Fortunately, socialism and fascism are not the only two political alternatives, for neither is attractive. Moreover, a well-kept secret is how similar the two ideologies are. Substituting socialism for fascism in many statements from fascists would bring instant approval from socialists. Many antifa agitators would be surprised to realize that they are doing fascism unknowingly, just as Mr. Jourdain was doing prose without being aware of it.
The following quotes come from The Coming American Fascism (Harper & Brothers, 1936) by Lawrence Dennis, a well-known American fascist of the time:
Fascism does not accept the liberal dogmas as to sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market. It does not admit that the market ever can or should be entirely free. (p. 299)
Social planning is the outstanding imperative of public order and material abundance in the present day and in the near future. (104)
Fascism assumes that individual welfare and protection is mainly secured by the strength, efficiency, and success of the State in the realization of the national plan. (p. 160)
Under fascism, private property, private enterprise, and private choice in the market, have no rights as ends in themselves. They have different measures of social usefulness subject to proper public control. (p. 180)
Light and power, transportation, and basic foods and textiles in given but limited quantities, can be assumed necessary at an arbitrarily fixed price, and State intervention can insure the production of an adequate supply of these goods within an arbitrarily fixed price range for the common good. (p. 180)
The source of the similarity between the two ideologies is that both want to impose politically-chosen ends on everybody. The main source of difference is that each system coercively favors and harms different groups of individuals in society.
Comparing moderate fascism to communism (which is extreme socialism), Dennis chooses the former. Somewhat surprisingly, he refers to Ludwig von Mises’s and F.A. Hayek’s arguments about the impossibility of calculation under communism:
In so far as property rights and private enterprise are concerned, however, the strongest argument for fascism instead of communism may be found in the regulatory functions of an open market. The strongest criticism of any socialism of complete expropriation is that it leaves no free market, no pricing mechanism and no valid basis for economic calculation. Pure socialism is collective ownership and unified central direction of material instruments of production which, sooner or later, must leave little or no freedom of choice for the individual as to consumption or occupation. These criticisms may be brought up to date and made relevant to communism in operation in Russia in the symposium of Professors Hayek, Pierson, Barone, Halm and von Mises entitled Collectivist Economic Planning, and the work of Professor Boris Brutzkus entitled Economic Planning in Soviet Russia. (pp. 177-178)
Dennis exaggerates the place of markets—of free markets—under fascism. In “Why Hayek Was Right about Nazis Being Socialists” (AIER, December 8, 2020), Richard Ebeling mentions many similarities between socialism and the Nazi brand of fascism. He is responding to Ronald Granieri who, in a Washington Post article, objected to the argument that the National Socialists were indeed socialists “The Right Needs to Stop Falsely Claiming that the Nazis Were Socialists,” February 5, 2020).
Given the logic of state power, fascism is likely to steamroll obstacles in the path of the state and thus economic freedom. Moreover, fascism’s heightened nationalism is likely to lead to war against foreign or internal scapegoats. Fascists hate different minorities (the Jews, for example) than socialists hate (the merchants and the rich). Dennis naïvely dismisses these dangers:
It is easy to draw alarming pictures of a powerful State against which the individual would have the resource of no judicial veto on government acts. Conceivable, of course, a State and government might fall under the hands of a few individuals whose every act would be an abuse. But such an eventuality seems most improbable in any modern State, least of all in the United States. (p. 160)
The other alternative besides the different forms of socialism and the different forms of fascism lies, of course, on the continuum of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 9 2020 at 7:29am
Although amusing, there is nothing wrong with the Linean interest in the classifications of various early 20th Century political-economic regimes. What is rather unhelpful is the confusion of every departure from free markets, every transfer of income with “socialism.”
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 9 2020 at 10:20am
@Thomas: Recognizing degrees in socialism, fascism, and liberalism is useful. It also implies that there are similarities–between moderate fascism à la Dennis and moderate socialism, for example. One observation, emphasized by de Jasay’s theory, remains useful:
Thomas Strenge
Dec 9 2020 at 10:14am
Fascism IS socialism. Any supposed difference is propaganda. Read up on Mussolini.
Greg G
Dec 9 2020 at 10:34am
“The main source of difference is that each system coercively favors and harms different groups of individuals in society.”
That difference is a very real difference. Pierre is very right about that and he is no propagandist for socialism. Which groups are favored and harmed by political movements is the most politically relevant difference of all.
