I think people overuse the term "fascist" to describe anything and everything, but in this case it's complicated.
Social Democracy isn't Fascism, but when push comes to shove, Social Democrats have a had terrible record of siding with fascists. Social Democracts are also not opposed to military/economic chauvinism, which some people use interchangeably with Fascism. There's also the fact that in the Stalin's time, many of the fascists and socdems had been quite literally the same people.
One of the big questions aint it? I think you should come to your own conclusions, as displayed by this thread there are radically different positions within the left on this. Personally I think it happening in more places than 1930s Germany would hint at something other than the uniqueness of the political scene in Germany.
OK, so now we're talking about a tendency in a revolutionary context, which is a lot different from "social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism," Stalin's far more absolute statement. And even arguing that it's a tendency is dubious when the biggest historical example by a mile involved social democrats siding with communists against fascists.
None of this even touches on how ridiculous this claim sounds to anyone who isn't already on a forum like this, either.
Tendency is all I was ever talking about. I explicitly said I don't think Social Democracy is Fascism, was just explaining why Stalin used the term. Again, WW2 doesn't disprove the fact that in revolutionary moments they tend to side with the reactionaries/fascists. War time is obviously a different scenario.
War time is "when push comes to shove," right? It doesn't make sense to claim that "when push comes to shove, social democrats will side with fascists" when we've seen push come to shove come to invading other countries, and the reaction of social democrats in that situation was to side with communists against fascists.
Of course, you can point to (smaller, more muddled) counterexamples, but all that means is that there isn't really a noticeable tendency.
This appears to me as SocDems reacting in a nationalist manner to Germany as a threat and a rival rather than SocDems reacting in a specifically antifascist manner, though they attempted to take those aesthetics. The second the bigger threat to their nationalist interests ended they sided once again against communism and communists.
Within Germany as the Nazis were rising the SocDems kept viewing the Nazis as a far lesser threat than the communists, who they just over a decade ago had literally slaughtered during the German revolution using the proto-fascist militias.
That reading of how non-German socdems responded to the rise of Nazi Germany sounds reasonable, but I think it's pretty far from Stalin's idea that socdems were anticommunist above all else, to the point where they operated basically hand-in-hand with fascists. If fascism can become such a big threat that your social democracy sides with communists against it, your social democracy is doing something closer to conventional geopolitical maneuvering than to picking sides based on ideology.
Bringing up nationalism as another distinct ideological factor is also a good point. There's more to these situations (especially in the imperial periphery) than just fascism vs. communism.
I've stated that I'm referring to revolution several times no? If you're trying to claim that periods of war and revolution are indistinguishable in the incentives/conditions they create I completely disagree. Even the Nationalists allied with the Communists during the war against Japan, and we all know the course of history after that. There's no denying that SocDems alongside liberals, conservatives, and Communists, fought against Nazi Germany I'm not saying otherwise.
Stalin's original comment was not limited to revolutions (it was from 1924, before the vast majority of communist revolutions got off the ground), and your original comment in this thread mentioned nothing about revolutions. And as many revolutions involve war, there isn't a clean distinction between the two concepts, anyway.
It's not a good take if you have to ignore the largest conflict of the 20th century to make it sensible, and if you have to assume a statement made in the 1920s was meant to apply to the Cold War but not the larger hot conflict that came before it.
It's a socialist forum, I assumed people would know what I meant when I said "when push comes to shove" in relation to SocDems. It's not specific enough, my mistake. For the 748373th time, I don't agree with Stalin I'm just giving my take on why someone would link Social Democracy with Fascism.
And as many revolutions involve war, there isn’t a clean distinction between the two anyway.
There's a clear distinction in the war between a country's revolutionaries and counterevolutionaries and a war between a country and some foreign invader let's not be silly here. The times where the two overalp only prove my point.
