Yes, obviously, in the same way they were the first time, though liberals and social democrats bear greater responsibility.
Large sections of the Western left (especially demsocs and anarchists), alongside liberals, treat “neutrality,” “free speech absolutism,” and abstract anti-authoritarianism as virtues detached from material conditions and class power. In practice, this is not neutral at all. When one side is the hegemonic ideology (capitalism, backed by the state, capital, and media) being “against both sides” objectively favors that hegemony.
Liberals and social democrats are more directly responsible because, historically and consistently, they side with reaction against communism when forced to choose. This is not hypothetical: the Freikorps were unleashed by social democrats to crush the German communists; liberal states normalized anti-communism through the Red Scare; and today we see the same logic in the criminalization of communists, the rehabilitation of fascists as “free speech dissidents,” and the alignment of liberals with the far right against AES states and revolutionary movements.
This pattern is structural, not moral. Liberalism and reformist social democracy refuse to confront capital as a system. They manage capitalism, they do not abolish it. When imperialism faces crisis (falling rates of profit, declining global dominance, internal decay) capital does not become more democratic. It turns to repression. Fascism is not an aberration; it is capitalism’s fangs turning inward.
By equating communists with fascists (“extremism on both sides”), by platforming reactionaries in the name of free speech, and by rejecting revolutionary authority while preserving bourgeois authority, liberals and much of the Western left ideologically disarm the working class. Anti-authoritarianism in the abstract becomes a cover for submission to the most entrenched authority of all: capital.
The real question is not “authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian,” but authority of which class, in service of which system. Without answering that, you don’t oppose fascism, you enable it.
History has already settled this. Fascism is defeated not by neutrality, liberal norms, or reformism, but by organized, class-conscious opposition to capitalism and imperialism. Fascists only understand the stick not the carrot and we must never forget that.
Yes, obviously, in the same way they were the first time, though liberals and social democrats bear greater responsibility.
Large sections of the Western left (especially demsocs and anarchists), alongside liberals, treat “neutrality,” “free speech absolutism,” and abstract anti-authoritarianism as virtues detached from material conditions and class power. In practice, this is not neutral at all. When one side is the hegemonic ideology (capitalism, backed by the state, capital, and media) being “against both sides” objectively favors that hegemony.
Liberals and social democrats are more directly responsible because, historically and consistently, they side with reaction against communism when forced to choose. This is not hypothetical: the Freikorps were unleashed by social democrats to crush the German communists; liberal states normalized anti-communism through the Red Scare; and today we see the same logic in the criminalization of communists, the rehabilitation of fascists as “free speech dissidents,” and the alignment of liberals with the far right against AES states and revolutionary movements.
This pattern is structural, not moral. Liberalism and reformist social democracy refuse to confront capital as a system. They manage capitalism, they do not abolish it. When imperialism faces crisis (falling rates of profit, declining global dominance, internal decay) capital does not become more democratic. It turns to repression. Fascism is not an aberration; it is capitalism’s fangs turning inward.
By equating communists with fascists (“extremism on both sides”), by platforming reactionaries in the name of free speech, and by rejecting revolutionary authority while preserving bourgeois authority, liberals and much of the Western left ideologically disarm the working class. Anti-authoritarianism in the abstract becomes a cover for submission to the most entrenched authority of all: capital.
The real question is not “authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian,” but authority of which class, in service of which system. Without answering that, you don’t oppose fascism, you enable it.
History has already settled this. Fascism is defeated not by neutrality, liberal norms, or reformism, but by organized, class-conscious opposition to capitalism and imperialism. Fascists only understand the stick not the carrot and we must never forget that.