Jon Murphy
Dec 9 2020 at 11:41am
On top of Greg G’s point, I think that acknowledging and discussing the subtle differences between the various forms of collectivism is important. To argue that fascism is socialism and any difference is mere propaganda is like arguing liberalism is anarchism and any difference is mere propaganda.
There is a lot of overlap between fascism and socialism, but they are not identical.
Garrett
Dec 9 2020 at 11:06am
I have no familiarity with Dennis, but it’s hard to read those quotes side-by-side and not conclude that he was arguing in bad faith by saying that communism was bad because it doesn’t have prices but fascism was good because it had an “arbitrarily fixed price range” even though “private property, private enterprise, and private choice in the market, have no rights as ends in themselves. They have different measures of social usefulness subject to proper public control.”
If not bad faith, he was willfully ignorant of where prices actually come from: private property, private enterprise, and private choice in the market.
Jon Murphy
Dec 9 2020 at 11:38am
I understand your point, but I think some context is in order. I doubt that Dennis is arguing in bad faith or willfully ignorant.
At the time he was writing and researching, the socialist calculation debate was ongoing. Mises and Hayek had shown that pure communism could not replicate the marketplace without prices, but that didn’t decisively end the debate. It was in 1936-1937 (the same time Dennis was writing) that Oskar Lange wrote his famous rebuttal to Mises, saying “Socialists have certainly good reason to be grateful to Professor Mises, the great advocatus diaboli of their cause. For it was his powerful challenge that forced the socialists to recognise the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting to guide the allocation of resources in a socialist economy.” Lange goes on to write how the socialist system can co-exist with market-derived prices for the ultimate socialist system (see On the Economic Theory of Socialism, in The Review of Economic Studies, 1936).
In other words, the collectivist economic literature at the time recognized the role private property could play, but not the full implications of Mises’ critique. It wouldn’t be until 1945 that Hayek would write The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1946 for The Meaning of Competition, and 1968 for Competition as a Discovery Procedure. Mises’s detailed critique, Inteventionism, wouldn’t be published until 1940. His book Socialism wasn’t in English until 1936. Meanwhile, Lange and Lerner were showing proofs of viable socialist models with dynamic pricing, and Pigou explained how governments could tweak markets.
So, I do not think Dennis was either willfully ignorant or arguing in bad faith. I think he was writing at a time when theory was developing and much of what we now take for granted (such as the role of property rights in market exchanges) was still being developed.
Gene
Dec 9 2020 at 12:59pm
“It is easy to draw alarming pictures of a powerful State against which the individual would have the resource of no judicial veto on government acts. Conceivable, of course, a State and government might fall under the hands of a few individuals whose every act would be an abuse. But such an eventuality seems most improbable in any modern State, least of all in the United States.”
Dennis wrote this, according to the OP, in 1936, while Hitler was remaking Germany and Stalin was fully in command in the USSR. And you’re saying he WASN’T “willfully ignorant or arguing in bad faith”? Maybe if we give him the benefit of the doubt, the best we can say is he was “unwillfully ignorant,” but ignorant nonetheless, in a big way.
Jon Murphy
Dec 9 2020 at 1:11pm
Gene-
I was responding specifically to the comment: “If not bad faith, he was willfully ignorant of where prices actually come from: private property, private enterprise, and private choice in the market.” Whether or not he was ignorant of the dangers of the state is a different question.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 9 2020 at 1:15pm
@Gene: Dennis seems to have known about the massacres in the Soviet Union but did not think that a fascist government could do anything like that “in any modern state,” especially against the middle class. (The Jews are another matter.) The impossibility of Soviet-style massacres appears to be one reason for him to prefer fascism to socialism. That’s what I gather from my quick reading, so I would be more than interested to hear from anybody who would have read his other books and know him better than I do.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 9 2020 at 1:05pm
Thanks, Jon, for this interesting account of the calculation debate at the time of the publication of Dennis’s The Coming American Fascism. This is also how I interpret his fuzzy theorizing. However, there is some suspicion that he was also cynical. Gary Younge’s Guardian review of Gerald Horne book about Dennis (book thatI haven’t read) says:
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 10:23pm
Like a great many people, you confuse the underlying notion of property with the more recent, popular use of “property” for an object in which one has some property. To have some property in an object is not to have every possible property in that object, but one either absolutely has property or absolutely does not. You invoke theorists whose work you do not understand.
