We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
Given the options of being beaten to death by fascists or being chastised by a communist while you beat them to death, people choose the latter. You will face severe hardship by moving left, but will face less hardship by moving right. Naturally, then, people will shift in the direction that makes their lives the least difficult in a given moment.
I wouldn’t argue it’s a case of least resistance materially, in terms of physical hardship, when choosing between socialism and fascism. I think neoliberalism does set people up to fail in the sense that fascism is ideologically the path of least resistance. Neoliberalism says we don’t need to change systems only the people in charge of those systems. Fascism says we should, in addition, change the people living in the system, mainly by removing them.
This is an easier change in thinking than fundamentally restructuring economic and political institutions to be inclusive instead of extractive. Thus socialists and progressives have to work harder than the fascists do because neoliberalism does most of the work for the fascists. Neoliberalism leads to fascism.
I am mostly talking about where we currently are, now that fascists are in power. People will start having to make that mental decision. ‘Do I keep my head down, do I stand up and die, or do I just join the fascists and try to have a good life?’
Neoliberalism doesn’t have any bearing on how things go next, IMO.
While that’s true that doesn’t necessarily mean a person is a fascist if they keep their head down. What I mean is that neoliberals are more susceptible to becoming fascists who terrorize other people.
Although, I think there are a lot of people who have consumed a decent chunk of anti-fascist propaganda. These people are effectively awkwardly stuck as neoliberals. They’ve rejected fascism, but they still can’t bring themselves to really be socialists or even progressives.
Getting these people to reject neoliberalism is crucial to building grassroots movements to build a political revolution. We need people to rise up against the systems that have enabled this fascist takeover. As long as a majority of people have neoliberal ideas in their heads, they’re unlikely to do that. People need to learn that systemic change and wealth redistribution are essential. Otherwise we are going to be victims to a larger fascist movement later and/or climate change even if we somehow defeat this fascist dictatorship.
So not only is neoliberalism how we got here, as neoliberalism leads to fascism, but rejecting neoliberalism is going to be crucial to getting rid of the current fascist regime. It’s not enough to only be against fascism, we also need to be for something too. And neoliberalism is getting in the way of being for something for a lot of people.