Valentina Nappi - Today fascism is called anti-capitalism

[Anselm_Weinberg]

If you are a composer of avant-garde music and you write piano pieces that you play with your ass, you have to worry about politics. At the time of Nazism they would have accused you of making degenerate art. Today you are 'only' the object of right-wing journalists' sarcasm and, under certain governments, you risk having your funding cut. A somewhat similar discussion, even if a little different, applies if you are a professor who promotes 'strange ideas' that seem to undermine certain traditional categories (for example if you try to teach that the homosexual couple is no more or less 'natural ' than the heterosexual one). What if you're a porn star instead? If you are a porn star who embodies the saint/whore dichotomy, perhaps you would have been fine with the Nazis (but perhaps not, because your conduct would still have fallen under 'anti-social behavior'). If instead you are a porn star who promotes the idea that 'all women should be sluts' and that 'all girls should be ultra-easy girls', then in Nazi Germany, but also in fascist Italy, you would certainly have done a bad job end. And you would have serious problems even today, in Europe, if certain nationalist, xenophobic and anti-modern movements took power. So you inevitably have to worry about politics. And this is why I decided to dedicate this post to the problem of fascism, obviously taking it for granted that those who are on my side must be anti-fascist in the most radical sense possible. Contrary to what many imbeciles think, it is not a question of being 'anti-fascists in the absence of fascism', but of being radically anti-fascists in the presence of the concrete risk of fascist tendencies.

The link between fascism and the small and middle bourgeoisie is completely evident. Furthermore, it is not difficult to understand that in the absence of a small and medium bourgeoisie there cannot be, and could not have been, any fascist drift (but at most a communist revolution). These are absolutely obvious findings, completely banal findings. Historical fascism was the expression of the mobilization of the impoverished small and medium bourgeoisie against the two then hegemonic classes, the large industrial and financial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Hence the dual character, revolutionary and reactionary, of the movement and the regime: reactionary against the egalitarian demands of the proletariat, but revolutionary with respect to an existing order (including international) based on the protection of the interests of big capital. It is no coincidence that Mussolini, in the declaration of war in 1940, called the enemies 'plutocratic democracies'. The analogy with various contemporary movements is evident, an analogy strengthened by the fact that even in post-war Italy the majority of the small and medium bourgeoisie no longer felt represented by a liberal-democratic political class which every day showed more inability and moral decay.


Fascism is therefore a struggle 'beyond the right and the left' (which means: not egalitarian) against big capital and against the politics of the liberal 'puppets' who are an expression of big capital. The fascist rhetoric of the struggle between 'work' (that of the trader, the small entrepreneur) and large financial capital, rhetoric which translates into the slogans of small entrepreneurs who 'get up every morning' and 'work more than their employees' and ' they carry the country on their shoulders', obscures the true class struggle which is first and foremost that between the small businessman with the Porsche Cayenne and the underpaid blackmail clerk, between the small businessman and the blackmailable worker who does not enjoy the protections of Article 18 because there are fewer than fifteen employees... Of course, large global financial capital is not an absolute good, but it represents a problem that cannot be progressively addressed in the present historical phase, since even those who are communists must understand that in the West there will never be a evolution towards the socialization of the means (including financial) of production as long as widespread interests of a small and medium bourgeois type survive (and the eventual prevalence, here and now, of such interests over those of big capital, see the possibility of an explosion of eurozone, would bring exclusively disadvantages to the working class (see purchasing power of wages). In the present historical phase, the cries against large global financial capital are cries in defense of the small and medium bourgeoisie. These are reactionary cries. The process of centralization of capital is in fact a necessary condition for authentic historical progress, and the alternative is to remain mired in the bourgeois dialectic between 'critical' liberalism and fascism. Even the communist, especially the communist, must hope that the post-bourgeois evolution of contemporary capitalism will continue. This is a process that will require refined balancing acts to prevent the seizure of power by fascist movements (one of the main dangers lies in the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the unemployed, and big capital must convince itself of the need to bring the unemployed to its side ).