We can say that a supposed owner does not have property in the means of production if he or she is told what it must produce, how much it must produce, and to whom the product must be supplied. And alienability would then have been replaced with merely the right to retire from the job of managing the property for the
actual owner.
One could indeed argue that the fascists and Nazis did not completely seize all ownership of the means of production, but neither did virtually any organization more widely recognized as socialist. Instead of the subtle distinction that you claim, we have the commonality that socialism is rarely thorough-going.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 10:35pm
Like a great many people, you confuse the underlying notion of property with the more recent, popular use of “property” for an object in which one has some property. To have some property in an object is not to have every possible property in that object, but one either absolutely has property or absolutely does not. You invoke theorists whose work you do not understand.
We can say that a supposed owner does not have property in the means of production if he or she is told what it must produce, how much it must produce, and to whom the product must be supplied. And alienability would then have been replaced with merely the right to retire from the job of managing the property for the
actual owner.
One could indeed argue that the fascists and Nazis did not completely seize all ownership of the means of production, but neither did virtually any organization more widely recognized as socialist. Instead of the subtle distinction that you claim, we have the commonality that socialism is rarely thorough-going.
Nick Ronalds
Dec 9 2020 at 2:24pm
Thanks Pierre that Dennis quote is revealing. It’s worth considering the function of the word “national” in the name of the Nazi party. Communist dogma held that “workers of the world” were linked by common interests, and revolution would consist of a global uprising of oppressed workers. The “National Socialists” in Italy and Germany essentially wanted to focus the magic formula of Socialism on their own workers, their own people, their own country. This national focus was justified by claims of superiority based on race and culture. Hitler even said Nazism has little to offer that Socialism doesn’t other than Antisemitism (sorry don’t have the exact quote). I also just found this Hitler quote: “We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national.”
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 9 2020 at 6:47pm
@Nick: Dennis also noticed the importance of nationalism in fascism. (“Fascism is nationalist and opposed to anything going under the name of internationalism which seems bad for the nation.”–p. 277-8) Do you have a source for the Hitler quote? I don’t find it in Mein Kampf (or at least not in the English translation published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1941).
Jon Murphy
Dec 10 2020 at 10:48am
Pierre-
The quote comes from an interview with Hitler conducted by George Sylvester Viereck in 1923, published in the Liberty magazine in July 1932. However, I can only find references or hand-typed replications of the supposed interview, no trace of the actual interview in the ProQuest archive.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 10 2020 at 5:23am
Until the socialists were embarrassed by fascism and by Naziism, the standard definition of “socialism” was
(This definition is from the OED and in the SOED.)
Fascists and Nazis have narrow conceptions of the community. For the fascist, the community is the nation; for the Nazis, it was a supposed ethnic group. Fascists and Nazis maintained a fiction of private property, but to have property in something is to have rights of control, whereas fascism and Naziism took control by regulation. Within what it held to be the community, Naziism was quite egalitarian; Fascism was not, but held that the benefit to all was not best realized in such manner.
So, setting aside later attempts to redefine “socialism” to exclude fascism and Naziism, in what way was each not a socialism?
Jon Murphy
Dec 10 2020 at 9:49am
You hit on the fundamental differences in your comment. The definition of socialism is:
Naziism and fascism do not attempt to own the resources but rather “control by regulation.”
Outside a few key industries, they do not seek to own the means of production but rather simply guide or promote certain outcomes.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 7:11am
You chose simply to ignore my explicitly stated point about the nature of ownership, which is the right to control. That is distinct from the exercise of control, as one may appoint agents. Fascism and Naziism took away the right of control, leaving only a pretense of private property.
Jon Murphy
Dec 11 2020 at 9:45am
I didn’t ignore it. I addressed it. But I see I did not convey my meaning well.
Ownership is indeed the power of control, but it is never absolute. If we are to define socialism as anyone having some element of control over your resources, then everything at all times is socialism.
For example, I own a car. I may use that car for any number of purposes. I may not, however, use it to drive up on your lawn and make tire marks. Since my power of ownership is somewhat circumscribed by your power of ownership of your property, can we say that I do not own my car?
