They Ain't Afraid No More

Social Welfare and the Change away from a Systemic Enemy

Morning Comrades.

With fascism in full swing, an economic collapse on the horizon for us peasants in the West and an engineered increase of racist violence, systemic and individual I’ve been once again thinking about societal pressure valves. I am certain that I have written about this in the past and the original point still stands. For Capitalism to sustain itself for the coming generations it needs to evolve, and it has. The fact that our ruling class have, once again chose the path of fascism for the systemic evolution is hardly surprising, they aren’t the smartest cookies in any jaw I know of, yet, from their perspective it could all be so easy - especially when I am honest even with myself.

With insane levels if productivity and profit over the last 40 years the accumulated wealth it is absolute feasible and still profitable ( in their system and world ) to, for example, institute genuine welfare systems across the entire globe - by all means read Jason Hickle’s work no the subject here -, with humanitarian basics such as accessible and free housing for all, free and accessible healthcare for all and more. The difference for the ruling class would be marginal at best - and truth be told, the vast majority of us, myself included, would find it hard to be remain as motivated as we are if those realities existed. Obviously, it wouldn’t take all that long for us worker bees to understand that we then don’t need these bosses and would get rid of them but that’s fiction, not science. The fact that there are countless, scientific studies on this particular possibility at the very least means that someone has thought of this but not, let’s take a hard right, every pun intended, and do “this”, I guess. Which means one thing and thing only, they aren’t afraid of us, anymore.

In an unusually brilliant move over the last 4 decades, capitalism as a system has managed to grind the alternative to itself to a stop, the Soviet Union, and replaced its systemic bogeyman with an identitarian one. Be it Muslims, Immigrants, the Queers, the Marxists - whatever works on that given news cycle and by that it no longer feels systemically threatened - thus, the total erosion of whatever social nets our grandparents and to a certain degree, parents, experienced. You see, before Reagan, Thatcher and their European minions got to power, the Western nations were so deathly afraid of an existing alternative to their system that they created social welfare systems, such as the NHS in England, unemployment safety nets in West Germany, Social Housing in the US and so to counteract its own systemic realities, if only for its voting base.

Not that this is a plea to return to said systems, all based on capitalist exploitation to be clear, but given the current realities, one can only think of how much pressure it would clear for the capitalists to continue on their path - only for us to them give them rope, but that’s another story all together.

With that, here is a little deep dive into the reality of Western Social Systems that existed solely as an anti-communist sugar cube and how the demise of the Soviet Union played and continues to play a major role in the systemic shift to fascism.