It is not difficult to understand that the fascist mentality and values ​​correspond to the mentality and values ​​of a small and medium bourgeoisie in difficulty: the traditionalist vision of sexuality is linked to a conception of the female child as a factor in the reproduction of the small family business (similar discussion for the homophobic mentality and the conception of the role of the male child), the intolerance for legal formalism is linked to a paternalistic and 'communitarian' way of managing problems with employees, anti-scientism is linked to the fear of being overwhelmed by the great capital, anti-rationalism is linked to the fear of the superiority of a large-scale organization of production, the fear of the avant-garde is linked to the perception of a world that changes in a way unfavorable to one's class, etc.

Fascism speaks the language of anti-technocracy, explicit or disguised as anti-plutocracy, and presents itself as a non-egalitarian form of anti-plutocracy when the concrete possibility of an egalitarian turn exists, and as anti-capitalism when an egalitarian turn is not plausible (for example because they are necessary certain further historical developments, for example the end of the small and medium bourgeoisie). Today fascism is called anti-capitalism.

Valentina Nappi

(20 October 2014)

https://forum.termometropolitico.it/653 ... nappi.html

[netzerkaiser]

If you are a composer of avant-garde music and you write piano pieces that you play with your ass, you have to worry about politics. At the time of Nazism they would have accused you of making degenerate art. Today you are 'only' the object of right-wing journalists' sarcasm and, under certain governments, you risk having your funding cut. A somewhat similar discussion, even if a little different, applies if you are a professor who promotes 'strange ideas' that seem to undermine certain traditional categories (for example if you try to teach that the homosexual couple is no more or less 'natural ' than the heterosexual one). What if you're a porn star instead? If you are a porn star who embodies the saint/whore dichotomy, perhaps you would have been fine with the Nazis (but perhaps not, because your conduct would still have fallen under 'anti-social behavior'). If instead you are a porn star who promotes the idea that 'all women should be sluts' and that 'all girls should be ultra-easy girls', then in Nazi Germany, but also in fascist Italy, you would certainly have done a bad job end. And you would have serious problems even today, in Europe, if certain nationalist, xenophobic and anti-modern movements took power. So you inevitably have to worry about politics. And this is why I decided to dedicate this post to the problem of fascism, obviously taking it for granted that those who are on my side must be anti-fascist in the most radical sense possible. Contrary to what many imbeciles think, it is not a question of being 'anti-fascists in the absence of fascism', but of being radically anti-fascists in the presence of the concrete risk of fascist tendencies.

The link between fascism and the small and middle bourgeoisie is completely evident. Furthermore, it is not difficult to understand that in the absence of a small and medium bourgeoisie there cannot be, and could not have been, any fascist drift (but at most a communist revolution). These are absolutely obvious findings, completely banal findings. Historical fascism was the expression of the mobilization of the impoverished small and medium bourgeoisie against the two then hegemonic classes, the large industrial and financial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Hence the dual character, revolutionary and reactionary, of the movement and the regime: reactionary against the egalitarian demands of the proletariat, but revolutionary with respect to an existing order (including international) based on the protection of the interests of big capital. It is no coincidence that Mussolini, in the declaration of war in 1940, called the enemies 'plutocratic democracies'. The analogy with various contemporary movements is evident, an analogy strengthened by the fact that even in post-war Italy the majority of the small and medium bourgeoisie no longer felt represented by a liberal-democratic political class which every day showed more inability and moral decay.