Great liberal theorists, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Ronald Coase, Armin Alchian, and Harold Demsetz all recognize the power of ownership is not absolute. Indeed, to claim it is would result in unresolvable contradictions. The power of ownership is circumscribed by justice and custom (Smith and Hume) or by law (and perhaps legislation) and institutions (Coase, Alchian, Demsetz).
Ownership also implies alienability. As the owner of a resource, I can sell (or not sell) it. So, even if the use of something is highly controlled, the fact I can still alienate myself from it implies a level of ownership.
So, in a fascist society, one still owns property. He may need to apply for a license to open a pub, for example. But he can run that pub largely as he sees fit. He can earn profit from the pub. He may decorate it, set hours, etc. Further, he may alienate (sell) the pub and keep the profits.
In a socialist society, the pub is owned by the state. The manager collects no profit from it. He cannot sell it and profit from the sale. He cannot run it as he sees fit. The state owns and operates the pub. He is an employee of the state.
These differences are subtle, but they are important, especially for analysis of the foregoing systems.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 10:38pm
[The ‘blogging software had repeatedly misplaced this reply.]
Like a great many people, you confuse the underlying notion of property with the more recent, popular use of “property” for an object in which one has some property. To have some property in an object is not to have every possible property in that object, but one either absolutely has property or absolutely does not. You invoke theorists whose work you do not understand.
We can say that a supposed owner does not have property in the means of production if he or she is told what it must produce, how much it must produce, and to whom the product must be supplied. And alienability would then have been replaced with merely the right to retire from the job of managing the property for the
actual owner.
One could indeed argue that the fascists and Nazis did not completely seize all ownership of the means of production, but neither did virtually any organization more widely recognized as socialist. Instead of the subtle distinction that you claim, we have the commonality that socialism is rarely thorough-going.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 12 2020 at 4:13am
Here is a proper discussion of ownership and property.
Jon Murphy
Dec 12 2020 at 10:53am
I don’t understand what you mean by your comment here. I don’t follow the logic or understand the meaning.
In following your link to “a proper discussion,” I think your point becomes a little clearer. It seems to me that the author there (I don’t know who it is as the post is unsigned) does not disagree with me in the use of property and ownership. I am using the phrase as Alchian and Demsetz do: “What is owned are rights to use resources, including one’s body and mind, and these rights are always circumscribed, often by the prohibition of certain actions…What are owned are socially recognized rights of action. It is not the resource itself which is owned; it is a bundle, or a portion, of rights to use a resource that is owned. In its original meaning, property referred solely to a right, title, or interest, and resources could
not be identified as property any more than they could be identified
as right, title, or interets” (The Property Right Paradigm, pg 17). The author of your piece seems* to agree: “…whether the object is well conceptualized for purposes of considering property rights, and without considering that actual ownership associated with that object might be distributed in some complicated ways amongst multiple parties.”
Now, you are right that “[w]e can say that a supposed owner does not have property in the means of production if he or she is told what it must produce, how much it must produce, and to whom the product must be supplied.” That’s true. That’s socialism. But it doesn’t follow, then, that if he does have some ownership except in certain cases, that it is still socialism. “Socialism” is not a “one drop of blood” thing and any infringement on ownership, no matter how slight, does not constitute socialism.
*I say “seems” because the piece is very hard to follow.
robc
Dec 12 2020 at 1:50pm
Jon, I think you are making the opposite mistake. As one drop of infringement doesnt make it socialist, lack of a drop of infringement doesnt make it free market. It is a continuum…with perfect freedom on one end and perfect socialism on the other, neither to be reached.
The pub that must licensed and follow specific hours is mostly free market, but still a wee bit socialist. The state is claiming some ownership (2-6 am, for example).
Jon Murphy
Dec 12 2020 at 2:03pm
I didn’t say it did.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 12 2020 at 10:06pm
Jon Murphy—
Since threading has been ended at this level, I will consolidate responses.
Where means of production are owned by and operated on behalf of the community, there is socialism ex definitione. Socialism is a one drop of socialism thing. To say that an economic order has only one drop of socialism is neither to say that it is fully socialist nor to say that it is simply not socialist.
Likewise, fascism is a one drop of fascism thing.
But what is really at issue here is whether the drops of fascism are drops of socialism. It’s a confusion to pretend that, in application, socialism was distinguished from fascism by one being thorough-going and the other not.
Take it to mean just what it says. It is abstract and unfamiliar to those embracing common confusions, but literally very simple.
