Real Canadian Liberal

Last edited - 24 Aug 24

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Anti-Egalitarian Socialism (Non-Egalitarian Socialism):  As previously mentioned, classical early Marxism (circa 1850) is the hypothetical 'pure' egalitarian socialism.  Marx envisaged an international revolution of the 'proletariat' (working class) that would transcend national/ethnic, racial and cultural boundaries.  This extreme egalitarianism or 'inclusiveness' is what defines egalitarian socialism.

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However, many socialists realised that very few people unite around socio-economic class.  Most are loyal to tribe, trades guild, geographic region, national ethnicity or race.  In World War I, French socialists fought for France, German socialists fought for Germany and Italian socialists fought for Italy.  With the notable exception of the Spanish Civil War, where many international socialists including the brilliant author George Orwell gathered together to fight Franco's Nationalists, international egalitarian socialism was a hypothetical idea with little true grass-roots support.

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As a consequence, many socialist movements have sought unity based on identities other than socio-economic class.  Their goal is to create social homogeneity through exclusion.  Members of the right guild, ethnicity, race or whatever are 'in' and everyone else is excluded.  The 'in' group tend to get the universal income, universal healthcare, universal employment, etc that the socialist ideology promises.  Those excluded, well, don't.  The exclusion of predominantly black farm labourers from FDR's 'New Deal' benefits is a textbook example of anti-egalitarian socialism at work.

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Most anti-egalitarian socialist movements adopt a less extreme form of economic structure, where individual economic success is allowed, or even encouraged.  However, economic activity is highly regulated and many key industries are owned or controlled by the political party elites.  State interests take precedence over individual, so loyalty to the party or state is essential.  Failure to exhibit the correct loyalty and support for the state inevitably results in a rapid fall from grace/wealth/influence/etc.

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It is unsurprising that anti-egalitarian socialism is the most common form found in recent history.  Put simply, it's just tribalism rebranded for a modern setting, the oldest human societal structure known.  

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Fascism: "National Syndicalism blended with Marxism influenced by a philosophy of Actualism"

 

Fascism is the most significant branch of Marxist socialism that rejects internationalism in favour of an revolutionary National Syndicalism where only the ingroup is afforded ‘social justice’.  As the ingroup consists of the national polity, there are few 'outgroup' people within the nation to persecute, making Fascism significantly less violent than Marxism or National Socialism.

 

The emergence of Fascism was triggered by the same conditions that triggered the emergence of Leninism/Bolshevism and Maoism.  By the end 19th century, the spontaneous revolution of the proletariat prophesied by Karl Marx simply hadn’t happened and, particularly in industrialized countries where the working class had doubled their material wealth in the last 50 years, the conditions for revolution were fading rapidly.  Many Italian Marxists, led by Mussolini (Italy’s leading Marxist and editor of the Italian Marxist magazine, ‘Avanti’), concluded that Italian workers weren’t united by class distinctions, but by other cultural identities.  With that discovery, the Fascists diverged from traditional Marxism and began to work toward a socialist model based on syndicalism and nationalism, rather than socio-economic class.

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NOTE:  Syndicalism was one of the primary competing socialist ideologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, having broken off from the Marxist mainstream in the late 19th century.  Born in the predominantly agrarian regions of Southern France and Italy, syndicalists argued that early Marxism was dependent on industrialization having already taken place and that a Marxist 'revolution of the proletariat', where the working classes seized the means of production and wealth would be shared among all was doomed to failure in a pre-industrial society where there were no 'means of production' to seize and, therefore, no wealth to share.  Instead of removing the bourgeois industrialist class, syndicalists proposed a system in which the bourgeois were simply 'harnessed' by the revolution, with their managerial and creative skills used to drive industrialization but under the control of state.  The mechanism of control was to be the syndicate, a 'super union' that dominated an entire economic sector and which exercised control over corporations on behalf of the ruling party/government.

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Another description of Syndicalism is 'Trade Unionism', making Fascism a 'Socialist ideology based in Trade Unionism'.  Effectively, an accurate description of most western socialism in the 21st century.

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The result was fascist corporatism, a concept virtually indistinguishable from Keynesian economics apart from the control mechanism at the top.  In the 21st century, the term 'fascist corporatism' has been replaced by the more benign sounding 'stakeholder capitalism'.  Despite the name, there is no 'capitalism' in fascism, it is simply corporate socialism where a ruling elite exercises control over society through corporate monopolies, duopolies, oligopolies and cartels; or through direct state power.

