Lol that’s my exact problem though.

I don’t want to wage war and I don’t want to gear up for battle when I have a discussion with someone that I disagree with. I wish more people would be willing to just sit down and compare notes openly and honestly.

Idk, in a broader sense I think that late stage capitalism has inculcated this horrible, frantic, terrified hyper-individualism in people because it’s easy to exploit individuals who feel this way and to make them self-absorbed and greedy. Think like the typical Boomer who is drenched in Fox news who considers everyone and everything a threat to their safety and their needs, who is constantly pushing to take as much of everything that they can because they viscerally feel that sense of threat throughout their lives. (But I think we all have all experienced that same sort of thing, to some degree.)

I just wish that people would be more open to checking out from that cycle of torment, of seeing everything as a personal and existential threat. I don’t want my discussions to be an accessory to all of that.

Can’t we all just play nice? 😭

Yeah, all of the above.

My problem is that it takes a specific term and makes it extremely broad which is bad for understanding and identifying fascism but also it’s really bad optics because it makes people who are radical or radical-ish look like they’re halfway through their first year of college.

I gestured towards my other critique where I talked about how corporations from their very outset in their fully fledged version that we know them today (i.e. the form that is one step beyond when people would go in on shipping by investing into a share of the shipping to distribute the risk and profit) were always fused to state power to the point where they directly exercised state power themselves - by saying fascism is when corporations and the state are merged it obscures the reality and it leads people to believing that we just need to “get corporations out of government” just like how progressive types want to “get lobbying out of government”, which is really kinda naive and self-defeating because it’s utterly insufficient as it fails to grasp the reality of the situation it’s a massive dead end for organising and activist efforts.

Way back when, about a quarter of a century ago, the predecessor movement to stuff like Occupy Wall Street was the anti-globalisation protests that failed to identify the fact that capitalism in its developed form has always been globalised and it failed to recognise that the problem was inherent to capitalism itself and that “globalisation”, whatever the fuck that actually means, is an integral part of capitalism itself. The argument about corporatism (i.e. corporatocracy) has the same energy. There’s no getting the toothpaste back into the tube and, in fact, the toothpaste was always already out of the tube from the very outset.

Presumably they are correctly identifying an issue with corporations having lots of unchecked power.

Yes and no. On the face of it, yes. But again this obscures the reality of capitalism - due to how it functions, capitalism is always going to seek to overcome the forces that hem it in by its very nature and so I’d object to the framing as it being “unchecked” power; capitalism is always waging war on what obstructs it and it’s a very dynamic system so even if it does get put back into its place it will undermine whatever has checked its power*. On another level, the distinction between the political sphere and the economic sphere is also fallacious imo; you don’t need any legal platform to lobby the government or any direct “merger” between state power and the influence of capital because capital commands its own power that brings politics to heel and the most obvious example of this is when one guy decided to move to a different state.

Who needs to lobby or to try and merge your power as a capitalist with the state when you can make government kowtow to you at your very whim?

So yeah, it’s the typical rundown of ML critiques of someone else’s position on politics and economics:

It’s ahistorical, it’s undialectical, it’s unmaterialist lol
(I’m being semi-ironic btw but if you wanted a TL;DR on my comment then that would be the most succinct summary.)

*Relevant section from Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, Notebook IV:

Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side – i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour – so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.

But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.