No, it’s a brutal answer in the form of a tautology. And the passage that you did not quote
makes an application to the concrete very plain.
Rot. I explicitly said that internationalism is not intrinsic to socialism, and argued against such a claim, but now you’re trying to impute that claim to me. (Your failure to be logical is why you get hit with tautologies in response.)
Jon Murphy
Dec 14 2020 at 1:26pm
Aside from the fact that is very different from the definition of socialism you provided below, it’s false. Means of production are owned and operated on behalf of the community all the time in a non-socialistic setting (think: charity, churches, non-profits, etc). Indeed, as Adam Smith showed us way back in 1759, resources can be operated on behalf of the community entirely unintentionally! (see his discussion of the Poor Man’s Son in Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.8-10. Pages 181-185 in the Liberty Fund edition. See also Mia Pia Paganelli and Fabrizio Simon’s forthcoming paper Crime and Punishment: Adam Smith’s Theory of Law and Economics).
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 16 2020 at 9:55pm
[Let’s see where the software puts this comment.]
Jon Murphy—
The expression was more telegraphic, but it conformed to the definition from the OED. At least three confusions underlie your thinking otherwise and your attempt to refute the point that I made.
First, one cannot disregard the issue of ownership. An institution operating for the benefit of a community but not owned by that community, as in the case of various philanthropic organizations, would not conform to the definition.
Second, within a somewhat liberal framework, it is quite possible for a group, treating itself as the relevant community, to operate socialistically. Many religious communities have been socialistic and widely recognized as such. An organization could also be socialistic without being overtly so.
Third, you have lost sight of a point essential to Smith, that there is a very great difference between working for the benefit of a community and working to its benefit. Indeed, someone who argued that ‘socialism’ were defined as working to the benefit of the community could then claim that any system that failed to benefit the community were not socialism by definition.
It has been suggested to me in e.mail that I try to provide something of a summing-up, so I shall: Prior to attempts to redefine “socialism” exactly for the purpose excluding fascism and Naziism, fascism conformed to what was the prevailing definition. Indeed, for some time, socialists of other sorts called the fascists “fascist socialists”. And the various attempts at redefining “socialism” did not remove all the illiberal characteristics that are found in fascism. It is therefore no wonder that what is now-a-days uncontroversally called “socialism” shares illiberal attributes with fascism.
Jon Murphy
Dec 10 2020 at 9:50am
For some of the subtleties, check out Sheldon Richman’s article on Fascism
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 7:24am
I’d likewise cite the definition to Mr Richman. He emphasizes the indirectness of fascism; I’d ask him where the word “direct” or a synonym appears.
Greg G
Dec 10 2020 at 3:52pm
Socialism is internationalist and egalitarian. Naziism and fascism are nationalistic and hierarchical to Nietzschean extremes.
Naziism and fascism claim to be recovering a lost national greatness. Socialism claims to be reforming an embarrassingly corrupt past.
Naziism and fascism explicitly endorse the value of private property while socialism explicitly rejects it. Naziism and fascism found strong support among industrialists while socialism found none there. You could get rich as an industrialist supporting Nazism or fascism. You would get expropriated by the socialists if you were an industrialist.
Both do value collectivist goals over individual ones in terms of political and economic freedom when they conflict.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 7:19am
Where in the actual definition does it say that socialism regards the entire world as the relevant community? Indeed, if socialism were intrinsically internationalist, then no smaller socialist communities could exist within a world that were not socialist.
And where in the actual definition does it say that socialism is egalitarian?
Further, you too ignore the explicitly made point that property is right of control, whereas fascism and Naziism took that right, while pretending to preserve private property.
Greg G
Dec 11 2020 at 9:20am
You asked “in what way was each not a socialism?” so I explained how they were different.
If you had asked what the similarities were, then a different question would have gotten a different answer.
I explained the real world differences, not just how they compared to one theoretical definition.
The allies also took also an unprecedented right of control in taking over major industries and imposing rationing on previously free markets during the war.
The cut and paste below is where I did address aspects of private property that are relevant and go beyond the right of control which was infringed on in major ways by all combatants:
“Naziism and fascism explicitly endorse the value of private property while socialism explicitly rejects it. Naziism and fascism found strong support among industrialists while socialism found none there. You could get rich as an industrialist supporting Nazism or fascism. You would get expropriated by the socialists if you were an industrialist.”
