Sephardi wrote:No. It's not.
Actually on thinking about this, he is right though, any uprising of that sort has a very large potential to be Fascism, and would not manifest as 'the French Revolution' in
any sense of the word.
As my own posts will even show, when searching the term 'middle-middle class', and arranging the quotes in a nice readable order:
Rei Murasame, Tue 14 Feb 2012, 0717GMT wrote:[G]lobal capitalism, also known as the "Dollar-Wallstreet Regime" (Magnus Ryner, 2010) is what is responsible for the economic basis for that unprecedented movement of people and the moral justifications for it.
Rei Murasame, Sat 10 Dec 2011, 1857GMT wrote:City of London should not have been left out... The term "Wall Street" sounds rather catchy, but I find that sometimes it actually obscures the transnational/transatlantic or global nature of the problem, by invoking that one location with that word.
Rei Murasame, Tue 14 Feb 2012, 0717GMT wrote:It should be impossible to talk about immigration without also criticising liberal-capitalism in the same paragraph.
Rei Murasame, Tue 17 Jan 2012, 1600GMT wrote:The issue is not only taxes though, but also financialisation of the economy in general, and financialisation of executives' pay, as well as well the ascendancy of finance over the regulatory mechanisms of the state.
With the situation like that, they'd always end up setting polices that allow them to skirt away from paying the correct amount of taxation to fund social services, and they'd always end up locketing away all the gains from increased productivity and running off with them.
The only way out is to address the problem systemically.
Rei Murasame, Sat 14 Jan 2012, 0333GMT (emphasis added) wrote:I would say that the upper-middle class has been locketing away an astonishingly high proportion of the growing wealth. They are even now using the liberal-capitalist state which they created, as an implement to further facilitate that.
The working class have been facing an offensive from the upper-middle class, which has really been intensifying over the last few years. It is an offensive against public services, incomes, living standards and unions in order to short-sightedly boost the returns for multinational companies led by international finance. Not contented with the banks receiving the biggest bailout in the history of capitalism - a bailout that they themselves engineered - international finance apparently wants to continue to make the national community skirt closer to destruction to serve the narrow interests of financial institutions.
We in the middle-middle class have been asked to co-operate with this disastrous development, but we should not co-operate with it, since it poses an existential threat to the national community. It's about time to seriously get a desire to take our countries back. If the present system is incapable of adequately allocating wealth to fulfil our policy preferences and foster social harmony - and now there is no doubt that it is incapable - then it ought to be sublated or abolished.
Rei Murasame, Tue 14 Feb 2012, 0717GMT (emphasis added) wrote:[The Third Position] is supposed to be trying to carry out an aufhebung on the current liberal society by using a type of 'popular historicism', which criticises the upper-middle class ideology (liberalism), by explaining it and by also by explaining itself and its role. By explaining itself as a historical product of the very society it is criticising, any revolutionary ideology should want to resolve the problems immanently, by positioning itself within various contradictions and elevating itself "to a principle of knowledge and therefore action" (Antonio Gramsci, Q11, S62).
Rei Murasame, Tue 21 Feb 2012, 1326GMT (emphasis added) wrote:It needs to capture hearts and minds first so that it can lead culturally [...]
Obviously nationalist parties would be defeated in a liberal hegemony. This is why it is necessary to be critical of the present liberal order [...] and by acting as critics we gain the power to reshape the very terrain of the debate that we are planning to win.
Knowing what question to ask, and what doubt to induce, is just as important as the eventual answer. Yes, questions are ideological.
Rei Murasame, Sun 29 Jan 2012, 0841GMT (emphasis added) wrote:The intellectuals and theorists are not the third position movement, they are the think tanks that which are judiciously studying reality and attempting to guide the thoughts of a potential third position movement. In turn, such a movement would not be the folk-state, it would be the movement which would be fighting to reconcile contradictory forces and build the folk-state.
Rei Murasame, Tue 14 Feb 2012, 0717GMT (emphasis added) wrote:Well, the Third Position is actually supposed to be "the path of national-labour" (Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, 1935) which leads to bureaucratisation of the economy and ascendency of the [folk-]state controlled by the middle-middle class.
It's not supposed to be working class 'in nature', but it is supposed to cater to them extensively and rest atop their support. Guilds and unions are pretty much necessary for any revolutionary nationalist tendency to gain ground, that much we agree on. It would hopefully result in a termination of the liberal-capitalist concept of enterprise, changing the adversarial relationship between labour and capital into a harmonious family-like relationship, so that "enterprise is family" (Kingoro Hashimoto, 1939).
