Is there a difference between Socialism, Marxism and Fascism?

[off2bed]

That wasn't the question.

I don't care what you think leftists do.

My question to you is do you believe there's any difference between socialsim, Marxism and fascism and can one person be all three at once.

Why do you ask?

 

[unregistered]

 

[Karen Kraft]

Is there a difference between naughtycakes and cornbreadcakes?

This is the sort of thing people really care about.

... and Twinkies !!!!

 

[off2bed]

Snacks have made me what I am today !!!!

And every time someone buys any of the above,
it's just like fucking Tinkerbell -- KK makes bank.
Okay, bank the size of schnauzers
(como mini-vacas al Jack in the Box),
but it's bank.​

​

​

​

Ahh, so you're heir to the Kraft fortune, living on the Kraft trust fund? Marry me, please.

 

[naughtycakes]

I like corn dogs.

Is there a difference between the three? Yes. Can one person be all three at once? Yes. (Marx was a Marxist and a Socialist.)

I love corndogs.

So one person can be a fascist, a socialist and a Marxist all at the same time? Can you give me an example of such a person, to illustrate your point?

I found this helpful guide:

"Pure Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one of your cows and gives it to your neighbor. You're both forced to join a cooperative where you have to teach your neighbor how to take care of his cow.

Bureaucratic Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and as many eggs as its regulations say you should need.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

Pure Communism: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

Russian Communism: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

Communism: You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for you share of the milk, but it's so long that the milk is sour by the time you get it."

Thanks for your input

Next!

Is there a difference between naughtycakes and cornbreadcakes?

This is the sort of thing people really care about.

Maybe.

 

[Karen Kraft]

Ahh, so you're heir to the Kraft fortune, living on the Kraft trust fund? Marry me, please.

I'm spoken for.

 

[naughtycakes]

Why do you ask?

I'm interested in what other people think about the question.

I suspect at different points of political evolution one can be all three.

I'm not talking about different points of political evolution, though. Can a person be a Marxist, a socialist and a fascist at the same time?

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[off2bed]

I love corndogs.

So one person can be a fascist, a socialist and a Marxist all at the same time? Can you give me an example of such a person, to illustrate your point?

Can a person be all three at once? Yes. Can I give an example of such a person? That's not relevant - you asked if it was possible. If no such person has existed, it does not negate the possibility.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Hitler was not a fascist. He was a dictator, but he wasn't a fascist.

Hitler: not a fascist.

Got it.

 

[off2bed]

Hitler: not a fascist.

Got it.

What did I tell you about deconstructing the language?

Leftists now are using the word "genocide" to mean, "Country A won a war, therefore all Country B's war casualties, however few, constitute genocide."

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Words have no meaning. When called a Marxist, Socialist, or Communist, Leftists immediately deconstruct the words to mean anything other than what they believe, thus escaping the inevitable stigma.

Okay. So a Japanese person is a Japanese person, correct? And not what you called them? Wait...lemme redact that...words have no meaning to you, so I guess it's all good for you to use racist terminology in describing someone. Gotcha. Must've been a Righty that taught you how to think since Leftists don't deconstruct bullshit.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Karen Kraft]

Liberals like to point out that Italian Fascism didn't have the strong racial component that Nazism did, but although this is true, there are many other similarities. Ernst Nolte has suggested that the conflict in terms might be reconciled by referring to Nazism as "radical fascism."

They also like to claim that the totalitarianism of Nazism and Communism are products of the extremism of both the right and left wing, when it is quite clear that both forms are parts of the same bird "totalitarianism".

I have pointed out in the past that a true political spectrum would put at the extreme right "anarchy" or no government, and on the extreme left wing "Totalitarianism" or total government.

The arguments against this concept of political spectrum works to disguise the connection of today's liberals and their penchant for massive government authority and the authoritarian philosophies of Communism (Marxism) and Fascism.

Then, of course, there was the thought and contributions of Gaetano Mosca...

 

[KingOrfeo]

Here's a fascinating source on fascism (including post-WWII fascism). Demotically, it's based on a radical, mystical nationalism in which the nation is considered to have a spirit, a Volksgeist, which is to be embodied in an absolute state against which individuals have no rights. That's in most incarnations; but some schools of fascist thought actually have internationalist potential. "Triumph of the Will" is the best nutshell-slogan for the whole thing.

The ideological component of fascism has often been neglected in favor of psychohistories of fascist leaders and morbid prose poems about national character. This is understandable, since one of the defining features of fascism is ideological syncretism. Usually, this has meant combining “socialism” with some form of nationalism, but even this minimum requires qualification. The study of fascist ideology is made even more difficult by the fact it was most systematically expressed where it had the least influence, in France and Britain. (Eatwell is not an admirer of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, but he does give him credit for producing the best thought-out fascist party-platform. The best platform so far, that is.) In any case, at the local level, fascism often had little theoretical content, beyond the privilege of beating people up with impunity. Nevertheless, fascism does have an intellectual history, and the phenomenon as a whole is not so diffuse as to defy definition.

