Yeah this meme is really stupid. I’m anti-Capitalism, but fascism doesn’t not do all that well in free markets. Nazis get deplatformed, demonetized. If you have money and influence, outing yourself as a Nazi is career suicide.
Fascism flourishes under a populist authoritarian leader, an obsession with national identity and the state, fear of an external boogieman, and a feeling that you’ve been oppressed but you’re about to get the reward you deserve.
This ironic statement is what is known as a thought-terminating cliche.
Here is the Wikipedia page so you can learn more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché
How is fascism a result of capitalism? It would exist just the same way without capitalism.
Imperialism is a result of capitalism…
When the resources of your home country are insufficient to feed the need for constant growth of profits, the resources of other people begin to look attractive. It’s just a matter of convincing your people that it’s worth it to go take those other people’s resources. Its easier to convince your people to exploit other people if you have dehumanized the other people, so you revert to racism and other tactics of making the others look like barbarians. Then you go make colonies and suppress the native population while exploiting them for labor and resources.
Fascism is imperialism turned inward…
Either the flow of resources from your colonies are insufficient to feed your need for the continual growth of profits or you don’t have the means to colonize far away lands, so the resources of countries closer to home begin looking very attractive. Its easier to suppress people at home first, so you turn that imperialist oppression on for a portion of your population at home, exploiting them more than other parts of your population. This doesn’t satisfy your needs for more resources for long, so you continue to exploit your own people more and expand the definition of who gets to suffer the imperialist oppression.
When your population can no longer satisfy your needs for continued growth of profits, you turn that imperialism on countries nearby. This process is why people say fascism is imperialism turned inward.
More food for thought…
Some argue this process is why Hitler and the Third Reich are looked on as the ultimate evil. The Nazis took imperialist oppression, a tool that every European country had historically only used on people in far away lands where the culture and the way the people looked was strange to the people at home and they turned that imperialist oppression on the white populations of Europe. Europeans finally began to experience the horrors they had been inflicting on the rest of the world for centuries.
What has me perpelexed is the fact that the USSR also did this, just to a slightly less genocidal degree - all the other SSRs largely served to supply the RSFSR, but some people do not consider it to be imperialist.
The greed for power and resources can stem from capitalism, but it really isn’t the only possible cause.
Okay… and what about Alexander, Ceasar, Ali, Genghis, Napoleon, and all the rest? The claim that empires are only motivated by profits is absurd.
None of them were fascist. Fascism is specific phase of development of capitalist system, as MeowZedong explained, it is not just when someone do conquests and/or kills many people.
Although the mechanism isn’t entirely dissimilar, all those you listed belonged to pre-capitalist levels of development (Napoleonic France was in progress of change but quite early) and are the effect of their societies reaching the boiling point of internal development saturation when it was ready for expansion, and also all of them followed earlier successes.
For comparison you might also add one of the most characteristical examples of Spain launching its global scale colonisation and conquests immediately after finishing centuries long reconquista.
Also note that neither of those cannibalised itself like fascism did, because they weren’t capitalist. They just ran out of the force driving them and either collapsed or stabilised on some level.
I’d say that, generally, imperialist motivation is a matter of gaining power. In a capitalist system, capital is power, so they are seeking capital.
The way I explained it was meant to break it down into a modern context to help answer the question, not to address imperialism in the context of feudalism or other systems. End of the day, someone is exploiting someone else for their own gain. It was just a matter of the context of the question and I erred on the side of keeping the scope within capitalism.
Imperialism is a result of capitalism…
The USSR would like a word
Everyone wants resources so the USSR stole some from poland and other countries for selfish reasons
Capitilism as we know it today (need for constant growth, etc) was only invented recently so for much of imperialist history capitilism didn’t exist.
Fascism is imperialism turned inward…
Fascism is when you when you give the government complete and utter control over everything. Of course that would lead to human rights abuse
Some argue this process is why Hitler and the Third Reich are looked on as the ultimate evil.
My great-grandpa was a holocaust survivor. Here are the key differences between Hitler and let’s say manifest destiny:
When the americans were manifest destinying they didn’t gas people to death just for being “inferior”
The Nazis were not anti certain groups they were anti people not part of certain groups. Sure the vast majority were Jews but a close second was russian civilians (not POW, just citizens). Disabled people were also killed. The total deaths, just for being “inferior” were 17,109,750–19,619,500
The Nazis killed people in the worst ways they could. They would either work people to death (not slavery, because at least in slavery your master would prefer you wouldn’t die)
The Nazis did stuff around the time everyone decided to stop being jerks. Slavery was mostly abolished by then, people mostly decided to not kill each other in wars. In fact - when Germany invaded France, some of their colonies left and formed “Vichy France” or “Free France”
And here is where it starts to get way, way worse - the reasoning for this. Hitler didn’t do this all for material profit. He did it because he believed that the “superior” Aryan race needed land (or “living space”) to expand. He exterminated people for their race because he didn’t want the people he called inferior to intermarry with the Aryans and cause the Aryans to become less pure
I could go on
Fair point about everyone wanting resources, but the question was about why people conflate capitalism with fascism. These comments are big enough as it is without starting a long-term discussion on the broader subjects of world history, politics, and economics.
To the topic at hand:
Your analysis fails to answer why members outside of the preferred races, etc, were chosen by the Nazis for exploitation. This isn’t about who was chosen or how they were chosen.
