Socialism No Longer Has Negative Connotation

[Ben Kenobi]

Especially when they say "originally defined" and failed to realize that Fascism was a very anti-capitalist philosophy.

Here, here.

The only thing that differs between Fascism and Marxism is that Fascism is based on race, whereas Marxism is based on class. Fascism seeks to preserve the nation hence, "National Socialism" , whereas Marxism seeks to preserve the proletariat. Both elevate the community over the individual.

Capitalism on the other hand is much more akin to Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism, which elevates the individual over the community.

[Ben Kenobi]

As a former Trotskyist, the fascists have never been our comrades.

Neither were the Mensheviks or for that matter, the Stalinists. Just because they aren't your comrades doesn't mean that they aren't socialists.

Nor were they the comrades of the Soviets. The Soviets simply needed to buy some time to keep them at bay, since the West refused to sign a defensive treaty with them. The West also sacrificed Spain to fascism, so I wouldn't brag too much if I were you.

Serving one undemocratic master is no better then serving another. Why should the west have supported the communists in Spain?

As to how fascism was defined, while the capitalists were applauding it for saving Italy, the communists were analyzing it and showing it for what it really was. Even before Mussolini claimed that fascism = corporations + government, communists were explaining what it was, and why it was dangerous.

So is communism for that matter.

[Blaupanzer]

The US has been in an economic structure called "monoply capitalism" since the turn of the last century. In this system, the Government is the lender and financial support of last resort. This is not supposed to be bail out the overpaid managers, but rather the "owners" of these big firms. Oh well!

Italy's government in WWII was chacterized by "syndicalism" which emphasized the power of labor unions as equals to the owners of the production facilities. National socialism depended on the cooperation of the owners of the production facilities to rule the state. Most "socialist" states simply increase the number of programs and their expense to "soften" the jagged edges of capitalism. Communist states to date have all been centrally controlled economies -- controlled by the state. These alternatives are not the same.

[Felch]

As a former Trotskyist, the fascists have never been our comrades. Nor were they the comrades of the Soviets. The Soviets simply needed to buy some time to keep them at bay, since the West refused to sign a defensive treaty with them. The West also sacrificed Spain to fascism, so I wouldn't brag too much if I were you.

Conspiring to partition Poland and dividing the rest of Eastern Europe between the two of them is just "buying time?" As was supplying raw materials for the Nazi war machine right up to June of 1941.

Have you had a chance to read Homage to Catalonia, or an of Orwell's essays about the Spanish civil war? By the end of the war, the fascists were pretty difficult to distinguish from the Communists. They were just rival gangs, trying to hold on to what they had, and take whatever they didn't have.

As to how fascism was defined, while the capitalists were applauding it for saving Italy, the communists were analyzing it and showing it for what it really was. Even before Mussolini claimed that fascism = corporations + government, communists were explaining what it was, and why it was dangerous.

The communists were analyzing fascism? That's like saying Ann Coulter analyzes liberalism. It was nothing to them but a dirty word.

[Darius871]

Capitalism has nothing to say about that.

Under your definition, that is. Under Imran's definition capitalism would insist that particular capitalists' enterprises would rise or fall in the free market on their own merits, which is contrary to the state's artificial subsidy or destruction of some particular segments of the the capitalist class. It really is a question of petty semantics.

[MOBIUS]

One would think that Europe would be a good enough arguement against it with its anemic economic growth and basket case politics.

Socialism doesn't exactly equal communism after all.

One would think that one day you'd learn how to spell!

You can take the boy out of Walmart - but you can't take Walmart out of the boy...

[Imran Siddiqui]

Capitalism has nothing to say about that.

Of course it does. It's state intervention. As originally defined, it would be anti capitalistic to take companies away from entrepreneurs and/or owners because you didn't like them. It's one of the reasons capitalism was such a revolutionary and tradition destroying force (even with all the constraints and anti-capitalist measures placed upon it by overbearing governments).

[Imran Siddiqui]

that Fascism is based on race

Incorrect. Fascism is based on the nation. That can be a racial or ethnic nation or patriotic members of a nation-state.

[Ben Kenobi]

That can be a racial or ethnic nation or patriotic members of a nation-state.

