[Griff]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

As near as I can figure his latest childlike gabble, tw remains blissfully ignorant that fascist and communist are both of the Left. Think about them. There are no substantive differences to be found. Adolf and company borrowed a leaf from Vladimir and company's handbook. In Germany and in Russia, it worked.

You don't know your political science, kid.

This is false. I prefer this guys take. Remember that fascists were pro-business, anti-union, anti-intellectual, law and order types, who in Italy anyway cloaked themselves in the Church. There are authoritarians all over the political spectrum but conservatives need to be as wary of fascism as liberals are of communism.

Look at how they governed to see where they are on the spectrum.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/03...left-or-right/

Since fascism was always a kind of pseudo-ideology made on the fly, without a long history of thought and debate like socialism, it’s wrong-headed to infer “what they really were” from the Italian fascists’ platform in 1919, or the fact that Hitler called his party “(National) Socialist German Workers Party”, or even from their electoral strategy.

To say that fascism is an extremism of the political right, as defined in historical terms, is reasonable for the following reasons :

All actually-existed fascist states practised business-friendly economic policies, even if they were not ideologically laissez-faire. They could have easily done otherwise — this was after all the 1930s, the heyday and apogee of socialism as an ideology. But no fascist in power even contemplated taking the Soviet route of destroying the capital- and land-owning classes.

All actually-existed fascist states repressed labour unions, socialists, and communists. Despite the worker-friendly rhetoric of fascists, they in actual power regimented labour in such a way as to please any strike-breaking capitalist of the 19th century. The Nazis, for example, forced workers into a single state-controlled trades union (DAF), which controlled wage growth and prevented striking and wage arbitration. Businesses (some, not even most), by contrast, were given incentives to consolidate into Morgan-style industrial trusts as shareholers and engage in contractual relations as monopolists or near-monopolists with other trusts and with the state.

Communists have a demonstrated record of erasing traditional society root and branch — exterminating aristocrats, industrialists, landowners, priests, kulaks, etc. Fascists in actual power, despite their modernist reputation, seem almost traditional in comparison. In Mussolini’s Italy, the king, the titled nobility, the church, the industrialists, the landholders, and the mafia slept soundly at night. The chief innovation of fascism was not really in political economy, but in political community.

Self-proclaimed fascist parties in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s pinched their votes from the middle-class and conservative parties, not primarily from the socialists and the communists to whom their traditional constituencies (urban workers) mostly remained loyal. In Germany’s election of 1932, the Social Democrats and the Communists maintained their usual proportion of the combined vote (~35%), but the other traditional parties were substantially weakened, even hollowed out, with only the Catholic Zentrum maintaining double-digit strength (~12%).

Big business interests either were strong supporters of the fascists once in power, or (in some countries) had backed them well before their seizure of power.

Fascists fetishised law & order, and made a cult out of the armed forces.

Amongst observers in non-fascist countries, it was conservatives and businessmen, not progressives, who were the most numerous to express admiration for the fascists. There were a few prominent socialists like H G Wells who applauded some aspects of Mussolini’s regime, but these were mostly amongst intellectual kooks, and their significance pales in comparison to the conservative reaction which varied from enthusiastic approval of a bulwark against communism to benign indifference.

Other self-proclaimed fascists — those who took their inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s — were unambiguously conservative in the unambiguously traditional sense, without the “modernist” touches which set Hitler and Mussolini apart. If I had to use three words to describe Franco, the best ones would be “God, Country, Property”.

The Nazis were sui generis and idiosyncratic, an outlier amongst fascists, and perhaps they really shouldn’t be pegged into the left-right spectrum. But if they had to be, their political economy was clearly capitalist and therefore clearly distant from revolutionary or egalitarian socialism.

Actual fascists who came to power behaved in a similarly labour-repressive, business-friendly, violently antisocialist way, albeit with national variations. Why were they so unanimous in their hysterical hatred of communists and socialists ? Could it have been that there was some “ideological space” for property and capitalism amongst fascists, albeit not well articulated theoretically ?

In the 1920s British conservatives generally approved of Mussolini, and liberals and socialists generally criticised him. I don’t mean that conservatives wanted fascism in Britain, but they thought it was an effective antidote to communism, admired fascist law & order, and found in it a healthy example of national pride. Of course Churchill was an early admirer of Mussolini and remained one until the early 1930s, and he took the nationalist side in the Spanish civil war.