The ideas in this blog are derived from the “Naples” essay written by Walter Benjamin of the Frankfort school with help from proletariat Asja Lacis. As you may know, the Frankfurt School refers to a group of thinkers dissatisfied with all then-current forms of government who coalesced during the interwar period in Europe. What struck me about the essay was the comparison of fascism and liberalism, which I found it very enlightening and still useful.

Fascism divides the world into “the vital and the decadent, the essential and the discardable, the us and the them.” All the dichotomies are false of course, similar to the old joke, There are two types of people: Those who love cats and those who love dogs. Extreme simplification works in a joke, but were it to be applied in reality, it would exclude people who hate both, who love both, who eat both, and who prefer fish.

The other problem with two types thinking is that it usually concludes one of the types is wrong.

Fascism encourages follower to “worship a concocted, false social whole,” like the three decades in America during which Caucasian white- and blue-collar workers were able to support a non-working wife and kids with a single job, usually while owning a late-model car and a TV, and maybe even a dwelling.

These conditions never existed either before or after that time period in the US, but they do survive in the living memory of many Americans today, even though that memory maybe misremembered, remembered from someone else’s life, or gleaned from watching or reading fiction.

Obviously those conditions don’t seem ideal to many today, though I can only speak for women like me, who are much happier wielding a soldering iron and getting paid than wielding a mop and getting ignored.

Liberalism “emphasizes the individual at the expense of the network of relations in which they are embedded.” This definition speaks to me, but seems vaguely worded. One example might be assuming a gay person would politically prioritize gay issues over issues relating to that person being a daughter, aunt, employer, PTO member, football fan, dancer, diabetic, or whale lover. This might be referred to as one type thinking, as in, people have one characteristic that matters, at least in terms of politics, to which all their other webs are subordinate.

That obviously doesn’t work. I can’t even choose between Scottish dancing and line dancing.

Liberalism “encourages followers to banish the idea of any social whole in favor of abstractions like the economy as if they were entities existing independently of human life.” Two things about this. Firstly, it reminds one painfully of all the election exhortations by liberals about the US economy being the envy of the world, when citizens just weren’t experiencing it that way. When you are reduced to living on disability insurance and your kid has to join the service because all the well-paying jobs with benefits have been shipped overseas to create more billionaires, you really don’t care what the numbers say.

Secondly, the economy is most assuredly an abstraction, something created out of the imaginations of people, for which there are no natural laws. There are plenty of historical societies and even some modern ones that maintain their members’ health and happiness throughout all the stages of their lives, without impoverishing–or over-enriching–anyone. The ideal that “making any challenge to [capitalism is] as pointless as challenging the laws of motion” is also fiction, a way of forcing all people to identify with “the power which beats them.”

In modern America, both fascism and liberalism encourage us to embrace capitalism in a simplistic, unthinking sort of way. We don’t have to, though.

Faced with the incursions of industrialization in the 1920s, “Nealpolitans stubbornly resisted modernization, and refused to be overwhelmed and remade by industrial commodities that flooded their city.” They preferred to fix their own cars, even if they had to stop every mile to do so, and often re-purposed modern inventions to be actually useful. Everyone not only had hands-on knowledge but also believed it was important in order to avoid reliance on outsiders or elites.

It still is. How deftly capitalism conceals its dark side! We all can purchase an industrial good without thinking of “the late-night labor, the unattended children, the workplace injuries,” or the laborers who are slaves, prisoners, or children. How empowered could we be with the ability to get our goals accomplished without kowtowing to a system designed to endlessly syphon more wealth to the wealthy?