Fascism is therefore a struggle 'beyond the right and the left' (which means: not egalitarian) against big capital and against the politics of the liberal 'puppets' who are an expression of big capital. The fascist rhetoric of the struggle between 'work' (that of the trader, the small entrepreneur) and large financial capital, rhetoric which translates into the slogans of small entrepreneurs who 'get up every morning' and 'work more than their employees' and ' they carry the country on their shoulders', obscures the true class struggle which is first and foremost that between the small businessman with the Porsche Cayenne and the underpaid blackmail clerk, between the small businessman and the blackmailable worker who does not enjoy the protections of Article 18 because there are fewer than fifteen employees... Of course, large global financial capital is not an absolute good, but it represents a problem that cannot be progressively addressed in the present historical phase, since even those who are communists must understand that in the West there will never be a evolution towards the socialization of the means (including financial) of production as long as widespread interests of a small and medium bourgeois type survive (and the eventual prevalence, here and now, of such interests over those of big capital, see the possibility of an explosion of eurozone, would bring exclusively disadvantages to the working class (see purchasing power of wages). In the present historical phase, the cries against large global financial capital are cries in defense of the small and medium bourgeoisie. These are reactionary cries. The process of centralization of capital is in fact a necessary condition for authentic historical progress, and the alternative is to remain mired in the bourgeois dialectic between 'critical' liberalism and fascism. Even the communist, especially the communist, must hope that the post-bourgeois evolution of contemporary capitalism will continue. This is a process that will require refined balancing acts to prevent the seizure of power by fascist movements (one of the main dangers lies in the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the unemployed, and big capital must convince itself of the need to bring the unemployed to its side ).

It is not difficult to understand that the fascist mentality and values ​​correspond to the mentality and values ​​of a small and medium bourgeoisie in difficulty: the traditionalist vision of sexuality is linked to a conception of the female child as a factor in the reproduction of the small family business (similar discussion for the homophobic mentality and the conception of the role of the male child), the intolerance for legal formalism is linked to a paternalistic and 'communitarian' way of managing problems with employees, anti-scientism is linked to the fear of being overwhelmed by the great capital, anti-rationalism is linked to the fear of the superiority of a large-scale organization of production, the fear of the avant-garde is linked to the perception of a world that changes in a way unfavorable to one's class, etc.

Fascism speaks the language of anti-technocracy, explicit or disguised as anti-plutocracy, and presents itself as a non-egalitarian form of anti-plutocracy when the concrete possibility of an egalitarian turn exists, and as anti-capitalism when an egalitarian turn is not plausible (for example because they are necessary certain further historical developments, for example the end of the small and medium bourgeoisie). Today fascism is called anti-capitalism.

Valentina Nappi

(20 October 2014)

https://forum.termometropolitico.it/653 ... nappi.html

Who's talking here, Valentina or you?

This is the problem here, I don't think anyone knows if you are giving an opinion or quoting an actress with an unsuspected intellectual axe to grind?

But if it is your opinion, surely you must know that the communist variety is as bad if not worse?

Having said that, Yugoslavia saw perhaps the best of communism. But don't tell this experience to those that lived in Russia & didn't have a relatively humane person like Tito.

I dunno. You lived it man, I didn't.

[Anselm_Weinberg]

I found this essay and at first couldn't believe it was from a porn star, mind you not because I am prejudiced and believe porn stars aren't as capable as anyone else to formulate these pertinent thoughts. I felt the need to share this, both for its valuable insights and for the reason that this is a slap in the face for some middle-class liberals and their joke of a pseudo anti-fascism.

I think it's correct to come to the conclusion that fascism was based and had its biggest potential of mobilisation among the petit bourgeoisie (small-scale farmers and small entrepreneurs) rather than big monopoly capital as claimed by some of the theorists of the Stalinist canon such as Dimitrov. I don't believe even Valentina Nappi is advocating for or against communism in this essay, from what I understand her position is a little bit more nuanced than that. She holds that Communism could potentially be the culmination or continuation of the project of modernity. Another quote by her.

"The battle of civilization is between modernity and the forces, such as the Catholic religion, which try to resist it. Modernity is Kantian autonomous morality, Benthamian utilitarianism, positivism, futurism and in the future probably communism. The forces that resist it are traditions, religions, social conservatism and economic conservatism (which today is represented by the nefarious neoliberalism that erodes labor rights."