Hmm, they all seem to come equipped with a definition of the Volk, just like Communists have for the proletariat.

[chequita guevara]

Although Adam Smith is often described as the "father of capitalist thinking," he never used the term "capitalism". He described his own preferred economic system as "the system of natural liberty." However, Smith defined "capital" as stock, and "profit" as the just expectation to keep the revenue from improvements to that stock. Smith also made capital improvement the central goal of the economic and political system.[45]

Arthur Young[46] first used the term capitalist of his economic surveys in his work Travels in France (1792).[47] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[46] an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk (1823).[48] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used capitalist in his first work What is Property? (1840) to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli[46] used capitalist in the 1845 work Sybil. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also used capitalist (Kapitalist) as a private owner of capital in The Communist Manifesto (1848).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary,[46] capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854, by which he meant by having ownership of capital.

According to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the term private capitalism in 1863.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred the capitalistic system (kapitalistisches System)[49][50] to the capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsform) in Das Kapital (1867).[51] The word "capitalism" only appears twice in Das Kapital, namely in tome II, p.124 (German edition) and in Theories about Surplus Value, tome II, p.493 (German edition). However, the late Engels made more frequent use of the term "capitalism". Marx's notion of the capitalist mode of production is characterised as a system of primarily private ownership of the means of production in a mainly market economy, with a legal framework on commerce and a physical infrastructure provided by the state.[52]

An 1877 work entitled Better Times, and an unknown author in 1884 of the Pall Mall Gazette, also used the term capitalism.[46]

However, the first use of capitalism to describe the production system was by the German economist Werner Sombart, in his 1902 book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben). Sombart's close friend and colleague, Max Weber, also used capitalism in his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus).

[Imran Siddiqui]

Hmm, they all seem to come equipped with a definition of the Volk, just like Communists have for the proletariat.

Like... Mussolini? The only "volk" he had was Italians who weren't commies.

"Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. [...] National pride has no need of the delirium of race."
- Mussolini 1933

Though he had to crack down on Jews when Hitler pushed on him (there were, prior to that Jewish members of the Fascist Party).

[Ben Kenobi]

Like... Mussolini? The only "volk" he had was Italians who weren't commies.

"Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. [...] National pride has no need of the delirium of race."
- Mussolini 1933

Though he had to crack down on Jews when Hitler pushed on him (there were, prior to that Jewish members of the Fascist Party).

Still a definition of who is a good 'Italian', even if he eschewed explicitly using race as a criteria.

[Unimatrix11]

Here, here.

The only thing that differs between Fascism and Marxism is that Fascism is based on race, whereas Marxism is based on class. Fascism seeks to preserve the nation hence, "National Socialism" , whereas Marxism seeks to preserve the proletariat. Both elevate the community over the individual.

Capitalism on the other hand is much more akin to Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism, which elevates the individual over the community.

a) Fascism != National Scoialism, at least in theory. To put it very briefly and roughly, Fascism is the total acknowledgement of brute force as legitimation for rule (and previlegde - when you think about it, this is pretty much, where the political spectrum ´rejoins on the other end´, because rule of the stronger could also be called the central, if not theoritical, then at least practical, consequence of anarchism ), inside and outside the country, while in National Socialism, inside there is some sort of solidarity, comradeship and such among the members of the state. The difference becomes quite obvious when you look at how military units were led in each, for example.

b) Marxism does not try to preserve the proletariat - it tries to dissolve all classes and form the classless society (which is utopian IMHO, but one can always try to come as close to utopia as is possible, if one chooses to).

[BeBMan]

To the general fascism - capitalism stuff: the German NS variant was - esp. early - not a consistent movement, and so you had all kinds of ideas flyin' around (anti-commie as well as anti-cappie or generally anti-western, in some sense anti-modern, in others not). H's 'Mein Kampf' wasn't really a systematic approach to develop a philosophy that would deserve the name. The history of Italian fascism has its weird turns too. Il Duce was more of a socialist apparatchik pre WWI, then turned to the right during the war....

[Saras]

Saulius Anuzis, sounds Lithuanian. Can't be bad