Capitalism causes fascism.
At this point it’s probably fairer to say that humanity causes fascism.
Concentration of power causes fascism. Capitalism concentrates power very effectively.
You can balance or domesticate it with good social policies, but those get undermined over time.
Entropy, which requires active effort to prevent and reverse. Machines rust. Bridges crumble. Food rots. Similarly, societies decay into fascism (or something similar). Preventing this decay requires actually holding leaders accountable, and replacing them if they’re not serving the people.
Think of governments / economies as machines, and the components of those machines are people. If a spark plug in your car isn’t sparking, you replace it. If your governor goes to cancun when your state freezes, you replace him.
In theory, it really shouldn’t be this hard.
Superman is the myth we are deluded with
It’s always been just Homelander
Right. Superman is a socialist. Capitalism would be Kingpin.
I love the amount of steps they have to go through in Red Son to pretend that whole thing wouldn’t be extremely based.
Times don’t have to be tough. We are living in an age of unprecedented richness. The only problem is most people don’t get to participate in that richness. Because greed.
“Hard times” are for the capitalist. It’s not really hard times in the typical sense. They are losing the fight against the contradictions of capitalism. They have fought hard against the tendency for the rate of profit to decline.
They have eroded the social safetynets of the imperial core countries. Blaming the destruction of these systems on the mass immigration from the global south that their exploitation and imperialism have caused.
The “hard times” are when the population of the global south are given alternatives in a bipolar world. With a secondary power unwilling to engage in direct conflict with them. But, are simply, beating capitalism at its own game; and have made the financial capital economy in the west entirely dependent on them.
So, the hard times are here. The rate of profit continues to fall. The “circus” for your population is working hard and easily available due to the internet age. The “bread” is drying up though and the profits cannot be sacrificed to maintain them.
So, Fascism is accepted. The oligarchs stand at the side of the fascist and trust them to serve their interests by offering a scapegoat to the angry masses. The trans people, the immigrants, the “antifas”, and any liberal that says they’re glad Charlie Kirk is dead.
Times did not “get tough”. That is too simple an explanation. There’s a certain type of people who make the times tough who are coincidentally also totally fine to shift into facism.
“I’m you when we get a bad president” - FTFY
