#Post-War Economics

[dailyanarchistposts]

The Arditi del Popolo

The Fascist Offensive

The Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, commenting on the massive factory occupations in northern Italy in September 1920 which involved 600,000 workers, predicted “if we do not carry on to the end, we will pay with tears of blood for the fears we now instill in the bourgeoisie”. His words were to be prophetic as both the PSI and CGL, instead of expanding the struggle from the factories into the community, collaborated with the state to return the workers to their jobs. It was from this moment onwards that the state moved onto the offensive, and Mussolini’s ‘revolutionary action’ squads were supplied with enough arms to take to the streets.

Until the formation of the AdP, the fascists had things mostly their own way. Starting off with an attack on the town hall in Bologna, the fascist squads swept through the countryside like a scythe, undertaking ‘punitive expeditions’ against ‘red’ villages. Following their success there, they began attacking the cities. Labour unions, the offices of co-operatives and leftist papers were destroyed in Trieste, Modena, and Florence within the first few months of 1921. As Rossi writes, they had “an immense advantage over the labour movement in its facilities for transportation and concentration… The fascists are generally without ties…they can live anywhere…The workers, on the contrary, are bound to their homes…This system gives the enemy every advantage: that of the offensive over the defensive, and that of mobile warfare over a war of position [2].”

However by March 1921 there were growing signs of working class defence structures being put in place. In Livorno, when a working class district (Borgo dei Cappucini) came under attack by the fascists, the whole neighbourhood mobilised against them, routing them from the town. In April, when the fascists launched an assault on one of the union centres (Camero del Lavoro), the workers held strike action on the 14th and surrounded the fascist squad, only for the army to rush to the fascists’ defence. By July, the working class had created their own armed militia –the Arditi del Popolo.

[mayday396]

Okay formal Post.

Singaporean here, as a person in a country living in what is basically a Trade market between China and the United States of America.

About Xiaohongshu, please remember behind the Social Media, China is still suffering in its own way and it's written in the guidelines please read it carefully

I just want to say God DAM you guys are petty, this is good by the way this is the good kinda Petty.

Now not all of China is a bustling City just like how not all America is a Cowboy standoff in the Desert, and just like how America is a melting pot of different people and Accents, China has more than one Ethnicity and dialects that just so happen to live in the same general Area.

So don't surprise when someone from Yunnan is speaking differently from someone in Beijing, they are both Chinese but different Dialects.

LGBTQ+ rights in China, it has been Legal since 1997 and the community has been thriving there however it's tightly knit, don't do anything stupid because there is no anti-discrimination provision or Legal Action, and Activism over there is different to ward off America's Individualistic Ideals.

Think of it as China's LGBTQ+ party as a Chinese Hotpot Session where everyone eat at the same table and converse in current affairs with peaceful and differing affairs all while your Uncles and Aunties(Older Gays) get Drunk on Huangjiu and Baijiu

The American LGBTQ+ party is raiding Villages and screaming Liberty and freedom while having civil war on the other side about differing opinions, screaming in someone else's face after accidentally misgendering someone and saying you're not the Problem

Working hours in China vary sometimes it has a 996 working hour system, which requires employees to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. BUT this is Illegal and some Companies still adopt it.

Standard working hours is Eight hours per day and 44 hours per week, in Chinese Culture it is normal to overwork but not in the way you think, it's mostly to impress your Boss and increase your standing in the company, know your Worth but put your All to it.

ALSO SAVE MONEY, I know you guys get taxed for everything but if you intend to move to China, start saving and do some Financial Planning.

Parents and Grandparents always taught us that it is perfectly fine to have Several metal boxes of Cash stashed away in your Home because just in case of Governmental Downfall you'll have something to live for

But in all seriousness, start saving you aren't gonna get your Perfect Xiaohongshu Rich FYP looking lifestyle if you don't save, you have to save and DON'T BUY EXCESS, BUY WHAT YOU NEED.

China censor free speech, but really all you gotta do to survive is not do anything stupid

End of Formal post

Okay bye

[arctic-hands]

I bought jello packs, cottage cheese, whipped cream, and fruit cocktail on a whim, all for separate purposes, but I've suddenly been possessed by the ghost of a prozac-addled bored housewife from the Fifties with a grudge against her asshole cheating husband and have this incredible urge to mix it all together

[wonder-worker]

Alice was perceived to be a destructive influence on every aspect of Edward III’s kingship, but specifically on his abilities as a military leader resulting in the subsequent collapse of the war in France." [In the Bridlington Prophecies, Erghome] speaks of a woman through whose love and counsel the king was impeded from waging many fair wars at that time. She has made the king effeminate. He no longer has a taste for war but remains at home indulging in luxury.

