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The '''Economics of fascism''' can be studied by examining the economic policies of various countries under fascist control during the period between World War One and the end of World War II. Some scholars and analysts argue that there is an identifiable political economy of fascism that is distinct from other systems, comprised of essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. Others argue that while there are some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization.{{fact}} A few see echoes of fascist economic policies in the modern welfare state or the neo-corporatism of transnational capital. The '''Economics of fascism''' can be studied by examining the economic policies of various countries under fascist control during the period between World War One and the end of World War II. {{fact}} Some scholars and analysts argue that there is an identifiable political economy of fascism that is distinct from other systems, comprised of essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. {{fact}} Others argue that while there are some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization.{{fact}} A few see echoes of fascist economic policies in the modern welfare state or the neo-corporatism of transnational capital. {{fact}}


The definition of the term ''Fascism'' is hotly debated by scholars, but it is generally used to refer to ] ] and/or ] regimes that existed in parts of ] (and, according to some, ]) during the early to mid 20th century through World War II; and in a variety of modified forms after that. The definition of the term ''Fascism'' is hotly debated by scholars, but it is generally used to refer to ] ] and/or ] regimes that existed in parts of ] (and, according to some, ]) during the early to mid 20th century through World War II; and in a variety of modified forms after that.

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The Economics of fascism can be studied by examining the economic policies of various countries under fascist control during the period between World War One and the end of World War II. Some scholars and analysts argue that there is an identifiable political economy of fascism that is distinct from other systems, comprised of essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. Others argue that while there are some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization. A few see echoes of fascist economic policies in the modern welfare state or the neo-corporatism of transnational capital.

The definition of the term Fascism is hotly debated by scholars, but it is generally used to refer to authoritarian nationalist and/or far-right regimes that existed in parts of Europe (and, according to some, Latin America) during the early to mid 20th century through World War II; and in a variety of modified forms after that.

The political ideology of fascism dictates that all aspect of national life are subjected to the national interest, sometimes to a totalitarian degree. Fascist leaders referred to their economic system as a "third way," noting it to be distinct from both socialism and capitalism. Mussolini, for instance, said that "fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrines of Liberalism, both in the political field and in the field of economics." .

Because fascism is not an economic ideology, the economic policies of fascist regimes were by no means the same in all countries, nor were they unique to fascism. This, along with the fact that the exact boundaries of fascism itself are not well defined, has generated considerable controversy. There is no single account of the economics of fascism that would be accepted by all historians. Different opinions exist, emphasizing various claimed aspects of fascist economic policy - including diverse and sometimes opposing things such as socialism, capitalism, corporatism, war economies, economic interventionism, central economic coordination, mercantilism, economic nationalism, protectionism, a welfare state, and militarism as an economic institution.

These characteristics are sometimes cited to support claims that similar economic policies under non-fascist governments are either inspired by, or share common values with, fascist regimes. Usually, this is done by opponents of those policies.

Currently, there is considerable social stigma associated with the words "fascism" and "fascist," which are often used with pejorative connotations. For this reason, many people commit the fallacy of guilt by association: assuming that any policy employed by fascists must be bad simply because fascists approved it. See also Reductio ad Hitlerum. The present article does not assert that any policy is good or bad.

General characteristics of Fascist economies

Fascism in part was developed as solution to the perceived problems of laissez-faire capitalism. Mussolini said that government planning would "introduce order in the economic field." Likewise, the America Lawrence Dennis, in his 1936 book advocating "fascism" for America, claimed that "history and present day experience are full of demonstrations that the more there is of what is commonly called laissez-faire, economic freedom, democracy or parliamentary government, the more economic maladjustments there will be, and the more difficult of readjustment they will prove." Fascist economic planning seeks to coordinate the economy to serve the what is held to be in the interests of the "common good" rather than allowing "private initiative" seek its own course.

Under fascism, business and government collude to profit by engaging in economic intervention. Socialist historian Gaetano Salvemini said in 1936: "In actual fact, it is the State, i.e., the taxpayer who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

Jutta Schmitt, a radical political economist, says that "the main objective of economic fascism is the elevation of the profit rate in times of economic recession to the detriment of the working class, and the tendential militarization of work itself." Schmitt says that, "Such militarization of work in combination with 'war production' inevitably leads to efforts of conquering foreign markets and dispose of new (or strategic) fields of capital investment."

According to Schmitt, a lecturer in Political Science at the University de Los Andes in Venezuela:

  • In our times of a highly increased and accelerated centralization and monopolization of capital on a world wide scale, the normal functioning of profit production depends on a considerable degree on State-guaranteed profit and the growing interaction and "melting" of economic monopolies with their political representation in the State apparatus (what Di Lorenzo calls "planned capitalism" and what Ralph Nader denounced as the two, ("democractic-republican") faces of Corporate America).
  • Economic fascism is a State-directed response to economic recession, that is, to the difficulties in capital accumulation (overproduction / underconsumption / inflation / weak currency), and especially if State-directed, benign "Welfare-State measures" fail in the absence of possible fields of investment. Economic fascism redirects part of the income of financiers, light-industry manufacturers, the middle class and especially the working class, whose response capacity is being crushed and whose hard fought for benefits are being cut back, towards the military-industrial complex or "war production".

Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism.

While fascist states generally allowed private property at least in name, many libertarian and conservative economists see similarities between the state intervention in fascist economies and that of socialist or even communist nations. See: Fascism_and_ideology.

Libertarian economist Thomas DiLorenzo says that under fascism, "private property and business ownership are permitted, but are in reality controlled by government through a business-government 'partnership'." Anarcho-capitalist polemicist Anthony Gregory says that economic fascism is designed for government and business's "mutual benefit: profits for the corporate interests, expanded tax revenue, and augmented central planning powers for the state."

According to conservative/paleoconservative ideologue John T. Flynn, the three key elements of economic fascism are: "1) The institution of planned consumption of the spending-borrowing government. 2) The planned economy 3) Militarism as an economic institution" . Lawrence Dennis, argued that militarism was not a necessary ingredient, in his 1936 book The Coming American Fascism promoting what he called a non-militaristic "fascist" economic system for the U.S.; he argues that even in the absence of war that laissez-faire cannot satisfy the needs of the masses.

Some free market advocates and conservatives have argued that the economic policies of the New Deal as being fascist economics. For example, President Herbert Hoover said, in his Memoirs, that the New Deal was "pure fascism; that it was a remaking of Mussolini's corporate state." President Ronald Reagan said, "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time." John T. Flynn wrote an influential book in 1944, called As We Go Marching, detailing the similarites. Likewise, several economists who favor free market capitalism have argued the same. See: Fascism_and_ideology.

Political economy of Nazi Germany

Hitler's government of Germany used a variety of means to achieve its objectives of remilitarisation. In the pre-war period, Germany embarked on a programme of public works and rearmament funded by deficit spending, overseen by Hjalmar Schacht. This period saw a considerable reduction in unemployment, while price controls prevented the recurrence of inflation. A number of economists, starting with Michal Kalecki, have seen this as an example of military Keynesiansm.

However, Germany's economic policy went far beyond normal Keynesian intervention. DiLorenzo notes that the Nazis in Germany demanded in their economic program, among other things, "abolition of interest; a government-operated social security system: the ability of government to confiscate land without compensation; a government monopoly in education; and a general assault on private-sector entrepreneurship..."

From 1939 onward, the control of the military on the German economy increased. By the end of the war, a significant component of the labour force of the Third Reich was made up of slave labour. This practice started from the early days of labour camps or colonies of undesirables (German:unzuverlässige Elemente) such as the homeless, homosexual and criminals as well as political dissidents, Jews and anyone that the regime wanted ou of the way. Slave labour use became much more prevalent during World War II with hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews, Slavs and other conquered peoples used by German corporations such as Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben and even Fordwerke - a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company.

Private property

Adolf Hitler said in a 1931 interview: "I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the principle: benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual. But the state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners of property."

Buchheim and Scherner argue that the opinion that private property existed in name only is not correct, though acknoweldging that state control over property was indeed significant. They describe the system as a "state-directed private ownership economy."

Another point was the expropriation of property owned by Jews. While this had a small (though noteworthy) impact on the economy, it was a vital exhibition of the Nazi's anti-semitic policy.

Capital and Class

In his book Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the independent Marxist, used class analysis in his assessment of the fascist economy in Germany. This was built upon years of experience secretly working in the offices of the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag or MWT - the headquarters of the German big business association. Sohn-Rethel argued fascist rule in Germany as part of the reconsolidation of bourgeois rule with the political triumph of financially unsound and unstable groups of big and small business (the Harzburg Front) over parts of the economy that were well adapted to the financial conditions of the time. However he argues than it is a mistake to see the "Nazis as the direct agents of a monopoly capital in command of capital in command of profits..." and that "profit-making itself had gone into the red before the Nazis could exploit the now unresolvable contradictions and get the better of finance capital." The strengthened state took over the entrepreneurial, managerial functions but capital remains in private hands even though the state sets prices, profit margins and the allocation of raw materials. This was part and parcel of the suspension of normative legal environs (both social and financial) in Germany.

Sohn-Rethel continues: "Capital is only in possession of its private initiative to dispose freely over its means of production while it keeps to the market rules. But only if one sees the crisis as an economic catastrophe which shatters all these rules can one get the measure of its immense dangers. In this case capitalism can survive in the paradoxical shape of the 'corporate state' in which the contridiction between the social character of production and the private appropriation of capital assumes the form of a state-run economy on private account". The bourgeoisie needed the defeat of the worker's class solidarity and further the depreciation in overall working conditions. This was in order to increase in the rate of surplus value and profit from wage freezes. The drive in the increased exploitation of the proletariat was greatly assisted by anti-semitism and resurgence of the war economy that reached fruition with the Nazi party's capture of power during the early 1930's. As Sohn-Rethel puts it: "the (world) capitalist was lifted off the rocks of stagnation only by means of the arms race forced upon the world powers through the initiative of German fascism preparing for world war."

