Thread | Brutkey

Capitalism paves the way for fascism by spreading lies like "You couldn't have cheap, accessible technology without slave labor. No one likes it, but that's just how it has to be." Of course you can, it just doesn't make a few hundred people wealthier than the rest of humanity.

But if you believe that, it's just a few steps to "You can't have safety and security without ethnic cleansing. No one likes it, that's just how it has to be."

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

I'm not saying "smartphone bad," or "socialism is when no smartphone," or even "smartphone socialist hypocrite." those arguments have all been made with varying degrees of sincerity and they're all garbage.

I'm saying bad things are bad. Conflict minerals are bad, hell, probably most manned mining operations are bad. Slave labor is bad. Sweatshop assembly is bad. But none of them are necessary to make your life easy. They're necessary to make a few people rich.

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

We condition people to tolerate evil for convenience when they could have convenience without evil. But that doesn't play into the ruling class ideology. It's important for the hegemon to instill the idea that exploitation (and therefor incredible wealth extraction) is necessary for "civilized life" to continue.

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

You can see it in the median attitude towards crime. Sure, people care when folks get hurt, but they care a lot more when someone is trying to "get a leg up on them by compromising their morals." They resent criminals for "cheating" at life, breaking the rules that the rest of us have struggled to follow and being rewarded for it. They hate the thief who steals their neighbor's car not because they love their neighbor, but because they could have stolen that car a hundred times and didn't.

Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social

But if you teach people implicitly that compromising their morals will improve their material conditions, even at risk to their safety (or, in some cases, their "soul") then you are preparing a lot of them to take that deal when the going gets tough.

Leftism rejects this idea, positing that cooperation is actually better than even the most morally compromised form of competition.

Fascism, however, feeds on it by offering impossible comfort through dehumanizing compromise.