Palestine Part 3: 21st Century Fascism and Capitalist Horrors Without End
New Crawdads and Taters episode!
Sorry I haven’t been able to post anything recently - we put a ton of work into this episode. I will be posting more on the Substack soon, but for now, I hope you will listen to this.
Episode Description by Erin “Crawdads” McCarley:
In this episode, we talk again about Fascism because we have entered into a Primary Election cycle where leftists of all stripes will once again be cajoled, harassed and even trolled by the neoliberal establishment to Vote Blue No Matter Who– in order to avoid Donald Trump and “Fascism.”
Many liberals feel entitled to attack leftists at election time because by their shallow, liberal definition, fascism is simply a right-wing ideology that is embodied by Donald Trump. But what the liberal establishment fails to understand time and time again is that fascism is not just an ideological project, but it is economic and political project, which is the inevitable result of working-class repression under neoliberal capitalism.
Looking at fascism's economic and political roots, we can see that what is actually pushing the world toward fascism is not simply a bunch of right-wing ideologues who just appeared out of nowhere. The breeding ground for fascism, the underlying conditions for fascism, rest within a global capitalist economic structure where the transnational capitalist class helps decide government agendas… the Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma… These are transnational entities whose profit mandates influence and control government policies.
And this kind of global political economy not only leads to huge concentrations of wealth at the very top of society. It also leads to mass poverty at the bottom– all over the world. And this social inequality breeds class war, which results in a perfect breeding ground for the ideology of fascism to take hold. So voting for Joe Biden will not stop fascism. And until we address the root causes of fascism, we will not be able to reverse this counter-revolutionary cycle.
Apropos to your notice I had a recent exchange of posts on Mastodon.social (for some definition of social) that followed the script you laid out.
Robert Reich posted a short video warning how Donald Trump was creating a distortion field by unfairly pointing out weaknesses in President Biden only to mask his nefarious fascism.
You only get 500 characters in a text box for a reply on Mastodon.social which includes the handle of the poster to whom the reply is directed.
So my reply started with the obvious that Mr. Reich himself was distorting reality. To buttress this provocative charge I pointed out the damage inflicted by the lack of a single-payer health system.
Now my pull in social media is extremely weak. Few follow me, but one non follower favored my post.
In less than the space of a day another reply proffered the thesis that a vote for anyone but Biden, or indeed not voting, was a vote for fascism.
With only 500 words I made the point that we are already living in a fascist state. Our government is abetting the genocide in Gaza and that is fascism in action.
My interlocutors ignorance of the fact that we do not directly elect Presidents is clear evidence that most citizens have no understanding of the concept of democracy and the weird perversion of it in our republic.
In closing, for those mortified by this post let me state clearly that both Trump and Biden are fascists.