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"Fascism is the marriage between corporate and state power" - Benito Mussolini

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Fascism is a totalitarian ideology.  As Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile (the 'Philosopher of Fascism') stated, ‘everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’, although some fascist states have tended toward authoritarianism rather than totalitarianism.  Fascist philosophy is inherently anti-liberal (philosophically and economically) and anti Judeo-Christian (as the primary source of Egalitarian Universalism and Liberalism).  Fascists aim to create societal homogeneity through ‘exclusion’ based on ingroup vs outgroup identity, traditionally national identity in Italian Fascism and Petainist Fascism (France & Canada), or race in the more extreme variations such as the US Democratic Party's fascism.

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NOTE on RACISM: Racism was not originally a feature of Fascism.  Mussolini opposed race-based politics and fully 1/3 of Italian Jews were members of the Fascist Party.  In the 1940s, when Nazi pressure forced Mussolini to pass racist laws, multiple exceptions to the law were built in so Jews who served in the Italian military or who were members of the Fascist Party were exempt.  So, with few exceptions, Jews remained equal citizens with other Italians under Fascism. In the US, Jewish voters have overwhelmingly supported the fascist policies of the Democratic Party.  The uncomfortable 'alliance' between fascism and National Socialism remains alive in modern Ukraine, where the fascist, and Jewish, president of Ukraine, Zelenskii, is heavily reliant on Banderist National Socialists like Dmytro Yarosh to maintain power and control.  It's only the Marxist branch of the Democratic Party that has maintained the anti-Semitic features intrinsic to classical Marxism.  So, like the alliance between Hitler and Mussolini and Zelenskii and Yarosh, the Democratic Party of the US represents an uncomfortable and often conflicting alliance between Racist Socialists and Fascists.  There's nothing new under the Sun!

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Traditional and modern Fascists tend to support a non-egalitarian socialist economic model closely approximating the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, known as ‘Keynesian Economics’.  This is also often referred to as State Capitalism or 'Stakeholder Capitalism'.  This economic system was broadly adopted by Fascist Italy, Petainist France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain, the US under FDR, post-Maoist China and the fascist dominated democratic socialist parties of many western nations post WWII.

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“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’ (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.” – Benito Mussolini (Lawrence K. Samuels, ‘The Socialist Economics of Italian Fascism’, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.)

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NOTE:  John Maynard Keynes was not a liberal, his economic hypotheses reveal him to be more of a classical conservative and highly interventionist, a set of ideas largely antithetical to liberalism.  However, he was outspoken about the scientific pretentions of Marxism and the horrors of Bolshevism.  His economic theories, reflected many ideas proposed by One Nation Conservatism and were influenced considerably by socialist critique of unrestrained classical ‘pure’ liberal economics.  It is from these two sources that the overlap with Fascist economics emerged.

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Many 'socialists' in the modern west will continue to scream the illogical and historically illiterate claim that 'FASCISM IS FAR RIGHT'.  Let's examine the philosophy of Mussolini's fascist intellectuals to determine whether they're socialists of the left or liberals/anarchist of the right:

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Giovanni Gentile - Syndicalist who became the 'Philosopher of Fascism'.

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Enrico Corradini - Syndicalist who invented national syndicalism in 1909.

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Alfred Rocco - Socialist / Syndicalist who embraced nationalism.

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Benito Mussolini - Marxist anarcho-Syndicalist who embraced nationalism.

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Serio Panuzio - Marxist Syndicalist who embraced nationalism.

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Ugo Spirito - Marxist turned Fascist (advanced the idea of Actualism)

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American proto-Fascism and Fascism:  During the early 20th century, Syndicalism or 'Trade Unionism' became a significant political force in the United States.  In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was elected President and became the poster child of the 'progressive' movement.  Described by the left as a 'liberal', Wilson was actually a syndicalist who carried the deeply rooted racism ingrained in the Democratic Party.  As a committed statist, Wilson opposed the liberalism of the US Constitution and once infamously opined that 'the constitution is an impediment to good government'.

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Wilson occupied a political position halfway between Hitler and Mussolini and presided over the creation of a supra-national version of proto-Fascism in which internationalism or 'Globalism' was born.  Instead of a state based imperialism, this new globalism was based around the corporatist model of fascism in which imperialism was economic and cultural, rather than militarist.  However, as George Orwell pointed out, 'All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force', explaining how American 'progressivism' or 'corporate imperialism' has relied increasingly on military power from the 1960s.

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Some observers have opined that Wilson was the first fascist, not Mussolini, but true fascism is not race-based and Wilson's 'progressive' ideology was definitely focused on race.  While being economically Syndicalist, this focus on race separated Wilson from true fascism as born in Italy and France.

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In 1933, the first true fascist president of the US was elected, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Infamous for his authoritarian mindset, FDR immediately launched his 'New Deal' economic policy, a policy formulated by his 'Brain Trust' after 6 missions to Fascist Italy to study Benito Mussolini's economic policy.  While pandering to the hard core racists in the Democratic Party for votes, FDR was not as race oriented as Wilson and could be legitimately considered the US's first true fascist leader.  Just as racism was a very late addition to Italian Fascism (1940s) and only adopted superficially for geopolitical reasons, FDR retained racist policies predominantly as a political ploy, not because his ideology was inherently racist.

