Is wokeness the remedy to fascism?

I'm doing neither. Merely exposing the truth behind such over-used rhetoric. Socialists, progressives, liberals & activists are the force that make the US (or any other nation) livable----despite the burden of capitalism.

With that said, what you said about the US being "better than all the rest" is outright gibberish. The Nordic & European nations still rank at the top in terms of standard of living, quality of life, and contentment (thanks to robust social programs). These nations just lack the size, resources, and wealth to accommodate floods of immigrants & refugees/asylum seekers. They are also much older nations that have been set in their ways socially & culturally, and naturally will be less accepting of disruptive changes from foreign influences.

Still, like the US, European nations have benefited from the spoils of empire-building, and as a result have had to contend with a relentless tide of immigrants, refugees/asylum seekers, racial mixing, and diversification. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are also dealing with these issues. And the remainder of the world's nations are not exempt. They're dealing with the fallout of mass migrations of people looking for any place that will accept them that's better than where they came from. Note that mass migrations are also due to the impact of capitalist-induced climate change.

 

Slavery can never be more expensive than paid employees, with or without machines. With machines, someone has to build, operate, and maintain the machines. Slaves can do all that for free.

A good example is the Nazi industrial labor camps during WW2.

[Forced labor] constituted over one fourth and in some factories up to 60 % of the workforce in some departments. Only with them could the population be sustained with supplies and the arms production, organized by Albert Speer as Reich Minister of Armaments, maintained. Major corporations as well as small craft industries, communes and administrative offices, but even farmers and private households continued to demand more and more foreign laborers and, in this way, they were jointly responsible for the system of forced labor. The industry profited from the expansion of production made possible by forced labor.
https://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/en/zwangsarbeit/zwangsarbeit/zwangsarbeit-hintergrund/index.html

And speaking of American slavery, the development of the cotton gin in 1794 actually increased the need for more slaves.

While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for enslaved labor to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for enslavers that it greatly increased their demand for both land and enslaved labor.
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent#background

Unless the machines are robots/automatons that can function on their own & replace many workers, the development of conventional machinery will (in a monetary/capitalist system) actually increase the need for slaves. This is because the growth in profits made possible by machinery requires more labor to sustain the growing business. This became evident with the invention of the cotton gin & other so-called 'labor-saving' devices.

The American anti-slavery/abolitionist movement organized & set the movement going long before the Industrial Revolution. In England also, the abolishment of slavery had nothing to do with their Industrial Revolution. In fact, England abolished slavery 32 years before the US.

There were lots of different factors that led to the 1833 Abolition Act. Slave revolts, home grown abolition movements, religious arguments, government policies and the economy. By the time of the act coming into force in 1833/4, the economy wasn’t as reliant on the triangular trade as it had been during its heyday in the early 1700’s. Prior to the act of 1833, the abolition movement began to gain momentum a number of years earlier in 1772 with the Mansfield case. This case was pivotal as it reached the verdict that slavery was unsupported in English law. Any slave that set foot in England or Scotland was legally free. People soon began to question that if everyone was free in England, why were they in bondage in the colonies?
https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-slavery-abolition-act-of-1833/

And...

Several factors led to the [Abolition] Act’s passage. Britain’s economy was in flux at the time, and, as a new system of international commerce emerged, its slaveholding Caribbean colonies—which were largely focused on sugar production—could no longer compete with larger plantation economies such as those of Cuba and Brazil. Merchants began to demand an end to the monopolies on the British market held by the Caribbean colonies and pushed instead for free trade. The persistent struggles of enslaved Africans and a growing fear of slave uprisings among plantation owners were another major factor.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act

One must also keep in mind that slavery is impractical due to the persistent struggle in maintaining & controlling slaves. Slaves are not free, and all people want to be free. So slavery is self-limiting by its own nature. People simply will not tolerate it forever.

So how did indigenous groups last (and thrive) for tens of thousands of years virtually unchanged, and all without benefit of machinery?

The major cause of starvation is domestic & foreign political conflict. In fact, the development of machinery has actually increased socio-economic & political conflict & instability because its utility has been co-opted/hijacked by the monetary/capitalist system.

If every machine in all the world were to be scrapped today, people could still survive by simply working together to acquire their basic needs (as they've always done in the past). It would be best to simply eliminate the monetary/capitalist system and keep the machines. That way the technology will be applied in ways that actually benefit us, and without harm to other life.

But you just said it was machines that ended slavery. Now you're saying it's greed?

In truth, greed destroys everything, so anything built on it (like slavery) will ultimately self-destruct. Likewise, the monetary/capitalist system, which is built on greed, will also self-destruct. The rise & fall of empires & kingdoms throughout history is proof of that. Today, we can observe the deterioration & imminent collapse of those nations that rely most heavily on the monetary/capitalist system----the US being at the top.

Thus, you're partially correct. Greed created slavery, and, because it's unsustainable, greed would've eventually destroyed slavery. However, greed was not the major reason for the end of slavery. The efforts of those opposed to slavery is what brought it to an end long before it would've self-destructed on its own.

Slavery was not at all an impediment to the objective of the rich. The link you provided above even contradicts this:

Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

Was the abolitionist crusade against slavery the product of a belief that slavery was an impediment to economic development?

Not in any simple sense. Williams was wrong to think that by the mid-nineteenth century slavery was a declining institution. Slavery was an economically efficient system of production, adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture to mining, construction, and factory work. Furthermore, slavery was capable of producing enormous amounts of wealth. On the eve of the Civil War, the slave South had achieved a level of per capita wealth not matched by Spain or Italy until the eve of World War II or by Mexico or India until 1960. As late as the 1850s, the slave system in the United States was expanding and slave owners were confident about the future.

We should note that slavery still exists today in the form of slave-wage labor. Even in the US, most workers are not being paid a livable wage, nor a wage in accordance to their true worth. Wages, for most people, fail to provide the kind of freedom they seek in life.

Essentially, the monetary/capitalist system has always been a system of slavery----ie, if you don't work for the big man, you starve.

 

If it doesn't involve working for your keep, it's not collectivism (eg communisism/socialism), it's something else.

When Progressives and their type refer to socialism etc, they're actually talking about something entirely different. Mediavalism, essentially.

 

'Healthy, functioning democracies'? I gather this means that New Discourses must be okay with empire-building and its global socio-economic & environmental implications.

 

". . . . we no longer have healthy, functioning democracies. . . . "

 

But (according to them) we apparently HAD 'healthy functioning democracies' at one time, and we've always been in the business of empire-building. So does this mean that if we 'NO longer have healthy, functioning democracies', that it's becoming more difficult to continue the traditional course of empire-building? Is that what 'wokism' is leading to----more equity & accountability?

 

What part of "...the universal demand for justice — which is the real meaning of CRT and “Wokeness”" is 'listing them as separate things? ...and yes, I asked this question already, you just havn't bothered to try to answer it yet.

 

No. It's fully beside the point.

 

And less democracy and freedom. Equity is the enemy of excellence. In order to achieve equity you have to hamstring the superior. That is why the woke oppose AP classes and Achievement tests. Democracy and freedom lead to excellence and hence inequity.

 

Equity? You mean manipulated outcomes instead of true equality?

Good god .. we can all hope not!!!

 

It may not have been 'the point' per the author's intention, but is still fully relevant.

 

There's crazy 'wokism' and rational 'wokism'. Which one are you referring to?

 

"Equity": the quality of being fair and impartial.

What part of 'fair & impartial' don't you understand? On a socio-economic level, the meaning suggests equal opportunity to achieve or pursue one's interests/talents & equal access to essential resources. But this is virtually impossible under a monetary/capitalist system. Instead, wealth determines who gets what & who controls what.

What you're doing is confusing academic achievement with superiority. You ignore the fact that all those smart people out there are nothing without labor. That's why worker strikes are so effective.

You're also ignoring the fact that billions of low-level workers in the world who support the capitalist juggernaut could be educated/trained & fully capable of holding high-level jobs if only given the opportunity to do so. That's what equity is. There are literally billions of great minds wasted in sweat shops.

We have neither democracy nor freedom. What planet are you living on?

You're also conflating 'excellence' with wealth/financial success. Most people in the world don't strive to become rich. They're happy to live a simple life in which they can be educated/trained to apply whatever creative talents/gifts & interests they have, to spend time with family/friends, to be free of chronic disease, to be free of toxins in our air/water/food/environment, and to be free of govt corruption, white collar crime & corporate domination.

The monetary/capitalist system thus leads to inequality because it allows wealth to dictate who gets what according to the Golden Rule: Those with the Gold make all the Rules. And so, the reason why capitalists hate 'wokism' (the rational kind) is the same reason they hate socialism: They both help to level the playing field by reducing the availability of money & low-level laborers that capitalists could otherwise profit from.

 

Not to me or the point under discussion here.

 

Quite a difference between posts 1 and 3. #1 attempts to be thoughtful. #3 is a bumper sticker slogan. IMO there's too much #3 on the Right. Often coming across as #2..............not the post...........the other thing.

 

Assuming you accept that definition. I view that definition as nonsensical.

 

To me it is unfair to remove resources from superior performers and give them to mediocre performers. It is also just plain stupid.

It is not a fact that billions of low level workers could be educated/trained. Intelligence is normally distributed (i.e. the bell curve). This is a fact proven by the Central Limit Theorem of statistics. We should train up the smart ones and find something useful to do for the mediocre.

I live on the Earth, you apparently live on Marxist La La land.

 

On what basis do you not "accept" the definition? The expression "Stay Woke!" originated in Civil Rights movements in the 1930s, and then re-popularized in 2014 by BLM. So what the hell do you think gives you the right to redefine words just because you don't agree black people should have equal rights? Why would you think you accepting or not accepting a definition makes any difference whatsoever to what a word means?

 

Well close anyway Best I can find is the 40's, if accuracy is a thing? As all catch words it has too, undergone a transition, and as par, not in a good way

 

No. "Wokeness" is the legitimation of Fascism just as "Zionism" has come to represent Nazism. The meaning or definition of words is irrelevant to what they have come to symbolize by their own deeds.

 

What is the definition of "gay" or "coward" or "racist" or "leftist" and do you adhere to those definitions?

 

Depends on the era, verbal twisting and most of all ignorance and willingness to accept ignorance

 

There are older roots.

Abolitionist "Wide Awakes" Were Woke Before ... - JSTOR Daily
https://daily.jstor.org › Archive of Most Recent Posts

Jun 29, 2020 — They were known as the “Wide Awakes,” because of their youth, enthusiasm, and torch-lit nighttime marches. “Now the old men are folding their ...

Before the Republican Wide Awakes There Were the Know ...
https://thereconstructionera.com › before-the-republica...

Jan 17, 2020 — Below are some examples of pre-Republican references to the Know Nothing Wide Awakes. The first article deals with the Angel Gabriel Riots.

 

Equity.

 

Exactly.