One is much more useful to the Capitalist and so it will ultimately prevail. The capitalist will devote all resources to crushing the leftist populism up to and including directly funding fascism.

Unless. We have to spread these ideas to as many people as possible. We can't afford to call it early.

We're gonna find out as soon as AI, automation, and robotics are more cost efficient at performing most functions than humans.

My expectation is genocide/mass murder, as there are somewhere between 10-100x more people than the planets resources can sustain long term, at a developed world rate of consumption and the current level of technological efficiency/advancement.

It goes keto and eats itself.

Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleed, y'all.

I really, really hate that expression. It's like it's purposely designed to alienate people with mostly good intentions telling them they're no different from horrible people they hate with a fiery passion.

That doesn't mean all liberals are fascist, that means that fascism is an outgrowth of liberalism.

Saying it means something other than what it plainly does mean doesn't make it any better. Maybe it means that to you, but any slogan you have to explain is a shit slogan. All it does is signal membership in your in-group while telling everyone else who hears it that you're part of their out-group.

Some of y’all do not have a basic understanding of history, economic systems, or what the term reactionary actually means.

Do you?

The correct response to “neo liberal capitalism has contributed to the rise of fascism” should be “no shit, Sherlock”

That's pretty much most of the comments in this thread

And just in case y’all also don’t know what that means, “liberalism” in that context isn’t “Obama liberal, Bush conservative,” it means the political ideology of liberalism, of which both Bush and Obama were proponents of.

I don't think these two were ever liberal about anything. The term liberalism has a wide history, associating it as a whole to fascism sounds a stretch.

The truth is, a real market is never actually truly competitive. In an unregulated market, competing firms always collude with each other to set prices and wages for the industry. "Free market" ideology is based on nonsense, they've proven this over and over.

Funnily enough, not even neoliberals believe in the free market regardless of how much they spout its nonsense.

Thatcher was one of such neoliberals, she would always talk about how people should become self-sufficient and governments shouldn't interfere in the free market for it to truly work and so on, but during her rule she was spending billions in subsidies for corporations (aka government interference in the free market). Of course, they weren't called subsidies in the paperwork but some other bullshit like "public investment", but their effect was still the same.

Capitalism was nice when it first popped up. Because it was an improvement over feudalism.

Actually, it wasn't that nice when it first popped up, considering the first capitalist ventures were colonialism (including the conquest of the Aztec and Incan empires and the east Indian tea company that was worse for India than Hitler was for Europe).

But it was relatively nice because before capitalism, most development needed to be done by the king, who had limited funds. Bankers had been building wealth and capitalism allowed them to become new sub kings with their own empires. More empires meant more development, which also means a lot of employment, so it did increase the quality of life for many people as they got paid to improve things around them and new products popped up.

But we've since outgrown the whole kings thing for control of a geographic or political region while corporations are still run like dictatorships (with the executive team acting as sub kings for the board, which acts as sub kings for the shareholders, where institutional investors dominate, which just makes the whole thing less transparent because those institutions also have similar command structures).

So while there is some truth to capitalism having had a positive impact, the overall story is more complicated than that (the plunder from colonialism made it look a lot better at a high price in the colonies, and it was a relative improvement to "only the lord of the land can develop it and benefit from that improvement") and society has generally since rejected that model for running political regions but the economic model has yet to catch up.

The capitalists are resisting that change similarly to how the kings resisted changing from monarchies to republics and have been since around WWI and the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s were a result of capitalists siding with them to prevent various leftist movements from gaining power.

Capitalism puts greed at the wheel and, naturally, ~~inventions~~ products are churned out, some really useful, some terrible. To make it work, you need to regulate hard to keep the greed from taking over the innovation.

Most people who were paying attention to the world when 1929 happened and witnessed the consequences up to 1945 are dying now. The people who were paying attention to the world when 2008 happened haven't seen how the story ends.

Mainly because we spent 80 years being told to snitch on our neighbors and that commies are the devil himself come to wipe the world clean of good moral people.

It's still going to be a long time till Marx is given an objective position in western society, if ever.

*Milton Friedman

And every president since Reagan, including him.

Yes. That is how it works. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate these outcomes. It actually takes concerted effort through propaganda and misinformation to maintain the level of cognitive dissonance we have about it.

The depressing thing is that fascists are popular enough to gain power. The populist pose, some scapegoating of minorities, and a dash of lying about their goals, is enough to win over many voters, and in a first-past-the-post system it doesn't matter if the majority of the people don't like them.

The market is authoritarian.