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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29797 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.

(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)

So adapting from Moldbug's ideas I'd say a more accurate definition of fascism is "a group of ideologies that sprang up in response to the perceived success of the Soviet Union by trying to create a totalitarian super state run by leaders on the right".

Basically in the late 19th century the lesson learned seemed to be that the strongest / best country was the one that could run the largest central government.

Leninism was about creating a total mega central government run by Moldbug's Brahmins. Early PR about the Soviet Union had everyone convinced that it was highly successful and clearly the future. Moldbug's Optimates, aristocratic families or who ran large industries, decided to try to create their own total mega central governments.

This is, iirc, Moldbug's definition, though naturally it takes him a couple paragraphs rather than a pithy sentence. I also liked Nick Land's: "Fascism is a late-stage leftist mutation made toxic by its comparative practicality."

I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.

I tend to agree with this, if by "communist means," you mean the sort of overly aggressive ways that communist regimes have traditionally trampled on human rights -- secret police; arrests in the middle of the night for speaking out against the regime; gulags; mass surveillance; etc.

I think that in practice, when a person is accused of "fascism," that's what the accuser is trying to imply --(1) that the person is using or supports these sorts of tactics; and (2) that the person is not a Leftist or Communist.

communist means

There's nothing particularly communist in those means. Those are just totalitarian means.

Agreed, I think “Leninist means” would have been closer to the mark

Orwell once described fascism as "socialism shorn of all its virtues".

My immediate reaction was "what virtues?"

"[W]hat virtues?"

Universal benevolence, the refusal to declare certain people born less worthy of well-being; a. k. a. the thing that gets bundled with Harrison Bergeron-style pressure toward self-ensmallening to produce Nietzsche's 'slave morality', per Metaphysiocrat's commentary on Alexander's commentary on Nietzsche.

You still haven't answered my question.

I have taken ill the past two weeks, and was unable to attend to many matters; however, I will respond to it shortly.

Orwell was a socialist, albeit a cynical and disillusioned one, and he had trouble publishing Animal Farm because the only publishers willing to publish anti-communist parables were anti-communist. Might be worth bearing in mind.

Oh, I'm aware.

For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens). Aristocrats who never actually accomplished anything and certainly don't deserve their wealth will often be more popular on account of modest charitable spending and a public image carefully designed to be maximally inoffensive (which is much easier if you're not constrained by trying to accomplish something) than a revolutionary entrepreneur.

Their view, as I understand it, is that communism at least sounds nice in theory and means well originally, and the same goes for communist activist, whereas fascist activist are just irredeemable monsters. Which I even partially agree with, the problem is just that the people they call fascists pretty much never identify as such and have only little commonalities with the historic concept. It's always Adorno-style sophistry where you use a definition of fascism that is 50% totalitarism and 50% being right-wing and then, upon showing that the right-wingers are indeed right-wing, claim that there are large parallels between fascism and whatever right-winger you choose. Not to mention that irrespective of the good intention of the communist, I don't want to end up in the gulag anyway.

For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens).

I can't help but notice how well this parallels the discourse around generative AI and whether or not it has a "soul" in the sense of the author's intentions. To some people, this intent of the author exists in an image (or video or song or a block of text or etc.) only insofar as the actual final pixels represent such an intent; the actual thoughts that went through the author's head in the moment don't matter. To others, it's the actual thoughts that matter, and how well the pixels convey those thoughts are merely a curiosity.

Right now, the culture war lines drawn in the world of generative AI doesn't seem to neatly match other lines of older culture wars, but I wonder if this aspect will mean we'll see support/opposition to treating media generated by AI as having exactly as much meaning as those generated by humans without AI getting split up in right/left or male/female. It's possible we're seeing it happen already (it's hard to get a sense of the latter, especially, since new tech is almost always heavily male-dominated by default).

