Problem with current discussion is that alot of people started accusing how everything they dislike is fascism. Same phenomenom ruined the word “woke”.
It became special word people started throwing around without any true justification.
Problem with defining fascism is that there is not any universal base for it.
In general its authoritian nationalist system where single person or group has all political power in country.
Defining fascism is highly contentious, but I’ll give it a go in the most neutral terms I can muster:
Fascism is the belief that the state/nation matters more than any given individual, that the function of the state is to strengthen the nation (the nation here meaning the dominant culture or ethnic group) at the expense of everybody else. It’s something of a siege mentality. Furthermore, fascists believe that strict and strictly enforced laws are necessary to keep the nation from being weakened or corrupted, particularly by the influence of enemy states and ethnic groups.
But I would also like to offer you some interesting leftist takes on fascism for you to chew on. I myself do agree with these takes but they are admittedly biased:
Fascism is a revolution of the bourgeoisie, as opposed to communism which is a revolution of the proletariat.
Either socialism or fascism will invariably follow capitalism, because capitalism never stops squeezing the people and plundering the land, and there comes a point at which there’s so much discord and discontent that revolution is a certainty. Fascism at that point is a prophylactic revolution against a building communist revolution.
Fascism is a far-right political system where one leader or government has total control. It usually includes extreme nationalism, suppression of opposition, and limited personal freedoms. People are expected to obey the state without question.
Wikipedia defines it as forcible suppression of opposition simply put a government who fight to keep power. They will silence all opposition. And silent, imprison, and even kill anybody who opposes them.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Fascism has become one of those words that you lob at your political enemies these days and as such it has lost most (or any, really) of its power much like the Nazi slur does.
It gets used so much and to such a broad spectrum of people that it has lost all of its relevance.
There was a poster sold in the Holocaust Museum with the 14 early warning signs of fascism. It’s from a 2003 essay and the accuracy is a point of debate but it sounds pretty close to me.
1.) Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
2.) Disdain for the importance of human rights
3.) Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4.) The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
5.) Rampant sexism
6.) A controlled mass media
7.) Obsession with national security
8.) Religion and ruling elite tied together
9.) Power of corporations protected
10.) Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
11.) Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Fascism is a reactionary movement claiming to return the country to a state of claimed previous glory, centered around the will of a single party, and a single individual within that party, who unites, leads and exemplifies the Will of the Nation, against both external foreign enemies and internal libertine decadence.
Fascism treats disloyalty or disobedience towards the leader as treason against the nation, it conflates strength with moral entitlement, and machismo with virtue. It’s also deeply cynical, and glories itself in sadism and cruelty as a goal unto themselves.
Fascism is a right wing ideology that encompasses ultra-nationalism and superiority politics backed by authoritarianism. It usually has a despotic cult of personality at its head and centralized organization.
It’s a hyper-capitalist ideology that integrates corporate and state power to advance its authoritarian goals.
The guy who invented fascism, Giovani Gentile, described it as a system of government made up of a national union of unions, which would be the ruling political party, and the party would be the government and the state. His idea was to combine unions into big meta unions, and then those unions would be nationalized and politicized into being the government, and their leader would run the state/government Through those unions all economic activity would be collectively organized, via “scientific socialism”, and benefit the state, and by benefiting the state, he believed the citizens who subsumed their will to the state would also benefit. In practice it was just a complete failure.
The imagry and name comes from the Roman Fasces which is an axe where the handle is made of a bundle of smaller, weaker sticks, with the idea of “together we are strong”. They wanted to create a third-way that wasn’t like the european right wing (conservative, monarchial, capiatlistic) or left wing (collectivist, socialist, internationalist); but wanted a nationalist, populist sort of socialism. A lot of the fascist party leadership were people who left the Italian Socialist Party because they didn’t see it as Sufficiently nationalist and pro-Italy.
When most people say “fascism”, they don’t actually mean actual 20th century fascism as happened in Italy. They mean any generic right-winged authoritarianism.
You genuinely won’t get much of an answer on reddit. In truth, the term has evolved significantly over the past decade and is now a sort of umbrella term which could mean a thousand different things to different people, depending on their political disposition and overall intellectual honesty. It has taken on a new life being used in discourse.
A system of government where the government has the ultimate power and even has control over people’s lives. Where the government suppresses the opposition, does not allow criticism, and limits civil (and sometimes economic) liberties and political plurality. This type of government also values the ultranationalism, militarism, and the leadership of the government by an individual or a small group of people who have a cult of personality within that state. And this type of government also engages in state terrorism.