Communism presupposes the sufficient development of large-scale industrial production, something which in Russia at the time hadn't been the case. Idealising small-scale production is something that objectively stands in the way of progress, yet you see this still being advocated by everyone from the '"left" to the "right". There are some things I don't agree with as outlined in her text, for instance the term egalitarian, now to be fair I don't think the views herself as Marxist, but it's still important to point out that Marx was famously opposed to the notion of Equality (see his work "Critique of the Gotha Programme") I also don't know what exactly she is getting at when talking about a post-bourgeois capitalism or whether that should be something that should be advocated for.

The Bolsheviks succeeded in their revolution after a bloody civil war, intervention and a decimation of much of the initial demographic of revolutionary workers in said war. Lenin and other famous Bolsheviks knew very well and almost literally reiterated time and time again that if the revolution in the Western, sufficiently industrialised countries failed the Russian revolution would be doomed as well. The last serious attempt at a revolution in Germany failed in the German October of 1923 and this was perhaps already the start of the crawling degeneration of the revolution and the party which in some respects had assumed a substituting role after, as mentioned above, much of the industrial proletariat had perished and the country consisted of a peasant majority which in itself could not constitute a revolutionary class in the vein of the proletariat. All this played into the hands of the rise of Stalinism, which once victorious, more and more replaced proletarian internationalism with the concrete realpolitical interests of the Soviet state, which faced with the above mentioned reality of being a country of mostly backward small-scale peasants and the need for industrialisation and modernisation, began to force the peasantry into submission by means of the forced collectivisation and terrorism. A similar campaign of terror was waged against much of the old Bolshevik nucleus.

Quote by Lenin

"Yes, the German revolution is growing, but not in the way we should like it, not as fast as Russian intellectuals would have it, not at the rate our history developed in October—when we entered any town we liked, proclaimed Soviet power, and within a few days nine-tenths of the workers came over to our side. The German revolution has the misfortune of not moving so fast. What do you think? Must we reckon with the revolution, or must the revolution reckon with us? You wanted the revolution to reckon with you. But history has taught you a lesson. It is a lesson, because it is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed—perhaps not in Petrograd, not in Moscow, but in Vladivostok, in more remote places to which perhaps we shall have to retreat, and the distance to which is perhaps greater than the distance from Petrograd to Moscow. At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed. Nevertheless, this does not in the least shake our conviction that we must be able to bear the most difficult position without blustering."

I do not believe that the degeneration into Stalinism was a historical inevitability, had the revolutions in the West succeeded and Germany for instance, with its magnificently developed industrial prowess could have come to the aid of Soviet Russia, which could have avoided of having to deal with the pitfalls of its then backwardness and developed along less destructive lines.

I link an interview by Amadeo Bordiga where he talks about some of the happenings in Italy at the time, including the rise to power of fascists. I generally don't agree with Bordiga on all points, for example he held that the Soviet Union after 1926 ceased to be a workers' state and developed along the lines of an ordinary state capitalist and imperialist great power. I still hold that the Soviet Union continued to be some form of degenerated Communism, albeit obviously in the sense of being an embodiment of a Communist movement, not a Communist mode of production which would prerequire the abolishment of wage labour, the law of value, money and commodity production. Something which isn't possible in an isolated country, especially one as backward and undeveloped as Russia was at the time, hence the need for international revolution in succinctly developed countries. If you look at other Stalinist countries established later you will find that even they were the exact opposite and by no means ripe for Communism.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=syh6YqFPiAA

Marx famously said "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

We're still far from that day, but perhaps one day the moment will come when the ruling class will no longer be able to effectively govern and humanity will be facing the question of descending into a new round of barbarism, be it fascism or even something worse, or a truly emancipated society. Should one be prepared for such a situation? I think yes.

Sorry, I had to type this up real quickly since I am out of time. It should still be possible to get the gist of what I meant to say.

[netzerkaiser]

Thanks. The key is that it was written by Valentina Nappi. To be honest I find sociology boring, but it's fascinating that she can write like this. There are probably contradictions with her career, but good luck to her.

