Nationalists,Racists, Neo-Fascists and Capitalism

While neo-liberals fight neo-conservatives in a war between roommates, the landlord and bank keep collecting rent and mortgage payments and are hardly noticed by most of the battling tenants. The lesser evil political system we call a democracy in which only a minority actually votes for winning Demublicans simply perpetuates its political economic foundation, which is crumbling not only in the USA and Europe but all over the world. Or the planet, to use the brand name popular among many wishing to bring about change but too often manipulated into finding it in the sex, skin tone, religion or sales pitch of the individual alleged changer. The present episode of Trump as villain president is a typical case - if more serious than any in recent history - as millions are programmed into opposition to him, while remaining unaware of the anti-social capitalist roots of the problem which bring the austerity, inequality, wars and environmental destruction which have been going on since the 19^th century but at a much faster pace since the 1970s.

What is both positively and negatively labeled Nationalism is often human reaction to capital forcefully transforming people and earth to promote private profit with no regard for communities in process of being destroyed by that economic system. What would identity group labelers call Indians, Palestinians, and others whose lives became commodities for colonial capital and who rebelled against them? Xenophobes? Nationalists? Racists? That’s what they might look like from the high rise, the hilltop or the ivory tower, but at street-level things are very different from the theoretical-academic vantage point of that economic high ground where many, if a dwindling number, are privileged to reside.

Derogatory labeling of people as neo-fascists is often the practice of those who do quite well in that liberal democratic state in which great majorities never vote for the neo-lib-con professional class who strengthen capitalism with essays and term papers about change read by their peers while rarely if ever being activated if what they propose is radical. These treat majority workers in missionary fashion as under educated and even lesser human material - unless they are of politically correct chosen people of the moment -only speaking of and about them and rarely if ever to them. Whether fundamentalist worshippers at the church of market forces or more sophisticated language manipulators of  control techniques useful in maintaining class privileges, the same divisive social forces at work now were those that helped the downfall of the Russian revolution and the triumph of fascism in Germany. 

Sometimes sincere advocates of change who were at best unable or at worst unwilling to communicate with the great mass of the population which, in the first place attempted a revolution eventually destroyed by forces within and outside the nation - including invaders from the USA -, and second, allowing an arch-reactionary force to make more sense to those suffering the failings of capitalism. Whether consciously or not, too many still work to help division with  politics that reduce all others to enemies and perpetuate the minority wealth that reduces people to consumers of material and intellectual waste, when they are left with enough means to consume anything at all in a credit based economy which could burst at any moment when a majority cannot pay its bills or worse, nature forecloses on a society and culture not just breaking but savaging its laws.

Those incapable of stopping the slaughter of Muslims in their homelands rise in anger against those who fear Muslim retaliation and support barring their entry into the USA. But the crisis that destroys nations, murders people and reduces so many to refugee status is the primary problem, not those reacting in fear that sometimes leads to hateful ignorance. End the first injustice and there will be no possibility of the second. Instead, the willful or helpless perpetuators of murder label the reactors who pay for it as neo-fascists, racists and worse.

Those whose jobs are lost to cheaper immigrant labor and who absorb the social costs that bring greater profit to capital – the backbone of this economy since immigrants came here in the 15^th century – are labeled derogatorily in the same fashion and in the same reactionary spirit. But if instead of lower economic end Spanish speaking immigrants from the south we had millions of English speaking upper end professionals entering the country from Canada, the reaction would likely be the same though coming from different economic strata. If we could get lawyers for 25 dollars an hour, teachers for 12.50 and doctors for 30, many Americans would be delighted while those of formerly upper middle incomes would be reduced to screaming about job, property and status loss – with good reason - and a few at the extremes might soon be parading about with shaved heads and swastika tattoos. The economic system that sets people apart by bringing great benefits to some only at great cost to others goes unquestioned. Only the divisiveness and labeling is highlighted.

Armed to the teeth under “fascist” Trump? We spent 600 billion on warfare under alleged peacenik Obama and started a multi billion-dollar program to upgrade nuclear weapons and further arm Israel in its democratic humanitarian suppression of Palestinians. Of course, the Palestinians are all nationalist-identitarian-xenophobe-racist-neofasicsts. Trump is a big individual problem, as is any CEO of this imperial corporation but the political economy of war capitalism is the much bigger problem, and its supporters, servants and willful or innocent constituents are not simply found on the right.

Fascist-populist-hate labeling brings comfort to some who can afford the high end marketplace community but can be demeaning to those carrying the social burdens at the lower end neighborhood of that same mall, though both play a role in maintaining the profits of private capital in divided groups which should be working together to make the entire community better for all its people. In this way, economic class barriers grow larger, more divisive and less visible, playing right into the identity group conflicts which are more easily seen and used by our rulers to keep democracy a word without meaning.

The political economy that lavishes billions of dollars on warfare and pet care while millions of its people live in poverty and lack health care and even housing is liberal and conservative, not either one or the other. It’s people who are of color, no color, some color, straight, gay or bent. It isn’t simply a good or bad person, however good some us think ourselves and however bad some of us are. We are part of a system that needs to be changed, radically, not simply part of a fake democracy which shuffles representatives of minority wealth every couple of years. Labels, including hate speech simplifiers, are used to manipulate us into continued buying of a stale and rotten product. It’s time we learn to understand the substance of our society and not just the words we are programmed to use, and abuse, in belief in its individualist myths and in opposition to one another.

Nationalism, like resistance to gentrification or immigration, is often the reaction of communities being radically changed by outside forces with no input from the people of those communities or nations. Are those who resent development that changes their high crime-low income community to a higher income-lower crime community all nimby ”not-in-my-backyard” types? Or do they express political economic protest, even if limited to only their own immediate surroundings, over having their survival further threatened? 

Are protesters against immigration which takes jobs from their communities and transforms those places in language and culture, with absolutely no voice in that transformation, all guilty of hate? Or are they just like anti-gentrification folk, with economic and other protests against change in their lives and communities over which they have no control?

Labeling protesters against immigration changing communities over which they no longer feel at home as evil nationalists or racists - as though immigrants were another race - makes perverted sense only if supporters of gentrification and immigration were labeled capitalist, globalization supporting colonialists for their anti-human policies that bring profit to those outside those communities and loss to those within. Ignorance and hate are not the best ways to stand against ignorance and hate.

Ultimately, we need to see the community we all inhabit – that rebranded “planet” – and all its inhabitants as dwellers on and in a common space, in a common time of great stress in which humanity must, and finally can, come to democratic practice in running the political economy by changing it from the destructive path the current form is on to a new, more positive and hopeful road that will assure a future for all, and not just a privileged few. If conditioned product-commodity label identification is imprinted in our heads, it’s long past time to change that label from an identity group minority “them” to the majority group humanity “us”.