Fascism would not have been possible without Friedrich Nietzsche. There has been no lack of anti-theistic philosophers both before and after Nietzsche, but he is almost alone in honestly facing the consequences of living in a world in which everything is permitted. Most thinkers have sought to preserve some fragment of the intellectual structure that depended from the hypothesis of the Christian God, and so they appeal to reason or history or science. Nietzsche would have none of it. If the skies are really empty, then there are no imperatives. There is, however, life, which in the case of human beings expresses itself not just as biology but as the will. Now Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer and unlike many of his own followers, recognized the will is itself a composite entity. It is not a primary physical force, and it is not a god. It does, however, actually exist, and its exercise is all the meaning that life can ever have.

The proposition that the meaning of life is the exercise of the will leads to two kinds of conclusions. The most obvious, and the most popular, is the cult of cruelty. Naturally, the street-fighters who normally figure in the public activities of successful fascist parties are rarely well-read in the literature of philosophical nihilism. Nevertheless, even the nihilist violence of the German SA and the Italian “squadristi” chimes with high theory. Fascism promotes ruthlessness for the same reason that it promotes conspiracy theories: for a fascist, nothing is going to happen unless some will makes it happen. One suspects this consideration is also a factor in the usual fascist suspicion of free markets.

The other conclusion to which an ontology of the will leads is the transformation of politics into art. Whole societies become instruments for the expression of the will of elites, or often of a single great individual. In fascist theory, this is all that politics ever was, no matter what purportedly disinterested purposes the ruling elites of the past believed they served. The difference that Nietzsche made was that this reality could become conscious.

<snip>

The myths used to organize the elites were not necessarily those provided for the masses. The Nazi leadership in particular cultivated a sort of occultism (though if figures like Julius Evola are any indication, this enthusiasm was not absent from Italy, either). The people, however, were pushed with more conventional forms of nationalist xenophobia and pulled with quite prosaic promises of economic improvement and social welfare (promises on which both regimes could in large measure deliver). This difference of integrative principles was consistent with the fascist notion of society as an organic entity. Organism implies differentiation, so it was only proper that elites and masses be organized through different means.

<snip>

On a popular level, the issue which has the most resonance for the New Right is immigration. Everywhere in Western Europe (and in much of the United States), ordinary people are spooked by changing demographics. They are also alienated by the tendency of establishment opinion to dismiss this concern as mere reflexive racism. Persistent levels of high unemployment, often seen as a function of the presence of too many foreigners, similarly undermines the credibility of the governments of the major European states. Issues like this, however, are not the stuff of which revolutions are made, fascist or otherwise. Additionally, while right-wing leaders are at pains to keep themselves free of the least taint of racism in general or antisemitism in particular, the fact is that at ground level their organizations are, for the most part, virulently antisemitic. There is a significant public for Holocaust-denial theories. However, in no country are such things electorally useful.

The distinctive thing about fascism, however, is that it has always been a doctrine for masters rather than followers. Eatwell has some very alarming things to say about the growth of “up-scale” fascism, of ideological resources for people who either belong to existing elites or would very much like to start one. This has been made immensely easier, at least in my own view, by the spread of relativist philosophies in the Nietzschean tradition in the last quarter of the 20th century, particularly at the elite schools. No matter the intent of the instructors, it always seemed singularly ill-advised to me to tell young people, who by virtue of native intelligence and social position were going to wind up running a fair slice of the world anyway, that life was really just about power. There is always some danger they might believe it.

A sentiment that seems to find increasing currency is what might be called “Euro-fascism.” While fascist parties between the wars built their followings on nationalistic platforms, still from the very beginning fascism has always had a universalizing streak. Nietzsche pronounced himself a “good European.” In these days when political theorists speak in terms of the clash of civilizations, New Right theory seems to be moving in the direction, not of renewed hypernationalism, but of an integrating theory for the European Union. Eatwell notes that the EU as it stands is a disedifying entity, run by bland bureaucrats who are most concerned with setting standards for bottled jam. Current plans for future integration will go no further toward turning Europe into a true political community (that word again). Eatwell asks whether anyone is ever going to be willing to die for the Bundesbank. Maybe what Europe needs is a Sorelian myth to hold it together. Work is in progress.

