koshergrl
Diamond Member
- Aug 4, 2011
- 81,129
- 14,025
- 2,190
fascism
noun
- an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
Oh brother, I hate it when the ignorant pull this crap.
"Many people want to track the Left by a kind of lineage interpretation. So they go back and look at intellectuals (usually quite selectively) and say something like: These people called themselves the Left, the people they hated were “the Right,” they hated the Nazis therefore the Nazis were right-wing."
"...fascism was seen as being to the “right” of Communism....Trotsky considered fascism to be right-wing socialism or middle-class socialism. It seems to me that the key word there is socialism, which is properly understood as a phenomenon of the Left. (The Soviets also considered not only the New Deal fascist and right-wing, but the American Socialist Party, too.)"
So perhaps if you are a Marxist, you consider fascism as a right wing phenom.
"Pseudoerasmus (and many others) notes that the Nazis maintained (limited and often purely rhetorical) respect for private property! The Soviets didn’t! Therefore, the Nazis were not left-wing! Well, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders believe in private property a good deal more than the Nazis did. Does that make them right-wingers?"
"Despite the worker-friendly rhetoric of fascists, they in actual power regimented labour in such a way as to please any strike-breaking capitalist of the 19th century. The Nazis, for example, forced workers into a single state-controlled trades union (DAF), which controlled wage growth and prevented striking and wage arbitration. Businesses (some, not even most), by contrast, were given incentives to consolidate into Morgan-style industrial trusts as shareholers and engage in contractual relations as monopolists or near-monopolists with other trusts and with the state. Here we go again. Yes, Nazis squelched independent labor unions. Yes, yes, Nazis repressed socialists and Communists. Fine, fine. You know who else treated independent labor unions roughly? You know who else repressed socialists and Communists? The Soviet Union. The Soviets surely killed and arrested more domestic socialists, starting with the Mensheviks, than the Nazis did. And how did labor unions fare in the Soviet Union? How were strikes treated? Let’s ask the survivors of the Novocherkassk massacre or the Kengir uprising. "
"The more interesting point, I think, is that most Communist regimes eventually stop erasing traditional society root and branch and move toward a policy of invoking and co-opting useful national traditions and institutions. It turns out that the masses grow weary of doctrinaire socialism and need a little nationalism to get out of bed (and, quite often, nationalist regimes slowly realize they can’t stay in power without becoming ever stricter socialists)...The best example of course is today’s North Korea, which started conventionally Communist but eventually became insanely nationalist (and racist). The economic policies don’t change that much, but the arguments for them do. "
Read more at: Was Fascism Right-Wing (Again)?