this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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They'll actually cheer on for those death squads. If they had their way, they would have their own death squads. Marxists are infamous for their tyranny, genocide, forced deportations, engineered famines, purges, labor camps, hate, and secret police death squads.
Marxism and fascism are sister ideologies because they ultimately want the same things but just from slightly different angles.
Marxism: History is defined by material conditions and value comes from appropriated labour which workers are entitled to. Thus society should be oriented around collective ownership of the means of production in order to elevate the material conditions of the worker and usher in a new age of history. It is inevitable that the owning class will resort to violence to maintain their position and so this change will be a violent struggle. Eventually the state itself should be abolished once the transition is complete. Also this is inevitable because umm science wand wave.
Fascism: Power should be centralised on strong men wiling to make hard choices, everyone else should live subservient to the state. Military power, an ethnonational identity, and autarchy are the highest pursuits. Concession and concensus are weakness, might is the ultimate expression of power and violence for the glory of the nation is beautiful. Modernity is degenerate and we should idolise a mythologised past based around an ethnic group we claim the mantle of.
SleezyDizasta: Could these be the same? 🧐
That's stupid, that's not what I implied. I said that they're sister ideologies that desire the same things just with different approaches, and that's objectively true.
Fascism was started by Mussolini, who was an infamous Marxist for most of his early life. He used to write for Marxist papers, be an avid Marxist activist, attend Marxist meetings, and even got arrested for rioting for Marxist causes. He, like many other socialists at the time, was against war. However, over time he came to the conclusion that war might not be a bad thing. If wars happened more frequently, it could bring about the social climate necessary for revolutions to happen that would end European monarchies and replace them with socialist systems. However, his ideas were rejected by the other socialists and he was shunned by them.
Mussolini started shifting away from other socialists over what unites men. Socialists believe it's class, but Mussolini started shifting towards the nation. He and his supporters starting gravitating towards revolutionary nationalism.. Professor Anthony Gregor from UC Berkely described Mussolini's nationalism as the following:
Mussolini's Fascism was very clearly heavily influenced by Marxism. He used a lot of the same ideals, a lot of the same terminology, similar rhetoric, and similar types of analytical lenses. In fact professor Gregor notes that Mussolini's viewed Fascism as a type of socialism, or rather as the successor of socialism:
Even though Mussolini eventually parted ways with Marxism all together. His opposition to them wasn't because they were socialists but because they were anti-nationalist. Despite declaring Marxism a failure and socialists as opposition, he still thought and constantly talked about how Fascism was about poor nations rising up against the plutocrats.
When I say they're sister ideologies, they literally are.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_nationalism
I think someone with a violent streak a mile long even as a child who became fascinated with populist revolutionary ideologies creating a new populist revolutionary ideology does not really make it inherently twinsies with previous populist revolutionary ideologies other than that they are both exactly that. I think it's pretty clear in hindsight that what Mussolini was really interested in was gaining power in a populist revolution, no matter the cost or method.
Obviously, with the power of hindsight, we can see that Mussolini didn't end up being the socialist that he was in his early days. However, it's still interesting to the influences of Marxism on Fascism as an ideology. They do share a lot of characteristics despite their many differences. This is why the claim that these two ideologies are polar opposites isn't true. They're different? Sure. Polar opposites? Not exactly.