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While FDR's enforcement of anti-trust regulation had the temporary effect of maintaining free-market effects in the economy, the Socialist Syndicalism at the heart of FDR's ideology set the US Democratic Party and economy on a path of 'Trade Unionism' that set the conditions for massive industrial concentration and a complete shift to a Fascist economy.  Following the failure of anti-trust enforcement in the late 1970s, the US economy has become very concentrated over the last 4 decades, turning a large percentage of the US economy into a tool of political coercion and propaganda.

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This trend in the US has been mirrored in the NATO 'vassal' states of western Europe and the Anglosphere, rendering most of the 'west' as vassal states of American Globalist Syndicalist Fascism, an evolution of Mussolini's original Italian Nationalist Syndicalist based Fascism.

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It is worthy of note that the adherents of this fascist corporatist based globalism have decided to 're-brand' to disguise their true origins and 'Fascist Corporatism' has been euphemistically renamed 'Stakeholder Capitalism'.  The stakeholders remain the same Statists and Corporatists, but this ideology remains diametrically opposed to free market liberal economics.  There's nothing 'capitalist' about 'Stakeholder Capitalism', it remains the Socialist Syndicalism that emerged in the late 19th century, with merely a veneer of flowery rhetoric disguising it's real name, FASCISM.

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National Socialism (Nazism): Racial Socialism with a philosophy of Imperialist Conquest (Lebensraum).

 

National Socialism is a more extreme version of Socialism that leans heavily toward the presuppositions and philosophy of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party (Nazi Party).  Nazi philosophy is a combination of German Socialism predating Marx, late Marxist writings including Marx's beliefs in antisemitism, German ultra-nationalism and 'lebensraum' ('living space for the Aryan race) and the philosophy of Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis, as found in ‘Mein Kampf’ (1925 & 1926), ‘Hitler’s Table Talk’ (1941-1944) and other similar works.  It is a race centric anti-liberal (particularly regarding liberal economics of finance or finance capitalism) and anti-Judeo-Christian philosophy.  It is primarily the racist component of National Socialism that separated it from Fascism, which divided humanity according to ethnicity, not race, but National Socialism also had an intrinsic component of imperialism that Fascism did not.

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The philosophical consequence of Nazism's concentration on race resulted in the rejection of classical Marxism, whereas Italian and French Fascists saw themselves as modifying and improving on Marxist doctrine, with Syndicalism having originated as a branch of Marxism.  So, while Fascism is a non-egalitarian evolution of Marxism, Nazism replaced classical class-based classical Marxism with the Racial Socialism found in early German Socialism and some of Marx's later ideas.  Nazism superimposed social Darwinism on socialism, drawing heavily on the racist hypotheses presented in Charles Darwin's 'The Descent of Man', published in 1871.  Combined with a deeply flawed interpretation of Fredrich Nietzsche's 'Ubermench' (Superman) concept, Nazism rejects Marx's fundamental presupposition that humans have no intrinsic value and replaced it with a hierarchy of value based on pseudo-Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' doctrine.

 

The Nazis are often described being anti-communist, but this is a grossly misleading analysis.  The Nazis were anti-Semitic and opposed Bolshevism and Bolshevik interference in German politics (Marxism and Bolshevism, hypothetically, being 'international' socialist movements and having significant Jewish influence and leadership).  As the German communist movement in the 1920s was inspired primarily by Bolshevism and heavily influenced by Moscow, the Nazis were antagonistic toward German communists.   However, through both diplomatic and coercive means, the German communist links to the Soviet Union were largely severed and, in 1933, most German communists voted for the National Socialists at the urging of their party leaders.

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After WWII, many Nazis in East Germany, particularly members of the SS, simply changed uniforms and joined the new socialist regime in the DDR.  This historical example serves to expose the false narrative that Stalinism and Nazism were substantially different.  The practical reality is that while most differences were superficial and reflective of character differences in both leadership and national psyche, the two systems were largely coherent in core ideology.

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NOTE:  It is often suggested that Nazism is a combination of 'nationalism' and 'socialism'.  This view has gained wide acceptance, but it is technically incorrect.  The 'nationalism' of Nazis is not the traditionally defined nationalism as a form of culturally isolationist nationalism, but a more aggressive race-centric imperialism.  More will be said on this subject in a subsequent article, but it was the aggressive militarist imposition of one race or ethno-centric culture on others that distinguishes Nazi 'imperialist nationalism' from the more traditional nationalism of Judeo-Christian philosophy, India's Ghandi, South Africa's Mandela and most of the anti-colonialist leaders of the post WWII era.