In reality, far from stopping the far right, Germany is implementing a far right agenda. Increase police authority? Check. Scapegoat immigrants and other marginalized groups? Check. Build up the military? Check. Suppress protests and dissenters? Check. Impose austerity, providing the fertile ground for fascists? Check.
By the time the AfD comes to power, they won’t have to do anything. The liberals (including socdems and greens) will already have created a fascist society.
The same is happening to France. As you said, they’ll have a field day when (at this point it’s not if, it’s when) they get to power.
Gotta love neoliberalism…The Netherlands will very likely have a right wing government and will be heading down the same path. Same with Italy, Sweden, Denmark.
With the next European election this year the right wing parties in the European Parliament will gain a lot of traction.
We could be heading down the American path and lose a lot or the progress we made over the last 2 decades.
I will be a father in a couple or hours. Between the right taking to power and accelerating climate change i am just so fucking worried in what kind of world my kids will grow up.
Congrats on fatherhood!
Thanks a lot :-). Will be another couple of days max.
rip your back if you have to sleep on the “husband couch” in the hospital room.
The rise of right wing parties might be a consequence of the left wings failure to govern.
In Norway the Labour Party was the biggest party for decades. Now the party is infested with politicians using it for career paths to NGO’s or international organisations like UN and EU. The same party made for the labourers implements tax policies making it really hard to start industries.
Money are being spent on the most incredible projects bearing no fruit for future generations.
At a point people get fed up, and in desperation they have to vote further to the right. If you want less government spending on stupid projects you also have to get some fascism.
The problem is not the right wing parties or stupid people. The problem is worthless left wing politicians not contributing positive to the nation.
It saddens me.
The problem is worthless left wing politicians not contributing positive to the nation.
The problem isn’t a person. It’s class society itself and the capitalist mode of production.
Both Fascism and Socialism solve the problem of capitalism being in crisis; it always eventually will be, and it currently is in Europe. Fascism “solves” it by fully cementing capitalist rule and removing the veil of bourgeois “democracy”, while Socialism solves it by overthrowing capitalism entirely and establishing proletarian rule.
The far-right rising again in Europe was always the inevitable consequence of capitalists winning the Cold War and ruthlessly suppressing the Left since. The only other “solution” to the crisis is Fascism.
I am not very well read in political theory, but I would agree with the idea that capitalism HAS to end in crisis because exponancial groth just can’t be sustained.
I would further point out that, to my limited knowledge, capitalism is a (or even the) root cause of the current climate crisis (altough things like humans inability to solve long term problems, as well as other factors come into play too. After all, things like the ozon hole have been solved even under a capitalist system).
A great example of how this class operates. Our foreign minister from the Labour party had to step down due to suspicions of providing her husband with inside information on government contracts to public traded companies. The husband bought stocks and they made some cash.
The reward for this corruption is a new position as our ambassador to the US. She officially got the job two days ago.
We have seen this upper class of politicians never having to stand responsible for their actions for some years now. On both sides.
There’s no wonder people get desperate. The only solution they get provided is using their vote. And when they do use it they get called out for using it the “wrong” way.
Either the current politicians fix their shit, or the people will topple them. It’s fairly predictable.
I don’t know about other nations. In Germany we have had the Conservative Party ruling for 16 years as a right leaning Party, 4 years of a left party that implemented right wing neo fashist ideas, followed by another 16 years of conservative rule with more centeristic than right wing rule (the political void in the right was filled by the AFD, which has become a true fashist party in the last 10 years). The only “left” government we ever had in the last 36 years has been in the last 2, and they are heavily restricted by beeing in a coalition with a neo liberal right wing party.
So, at least for Germany, this just doesn’t hold true.
Yes. Pretty much everywhere has had capitalists ranging from moderate to hard-line in lead. Now they’re just seeing that they can form coalitions with open fascists. Leftists don’t even have the opportunity to try to achieve change… Maybe Uruguay or such are the exception
The only “left” government we ever had in the last 36 years has been in the last 2, and they are heavily restricted by beeing in a coalition with a neo liberal right wing party.
