Multiculturalism and Socialism: The Odd Couple

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 2:

In the comments section, Scott, who is a White nationalist, discusses the disconnect between multiculturalism and socialism or social democracy.

Yes, we do allow White nationalists, even anti-Black ones, on the board, but every time a cute Black woman shows up on the board, we force them to kiss her. On the lips. On penalty of banning. None have left yet. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?

Scott says:

Look at the countries that have the highest index of egalitarianism in the West: Iceland, Norway, Sweden (used to have more). The inhabitants are all pretty closely related to one another. I'll spot my sibling $100 cash.

It's basically the same thing but in a less dramatic way in such countries, but when other nationalities come in because of the aforementioned ethnostates' welfare system, as seek to take advantage of it, the whole system gets messed up. Find me an ethnically diverse country with a social democracy.

I respond:

Scott is right. Does the UK count as a multicultural country? If it does, it's growing a nasty White racist - fascist party of reaction to the diversity in the BNP.

Does Venezuela count? If Venezuela counts, I would say that Venezuela is a country riven with violence, tension and class war. There seems to be a racial angle, but in the upper class and upper middle class, it's really more about class than race. Nevertheless, it's clear that the oligarchy is much more light-skinned than the Underclass that supports Chavez.

Is multicultural Russia a social democracy? Maybe so, but it's riven from one end to the other with horrible racism.

Do Communist states like China and Cuba count? Maybe so, but those countries, probably due to the class warfare (in the case of both) and combined class/race warfare (in the case of Cuba) inherent in their societies, needed full, bloody Communist revolutions to institute any kind of socialist system.

Vietnam and Laos are multiethnic countries, but the Lao and the Vietnamese are the overwhelming majority. They also needed Communist revolutions to put in socialism.

I would say Sri Lanka. They have a pretty good social democracy there, and the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International. There's also a horribly vicious civil war going on, because that "socialist" party in power has never done much to help the Tamils.

Socialist parties in Chile, Argentina and Brazil haven't been able to get much done. In Chile and Argentina the problem is probably much more class than race. In Brazil, surely it's both race and class together. The socialists in Ecuador and Bolivia are trying to get something done, but Bolivia is riven with a horrific class/race division and it's almost civil war there.

I don't think that the socialist parties in Nicaragua and Guatemala will be able to get much done. Both nations had Leftist revolutions for decades, in the case of Nicaragua followed by a revolutionary government and more civil war, this time counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua was always more about class than race, but the oligarchy is light-skinned. In Guatemala, the situation is very much about both class and race riven together.

One thing becomes clear in this analysis.

The only way to peacefully vote in a socialist or social democratic government is to have a relatively homogeneous society. Typically a White society. As diversity and multiculturalism increases, even in White European countries, White racist/fascist groups rise up for various reasons and racial violence against minorities becomes common.

In multiethnic or deeply class-riven nations (Note how often the two are conflated!), socialism, social democracy or movements towards them is typically accompanied by either outright civil war, de facto civil war, tremendous open class war in terms of coups, attempted coups, lockout strikes, riots, imperialist interventions, class-based separatist movements, and much violence.

In other places, socialist governments are not able to get much done due to deep class and race-based conflicts and the threat of violence from dominant ethnics and/or classes.

In other places, long civil wars eventually installed Communist regimes in multiethnic countries and ethnic conflict subsided or stopped. Short of installing a Communist regime, multiethnic countries moving towards socialism are likely to experience a lot of internal violence and chaos.

If diversity is so bad for socialism, why do socialists in the West keep pushing it?

Good question.

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The 14 Points of Fascism

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

Excellent article.

I'm usually the last person on Earth to throw the word, "fascist" around promiscuously, but this article lays it out pretty clearly that the Bush Administration is what I would call a pseudo-fascist or quasi-fascist regime (pseudo-fascist is more like it).

This shit has actually been going on since Reagan came in. I'm not usually one to dog on my fellow Whites, but the US movement towards fascism can be laid directly at the feet of US Whites. Not only that, but I think that this whole movement by US Whites is related to racism and their fear of losing their demographic majority.

As Euro-Whites decline to 65% (61% if you don't include Jews, and many White nationalists don't wish to include them) of the population, note that the US Whites have been getting more and more fascist as their majority shrinks ever more.

We went through a similar thing here in California when Whites were on the verge of losing their majority. Now that Whites a definite minority here in the state, the nasty, ugly and reactionary tendency of Whites has faded as a movement, but we still see traces of it in Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For instance, in order to "balance the budget", the CA Republicans have called for cutting Medicaid below its already incredibly low figures. CA's schools are at about 29th in funding, but have the largest teacher-to-student ratio in the US, because CA schools are flooded with students. The reason for this is simple. Whitey is still in just-enough in charge here in California.