Except they did. Socdems took up positions aligned with fascists before the war was even over. Greece is the best example imo. The British Labour Party and then the Truman era USA continued to arm literal nazis to continue the fight fight away against the communist factions of the Greek Resistance. Socdems broadly did not protest the western powers assuming an immediate militant stance against the Soviet Union. Even the socdem successes like the welfare state in the UK or France are built specifically to keep workers sated due to the USSR being right there on the other side of the curtain. They instituted policies with the intent of giving the workers enough that they had something to lose. All the while continuing undeniably fascistic wars in Asia and Africa, where they didn't have to appeal to a base of their own supporters of citizens.
Attlee was a committed social democrat and did some fantastic shit on the homefront, and also backed literal Nazis before the decade was out. Also I think "when push comes to shove" can be outside of war time tbf. In war it is easier to form an alliance like that, but when it is over and actually making peace and accepting one another is when push comes to shove, the other shoe dropped and they chose fascist collaborators rather than share a world with the Soviets.
Nothing socdems did to help fascists after the war (or before it) matters half as much as actually aligning with the USSR and actually fighting Nazi Germany. If you had read Stalin's statement on the eve of WWII (it was originally made in 1924) you would have thought he'd expect the social democratic countries to align with the fascists against the communists. They did the exact opposite.
This doesn't mean that social democrats are BFFs with communists, but it does substantially weaken the argument that "when the chips are down, social democrats tend to side with fascists," and it disproves the type of absolutist claim Stalin made in his original comment. We can't claim to have politics informed by history and then ignore the most obvious, most relevant bit of history just because accounting for it would make something Stalin said look like a bad take.
WW2 wouldn’t have even happened if SocDems hadn’t armed fascists to kill communists beforehand, so your notion that WW2 somehow disproves this is ridiculous.
Except it does matter about as much. They helped facilitate the Nazis getting power in the first place. They then continued the Nazis projects. The history shows that socdems align with and enable fascism. That Nazi Germany arising in the first place required the socdems to murder communists and create fascist militias. That is material to, and cannot be divorced from their later opposition to Hitler. You are acting like fighting against the Nazis exists in a vacuum, while aiding fascism does not and in fact is made null due to they helping mop up their mess.
They also do tend to side with fascists since before and after the big example, they have done so. We cannot make ww2 the singular case of fascism that matters. Socdem enabling of fascism in Latin America and elsewhere, or post-war Europe matters and is a stain on them that fighting the nazis for a time cannot clean away. You want to take some history and say that refutes the import or significance of other history before and after. The point is socdems can exist with fascism, they helped it become a thing in the first place. Fighting Hitler and then immediately protecting fascists' post-war does not somehow refute the point. It speaks to the ability of social democracy to facilitate fascism. It _can oppose fascism, but fascism also seems to rely on its help
Couldn't this argument just as easily be made the other way?
By rejecting social democrats efforts at reform and public services and focusing their energies on internal conflict aren't more orthodox leftists ensuring that nothing at all is done to curb the power elite and the publics concerns go unaddressed? Aren't they then siding with fascists by default?
In fact couldn't a cynic even argue that is their goal because in their conception of how Revolution must be carried out it is only at this stage of public suffering that it could occur - so they would oppose any effort to ameliorate. But of course in all their red bureaucracy edginess they've done nothing to engage with and organize the public. So all they achieve is a divided left that is easily conquered.
It depends what you view as empowering the power elite, working within their institutions or refusing to do so. There is a case to be made that the Communist party of Germany's total rejection of the Social Democrats is one of the big reasons why the Nazis were succesful in taking power. To argue that it was a bigger factor than the Social Democrat suppressing the revolution and directly collaborsting with the right wing, I think is a much more difficult argument to make.
I'm just going to ignore your third paragraph, it is a bit ridiculous.
In fact couldn’t a cynic even argue that is their goal because in their conception of how Revolution must be carried out it is only at this stage of public suffering that it could occur
You don't need to be a cynic to believe this -- there's at least a small faction of leftist accelerationists who will tell you this openly. Shit, look at Posadists.
I think people overuse the term "fascist" to describe anything and everything, but in this case it's complicated.