They’re all neoliberals. They wouldn’t be doing anything substantially different if the FDP didn’t exist.
Are you living in a different Germany than me? There are sadly things going on to make immigration harder. But other than that, things are okay.
Make immigration harder??? Nice euphemism for this fascist shit. They’re throwing human rights out of the window. They’re literally putting migrants into concentration camps, if they’re don’t drown first thanks to Frontex pushbacks. Greens defended this so-called compromise to their base while fascist Meloni was giving victory speeches.
“Endlich im großen Stil abschieben” (Scholz). I can’t tell the difference an NPD slogan and the SPD chancellor.
And for the other shit, there’s some extra police authority or surveillance law proposed every other month or so. Pro-palestine protests are criminalized and they’re threatening Muslims with deportation for not being loyal enough to Israel. All the parties are discussing what sort of services they can cut so they have more money for the military. Real wages are shrinking. You can’t open a newspaper without reading about how Germany needs to prepare for war. Things are not okay.
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These are a lot of statements without sources. Also most people would disagree with the statement that a government that includes social democrats and greens is implementing a “far right agenda”.
Fucking Scholz said he wanted to “finally deport in a big way” (“endlich im großen Stil abschieben”). This is (well used to be) a far right agenda. They’re sending weapons to Israeli fascists while they commit genocide, and defend them at every opportunity. These people support fascists and fascist policies.
What exactly do you even dispute is untrue about what I said?
Scholz was talking about around 50000 people who came seeking asylum but we’re found to have no right to asylum. It’s not very humane but it’s the current law. The actual fascists of the far right are talking millions.
SPD is a relatively conservative party but it’s absolutely insane to call them fascists.
It’s not very humane but it’s the current law
They changed the law so they can deport more people!
They are absolutely going far right with this one especially and their rhetoric around it. These used to be totally unacceptable far right slogans and policies, but here we are. Basic human rights suspended. Just because the AfD is worse does not mean the SPD has not shifted into what not long ago was far right territory. But oh no, calling out racism and how the SPD is effectively enabling a shift towards fascism is too far for you! That’s exactly how this rightward shift can happen, because people like you are making excuses for this shit.
Sorry, statement rejected - no source provided (hypocrite)
Build up the military?
Any source on that? We do not have a military right now. Wouldn’t be bad if we wanted to defend ourselves against Putin.
Yeah yeah, I remember all that shit from back in the day. Die Russen kommen! Die Russen kommen! Oldest trick in the book.
Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land. – Hermann Göring
Also, I love that you want a source for something that was a top news story for months. You somehow heard, dass die Russen kommen!!! but not the Sondervermögen? You’re just fucking with me, aren’t you?
Yeah I barely pay attention to Europe on news and I knew they were talking about rebuilding the military. Made for some good meme’s.
If it helps, I’m a (terrified) immigrant in Germany and it’s really confusing. I don’t know why there’s so much certainty in media reports about things that aren’t certain. It could be a language barrier, but I assume mild shade whenever Konjunktiv I comes up, so I’m probably interpreting that as unfairly noncommittal.
Examples: Scholz wanted to disallow immigrants from working, then make them work to be eligible for citizenship, whatever is happening with marijuana, I read about Wagenknechts new party more than a year before she actually formed it.
Do liberals have a theory for why fascism is sprouting up around the world?
Because Marxists are like
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/FascismIt’s tough to be critical of “liberalism” when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify “economic liberalism”.
Along with it’s deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
Almost nobody knows the academic definitions of most political ideologies, they’re just all cable news buzzwords now. If you took a sample of the population I’d be surprised if even 5% could give you the correct academic definitions for the vast majority of political ideology terms.
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These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
Almost like they use buzzwords to obfuscate the real meaning of the ideas that threaten their hold on power.
I don’t think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.
Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.
Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.
A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is… it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.
