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Yes, I think we've established that things develop in increments, but they don't exist in degrees. By the criteria proposed here, you could talk about the advent of American socialism today because many of the elements of socialism are out there. But you're not even being consistent with this. You say we should defend the bourgeois republic against a fascism that's threatening by degrees, but you don't seem to see where those incremental elements come from. The fact of those bourgeois republics is that they were all founded on slavery, the legal invisibility of most who weren't slaves, and distilled only in the form of the nation-state, rooted in the assumption of its innate superiority to all other nation-states. These provide the building blocs that fascism would later take up. Yes, indeed, everything's connected to everything else. But that doesn't make everything everything else, does it? Still--notwithstanding the inconsistency in the application--any definition that defines everything actually defines nothing. There is a point at which quantity becomes quality. Fascism's not about the cultural attributes which fascinate Michael, but about raw political power. People waving teabags and saying mean things because they heard them on television does not make them fascist. People repeating St. Paul on women doesn't make them fascists. When real fascism rears its head, we won't have to have a debate on an email list about it. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
