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French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his new government almost three months after a snap general election delivered a hung parliament.
The long-awaited new line up, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, marks a decisive shift to the right, even though a left-wing alliance won most parliamentary seats.
Despite the partnership between Macron’s centrist party and those on the right, parliament remains fractured and will rely on the support of other parties to pass legislation.
I keep wondering why and how it is that fascism is rising up so much. This is a serious question.
Because liberals in power would rather align with fascists than anyone to the left. Look at how US Democrats would rather debate the merits of executing abortion doctors than debate Medicare for All, how how UK Labour would rather argue whether transwomen should be allowed in public spaces rather than bringing back council housing. Corporate interests will always lead to fascism since it is the only way to continue selling the failed promises of capital
They always view those to the left as extremists who can’t be negotiated with, while those to the right are seen as useful idiots who can be exploited for political gain. See the conservative parties in Nazi Germany for how that “useful idiot” thing tends to work out.
It’s profitable to keep the left out of power as fascists will allow the rich to keep their wealth so long as they toe the party line and remain useful to the authority
Well, profitable in the short term. If the lowly peons don’t have money because you took it all, they cant spend it on stuff from your factories and your profit goes down and everything grinds to a halt. of course you can try to sell it to other countries, which fucks over their economies and makes them more susceptible to populism/facism (well after an initial phase of excitement over those sweet cheap imports) and then it’s facism all around and everyone is fucked. You just need to plan it well enough so you’re on your private island/mars colony with robot butlers by that point
Thinking ahead has never been the purview of the rich.
It’s moreso that they think “by the time shit hits the fan, I’ll be long dead anyway, so I don’t see why I should care”. Ergo, pure, distilled lack of empathy, a “fuck you, I got mine” aimed at the future of every living being in our planet.
This didn’t stop slavery last time, it won’t stop it again. They don’t need the peons as long as they maintain enough of a “middle class” of people who are paid just enough to feel as if they’re in touching distance of the top (temporarily embarrassed millionaires who in reality are much closer to homelessness) so they both continue to overconsume, and become reluctant to fight to change the status quo because it gives them the privilege of not being a slave. And it’s working.
Slavery in the US before the civil war didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were slaves in the south that didn’t consume anything, producing goods that in a large part were exported to britain. And the money from that was used to buy more slaves and land. But some of it was used to buy goods and expertise from the north that the slave economy was lacking, which in turn drove industrialization in the north.
But i stand by my point that over time the artificially low prices due to slave labor causes outflows of money from the rest of the world, depriving workers in other countries of money/wages and causing them to spend less. So all those slaves would overproduce things that there isn’t demand anymore and it’s still worse for the rich fucks than if they had paid slaves a fair wages.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying such a system can’t exist or work, just that in the long run it’s worse for everyone, even the rich who thrive on exploiting poor people.
Sadly the billionaire class don’t seem to understand this and there’s not much to do other than teaching them by force every 50-150 years.
Neither is what’s happening today (more like has continued to happen since), and now there are literally billions more people available to exploit.
Only they wouldn’t continue to produce things there wasn’t a market for, so capitalists either continue investing trillions in to advertising and other ways to create a market and propagandise people to overconsume, and or diversify what they produce/commodify, like they have over and over and over again.
This is where you’re most mistaken:
A. they understand perfectly well, they just don’t care. You really don’t seem to have a great understanding of how the super rich become, and stay that way.
B. there is plenty to do, it just requires working outside of the rules those in power have set out for society. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without capitalism (E: or even its predecessor, feudalism), the idea that we must accept it as some inevitable fact, submit to it and just let it deteriorate to fascism once or twice a century and then just slap it on the wrist and wait for the next time is defeatist and honestly a little pathetic.
They have most of the money they’ll just sell stuff to each other. Profits stay up and the pooor get nothing.
A prime example of this is the current Finnish government. The traditionally moderate right-wing party has allied itself with the more extreme populist right-wing party. And even though the moderate party won the most votes. It is the populist party that seems to be making all the important decisions. All the while they are both dismantling the welfare system that allowed Finland to become what it is.
That is what is happening everywhere. I don’t understand does that mean all the moderate right people where just faking for votes.
The main political difference between Neoliberalism and Fascism is the order at the very top of the power pyramid:
For both the rest of the pyramid - I.e.citizens - are only there to produce wealth for the top.
Whilst it’s much more obvious to people that Fascism wants to control them because the Fascist State cannot allow itself to be controlled by the populous via elected leaders, Neoliberalism keeps the vote as a sort of meaningless ritual were people elect “leaders” (and generally the “choices” offered are carefully selected) for an entity which is not the one that actually controls things so de facto the vote controls little or nothing and all the Neoliberals have to worryabout is to stop any politicians who would actually try to undo the Neoliberalist structure (which is why you see things like transnational Trade Treaties which require countries to practice elements of Neoliberalism, sometimes even including element such as “arbitrage” courts explicitly placed above all sovereign power including the highest courts of a land).
It is the end result of capitalist exploitation. Liberal democracies cannot stop this process through voting.
Least of all American Democracy. Even if we have the numbers, the system is abysmally unfair, always canted in the rightward direction. Even when the country elects the least right leaning option the country ratchets to the right. After Obama less dems were anti war. With Biden now more Democrats are for Republican style border control. Even winning is a losing strategy long term.
I can only speak for the UK but since the 2009 banking crisis the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. Meanwhile the press have very successfully focused attention on to migrants.
A lot of people truly believe that they are poor, not because the richest are picking their pockets, but because the poorest are.
Social media is one of the main reasons.
this is happened before after a capitalism crisis
The Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay -R. Palme Dutt would be a good place to start.
Follow the money. 💰