Chapter 3: But What About All The Other Ideologies? Part IV

So what about social democracy and fascism? Stalin once described social democracy as "the moderate wing of fascism" and declared social democracy and fascism as "not antipodes, but twins" (Stalin, "Concerning the International Situation," Bolshevik, September 20, 1924, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/09/20.htm ). As noted earlier by Lenin, socialism as theory does not originate with the workers, who are lulled by bougie false consciousness, but with the petty intelligentsia class traitorate. The founders of Marxism-Leninism were, with the exception of Stalin, petties. The petty intelligentsia are the only subclass (outside of worker prodigies like Stalin) with sufficient education to determine the truth, and the occasional intellectual misfit with more scruples than money will even dare to say that truth out loud.

However, the petties strive to be like the bougies, and so they engage in the same sort of virtue signalling that bougies do. Because the truth of Marxism-Leninism is undeniable at some level, the petties feel a need to ape socialist rhetoric and imagery, either about "financial speculators" and the Rothschilds and George Soros and "national socialism" and "traditional workers" if they're fascists, or about how anyone who works 80 hours a week ought to get a free eye exam if they're social democrats. Insofar as socialist principles can directly benefit them, they will even advocate them. This is why Bernie Sanders supports free college and Medicare For All - these measures will benefit proles too, but they are primarily aimed at the petties. This is why many people who caucused for Bernie ended up voting for Trump - both candidates support petty interests, albeit in different forms. Self-interest is the motivating principle of petties who are not class traitors, which is to say most of them. It is impolitic now to openly advocate petty interests in Democratic Party circles, so these people pose as socialists. But democratic socialism always attempts to reform capitalism into something nicer, instead of advocating for a revolution to overthrow it. This strategy is doomed to failure; capitalism will always regress to its worst instincts over time, but that's the unspoken, perhaps in most cases unconscious point of democratic socialism and the petties who vote for it. The petties aren't really opposed to capitalism; they're just opposed to being on the business end of it. This reform/revolution split is incredibly important; it is not just the split between social democrats and communists, but is also the split between petties and proles.

As for what distinguishes petty social democrats from petty fascists, as in the liberal/nazbol dichotomy it's the nature of the attempt to manipulate others. If the petties' most deeply-held ethic is self-interest, social democracy is that self-interest's carrot, and fascism the stick. Or to roll with the Donnie Darko dichotomy, social democracy is self-interested love, and fascism is self-interested fear. But the outcome is the same either way. Social democrat-inclined petties backed LBJ as he passed Medicare, food stamps, and civil rights for African-Americans. But the money for the first two had to come from somewhere, and it came from a fascist foreign policy.

The Vietnam War is the most obvious example of that fascist savagery, but a less well-known example is the purge of Indonesian communists that LBJ greenlit. Somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesians who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with us against Japan were killed as a CIA coup orchestrated malevolence in an episode that would've made Hitler blush. Another example of social democrats betraying their principles before their class is when FDR's vice president, Harry Truman, bombed Korea back into the stone age. By the estimates of Curtis LeMay, contemporary head of US Strategic Air Command and a raging anti-communist, twenty percent of North Korean civilians, or one-and-a-half to two million people, died from American bombings. The party of FDR didn't even see fit to publish these casualties in the papers.

Lenin talked about a "labor aristocracy," and this phenomenon of social democracy is precisely to what he referred. The wars America waged in the Third World during the Cold War were meant to contain the spread of communism. The point of this was not whatever Top Gun-esque notions of "freedom" we were all raised with, but essentially to act as the Pinkertons in our global sweatshops. Without the exploitation of the Third World by the First, there would not have been the money with which to bribe First World petties to stay loyal. Without the threat of communism, there would not have been the need, which is why nobody's gotten a raise in America since the Soviet Union fell.

Keep reading Part V