It's an economic system that seeks to control the political system enough to further itself with no thought or care for anything that doesn't fit that goal, in the same way a malignant cellular mass seeks to control the host environment enough to further unrestrained and out of control growth. Both kill the host.
The argument is that as more people are harmed by capitalism and realize it's flaws, the more likely the ruling class is to embrace fascism rather than let their ill-gotten gains slip away from them.
Definitely clumsy here, but I can make sense of it.
I mean, yes, but you should understand that when the creator of this meme wrote "capitalism" they really meant "liberalism" but didn't want to scare the normies.
It's not just about the ruling class, it's about uncertainty leading people to look for "strongmen" to provide direction and certainty, no matter how false it is, creating the popular support needed to overthrow democratic institutions.
Still doesn't make much sense, fascism is a populist movement.
It would make way more sense if it said Feudalism instead. Keep the peasants in line with your armed militia class, eventually murder-robots. The peasants might be miserable, but they're going to work the land because that's they're only choice to survive.
When the resources of your home country are insufficient to feed the need for constant growth of profits, the resources of other people begin to look attractive. It's just a matter of convincing your people that it's worth it to go take those other people's resources. Its easier to convince your people to exploit other people if you have dehumanized the other people, so you revert to racism and other tactics of making the others look like barbarians. Then you go make colonies and suppress the native population while exploiting them for labor and resources.
Fascism is imperialism turned inward...
Either the flow of resources from your colonies are insufficient to feed your need for the continual growth of profits or you don't have the means to colonize far away lands, so the resources of countries closer to home begin looking very attractive. Its easier to suppress people at home first, so you turn that imperialist oppression on for a portion of your population at home, exploiting them more than other parts of your population. This doesn't satisfy your needs for more resources for long, so you continue to exploit your own people more and expand the definition of who gets to suffer the imperialist oppression.
When your population can no longer satisfy your needs for continued growth of profits, you turn that imperialism on countries nearby. This process is why people say fascism is imperialism turned inward.
More food for thought...
Some argue this process is why Hitler and the Third Reich are looked on as the ultimate evil. The Nazis took imperialist oppression, a tool that every European country had historically only used on people in far away lands where the culture and the way the people looked was strange to the people at home and they turned that imperialist oppression on the white populations of Europe. Europeans finally began to experience the horrors they had been inflicting on the rest of the world for centuries.
What has me perpelexed is the fact that the USSR also did this, just to a slightly less genocidal degree - all the other SSRs largely served to supply the RSFSR, but some people do not consider it to be imperialist.
The greed for power and resources can stem from capitalism, but it really isn't the only possible cause.
Neoliberalism is agnostic to the form of government so long as profit keeps moving. Business is still done in the worst countries. And that keeps capital voting with their wallets for an increase in evil.
While fascism can exist without capitalism. when an unrecoverable economic crisis happens under a capitalist country and the system is not challenged, instead minorities like jewish people or immigrants take the blame
I dont think that is generally true. It may have happened in the past and may also happen in the US, but the opposite can happen with people turning to socialism like in many countries. In times of crisis people turn to extremes, but that doesnt mean it has to be fascism.
Yeah this meme is really stupid. I'm anti-Capitalism, but fascism doesn't not do all that well in free markets. Nazis get deplatformed, demonetized. If you have money and influence, outing yourself as a Nazi is career suicide.
Fascism flourishes under a populist authoritarian leader, an obsession with national identity and the state, fear of an external boogieman, and a feeling that you've been oppressed but you're about to get the reward you deserve.
I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” They haven't changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Are you joking? Every scholar of Fascism will tell you that Fascist Italy inherited numerous colonies from the prefascist period: the Dodecanese Islands, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, and arguably a portion of Tianjin, and later Fascist Italy added Fiume in 1924 and Albania, Ethiopia, and Tavolara in the 1930s. The very expression ‘mutilated victory’ was quickly adopted by the Fascists because they were outraged that the Kingdom of Italy didn’t gain more territory from World War I. Did you seriously not know this?
From the Dodecanese Islands to Libya, to Eritrea, the Italian state’s colonial holdings were testing grounds for strategies of governance and repression that would characterize [Fascist] domestic and occupied territories during World War II.13
I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.
He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It's very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.
The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!
But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:
It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn't even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they'll define those freedoms differently.
It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it's almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.
It's a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.
When wearing a mask from time to time for a few months in certain places is your life’s persecution story you know you’re a spoiled diva.
Only one variant had mask requirements btw. And it was while millions of people were dying and out hospitals were at max capacity, and people without Covid couldn’t get basic treatment.