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People died while trying to get better, more humane working conditions.
I tend to think we forget that things we enjoy today were won through, sometimes violent, struggle, and we take them for granted, what makes it easier to lose them.
To me this is one of the most important celebrations.
One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
I don't know if that's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_season_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_and_Girls_(The_Office)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Rae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Chavez_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Waterfront
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn_(film)
But it's true the topic hasn't been en vogue for a while.
Kudos for mentioning the second season of The Wire. At first, when watching the season, the theme felt misplaced, but it ended up being a very well done sociological exploration on deindustrialization. Given the current geopolitical issues it seems relevant even in contemporary times.
I already knew before watching the show that each season focused on a different aspect of Baltimore; though I didn't know any spoilers or major plot points. So I wasn't as thrown as most first-time viewers always seem to be. I quite liked it my first time.
I've never heard of any of those, so maybe it is true?
Literal Oscar-winners, critic favorites, and even a mass-market sitcom (just added it because I thought of it after writing the comment) on that list. Maybe you're not into pop culture?
One of the movies you're talking about is from 1954. No need for the snark. If you are going back 70 years, i don't think you can call it modern pop culture anymore. If instead you said, people into movie history, then sure.
Some of them are more recent, but even the most recent movie (the Chavez one) is over a decade ago, got panned by critics and looks to be a relatively low budget film. The sort of thing people into pop culture are likely to not know about.
I think the fact you can't find anything this decade is pretty telling
I wasn't being snarky. The Wire is the embodiment of prestige television drama. There's nothing wrong with not being into TV.
I also admitted the topic hasn't been popular of late. Your comment didn't say anything about recency. It's likely that the dwindling percentage of Americans in unions has something to do with fewer recent depictions of labor struggles in TV and movies.
Cynical me suspects that the large corporations who get to decide which TV show or feature films get to be made are opposed to depicting workers organising and acting on behalf of their collective interest. This seems to be particularly true in America more so than Europe, e.g, Brassed Off, a British film from the mid-nineties realistically displays working class culture associated with labour unions at a time when the unions were struggling against the closure of the coal pits. Interestingly, according to its Wikipedia article¹, “In the United States, the film was promoted simply as a romantic comedy involving McGregor and Fitzgerald's characters.”
On the other hand, Season 4 of For All Mankind depicted a strike of private sector workers in such an unrealistic, ham-fisted way that it couldn’t be taken seriously – much like many of the other half-assed story-lines that were crammed into the show for Seasons 3 and 4.
Hollywood is completely dominated by liberal progressives, wtf are you talking about?
Progressive socially =/= labor friendly/left wing political views. The executives running things are always going to be in favor of increasing their profits over anything else. Strong labor protections/rights usually get in the way of that. This also applies to a large portion of wealthy people in general, and there are many of them in Hollywood.
The talent? Sure they're probably liberal. The bosses? Not a chance.
It's a very very messy process and most of the time doesn't end well because of the power imbalance. Larger the worker group more the disagreements amongst them too. My Dad was a factory manager and I grew up running around the factory, playing with workers, they would help me on my school projects etc. The same guys beat my Dad up during one particular strike. Many of them got arrested and we had a cop outside our house for months.
The 2014 film [Pride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)) is probably the best example of this reality you're describing; there are indeed few movies about workers' struggle.
Labor struggles are a central theme of Disco Elysium
DS9 episode is worth it just for “He was more than a hero, he was a union man.”
I love the juxtaposition with the character Meaney played on Hell on Wheels
>One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
Same reason all sorts of other stuff has gone nearly extinct.
Mainstream entertainment media is subject to the same eyeball-hour based economics as everything else and that content doesn't resonate with enough people.
Given how every second piece of mainstream entertainment is about sticking it to the man, i find that reasoning a little uncompelling.
You can't make a hollywood movie or expensive TV series or other top tier content about something that can't be repackaged and resold to foreign audiences.