(Laura Tompkins)

nothing but respect for MY fourteenth-century antiwar activist <3

[t4tails]

speak for yourself i will eat a dentist

[stars-and-darkness]

.

[nando161mando]

Don't kill yourself, think of the economy!!!

[firefighter-diazbuckley]

yk it’s bad enough that we could say that the erie canal was influential in starting the civil war but i truly believe you could make the argument that it also led to the great migration

[racefortheironthrone]

Just read that the reason the US boomed post wwii wasn't because of fdr/domestic policy but because the US had little international competition since Europe was destroyed. China closed off etc, soviet union was communist and only the usa had the infrastructure and was in a league of its own and that even if this had continued under reagan and onwards we would still have the inequality and other economic problems we have today. Is this true?

This is a common misconception, confusing an entirely temporary dominance in production with national prosperity. It's wrong on both foreign and domestic levels.

I'll start with the foreign: it is true that the U.S had (relatively) little international competition to start with after WWII, but it was also true that the U.S had (relatively) little international customers either. Europe, formerly the richest region in the world, had been utterly devastated. The Soviet Union and China were out of the question due to Cold War concerns. In Central and South America, Africa, and Asia, trade was limited by lower incomes and the increasing popularity of import-substitution industrial policies.

This is why, after WWII, the United States pursued a policy of fostering international competition and giving these countries access to the U.S' massive domestic market in order to spur economic recovery in Europe and Japan and prevent those countries (and Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) from going over to Communism. Hence the Marshall Plan, hence Bretton Woods, hence GATT, the World Bank, the IMF, and on and on. Here, I recommend Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance.

On to the domestic: the main reason why the argument that the U.S economy was prosperous after WWII because of international dominance is stupid is that trade just wasn't that big a part of the U.S economy: U.S exports and imports together were less than 10% of U.S GDP throughout the 1940s (with a brief exception for the war), the 1950s, and the 1960s. The U.S had industrialized behind massive tariff walls in the 19th century, and even after the Underwood Tariff of 1913 that shifted Federal policy from tariffs to income taxes, the economic habits of generations remained.

When it comes to the major sources of post-war economic prosperity, you really do need to look at the New Deal, WWII economic policy - especially bond policy that saw 85 million Americans buy a combined $185 billion in war bonds that would be released into the post-war economy, and the GI Bill which generated $33 billion in home loans (unfortunately, almost entirely for white veterans only).

[sukimas]

i like to imagine the way that renko and merry dress is retro even for their retro age. what’s “in” is 50s-60s clothing.

[iamthepulta]

I've actually been scrounging for an ending to Ellenville, because it's hard to actually 'end' a tragedy with something that feels complete, and that last post hit me with yeah, that's right. Because we live in a world where blood is protection and the cost of safety; and it fits in so neatly with the themes of death as stasis and longevity.

The 'end' is the regulations in place. Not even watching it happen, but success. This is The Pushcart War but epic fantasy.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Introduction

In this pamphlet, we explore different forms of resistance to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Firstly, the Edelweiss Pirates, thousands of young German people who combined a thirst for freedom with a passion for street-fighting and satirical subversion of the Nazi state. Secondly, the story of the FAUD, German anarcho-syndicalists who went underground in 1932 and undertook a long struggle against fascism while continuing to develop networks and ideas aimed at a free society through the general strike against oppression. Finally, the Zazus, French counter-culturalists and alternative lifestylers – in our terms – who did much more than simply celebrate their difference and party. They fought as well. These stories reveal the power of the organised working class and the danger to capitalism and authoritarianism posed by the innate and ever-present desire for freedom within every human being. They also reveal the extent of a resistance hidden within the shadows cast by the corpses of the remembered dead, the statues of victorious generals and glorious martyrs or distorted by the commercialisation of history.

