Unsurprisingly given the title of this article, Eley's field of expertise in history includes fascist movements. Although our interviewer does manage to rope him into one question about the historical study of fascism, Eley's answers in this piece are otherwise hyper focused on providing a practical understanding of modern fascism. For example, when discussion portability of fascist politics, the professor offers up this explanation of the conditions required to enable this kind of political movement to thrive:
Along the way, Eley also talks about the three things all fascist movements have in common (rejection of liberal democracy, preference for authoritarianism, desire to violently disenfranchise an other they define,) and how society can fight fascism; with broad coalition building and a popular front approach. If you don't have time to read dozens of, or even just one whole book about fascism, this is more or less an excellent little primer; with one big caveat.
That caveat is that by way of injecting the talking point into a question about Narendra Modi, our interviewer pushes the idea that Donald Trump isn't a fascist, because he "lacks a coherent ideology that is a crucial aspect of fascism." This weaksauce argument has been an asinine hobby horse for Jacobin magazine ever since noted reactionary trashfire and friend to fascists Ben Burgis published an article telling folks to "relax, it's not fascism" days after the January 6th MAGA coup attempt; they were wrong then, and they are wrong now. For starters, Trump is definitely a fascist; secondly, if being a fascist requires understanding ideology, then illiterate Nazi murderers who did pogroms in World War II weren't fascists either - absurd.
Furthermore, you can tell Eley doesn't like this nonsense either, because he spends a paragraph trying to form a convoluted definition of ideology that allows both him and the host to be correct; before specifically referencing the rise of Trump in his conclusions about what type of political environment allows fascist movements to succeed. Despite this bad noise, the interview is a worthwhile read; even if I'm giving Jacobin and its interviewer zero stars and a failing grade on anti-fascism as a whole.
Editor's note: the Picture Show is a short-burst analysis feature over on my (always free to read) Patreon Blog, exploring the world of lefty YouTube videos you can enjoy in twenty-two minutes or less.
In our latest edition of In the Aggregate, I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do something a little different with my still relatively new Picture Show segment. In light of the fact that it's pretty hard to righteously analyze a good pinko YouTube video in four hundred words or less, I ultimately decided to just start a new feature entirely. Shorter, more conversational, and more opinion-based than my Film Sessions essays, I hope to publish these informal blogs semi-regularly over on my (free) Patreon; which has a platform feature designed specifically for sharing offsite videos online.
In our inaugural stand-alone Picture Show blog, we're looking at the climate legacy of colonial capitalism and the disproportionate burden in combatting climate change currently borne by the Global South. Using a short, but informative video by Our Changing Climate as a basis for discussion, I explore the important concept of Climate Debt and why reparations from the imperial core, to the hyper-exploited developing world, are a necessary feature of both positive justice and any viable plan to prevent a climate apocalypse. Finally, I offer a few thoughts on how we might pay for all this in a fair and equitable manner for the labor class in both the imperial core, and the developing world.
Like many left wing analysts, I spend a lot of time studying and writing about violent, racist, and fundamentally reactionary policing in America. Although widespread police brutality against everyday people protesting the murder of George Floyd has opened some eyes about the violence and racism inherent to U.S. policing, there remains precious little discussion in the mainstream about the institutional power police wield in our society. Protected by qualified immunity, aligned with reactionary political power, and armed to the teeth, American cops have become a "troopified" overseer class that exists above the law, and by extension, above the peasantry.
Well, if this October 24th opinion piece by Matthew Guariglia on NBCNews.com is any indication, the public at large is starting to notice. Yes, you read that correctly, NBC News. Using a viral video of a man having his rights violated for asking two New York cops why they aren't wearing masks on the Subway platform as a starting point, the author asks tough questions about authority and oversight that no police reform advocate wants to touch. Although Guarariglia focuses on covid prevention regulations, his prose makes it quite clear he's talking about larger questions of power and control in our society; as does the video. From the article:
"It’s bad enough that mask mandates seemingly do not apply to the officers often tasked with enforcing them. But the altercation in New York City highlights a deeper problem: The way police seek to penalize or harass anyone who dares question the unofficial and ultra-legal privileges of being an officer.
Mask mandates are a canary in the coal mine. If there is no plausible way to get all officers to wear a small strip of fabric that does quantifiable good for the public, what does that say about the institution as a whole? Who really controls police?"
