http://www.forsalebyowner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
I am for the latter and against the former. (If you've ever been to Paris, you know in your gut what I'm alluding to).
To elaborate....What does the first image represent?
*Pre-modernism
***Religion
***Family as the essential economic unit
***Private society (as opposed to mass society or public society)
***Narrow-mindedness
***Provincialism
***Exclusionism and hierarchy according to the following criteria:
*****Nation
*****Race
*****Gender
*****Class
***Nepotism
*****Non-transparency in life
*****Arbitrariness
What does the second image represent?
*Modernism
***Secularism in the public sphere (which will be expanded to include any relation between two people...genuinely-private
***Family no longer as an economic unit (children and non-working family members not economically dependent on the family, but rather supported by the public). Family as a provisional instrument for raising citizens, with children and other family members (girls, women, mothers) who are traditionally told to keep to the private sphere being transformed into fundamentally public citizens, ultimately answerable not to any head of the household, but to the public citizenry in general from the basis of being an equal fellow citizen.
***Mass society or public society (as opposed to private society)
*****People addressing each other in the political/economic sphere not as friends, pals who are owed favors or privileges, etc, but as equal citizens.
*******Friendship and love freed from any instrumental, mechanistic political/economic duties, and liberated to function truly as bonds of affection between mutually-consenting peers, without the strategic calculations of former times
***********The strategic calculations are instead relegated to the formal, transparent public political/economic sphere. People argue for policies, renumerations (not favors), etc., as citizens meeting in ultra-democratic workplace, municipal, and national councils.
***************All citizens vote directly on all laws applying to their jurisdiction (workplace, town, or countryewide).
***************Drafting committees are elected to guage concerns and propose, but not pass, legislation. Others may draft legislation and petition it for the general ballot.
***************Ballots are not taken once every few years, but are accessible continuously. That is, there will be a permanent ballot office in each precinct. You will have a safety-deposit box with your ballots that you have filled out. Whenever you want to change your vote or vote on something new, you go there, get out your old ballots, change your vote, get the vote recorded, and put the ballot back in your safety-deposit box as a record of your vote. No need for "nay" votes. When a bill gets 55% of the registered voting citizenry to vote "yea" for it, the bill becomes law. If enough people who supported the bill ever change their votes such that the bill drops below 45% approval, the law is revoked.
***************Elected, instantly-recallable judges and jury duty as before.
***************Elected, instantly-recallable officials of the executive branch.
***************This is mob rule. If you fear the consequences, you need to go to work on your fellow citizens, whipping them up into shape to take on these adult responsibilities in a rational manner.
***************All adult citizens will also have militia training and militia duty for a few weeks out of every year.
****************The citizenry's vote will be required for a formal declaration of war, and a formal declaration will be required in all cases for an extended conflict. The (recallable) executive may exercise provisional powers for only a short period of time. The professional, standing army will be minimal--enough to resist a surprise attack for a short while. In the case of a real war, the military will use a ruthlessly undiscriminating "Levée en masse" (draft). Only the disabled, young, elderly, and resisters will be exempted. Resisters will lose their citizenship if they resist, but it would be illogical to force them to fight. Gays will be included.
*******************In the military, to be eligible to be an officer, one must have a certain qualification of training. From this pool, officers are to be elected by their inferiors by secret ballot. But while they are officers, they are to receive strict obedience. Officer votes (recalls) will occur only at certain intervals. Generals are to be elected by the citizenry and are to be instantly recallable.
******************As long as citizens perform their basic jury, militia, and (if need be) military duty, they will be provided with basic food, housing, and healthcare. What renumeration they receive beyond that will depend on the judgment of their workplace council.
***Broad, farsightedness.
***Internationalism. The entire world may even be conceived of as "one nation of humans."
***Inclusive of everyone who makes effort to ally with your cause. Integrating races, ethnicities, genders, and classes into one equal citizenry so as to strengthen society and free it from being riven by internal divisions.
***Impersonal workplace councils as the key to "success," not nepotist favors or informal favors from family or friends (which breed their own dependencies and power relations). Friends and family members can still give and receive gifts, but no citizen will be dependent on such charity because each citizen will have his/her essentials provided for, in addition to extra renumeration from their workplace.
