Debunking the Singapore meme

This is like what the rapture is for the jehovah's, the event is always just ahead, not as true prediction of the future, but as future indefinite to keep the present in place.

"Fascism" is anything from Leon Trotsky to children having a bedtime. It doesn't mean anything specific thing but a sentiment towards a thing.

I think it's just funny when leftists call things fascist when they are proposed (capitalism with authoritarian state measures) but then deny it's fascism when it turns out well.

The event is not 'just ahead' it is a historical category.

And it is intimately tied to resource scarcity forcing increases in the organic composition of capital to produce efficiently.

critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/historical-materialism-and-the-inevitable-end-of-capitalism/factors-that-limit-the-life-span-of-the-capitalist-system/

We don't make value judgements about different flavors of capitalism, you're thinking of liberals. Most here agree that authoritarian capitalism works better than more "free market" capitalism.

Fascism's performative and aesthetic nature makes it hard to pin down, but 'authoritarian capitalism' it is not. Singapore definitely doesn't fit the bill.

Singapore was an already-rich COLONIAL financial centre. It seceded from the poorer Malaysia when it became independent. As a city-state, its GDP is artificially boosted by the absence of a rural hinterland and poorer migrants. It's US-allied and its growth since the 1970s was due to US and Japanese outsourcing. Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea were deliberately built-up for geopolitical regions.

Pretty much all of the "Third World" had substantially state-run economies before the 1980s. Even today, in most African, Asian and Latin American countries, most of the big companies (excluding transnationals) are owned by state elites or their cronies.

Historical materialism is a method of shoehorning that has never been successfully used to predict future events, not even the grand wizard succeeded in this, it is always ad-hoc.

Capitalism doesn't work, people do. Its succes is entirely dependent on the people engaging in capitalist economics.

George Bush does, homosexuality does, the NYPD does, antifa does.. there is no fascism in itself, there are only things that are fascist, it's the leftist/liberal (and increasingly also the right-wing) version of haram.

Things that are called fascism do not equate to fascism. Get out of here with this PoMo nonsense.

Please explain how meaning does not follow from use and is instead instilled into some ethereal realm you have acces to and others don't. I'll wait for you to pick up your nobel prize.

Dear user, let's not be retarded. Meaning does come from use, but there are also many meanings based on context. On this imageboard we prefer rigorous, scientific definitions which are of course not final or 'objective' and are matters of debate. They are however markedly different from what some ignorant liberal feels is the appropriate use of a word. When we are discussing what fascism is, we are not interested in the liberal meaning which is 'anything authoritarian' or in the theoryless antifa meaning which is 'anything vaguely right-wing'. We aren't even necessarily interested in what a historian would think of fascism, we are interested in what the social sciences might say about fascism, then we can compare and evaluate different formulations. The examples in your retarded outburst are not in any way fascist in the context of this discussion. Now stop being a retard or stop posting.

So fascism basically has no definition, and its use is basically "bad shit".

yes dear user, to some people it does mean that. that definition is however useless so I have no idea why you are so hung up on it.
Fascism in a more useful definition is defined by:

I'm not so hung on it, but every times people talk about fascism, there's literally thousands of definition of it.

When it just means: the state and the corporation merges, and it engages in imperalism/expansionism.

I think one of the best arguments against the free marketeers gloating over Singapore is also going to be one that will surprise many Stalinists: Lee Kuan-Yew's PAP (People's Action Party) used Stalinist 5 year planning it learned from studying Stalin's USSR to propel its gigantic economic basis before liberalising (South Korea did the exact same thing under military dictatorship). Virtually every "Asian Tiger" economy is grown either off of something similar (Japan and Taiwan were also in particularly corporatist and publically-managed regimes before only rather recently). Another good one is that Singapore has more than 70% public housing, which is in the top 10 highest of the world, and it mostly makes its GDP through being a logistical harbor spot with importing and exporting services.

Singapore engages in fascism.

It allows its market to prosper, but it holds a tight hand to control in order to direct for the benefit of the state.

The same for Japan.

I'm pretty sure that the asian tiger countries still use 5-year plans.

You have to go back. Also, I find it ironic how rightists constantly accuse leftists of calling everything "fascist" when you are now trying to attribute the success of asian tiger countries to fascism when you'd have to look at georgism, keynesianism and stalinism instead

but dear user, thats not what happened in Italy during Mussolini's reign, so I think your definition isn't very good. Corporation happened on a very small scale only in real terms. And it is plausible that a fascist regime could be non-expansionist at least for a while before national capital needs more open markets, though what with the veneration of martial power, militarism and aesthetisation, aggressive war is quite likely to happen.

so how much state intervention in capitalism is 'fascism' to you? was New Deal USA fascist? was mercantilism fascist? are foreign trade departments fascist?