A large part of answering the question of “Why?” comes back to the economic depression experienced in Germany and other nations who turned to fascism at that time , how capitalist powers directly sided in them overthrowing labor movements and coming to power, and how racism was used as a tool to justify fascist action. I’m not arguing about how they chose different groups of people or denying that it extended beyonds Jews. That’s a larger topic than I was willing to go into for my comment and not particularly relevant. The holocaust was awful and they did truly vile shit. I’m not denying that in any way, those specifics just aren’t relevant to the question. For more info on this topic, I suggest the book “Black Shirts and Reds” by Michael Parenti.
This topic isn’t about holding a dick measuring contest for who suffered the worst atrocities. Was it the victims of Nazi Germany or American manifest destiny or French/English/Dutch/Spanish/etc colonialism? This is about WHY those things happened and WHY some of them stuck in the minds of the Western world better than others. It’s just like how everyone focuses on the atrocities committed in Europe during WWII, but they ignore the atrocities committed in Africa during the same time period. What were the material conditions of the time and the forces that drove these events to occur? If we can understand those things, we can act directly against those forces and prevent them from repeating the parts of our history that we find repulsive.
If you really do want to dig into the horrors of imperialism, you might want to start by taking a good look at American manifest destiny again because I assure you that it was no “nicer” than the holocaust. Are you aware that many of the holocaust practices were adopted as a result of studying American manifest destiny and that the Nazis came to the conclusion that some of those practices were too cruel? American manifest destiny was used as direct inspiration for the holocaust! Yes, I could go on and talk about the tragedies caused by imperialism across the global South as well, but the point of this conversation was to answer why does this happen so we can then determine how we can prevent it from happening again.
I think we should denounce the violence of imperialism no matter who was affected and work to prevent it from happening again no matter where it occurs. There are people who are directly affected by the remnants of manifest destiny and contemporary imperialism who live in our world to this very day. To deny that this is a result of our systems at work is a disservice to those people.
The argument is that as more people are harmed by capitalism and realize it’s flaws, the more likely the ruling class is to embrace fascism rather than let their ill-gotten gains slip away from them.
Definitely clumsy here, but I can make sense of it.
I mean, yes, but you should understand that when the creator of this meme wrote “capitalism” they really meant “liberalism” but didn’t want to scare the normies.
It’s not just about the ruling class, it’s about uncertainty leading people to look for “strongmen” to provide direction and certainty, no matter how false it is, creating the popular support needed to overthrow democratic institutions.
Strongmen like Lenin and Stalin who provided direction and certainty in uncertain times?
Or a strongman like George Washington?
Still doesn’t make much sense, fascism is a populist movement.
It would make way more sense if it said Feudalism instead. Keep the peasants in line with your armed militia class, eventually murder-robots. The peasants might be miserable, but they’re going to work the land because that’s they’re only choice to survive.
Re robots
We won’t need them to work the land. And we will starve them as they’ll no longer be needed. There will be two classes. The ruling class, and the maintenance class. And it’s timing is perfect considering that in about 100 years every population model says humans will go from 10 billion to less than 1 billion as quickly as our population grew. And it will coincide with extreme scarcity due to climate change. Unless we start nuclear war first, of course.
While fascism can exist without capitalism. when an unrecoverable economic crisis happens under a capitalist country and the system is not challenged, instead minorities like jewish people or immigrants take the blame
I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Fascism was a form of colonialism
Wow what an utterly ridiculous statement. No wonder it came from lemmygrad.
Are you joking? Every scholar of Fascism will tell you that Fascist Italy inherited numerous colonies from the prefascist period: the Dodecanese Islands, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, and arguably a portion of Tianjin, and later Fascist Italy added Fiume in 1924 and Albania, Ethiopia, and Tavolara in the 1930s. The very expression ‘mutilated victory’ was quickly adopted by the Fascists because they were outraged that the Kingdom of Italy didn’t gain more territory from World War I. Did you seriously not know this?
From the Dodecanese Islands to Libya, to Eritrea, the Italian state’s colonial holdings were testing grounds for strategies of governance and repression that would characterize [Fascist] domestic and occupied territories during World War II.13
(Source.)
More Lemmygraders? Yawn
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
Capitalism is financial, fascism is political. They can be concurrently implemented.
It’s an economic system that seeks to control the political system enough to further itself with no thought or care for anything that doesn’t fit that goal, in the same way a malignant cellular mass seeks to control the host environment enough to further unrestrained and out of control growth. Both kill the host.
You can’t meaningful separate these. Sure, capitalism is not mutually exclusive to say parliamentary democracy or dictatorship or monarchy, but you need a state that enforces the “will of the market”. Capitalism values property very highly. That’s a political decision. It allows a very hierarchical relation between workers and bosses by enforcing the property laws of the latter. At the end of the day, it’s the police (and therefore the state) that evicts you, not the landlord and not the market.
I think the argument is that economics and politics are not independent of each other. They are two sides of the same coin. Whomever controls the food supply has power over the population, which means it has political power. Whomever has power over the population, has power over the food supply. Basically, economics and politics are different perspectives on power.
For example, the political structures in the West create the rules over who gets to obtain power through the economy. From the other direction, the people with economic power get to control who gets to obtain power through the political structures.
Definitionally, anything that prescribes the way things are to be distributed is political. There has been a desensitization to the word politics with an ever present right using words loosely adjacent to their true meaning, but capitalism is inherently political. Now it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with western democracies kinda being formed around it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I sincerely doubt anyone would argue communism or socialism aren’t political because they are economic theories.
When you can be brainwashed that times are tough by a news organization…