However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody ‘think global, act local’, or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?
That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.
That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I’d consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn’t interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc…), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I’d want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).
I think putting one’s viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.
So that’s the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
All I’m saying is that if you don’t take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the “correct” (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn’t well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody
Yeah you do that.
I’m getting downvotes because I’m telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It’s why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
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I know exactly why I’m getting downvotes. No head scratches required.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn’t have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don’t drop the word “liberalism” into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it’s technically incorrect, but language also isn’t static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don’t assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition
“Neoliberalism” rather. Though that’s more like mask-off imperialism. And “corporatism” is just capitalism but when you don’t want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
Lol I’m sure Prolewiki is an unbiased source that the majority of people would agree with on the definitions of words. /s
Where did he say that the majority of people agree with this definition?
Well, the majority of workers in the US probably did, until the labor movements were crushed in the 60s and 70s
If the majority of people don’t agree on the proposed meaning of a word then that isn’t what the words mean. In other words, it is wrong.
It’s a materialist/Marxist definition, hence the
Because Marxists are like
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
And so we can choose to act towards restoring definitions to words with important meanings, so that we become capable of discussing the things they signify again.
If we don’t use words as they mean, but instead use unorthodox terminology, then we allow the significance of such words to be lost, with no standardized alternatives in common use - i.e., no alternatives that are any more clear than the original word.
There is a war on language. It’s primarily a subset of the class war. We can surrender, or fight what is probably the simplest fight of our life: We can use words as they were meant to be used.
Yeah, I’m glad you’re slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I’m informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights
Communists had to pry these concessions from liberalism with organized violence, don’t pretend like liberalism did these things.
Honest question: when did communists use organized violence to abolish slavery? To win LGBT+ rights?
A lot of radical abolitionists were communists
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.
You quoted me, then immediately misquoted me. I didn’t say what you think I said.
Sorry should have phrased it as “people shouldn’t pretend…”
honestly there seems to be some confusion/distinction only in the US.
i think most people elsewhere mean mostly “neoliberal capitalism” when they say “liberal”.
What year is it?
1930 something.
Let’s see if any Lemmy users are able to correctly identify why this is happening. Bonus points for American-Style ignorance
Love to climb up on my high chair with my sippy cup. Looking down on everyone while pretending at intellectual superiority and yet making no actual statement at all.
Hitler 2: Facist Bugaloo?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Germans have already had a front-row seat to the rise of so-called illiberal democrats in Poland and Hungary who used their power to stack courts with pliant judges and silence independent media.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD.
But every remedy holds its own dangers, leaving German politicians threading a course between safeguarding their democracy and the possibility of unwittingly providing the AfD with tools it could someday use to hobble it.
Hesse’s rival mainstream parties came together to pass a “democracy package,” rewriting several parliamentary rules, including one that effectively blocked the AfD from the intelligence committee.
In the eastern state of Thuringia, mainstream lawmakers also wanted to block the AfD from their intelligence committee, and initially agreed to put their differences aside and vote for each other’s candidates.
Some measures under discussion would give law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies more latitude, never an easy step in a country that experienced both Fascism and Communism in the last century.
The original article contains 1,301 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Stopping the rise of the far right is trivially easy, and government holds the levers. Just do two things:
- reduce immigration
- tax the wealthy
Seems they would rather lose to nazis than do those two things.
Edit: seems more than a few of you are rushing to lose to Nazis too
Taxing the rich is what the current government wants. The right wing does not want that.
The FDP very definitely does not want this, and one would be justified in doubting if the top brass of the SPD wants it. Personally, I am inclined to believe they only suggest plans like this knowing full well nothing will come of them in this government constellation.
The FDP does not want this. But both the SPD and the Greens want to. Good luck getting any tax increases past the CDU, FDP and AfD.
The first one isn’t necessary. Just need to tax the wealthy and ensure that companies cannot exploit immigrant labor to increase profits. Immigration isn’t the problem, the companies are.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD. Some have even launched a campaign to ban the AfD altogether.