Mussolini literally nationalized the railroad, infrastructure and forced corporations/companies like Beretta into the fold of the state.

Sure, it can be, it can do it the Japan-way, i.e. buying assets and resources from outsiders.

Because fascism is what it engages in.

It allows the market to still operate freely (you can trade, you can scam, you can own private properties), but it controls heavily on the direction of the properties owners (okay, you own that properties but you play by the state's rules), this is what happened to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Stalinism isn't what could be used to describe it because Stalinism is frankly anti-market, while fascism seeks to control the market.

It's fascist when it nationalizes the industries, forcing a private company into a public-private company.

I think any useful definition of fascism should include social democracy (actual social democracy, not Third Way neoliberal shit). Of course, that means Fascism isn't quite as negative a word as we've typically been using, but the reasons what we call Fascist movements are shit are the imperialism/anti-intellectualism/tyranny of them, adjectives we can slap on to select Social Democractic, Neoliberal, and even Socialist regimes if we count tankies.

What the fuck? Fascism is anti-social democracy.

All fascists HATE the idea of democracy, which is liberalism.

*are particularly shit; they also don't support abolition of private property but we give fascists a lot more shit than liberals even though liberals are also against it, and that's because we recognize imperialism/anti-intellectualism/tyranny as problems correlated but not entirely synonymous with capitalism.

lol, prepare to get lectured by leftists on how capitalism is inherently imperalism and tyrannical.

Otherwise it would just be Asserism or SocDem, which is something else.

nationalisation isn't fascism, dear user. Are you going to call social democrats fascist next? social fascists deserve it tbh
I should have perhaps said 'corporatisation', where representatives of the state, the employers and the employees form corporations that are meant to solve conflict of labour - this is what corporatism means. In the real world the only the tiny artists' and intellectuals' corporation worked in any meaningful way, for the more relevant sectors of economy like the automobile factory workers the state-controlled 'fascist trade unions' were just another tool of labour interest repression.

Somehow the 'state's rules' were also the benefit of the capitalist class just about every single time. Labour conflicts consistently ended in wage depression and loss of worker rights Funny how that happens, isn't it. Almost as if class interest still dictated the politics of the country.

I can maybe agree, but perhaps for a different reason. IMO social democracy contains a rejection of universalism and a sort of implicit chauvinism of inherent superiority of the citizen compared to everyone else. Soviet renounciations of western social democrats (maybe on the basis of Leninist theory of imperialism) as 'social fascism' does have more than a mere grain of truth.

I'm most certainly not a right-winger and even I recognize that Capital tends towards those things, but I can vote, marry a dude, and shit-talk the state under liberalism, whereas I could not under an explicitly imperialist and tyrannic state like Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, or Pinochet's Chile.

If you talk about how fascism is "given too much shit" compared to liberalism (true, but only in a sense) by appealing to what fascism was like historically, and then smugly start to protest incoming comments on how fascism is just like all forms of capitalism inherently imperialistic, you'll have to explain how the same regimes you should "give less shit to" like fascist Italy or Nazi Germany were in any way less imperialist than their contemporaries or even their successors. Because Italy's never been more active imperially than under Mussolini, and Nazi Germany is the largest imperial capitalist power ever seen in Europe period.

Pinochet nationalized his banks. What is your point? They only did it reluctantly because the economy would collapse otherwise like free market capitalism always has.

Nationalisation is the way fascism works.
Nah, because they embrace democracy, that's not how fascists work.
But this is not what fascism means, it means the state buys up the corporations, and the guys who own private properties start to get lead around by the state.
Yes, because fascism rewards the rulers, such as the state and the corporations the most. This is what you see in South Korea, Japan and Singapore nowadays where corporations have political positions.

And what's so funny about it? That's fascism.

My point is Pinochet also engages in fascism.

I don't think even the libertarians are going to say Pinochet was a freedom-loving guy.

This, basically. Lurking lolberts who believe there's a magic means the most successful capitalist economies wield should watch WEBM related.

Also, they should read some Kliman and leave the fantasy world in which polity of capital is predominantly the product of political causes rather than the real material causes underlying what truly can and cannot be done with capitalist polity:
libcom.org/files/The failure of capitalist production.pdf

Nobody is arguing that fascism isn't imperalistic, Mussolini boasted about it, we love it.

