• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
    11·
    9 months ago

    Fascism is a stage of colonial development, when the rate of imperial superprofit began to fall and the empire came home. It “emerges” in the sense that it’s just the exact same thing the empire was always doing but turned inward. Fascism never went away, it just turned outwards again with the emergence of neocolonialism. Now that neocolonial development has again reached a stage when the rate of profit begins to fall and the empire turns inward, fascism (or some kind of neofascism) is the next stage of development.

    It’s only useful as a way to understand historical development, and it’s not as if fascism and colonialism are truly different things; they’re part of the same ongoing process, two sides of the imperial boomerang. When fascism “emerges” is when the revolutionary potential of the imperial core is at its highest, which is why the empire has to come home to manage the internal contradictions and stave off revolution. As a way to define political moments its only useful as a way to understand revolutionary potential within the imperial core.

    • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Umm… Europeans have been colonizing other Europeans long before 1492. The most notable example of this was Ireland:

      Irishmen could not own land, sue in the king’s courts, hold office in central or local government, or be admitted to any ecclesiastical benefice in the territories under English control. In addition, the killing of an Irish man or woman was not a felony in English law; at most, the killer might owe compensation to the dead person’s lord.

      This last provision did not, as is sometimes assumed, imply murderous intent. The point was that Irishmen, as aliens rather than subjects, were outside the protection of the law. But the implications of that principle, where settler and native shared the same territory, were far reaching.

      (Source.)

      Capitalist colonialism within Europe was phenomenal years before the Fascist era. A byspel of this was World War I:

      In 1918 Germany annexed huge tracts of territory from the Russian Empire, taking direct control of almost all its coal mines, three‐quarters of its iron ore, half its industry, and a third of its rail system. An increasingly anti‐Slavic ideology added a racial dimension to this imperial expansion.

      Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff wanted not only to control the resources of Eastern Europe, but also to subdue the region’s Slavic nationalities, settle Germans there, and create a “frontier wall of ‘physically and mentally healthy human beings.’” First in Poland then later further east, the German army commandeered forced labor, deported thousands of Slavic workers, and monitored the local population through registration and identity cards.46

      (Source and see Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I for more.)

      If by ‘empire coming home’ you mean ‘white capitalists superexploiting their fellow white citizens’, then that is likewise a prefascist phenomenon:

      Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working‐day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night‐labour, irregular meal‐times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.

      (Source.)

      All that aside, what really disappoints me is seeing another person overlook the Fascist colonies in Afrasia. It bums me out. I try to regularly inform other users on that subject, so when I see a statement like ‘Fascism is the empire turning inward’, it makes me feel like my topics haven’t been of much help and haven’t really made a difference.