Thread by @EmpireinWinter

'...can you explain why you think the description of an essentially fascist anti-Green Pass movement is misleading?'
illwill.com/conspiracy-and…

'We harshly criticized the majority of the grassroots left...for focusing any talk exclusively on the virus and the risk of infection, while saying very little about the government managing the pandemic in irrational, unjust, hypocritical and even criminal ways.'

'Faced with street protests against the pass — but which are actually directed against the entire management of the pandemic by the past two governments — the neoliberal mainstream immediately resorted to the reductio ad Hitlerum...'

In the 'Komintern of the 1930s and the Kominform of the 1940s....Stalinists described Trotskyists as "trotsko-nazis," Social Democrats as "Social-Fascists," and later Yugoslav Communists as "Tito-Fascists."'

'In this early post-pandemic phase such reductio ad Hitlerum in fact plays to the favor of neofascists, by exaggerating their role. In many anti-pass rallies, fascists are absent or irrelevant, in others they're present and obviously they try to do their dirty maneuvers. '

'It didn't take us by surprise that those demonstrations expressed hostility towards "the Left." By now, to many Italians, "the Left" means the Democratic Party, that is, a neoliberal party which the popular masses rightly recognize as an enemy. '

'That's where you can find the Party's constituency: a pretentious and hypocritical upper middle class flaunting the remnants of an old "intellectual" status and an increasingly moderate leftish identity. In actual reality, they're disgustingly elitist'

'One needn’t be a fascist to hate this "Left." And we can't even blame those who don't see a different one....given that many self-described "radicals" share with the mainstream Left a whole lot of its flaws: a bourgeois background, elitism, cultural arrogance...etc.'

'the Pass is just a way for the Draghi government — which continuously legitimizes itself with a "war on the virus" framework — to offload all responsibilities on the population while pursuing its policy of social butchery.'

'While we fix our gaze on the virus, the government and the bosses are slaughtering us.'

'It also makes little sense to philosophize on the alleged misuse of the term "freedom" by many demonstrators...."right-wing libertarian" or "anarcho-capitalist" that certain intellectuals applied to the mobilization completely miss the mark, as do the comparisons with Trump'

'More often than not, those people are not really just talking about "freedom": they're talking about their own proletarianization. Most members of the precarized, impoverished, frightened middle class never mastered the language of social struggle...'

'In their eagerness to distance themselves from the squares, certain "leftist" milieus that spend their time predominantly on social media expressed utter disdain for “personal freedoms,” which they consider “bourgeois” freedoms. Again, nothing new: '

'there are traditional strands of the left in which freedom has always been talked about with sufficiency and contempt. Eventually, they will lead us to the gulag. '

'Individualism and egoism are one thing, the sphere of autonomy that each human being must enjoy is another. There's an existential habeas corpus without which life is not life anymore.'

'Those who abandon this distinction fall into a terrible confusion and end up espousing authoritarianism, moreover authoritarianism under capitalism, without even the excuse of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."'

'In this context, "freedom" may also mean the freedom to be together, to act collectively, to demonstrate. To dismiss all this as simply "fascist" is at the very least a sign of ideological obtuseness.'

Ottawa bound?
'The representation of anti-pass demonstrations as controlled by fascists was dominant until three weeks ago, then there was a drastic change in perception. The media started pointing fingers at "leftist extremism," the danger of a return of the "Black Bloc"'

'the police attacked and dispersed the crowd using water cannons & tear gas...by the most pro-corporate & neoliberal government in Italian history, a govt. presided over by the former head of the European Central Bank...who orchestrated the strangulation of Greek society. '

'Especially — though not only — in Europe, future uprisings will be increasingly "impure" and startling, at least at their inception. This was already clear to anyone who observed the Yellow Vests in France in 2018. '

'Struggles will be impure because the subjects who will start them lack the background we're at ease with: memory of the workers' struggles & social movements, class consciousness....[Yet] lack of memory will also exempt those struggles from following pre-established patterns. '

'The protagonists of the next waves of social conflict will often be "biconceptual," i.e. split in half between their new proletarian — and even precarious — condition, and a residual bourgeois mentality.'

'As...George Lakoff says, we can speak to "biconceptuals" by addressing the part of their mind that they have in common with us. We will have to "speak" to their suffering of the new material conditions, to their actual feelings, to their anger against the system'

'If we don't, only fascists and other reactionaries will do it, addressing the other part of their mind, the rancorous nostalgia for bourgeois white privilege. '

'At that point the ruling class, in order to conceal its responsibility in what was happening, put in place a series of diversions based on the most classic neoliberal ploy...any responsibility for contagions was offloaded onto the individual and individual behaviors.'

@threadreaderapp unroll