Rei Murasame, Tue 14 Feb 2012, 0717GMT (emphasis added) wrote:Most simply, you can't have class collaboration later on, without first pointing out that it's the the upper-middle class that mostly are at the helm of the problem and need to be stopped.
Rei Murasame, Thu 16 Feb 2012, 1223GMT (emphasis added) wrote:What JM Keynes accidentally called 'hoarding' is really most properly known as 'cash-building deflation', and it is not an inherently bad thing in itself at all.
Rei Murasame, Sun 19 Feb 2012, 1708GMT wrote:[D]ebt must be allowed to be paid down. [...]
The mistake in JM Keynes' thinking is that he classified debt-servicing as a type of hoarding, a thing that had a negative connotation. In fact the deep structural problems which lead to the inexorable piling up of debt are what need to be addressed [...]
Paying debts should be classified actually as a good thing because it has a stimulative effect on the economy in the medium term. This is because every coin that would have been spent on interest payments by businesses or taken off them in taxation to service interest payments by the state, would be freed up to be used on productive growth and making widgets instead.
Rei Murasame, Sun 19 Feb 2012, 1631GMT (emphasis added) wrote:[T]he only way to begin the healing process is to take a big stick to international finance and discipline them, since their perverse influence is the main reason why these problems are so intractable and so corrosive.
Rei Murasame, Sat 14 Jan 2012, 0043GMT (emphasis added) wrote:For a quick look at the labour side of that in action, let's take for example an organisation like Dai Nippon Sangyou Houkokukai (Greater Japan Association for the Service to the State through Industry), which was to co-ordinate enterprise-level fascist guilds in a strategy for preventing labour disputes. The [middle class bureaucratic] designers hoped to actualise the content of their slogan 'jingyo ikka' (enterprise is family), by terminating the liberal-capitalist concept of enterprise and changing the adversarial relationship between labour and capital into a harmonious family-like relationship. This was actually accomplished by breaking down the old managerial authority and making workplaces run on consensus.
In 1940, Sangyou Houkokukai membership was at about 41% of the industrial workforce, and by 1945 it was around 85%, and gains in real wages since the 1930s had not been reversed. Having work-stoppages if agreement could not be reached, was actually permitted and did happen (though thankfully much less than there were before the system was established).
Rei Murasame, Sat 10 Dec 2011, 1857GMT (emphasis added) wrote:From a class standpoint Fascism could be viewed as an attempt led by a sort of vanguard of what you'd call the 'petit-bourgeoisie' (read: middle-middle class) leading the classes beneath it to "take [control of] the society back" from the international financier class and the upper-middle class, a taking-back which is supposed to be accomplished through the politicisation and bureaucratisation of everything.
They would have to either submit to a state that is doing that with our group in charge, or otherwise be removed from society by 'systematic violence' (read: the state) since we'd have monopoly on force.
Fascism of course is about a lot of other non-economic things that I need not elaborate on since everyone knows those, but that class aspect cannot be overlooked.
Recently a lot of newbies who like to call themselves 'far right' (particularly in Europe) have forgotten all about that aspect and have found themselves single-mindedly focussed on old narrowly-cultural concerns, but they are riddled with lots and lots of glaring contradictions because of that.
Basically we have to take into account that there is actually a connection between the reality of the world as being shaped by the human spirit, ties of blood and proximity, and other unseen spiritual forces, and the material issues. Because ideologies are partly expressions of the structure and are modulated by changes in the structure.
Rei Murasame, Sun 19 Feb 2012, 1743GMT wrote:[We will have] complete and total change of society and not just a top-down change. It is necessary to lead before taking power, and then after a class of people [are in] power they may continue to lead. Hegemony is an ongoing process.
Rei Murasame, Sun 29 Jan 2012, 0841GMT wrote:If that is actually carried out, the third position movement, having been a revolutionary social movement that understood the contradictions that it was seeking to reconcile, having situated itself as an element of those contradictions, and having taken actions to attempt to reconcile them, would have fulfilled its self-assigned historical role of terminating liberal-capitalism in time for the transition into a new epoch. Having accomplished [the construction of the folk-state], the third position itself could [some day] then self-terminate, or be superseded.
So actually Beren has noticed a real pattern here.
I could do more, but that should be enough to make the point. There isn't really any choice, if you are trying to rally the middle-middle class into leadership in society, either you side with the Liberals
(big mistake) and try to manage decline,
or you take a look at the Third Position which has revitalising and redemptive power.
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