Examples:
I. Nazi Germany (with antisemitic, racist and albeist ideologies)
II. Fascist Italy
III. Imperial Japan
IV. Fascist Cuba
V. Fascist Spain
Communist states were criticized for having not been the true form of communism and were criticized for having been communism with the face of fascism, as true communism itself values a stateless society. Such criticism was from Mussolini the leader of Fascist Italy who criticized Stalin the leader of the Soviet Union to have created Red Fascism (Red as for communism).
Fascism is an autocratic authoritarian form of government characterized by militarism, draconian internal security policies, and state-sanctioned discrimination.
Power is ultimately vested within a very tiny group of individuals who wield absolute authority and there is no legal means by which this authority can be challenged. The state heavily controls industry, commerce, and cultural expression. Those acting outside the state’s interest, or otherwise upset those in power, are subject to harsh and unfair legal consequences.
You’re going to get a lot of different answers because what fascism says it is and how it materialized in reality are sort of different. You see a similar phenomenon in communism, where what Marx and Engels envisioned and how it has played out in reality are not the same. Even scholars have a difficult time defining it; the implementation was so brief and ill-fated it’s hard to really grasp a lot of it. I’ll do my best.
Economically: the state determines the means of production. Unlike communism which regulates goods by distributing them based on need, fascism would tell industries how much of a good to produce. This is also unlike capitalism (as practiced in the US) where the government buys up some of the plentiful goods to drive up the price artificially (produce and dairy, normally).
Socially, there’s a huge emphasis on nationalism. Every citizen must act with the nation’s benefit in mind. This leads to some of what we saw in Nazi Germany with eugenics. What good to the nation would having a handicapped child be? A person with disabilities is seen as a liability. There is also–tied to the nationalism–a strong belief in use of the military to expand the area of influence. To that end, there is a call for having a lot of children (people die in wars and need to be replaced).
Politically, there is only one party. There is no need for political parties outside of the ruling party. There is no room for dissent. At its extreme, this is part of the reason Hitler went after political enemies and put them to death. It follows that media is tightly controlled to maintain the nationalist fervor.
I hope that helps. I fear I may have fallen into the trap of explaining using the limited examples available, but Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy are the best examples available and extremes of the ideology.
Other people answered about the Fasicst ideology(ies), but no one really mentioned when, why and how do Fascists get into power – and what is their actual purpose for the state.
Any Capitalist state eventually finds itself in a situation where the working class becomes collectively upset with the system (or some major aspects of it). This can lead to actual meaningful changes to the system which will transfer wealth and political power from the owning class (also called Capitalists and the Bourgeoisie) to the working class. Sometimes they might even take control of the entire system and turn it socialist (gasp!). So the state, which exists to serve the interests of its ruling class, must take action to prevent it.
There are two general directions that the state can take:
Giving workers some concessions, hoping this will quell a full-blown socialist revolution (as seen in the creation of the social-democratic Weimar Germany after WW1, or the creation of western European social-democracies after WW2).
Crushing any power workers have, by turning completely joining the state apparatus together with industry, militarizing it and turning it authoritarian by any degree (anything from slightly more authoritarian to a full-blown dictatorship), and in the process wiping any workers’ resistance (destroying workers unions, socialist/communist organizations, etc.).
The latter method is Fasicsm. What happens in practice is that members of the ruling class turn to openly supporting and funding Fascist organizations, in a sense “lending them the keys” to the state to work things out and solve the crisis faced by the state. This is what happened in Italy in the 1920s, in Germany in the 1930s, in Spain in the 1930$s, etc.
A similar but different process happened in some not-first-world countries: for example, in Chile, Argentina and other Latin-American states in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Instead of the Fascists being supported and funded mainly by their own country’s Bourgeoisie, they were supported materially by the US, and in turn when they got in power they completely opened the doors to American imperialist interests.
This is, in essence, how and why Fasicsts get into power. The mechanisms by which Fasicsts achieve thier goals, and the different processes and ideologies they have are explained by other people here.
Comments
Extreme nationalism, autocratic rule, and the repression of dissent are characteristics of the authoritarian far-right ideology known as fascism.
I’m personally a fan of “palingenetic ultranationalism”, as I think ot does a pretty good job summing it up.
Umberto Eco wrote a good essay on the topic, back in 1995.
Problem with current discussion is that alot of people started accusing how everything they dislike is fascism. Same phenomenom ruined the word “woke”.
It became special word people started throwing around without any true justification.
Problem with defining fascism is that there is not any universal base for it.