Whites look out and see schools full of non-Whites and say, "Fuck you *niggers and Mexicans, we aren't giving you one thin dime." What's sad about this is that California's schools are still full of lots of White kids, especially in certain regions like the Sierra foothills. They're getting screwed too.

In Oakhurst and Coarsegold, where I spend a lot of time, a large percentage of the local poor Whites are on Medicaid. These Whites are getting the shaft by wealthier Whites in the cities, all because these Whites want to "cut off the niggers* and the Mexicans."

Right now, the Legislature is mostly non-White and liberal, and the governor is in the hands of a fake-progressive Republican who was put in by a fraudulent lie of an election. So we have gridlock to the max, but really it's just non-violent race war played out at state government level.

It was amazing that the Republicans managed to scam one of their own into the governor's seat, but here's how the scam worked:

The Republicans deregulated the electricity industry in California, which nearly ruined the economy and pocketbooks of Californians. They pretty much knew this was going to happen, and Schwarzenegger himself attended these meetings and helped to plot this scam.

A pro-business, extremely fake-liberal Democrat, Gray Davis, was in power, and he got screwed by the resulting skyrocketing bills, power outrages and wild profiteering by Enron and the rest. Californians being idiots like most humans, they (mostly White Californians) turned around and blamed Gray Davis for the energy crisis that he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with.

He kept appealing to the Bush Administration to shut off the disastrous experiment, but Bush refused. It's true that Davis diddled and fiddled. As a pro-business Democrat, he was determined to craft a solution that benefited the various energy companies that were maxi-profiting from the whole mess.

The "final solution" ended up raising California homeowners' energy rates by three times over the long term. California businesses, especially big businesses, more or less got rate cuts, as you might expect.

Nevertheless, White homeowners and small business owners (at least from my asking around) were still 100% supportive of energy "deregulation"! I tell ya, free market ideology is more insane than religion. If your religion is actually killing you or fucking you over, most even religious nuts will get a bit less religious.

Free market fundamentalism is an odd beast. The more it fucks over Whites, the more they support it. I think it is because free marketeerism in Whites is rooted in racism.

"Free market", "deregulation", "privatization", and all that crap means "less government". US Whites hate government because government takes hard-earned White money in taxes and gives it no-good, worthless, criminal, gangbanging niggers* and Mexicans for various welfare schemes.

This is the only sense I can make of US Whites' lunatic dedication to extreme freemarketeerism. Either that or someone has done a damn fine job of brainwashing.

Anyway, the Republicans then engineered a recall election which was one of the sleaziest elections in California history. Even though the Republican Party is on its last legs here in California, they picked a very popular actor who is especially popular with Hispanics to run for governor. I am convinced that this clown got a majority or close to it of the Hispanic vote.

Hispanics here normally vote pretty liberally, but they are unbelievably uneducated, and vastly less sophisticated politically than even Blacks. Hispanics and even a lot of young, fairly liberal, know-nothing Whites marched off and voted for "The Terminator", who ran as some kind of fake-liberal.

It's true that the state's present economic crisis is partly rooted in the massive invasion of illegal aliens that has turned much of our state into Tijuana Norte. But the California Republican Party and Schwarzenegger are 100% pro-illegal alien all the way. Forget the California Democratic Party. They're long lost to the illegals and their traitor Hispanic-American politicians.

I like to say that here in California, we have two political parties, the California Illegal Alien Republican Party and the California Illegal Alien Democratic Party. There's no political party here in California to represent actual American fucking citizens in this state.

Anyway, check out the article. The author compared Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet to come up with his analysis. I'm glad he included Indonesia and Chile.

It would be nice for an intelligent person to look at this list and point out differences (and similarities) between Communism and fascism, but this post is a bit long as is. Maybe another time.

Secular Humanism Magazine is pretty cool, by the way, if you don't mind in-your-face atheism.

*used sardonically.

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Problems of Leftwing Democracy

In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::

The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression.

This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples' thoughts.

I'm not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country's infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.

I respond:

huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.

This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.

The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.

This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.

Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.

These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.

The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.

What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.

The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.

The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.

In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.

Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.

Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.

The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.

Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.

Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.

Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.

What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.

If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.

One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.

The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.

If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.

What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.

So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.

The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.

All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.

On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.

When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?

Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?

In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?

I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.

Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.

People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.

The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.

Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.

There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.

We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.

The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.

One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.

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