Political economy of Fascist Italy

Benito Mussolini said: "For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State."

Maria Sophia Quine, in Italy's Social Revolution, discusses the rise of a welfare state with the development of fascism in Italy. She says in the introduction of the book that it is discussed "how Italian governments from liberalism to fascism attempted to build a welfare state atop a charitable foundation that was fast set in the Middle Ages." No longer was charity relied upon, but citizens were taxed to care for those perceived to be in need. Systems such as a national healthcare system and employment insurance were set up.

Richman explains how fascism replaced a laissez-faire system in Italy: "From 1922 to 1925, Mussolini's regime pursued a laissez-faire economic policy under the liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani. De Stefani reduced taxes, regulations, and trade restrictions and allowed businesses to compete with one another. But his opposition to protectionism and business subsidies alienated some industrial leaders, and De Stefani was eventually forced to resign."

Political economy of Franco's Spain

In 1933, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the former authoritarian Prime Minister, founded a political movement known as the Falange, or "phalanx." The Falange was not successful in the elections of 1936, elections that resulted in the creation of a Popular Front government.

When conservative elements of Spanish society supported Francisco Franco and the military in his war against the Popular Front, the Falange became associated with Franco's side in that war, and the government that arose from Franco's successes appropriated the ideas and some of the terminology of the Falange, including a nostalgia for the interventionism of Miguel Primo de Rivera.

One falangist theorist, Federico de Utturia, described the goal of the movement as "to kill the old soul of the liberal, decadent, masonic, materialist and frenchified nineteenth century."

See a work by Stanley G. Payne, Falange. A History of Spanish Fascism Stanford University Press (1961).

References

  • Adler, Les K., and Thomas G. Patterson. "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism." American Historical Review 75 (April 1970): 1046-64. in JSTOR
  • Alpers, Benjamin L. Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s. University of North Carolina Press. 2003
  • Blum, George P. The Rise of Fascism in Europe Greenwood Press, 1998
  • Brady, Robert A. The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism 1937.
  • Brady, Robert A. Business as a System of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, argues National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as well as NRA were proto-fascist
  • Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. Vintage, 1995.
  • Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World 1941.
  • Cannistraro, Philip (ed.). Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy, Greenwood Press, 1982
  • Diggins, John P. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton University Press, 1972.
  • Feuer, Lewis S. "American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917-1932: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology." American Quarterly 14 (June 1962): 119-49. in JSTOR
  • Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism London, Routledge, 1993
  • Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London, Arnold, 3rd edn, 1993,
  • Maddux, Thomas R. "Red Fascism, Brown Bolshevism: The American Image of Totalitarianism in the 1930s." Historian' 40 (November 1977): 85-103.
  • Philip Morgan; Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 Routledge. 2002
  • Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 1995
  • Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Thought in the Depressions Years. Harper and Row, 1973.
  • Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933-1993. University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
  • Sohn-Rethel. Alfred Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, CSE Books, 1978 ISBN 0906336015
  • Skotheim, Robert Allen. Totalitarianism and American Social Thought. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
  • Swedberg, Richard; Schumpeter: A Biography Princeton University Press, 1991.
  • Wiesen, S. Jonathan. German Industry and the Third Reich Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies Vol. 13, No. 2

Notes

  1. Logical fallacy: The Hitler card
  2. Appleton, Josie "I'm right because... you're a Nazi"
  3. "The greening of hate", Interview of Betsy Hartmann by Fred Pearce (20 February 2003)
  4. Schmitt, Jutta. "Concerning 'Economic Fascism'"
  5. Fleming, Thomas. Chronicles (Rockford, Illinois), May 2000, p. 11.
  6. Mussolini, Benito Fascism: Doctrines and Institutions 1935.
  7. Reisman, George Why Nazism Was Socialism and Socialism Is Totalitarianism
  8. Flynn, John T. As We Go Marching 1944.
  9. Dennis, Larence. The Coming American Fascism 1936.
  10. Buchheim, Christoph and Scherner, Jonas. The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry University of Mannheim, Germany.
  11. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Economic Fascism, 1994.
  12. Mussolini, Benito Fascism
  13. Salvemini, Gaetano. Under the Axe of Fascism 1936.
  14. Richman, Sheldon; "Fascism," discusses economic fascism.Fascism by
  15. Anthony, Gregory Why the Supreme Court Should Have Just Shut Up 2005.
  16. Britt, Lawrence, 'The 14 characteristics of fascism', Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, p. 20.
  17. Quine, Maria Sophia Italy's Social Revolution, Palgrave (2002).
  18. Barkai, Avraham, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, Oxford Berg Publishers, 1990.
  19. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, CSE Books, 1978 ISBN 0906336015
  20. Beevor, Antony. The Spanish Civil War (1982).
  21. Payne, Stanley, History of Fascism (1995) p 230

See also

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