larsmaischak

[larsmaischak]

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[larsmaischak]

Race, Gender, Class and the Old vs the New Left

With an afterword by Sojourner Truth

1960s

Capital:  Maybe we look bad, now that the Soviets have female tractor drivers and engineers, and Africa is governed by actual Africans, while we have a labor market that privileges white men?

New Left:  The Old Left has not done enough to recognize the specific ways in which women and African-Americans are oppressed.

Old Left:  Who has been leading all those Civil Rights marches, if not the left?  Who has been paying for the field organizers and buses, if not the labor unions?  Who has been pushing for equal pay and equal rights for women, if not socialists like Margaret Sanger?

1970s

Blue Collar Workers: Let’s beat the crap out of some hippies.  USA!  USA!

New Left:  See?  The Old Left is for the war, and against the counter culture, and all that.  They are squares!

Old Left:  You know that the craft unions representing those reactionary white, male workers have a long history of exclusion of women, immigrants, and African-Americans that goes back to the 1880s, right?  That’s different from our industrial organizing tradition that goes back to Eugene Debs, the Wobblies, the CIO…

New Left:  Workers are the enemy!  Let’s focus on women and people of color!

Old Left:  Now wait a minute!  95% of women and people of color rely on wage work for their income!  They are working class!

New Left:  Let’s march through the institutions!  I’ll be a lawyer!  You can get tenure!

1980s

Capital:  Let’s squash Communism and the unions!

New Left:  What unions?  Were there any left?  How quaint!

Old Left:  We have to defend the rights of workers!

New Left:  Workers are (a) fine, and (b) sexist, racist, reactionaries.  Shut up!

1990s

Capital:  Look, the Soviet Union is gone!  Let’s modernize our economy, and return personal responsibility to the individual!

Old Left:  Responsibility for what, exactly?

Capital:  For how they survive a modernized economy without adequate wages, health care, housing, and retirement benefits.

New Left:  Did you know that all those old, secure, well paid jobs were held by - gasp! - white men?  It is about time that they let go of their privilege and give women and people of color a chance.  Did you know that women and people of color like flexible jobs and thrive in them?  The kinds of jobs for which working class men are frankly not suited?  That require intelligence and education?

Old Left:  You mean making wage-work less secure and rewarding, more stressful, and placing the burden of obtaining the required education on the individual workers is good for women and people of color?

New Left:  Aha!  You are still your old racist, sexist, unreformed selves!

2000s

Old Left:  Fight Globalization!  For the rights of indigenous people, women, workers, for environmental protection!

New Left:  Hooray!  You know how we can get all those good things?  By opening up our markets for Free Trade!  Modernize!  Knowledge economy!  Global village!

Old Left:  That sounds an awful lot like the stuff corporate consultants are saying …

New Left:  Many corporate consultants are women, people of color, and even gay or lesbian!  We are not surprised that you fossils are still afraid of those groups gaining power at the expense of white men!

Old Left:  White men, like the indigenous women in Chiapas backing the Uprising?

New Left:  Cultural appropriation!

2010s

Old Left: Listen, have you paid attention lately to the free fall of the working class through the tattered social safety net?  There’s a swath of human misery and devastation from opioids, the starving of public institutions like schools and libraries, neoliberal schemes to penny-pinch urban areas that literally poison people with their tap water, …

New Left:  OBAMA!  Oh, the dreamy, well-spoken, intelligent, Obama!  Sigh!

Old Left: … as we were trying to say …

New Left: It is the Millennium of Modernity!  History is at an end!  All contradictions in the world, all conflicts, have been laid to rest!  Hosiannah!

Old Left: ... and these unaddressed problems will not just go away.  We have to pay attention …

New Left:  Will you SHUT UP ALREADY about the flyover states and the human scum that dwells in them!  We’re trying to listen to NPR, here.

2020s

Capital:  Enough with this democracy business.  It allows the wrong people to have their dirty fingers on the levers of power.  Didn’t we have a pretty good system in place for dealing with this stuff?  Steve?

Bannon:  Heil Trump!

Capital:  Sounds good.

Fascism:  Cultural Marxism has too long incited women and other inferiors to aspire to a status far above their place.  It is time to restore America to Greatness by putting these people back in their place.  By force, if needed.

New Left:  See what you’ve done!  All your decades of coddling the working class, those reactionary white men!  Now they’re back in full force, and all because of you and your idiotic refusal to go with the program.  We had it all!  Tenure!  Professional jobs!�� CLOUT!  NPR!  MSNBC!  And you ruined it all!

Old Left:  Let’s talk about SOCIALISM …

New Left:  All the rights of LGBTQ+ people, women, people of color, and you want to throw that all out by capitulating to the Fascists?

