Comment of the Day: Fascism Should be Called Corporatism
2017-10-06
Jim Vance
Taylor, TX 1 day ago
“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
–Benito Mussolini. (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor)
A statement that has never been more true than today with the current Administration as its primary evidence.
10 Comments
leave one →
Conrad Theodore Seitz 
But wasn’t Gentile a man committed to socialism?
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re speaking of Giovanni Gentile? He apparently was a fascist through and through.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Right, but from his writings, he saw fascism as a logical continuity of the thoughts of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky. They were not clear how the State would “wither away”. He thought it more honest to harness capitalism to the direction of a Socialist State, and control it through regulation. His thoughts on regulation are actually very similar to Bernie Sanders.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re making socialism and fascism out to be very similar. . . are you spreading the meanings of words or saying “socialism is bad like fascism”? Not having read his writings I can’t say much about Gentile or how he viewed Marx and other communist theoreticians (the reviews say he was a committed fascist who ghost-wrote at least one of Mussolini’s most important works) but socialism and fascism are two different things, and Bernie Sanders would not accept any comparison. Fascism is bad, we all agree, but what do you think of socialism? Regulations are not an element of socialism in any way. It seems that “government ownership of the means of production” is technically (according to some dictionaries) the essential element of “true” socialism. By this metric, Sweden is “capitalist” because 95% of productive capacity is privately owned. What we in the US call “socialism” is simply government economic and social support for needy individuals, not government ownership of anything.
Actually, I just thought that statement by Mussolini was interesting although somewhat inaccurate. Fascism implies aggressive nationalism and racism, authoritarianism and dictatorship, suppression of free speech and dissent through secret police and censorship, and militarism; all of these were features of Nazism. The only difference being the racism the Nazis practiced specifically stated that the Aryans were the best; I don’t know what kind of racism the Italian fascists practiced, if any. Socialism, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily imply any of those things except in the minds of some right-wing conservatives. Communism entails all of the above except nationalism (although the Chinese have a nationalist bent); and the communists in the Soviet Union were at least moderately anti-Semitic.
As I mentioned in another post, the entire concept of “races” and the foundation of racism, particularly the “black vs. white” distinction, is entirely without scientific justification according to modern ethnologists.
Such a subject! I never meant to get involved in discussing that, just to pass along an interesting quote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Very good thoughts! I’m challenged to read more GG and other foundational thinkers of fascism, or corporatism. Many ideas have seeped into societies despite labels. Would be good to clarify terms. Thanks!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Keep reading. . . but tempus fugit and you need to prioritize your reading material in order to get to the most important items at all.
LikeLiked by 1 person