[Sergio8317]

Communism presupposes the sufficient development of large-scale industrial production, something which in Russia at the time hadn't been the case. Idealising small-scale production is something that objectively stands in the way of progress, yet you see this still being advocated by everyone from the '"left" to the "right". There are some things I don't agree with as outlined in her text, for instance the term egalitarian, now to be fair I don't think the views herself as Marxist, but it's still important to point out that Marx was famously opposed to the notion of Equality (see his work "Critique of the Gotha Programme") I also don't know what exactly she is getting at when talking about a post-bourgeois capitalism or whether that should be something that should be advocated for.

All this writing is just a stream of sick consciousness.
Communism presupposes poverty, dictatorship and mass murder. Which was implemented in those countries where they tried to build it.

[netzerkaiser]

Communism presupposes the sufficient development of large-scale industrial production, something which in Russia at the time hadn't been the case. Idealising small-scale production is something that objectively stands in the way of progress, yet you see this still being advocated by everyone from the '"left" to the "right". There are some things I don't agree with as outlined in her text, for instance the term egalitarian, now to be fair I don't think the views herself as Marxist, but it's still important to point out that Marx was famously opposed to the notion of Equality (see his work "Critique of the Gotha Programme") I also don't know what exactly she is getting at when talking about a post-bourgeois capitalism or whether that should be something that should be advocated for.

All this writing is just a stream of sick consciousness.
Communism presupposes poverty, dictatorship and mass murder. Which was implemented in those countries where they tried to build it.

i agree

[netzerkaiser]

mind you, it did work in Yugoslavia, but it was the only place on earth it worked. This in itself should be an exercise in itself. Why did it work there? But it did. Maybe Tito was a genius, who knows.

[Anselm_Weinberg]

Look up presuppose in a dictionary. The only genuine proletarian revolution took place in Russia in 1917 and Russia could not stand alone and explicitly the Bolsheviks emphasised that if the revolution in Western Europe failed, so would they. There never was a successful revolution in a sufficiently developed industrial county. Both Marx and Lenin go at length about it not being possble to build Communism within agrarian backward countries.

Mao's revolution wasn't even a workers' but a peasant revolution and Mao himself was an eclectic romantic revolutionary that took all kinds of things from ancient Chinese philosophy, Marxism and liberalism and mixed them together.

Presuppose means that you need a fully developed and concentrated industrial capitalism that you can eventually build upon if in the long run you want to have a global society that is run according to a common plan.

How long did it take the bourgeoisie to establish their hegemony? How many failed republics were there in French history? From the initial French revolution to the Thermidor to Napoleons' coup. Then you had the Bourbon restoration, Louis Philippe, the 1848 revolutions and yet again the usurpment of power of Louis Napoleon and his dictatorship subsequently lasted until 1870. It took the bourgeoisie an eternity to finally establish the perfect form of its rule in the democratic republic and someone then might just as well have told the liberal bourgeoisie to stop chasing the utopian dreams of democracy and that it's all in vain and one should just accept the then present order as the happy end of history. Well, surprise, they didn't.

I emphasise there is no "it" as I've already established with the Marx quote above. Communism is a movement, not a state of things that is to be established. That movement will have to abide by the real conditions within which it finds itself at a given point in history. This is basic materialism as opposed to idealism. In any case, a workers' state would first and foremost foster revolutions abroad if it were to find itself in an isolated position. But the eventual goal would be to overcome the anarchy of production, the system of wage labour and money and run society according to a common plan. But this is not possible in single isolated countries that depend on international trade, surrounded in a hostile environment will have to retain the state machinery to defend the gains of the revolution etc.

Tito certainly was even more of a renegade than Stalin with all the "self-management" ideology that is really closer to petit bourgeois anarchist conceptions. The goal isn't that workers should exploit themselves and that the value form, commodity production and the likes should be retained but that the means of production should be held in common rather than by atomised groups of workers competing with another. Let's not get me started on Tito's IMF loans and how absolutely disastrous that was.

[netzerkaiser]

but i the Russian situation no-one can deny the jewish vengefulnessagainst the pogroms? am i right or wrong?

