Thread by @terrorhousemag

HEY KIDS! History lesson time!

What do you call a political system where corporations from Google to Facebook to Delta and Coca-Cola work hand-in-hand with the president/ruling party to suppress criticism and punish the ruling party's enemies?

Answer: FASCISM!

"Democrats are the REAL fascists!"

Mock the line all you want; it's true. The system being set up by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party is the literal dictionary definition of fascism, shorn of its triggering elements and made safe for the mulch-brained masses.

"But isn't fascism racist?"

Nah. Plenty of non-fascist racist regimes. The Jim Crow South was plenty racist, but it wasn't fascist. It was a democratic republic with constitutionally guaranteed human rights.

Moreover, many fascist regimes WEREN'T mindlessly racist. Fascist Italy, for example, treated its Jewish population kindly. Mussolini even had a Jewish girlfriend at one point. The Croatian Ustase genocided Serbs but privileged Bosnian Muslims.

"But isn't fascism nationalistic?"

Nah. Every state with a vested interest in its survival fosters nationalism/patriotism/chauvinism of some kind. Was the Soviet Union a fascist state because it encouraged patriotism based in the workers' revolution? LOL no.

"But isn't fascism about a dictator controlling everything?"

BZZT! Wrong again. If you're going to define a sociopolitical system based on this heuristic, then it expands to include everyone from Idi Amin to Kim Jong-un, making it basically worthless.

No: the dictionary definition of fascism is the marriage of corporate power and state power to the point where there's no meaningful distinction between them. That's what happened in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It's what's happening in the U.S. right now.

The communists are *ALMOST* right when they say fascism is capitalism in decay.

It'd be more accurate to say fascism is the natural endpoint of managerialism, the system of economic organization that's dominated the world since the 1930's.

James Burnham predicted this in THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION, written in 1940. He observed that the increasing scale of society made capitalism obsolete and socialism impossible, giving rise to the managerial class: the middlemen (CEOs, bureaucrats etc.) who grease the gears.

Managers are not capitalists in the Marxist sense (Burnham was a Trotskyite and wrote THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION from a Marxist perspective). Capitalists own the means of production. CEOs and bureaucrats don't own the corporations etc. they work for, yet they have all the power.

Managers possess their own class consciousness independent of the countries they hail from. Managers feel more loyalty to foreign managers then they do to their own countrymen and work to that effect. Sound familiar?

Burnham predicted that as managerialism advanced, political and economic power would shift to unelected bureaucrats and executive leaders (i.e. presidents) and that the distinction between the public and private sectors would disappear.

Let's see...who runs the country right now? Unaccountable corporations and the executive branch working hand in hand. Managers, in other words, implementing fascism. An anti-racist, LGBT-friendly, progressive fascism, but fascism all the same.

Like all systems in decline, managerialism has turned to increasing repression to maintain control. And like capitalism collapsed, managerialism will eventually collapse as it proves incapable of meeting the challenges of a changing world.

World War I ended capitalism. The laissez-faire society of Andrew Carnegie and Cecil Rhodes was discredited by that meat-grinder war. It left the great capitalist empires of Britain and France totally broken.

World War II was a war between two competing visions of managerialism: the repressive, cartoonish jingoism of the Nazis vs. the U.S.' smiley internationalist pretentions. Burnham observed the similarities between Hitler's and FDR's approach to economics.

What will end managerial fascism? A new world war? An actual plague? The reversal of the magnetic poles? Who knows. But systems in decay never go quietly.