Hot damn, now we're cooking with gas! Of course, the answer is that nobody really controls police; even politicians that want to remove violent cracker cops are terrified of police unions and the political consequences of feuding with armed reactionaries who exist above the law. Furthermore, it's still very much taboo to talk about the nexus between policing, reactionary vigilante violence, and fascist street politics, in the public discourse; you certainly won't find anything about that it in Guariglia's article here. Did you know that on the night Trump lost, New York cops literally rioted on behalf of their favorite fascist failson? Apparently, neither does the mainstream media.
Look, I'm not going to pretend an opinion piece on NBC is the blow that turns the tide against bootlickers and appeasement-loving police reformers. You can't reform an institution built to suppress and segregate marginalized people on behalf of capitalist exploiters; there's nothing good there to reform. But as long as we're still talking about bad apples, and worthless body cameras instead of the institutional power police command and represent, few people will truly understand why abolition is the only answer. If articles like this one take us one baby step forward, I'm all in favor of that.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.
Personally, I have never quite mastered the important internet art of relentless self promotion. In fact, that might be why this blog generally tops out of a few hundred readers. If there is one thing I've learned in my time publishing analysis online however, it's that sometimes you have to toot your own horn a little; if only because nobody is going to do it for ya. So today we're going to try something a little different; I'm counting coup with some help from bigger voices in the progressive media sphere online.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article arguing that most mainstream media coverage of the reconciliation bill fight in the US Senate amounted to complicit codswallop and "corporate-sponsored fan fiction for lanyards." In that article I noted that anarcho-capitalist billionaires and corporate America had poured millions into stopping the Build Back Better Act at all costs. This including buying off Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema; whose support is necessary to pass the bill. Finally I observed that corporate media was engaging in active propaganda on behalf of their rich owners by pretending this was any sort of good faith political dispute. The whole mystery was a stalling tactic, and as of now it appears to be working.
Well, it turns out that I'm not the only person who noticed:
In this October 22nd report by Spencer Snyder over at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, we find documented evidence that the willful blindness I observed in print media carries over to cable news coverage. In a review of twenty-one news programs covering the reconciliation bill fight (including programs from major players in corporate cable news), the author identified a total of forty-five seconds spent discussing conflict of interest issues; also know as corruption. Indeed, ABC's "Good Morning America" actually had former Senator Heidi Heitkamp on to admonish folks for questioning Manchin and Sinema's motives in stopping the bill.
The article also goes on to detail Manchema's flagrant conflicts of interest; including donor money, Machin's one-step-removed coal empire, and Sinema's obviously corrupt relationship with a lobbying group in cahoots with Big Pharma. Finally, Snyder hammers away at cable media for spinning a narrative that ultimately sides with corporate power and the two corrupt Senators, while blaming the left for refusing to surrender. This is all great stuff, but given that I already wrote all of these same things, you probably could have guessed I'd feel that way.
In this October 21st article by Luke Savage in Jacobin, the author looks at the same corruption and coverage I did, and comes to the same conclusion; the fix is in and the media is in on it. In fairness to Savage, he then uses this discussion to point out that the Democratic Party (and Joe Biden; who was tepidly supporting the progressive position when I published) is also complicit in letting corporate lobbyists and two Senators hijack the negotiations. From the article:
"In exposing the deep dysfunction of America’s political institutions, the reconciliation battle has also, yet again, laid bare the structuring contradiction of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for real reform. Having begun the process by proposing trillions in big programs and new spending, the party’s subsequent negotiation with itself looks set to yield something both ideologically feeble and electorally counterproductive.
Among other things, that’s because the Democratic coalition is less a coherent ideological formation than it is a Frankenstein hodgepodge of progressives, public interest groups, liberally minded voters and corporate lobbies — with the latter, by virtue of its influence in DC, bottomless reserve of campaign cash, and de facto purchase of many elected representatives almost invariably carrying the day."
Now, I want to be clear; I'm absolutely not accusing either of this guys of plagiarism. What I'm suggesting you to do is look at the dates all three of these pieces were published, and then ask yourself one simple question. Why wouldn't someone who wanted to be informed on the cutting edge of left wing political analysis, subscribe to ninaillingworth.com, this blog, and all the social media services listed in my signature at the bottom of this post?
Exactly, such a decision would be inexplicable; which is why you should sign up if you haven't already my friends.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 6th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.
One of the most frustrating things about the vast majority of mainstream media reporting on Q-Anon is the liberal establishment’s general inability to accept the movement for what it is – a fascist conspiracy cult that has gone completely global. More specifically, it’s a globalized fascist conspiracy cult that works by blending all the other reactionary conspiracy theories into one, and then conveniently aligning believers with far right, objectively fascist politicians, parties, and political organizations.
