Journal: All Roads Lead Here

NinaIllingworth October 30, 2022November 5, 2022 All Roads Lead Here, anarchism, anticapitalism, antifascism, austerity, billionaire funded fascism, Breitbart, CA4, capitalism breeds fascism, capitalism is causing climate crisis, capitalism kills, capitalist realism, CC3, Climate Crisis, climate science denial, corporate America, dark money, Democracy, ecofascism, eliminationism, end of democracy, FA1, fascism, fascist propaganda, fossil fuel industry, Fox News, free market fundamentalism, informal writing, internet media, Journals, lie, Mark Fisher, Media, misinformation, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, paywalls, pig empire, Politics, Propaganda, Socialism, ST2, Stanford Prison Experiment, The Daily Caller, Trumpism is fascism

Editor’s note: I write a lot of informal journals that usually appear on Facebook, or over on Can’t You Read. If those journals are long enough and strong enough, I sometimes clean them up, add citations, and share them here on NIDC.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

In a time when fascist fantasy and conspiracy theory is now actively achieving the force of law, I am of course sympathetic towards the labor class liberal’s desire to avoid “conspiracy thinking” in our modern political environment; indeed, I share the same general sentiment with them. Frankly however, there is a fine line between rejecting conspiracy, and putting your head in the sand because you simply don’t want to believe the capitalists who run our society are rotten sociopaths who’re actively fueling a climate apocalypse and the fascism needed to ensure it. At this point, the idea that rich capitalists in the Pig Empire are contributing directly to the propagation of fascist movements and ecofascist ideology is simply a demonstrable fact, widely reported across all vectors of media; albeit, often without proper context. It is for example not a conspiracy theory to say reactionary billionaires buying social media sites and promising to un-ban prominent fascists is a plot to continue mainstreaming fascist thought; there are forty-four billion cold hard reasons to believe this particular conspiracy is no theory.

Even setting aside the direct funding and support the ruling classes provide fascist movements in Pig Empire politics to examine the presumably neutral workings of commercial life however, does not particularly improve the picture. The purpose of a bread company after all is not to feed people, but rather to exploit enforced scarcity for profit; if you cannot afford the bread, the company does not provide it because their business model requires them to charge people for bread. The bank doesn’t loan you money to promote economic activity, they expect the money back with significant interest; and if you cannot, or will not pay, they will take your house even if it leaves you homeless. Hell, even supposedly “public utility” companies will shut off your power if you don’t pay the bill; it may take until spring due to local regulations, but eventually you’ll lose heat, light, and water unless you can pay.

On the surface all of this seems quite logical to anyone who has grown up surrounded by these hyper normalized social interactions under capitalism; but by any objective measure, we’re talking about ransoming the necessities of life for profit under the best of circumstances, and outright atrocities under the worst. Our everyday way of thinking and living is highly reactionary under capitalism even on a consumer level; did have to drive to work this morning? Well the next time you put gas in your car, you’re going to be helping a whole bunch of homicidal reactionaries continue murdering poor people for profit while the oceans boil. Is refusing really an option for you? Not if you need the vehicle to earn rent money it isn’t. It is in fact impossible to run a capitalist society dominated by free-market fundamentalist thinking, without embracing a great deal of fascist ideology and reactionary practice, or at least ideology and practices that are quite useful to the fascists. Furthermore, the predictability and intractability of the mainstream capitalist establishment benefits fascism in a number of subtle, but surprisingly important ways.

Take the example of for-profit media on the internet. As what might be called a “super-consumer” of online media, I can assure you that reactionary capital, and mainstream “liberal” media are simply not playing the same game. Right wing media works on an advertiser-based revenue model and there’s no shortage of fascist company owners happy to advertise on networks that toe their desired ideological line; while most liberal media exists on a subscription model, and thereby rely on individual customers. That might not sound like a big deal, but when one side of the political divide is openly pushing the idea that baby brain juice drinking liberal elites are coming to “trans” your kids, the danger becomes predictable and obvious.

The end result here is that regular people searching for the news online can read fascist conspiracy theories for free, but actual news comes at a price, and an extra degree of hassle. Is the Washington Post trying to help fascists win by hiding their reporting by a paywall? Of course not; but since you can get Fox News, Breitbart, and The Daily Caller without having to sign up or pay anything, this completely profit-motivated practice is actively driving poor people into the arms of fascist propagandists, every single day. If you multiply those days out long enough, as more and more people who spend their entire lives online reach voting age, it’s not hard to see this impacting politics in the Pig Empire in ways that are decidedly unfavorable to the “liberal” political and media establishment; if not the rich capitalists who own said establishment.

This is not in any way to suggest that that the folks reflexively aiding fascists in our society for purely profit-motivated reasons are somehow innocent, or even that what they’re doing is merely a question of negligence. But when we’re talking about questions like “why is the Pig Empire falling to over fascism now” and “what are we going to have to change to stop these nazis before they start digging mass graves” it’s important to understand the structural nature of the problem in a neofeudalist hellpit society. When Amerikkkan companies promote inclusion or denounce bigotry to improve their public image, then turn around and fund fascist conspiracy theorists pushing hate-speech as politics to minimize their tax burden and regulatory obligations, that decision must be understood as a rational, if monstrous action in a wholly reactionary, irrational culture. We can certainly blame capitalists for supporting a genocide in progress for their own financial advancement, but we can’t pretend that everything about our way of life isn’t actively incentivizing them to do so. Until that underlying motivation changes, we cannot be surprised if fascism continues to grip hold of our society.

So who rigged our society to reward short term profit taking and homicidal reactionary greed at all costs? Would it surprise you to learn that it was (and is) the very same capitalists profiting from normalizing this behavior? Indeed, one good way of thinking about so-called “late stage capitalism” is that the extraction of profits has more or less become the world’s largest version of the Stanford Prison Experiment; the monstrous behavior of individual capitalists sets a baseline which would-be competitors are encouraged to match or even exceed. If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. Which is of course just one more reason why capitalism, and all the capitalists, must go; literally everything depends on it now.