Field Notes: Long Time Coming

 

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Fascism is a Legalist Doctrine

I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but until the people around me understand that fascism in power is primarily a legalistic formulation, and that chud neo-nazis, paramilitaries, or mass shooters only represent highly visible, but ultimately fringe aspects of that power, I don’t see how we have any hope of stopping or fighting fascism. What does that look like in practice? I’m glad you asked.

As you may already be aware, the 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court is currently in the process of dismantling the Voting Rights Act on the basis that it’s discriminatory against white voters; an argument which is in and of itself, fascist propaganda. At the same time, this very same fascist Supreme Court is slated to hear a radical right wing argument that will allow state lawmakers to simply (and legally) choose who wins federal elections; regardless of how their states vote. Taken together, these two arguments are quite literally the death of what passes for our democracy.

Now lemme ask you a question? Are these judges Proud Boys? Are the high priced lawyers bringing these cases before the court 3 Percenter militias? Are the billionaires and corporations paying to support this final implosion of democracy, far right crank shock jocks on Youtube? No of course they aren’t; these folks are more or less the conservative establishment – and they’re actively embracing fascism, as a legal doctrine surrounding elections, as we speak.

This isn’t a new development, fascist movements historically seek to subvert the laws and processes of “liberal democracies” everywhere those movements exist. A fascist regime is always enforced by courts and cops first and foremost. There are ways to stop this, to resist the rise of legalist fascism – both in politics and in the streets; all hope is not lost. But what I can tell you won’t work is screaming “vote harder” at a disempowered electorate while hiring a hundred thousand more cops who’re not only violent reactionaries themselves, but explicitly beholden to whomever is in power; including fascists who just rigged half the elections in Amerikkka.

 

Elon Musk Buying Twitter is a Win for Fascism

Watching the “will he or won’t he” saga of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, I must confess that the discourse surrounding these events is discouraging. Frankly we’ve just come off seven years where carefully crafted online propaganda operations have allowed American fascists to wholly subsume a political party, elect a President, deny the existence of a global pandemic, organize a coup attempt, and build an increasingly mainstream movement to suppress marginalized people – particularly LGBTQ folks, migrants, and African Americans. Given that, you’d think the influencer class reaction to a billionaire Afrikaner buying his own social media platform, and promising to make it a safe space for Trump and other currently banned far right figures who are directly responsible for the rise of fascism, might consist of more than bemused chuckling and predictions of stock market doom.

Look, Musk’s proposed purchase of Twitter won’t be a death blow for free speech. Twitter is a just a social media platform, and no amount of pretending it’s an 18th century town square is going to change that. Musk will not actually be able to silence his critics and enemies, because he won’t be able to force them to keep using Twitter. Folks are free to choose other platforms to communicate with each other; platforms that aren’t owned by a billionaire nazi – over the long term, Elon just might kill Twitter because he’s an odious buffoon.

What purchasing Twitter will give Musk (and by extension, his fascist friends) is a giant megaphone from which to spout fascist ideology, socially harmful disinformation, and the type of raw hatred we see being aimed at the marginalized, to grow this fascist movement. Furthermore, the army of liars, hatemongers, and propagandists working to put fascism over the top in the Pig Empire is already intimately familiar with how to use that megaphone to tear society apart, and profit from exploiting the open wounds that are left behind – after all, Twitter is where they started the plot to capture the nerve center of the Pig Empire; the White House.

Elon Musk buying Twitter is no laughing matter; it’s a disaster for what passes for democracy in our society.

 

Accelerationism is Fascism With an Extra Step

The obvious truth is that there is no such thing as a “red-brown” political alliance because working to help fascists gain power is just being a fascist with more steps. Not only are socialist ideologies completely incompatible with reactionary thought, but fascist movements (including MAGA) are openly and violently hostile to both marginalized people and the left as a matter of course. When some muppet “Patriotic Socialist” Fox News guest like Jackson Hinkle says he’s working to unite Marxists and MAGA against the system, he’s really just pitching you fascism with some pretty pathetic cosplay stapled to the frame.

The fact is that socialism is about working together for the common good, and it takes a lot more to be a leftist than throwing some communist iconography on your social media profiles. Socialism (and indeed Marxism) is an inherently left wing ideology, and the only people in history who’ve ever claimed they were “neither left, nor right” were reactionaries; sometimes quite dangerous ones, like Joseph Goebbels for example.

If it walks, talks, and squawks like a fascist, odds are pretty good it’s a fascist whether its willing to admit that or not; after all, fascism isn’t popular and reactionaries have been known to lie.

 

There Is Still Power In a Union

If there is one bright spot in this year of our collective discontent, it’s that 2022 has seen a resurgence of successful organized labor action in the Pig Empire. From the formation of new worker’s unions in non-traditional workplaces like Amazon warehouses, and Starbucks coffee shops, to ongoing actions to protect workers by teachers unions, and railway workers – unionized labor is finding ways to take the fight to the exploiter class and their in-pocket politicians, despite operating under rigged rules in a capitalist dystopia.

The upshot here is that recently some of these organized labor actions have been so wildly successful, that even a captured corporate media has no choice but to report on them. What you are far less likely to hear about on cable news however, are the lengths name brand American companies are going to stop workers from organizing, and to isolate, punish, and ultimately remove those brave souls who do work to form a union in their work space.

Right now millions of dollars are being spent by American corporations to demonize unions, stalk and harass workers trying to organize, and find razor-thin excuses to fire employees who have participated in a union drive; all of which barely makes the evening news. You know what does make the news? A billionaire investor like Warren Buffett accusing railway workers of threatening the critical American supply chain, while the companies he invests in are purposely cutting routes and under-staffing trains to produce precisely that result; with no pushback from corporate media whatsoever.

The fact is, the entire capitalist class in the Pig Empire, including but perhaps especially corporations working in the field of influencing how you think, has a vested interest in only presenting one side of this story. This isn’t just about keeping the cost of labor down; rich guys and investors know that organized labor is both an instrument to obtain justice for exploited workers in the shop, and an equally effective tool for liberating the labor class in politics, and indeed society at large.

There is definitely power in a union; and that’s why none of these rich folks want you or I to have one.

 

Declaring Covid Over Prematurely Is Eugenics

Frankly I’d love to tell you that watching the President of the United States declare the covid pandemic over while thousands of Americans per week are still dying from the virus shocked me, but sadly, it didn’t. From the very beginning of the crisis, the entire Pig Empire’s response to Covid-19 has been to play a complicated shell game designed to test for, and identify, the number of dead people the population at large considers acceptable, while getting back to the business of capitalist extraction. How many times does some sociopath on the news have to tell you “the virus only kills the elderly and folks with compromised immune systems” before this covert eugenics program no longer surprises you?

Naturally of course this horrifying project has taken many forms, across a very broad swathe of the ideological spectrum. The fascist far right has wallowed in open conspiracy theories and denial-ism to justify restarting the machine, but most of the corporate establishment that bills itself as “centrist” has been playing much the same game with different words. How else do you explain sending hundreds of millions of poor people out to work in the middle of a plague, pretending long covid is mostly a rumor, or literally changing how covid cases are measured to justify sending everyone back into a society-wide Petri dish of doom?

At every single stage of this crisis, an entire army of media muppets, think tank minions, and double talking politicians have told you, more or less, to put your life at risk for capital. Sometimes by minimizing or even denying the risk, sometimes by keeping you from properly assessing the risk and then pretending the choice is up to you. This response has been consistent with both “conservative” and “liberal” governments, across pretty much the entire Pig Empire. At some point if it looks, acts, and quacks like a duck that’s trying to kill you, it probably is – and sadly, that’s just not shocking anymore after two and a half years of this mind-fucking song and dance.

 

Mainstream Fascists Are The Greater Evil

One of the most frustrating things about living in a Pig Empire that is materially interested in keeping its citizens ignorant of what fascism actually is, is that this in turn actively prevents folks from recognizing how fascism works, or what a fascism movement in progress looks like. More than eighty years of rewriting the history of World War II, and redefining fascism very narrowly as the German Nazi Party, have lead people to honestly believe that it’s not fascism until dead-eyed Aryan soldiers are marching through town square in Hugo Boss-designed uniforms to the cheers of adoring crowds.

The truth however, is far less cinematic; in reality fascist regimes are almost always top-down dictatorships, supported by the perversion of a nation’s laws, and enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence. In other words, a fascist regime doesn’t explicitly use violence to supersede the law, but rather seeks to gain the power to subvert the law in order to make violence and repression, legal. The most dangerous fascists are not in fact chinless neo-nazis who believe Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ, but rather the army of amoral, reactionary, openly fascist lawyers, judges, and lobbyists that have facilitated the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA fascist movement’s attempts to seize power.

Sure, fascism is about violence, it’s about terrorism, it’s about mass graves. But fascism is also about rigging elections in plain site, legalizing state suppression of “undesirable” or “disagreeable” people, and transforming a society’s laws (even retroactively) to make repressive violence, looting, and yes, mass murder, legal. This is of course the source of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous reminder that everything Hitler did in Germany, was legal. If America is truly going to fall to fascism, the harbingers of its demise will almost certainly come wearing badges, and clad in judge’s robes; and folks living under a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS regime would be wise to remember that.

 

Social Media Isn’t What They Told You It Is

If the current and ongoing debate about “free speech” on social media is any indication, it is now extremely clear that most folks in Pig Empire society still do not understand what this technology is, and what it’s ultimately capable of. First and foremost, private social media companies are in fact media, and as such are subject to all the same pressures and distortions as regular media is under capitalism. To invoke Manufacturing Consent, social media is still part of the propaganda model; and although it’s possibly for the masses to hijack this technology for short periods of time, by and large what it’s going to serve up is propaganda.

What makes social media platforms unique however, is some fairly advanced technology that allows for hyper specific targeting of that propaganda, and extremely intimate transmission of that propaganda, all under the guise of a “discussion forum” that looks to the uneducated observer, like a crude recreation of a social commons – the mythologized “town square.”

In reality, social media platforms are actually highly sophisticated influence machines, and the companies that manage them are in the business of renting out access to this influence over the target audience; you’re more or less only allowed to post because letting you do so attracts more targets and keeps you under the larger field of influence that’s being sold. Anyone familiar with rudimentary media theory will be aware of the idea that under an advertiser-driven revenue system, the consumer actually becomes the product; social media takes this one step further however by allowing someone to profit from you on both ends – as the consumer of propaganda, and as the product being sold to influencers who want you to eat that propaganda up.

In this context then, the current battle over social media censorship and misinformation ceases to be a discussion about free speech, and more clearly becomes a pitched battle for who will control access to the propaganda megaphone. Whether that’s fascist futurist tech bros, or a previously hegemonic neoliberal establishment that obeys capital anyway, everyday people are ultimately the losers in this rigged game.

 

• nina illingworth