Old Left: No, actually, we want to fight capital, so that the reactionaries are deprived of their funding and support.  Then we can rally the vast majority of the people, who are working for wages to survive, around their common interest as working, suffering, hoping, creative, loving humans.

Sojourner Truth:

I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. …  That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sojtruth-woman.asp

#Old Left #New Left #Capitalism #fascism #democracy #socialism #racism #patriarchy #Sojourner Truth #liberalism

[larsmaischak]

In 2016, everyone was taking online personality quizzes to find out what superhero, Disney princess, or 90s sitcom character you were. I took one of these myself (I’m Batman, if you were wondering).

In 2017, the fad suddenly vanished. Then we found out Cambridge Analytica had been using online personality tests to secretly mine user data and create personality profiles to divide Democrats against each other, manipulate swing voters, and help elect Trump.

Now it’s 2020, and suddenly these quizzes are back. And I see even many of my most politically astute friends are taking them. If we’re not going to learn from the past, I guess we deserve whatever we get.

https://www.facebook.com/apiper/posts/10157287692029232

[larsmaischak]

Yesterday, Farah Stockman from the New York Times editorial board published an article claiming to be “The Truth About Today’s Anarchists.” It draws on the work of an amateur conspiracy theorist, a poorly researched report from a nonprofit including a former Republican state attorney general and a former NYPD chief, a couple interviews with politicians and reformers, decontextualized and misleading references to two of our own publications, and regurgitated right-wing talking points to argue that violent anarchists are somehow controlling the ongoing countrywide protests but don’t care about Black lives.

[larsmaischak]

Nazi Collaborators,

Or, why you should think of certain individuals as such

Me: Republicans are fascists.  If you carry on like that, Trump will be executed for crimes against humanity.

Actual Nazis online:  We want Maischak fired, or we will kill people at Fresno State!

Local fascists with money, like Michael DerManouel:  We want Maischak fired, or we will no longer give Fresno State our money.

Joseph Castro, President of Fresno State:  I agree with you, and will do as you wish.  Get him out of the classroom, and tell the union we’re doing it because we cannot protect anyone from the violence.

Nazis:  Hooray, we won!

Me:  Why are you removing me from the classroom?

Provost Lynette Zelezny:  Because we can, according to the union contract.

Union local president Diane Blair:  We are okay with that.  You’re good with us.

Union rep Kathryn Forbes:  It’s your own fault, be the model employee now, and they might not try to fire you.

Union diretor of representation, Kathy Sheffield:  CSU was justified in removing you from the classroom because of the threat of violence.

Me:  My union, CFA, helped my employer, Fresno State, meet the demands of fascists making threats of violence.  Do you think that is a problem?

Union local president John Beynon: [crickets]

Union activist Meta Schettler:  HOW DARE YOU TELL LIES ABOUT GOOD PEOPLE!  THEY ARE NOT NAZI COLLABORATORS!

For the record, then, let me set things straight.

If you help fascists realize their demands, and you justified this with the threat of violence they made, you are a nazi collaborator.

Are you a nazi collaborator only if you do this habitually?  No, once is enough.

Are you not a nazi collaborator, because you are also a feminist, progressive, advocate for social justice, or all of the above?  No.  If you helped fascists realize their demands, doing harm to your colleague in the process, even though you could have prevented such harm with very little effort or risk, you are a nazi collaborator.

For that reason, one should recognize Joseph Castro, Lynette Zelezny, Kathryn Forbes, Diane Blair, and Kathy Sheffield as nazi collaborators.

If there is a time after Trump, and if there is a time when we beat back fascism in this country, let’s make sure it is never forgotten that Joseph Castro, Lynette Zelezny, Kathryn Forbes, Diane Blair, and Kathy Sheffield are nazi collaborators

Let’s also not forget that John Beynon, Meta Schettler, and many others like them in the Calfornia Faculty Association are guilty of enabling nazi collaborators, shielding them from criticism, deciding to victimize the victim once more in the process.

I will continue to insist on holding them accountable for their acts.

#fascism #nazis #collaborators #collaboration #labor #union #california state university #Fresno State #California Faculty Association #Fresno

[larsmaischak]

Don’t Say You Didn’t Know

Recently, it has become much more common for political commentators to acknowledge the threat of fascism in this country.  I want to take this occasion to remind the general public that I had warned against this threat in 2017.  At the time, liberals dismissed the very thought of fascism as an absurdity.  In fact, it was clear to any unbiased observer at the time that the danger of fascism was imminent.

Here are some of my public statements from April 2017

April 9 2017 - Why the Prediction that "Trump Must Hang"?

