Mainstream politicians express alarm while lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt welcomes congratulations from Elon Musk

Mainstream politicians around Europe have expressed alarm after the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) swept to a historic state election victory in Germany, while nationalist figures cheered the result as a mandate for change.

While falling just short of an absolute majority, the AfD surged into first place in the Saxony-Anhalt state election on Sunday, exit polls ⁠showed, putting the far right within reach ​of power at ‌the state level for ‌the first time since the second world war.

    • UnequalExchange@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      the capitalistic system that we have created makes it so easy to become a racist or even an interbalized racist as I wass . Not only do those in power (billionaires and multi millionaires) fund smear campaigns against minorities and 2SLGBTQIA+ people but this system we have put in place makes it very easy for the average worker to unconciouusly become “anti-minority” or even ‘anti-anyone who isnt super rich’ because those who hold the most capital or have hhad the ability to obtain the most capital have become very good at painting themselves as saints when they are the cause of most of the world’s iniquities and we have fallen for it all. Its a self-sustaining system that has to.be completely , permanently broken up

      “In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social relations. Consider a specic phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with each other. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the fore, racism becomes not less but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial arenas of struggle at the very same time. Marxists further maintain that racism involves not just personal attitude but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by well-nanced reactionary forces seeking to divide the working populace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves. Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depressing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super-exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By “rational” I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.” -Michael PArenti

      “In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, key welfare metrics have still not recovered.  Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, progress began in the 1880s, while in the periphery and semi-periphery it began in the mid-20th century, a period characterized by the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements that redistributed incomes and established public provisioning systems.”. Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century  by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel