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Goblins Under the Apple Tree's avatar

I may be overreacting here but I am starting to feel that the distinction between Fascism and Communism is reflected – in perhaps a very weakened and diluted way – in the divergence between the Marxist and non-Marxist strains of opposition on various internet sites. And this has become extremely marked since the covid manoeuvre began and so many Marxist sites seemed to fall under the sway of this new pseudo-Leftism adopted by the mainstream, leaving the rejection of covid, climate, transgenderism (and other such Pavlovian props) to the non-Marxists.

This issue can be demonstrated clearly by an encounter I had recently with one Sam Gerrans who has some videos on YouTube in which he inveighs against the rubbish ceaselessly pushed by the media but then arrives at the claim that the entire West is a vast cult. This is one of those statements that has an exciting sense of “ultra-radicalism” about it. But the fatal mistake here is to fail to realise that every social order that ever existed needs to have behavioural norms. Thus to simply train citizens to behave in a certain way cannot be glibly dismissed as “brainwashing”.

The dismal effect of this failure to see the roots of any social formation always presupposes a – usually unacknowledged – assumption that there is some kind of “pure behaviour” floating somewhere that we can just “tune in to”. This is similar to the notion that capitalism is a purely natural order that would spontaneously develop if we “just left things alone”.

The inevitable course of all such naïve thinking is to arrive at a deeply regressive outlook that postulates a golden age somewhere in the past. One of the tell-tale signs is the use of the word “modernity” as a pejorative.

A clue to what is happening here can be found in Trotsky’s essay, “FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It”, which can be found here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

This part goes right to the heart of the matter:

“The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader. If the communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat ...”

Thus, in times of crisis, we have two emergent forces: revolutionary optimism (communism) and counter-revolutionary despair (fascism). The former looks forward to a hopeful new society, the latter looks backward to an imagined pristine innocence.

I don’t think it is accidental that every one of the backward reactionary anti-Marxist sites I’ve been reading tends towards religious or occult notions. Gerrans is a student of Islam and has produced his own translation of The Koran. Another anti-Marxist, Guido Preparata, seems to have a fixation with some kind of esoteric interpretation of Catholicism. He has also hinted at demonic entities. And, most infamously, there is David Icke and his reptilian beings.

These are the murky waters through which I have been paddling since the “Left” succumbed to the bogus revolutionary twaddle of the mainstream.

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Shaenah Batterson's avatar

Great lecture. I appreciated how you all tied in imperialism and colonialism to the discussion and related it to the Gaza genocide

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