[netzerkaiser]

to call a spade a spade

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/ ... ssia.books

[Anselm_Weinberg]

I am not sure what you're referring to. But if you mean that many Bolsheviks were Jews then this was simply owed to the fact that Jews were marginalised, persecuted and confined to ghettos and were as such more receptive to universalism. They essentially wanted to cease being themselves for it had brought them nothing but misery and many thought Communism would be the way to accomplish this.

[netzerkaiser]

I am not sure what you're referring to. But if you mean that many Bolsheviks were Jews then this was simply owed to the fact that Jews were marginalised, persecuted and confined to ghettos and were as such more receptive to universalism. They essentially wanted to cease being themselves for it had brought them nothing but misery and many thought Communism would be the way to accomplish this.

its a fair point. but i give you Zhinoviev...

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated

i mean i'd be one of these 10%, so would you, so fuck that?

[Anselm_Weinberg]

I've tried looking up that quote and it's from the civil war. If you dig deep enough you'll find similar quotes by the US founding fathers etc. It's safe to say that in the context of the war, leaving aside the fact that this quote is obviously a silly over the top attempt at expressing extreme fervour in a rhetorical way and is by no means a scientific estimate on his part.

The White Guards were certainly no innocents that could be bargained with and they may very well be who Zinoviev is referring to.

In any case, I am not in the business of defending every single action or expression by every single Bolshevik. You'll find that the possibility for open discussion at this time within the party was still very much possible and individual members aren't representative of a singular line as there wasn't yet enforced a single pre-determined line of thinking. Let him speak for himself.

[netzerkaiser]

In any case, I am not in the business of defending every single action or expression by every single Bolshevik. You'll find that the possibility for open discussion at this time within the party was still very much possible and individual members aren't representative of a singular line as there wasn't yet enforced a single pre-determined line of thinking. Let him speak for himself.

Your answer speaks for itself. For my part, as I'm sure you'd agree, I'd rather do face to face. But in any case I've made my point.

No hard feelings, I respect you. But I respect my point further.

just the way it is...

[netzerkaiser]

there's a lot of blood on the tracks, & a lot of sadistic blood too. But you caused none of it nor did I... so I suggest we call a truce. We all good men just see it from where we stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZuaX3xqqLg

[netzerkaiser]

Look up presuppose in a dictionary. The only genuine proletarian revolution took place in Russia in 1917 and Russia could not stand alone and explicitly the Bolsheviks emphasised that if the revolution in Western Europe failed, so would they. There never was a successful revolution in a sufficiently developed industrial county. Both Marx and Lenin go at length about it not being possble to build Communism within agrarian backward countries.

Mao's revolution wasn't even a workers' but a peasant revolution and Mao himself was an eclectic romantic revolutionary that took all kinds of things from ancient Chinese philosophy, Marxism and liberalism and mixed them together.

Presuppose means that you need a fully developed and concentrated industrial capitalism that you can eventually build upon if in the long run you want to have a global society that is run according to a common plan.

How long did it take the bourgeoisie to establish their hegemony? How many failed republics were there in French history? From the initial French revolution to the Thermidor to Napoleons' coup. Then you had the Bourbon restoration, Louis Philippe, the 1848 revolutions and yet again the usurpment of power of Louis Napoleon and his dictatorship subsequently lasted until 1870. It took the bourgeoisie an eternity to finally establish the perfect form of its rule in the democratic republic and someone then might just as well have told the liberal bourgeoisie to stop chasing the utopian dreams of democracy and that it's all in vain and one should just accept the then present order as the happy end of history. Well, surprise, they didn't.

I emphasise there is no "it" as I've already established with the Marx quote above. Communism is a movement, not a state of things that is to be established. That movement will have to abide by the real conditions within which it finds itself at a given point in history. This is basic materialism as opposed to idealism. In any case, a workers' state would first and foremost foster revolutions abroad if it were to find itself in an isolated position. But the eventual goal would be to overcome the anarchy of production, the system of wage labour and money and run society according to a common plan. But this is not possible in single isolated countries that depend on international trade, surrounded in a hostile environment will have to retain the state machinery to defend the gains of the revolution etc.