So, are we really just back where we started at the beginning of the 20th century, waiting for some crisis that will delegitimize the existing establishments and start the ball rolling again? One way to look at the 20th century is as one long recoil from the process of globalization. It was only in the 1990s, for instance, that international capital flows again reached the levels relative to the economies of the major countries that they had reached before the First World War. Similarly, it is only recently that international trade in general became as important as it was around 1900. What happened thereafter was that the governments of the leading nations sought to gain unprecedented control of their countries’ destinies. Partly this was accomplished by war, partly it was accomplished through the creation of command economies. Stalinism was simply Lloyd George’s “War Socialism” made permanent, something that happened in greater or lesser degree throughout the West. In every case, the goal was to replace the power of capital with the power of the will, whether the will was that of an electorate or of a would-be Nietzschean superman. When, starting in the 1980s, the military and economic systems of command began to be relaxed, the world economic system began to look again something like the way it had looked before these measures were implemented. The process of globalization began again. So did the attempts to stop it.

It would be wrong to say that all attempts to stop globalization of economics and communications and culture are fascist. Most resistance to universalism comes from a positive desire to preserve local identities and traditions. Such things may or may not be worth preserving. The balance between the local and the universal is not something that can be dictated categorically. Fascist nationalism, in contrast, was perhaps just an improvisation, made necessary by the fact that nations states were the largest units that fascist elites could hope to control. At a deeper level of fascism is the ideal of the universal empire, of the whole world subject to a single will. The goal is repeatedly deferred only because it is obviously so much harder to achieve.

The word "fascism" is often misapplied. Franco and Pinochet were not fascists (though Franco had fascist, or falangist, supporters). They were military-authoritarian traditionalists, not products of a radical mass movement, and completely uninterested in radical transformation of society to a new form; rather, their aim was to turn back the clock.

Every school of Marxism is socialist, but not every school of socialism is Marxist. Socialist and communist movements already existed when Marx joined up. (IMO the socialist movement would have been better off without the pseudoscientific intellectual substructure Marx gave it, but that's another discussion.)

As for the difference between socialism and fascism, here's George Orwell's opinion, as of 1941:

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that nonnordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

According to Bertrand Russell (in his History of Western Philosophy) and many other commentators, the socialist tradition has its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, while fascism is rooted in the Romantic reaction to it. Voltaire v. Rousseau, culminating in Stalin v. Hitler. As Michael Lind puts it:

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette's France, Atatork's Turkey, Yeltsin's Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a "rational" social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the "reasonableness" of Renaissance humanists and the "rationality" of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The "secular humanists" who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

They are but degrees and self-labeled differences of altruistic collectivism.

They are what happens after Liberals discover individual liberty.

Real Liberals, like Mill, von Humboldt, de Tocqueville, Hayek, and Rand.

You might as well add Progressive and Communist to the list.

The all mean one thing: Looters.

 

[naughtycakes]

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Socialism

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens...may continue to hold titles to property - so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

PEIKOFF, LEONARD, The Ominous Parallels

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

REAGAN, RONALD, Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987

When you start to ascribe moral characteristics to a form of government, you've lost me.

Well to a degree I suppose one can. Hitler was a fascist and a National Socialist, and Socialism is derived from Marxism.

Hitler was a tyrant, a dictator and a human piece of garbage, however he was not a fascist.

 

[naughtycakes]

Can a person be all three at once? Yes. Can I give an example of such a person? That's not relevant - you asked if it was possible. If no such person has existed, it does not negate the possibility.

Ha. Combative much?

Of course it's relevant, but you don't have to answer if you can't illustrate your point.

Hitler: not a fascist.

Got it.

Good. Glad you're paying attention.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Hitler was a tyrant, a dictator and a human piece of garbage, however he was not a fascist.

As noted above, the word "fascist" is often applied too broadly. Nevertheless, you are defining the word too narrowly, if you think only Mussolini and his followers can claim it. Hitler definitely was a fascist. (Tojo probably was not; that's debatable.)

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Ha. Combative much?

Of course it's relevant, but you don't have to answer if you can't illustrate your point.

He's really good at those non-answers, isn't he?

"Okay, she got me by the ballhairs here...but I must make it seem like I have something to say, or I'll lose face in front of my peer group."

 

[off2bed]

Ha. Combative much?

Of course it's relevant, but you don't have to answer if you can't illustrate your point.

This whole thread was made to be combative. Your motives are clear.

If I provided you with a concrete example, what would it prove?

And, if there is no concrete example, what does that prove?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This whole thread was made to be combative. Your motives are clear.

If I provided you with a concrete example, what would it prove?

And, if there is no concrete example, what does that prove?

The thread is a direct result of what I said in another thread.

I gave her my answer above...

It was ignored.

 

[off2bed]

I'm too busy today following the coup d'etat in Honduras today, where they kicked out a Communist president.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

That was very interesting.

The more things change down south, the more they stay the same...