You see, democracy is when…
I’ll help you with this sentence:
… it defends itself against an undemocratic power.
Right, like the USSR, China, DPRK, and Cuba
Yes. Democracy is when you refuse to allow the people to have a say in their systems of governance.
Time to pull this one out from the archives again…
And it is fixed when you understand that it is a social contract. You breach the contract? Then tolerance no longer applies to you.
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Yes. Democracy is when you refuse to allow
the peoplea party that wants to dismantle the democratic state and bringing in nothing than hate to have a say in their systems of governance.Maybe if you want to prevent such a hypothetical future the democratic solution is to offer something better for people to vote for, instead of using threats of violence by employing the law to enforce your systems.
There is and never will be a perfect system of whatsoever. I’d rather watch them nazi party get forbidden than waiting for a solution that will come in place when it is already too late.
And unless you aren’t a nazi, putin follower or trumpist, I don’t know why I even have to explain why a German future with a nazi party at its front will be no good for nobody.
The perfect one is the one that has the power to stop fascists from taking over.
LOL, it’s so funny how close you are and yet how far you are. When the USSR was dismantled by compradors in power and they invited the USA to come in and liberalize their economy, they suffered millions of death of poverty and their life expectancy dropped 10 years in 10 years, literally as bad as if they had been invaded and literally worse than what COVID did to the USA. So Putin gets elected on the narrative that he will reassert Russia’s sovereignty and not allow the USA and Europe to continue imposing austerity, causing mass suffering, and then he does so. Everyone in Russia gets a better life after Putin takes office. And since he’s KGB, he knows exactly how the USA is trying to infiltrate Russian politics and ensure a puppet government is in place. And yet, you can’t see how Putin is doing exactly what you’re saying Germany should do: prevent undemocratic forces from taking power by using his authority to do so.
Maybe one day you’ll get it. The USA is the fascist core and Europe is the birthplace of the USA as well as the USA’s luxury market and historical globe spanning power base. Every other country outside of them is doing absolutely everything they can to prevent the USA from taking away their ability to operate as a sovereign state, and in a lot of places that looks like authoritarianism. But in the end, it’s literally anti-fascism.
Don’t believe me? Look at the voting record in the UN for resolutions condemning the glorification of Nazis. The USA votes against it every single time.
It is easy to say that when you’re not the one that they are using the law against.
Will you say that when they come for you next?
If they come for me because I’m a fascist, then yes, just take me out behind the shed and put me out of my misery.
Are you actually referencing the “first they came for the Jews but I wasn’t a Jew” thing to argue that we should let nazis go ahead and take the power?
The solution being proposed here to prevent authoritarian systems is… other authoritarian systems. Can you understand why people see this as a problem brewing?
Retaining democracy is not authoritarian.
Getroffene Hunde bellen.
Fuck off you fifth pillar arsehole
Checks and balances are about preventing a small faction of the government from gaining absolute control of the entire government. It’s not about preventing a say, it’s about preventing a total takeover that prevents anyone else from having a say in the future.
Are you surprised that the country that ushered the Nazis into power is more vigilant about making sure they never head remotely in that direction again?
Even the party’s leader resigned in 2022 because he saw that the party was becoming more totalitarian and incompatible with German democracy.
Op sounds less surprised more disappointed.
You see, we call it Wehrhafte Demokratie. According to Wikipedia this can be translated as battlesome democracy, though I find that clunky.
The entire idea of our constitution is to keep a democracy, we even have a constitutional right to disobedience, if democracy is threatened.
The constitution is deliberately very open, but there’s one thing that’s non-negotiable: FDGO, liberal-democratic basic order. If you’re operating outside of that, you’re not supposed to be part of the political landscape.
L take. AES countries which are actual democracies do the same thing.
Though of course, banning it isn’t gonna go anywhere for Germany unless they tackle the root cause of capitalism.