Tito certainly was even more of a renegade than Stalin with all the "self-management" ideology that is really closer to petit bourgeois anarchist conceptions. The goal isn't that workers should exploit themselves and that the value form, commodity production and the likes should be retained but that the means of production should be held in common rather than by atomised groups of workers competing with another. Let's not get me started on Tito's IMF loans and how absolutely disastrous that was.

I didn't read this properly the first time. It certainly is a powerful effort to distinguish between the various experiences on the broadest level. But to be honest, I find political theory incredibly tedious. I inherited a collection of about 200 sociological & Marxist books once, it came my way courtesy of a clear-out of a deceased scholar's library. Last summer the whole lot went into the recycling skip.

[netzerkaiser]

"The White Guards were certainly no innocents"

You are right. And I guess, I was reading Turgenev & his great book, the hunters diaries or whatever. It can be difficult for us today to imagine the lot of the poor then.

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a sentimentalist 'about the good old days'. There probably were no good old days unless you were the lord of the manor.

Kudos to you for reminding me of that.

I guess we learn something every day.

[netzerkaiser]

I guess I suffer from what I call Ray Davies syndrome.

Overly sentimentalising the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FarhbgbkEjE

I look back at the way I used to look at life
Soft, white dreams with sugar coated outside
It was great, so great
Young and innocent days

I wish my eyes could only see
Everything, exactly as it used to be
It's too late, so late
Young and innocent days

I see the lines across your face
Time has gone and nothing ever can replace
Those great, so great
Young and innocent days

[netzerkaiser]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZSVsRTMp1I

I think you'll really like this guy. The Kinks suffered from dreadful production. Man, if they had George Martin producing them... I shudder to think...

Now that you've found your paradise
This is your Kingdom to command
You can go outside and polish your car
Or sit by the fire in your Shangri-la
Here is your reward for working so hard
Gone are the lavatories in the back yard
Gone are the days when you dreamed of that car
You just want to sit in your Shangri-la

Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You've reached your top and you just can't get any higher
You're in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-la
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You can't go anywhere
Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la

The little man who gets the train
Got a mortgage hanging over his head
But he's too scared to complain
'Cos he's conditioned that way
Time goes by and he pays off his debts
Got a TV set and a radio
For seven shillings a week
Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la

And all the houses in the street have got a name
'Cos all the houses in the street they look the same
Same chimney pots, same little cars, same window panes
The neighbors call to tell you things that you should know
They say their lines, they drink their tea, and then they go
They tell your business in another Shangri-la
The gas bills and the water rates, and payments on the car
Too scared to think about how insecure you are
Life ain't so happy in your little Shangri-la
Shangri-la, Shangri-la la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You've reached your top and you just can't get any higher
You're in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-la
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You can't go anywhere
Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la, Shangri-la

[isis666xxx]

If you are a composer of avant-garde music and you write piano pieces that you play with your ass, you have to worry about politics. At the time of Nazism they would have accused you of making degenerate art. Today you are 'only' the object of right-wing journalists' sarcasm and, under certain governments, you risk having your funding cut. A somewhat similar discussion, even if a little different, applies if you are a professor who promotes 'strange ideas' that seem to undermine certain traditional categories (for example if you try to teach that the homosexual couple is no more or less 'natural ' than the heterosexual one). What if you're a porn star instead? If you are a porn star who embodies the saint/whore dichotomy, perhaps you would have been fine with the Nazis (but perhaps not, because your conduct would still have fallen under 'anti-social behavior'). If instead you are a porn star who promotes the idea that 'all women should be sluts' and that 'all girls should be ultra-easy girls', then in Nazi Germany, but also in fascist Italy, you would certainly have done a bad job end. And you would have serious problems even today, in Europe, if certain nationalist, xenophobic and anti-modern movements took power. So you inevitably have to worry about politics. And this is why I decided to dedicate this post to the problem of fascism, obviously taking it for granted that those who are on my side must be anti-fascist in the most radical sense possible. Contrary to what many imbeciles think, it is not a question of being 'anti-fascists in the absence of fascism', but of being radically anti-fascists in the presence of the concrete risk of fascist tendencies.