That issue is somewhat confused by postmodernism and death-of-the-author being associated with left-wing intellectual discourse, even though it's also left-wing to hate on AI for lacking soul. It's not quite irreconcilable - you can say, for example, that the fun thing about experiencing art is trying to guess what the author meant, so that the game is equally spoiled by rigid adherence to factually documented authorial intent or by the knowledge that the content was spat out by a machine and there is no 'there' there to guess at. But it's an interesting paradox.

I use a similar definition - fascism is totalitarian socialism with right-wing aesthetics. (As opposed to communism, which is totalitarian socialism with left-wing aesthetics).

Incidentally, although Singapore is a long way off being totalitarian socialism with neoliberal aesthetics, it is proof of concept that it would be possible.

And so we circle back to ye olde "national socialism".

The problem with this definition is that it indeed won't please the only people who have an interest in using the label of "fascist" in the first place.

Referring to fascism as national socialism and mentioning the socialist underpinnings of the movement is the single easiest way to rack up downvotes on reddit without actually breaking any rules. The socialists will never allow themselves to be tainted with that association.

Hardly the only people. There are plenty of leftists with an interest in condemning right-wing figures as fascists who would also regard themselves as being against communism - from mainstream Dems who don't even go as far as calling themselves socialists or anti-capitalists, to radical leftists of a more libertarian-adjacent, anarchist bent.

Fundamentally that's more about lumpers vs splitters.

For insiders obviously The People's Front of Judea (PFJ) and the Judean People's Front (JPF) are completely different. Outsiders will generally lump them together.

Or how Antifa is not a thing, it's just a bunch of independent and completely different groups who happen to hold training sessions they all attend, connect to share tactics, cooridinate together at events under the idea of "diversity of tactics"...

I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above. Certainly, they're not going to be relevantly interchangeable with them when it comes to whether they'd endorse "fascism is basically just a mutant strain of communism".

I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.

Why not? Were anarchists not a core constituency of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution? Do Anarchists now not trace their lineage back to ideological progenitors who failed the Bolshevik test, just the same as the rest of the trotskyists and socialists and communists?

The truth, I think, is that the ideology is not and has never been load-bearing. Observably, where ideology has imposed unacceptable real-world tradeoffs, the overwhelming majority of leftist ideologues have ditched the ideology rather than accepting the losses. Ideology is a means to an end, nothing more.

If you're being this maximally cynical and high-level, then trying to analyze political ideologies at all, as more than a red flag and a blue flag waved furiously by two warring, unprincipled tribes, loses all meaning. We were talking about the extent to which fascism as a system can be defined as an offshoot of communism, and it seems to me that this is a topic of conversation that necessitates focus on the theoretical systems themselves. If ideologies don't matter then the proper definition of fascism as an ideology doesn't matter either.

Your statement:

I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.

...indicates that you recognize that some ideological differences are marginal, and assert that some are significant. I am asking you why the Anarchists belong in the "significant differences" category while the Trotskyists do not, given that both Trotskyists and Anarchists followed what appear to me to be identical trajectories in the defining example of communist revolution.

If you want to map meaningful ideological differences, you first need to establish that they exist and are significant. Did Trotsky break with Stalin because their ideological models were incompatible and a dispassionate pursuit of sociopolitical truth through a rigorous Rawlsian veil of ignorance led them to tragically incompatible conclusions and thus to lethal conflict? Or was it a simple matter of it not being possible to share absolute power?

I would argue that ideology can matter in some instances. There are people who opposed both Communist Russia and Fascist Germany, and the Anarchists, and the Trotskyists, for consistent ideological reasons.

Then there are people who broke with the Nazis or the Soviets only because the leopard started eating their face in particular. The fact that a lot of these people were still carrying water for the Khmer Rouge or the Maoists in the 1970s indicates to me that it's not really about ideological details as such. If your ideology is based around the idea of unrestrained and unaccountable wielding of absolute power to secure good things and remove bad things, and that any negative consequences apparently caused by such wielding are either imaginary or the fault of counter-revolutionary forces that your ideology bears no responsibility for, as Enlightenment thought observably has for hundreds of years, then searching for deeper ideological motivations is hallucinatory. You seem to recognize this for Trotsky. Why is Kropotkin different?

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