It's the fact that the capitalists are gonna get shit on by this board by thinking capitalism isn't imperalism (it actually isn't, there are capitalists that sustain themselves without the need of expansion).

Except in Germany where the opposite occurred.
That's how any class society works, fascism or not.

In Nazi Germany, every corporations are tied to the state, and their prices are fixed by the state, so no, the opposite does not occur.
Fascism does this without the pretension. Liberalism wants equality for everyone, communism wants muh workers, fascism just straight down rewards the rulers.

Fascism is historically everything but the opposite of that; it's going so far with the laissez-faire economically that you birth in the word "privatisation" into the lexicon of world language.

Except that's not true.

Price fixing and nationalization both exist in Nazi germany.

It let the corporations compete with each other, but it controls all the corporations.

Its true descendants are really S. Korea, Singapore and Japan on how the megacorporations (Samsung, Yamaha, Mitsubishi) all have government tied.

It doesn't. Liberalism is an example of class society and in a class society there is always one who has more.
Again, that's what all class societies do.

You want to argue against recorded historical truisms there? I'll repeat this factoid again, just for you: the Nazi German regime was the one to coin the term "privatisation" because it did it (transferring ownership of capital from public to private hands) the most out of any nation hitherto, and most structurally and efficiently. I'll wait for you to give me a proper argument now, one that is supported with a consistent understanding of what fascism and ownership entail, and most importantly one that contests the Nazi German origins of the practice and naming of privatisation.

It does, liberalism, as an ideology, is about equality for everyone. That's what it means.
Again, fascism does away with the pretension.

I want the American brainlets to leave.

Here, I will just copypaste from Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
Do argue against those facts.

Why? Because I give the correct definition of liberalism?

What about the historical example of fascist privatisation?
So now fascism is social democracy without democracy but with autocracy?
Where are you getting your definition of fascism, then? It doesn't really capture the historical political movement if you are including more or less all state intervention into capitalism as 'fascist'. Either way it seems to me that fascist states either serve bourgeois class interests or somehow magically bourgeois class interests and state interests are the same thing.
Then why was the 'fascist' Japanese company pay structure so flat then until maybe the 90s, compared to Reaganite USA for example?

Except zaibatsu existed way before fascism was even a thing. And in dealings with the zaibatsu the Japanese government was often subservient to the needs of the zaibatsu rather than the other way around. Then again as we see from the European example maybe it makes it more like fascism than less in real terms.

What about it? Fascism uses both.
Uh, fascism is about a ruler controlling the state, and the corporations. Nothing to do with democracy.
Mussolini, the inventor of modern fascism.
Yes, that's the point, to let the bourgeois profit the state. A win-win for the social rulers (i.e. the state) and the economy rulers (the bourgeois).
I dunno about you but Japan invests heavily into infrastructure, much more than America.
Zaibatsu and fascism were actually nested about the same time, the 19th to 20th century.
Hilariously wrong actually, they both work for each other, the recent scandal where the Samsung heir got in cahoot with some government bigwigs show it. Samsung provides the cash, the government makes sure it stays operational, forever.

A capitalist state is an imperialist one. We never said all individual companies under a capitalist system is imperialist and you cannot have capitalism without growth.

You cannot have capitalism without growth but you can have capitalism without imperalist.

There are literal examples of capitalist states that never colonize, never expand, and just stick to their small lot of land i.e. Hong Kong, Singapore, and other super small states like Luxembourg…

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nice try Holla Forums

Let's also take a look at the first claim cited by [42]. It's from War and Economy in the Third Reich, which libgen luckily happens to have.

libgen.pw/view.php?id=1322074

He wasn't talking about corporations as in a legal entity, he was talking about literal bodies enforcing the will of a fascist leader via violent direct action.

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Hong Kong doesn't even deserve that much recognition. While being a hub, it was also part of a massive worldwide-spanning empire that amplified its trading exponentially.

I don't think he's disputing the ability of the government, just stating that location was the key to its success. Teleport it to Kamchatka peninsula or something, and it would literally wilt.

Location but also the development of pic related as a mass transportation method.

Venice is totally dependent on tourism too

I reject the barometer for success as something like GDP. Singaporeans might be more rich but their lives are ikea hell. They're living the consumer mammon nightmare, so it doesn't matter. Successful is the cultivation of the good life.

I think he was referring to Venice in past centuries.

piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capitalisback/CountryData/Germany/Other/Pre1950Series/RefsHistoricalGermanAccounts/BuchheimScherner06.pdf