The link between fascism and the small and middle bourgeoisie is completely evident. Furthermore, it is not difficult to understand that in the absence of a small and medium bourgeoisie there cannot be, and could not have been, any fascist drift (but at most a communist revolution). These are absolutely obvious findings, completely banal findings. Historical fascism was the expression of the mobilization of the impoverished small and medium bourgeoisie against the two then hegemonic classes, the large industrial and financial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Hence the dual character, revolutionary and reactionary, of the movement and the regime: reactionary against the egalitarian demands of the proletariat, but revolutionary with respect to an existing order (including international) based on the protection of the interests of big capital. It is no coincidence that Mussolini, in the declaration of war in 1940, called the enemies 'plutocratic democracies'. The analogy with various contemporary movements is evident, an analogy strengthened by the fact that even in post-war Italy the majority of the small and medium bourgeoisie no longer felt represented by a liberal-democratic political class which every day showed more inability and moral decay.


Fascism is therefore a struggle 'beyond the right and the left' (which means: not egalitarian) against big capital and against the politics of the liberal 'puppets' who are an expression of big capital. The fascist rhetoric of the struggle between 'work' (that of the trader, the small entrepreneur) and large financial capital, rhetoric which translates into the slogans of small entrepreneurs who 'get up every morning' and 'work more than their employees' and ' they carry the country on their shoulders', obscures the true class struggle which is first and foremost that between the small businessman with the Porsche Cayenne and the underpaid blackmail clerk, between the small businessman and the blackmailable worker who does not enjoy the protections of Article 18 because there are fewer than fifteen employees... Of course, large global financial capital is not an absolute good, but it represents a problem that cannot be progressively addressed in the present historical phase, since even those who are communists must understand that in the West there will never be a evolution towards the socialization of the means (including financial) of production as long as widespread interests of a small and medium bourgeois type survive (and the eventual prevalence, here and now, of such interests over those of big capital, see the possibility of an explosion of eurozone, would bring exclusively disadvantages to the working class (see purchasing power of wages). In the present historical phase, the cries against large global financial capital are cries in defense of the small and medium bourgeoisie. These are reactionary cries. The process of centralization of capital is in fact a necessary condition for authentic historical progress, and the alternative is to remain mired in the bourgeois dialectic between 'critical' liberalism and fascism. Even the communist, especially the communist, must hope that the post-bourgeois evolution of contemporary capitalism will continue. This is a process that will require refined balancing acts to prevent the seizure of power by fascist movements (one of the main dangers lies in the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the unemployed, and big capital must convince itself of the need to bring the unemployed to its side ).

It is not difficult to understand that the fascist mentality and values ​​correspond to the mentality and values ​​of a small and medium bourgeoisie in difficulty: the traditionalist vision of sexuality is linked to a conception of the female child as a factor in the reproduction of the small family business (similar discussion for the homophobic mentality and the conception of the role of the male child), the intolerance for legal formalism is linked to a paternalistic and 'communitarian' way of managing problems with employees, anti-scientism is linked to the fear of being overwhelmed by the great capital, anti-rationalism is linked to the fear of the superiority of a large-scale organization of production, the fear of the avant-garde is linked to the perception of a world that changes in a way unfavorable to one's class, etc.

Fascism speaks the language of anti-technocracy, explicit or disguised as anti-plutocracy, and presents itself as a non-egalitarian form of anti-plutocracy when the concrete possibility of an egalitarian turn exists, and as anti-capitalism when an egalitarian turn is not plausible (for example because they are necessary certain further historical developments, for example the end of the small and medium bourgeoisie). Today fascism is called anti-capitalism.

Valentina Nappi

(20 October 2014)

https://forum.termometropolitico.it/653 ... nappi.html

that text is too complex for me

i would expect a whore to talk in a simpler way