The Second World War is remembered as a struggle between freedom and oppression and so it was. But in social terms it was also a struggle between two different forms of capitalism – authoritarian vs bourgeois – in which progressive forces in society were almost entirely destroyed. Of the 20 million people who died, many millions were communists, intellectuals, students, socialists and anarchists; virtually the entire movement of organised labour, its trade unions and left-wing parties and organisations were physically eliminated by hanging, shooting, starvation, disease and exile. This was a crushing blow and has haunted anarchism ever since. Don’t look for organisational reasons for why anarchism or libertarian communism have been marginal forces in the development of Europe since 1945. Look for the graves, seek out the places where its tens of thousands – and the millions of other progressive activists – went down fighting.

When we think about the resistance to Nazism, three or four images come to mind: the dour but romantic French maquis blowing up German troop trains, the beautiful SOE operative parachuting into Occupied Europe, the tragic heroism of the student pacifists pitting wits and bodies against the Gestapo and SS. Their struggles and suffering are portrayed as a patriotic response to physical occupation and ideological oppression, a thing that is forced upon them, an unnatural condition which ends with the liberation until all that is left are grainy photographs and the quiet voices of old people, remembering. There was the French resistance, the Warsaw uprising, Yugoslav partisans: native struggles in response to alien occupation, whose only ambition was liberation and the restoration of the nation-state. But there was more: blows struck, voices raised that once went unheard but that speak to us still. This pamphlet is about that other resistance, one involving hundreds of thousands of people, that began not in 1939 but many years earlier. A resistance not against occupation but against fascism and for freedom. A resistance that was international, rejecting the tired slogans of empire and fatherland, not a desperate struggle for survival against Hitler’s ten year Reich but a war begun on the barricades of 1848: against tyranny, exploitation and war and for freedom, brotherhood and peace. A resistance rooted in the organised working class and its understanding that fascism brings only exploitation, terror and war, that authoritarian and totalitarian governments of all kinds are good only for one class – the ruling class, the merchants, the generals and industrialists. These histories remind us of the almost limitless strength of the aware and self-organising working class, its capacity for struggle and sacrifice, it’s determination to hold on to its ideals in the face of brutal oppression. There is another history that we are writing even today.

Before Hitler could build the war machine he needed to acquire power for himself and lebensraum for the German people – to be built amongst the mass graves of the ethnically-cleansed east and south – he needed to defeat this powerful and dangerous resistance. Hitler’s first victims were not the Jews, the intellectuals, the Poles or Russians. The first victims of Nazism – deliberately so – were communists, trade unionists, anarchists, working class communities and activists. Hundreds of thousands of working class people, whole communities, trade union branches, workers’ societies and leagues were liquidated, their members arrested, imprisoned, exiled or driven underground, sent to forced labour and re-education camps and later, konzentrationslager: concentration camps.

It is difficult, now, to imagine the strength of that resistance. Hitler is often portrayed as a progressive campaigner who took to the air to criss-cross Germany, winning the hearts and minds of its people. It’s not well-known that this was a tactic forced on the Nazis because it was less dangerous than travelling by road or rail! Just months before the National Socialists seized power, Goebbels was chased out of Koln – his home town – ‘like a criminal’ by anarcho-syndicalist protests and mass action. All over Germany before 1933, vigorous and determined action, taken over the heads of social democratic and trade union leaders, gave the Nazis a very hard time.

Marches by Nazis were often surrounded and had to be protected by the police, their hit squads often ambushed and beaten up (or killed) by organised workers. The resistance took its strength from the experiences of workers and the lessons learned during the period of social upheaval and repression following WWI. Its resilience and dynamism was rooted in the desire for a socially-just, progressive and peaceful society, things that millions of people were prepared to struggle, fight and die for. Its weakness lay in the separate methods of organisation of anarchists, socialists and communists and competition between them for the loyalty of working people, rather than co-operation. And as with the period before WWI, nationalism, patriotism and sectional identities weakened the front for progress and justice. The Second World War was simply the final phase of a seventy-year struggle between authoritarian and bourgeois capitalism, a long struggle that decimated progressive forces in Europe and elsewhere, precluding the possibility of forming any other society in the ruins of the old except on democracy’s terms.

