T/S: Communism vs Fascism

plus also his "you have to choose" is bullshit (ts: western roman empire vs eastern roman empire) ---- we live in the shadow of the collapses of both projects

Burchill basically said sommat similar a few years back - basically, the aim of fascism was that lots of people would die, wheras that was a perverted side-effect of communism. On that basis, one could still hanker after the emancipatory ideals of communism as it went wrong, wheras fascism went according to plan.

xpost - I think Burchill sees fewer films and drinks more.

"Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature."

This is so neat an explanation, and it's the ur-Zizekian trick of taking a metaphor derived from psychoanalysis (usually Lacanian) and applying it to historical events. This is fun, but also illegitimate. Can you really apply "displacement" here? A lot of the time SZ makes no sense on second reading. "[T]he notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat." I don't really see where he actually argues this, but even if this 'notion' could be said to 'produce' conclusions, how can anyone rational state that 'even to compare the two' is to condone or somehow mitigate the horror of fascism, which is kind of what SZ is doing here...

kolko is an ultra-lefty also, but he's no way as ahistorically dewy-eyed about why the bolshies succeeded in russia

neither movement was remotely "on top of" the historical forces that formed them

one of the weaknesses of slavoj growing "under communism" is he never had to meet and argue with obnoxious but clever trots: his thumb-nail of "idealised stalinism" as "still part of the enlightenment project" is REALLY REALLY SILLY, unless "idealised" means "bears no relationship at any level to the reality"

conclusion: zizek and burchill both hopelessly lesser contributors to the common cultural weal since they stopped doin SPEED in mountainous amounts?

i think the 'enlightenment project' thing might be the real kicker: it just seems very broad a way of talking about stuff, i can't get a grip on it, and maybe it's a bit idealist to claim that all history is or is not 'of' this project.

my comparison would be the reformation and the 'counter-reformation'. no-one ever says that the latter was *all* about 'countering' the reformation; on the contrary, a lot of what the counter-ref ended up doing (for lots of contingent reasons, as with anything, example given: the october revolution) was similar to what the reformation itself achieved, whatever the rhetoric.

i couldn't summarize ept unfortunately, but the book really 'gets' the whole english-marxist-historian MO: him and christopher hill especially. it's a sort of after-the-fact manifesto. i think ept says that the substitution of 'theory' for history is wrong because even marx only reached 'marxism' by pretty hardcore footnoted research. iow marx was an historian, not a philosopher/theorist, and that you can't reach marxist conclusions just by applying the theory -- theory itself has to be distilled from the empirical.

he sort of reminds me of lindsay anderson: same temperament, at any rate, and LA's stuff appeared alongside EPT's in the old new left review. this could also lead to some pretty harsh assessments of '70s counter-culture!

it's a bit forgotten now but i think it wz catalytic far beyond its apparent (very muich overlooked and sneered-at) presence

is rudolf bahro still alive? what's he up to?

wikipaedia: "Bahro is seen by many as a pioneer of the democracy movement. However others have accused him of being too uncritical of the far right." Which in a nutshell is the whole stupidity of "YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE"

basically PA thinks the world is changed by vair vair clever ppl writing and reading books

i like the early NLR because it still has a fair relationship to non-NLR readers: in theory anyone could become an NLR reader, which mightn't be the case now. but it was a pretty weird generational decapitation, and the post-EPT NLR was always a bit removed from cultural movements, they sort of became objects for NLR to dissect rather than things which had at least *some* life and potential, like free cinema.

it's funny cz i'm basically pro (most of) the frenchies and perry et al were a vector they came in by - where thompson wz always a bit john bulldoggy abt em - but now they seem much more "stuck" and stale than EPT ever did: the WALL IS DOWN FOREVER PERRY!!

(of course EPT's achievement was to CREATE THE SPACE for the "new left" by editing the mag which ppl read as they all left the CPGB in 56-57 after hungary: it became NLR but i think its important work had kinda already been done)

actually i rate tom nairn (even if the pistols don't get into his book on anti-royalism)

it's true EPT (and hobsbawm, hill, ect) were a bit nonplussed by all this foreign muck -- wasn't all this 'hegemony' stuff basically implicit in good stout british stock like raymond williams? -- but eventually nairn and anderson more or less came round to some of his points.

the converse of EPT's john bull act was what isaac deutshcer (sp.) detected in nairn and anderson: "national nihilism". for NLR english marxism became a kind of dead zone which wasn't worth looking into: the whole edifice was rotten, so (eg) EPT had nothing to offer them, he was an emotionalist and a romantic. basically it's the conversion of NLR to althusser in the late '60s (a v. different proposition from gramsci or korsch or lukacs) that made EPT write 'PoT'.

by goofy hook and crook zizek is rilly just defending the enlightenment here (& arguing that that's a component element of "anti-fascist identity" which is much more debatable).

i like zizek but largely coz he's provocative on hegel and i've started to automatically draw little zizek-inspired diagrams of cheesy movie plots in my head when i watch them. on the politics qua such front he's obv. a self-professed do-nothing.