*****There will be no bosses or owners in the economic sphere. In this sense, it will be post-capitalist.
*******There can be competition, though. People will compete at being citizens. The better the work they do, and the better they are impersonally rated by their co-workers, the more renumeration they will receive. But under all circumstances, all citizens will have equal *power* to contribute to these decisions.
********New companies will can be launched and given starting capital by municipal votes. Workplaces will compete against each other. There will be a market exchange mechanism. But nobody may buy another's labor-power. Those involved in an enterprise must always be treated as equal citizens with equal decision-making power.
*********Workplace delegates (instantly-recallable) may be elected.
**********This movement sees the daily struggles between workers and employers as irrelevant to our interests. We will take sides with neither one. We are not for any class above any other. We want workplace democracy for all citizens. We are not interested in the particularistic battles benefitting one trade union or another. We want equal power. Once we have equal power, we will each be in an equal position to judge whether particular situations warrant equal *conditions* or renumeration for those involved. Insofar as communist groups are striving for these same things, they are our allies. If they relegate themselves to narrow reformist battles, they are irrelevant.
The key word is modernism.
The key manifestation is mass society.
The key method is direct democracy. Mob rule.
Calling all hardcore "vrai(e)s républicain(e)s": let us fulfill the promise of 1793.
The catchphrase: "The French Revolution on steroids."
Okay, why is this fascist?
*The political/economic community is defined in terms of citizenship instead of class (although it is a citizenship that is willing to embrace any race, nation, gender, etc., and that only discriminates based on a person's views and willingness to fulfill the duties of a citizen of this society, and it is a citizenship that inherently dissolves class).
*It calls for strict self-discipline and coldly-nihilistic rationality in the public sphere (when political/economic issues aren't involved, when you are in what private sphere is left, when you are not using a social relation for instrumental advantages, you can be as irrational and emotional as you want). How else could this mass public citizenry not descend into emotivism, irrationality, and mob rule?
*It is motivated by a desire to modernize and strengthen one's society, to make it more dynamic, just as fascism was, in part, motivated.
*It calls for allegiance to the public before allegiance to the family or any other personal, private relations. When the two conflict (when you must disagree with your friend or lover on policies, or when you must judge them concerning a criminal wrongdoing), your duties as a citizen carry more weight than your duties as a friend or lover. (But as long as they remain good citizens as well, everything's peachy).
How does this differ from traditional fascism?
*It's more modern than fascism. It is not saddled with absurdly obsolete racist biology, primitive leader-worship, or pre-modern enshrinement of the family.
*Allegiance to the public and occasional sacrifice is ultimately justified on transparently, farsightedly-egoistic grounds rather than on supposedly-altruistic ones (which usually turn out to be egoistic anyways when you pull away the rhetorical disguises).
*This does not seek to protect capitalism, but to supersede it. It does not just call for "respect" between employers and workers, or even better conditions for workers. It calls for the abolition of employers and workers, and the institution of equal economic citizens at each workplace (and by the way, if you want to change workplaces, you have to get voted on at the next one, but you assume your position with equal powers at the new workplace just as everyone else. Perhaps not equal expertise right away, but equal powers. And if you want to kick a miscreant co-worker out of the workplace, you can vote on that and do that as well. That worker will just have to subsist on the citizen rations for a bit and join another workplace sometime later).
This new "state" is obviously not authoritarian as it is in fascism. Instead, it is directly-democratic. However, this new "state" in this new modern mass society is still just as totalitarian, perhaps even moreso, because it "intrudes" into the private sphere perhaps even more than in fascism (or, rather, it robs the private sphere of territory...when it comes to the family, when it comes to dispelling nepotism, when it comes to providing for economic survival, when it comes to confining religion or spirituality to an ultra-private domain, etc.). It is totalitarian in the same way that the French Revolution was totalitarian.
Finally, I must mention that the new Spartan state will be in favor of all forms of mutually-beneficial organic pleasure, so consensual homosexual love and sex will be celebrated just as much as heterosexual love and sex. Similarly with transgender love, etc.....people pursuing their organic desires with nihilistically-rational determination. That's what I'd like to celebrate.
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