""Post Truth" politics"

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hmm, excellent point about the bank bailouts. And it's certainly true that "free trade" or the "free market" is a complete chimera.

I agree that neoliberalism isn't coherent/consistent, but you can say much the same thing about Fascism. I would say neoliberalism in itself is not really an ideology, more just an economic system, but that the conviction that it's the best or only way to run an economy constitutes an ideology of sorts.

Precisely. The aim of neo-liberalism is not to destroy the nation state, but to hollow it out so it solely serves market interests.

OK, so the nation-state is not destroyed wholesale but reduced to a sort of life support system for big business.

Edit: still, that's very different from nationalism, which aims to preserve and reinvigorate the cultural/religious/ethnic unity that nations were (once upon a time) defined by.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
But wasn't that unity of nations always just a narrative used to serve other ends anyways (imagined communities and all that)? In a way neoliberalism needs nationalist propaganda more than previous versions of capitalism, precisely because of the nation's hollowing out in reality. Fervent protestations that the nation is a real thing.

In terms of 21stC fascism and how its particular form of nationalist propaganda will play out, I think it's difficult to tell at this stage. And of course Marine Le Pen is very different from Donald Trump.
As a side point, it is interesting how much of the press wants to ascribe a clear, consistent ideological outlook to people like Le Pen and Trump. Seems like the political version of the intentional fallacy to me - these people are fucking mad, proper batshit crazy (whatever their technical skills in manipulation of the public) . As if to say, "if we can only understand the logic in what they're saying, then maybe we can somehow come to fight it or accept it"
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But wasn't that unity of nations always just a narrative used to serve other ends anyways (imagined communities and all that)?

As vim intimates, it depends on what you mean by a 'nation', a 'state' and a 'nation-state'. I'm sure being a Jute or a Pict or whatever really meant something to people in the days when they defined themselves as such, but that's many centuries before the rise of the nation-state in modern terms. And many of the indigenous ethnic groups in North America regard themselves as 'nations', although of course that's just an English translation of their own words.

Kings and governments may have encouraged a sense of nationhood when it suited their purposes (being at war with a foreign power, most obviously), but I think it's probable they were tapping into something that existed independently of that. It's a nice idea to think that people wouldn't have a concept of nationality were it not for the pernicious influence of self-serving elites, but that strikes me as a bit of socialist romanticism. (Although of course you could be saying the opposite, i.e. in the absence of central authority at a national level, we'd naturally exist in a situation of more or less constant micro-level mutual strife, clan against clan and village against village, which sounds like a fair description of life in a lot of present-day hunter-gatherer and pastoralist societies, actually.)

Seems like the political version of the intentional fallacy to me - these people are fucking mad, proper batshit crazy (whatever their technical skills in manipulation of the public) . As if to say, "if we can only understand the logic in what they're saying, then maybe we can somehow come to fight it or accept it"

I think looking for consistency in Fascism is a fool's errand, really. Italian Fascism grew in large part out of Futurism, which fetishized technology, industry and urbanism and scorned everything that was old-fashioned, slow, traditional and rustic. National Socialism grew out of a reactionary ecological cult which despised cities, intellectualism, industry and capitalism and valued 'traditional' country living, pre-Christian nature worship, handicrafts and organic food. And yet the Fascists co-opted the symbolism of ancient Rome and consciously set about ordering Fascist society as a modern-day reincarnation of the Roman Empire, while the Nazis became technologists par excellence because Panzers and Messerschmidts are superior weapons to swords and spears.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Bernie Sanders takes a similar view, incidentally. Here he is being interviewed by an incredulous Ezra Klein:

There was a time — I think under Roosevelt, maybe even under Truman — where it was perceived that working people were part of the Democratic Party. I think for a variety of reasons, a lot having to do with money and politics, that is no longer the case.

Money and politics. Yep, they're probably the main two factors here! :cool:
 

vimothy

yurp
There's some truth to the idea that the Jutes or Picts were nations - at least in the original (Roman) sense of the term, but clearly they were not nation-states. Equally, a state hollowed out by capitalism -- "so it solely serves market interests" -- might indeed be a state, but it has little to do with nations or with nation-states. Liberal capitalism, at least in the imagination of those who think about such things, has superceded nation-states, just as it has also superceded nations.

In the 19th century, Mazzini wrote of the citizens of the emerging nation-state of Italy,

They speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and express their idea; to contribute their stone also to the great pyramid of history.​

The emerging -- increasingly dysfunctional -- "market state" (Philip Bobbit) of 21st century globalised, liberal capitalism is another matter entirely.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
As you say with your reference to 'imagination', we're talking about large doses of fantasy and propaganda here in terms of nationalism and the upholding of the nation state, not an on-the-ground reality. Many would argue that this has always been the case. e.g according to Hobsbawn via Wikipedia, only 50% of the french people spoke French at the time of the French revolution. America has never been a coherent nation state in the way that many mean it, and 'Make America Great Again' is obviously incoherent because its underlying yearning is for a white America that never existed.

I didn't know who Mazzini was, but I read that he was an activist for Italian unity. Also a fantasist, cos apparently only 2.5% of the population could speak standardised Italian properly in 1861. Post-truth politics in the 19th century!

So we increasingly have the neoliberal market states/hollowed states/whatever we want to call them, but I don't see how that excludes an appeal to nationalism/the coherent state on the level of fantasy and propaganda - business as usual, basically, albeit in unusual circumstances. After all, it's a common occurrence that the parts of a country most concerned about immigration are those parts where there is least actual immigration. Nationalism is the objectionable glue that neoliberalism may rely on to hold barely functional states together, for a while at least.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
It's a nice idea to think that people wouldn't have a concept of nationality were it not for the pernicious influence of self-serving elites

Definitely not saying that (as tbf you suggested yourself), rather that that concept has been pretty strong through much of human history, and how else are you going to tie together the people who live on often arbitrarily defined land masses? The idea of nation has always involved a large quotient of fantasy, but the nation-state pushes the fantasy quotient into new realms.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I would like to hear more about this interesting theory that Fascism sprang largely from Futurism. Surely the most consequential artistic intervention in world history?
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Precisely. The aim of neo-liberalism is not to destroy the nation state, but to hollow it out so it solely serves market interests.

To paraphrase and sharpen (a bit) - the neoliberal agenda wants and needs the state and pretty much everybody to transform into a machinery serving specific market interests and the specific interests of a very small group - the 1-5 % of the really wealthy. Main aim - to sustain the 10+ % annual income growth for that said tiny group. In times of general weak growth rates for the last lets say 15 years (more or less) throughout the west this could only work by: tax the middle class/cut back on the welfare system/privatice former public services (railways, motorways etc) - this worked somehow up until now bc of the cheap goods imported from (mostly) asia which clouded the fact of decades of income stagnation for the majority of people in most of the OECD countries.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Ultimately any political regime that threatens neoliberal capitalism (in its current form, globalism) will be its enemy - like Nazism and Communism were.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
I would like to hear more about this interesting theory that Fascism sprang largely from Futurism. Surely the most consequential artistic intervention in world history?

Fascism was mainyl a reacton to the Russian/Soviet revolution and a reaction of disappointed Italian nationalists after WW1 which didn't bring them the gains they had expected. Couple this with a large group of brutalized men between 18-45.

Futurism and facism had overlapping aspects, but it was definitely not a crucial reason for Fascism to develop.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Any movement that claims the Jews are in charge of money is going to be antithetical to neoliberalist capitalism - as Richard Spencer is.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
It wasn't my theory Monsiuer Fire Finger, it was Mr Tea's. I'm waiting for the exposition.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I have a few quibbles with it actually, but not enough to sidetrack the main event, which is Mr Tea's new theory of the origin of Italian Fascism.

After that we'll move onto Nazism being an ecological movement.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I have a few quibbles with it actually, but not enough to sidetrack the main event, which is Mr Tea's new theory of the origin of Italian Fascism.

Ha, OK, I've set myself up for this, rather. "In large part" may have been an exaggeration, but I don't think it's considered controversial to say that Futurism was a significant influence on early Italian Fascism. The Futurists were all about POWER and VIOLENCE and MALENESS - remind you of anything? They scorned liberalism and democracy and thought women were basically pretty useless except for fucking and making babies. The movement's founder, Marinetti, co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto and founded a short-lived Futurist Party which soon merged with Mussolini's official Fascist militia movement (forerunner to the Fascist Party per se).

Where I think the movements differed is that Marinetti was very much put off by Fascism's use of Italy's historic past, and of the Roman Empire in particular, to instill a sense of national unity in a country that had, after all, only become one country just 50 years earlier, and he left the Fascists in a huff after just a couple of years as a result. He saw Fascism (as it should be) as an entirely revolutionary movement, and thought all the SPQR bollocks terribly reactionary. Having said that, I think he was much later semi-reconciled to Fascism and even briefly served in the army in WWII.

After that we'll move onto Nazism being an ecological movement.

Come on, this is textbook stuff! Blut und Boden, "racial purity", the obsession with "hygiene" - it's all there right from the start. Read this and check out this fascinating chap.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So you've got these two movements that started out poles apart and eventually converged to the point that, today, they're virtually synonymous. This happened over the course of the '20s and '30s, firstly due to Hitler's admiration for Mussolini, and then much later because of the Nazi influence on Italy when it became clear the latter was very much the junior partner in the alliance.

In particular, the racism in early Fascism was of a rather 'soft' and basically cultural kind, nothing like the pseudoscientific biological racism of the Nazis, and Mussolini in fact rejected the notion of biological race. They later adopted anti-Semitic laws but this was pretty much a German import and was widely unpopular.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
To be fair, I was being rude. But, yes, you did set yourself up for this by, I think, trying to be too clever in defining Fascism and Nazism by fairly esoteric influences and offshoots to the main movements, which where in Southern and Northern variants only tangentially influenced by or related to aesthetic, ecological, pagan and neo-classical movements, fascinating as these strands were. Power, race, militarism, nationalist statisism, were the fundamental blocks. Futurism was an old exotic add-on for the Fascists; kind of irrelevant for Mussolini, who had no time for Marinetti. The Nazis, by the time they took power, where a broad church, could indulge Himmler's weird esoteric fancies. But they were ultimately about power and race. That was their world view and motivation, not ecology, vegetarianism and Indian caste rules.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Also, you're correct to note that Italian Fascism was not, initially, anti-semitic, but it was racist and militaristic, as evidenced by the African campaigns.
 
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