1) The Republican Party has placed itself in the tradition of fascism (German or otherwise) by its embrace of ethnic nationalism, Social Darwinism, militarism, and patriarchal gender ideology.

2) The present government of the U.S. is pursuing policies that follow from the above ideas.  For instance, the deportations of undocumented immigrants are not driven by any rational policy incentive, but rather by ethnic and racial resentment.  They are conducted with a degree of cruelty that goes far beyond the imperatives of sensible law enforcement.  In the broader view of historical precedent, they are akin to ethnic cleansing.

3) Historically, democracies faced with a threat from a fascist sub-culture have succeeded in defending themselves only if they were willing to use repressive means. Considering the hermetically closed frame of reference within the fascist sub-culture in this country, there is little hope for the liberal remedy of rational debate, convincing others in a market-place of ideas, etc.  This makes a repressive and punitive remedy almost inevitable.

4) Once the full extent of the ideological motives behind the actions of the present government becomes more readily apparent, and once these actions have taken their toll on the population of this country, I think that it will be likely for a trial or tribunal to take place where leading Republicans will be held accountable.  The execution of the present chief executive is a possible outcome of any such proceedings.

5) At the moment, based on my conviction that a majority of Americans are committed to democracy, it therefore follows that "Trump must hang" (the partial text of one of my most-quoted tweets), with the word "must" expressing a logical necessity, rather than a demand or wish.

My assessment of the situation in which this country finds itself is of course colored by my background as a German.  I have observed the increasing similarity in tone, style, and content between the utterances of Republicans over the past decade, and those of German neo-Nazis and old Nazis.

April 11 2017 - Is Trump a Fascist?

Authors of the numerous items of hate-mail I have been sent by the dutiful followers of the right-wing propaganda sub-culture have taken issue with my comparison of Mr. Trump and his followers with German Fascism.

For starters, a few pieces of evidence:

1) The claim that immigrants (undocumented and otherwise) are inherently dangerous, and take away jobs from honest, hard-working citizens, has become the basis for the policies of this administration.  This is a claim made by neo-Nazi parties in Europe since at least the 1980s.  It has never been embraced by the government of a civilized, Western nation before.

2) The insistence that members of an entire religious group pose a threat to the safety of citizens of this country informed both the Muslim Ban and the planned Muslim Registry.  This is a departure from core values of Western, constitutional liberalism that consider citizenship a term neutral to race, ethnicity, and religion.  The revocation of German citizenship from Jews in the 1930s constitutes one of the rare historical precedents for this radical rejection of the idea of civic equality.

3) Social Darwinism informs the social policy and attitude towards organized labor taken by the Republican Party, even before Trump.  In practice, the embrace of a free market by politicians like Paul Ryan represents a committment to the survival of the fittest.

4) Mr. Trump, in his inaugural address, made positive reference to the "America First Committee," an organization that hoped to prevent the United States from entering into war with Nazi Germany.  For the founders of this organization, the motivation for this stance was agreement with Hitler, and support of his policies.

If the standard for identifying a set of political ideas as "Fascist" is that it result in a genocide that claims the lives of six million people, as was the case with German Fascism, then there are no more Fascists after Hitler. But Italian Fascism is no less Fascism for the absence of an anti-Semitism to match that of the German Nazis in its ideas and practices.  Neither was Mr. Hitler less of a Fascist in 1932, before he accomplished any of his goals, than he was in 1945.

#fascism #Trump #2017

[larsmaischak]

https://medium.com/@katelynburns/im-a-trans-woman-and-i-don-t-know-how-to-do-this-6958817a29b7

[larsmaischak]

what 2020 feels like

[larsmaischak]

Grateful to have someone state this so clearly.  This is maybe not the key, but a key to understanding Trump-Brand Fascism.  It was also a major, official, universally touted program point of German fascism.  Weakness is bad.

“You gotta understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for weakness, because that’s what they believe strength is, hatred for weakness. And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred. And I’m not exaggerating. Believe me. Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that’s what proves they’re strong, their passionate hatred for weakness. Sometimes they lump in vulnerability, a compromised circumstance, or an overwhelming circumstance in there with weakness, too, because people tend to start humbling themselves when they’re in those circumstances and that’s an obvious sign of weakness. “Kindness=weakness. Honesty=weakness. Compromise=weakness. They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn’t hate weakness as much as they do. They consider liberals to be weak people who are inferior, almost a difference species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it’s that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority. “

#fascism #social darwinism #cult of strength #disdain for weakness #trump-brand fascism

[larsmaischak]

I know it is a long shot, but if nothing else, I want to be able to tell liberals, “yes, you knew.  Don’t go telling yourself, your kids, and everybody else afterward what my grandparents told us, that you just didn’t know.”