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 10:06pm
I’m going to keep arguing points of logic.
The definition of “socialism” does not include internationalism. There were and are things in the real world that conform to that definition without being internationalistic, so your reference to the real world is at best a confusion.
The fact that opponents of the Italian Fascists and of the Nazis also took rights of control from those who had been owners doesn’t somehow mean that doing so wasn’t seizure of property.
Nor does the lip service paid by fascists and by Nazis to private property somehow refute the point that they effected state ownership.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 12 2020 at 10:31pm
Greg G—
No, it absolutely does. Like Mr Murphy, you are implicitly modifying the definition to preclude the possibility that there could be “one drop” of socialism.
As you acknowledge with delay, my question, which you and Mr Murphy were supposedly answering was
because, yes, it is possible to redefine “socialism” to be
and that, albeit with more subtlety, is just what happened in the wake of fascism, Naziism. Indeed, after the death of Stalin and acknowledgment of his crimes by many of the Communist parties in the West, definitions shifted still further. (Elsewhere, I have written more extensively and more precisely about these shifts.)
You cannot have been answering my question by turning to a later definition of “socialism”. It is not amusing to see you try.
Jon Murphy
Dec 11 2020 at 9:46am
Why? That doesn’t make sense.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 11 2020 at 10:32pm
It makes perfect sense to note that an institution cannot operate internationalistically without operating internationalistically.
Socialistic groups having only the resources of a small community cannot treat the whole world as entitled to the product of their means.
Greg G
Dec 12 2020 at 8:35am
Daniel,
>—“I’m going to keep arguing points of logic.
The definition of “socialism” does not…”
Your “logic” does not extend to using the same standards for judging these systems. You are claiming that any infringement of the right of control over private property is sufficient to give you license to call it socialist even if people are allowed to get rich from profit making businesses with less than full control. Well then every country with a system of mandatory taxation (which is to say all of them) is socialist by that definition.
But there is an even more fundamental defect in your argument. You keep referring to “the definition” as if there is one correct source for a definition. It is always amusing when someone purporting to make a libertarian argument makes this classic mistake.
You see, language is the most perfectly libertarian of all human institutions. Everyone gets to decide for himself what the words he speaks and hears mean. The penalty for getting it “wrong” is that you won’t be understood the way you intend to be. Language is entirely conventional. When logic and convention conflict, convention rules. For example, you often hear it said (in English) that a double negative is wrong because the second negative negates the first making it a positive, not a negative statement. But there are languages where a double negative is understood by everyone to simply emphasize the negative aspect, not reverse it, even in the most formal speech.
There has been a great deal of work done in philosophy and linguistics and all of it has led to the conclusion that language is conventional all the way down. There simply is nothing more foundational to appeal to. This why different languages can and do use entirely different words to refer to the same things. Dictionaries are consumer products that are revised every year in a lagging attempt to keep up with changing conventions.
Ever hear the slogan “Workers of the world unite!”? Not that this is from “THE” definition. Such a thing does not exist. The word “socialism” is used with a quite spectacular variety of meanings and your use of it to refer to any system where control of private property is infringed on in any way has been a good example of that.
Jon and I have been explaining to you the ways they differ because that’s what you asked about. There is a reason real world socialists and real world fascists have always regarded each other as mortal enemies not natural allies and a reason why conventional language use reflects that reality.
Jon Murphy
Dec 12 2020 at 11:07am
That’s a tautology, not an answer. Socialism has long been concerned with international matters (the definition of internationalistic). The mere fact that socialism doesn’t exist all over the world doesn’t mean socialism isn’t international in focus.
In fact, if we accept your argument, then your definition of socialism becomes not about ownership of the means of production, but about arbitrary political borders. You’d have to argue that the USSR was not socialist since it did not encompass the world, despite the fact that they controlled production.
So, we have an issue: according to your definitions: the USSR is both socialist and non-socialist. Same with the US.
Jon Murphy
Dec 12 2020 at 11:31am
As an aside, I don’t entirely agree that socialism is inherently international in its views. It can be, but for me the definition of socialism relies only on the ownership of means of production rather than the focus of welfare.
Socialism does tend to be international in its focus and fascism does tend to be nationalistic, but I don’t think either must be.
Alex S.
Dec 11 2020 at 2:53am
Fascism is socialism for one race. Socialism is fascism for all races.
Comments are closed.