In the 1930s, the level of repression was so severe that only individualist activities were possible. In Germany, assassination plots – many against Hitler himself — and murders were attempted, pamphlets and posters printed and distributed, sabotage in the factories carried out. An underground network formed by the FAUD – German anarcho-syndicalists — managed to raise money for anarchists fighting fascism in Spain during 1936–39 and smuggled technicians across Europe to assist them. But without a mass base, anarchists and those they worked with were gradually hunted down, suppressed. Ernest Binder, a FAUD member wrote in 1946: “Since mass resistance was not feasible in 1933, the finest members of the movement had to squander their energy in a hopeless guerilla campaign. But if workers will draw from that painful experiment the lesson that only a truly united defence at the proper time is effective in the struggle against fascism, their sacrifices will not have been in vain.”

“Hopeless”? Maybe. Squandered? Never.

With the complete collapse of organised labour resistance to Nazism – its leaders in prison or exile, activists in concentration camps or underground, working class districts terrorised by SA and Gestapo raids and arrests, its funds and printing presses seized, its organisations and newspapers declared illegal – anarchist resistance too had to go underground and gradually lost coherence and the ability to act. This didn’t just occur in Germany. Italian anarchists continued to fight the fascist gangs throughout this period, forming their own partisan bands as social struggles became military but retaining a hard political analysis and edge, continuing their call for social revolution. The anarchist movement in France – because it was internationalist and anti-war – was suppressed in 1939–40 for resisting mobilisation, with activists arrested, imprisoned for refusing to be drafted or forced into hiding. After the occupation in 1939, Polish trade union organisations were proscribed but syndicalists gathered its militant remnants together in the Polish Syndicalist Union (the ZSP) and organised both propaganda and overt resistance. An illegal new-sheet, the Syndicalist, was published and the ZSP actively resisted in co-operation with the National Army (the AK) and People’s Army (AL); ZSP detachments took part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Resistance coalesced amongst affinity groups or upon the remains of pre-war political and industrial networks amongst organised workers. Anarchists who had direct experience of fascism, for instance in Germany and Italy, retained their internationalist and revolutionary goals and organised separately, though often co-operating with resistance groups. They published radical pamphlets and bulletins and continued to call for social revolution. One example is the Revolutionary Proletarian Group formed in France in 1941 by revolutionaries of many nationalities and which issued a manifesto in 1943 calling for an international republic of workers councils. It urged economic resistance, the disaffection of German soldiers and workers and resistance to forced labour drafts whilst forming clandestine factory committees and militias. Thousands of German soldiers did desert but at the cost of hundreds of lives: executed, starved, shot ‘while escaping’ or simply disappeared. At the same time, a secret congress of anarchists and libertarians was held under the noses of the Vichy authorities in Toulouse. It formed the International Revolutionary Syndicalist Federation and aimed to organise a mass general strike as soon as conditions permitted, while continuing guerilla resistance and economic sabotage.

Other anarchists were drawn into the struggles against Nazi occupation as an extension of their long fight against fascism or the hope of social progress with liberation. In 1940 there were 230,000 Spanish Republican exiles in France, of whom 40,000 – anarchists, socialists and communists – joined the maquis; perhaps as many as 30,000 died in the struggle. Spanish exile units fought in many battles during the war and anarchist battalions with names like “Durutti”, “Guernica” and “Guadalajara” on their vehicles took part in the liberation of Paris while 50 French towns, including Toulouse, were liberated by Spanish guerilla groups.

Yet, as the post-war settlement proved, democracy is simply a more benign form of capitalist authoritarianism. National liberation and anti-imperialist struggles – though ultimately victorious – simply further entrenched capitalist social relations within society. Some anarchists predicted this. The Friends of Durutti, a radical group during the Spanish Revolution, argued that anarchists and libertarians who had set aside revolutionary goals to help the bourgeois Spanish Republic fight fascism had gained nothing, suffering defeat, exile, death and the destruction of their popular workers collectives and the other organisations by which people were self-managing society in the midst of war. Even after victory, oppression continued: anarchists who had refused to be drafted in 1939 or who had carried out ‘illegal’ actions against state targets were arrested and convicted despite serving in the Resistance.

What this history tells us is the importance of fighting fascism wherever it rears its ugly head, of the need to put aside sectarian differences. An aware, progressive and mobilised working class is one of the most powerful forces in the world, strongest when it acts from its own sense of what is necessary, weakest when badly led. And because fascism is a facet of capitalism, it cannot be fought except upon the basis of the social relations capitalism creates. National liberation without social revolution merely postpones an inevitable struggle and continues an oppressive and deadening life without freedom.