The fact is that while believers in the cult may not always perceive themselves as acting politically, the conductors marshalling the cult are explicitly political in nature. Therefore, it does no good to approach Q-Anon as a grift, because it literally doesn’t matter if the freaks pushing these conspiracies into the mainstream are true believers or not. What matters is that they’re able to draw on a massive, preexisting undercurrent of people motivated by anger, reaction, and bugsh*t conspiracy writings, and then point those people at the enemies of the would-be fascist order. In some ways this makes Q-Anon almost something of a “rent-a-mob” organization, to be summoned and deployed by more organized fascists – both in politics and in the streets.
Of course, linking and empowering these folks has a cost, usually paid in crime, violence, and sometimes human lives, but generally it’s not the rich nazis paying it, so they don’t care. Indeed, one might argue that the blowback produced by the Q-Anon cult in and of itself works towards the fascist goal of destabilizing our faux liberal-democratic order, and creating the demand for a more authoritarian form of government. The chaos is a feature, not a bug.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 5th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting mighty damn tired of hearing excuses about why "we" can't collectively come together to prevent climate catastrophe; and I'm especially getting tired of hearing it from bougie ruling class muppets who're inarguably a massive part of the problem.
You can chant "we're all on this Earth together" like a mantra if you want, but the numbers don't lie. Rich people are overwhelmingly using more of our shared resources, and releasing more carbon than the entire labor class. Poor people and indigenous farmers aren't killing the planet; seventy one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 come from just one hundred corporations. And we know who the owners and controllers of those corporations are! Hell the one of the largest polluters on Earth is the United States military; does that sound like a "we" problem to you?
It's overwhelmingly the capitalist class that's causing the problem, and it's the capitalist class whose lust for endless and immediate profits that's preventing us from taking the steps necessary to save our planet, and with it potentially all life on Earth. The rich have already pillaged our collective future for filthy lucre, and now they (and their in pocket politicians) are refusing to pay for the ensuing fallout; a fallout that may well kill us all.
This is absolutely not a "we" crisis, and we sure as sh*t aren't all in this together.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 3rd, 2021 over on our Facebook page.
Over the next few weeks, you're likely going to be hearing a lot about a series of global financial leaks called "the Pandora Papers" - and if the history of the Panama Papers, and the Paradise Papers is any indication, the reporting on this subject will be equal parts atrocious and complicit.
These leaks are a part of a gigantic (2.94 terabyte) data trove that exposes the secret offshore financial manipulations and tax evasions schemes of the uber wealthy; including individuals from over 200 countries and territories. Perhaps most importantly, these leaks include records of financial skullduggery from more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires; these aren't just the machinations of the ruling classes, but also of their in-pocket muppets in what is very loosely defined as "public service."
Unfortunately, and despite the gravity of these leaks, this story will likely receive very little attention (long term) in for-profit Western media for two primary reasons.
The first reason is that due to the absolutely absurd way American tax law works to protect the wealthy from any form of taxation, there are very few Americans listed in these leaks because American billionaires already get to keep all their money; and as anyone who has ever worked in American media can tell you, the world ends for our news on the near shores of either ocean that surrounds Turtle Island.
The second reason is that despite the (rightful) moral outrage these leaks would produce in any person who actually understood them, the vast majority of financial activity depicted within is perfectly legal. Oh sure, there may be some question of ethics violations by the various political puppets who used offshoring and secret banking instruments to enrich themselves while on the public dime, but the reality is that rich people all over the globe have spent the past forty years making this type of bald faced corruption not only legal, but the expected reasonable behavior for the rich.
Of course, rigging the laws to make your wholly unethical behavior "strictly legal" is nothing new; I'm reminded of the time when Martin Luther King Jr told a captivated audience that "everything Hitler did in Germany, was legal." Nor should it be particularly surprising that a media owned (and increasingly staffed) by the wealthy, would hand wave away corruption and malfeasance like this; it's a big club, and you aren't in it lads.
What's surprising here more than anything, is the crassness with which the ruling classes will respond to this; shrugging their shoulders and in their best Joe Manchin asking "you got a problem?" And even worse is the realization, even before the news has grown cold, that at the end of the day they're all going to get away with it.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 2nd, 2021 over on our Facebook page.
