I wrote out a big explainer thing for you but Lemmy ate my comment so here’s the simplified version
I don’t really like the meme because it’s reductionist imo. Fascism is a form of capitalism that comes about in times of crisis to protect capitalism from emerging working class anti-capitalist movements that have become more popular thanks to worsening conditions (that’s why the poem goes “first they came for the communists, but I said nothing because I wasn’t a communist”) - essentially fascists are the white blood cells of capitalism’s auto immune system.
So what we consider “normal” capitalism (in Marxist terms this is called either bourgeois democracy, liberal democracy or bourgeois liberal democracy usually interchangeably (in Marxist terms liberal means someone who supports capitalism but isn’t necessarily a capitalist / bourgeois themselves and isn’t a fascist, at least not currently)) has the potential to turn into fascism when the going gets tough and it looks like socialist movements are gaining power because of that.
So liberal democracy =/= fascism, but both liberal democracy and fascism are forms of capitalism and liberal democracy can potentially turn into fascism under the right conditions.
I wrote out a big explainer thing for you but Lemmy ate my comment so here’s the simplified version
I don’t really like the meme because it’s reductionist imo. Fascism is a form of capitalism that comes about in times of crisis to protect capitalism from emerging working class anti-capitalist movements that have become more popular thanks to worsening conditions (that’s why the poem goes “first they came for the communists, but I said nothing because I wasn’t a communist”) - essentially fascists are the white blood cells of capitalism’s auto immune system.
So what we consider “normal” capitalism (in Marxist terms this is called either bourgeois democracy, liberal democracy or bourgeois liberal democracy usually interchangeably (in Marxist terms liberal means someone who supports capitalism but isn’t necessarily a capitalist / bourgeois themselves and isn’t a fascist, at least not currently)) has the potential to turn into fascism when the going gets tough and it looks like socialist movements are gaining power because of that.
So liberal democracy =/= fascism, but both liberal democracy and fascism are forms of capitalism and liberal democracy can potentially turn into fascism under the right conditions.
The first chapter of ‘Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism’ gives a more in depth explanation of how this works (it’s only about 20 pages or so and it’s well written so it shouldn’t be too hard a read).