I mean it is like wanting the cold war to end with nuclear weapons. No one wins and we all die. Even the preppers who built bunkers back then would not survive for long, and this is assuming they survive the initial blasts.
Correct.
“Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil.”
You have a duty to ensure the least amount of harm is being done.
Saving three people out of ten is better than saving zero out of ten.
Rewatched the divergent series recently, in the last movie there’s an exchange between two characters that goes roughly like this:
“If you only had enough to save one, would you choose a sick, dying old man or the young boy?”
“I wouldn’t choose”
“Oh good, now they’re both dead.”
Sounds like Accelerationism. It’s stupid, but not fascism.
Stalinists are absolutely fascists. Accelerationism is just the preferred technique.
I don’t like these “polemic” definitions. I neither like the marxist-leninist definition (everything not socialism is fascism) nor the idea that any state-socialism is fascism, even if it becomes authoritarian or totalitarian.
The best definition for fascism I recently learned is “A belief in inequality based on a mythological identity” (like for example race or gender). See this book: What Is Fascism? An Excerpt From “Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It”
What I call socialists who insist on principles and advocate for supporting fascism is “stupid entitled children”. But they are not really the problem. We just saw in France that the centrists there rather cooperate with fascists than with socialists.