One of the key hallmarks of a nominal liberal democracy's transformation into an overt fascist state, is the way public sector or state power will intertwine itself with reactionary paramilitaries; thereby sharing its monopoly on violence and intimidation with "the brownshirts" as it were.
Typically this arrangement will take one of three major forms. The state may act as a direct enforcement arm for the fascist agenda, as we saw in the assassination of Michael Reinohl. The state may also establish a quasi-legal enforcement arrangement with reactionary vigilantes, as we observed in the Mother Jones story about Bedford County, Virginia’s officially sanctioned militia. Finally of course, pro-fascist actors in the state can simply legalize vigilante enforcement of fascist norms, which is what we’re looking at here with these laws making it effectively legal to run down protesters with your car.
Of course Wingers will howl that the purpose of these laws are to protect innocent drivers accosted by protesters, but even a casual glance at the statistics demonstrates that’s a crock of bullsh*t. America doesn’t have a massive protesters-attacking-cars problem, but throughout our last major summer of protests, angry reactionaries have frequently slammed their cars into innocent people exercising their right of free assembly – there’s even a Wikipedia entry for the phenomenon.
As demonstrated (with citations) throughout this article, these laws are clearly both political in nature, and racialized in practice; these laws are being enacted in response to what amounts to a second American civil rights movement. Whenever you combine political power, with codified racialized suppression, and vigilante violence, you’re looking at the practice of fascism; whether those practicing it want to admit it or not.
The purpose behind enacting these laws could not be more clear. They exist to suppress mass protest and enforce white supremacy by enlisting reactionary vigilantes to enact potentially lethal violence as a form of mass intimidation.
This is the core of both the fascist project, and the reactionary terrorism it employs. This right here is what separates a fascist creep from simple reactionary thugs; the rubber stamp of legal sanction and legitimacy granted by the fusion of far right violence, with reactionary policy; in this case enacted by the GOP at the state level.
That in a nutshell, is what fascism looks like in practice.
Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 1st, 2021 over on our Facebook page.
A little while ago, I realized that there now comes a point in every late summer on Turtle Island in which the west coast is literally on fire, while the east coast is being battered by severe hurricanes. Climate catastrophe is clearly not an oncoming event, so much as its already here and that should be pretty obvious to anyone reading stories about folks drowning in New York City basement apartments - at a minimum.
You can drone on at me about whether or not these young women's activism is effective, or revolutionary, but at least they get to yell at some of the rat bastards that are helping kill us all. I'd like to yell at them too, wouldn't you?
The fact is, there is no way out of climate catastrophe that involves keeping capitalism; it's not technology, or even sums of money itself that's stopping us from saving life on this planet - it's the bald reality that our society doesn't do *anything* unless it profits elite capital directly, and in the short term.
Frankly, I wish they'd drag Greta and Vanessa to Wall Street because those are the guys trying to murder the lot of us for a quick buck. Billionaire anarcho-capitalists are killing the planet in real time for pennies on the share, and those guys don't work at the U.N. Obviously, these politicians are mostly just bellhops for capital.
Editor's note: Film Sessions is a weekly feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of Youtube.
-----
As I mentioned in my most recent journal, I'm currently up to my eyeballs trying to put together a flurry of Biden-centric articles about American politics, just to establish a baseline understanding with my readers as we pivot into a new (yet familiar) era of neoliberal authoritarianism. What I neglected to bring up in that post however, is that I'm also battling a head cold, getting my research notes together for a new episode of the No Fugazi Podcast with my co-host Nick Galea, and trying to finish a tedious but necessary cross-posting project on my main website, ninaillingworth.com. In other words, despite working twenty-one out of twenty-five days this month already, I'm behind my own schedule and I have little hope of actually finishing everything I wanted to do in January on time.
Still, like a fool, I insist on trying my best, and so for this week's Film Session blog, I'd like to return to a man who needs no introduction (in part because I introduced him quite thoroughly only two weeks ago) - Marxist economist, Richard D. Wolff. The twist here is that I'm going to post two short videos starring professor Wolff, one from his YouTube channel, and one from the Gravel Institute. In return, it is my hope that you'll forgive me for keeping my analysis brief, and skimping a bit on the additional resources this time; after all, many of them will be repeats from my last post about Richard Wolff's work.