Anarchist Federation, April 2006

[oflgtfol]

“Other shortcomings [in communicating science] are evident in television science fiction programming. Star Trek, for example, despite its charm and strong international and interspecies perspective, often ignores the most elementary scientific facts. The idea that Mr. Spock could be a cross between a human being and a life-form independently evolved on the planet Vulcan is genetically far less probable than a successful cross of a man and an artichoke… There must be dozens of alien species on various Star Trek TV series and movies. Almost all we spend any time with are minor variants of humans. This is driven by economic necessity, costing only an actor and a latex mask, but it flies in the face of the stochastic nature of the evolutionary process. If there are aliens, almost all of them I think will look devastatingly less human than Klingons and Romulans.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[wonder-worker]

"Among their complaints [in 1460, the Yorkists] specifically blamed the earls of Wiltshire and Shrewsbury and Viscount Beaumont for ‘stirring’ the king [Henry VI] to hold a parliament at Coventry that would attaint them and for keeping them from the king’s presence and likely mercy, asserting that this was done against [the king's] will. To this they added the charge that these evil counselors were also tyrannizing other true men* without the king’s knowledge. Such claims of malfeasance obliquely raised the question of Henry’s fitness as a king, for how could he be deemed competent if such things happened without his knowledge and against his wishes? They also tied in rumors circulating somewhat earlier in the southern counties and likely to have originated in Calais that Henry was really ‘good and gracious Lord to the [Yorkists] since, it was alleged, he had not known of or assented to their attainders. On 11 June the king was compelled to issue a proclamation stating that they were indeed traitors and that assertions to the contrary were to be ignored." - Helen Maurer, "Margaret of Anjou: "Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England"

Three things that we can surmise from this:

We know where the "Henry was an innocent helpless king being controlled and manipulated by his Evil™ advisors" rhetoric came from**.

The Yorkists were deliberately trying to downplay Henry VI's actual role and involvement in politics and the Wars of the Roses. They cast him as a "statue of a king", blamed all royal policies and decisions on others*** (claiming that Henry wasn't even aware of them), and framed themselves as righteous and misunderstood counselors who remained loyal to the crown. We should keep this in mind when we look at chronicles' comments of Henry's alleged passivity and the so-called "role reversal" between him and Queen Margaret.

Henry VI's actual agency and involvement is nevertheless proven by his own actions. We know what he thought of the Yorkists, and we know he took the effort to publicly counter their claims through a proclamation of his own. That speaks louder than the politically motivated narrative of his enemies, don't you think?

*There was some truth to these criticisms. For example, Wiltshire (ie: one of the men named in the pamphlet) was reportedly involved in a horrible situation in June which included hangings and imprisonments for tax resistance in Newbury. The best propagandists always contain a degree of truth, etc. **I've seen some theories on why Margaret of Anjou wasn't mentioned in these pamphlets alongside the others even though she was clearly being vilified during that time as well, and honestly, I think those speculations are mostly unnecessary. Margaret was absent because it was regarded as very unseemly to target queens in such an officially public manner. We see a similar situation a decade later: Elizabeth Woodville was vilified and her whole family - popularly and administratively known as "the queen's kin" - was disparaged in Warwick and Clarence's pamphlets. This would have inevitably associated her with their official complaints far more than Margaret had been, but she was also not directly mentioned. It was simply not considered appropriate. ***This narrative was begun by the Duke of York & Warwick and was - demonstrably - already widespread by the end of 1460. When Edward IV came to power, there seems to have been a slight shift in how he spoke of Henry (he referred to Henry as their "great enemy and adversary"; his envoys were clearly willing to acknowledge Henry's role in Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule; etc), but he nevertheless continued the former narrative for the most part. I think this was because 1) it was already well-established and widespread by his father, and 2) downplaying Henry's authority would have served to emphasize Edward's own kingship, which was probably advantageous for a usurper whose deposed rival was still alive and out of reach. In some sense, the Lancastrians did the same thing with their own propaganda across the 1460s, which was clearly not as effective in terms of garnering support and is too long to get into right now, but was still very relevant when it came to emphasizing their own right to the throne while disparaging the Yorkists' claim.

[justaholeinmysoul]

The main example of how the mass thinking nowadays is UScentric and unfiltered from context is the age discourse. The whole boomer thing.

[kyouka-supremacy]

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