Social Democracy isn't Fascism, but when push comes to shove, Social Democrats have a had terrible record of siding with fascists. Social Democracts are also not opposed to military/economic chauvinism, which some people use interchangeably with Fascism. There's also the fact that in the Stalin's time, many of the fascists and socdems had been quite literally the same people.
Except WWII, of course. That's the key problem with this claim: the biggest piece of historical evidence runs squarely against it.
The claim that Social Democrats tend to choose fascists over communists during revolutionary moments is not disproven by WW2.
But is that because of two specific political parties in Germany in the 1930s or because of the philosophy as a whole?
One of the big questions aint it? I think you should come to your own conclusions, as displayed by this thread there are radically different positions within the left on this. Personally I think it happening in more places than 1930s Germany would hint at something other than the uniqueness of the political scene in Germany.
OK, so now we're talking about a tendency in a revolutionary context, which is a lot different from "social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism," Stalin's far more absolute statement. And even arguing that it's a tendency is dubious when the biggest historical example by a mile involved social democrats siding with communists against fascists.
None of this even touches on how ridiculous this claim sounds to anyone who isn't already on a forum like this, either.
Tendency is all I was ever talking about. I explicitly said I don't think Social Democracy is Fascism, was just explaining why Stalin used the term. Again, WW2 doesn't disprove the fact that in revolutionary moments they tend to side with the reactionaries/fascists. War time is obviously a different scenario.
War time is "when push comes to shove," right? It doesn't make sense to claim that "when push comes to shove, social democrats will side with fascists" when we've seen push come to shove come to invading other countries, and the reaction of social democrats in that situation was to side with communists against fascists.
Of course, you can point to (smaller, more muddled) counterexamples, but all that means is that there isn't really a noticeable tendency.
This appears to me as SocDems reacting in a nationalist manner to Germany as a threat and a rival rather than SocDems reacting in a specifically antifascist manner, though they attempted to take those aesthetics. The second the bigger threat to their nationalist interests ended they sided once again against communism and communists.
Within Germany as the Nazis were rising the SocDems kept viewing the Nazis as a far lesser threat than the communists, who they just over a decade ago had literally slaughtered during the German revolution using the proto-fascist militias.
That reading of how non-German socdems responded to the rise of Nazi Germany sounds reasonable, but I think it's pretty far from Stalin's idea that socdems were anticommunist above all else, to the point where they operated basically hand-in-hand with fascists. If fascism can become such a big threat that your social democracy sides with communists against it, your social democracy is doing something closer to conventional geopolitical maneuvering than to picking sides based on ideology.
Bringing up nationalism as another distinct ideological factor is also a good point. There's more to these situations (especially in the imperial periphery) than just fascism vs. communism.
Theres definitely more nuance to it yeah.
I've stated that I'm referring to revolution several times no? If you're trying to claim that periods of war and revolution are indistinguishable in the incentives/conditions they create I completely disagree. Even the Nationalists allied with the Communists during the war against Japan, and we all know the course of history after that. There's no denying that SocDems alongside liberals, conservatives, and Communists, fought against Nazi Germany I'm not saying otherwise.
Stalin's original comment was not limited to revolutions (it was from 1924, before the vast majority of communist revolutions got off the ground), and your original comment in this thread mentioned nothing about revolutions. And as many revolutions involve war, there isn't a clean distinction between the two concepts, anyway.
It's not a good take if you have to ignore the largest conflict of the 20th century to make it sensible, and if you have to assume a statement made in the 1920s was meant to apply to the Cold War but not the larger hot conflict that came before it.
It's a socialist forum, I assumed people would know what I meant when I said "when push comes to shove" in relation to SocDems. It's not specific enough, my mistake. For the 748373th time, I don't agree with Stalin I'm just giving my take on why someone would link Social Democracy with Fascism.
There's a clear distinction in the war between a country's revolutionaries and counterevolutionaries and a war between a country and some foreign invader let's not be silly here. The times where the two overalp only prove my point.