The first thing I want to note is that I told you that I agree with most, but not all of the things Wolff says in our last article about him, and that kind of applies here in a very odd way. Because the professor put the word "immediate" in the title of his video, and yet his presentation doesn't start with, or even mention the absurdly obvious need to literally pay Americans to stay home until we can put Captain Trips (coronavirus) in a shallow grave, I unfortunately have to cry foul here. The fact of the matter is that the number one crisis, social, economic, or political, facing pretty much every person in the labor class the world over right now, is stopping Covid-19, and until that happens, some of the good ideas Wolff does suggest in this video, simply don't matter - and in fact, one of them, a federal jobs program, would be a colossally bad idea "immediately" in light of the struggle against the virus as it stands today.
Frankly however, I've watched enough of professor Wolff's videos, debates and lectures to know that he's not a heartless eugenicist who doesn't care if workers die, and in fact his three big suggestions for Biden in this video would all be important parts of an agenda to help people survive the fallout from coronavirus after we've got it under control. In other words, the real problem with Wolff's video essay might literally just be that he put "immediate" in the title, and he forgot to say "once it's safe to even go back to work" somewhere in the presentation.
To be clear, nothing Wolff is calling for in this video is really all that radical and I suspect that's very much on purpose given his feelings about Palooka Joe's economic team. A federal jobs program is a big part of how we got out of the Great Depression, rich people have so much money they're inflating speculative asset bubbles all over our economy, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out any money we spend on f*cking with China, is money we can't spend on a post-Covid recovery. And yet, I think we all know that our capitalist overlords will refuse, and call these simple and achievable measures extreme.
To that I say? Bullsh*t. If you remember back in the Spring when America was being lead by a reality TV show fascist who tried to pretend Covid wasn't even real, even quasi-mainstream observers were talking about coronavirus signaling the end of capitalism as we know it; and yet today, as the bodies climb even higher and the crisis (both social, and economic) deepens, those same folks would call professor Wolff' suggestions here too extreme? Hell no; Biden asked the country to give Democrats control of the Senate so he could fight Covid-19 and restore the economy. Well he now has the House, the Senate and the Oval Office - it's time to stop pretending a mask mandate on federal property is a real solution and put the people's money, where Palooka Joe's mouth has been. Check out the video with professor Wolff below:
Our second video in this "Cheater's Week" edition of Film Sessions once again comes to us from The Gravel Institute, which is showing promising signs of an ongoing collaboration with professor Wolff that has me really exciting. It's called "How Capitalism Exploits You."
I chose this video to round out our discussion this week because once again, I think Wolff and the Gravel crew have managed to produce a (very short) feature that successfully attacks the "common sense" right wing ideologies that underpin the work of propaganda outlets like PragerU. In this case, the bogus reactionary idea that finds its way into Wolff's crosshairs is the belief that your boss is doing you a favor by employing you, and as such has a morally supportable right to profit from your labor. Not so says Wolff; capitalism is by its very nature about theft and exploitation - theft from who? You.
Ultimately, given that I specifically said you'd be better off using your time on Youtube teaching Marxist concepts, than debunking PragerU one video at a time, and this video is quite literally five minutes of Marxist labor theory, I feel obligated to include it here today:
Editor's note: Film Sessions is a weekly feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video from the left wing of Youtube. Please note that I'm merely writing about these videos; I don't create them, nor in most cases to do I know very much about the folks who do - I'm learning the ways of Left Wing Youtube right alongside my readers.
Additionally, I'd like to shoutout "TechnOkami" on my Discord server for recommending today's video for inclusion in this series; excellent pick my friend.
These requirements created some complications then, as originally I want to feature a video about the chud uprising in last week's edition of Film Sessions, but couldn't find a feature suitably focused on both American fascism itself, and what happens after Trump is mercifully gone. Thankfully, and just when I was about to give up, a friend of mine pointed me towards today's twenty-two minute Youtube feature by Renegade Cut, otherwise known as Leon Thomas, entitled quite appropriately "Where Do We Go From Here?" Frankly, I don't know much about Leon (who is also a geek genre film critic, hence the channel title) but if the two videos I've watched are any indication, this man might be my brother from another mother - at least when it comes to analyzing American fascism.
The first thing you'll notice when watching Leon's work, is that he talks very quickly and his videos are jam-packed with highly-specific, factual references. In a format typically dominated by the hot take economy, and opinion-based reaction videos, I find this quite refreshing - but I'm not going to lie; I caught myself taking notes at several points in Renegade Cut's presentation, just to make sure I wouldn't leave anything out in this write up. Thankfully, the second thing you'll notice about Thomas's videos is that he seems like a really organized presenter, and even a short (22 minute) video essay like "Where Do We Go From Here?" is divided up into three distinct, labeled parts.
