We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
My point is even if you get a person to stop being a fascist, they don’t also lose the neoliberal ideas that they have in their head. Once a person rejects fascism they still have to reject neoliberalism.
You’re thinking of neofascism as a compound form of neoliberalism there, which I think is a mistake.
The people migrating from US-style neolib views into protofascist veneration for a strongman aren’t stacking one thing on top of the other. They are breaking with a neoliberal scheme that didn’t do much for them and into a fascist mindset that presents itself as revolutionary.
Had the left done a better job of channeling that disaffection they could have broken leftwards. They didn’t, so they abandoned neoliberal views for neofascist ones.
I am very skeptical that the conversion path for those fascists is back to neoliberalism and then from there to a more leftist stance. The left isn’t competing for the people already radicalized right, they are competing for the people that keep shedding off the husk of the liberal establishment.
And they’re losing.
Also, I should add, the loop I’m referring to is that no matter how bad it gets this acceleration principle always states things need to get worse. This is not the neoliberal to fascist pipeline. edit: although things getting worse is what’s pushing people to choose between fascism and socialism
And when a neoliberal becomes a fascist, they are adopting fascist ideas. However, those neoliberal ideas aren’t rejected. The neoliberal ideas are what lead the person to reject socialist and progressive ideas in favor of fascist ideas. It’s not that we failed to channel the dissatisfaction, but failed to challenge the underlying framework for internalizing their dissatisfaction. Instead of blaming the system people are blaming the people living in that system, like immigrants and trans people.
If a fascist rejects those fascist ideas the neoliberal ideas will be what they fall back on. For example, if a person believes systemic change is unnecessary, then rejecting the fascist alternative, removing people, doesn’t mean they will question the underlying assumption that systemic change is unnecessary. The fact we need systemic change still needs to be learned.
It’s not a path. People do not need to go through neoliberism. People are, usually anyway, not purely a fascist or purely a neoliberal. It’s that people have a collection of ideas in their heads. In the case of our modern society, there are a lot of neoliberal ideas and increasingly fascist ideas in people’s heads. All of these neoliberal and fascist ideas need to be addressed one at a time before a person can start accepting the progressive and socialist alternatives to those ideas. edit: typo
We have distinctly different ideas on how this works. Both hypotheses are untestable, though (at least to us).
Or, you know, to put it differently, “agree to disagree”.
I think you both brought useful illustrations to the table.
I see the op as describing more of a layering of neoliberalism and fascism than an outright fusion.