this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Never forget, the fruit of the tree of capitalism is fascism.
Capitalism unrestrained and left to do its thing, as it has, always leads to fascism. Fascism is the takeover of the state by the capitalists.
This is why fascism is blooming all over the western world. The global capitalist economy is simply in full bloom sitting on entirely captured nation states and fruiting.
The fruit being concentration camps, war, poverty, and scapegoating. Anything to blame literally anyone and everything else for all the inhuman malice the capitalists are doing to attempt to satiate their unquenchable greed.
If anyone still cares about maybe not ending the world for humanity, the capital markets must be destroyed, and speculative investment by passive robber barons not actively participating in laboring to produce products and services must be outlawed. But don't worry, we'll fade into the oblivion of greed made climate change out of cowardice. We'll probably be grateful to die to that after the Fascists have had their fun.
I get the frustration with unrestrained capitalism and the real harm it can do—wealth concentration, exploitation, and rampant inequality are major issues that can breed extremist movements. However, to claim fascism is an inevitable “fruit” of capitalism ignores a whole host of other historical, cultural, and political factors that shape authoritarian regimes. There are plenty of capitalist societies that have never slipped into fascism because democratic institutions, social safety nets, and regulations acted as guardrails.
It’s also important to remember that while corporations can capture political systems, it takes more than greed to sustain a fascist state—there’s often a strong dose of nationalism, militarism, and scapegoating of minorities involved. Lumping all of these under “capitalism leads directly to concentration camps” oversimplifies a complex issue. Yes, we should criticize harmful capitalist excesses, but we need to be precise in how we analyze the broader political environment that actually fosters fascist ideologies.
What. Capitalism is already the takeover of the state by capitalists. The state apparatus is just the means by which the dominant class exerts its power.
It is inevitable that capitalists will conquer their state, but with constant vigilance, for a time, capitalism can and is used as an engine to serve society, so long as it is heavily regulated and hobbled. The Nordic nations for example.
It's when the capitalists begin to be allowed to influence their government, and convince the people THEY can live larger than their neighbors if it weren't for all the social equity evil government enforces, capitalism's signature siren call.
The Nordic countries still have free to roam policies. Capitalism here capturing their own regulators and being allowed to warp public opinion with blatant self serving lies through for profit media pulpits make some Americans eager to shoot other Americans.
I'm not for capitalism at all because it eventually leads here, to fascism, and eventually someone in power will be dumb or corrupt enough to let their guard down. But we let our capitalists conquer our government, as have several western nations. And here we are.
Nope. The Nordic countries are still controlled by capitalists, they (akd most of western Europe as well) just have given the workers some welfare policies in order to appease them and stop any revolutionary ideas. It's no coincidence that these policies were in place while the Eastern bloc was around and they began to dismantle the welfare state as soon as the USSR fell and they felt they could get away with it.
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying that the welfare state is evil, and that we'd be better with the shitty US way of doing things)
This I disagree. While we're seeing it keep winning and winning, and we might be put through all sorts of unimaginable hell's as it keeps winning, but human societies have been here before. A lot, in fact. People like to point at Mao's communist China and how bad that was, without knowing about the capitalist warlord China that preceeded it. Conquering the state by their means, such as violence or compromising/begging in grand halls? No, we'll never win, but nature always wins, it is the one true God we're all at mercy to. Back in the day of native central-american hyper-capitalism/imperialism/monarchism such as the Mayans, Aztec's, etc. where the population was literally everyone being enslaved to worship and human sacrifices, salt mines and pyramid building. While we don't exactly know how it happened (probably plague, it's always plague) but what is evident is that they consciously rejected hierarchy, dispersed into thousands of different tribes across the Americas, practicing amazingly complicated distributions of land and trade amongst eachother, totally free from any central forms of leadership but a series of central comittee's, consciously rejecting individualism, consciously rejecting laws in favour of reason, consciously rejecting arbitrary authority, consciously choosing a discussion over coffee and tobacco before resorting to war, even consciously giving preferential treatment to slaves they captured. Instead of labouring over pyramids and mines, they built social housing literal fucking palaces that thanks to modern archaeology tech has unearthed these things by the hundreds of thousands. And even then, by the time all that was so ancient it was all buried and overgrown, when the Europeans first came over and saw the garden forests they've maintained for millenia, the remarkable intelligence displayed by people who couldn't write or didn't wear pants, that women had autonomy! It was quite enlightening to those Europeans, so much so that they wrote plays that questioned European authority through sock puppets and fictional natives used as vehicles to promote ideas such as liberty, freedom, and atheism, without being imprisoned or executed for heresy. It was so popular, so was tobacco and coffee, upon which these certain Natives would come and speak in these French salons, the very same ones that great European Enlightenment thinkers frequented. While European culture has yet to assimilate to (Native) American culture, it has been reeling since, and the European ideaology of Kings has been shaken ever since.
Keep pushing, act as if you're already free.