Fascism

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day ..., fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—"blood and soil"—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

The policies and principles of the Fascist Party of Italy providing for the complete regimentation of business and the suppression of all opposition. This Party, founded in 1919 by a former socialist editor, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), marched on Rome in 1922. Mussolini then assumed control of the government and gradually expanded his power until he became an absolute dictator. After the successful Allied invasion of Italy, the Fascists were deposed in 1943 and Mussolini was assassinated by Italian opponents in 1945.

Under socialism, the state owns all the facilities: the hospitals, clinics, machinery, etc., and the medical staff are paid employees. Under our present system, most hospitals are privately owned, as are the clinics, medical offices, and machinery. Private parties—not the state—must pay for medical malpractice claims and insurance premiums. A system in which property is privately owned but regulated by the state is not one of socialism, but of fascism. So, please, for the sake of accuracy ... let us refer to our existing system—and its myriad proposed additions—in more exact terms, as fascist medicine!

She accepts E.B. Ashton’s definition of fascism as 'capitalist collectivism': the forms of capitalism (nominal private property, contracts, and markets) but the substance of State control, both direct and indirect. Twight cites the constitutional basis for the legality of American fascism (the interstate commerce clause, and the preemptive doctrine), and she then goes on to catalog numerous economic interventions, the sum total of which she demonstrates add up to, at the very least, an emergent system of economic fascism. She perceptively sees that control over the economy's money and credit is the necessary and most important command post.

Lew Rockwell has posited the rise of what he calls "red-state fascism," as have I, and we can see, from recent events, that this phenomenon is quickly congealing from a fluid potentiality into a hard reality. All the elements of a new American fascism are in place: a regime that recognizes no restraints on its power, either moral or constitutional; the rise of a leader cult surrounding the president; and a foreign policy of relentless aggression. And make no mistake: it is this latter that makes all the rest of it possible.

It is not widely recalled that the third way had another name in the 1920s and 1930s: fascism. Its exemplar was Benito Mussolini's Italy. Before this word became merely an all-purpose insult, it functioned as a label for what was seen as a legitimate middle course between revolutionary Marxian socialism ... and laissez-faire capitalism ... The fascists had their roots in a variation of socialism ... in Bismarck's Germany ... State socialism, or fascism, was long in the air when an obscure Austrian artist formed a small political party in Germany and devised a program to govern that outcast nation.

The American political system has been soft-core fascist for almost a century ... Everyone who believes in the efficiency of the so-called government-business alliance is a fascist. The fascist State was always an attempt to control private industry by means of inflation, taxation, and regulation. Fascism was always a system of keeping the big boys alive and happy at the expense of the taxpayers ... The system was always one gigantic system of cartels, regulation, and fiat money. It was, in short, everything that the critics of modern capitalism say is wrong with capitalism.

In today's GOP, we are dealing with a party of a new type, at least in the context of American history. Lew Rockwell calls this emerging trend "red-state fascism," the existence of which is increasingly confirmed by the legislative initiatives and rhetoric of the Republican leadership. The passage of the Military Commissions Act–which gives the president the power to designate an American citizen an "illegal combatant" and send him to prison without trial–marks a milestone on the road to red-state fascism. Organized support for such measures is the closest we have yet come in this country to a genuinely fascist movement.

Critics of Roosevelt's New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt's numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear, it is perfectly true. ... The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures ... The Nazi Party newspaper 'stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies ...' ... Mussolini ... wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found 'reminiscent of fascism ... the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices' ...

[Benito] Mussolini ... wrote "If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual ([classical] liberalism implies individualism)," then "this [the twentieth century] is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State. ... Fascism spells government." ...
On the New Deal:

... the program that consisted of the NRA and the AAA ... was a plan to take the whole industrial and agricultural life of the country under the wing of the government ... Fascism ... insists, logically, that this cannot be done by a democratic government; that it can be done successfully only under a totalitarian regime.

Written with high courage ..., AS WE GO MARCHING ... first describes and analyzes the fascism of Germany and Italy, and then ... points out that the New Deal, in its corporatist and interventionist policies at home and abroad, was in the process of bringing the essence of fascism to once-free America. The essence of fascism, Flynn warned, is not brown shirts or pogroms, but the political economy of statism: Big Government dominating and planning the economy at home, the Leader (or President) virtually all-powerful within the government, and a foreign policy of perpetual war and intervention to establish hegemony over the globe.

REASON: Isn't reindustrialization just corporate fascism?
HESS: It's Italian fascism, which was corporate fascism, sure. It's a shame in this country that fascism has come to be thought of as something in the German mold ... Italian fascism was very attractive to a lot of American conservatives, including Herbert Hoover. And it's not just idle speculation that this has resurfaced. Felix Rohatyn writes that one of the essential elements of the reindustrialization policy will be to reinstitute the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was Hoover's great borrowing from the Italian fascists.