China would love an American movie about the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie.
(I think that’s the real reason these movies don’t get made: they’re too “Communist” for American audiences.)
Such films might be too “communist” for Americans but they would definitely be too “communist” for the current Chinese Communist Party. They might call themselves communists or socialists but the last thing they want is for Chinese workers to get ideas about organising autonomously and collectively. The last time this happened in 1989, they were ruthlessly crushed by the dominant, conservative wing of the CCP.
https://jacobin.com/2019/06/tiananmen-square-worker-organiza...
Yeah they jail communists now. They went full totalitarian.
Communist regimes jail communists too.
Are you sure the tail isn't wagging the dog?
This is a US-specific take. European cinema, especially French but also Italian have many many films depicting strikes, as the main plot.
It's not explicitly pro-union, but this made me think of the Dolly Parton song "9 to 5": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbxUSsFXYo4
Apparently it was written for the movie of the same name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_to_5_(film)
The wonderful movie Billy Elliot takes place against the backdrop of the 1984-85 UK miners’ strike, probably the most significant labour struggle in modern British history.
Although it might not be the type of movie you’re looking for, because the miners lost.
And because the miners were causing power blackouts in the UK, and they were far, far less efficient than overseas sources, or alternatives to coal-fired power stations.
I'd say it was The Full Monty and Brassed Off. I'd say it was almost a mini-genre at the start of the Blair years.
There's also Made in Dagenham. There's probably lots of french language films with workers struggle. The one that springs to mind is the hilarious satire Louise-Michel
Severance quietly covers the topic. The conversations in season 1 on the Macrodata refinement uprisings and that big painting of the event come to mind.
> maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion
For reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Association_(Star_Trek:_De...
I'm not sure I agree DS9 treated it in all that silly fashion, beyond involving the Ferengi's. It's part of what makes Rom's arc one that shows the greatest character development in Trek.
It's also one of few depictions of strikes in US TV that treated the strikers with substantially more sympathy than their counterpart. Incidentally, this is another parallel to Babylon 5, which also had a strike, and were the negotiator that was brought in was a really unsympathetic caricature.
DS9 even managed to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, and still painted the strikers in a good light.
I agree its important to rom's arc, and in general is a good episode. However it definitely gave me the vibe of "oh look how cute, he wants rights". There was something a bit condescending about it.
You're right though, its definitely better than the babylon 5 episode.
I think in isolation it does have that vibe, and had it been left effectively as a bottle episode, it would have, but given we see Rom increasingly stand up for himself and make a mark as a reformer, it gets redeemed by the rest of the arc.
I also kinda like the Babylon 5 episode, but it has an entirely different feel to it, and the way it is resolved does make it weaker overall - it's the captain rather than the strikers that seal the win. The main strength of the Babylon 5 episode is that caricature of the negotiator and the visual presentation of the conflict, that feels like it is referencing an old-fashioned way of presenting conflict in US media that is made toothless by focusing on the anger while giving little play to the issues. Only in the Babylon 5 case, the extreme caricature of the negotitator gives him the more negative portrayal often given to strikers.
The premise of Star Trek kind of is 'what if we reached communism and hence could science up actual space travel?', which DS9 somewhat digresses from by having these episodes about social struggle like the bar strike and the battle of the sanctuary district as well as the genocide arcs.
It speaks to the foundational values of the franchise being widely accepted that the strike episode is what is remembered as the labour thing, as if a lot of people would like the results of an egalitarian society but have been taught that the means to achieve it are somehow controversial.
If you're still inventing and discovering things, you probably don't have communism, because not all inventions are distributed equally (straight away) and not all places can be shared by all people.
Communism does not require equal distribution. In fact Marx argued communism explicitly requires unequal distribution.
In Critique of the Gotha Program he outright ridiculed what is now the German SDP for demanding that "the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society".
He went on to write: "Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
Later in the same text he then reiterated the traditional socialist slogan, that explicitly also rejects equal distribution: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Communism is a society without class stratification, capital and money. I'm not sure how you come from this to that conclusion about "inventions".
For one the slogan of communist movements tend to be 'from each according to ability, to each according to need', and secondly it is more likely that a communist society would use scientific academies or committees rather than rely on inventors to accomplish technological or other achievements.
Over the Top (1987) with Sylvester Stallone comes to mind
The resolution to that BSG episode was, also, on-the-nose consistent to its resolution for most of its political crises - everyone needs to sit down and shut up and get in line, because despite the veneer of representative government, they are living in a military dictatorship, where decisions are solely at the whims of Adama.
Who, despite all his flaws, (unlike the president, generally speaking) is not a bad person. But is very much a dictator (which was his job as the commander of a military vessel).
The biggest problem with that episode is not the ending per se, but that there were no lasting consequences.
Everyone went back to being friends the next episode.
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"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
I’m thankful that the career I’ve had helped me learn about the organizations that had an impact in that history and a new lens to see the world with.
The US minimum wage is at $7.25 per hour since..24 Jul 2009, that is 16 years ago. Taking into account cumulative inflation US workers enjoy now about 68 % of the 2009 purchasing power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
The vast majority of US workers live in jurisdictions with higher minimum wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_states_by_minimum_w...
In the biggest state with just the federal minimum wage, Texas, individual income percentile of $20k per year ($10 per hour/40 hour work weeks/50 weeks per year) is 20th percentile. That will capture all the part time workers too, so it seems the lowest priced labor in most US labor markets is disjoint from the federal US minimum wage.
https://dqydj.com/scripts/cps/2024_income_calculators/2024_i...
So it should not be a problem to raise it...
"Scott Bessent believes federal minimum wage should not be increased" - https://www.nbcnews.com/video/scott-bessent-believes-federal...
I'd rather not put even more of the economy under even stricter control of the federal government just now, with so much chaos afoot. Giving state governments even less room to maneuver to weather whatever comes next doesn't seem wise to me. Especially when (as you seem to implicitly agree?) there's not much of a current problem that needs solving, but you just feel like we should anyway because why not?
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you are hardly steel-manning something with a comment like that
If you look at minimum wage purchasing power over time, it peaked in about 1970, with about $15-equivalent 2025 dollars.
That tracks fairly closely with purchasing power having declined 68% since the last time minimum wages were updated.
Should probably tie it to inflation while we're in there
Still not good enough.
Discriminatory and biased! Why is so much attention lavished on workers? Where's International Shareholders' day? Where is a day to celebrate wealth and those who have it? Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
> Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
That's why labor gets 1 day and owners get 364.
(Just realized that's roughly in the ballpark of CEO-to-worker wage ratio. ~290:1)
It's truly under-appreciated how much the rich do for the economy, and indeed, for the workers, by having some database rows in some computers with their names on them.
But the numbers next to their names aren't big enough. We're gonna have to gut social services and environmental protections in an attempt to pump those numbers up. Oh and definitely everything we can to cast unions in a bad light. Who needs a union? All they do is eat your hot chip.
In the united states, it is nov 18 (National Entrepreneur Day)
That’s just Black Friday.
I'd say that's just any other day
Well you do get admission to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting if you buy just a single share (and prepare your wallet for exorbitant Omaha hotel prices that weekend). Closest thing to that I can think of.
The stock is trading at only ~$800k USD and people complain that the 1% is a closed-off club.
Those are the class A shares. Class B stock is below $600.
> exorbitant Omaha hotel prices
That phrase doesn't compute. Except for "during that weekend", when of course they all jack up their rates knowing who is coming to stay.
That's a capital idea!
>Where's International Shareholders' day?
The entire rest of the goddamn year.
Well... "National Shareholder Day" - https://www.nationaldayarchives.com/day/national-shareholder...
This is presumably sarcastic, but be aware you’re posting on HN where such opinions are held unironically.
Poe's Law applies.
Forget ordinary shareholders day, what about celebrating billionaires in some way? I can't recall that ever to happen./s
Reminds me of this [0] classic.
It wasn’t even satire. It was based on this opinion from WSJ
> Progressive Kristallnacht Coming? > I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316...
To read this gem: https://archive.is/zLjrX
"And we didn't even do anything wrong!" cracks me up each time
That took me entirely too damned long to realize that wasn't a real billionaire whining.
I prefer to raise awareness to the plight of the rich with music:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ej7dfPL7Kho&pp=ygUNc2F2ZSB0aGUgc...
We should hold it on Jan 6.
I'm celebrating by working all day.
I associate May 1 with getting mashed in Helsinki as for many years I spent it in Finland, with amazing parties in the park for Vappu [0] the Spring Festival. It's a celebration of Spring, labour day, and also "education and industry" since people proudly wear their school colours, company badges and graduation caps. Quite an atmosphere!
According to the US, whose movements originated the May Day holiday, it's officially "Law Day," which is the day we celebrate obedience to the law (I assume by not celebrating May Day.)
The Voice of America is the only media outlet I've ever heard actually celebrating Law Day. An old job of mine had a poster on the wall for Law Day that VoA had actually printed and given away for some reason.
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Obligatory marching for everyone during commie period in some countries. Luckily that ended in 1989, the holiday stayed
All of Europe celebrated May day. All of Europe? No one village stood against the lazy commie legions!
Good thing we're all working here in Switzerland :/
Gotta protest to deserve it in the whole Bund :)
Cantons, like Jura and Neuchâtel, have it as a banking holiday tho.
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With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germany was the first non-communist country to officially make May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a national public holiday.
Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.
Note that the spread of Labor Day owed a lot to intentional efforts to counter May 1st as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre.
So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.
Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.
You can read a detailed analysis of the Nazi manipulation of the May Day and how it was totally anti-socialist here: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism
This is such a bizarre lie.
No, the Reich did not make International Workers' Day a holiday. It made May 1st the Day of National Work and prohibited all celebrations except those arranged by the nazi state, especially celebrations by worker organisations.
So, how do you interpret that?
My interpretation of the above fact is this:
Be cautious when you hear people loudly proclaiming “we’re for the working class” (Republicans) or “down with the oligarchs.” (Democrats)
This shows us that bad guys have used pro-worker language to gain public support, only to later strip away freedoms and centralize the power.
In short when a guy like Soros or Trump says they are for working class do not trust them.
i mean, what it sounds like you're trying to say is "the owner class will lie to the working class when it benefits them"... which I agree with...
but the way you reached this conclusion is that you disagree with the framing of contemporary US right-wing conservative activity as fascist?
even when Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two private citizens who are very close to the levers of power, are on camera sieg-heiling?
even when the president of the united states pardoned paramilitary actors like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front members who actually did real violence?
even when people are being sent to a concentration camp in another country with no due process?
even when people who protest this administration's policies and actions are being targeted for professional blacklisting (lawyers, judges) or arrested and held without due process (eg, mahmoud khalil)?
if these actions are not close enough or akin to the actions of the Nazis (or other fascist movements) for the impact of these things to supersede a very pedantic definition of either term, then you must be willfully ignoring the intent behind applying those terms - they might not be "Nazis" but they're doing the things Nazis did, and that's extremely bad and worth comparison.
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I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.
Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is nominally democratic.
They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government.
They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class.
Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
> The 'communist' countries generally did these same things.
There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted because what you say is correct. As a socialist, I can’t really disagree with what you other than “there’s no real facism” but I guess what you mean by that is something like Mussolini’s vision for society differed from what he actually presided over after the fascists achieved state power.
I hate that all the bluster about "socialist or non socialist" doesn't bring up the evidence for each side.
It's very much a "it started socialist but they were used and quickly purged from the party" situation.
1. Evidence for socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
2. Evidence against socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefo_bills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrielleneingabe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freundeskreis_der_Wirtschaft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_participation_i...
By socialism they meant nationalism way, way earlier than the Night of the Long Knives.
See for example this pamphlet:
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken3...
That’s some good propaganda! As much as I disagree with him and his views, Goebbels sure was a skilled polemicist. The German Propaganda Archive is an excellent historical resource that I wasn’t aware of until now. Thanks for the link!
Randall Bytwerk has produced some books as well, you might be interested in his work on Julius Streicher.
The real labor unions were also banned in communist countries.
Labor unions in communist countries were directly controlled by the Communist Party.
Incorrect.
Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki...
> One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances.... The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent
Not unlike the amorphous political movement plaguing America currently.
Well it was a (total) war economy, not communism lite.
They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated.
All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish"
(And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology)
So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
It's worth adding that the change of the name to NSDAP also happened before Hitler consolidated control and "Socialist" was added over his objections.
With respect to people repeating this idiotic claim, it dates at least back to the 70's in various places, seemingly as a counter for groups on the right that wanted to create distance from the nazis.
Ditto for the Niemoller poem. They love it so much as a template that most of them completely forgot what it said before they scribbled over it:
First they came for the Communists...
Then they came for the Socialists...
Then they came for the trade unionists...
Then they came for the JewsAll of which also happened in some 'communist' countries.
the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
Sure, and I actually wouldn't call the leadership of the USSR at that time (Stalinists) socialists either. It wasn't even that they wiped out those "who weren't Bolshevik aligned". The entire 1917 Bolshevik leadership was exterminated by Stalin by the end of the 20s.
(And frankly people who grew up in the Eastern Bloc in USSR-times were not taught this in history class, either. Or they got a distorted version of it)
What was established there in the late 20s and early 30s was very much a return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job.
"Socialism in one country" and the efforts around it was the re-establishment of Great Russian Nationalism and a cult around a leader as the motive force of everything. Underneath that there was some usage of aspects of "Marxist" ideology, so it's not nearly as clear as what happened in Germany, but it's not dissimilar.
There's a reason why the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was able to be signed.
I'd be willing to consider them "socialist" in the way that Marx used socialism. There's after all a whole chapter in the Communist Manifesto dedicated to forms of socialism that were all wildly different ideologies, ranging from the utopian to the outright feudalist.
In that Marxist sense, that "socialism" has a very limited implication about a very limited set of concepts around putative public ownership of the means of production, one could call the Stalinists socialist. But by that use, then one should be aware that it's a trait of a set of ideologies that otherwise have pretty much nothing to do with each other.
And indeed, he called out the "return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job" explicitly in describing "feudal socialism".
A later preface (by Engels, I think? I think it was one of the prefaces from after Marx death) points out that they used the word "communist" because the word socialist at the time had become largely associated with some of those ideologies that they did not want to be confused with. And of course "communism" has since become equally overloaded by ideologies so different their adherents have pretty much nothing in common.
Already before Lenin died, there was already the notion of "left" and "right" communism, as two incompatible camps that were not even single ideologies, but sets of ideologies. Hence Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" that covered a range of "left" communist ideologies (because the Bolsheviks were considered "right" communists)
It's more complicated than that, because after Lenin, the USSR and countries in its sphere like East Germany considered themselves not to be Communist but rather socialist, as they believed that true Communism was an end goal to be achieved in the future like "We will achieve Communism by the year 2000"
Fair enough, though this also throws away 150/200 years of convention. In the end, the buckets and labels serve little purpose. What is important is to point out that "fascists are just socialists" is a garbage slogan/slander that obscures the reality of history behind an ideological cover that serves only the purpose of implying that any collective action inevitably turns into tyranny. Or something.
The reality is that "actually existing libertarianism" is just as or more liable to degrade into authoritarianism as it hands over blanket authority to the private market -- and, eventually, the form of the state that arises when said market goes into crisis. As we've seen in practice many times, and with the way a whole class of American "libertarians" have embraced the triumph of the will motive force behind Trumpism in the present day. (Or lined up behind Pinochet, etc. in the 70s)
I mostly agree with you - the point I made is mainly one to make with people who get really insistent on that labelling, as a means to point out that even if they believe Stalinism is socialism, that still doesn't mean it's the same socialism as whichever flavour they're trying to equate it to.
Fully agree with you regarding the "fascists are just socialist" canard.
With respect to libertarianism, I like to taunt US libertarians by pointing out that the first liberatarian was Joseph Dejacque, a French anarcho-communist, who, of course, given his anarchist background, praised Proudhon for the view that property is theft - and requires state power to oppress those who reject it - but criticized Proudhon as a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for not going far enough in his rejection of authority.
It tends to make a lot of them very upset.
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Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists.
Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world.
Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else.
Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
> Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else. The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
There are people who think looking at the structures of power, eg the role of the state, is more useful than looking at propaganda when discussing politics. In the behaviorist sense that what people do is a better revelation of their beliefs than what they say.
In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
The Bolsheviks literally carried out a coup against socialists, and murdered a long range of socialists and communists who took up weapons against them to try to prevent their dictatorship. In that perspective it's clear that these are not singular ideologies, but sets of ideologies were individual variations often have very little in common.
That same experience of the inner party murdering and subjugating the outer party who enabled them played out across multiple communist regimes.
I wasn't talking about the internal purges in the Bolshevik party.
I mean... actual Marxists should subject so-called Marxist-Leninist states to a Marxian materialist analysis, as Marx would have expected them to, and would have, himself. Discounting what they called themselves and what their motivations were, and looking at the material causes and effects and the actual reality on the ground.
Which is why parent-of-you commenter is missing the mark about my comments. I'm not making a "no true Scotsman" argument, and talking about "those weren't really socialist" blah blah. The reality is that material forces in the early 20th century pushed many places into these forms which looked much like each other, and had little to do with the ideologies held in the head of the parties and people involved and more to do with the combined and uneven nature of the economies of Russia, etc. and the structure of imperialism/colonialism at the time.
I'd point the finger back at parent-poster -- it's not about the essences of"progressivism" and "socialism" and "fascism" ideologies having some common net effect, or common DNA. That, too, is unscientific and idealist (in the philosophical sense) and frankly false.
It's about what productive forces and the state of the world looked like in the 20s and 30s, which also forced entire societies on trajectories regardless of what the leadership of said countries said about themselves.
And circling back, the value of "Trotskyism" as an intellectual current (when it's not debased by weird cultism) is not in the personhood of Trotksy himself or the fact that he somehow was some saintly figure (he was not), but in that he offered up a materialist, Marxist, analysis of what the USSR had become and how it had gotten there. Which had little to do with the people or their ideas, but the material forces that had made those people, their ideas, and their actions possible.
Technocratic managerialism is the common structure between them that channeled societal forces in similar directions — we can’t ignore the structure the governments took in analyzing their outcomes.
> The reality is that material forces in the early 20th century pushed many places into these forms which looked much like each other
The name of that form is technocratic managerialism — of which progressivism, communism, and fascism are different ideological interpretations of that common form.
And they had particular failure modes due to that form.
Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
> Socialism is collective ownership of capital
Collective ownership in practice means state ownership. And state control.
Fascism has state control as well.
You're pointing at a superficial similarity while ignoring the serious ideological differences.
Fascism comes with a deeply stratified class hierarchy. Collective ownership in the socialist sense is incompatible with this.
"deeply stratified class hierarchy" - you have no idea how it was in the Soviet Union, it was nothing short of a cast system. It was so normalized you can see it clearly in the movies of that period.
I wasn't talking about the Soviet Union, I don't think.
Soviet Union != Socialism
The government in China isn't the same as the government in Vietnam isn't the same as the government in Cuba.
I don't know how close any of them are to the socialist goal of collective ownership. China seems particularly far from that.
"Soviet Union != Socialism"
Lolwhat?
Is every attempt at socialism the same to you? Do you not see a meaningful difference between Laos and the Soviet Union? Or China and the Soviet Union?
Are all they same to you? The Soviets were as close to socialism as it gets. It WAS the socialism in its purest possible form. This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.
See, to you these things are some abstract ideas, a beautiful theory. To me it is practice - this is what I lived in and lived by. So yes, I can tell the difference between SU and Laos. Laos has never been even close.
>This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.
That's quite an interesting take.
So to you, China and Laos aren't socialist?
The official position was that China (along with Yugoslavia) wasn't truly socialist (they were referred as "opportunists" - google that), a kind of socialist-capitalist-feudalist hybrid. Vietnam, Laos, and DDR were considered developing semi-socialist. Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Albania were the "true" socialists though.
The arguments were pretty solid. I think it was a fairly correct classification as it was based on who owned and managed the means of production. Only USSR, Romania and Bulgaria (and Albania) had a nearly total ban on private ownership.
Again, it wasn't about who was "better" or "purer" in some superficial sense, but there was a formal criterion: who owns the means of production.
So to be extremely clear, you don’t consider Laos to be socialist?
So, if I put on my old soviet socialist hat, I would describe Laos as developing socialist semi-feudal state transitioning from the military communism phase to some opportunistic mixed capitalist form, kind of like NEP. In short, it's not a question whether it is socialism or not, but rather where it fall on the spectrum, and more importantly - in what direction it is developing.
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> superficial similarity
You mean the actual similarity.
The ideological aspect IS the superficial part when you put it into practice.
No, I mean a superficial similarity. The ideological aspect drives all aspects of government.
Did you come to the understanding you have through careful consideration and thought? Are you open to re-consideration of the ideas you have about this?
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Many socialist and communist ideologies are explicitly opposed to even the existence of a state, and/or want a weak state. Some of them see state control of capital as inherently instituting class rule, and so consider it inherently a threat to their goals. In other words, while you will find ideologies that call themselves socialist that favor a state, the a strong state or even the existence of one is not a defining feature of socialism.
It is, however, an inherent, defining feature of fascism.
How exactly would a stateless socialism work? No matter what you call it, it'll always end up looking like a national state.
At least a dozen different socialist ideologies have entirely different answers to that. First you'll need to decide what you consider a state. Some - e.g. anarchists and other libertarian socialists reject the state outright, and don't want anything to replace it. Others reject "only" top down/involuntary authority, or want any replacement to be minimal in scope (e.g. communes).
A defining trait of a national state is sovereignty over a territory and control of the use of violence in that territory, and those are both traits that multiple socialist ideologies explicitly reject.
Whether or not you believe any of the variations can work is orthogonal to the point that socialism is not a singular ideology, but a spectrum of ideologies that where many reject the state, and so the existence of one is not a defining trait of socialism.
Insisting that it is, is a bit like insisting that capitalism is the same as fascism because capitalism too relies on a state (to enforce property rights). If anything, capitalism is inherently tied to the existence of a state because of the need to enforce property rights that many socialist ideologies reject. But very few socialists would equate capitalism with fascism (some would).
If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't.
They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.)
More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach.
I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi)
Well sure. It's like MAGA calling themselves conservative while throwing out all conservative values.
MAGA don't throw out traditional conservative values (reinforcing the power of traditional racial, religious, and economic elites at the expense of other groups seeking a downward distribution of power), they throw out the libertarian values that got blended in and labeled as “conservative” values when a minimal winning coalition could not be formed purely around the overt embrace of actual traditional conservative values.
Crafted by Rajat
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