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article244802432.html

Joe Biden’s calling for people to be prosecuted just for being anarchists and if you honestly think you’ve still got an electoral way to avoid fascism this should be a wake up slap

Biden says he wants to throw me in prison, and you still expect me to not say anything bad about him that might “discourage people from voting”?

[larsmaischak]

#BLM #fascism #Reichstagsbrand #right-wing violence #antifa #Portland #protest #democracy #equality #rule of law #John Adams #james madison #George III

[larsmaischak]

#capitalism #socialism #democracy #fascism #United States

[larsmaischak]

See, now they're asking Trump to take their money, already, to finish that wall.  

This will never stop being funny to me.

[larsmaischak]

How to justify the violent repression of dissent ---  An Easy, Seven-Step Guide

The following is a step-by-step breakdown of the line promoted by government propaganda, feds (esp. DHS) and Republican Party, starting from a simple and widely shared premise.

1) If you work hard, you can get ahead.

2) If you're poor, you did not work hard enough, and laziness is a sin.

3) If black people are disproportionately poor, it is their own fault, because they are lazy, not because of racism.

4) There is no racism in the United States.  People are complaining because they have been misled by Cultural Marxists (especially their teachers).

5) Cultural Marxists use 'race' and 'gender' instead of 'class' to whip up dissent; because they hate America and its foundations of freedom and faith.

6) Behind it all, THE JEW (Soros, Alinsky, Horkheimer, Adorno ... ).  But we are not anti-Semites. We support Israel.

7) What you see in the streets is not legitimate dissent, but a Marxist insurrection. You can't reason with these people, you can only arrest, deport, and kill.

This has nothing to do with politics and elections, and everything with ideology.

The name for this ideology is fascism. It directly informs the actions of the U.S. government and its supporters. When your neighbor says, 'BLM are Marxists,' this is where that comes from.

#BLM #Marxism #fascism #cultural marxism #Trump-brand fascism #Portland #DHS thugs

[larsmaischak]

From Portland to the World A Call for Solidarity with the Struggle against the Federal Occupation https://cwc.im/PortlandToTheWorld Since the end of May, demonstrators opposing police violence and white supremacy have thronged the streets of Portland, Oregon, clashing with law enforcement officers. Last week, aspiring autocrat Donald Trump escalated the situation by announcing that he would be sending federal agents around the country to assert his authority through acts of violence against protesters. The past few days have seen thousands sweep into the streets of Portland to defend those who were already protesting and demand the departure of Trump’s federal agents from their city. Now participants in the movement in Portland are calling for solidarity actions starting this Saturday, on July 25. The following statement from several Portland organizations—including (Pop)ular (Mob)ilization, Portland Rising Tide, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Group, Colectivo X, and Symbiosis PDX—entreats everyone who has been inspired by the determination and endurance of demonstrators in that city to spread the struggle countrywide, just as Donald Trump hopes to deploy federal forces everywhere.

[larsmaischak]

It’s only tyrannical to them, if government acts in the interest of people of color.

Besides, they’re not in hiding.  They’re cheering and hoping they’ll get invited to join the fun.

This, in truth, is what they’ve been hoping for all along, because the main reason they wanted guns is to be ready when the “urban hordes” come for their stuff.

Read their press.  They consider any claim to equality by the actual working class (as opposed to the idealized white male one) an assault on their property.

maybe the GOP takes a Hypocritical Oath and pledges to be total douchebags and lie all the time?

if this is true, they are staunchly upholding that oath at all times

[larsmaischak]

I always doubted the notion that right-wing politics is about (lack of) empathy.

1) The lack-of-empathy thesis serves to make empathy a marker of liberalism.  I have met plenty of liberals who are highly selective in awarding empathy, limiting it to a narrow group of socially similar people.

2) Empathy is a personality trait.  To make political ideology about the possession or lack of a positive personality trait depoliticizes, and instead moralizes, the goals and values of right-wingers.

3) Even genuine fascists (and I’ve known a few, being German by birth) are capable of empathy, albeit in a fairly narrowly circumscribed circle of people (e.g. family).

What is at work when fascists shrug off (or even celebrate) individual suffering is a political ideology that values strength, demeans weakness, celebrates sacrifice for a greater good, and demands stoicism.  It is a learned behavior consistent with Social Darwinism and nationalism.

To summarize, it is not about individual character or morality.

It is about politics and ideology.

Seriously, everyone who is all: “Oh, they’ll care when it starts to affect THEIR families/loved ones” are seriously underestimating just how horrible these people are.

Um, no. I doubt Donald Trump cares that much that Don Jr’s girlfriend caught it. Heck, Don Jr himself might not even care that much.