Except they did. Socdems took up positions aligned with fascists before the war was even over. Greece is the best example imo. The British Labour Party and then the Truman era USA continued to arm literal nazis to continue the fight fight away against the communist factions of the Greek Resistance. Socdems broadly did not protest the western powers assuming an immediate militant stance against the Soviet Union. Even the socdem successes like the welfare state in the UK or France are built specifically to keep workers sated due to the USSR being right there on the other side of the curtain. They instituted policies with the intent of giving the workers enough that they had something to lose. All the while continuing undeniably fascistic wars in Asia and Africa, where they didn't have to appeal to a base of their own supporters of citizens.
Attlee was a committed social democrat and did some fantastic shit on the homefront, and also backed literal Nazis before the decade was out. Also I think "when push comes to shove" can be outside of war time tbf. In war it is easier to form an alliance like that, but when it is over and actually making peace and accepting one another is when push comes to shove, the other shoe dropped and they chose fascist collaborators rather than share a world with the Soviets.
Nothing socdems did to help fascists after the war (or before it) matters half as much as actually aligning with the USSR and actually fighting Nazi Germany. If you had read Stalin's statement on the eve of WWII (it was originally made in 1924) you would have thought he'd expect the social democratic countries to align with the fascists against the communists. They did the exact opposite.
This doesn't mean that social democrats are BFFs with communists, but it does substantially weaken the argument that "when the chips are down, social democrats tend to side with fascists," and it disproves the type of absolutist claim Stalin made in his original comment. We can't claim to have politics informed by history and then ignore the most obvious, most relevant bit of history just because accounting for it would make something Stalin said look like a bad take.
WW2 wouldn’t have even happened if SocDems hadn’t armed fascists to kill communists beforehand, so your notion that WW2 somehow disproves this is ridiculous.
Except it does matter about as much. They helped facilitate the Nazis getting power in the first place. They then continued the Nazis projects. The history shows that socdems align with and enable fascism. That Nazi Germany arising in the first place required the socdems to murder communists and create fascist militias. That is material to, and cannot be divorced from their later opposition to Hitler. You are acting like fighting against the Nazis exists in a vacuum, while aiding fascism does not and in fact is made null due to they helping mop up their mess.
They also do tend to side with fascists since before and after the big example, they have done so. We cannot make ww2 the singular case of fascism that matters. Socdem enabling of fascism in Latin America and elsewhere, or post-war Europe matters and is a stain on them that fighting the nazis for a time cannot clean away. You want to take some history and say that refutes the import or significance of other history before and after. The point is socdems can exist with fascism, they helped it become a thing in the first place. Fighting Hitler and then immediately protecting fascists' post-war does not somehow refute the point. It speaks to the ability of social democracy to facilitate fascism. It _can oppose fascism, but fascism also seems to rely on its help
Couldn't this argument just as easily be made the other way?
By rejecting social democrats efforts at reform and public services and focusing their energies on internal conflict aren't more orthodox leftists ensuring that nothing at all is done to curb the power elite and the publics concerns go unaddressed? Aren't they then siding with fascists by default?
In fact couldn't a cynic even argue that is their goal because in their conception of how Revolution must be carried out it is only at this stage of public suffering that it could occur - so they would oppose any effort to ameliorate. But of course in all their red bureaucracy edginess they've done nothing to engage with and organize the public. So all they achieve is a divided left that is easily conquered.
It depends what you view as empowering the power elite, working within their institutions or refusing to do so. There is a case to be made that the Communist party of Germany's total rejection of the Social Democrats is one of the big reasons why the Nazis were succesful in taking power. To argue that it was a bigger factor than the Social Democrat suppressing the revolution and directly collaborsting with the right wing, I think is a much more difficult argument to make.
I'm just going to ignore your third paragraph, it is a bit ridiculous.
You don't need to be a cynic to believe this -- there's at least a small faction of leftist accelerationists who will tell you this openly. Shit, look at Posadists.