In general its authoritian nationalist system where single person or group has all political power in country.
Defining fascism is highly contentious, but I’ll give it a go in the most neutral terms I can muster:
Fascism is the belief that the state/nation matters more than any given individual, that the function of the state is to strengthen the nation (the nation here meaning the dominant culture or ethnic group) at the expense of everybody else. It’s something of a siege mentality. Furthermore, fascists believe that strict and strictly enforced laws are necessary to keep the nation from being weakened or corrupted, particularly by the influence of enemy states and ethnic groups.
But I would also like to offer you some interesting leftist takes on fascism for you to chew on. I myself do agree with these takes but they are admittedly biased:
Fascism is a revolution of the bourgeoisie, as opposed to communism which is a revolution of the proletariat.
Either socialism or fascism will invariably follow capitalism, because capitalism never stops squeezing the people and plundering the land, and there comes a point at which there’s so much discord and discontent that revolution is a certainty. Fascism at that point is a prophylactic revolution against a building communist revolution.
Fascism is a far-right political system where one leader or government has total control. It usually includes extreme nationalism, suppression of opposition, and limited personal freedoms. People are expected to obey the state without question.
Wikipedia defines it as forcible suppression of opposition simply put a government who fight to keep power. They will silence all opposition. And silent, imprison, and even kill anybody who opposes them.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Fascism has become one of those words that you lob at your political enemies these days and as such it has lost most (or any, really) of its power much like the Nazi slur does.
It gets used so much and to such a broad spectrum of people that it has lost all of its relevance.
Expansionist, racist and authoritarian nationalism.
Basically what the Trump government is.
There was a poster sold in the Holocaust Museum with the 14 early warning signs of fascism. It’s from a 2003 essay and the accuracy is a point of debate but it sounds pretty close to me.
1.) Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
2.) Disdain for the importance of human rights
3.) Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4.) The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
5.) Rampant sexism
6.) A controlled mass media
7.) Obsession with national security
8.) Religion and ruling elite tied together
9.) Power of corporations protected
10.) Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
11.) Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
12.) Obsession with crime and punishment
13.) Rampant cronyism and corruption
14.) Fraudulent elections
Fascism is a reactionary movement claiming to return the country to a state of claimed previous glory, centered around the will of a single party, and a single individual within that party, who unites, leads and exemplifies the Will of the Nation, against both external foreign enemies and internal libertine decadence.
Fascism treats disloyalty or disobedience towards the leader as treason against the nation, it conflates strength with moral entitlement, and machismo with virtue. It’s also deeply cynical, and glories itself in sadism and cruelty as a goal unto themselves.
Fascism is a right wing ideology that encompasses ultra-nationalism and superiority politics backed by authoritarianism. It usually has a despotic cult of personality at its head and centralized organization.
It’s a hyper-capitalist ideology that integrates corporate and state power to advance its authoritarian goals.
Ask the guy who invented it
https://putpeopleoverprofit.org/freedometer.html
there are lots of measures to account for… it’s not just ONE thing.
The guy who invented fascism, Giovani Gentile, described it as a system of government made up of a national union of unions, which would be the ruling political party, and the party would be the government and the state. His idea was to combine unions into big meta unions, and then those unions would be nationalized and politicized into being the government, and their leader would run the state/government Through those unions all economic activity would be collectively organized, via “scientific socialism”, and benefit the state, and by benefiting the state, he believed the citizens who subsumed their will to the state would also benefit. In practice it was just a complete failure.
The imagry and name comes from the Roman Fasces which is an axe where the handle is made of a bundle of smaller, weaker sticks, with the idea of “together we are strong”. They wanted to create a third-way that wasn’t like the european right wing (conservative, monarchial, capiatlistic) or left wing (collectivist, socialist, internationalist); but wanted a nationalist, populist sort of socialism. A lot of the fascist party leadership were people who left the Italian Socialist Party because they didn’t see it as Sufficiently nationalist and pro-Italy.
When most people say “fascism”, they don’t actually mean actual 20th century fascism as happened in Italy. They mean any generic right-winged authoritarianism.
You could go back to Mussolini or further back to the Greeks and see what their views were on it.
I simply see it as the willingness of a governing body to force (in all manners) their views onto their citizens.
You genuinely won’t get much of an answer on reddit. In truth, the term has evolved significantly over the past decade and is now a sort of umbrella term which could mean a thousand different things to different people, depending on their political disposition and overall intellectual honesty. It has taken on a new life being used in discourse.
