nothing in this tweet is wrong per se but when I teach fascism, I always have students move past this stuff on the first week. And then to move into what fascism actually was in historical and political economic terms...

https://twitter.com/FinchelsteinF/status/1642242091530027013

... which is the most fruitful path to thinking about neofascism today. Without that, you end up with Arendt style all encompassing "totalitarian" analysis. Like this:

https://twitter.com/FinchelsteinF/status/1643228109213147136?s=20

Marx - middle class bohemian polymath

Engels - factory owner and manager

Lenin - middle class, paralegal

Luxemburg - middle class, economist

Mao - wealthy agrarian family, assistant librarian

Kautsky - middle class, journalist

Castro - wealthy family, aspirational athlete Fanon - middle class, psychiatrist

Trotsky - upper middle class, professional revolutionary

Cabral - wealthy family, agronomist

Che - bourgeois, doctor

Kollontai - aristocratic background, literary and political writer

Nkrumah - middle class, teacher

I don't want to pick on any one example of this sentiment per se since there are so many and so many varieties (if only X election had gone different, etc.) What people really need to understand is how the right-wing is achieving so much by _not_ thinking or acting this way.

https://twitter.com/JuddApatow/status/1540625435112996864

Yes, they do electoral work but also cultural work, intensifying right-tendencies in existing institutions or nurturing novel ones, from the Federalist Society to the Moral Majority to the Proud Boys, pushing its languages in media & also engaging in violent campaigns of terror.

I can't think of a single example of real, successful left politics, particularly on the scale of what climate mitigation and adaptation requires, that would pass this bizarre Kantian sniff test.

https://twitter.com/Leigh_Phillips/status/1442702281485406210

Even the most explicitly non-violent examples (like Satyagraha in the context of Indian independence) were part of a broad network of actors, some quite violent. Basically all world revolutions, radical transformatios, particularly anti-colonial are out.

Ok. So the thing that people keep missing here is that not only is Andreas' call for Palestine solidarity justified on its own grounds in this discussion, it's actually wholly ON topic in a panel on Climate, COVID, states, etc. /1

https://twitter.com/mattpetersonnyc/status/1393354836461162497

We should regard COVID as an example of already existing climate change which itself is caused by the functioning of actually existing capitalism. Dispossession of peoples, incorporating nature, accelerating extraction are merely intensifications of long standing trends. /2

Genuine curiosity: since rioting, looting, violence, etc. accompany the vast majority of social and political transformations in history, what is the actual threshold that 'rioting is always wrong / bad / counter-productive' types have for when it's good? like there must be some threshold or else you'd actually have to believe that _every_ revolution in history - even the mostly clean ones - were reprehensible crimes against humanity.

Oh hey, what's up Twitter? I've been away on work trips. Oh, we're having a semantic fight about "concentration camps" instead of actually addressing the rolling horror of daily life in 21st century capitalism. Ok, let's start. /1 First, literally nothing that @AOC said about concentration camps is "insensitive" or "inaccurate." It is historically accurate (as about a billion historians and Jewish studies scholars have already pointed out on here, including my colleague @suzy_schneider) /2