United States | News & Politics

In a first past the post system, there can only be two parties, this is true. However it doesn't have to be these two Fascist Capitalist parties. Of course voting by itself does almost nothing, but refusing to vote for the two parties of Capital is the absolute least you can do. Who you choose to vote for as long as it is not the two parties of Capital is up to you. If you want to do more, there are plenty of orgs you can get involved in to help build a parallel support structure. Just make sure they aren't a non-profit, or a foundation led by some professional manager. If they are funded by a local government that's decent, if they are funded by a co-op that self-funds some other way, that is even better. But all of them require more effort then voting blue.

It's also dangerous to think that such right wing movement can be stopped simply by voting. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power the mask comes off. Republicans were seriously considering similar tactics during last elections, and I'm sure we'll see that happen again going forward.

First chapter in Blackshirts and Reds discusses the rise of fascists in Italy and nazis in Germany, and it's hard not to draw parallels with what we're seeing currently happen in US and Canada:

After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"- really a coup d'etat - took place.

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.