Is there an actual theoretical basis for Fascism, in the same way that Das Kapital is for Commumism. Why is there no Hitlerism, or Francoism?

I would assume that mussolini et al must have had some "theory" of some sort written down, but I can't recall ever reading about it anywhere.

Pro-war anti-Jewish writer Ernst Junger is seen as something as theoretical forefather as well, tho he had to undergo a bit of harassment once the Nazis actually got in.

Il Duce stole a lot of his economic ideas from syndicalism

The guy who came up with the concept of 'Lebensraum', IIRC, had a lot of his books banned/burned as well

Also isnt this;

"Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature."

basically the argument made by conservatives like Joachim Fest

(2 of the CRAZIEST, larger-than-life mofos produced by the 20th century.)

Now, TS: communism vs. consumer fascism?

Fascism is not an intellectual movement, so no. It is also not a coherent movement, so no one document could inspire it. I mean, a movement based on the idea that people in your country are better than people in other countries is not one that lends itself to universalist manifestos.

Why is there no Hitlerism, or Francoism?

these terms are sometimes used, when discussing the (large) differences between Fascist regimes. Especially Francoism.

I wouldn't be so sure of this. W.B. Yeats was quite fond of Eoin O'Duffy, for one. For a long time it was seen as the political expression of late nineteenth century irrationalism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.) but frankly, that's toss.

Also, 'not a coherent movement' as opposed to what? The Anarchist tradition doesn't exactly follow a straight line from Proudhon to Zapata. Karl Marx hammered together various nineteenth-century schools of thought with little respect for epistemological consistency: look how influential he was.

I don't think he's saying that communism beats fascism because "in theory" everyone is equal. I think he's observing the irony that beneath (and not in spite of but because of) the theoretical equality of communism there existed a much more random, unpredictable and therefore in some senses more dangerous form of social violence.

Finishing by saying that one has to make a choice doesn't seem at all like a theoretical conclusion but rather a self-consciously irrational insistence: after spending the entire article essentially agreeing with the idea that maybe communism (or at least stalinism) might actually have been historically more awful than fascism, he strategically refuses to actually adopt this conclusion (instead choosing the reverse) because he fears that doing so is playing into the hands of quasi-fascist conservatives (the bigger current "threat" than socialists).

There's an imaginary second half to this article where Zizek explains the obvious: that any attempt to analyse this "historical" question either conceals or neccessitates a position on current euro politics. The fact that Zizek has to artificially make his switch to anti-fascism (rather than arrive there cleanly by reasoning) is a symptom of the failure of the left to come to terms with Stalinism, the very malady he describes in the previous paragraph.

But Zizek is generally hamstrung on this question by his sympathy for Lenin - which leads him to try and relocate the moment of "perversion" of the "authentic" revolution (sorry for all the scare quotes) from bolshevism to stalinism, or at least later Lenin; he glosses over the fact that the authoritarian turn in marxism occurred much prior to the October Revolution. Laclau and Mouffe's description of how marxism necessarily became authoritarian probably provides a better vantage point for comparing comparing communism and fascism, but it sorta leads to the conclusion that Zizek is strenuously avoiding (ie. the one NRQ comes to at the end of his initial question) - under this explanation fascism isn't a reaction to communism; rather both are an attempt to recover from the failure of the working class to kickstart their own anti-bourgeois revolution by providing a different, militaristic adhesive for a populist movement.

I think it means he plans a takeover bid on the Centre for Football, and is slowly and carefully lining up the right institutional base from which to launch it.

I like Mark S's Peregrine post quite a lot.

I find it a pity that people go out of their way to attack Eagleton even when he's not the subject of a thread. But I distrust his admiration of Zizek, as I distrust Zizek, greatly. I have heard it quite reliably said that Zizek submits his copy in some kind of note form, and various hands need to salvage it into prose.

We had antifascists kick some fascists off the streets yesterday the gardaí had to baton charge the lefty muscle out of a poundshop in a rescus attempt it was heartening and energising stuff I thought the young left were all internet cuddles

now tell me this one thing is there a handy term for leftist muscle as a quick scope said that leftist fascism isnt an accurate term and its going to come up and I thought someone here would know

downloaded any good albums recently, darraghmac?

PC Thugs, the REAL fascists, etc iirc

now tell me this one thing is there a handy term for leftist muscle as a quick scope said that leftist fascism isnt an accurate term and its going to come up and I thought someone here would know

― broderick f (darraghmac), Sunday, February 7, 2016 4:00 PM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kinda funny that the answer to this turned out to be "antifa supersoldiers"

anyway I pick communism

Evo Morales says there can be no reconciliation with racists and fascists. pic.twitter.com/9kdQLOLdLX

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) September 20, 2021