A system of government where the government has the ultimate power and even has control over people’s lives. Where the government suppresses the opposition, does not allow criticism, and limits civil (and sometimes economic) liberties and political plurality. This type of government also values the ultranationalism, militarism, and the leadership of the government by an individual or a small group of people who have a cult of personality within that state. And this type of government also engages in state terrorism.
Examples:
I. Nazi Germany (with antisemitic, racist and albeist ideologies)
II. Fascist Italy
III. Imperial Japan
IV. Fascist Cuba
V. Fascist Spain
Communist states were criticized for having not been the true form of communism and were criticized for having been communism with the face of fascism, as true communism itself values a stateless society. Such criticism was from Mussolini the leader of Fascist Italy who criticized Stalin the leader of the Soviet Union to have created Red Fascism (Red as for communism).
I hope this helped.
Fascism is an autocratic authoritarian form of government characterized by militarism, draconian internal security policies, and state-sanctioned discrimination.
Power is ultimately vested within a very tiny group of individuals who wield absolute authority and there is no legal means by which this authority can be challenged. The state heavily controls industry, commerce, and cultural expression. Those acting outside the state’s interest, or otherwise upset those in power, are subject to harsh and unfair legal consequences.
anything the left wing doesn’t like.
The operational definition for fascism used on Reddit is anything to the right of Country Club/Rockefeller Republicanism.
The best definition I’ve found is Umberto Eco’s.
You’re going to get a lot of different answers because what fascism says it is and how it materialized in reality are sort of different. You see a similar phenomenon in communism, where what Marx and Engels envisioned and how it has played out in reality are not the same. Even scholars have a difficult time defining it; the implementation was so brief and ill-fated it’s hard to really grasp a lot of it. I’ll do my best.
Economically: the state determines the means of production. Unlike communism which regulates goods by distributing them based on need, fascism would tell industries how much of a good to produce. This is also unlike capitalism (as practiced in the US) where the government buys up some of the plentiful goods to drive up the price artificially (produce and dairy, normally).
Socially, there’s a huge emphasis on nationalism. Every citizen must act with the nation’s benefit in mind. This leads to some of what we saw in Nazi Germany with eugenics. What good to the nation would having a handicapped child be? A person with disabilities is seen as a liability. There is also–tied to the nationalism–a strong belief in use of the military to expand the area of influence. To that end, there is a call for having a lot of children (people die in wars and need to be replaced).
Politically, there is only one party. There is no need for political parties outside of the ruling party. There is no room for dissent. At its extreme, this is part of the reason Hitler went after political enemies and put them to death. It follows that media is tightly controlled to maintain the nationalist fervor.
I hope that helps. I fear I may have fallen into the trap of explaining using the limited examples available, but Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy are the best examples available and extremes of the ideology.
The left setting fire to Teslas and calling Donald Trump Hitler.
Whatever I disagree with
Other people answered about the Fasicst ideology(ies), but no one really mentioned when, why and how do Fascists get into power – and what is their actual purpose for the state.
Any Capitalist state eventually finds itself in a situation where the working class becomes collectively upset with the system (or some major aspects of it). This can lead to actual meaningful changes to the system which will transfer wealth and political power from the owning class (also called Capitalists and the Bourgeoisie) to the working class. Sometimes they might even take control of the entire system and turn it socialist (gasp!). So the state, which exists to serve the interests of its ruling class, must take action to prevent it.
There are two general directions that the state can take:
Giving workers some concessions, hoping this will quell a full-blown socialist revolution (as seen in the creation of the social-democratic Weimar Germany after WW1, or the creation of western European social-democracies after WW2).
Crushing any power workers have, by turning completely joining the state apparatus together with industry, militarizing it and turning it authoritarian by any degree (anything from slightly more authoritarian to a full-blown dictatorship), and in the process wiping any workers’ resistance (destroying workers unions, socialist/communist organizations, etc.).
The latter method is Fasicsm. What happens in practice is that members of the ruling class turn to openly supporting and funding Fascist organizations, in a sense “lending them the keys” to the state to work things out and solve the crisis faced by the state. This is what happened in Italy in the 1920s, in Germany in the 1930s, in Spain in the 1930$s, etc.
A similar but different process happened in some not-first-world countries: for example, in Chile, Argentina and other Latin-American states in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Instead of the Fascists being supported and funded mainly by their own country’s Bourgeoisie, they were supported materially by the US, and in turn when they got in power they completely opened the doors to American imperialist interests.
This is, in essence, how and why Fasicsts get into power. The mechanisms by which Fasicsts achieve thier goals, and the different processes and ideologies they have are explained by other people here.