The Fascist Threat

The Fascist Threat por Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.:

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.

It is true that fascism has no overarching theoretical apparatus. There is no grand theorist like Marx. That makes it no less real and distinct as a social, economic, and political system. Fascism also thrives as a distinct style of social and economic management. And it is as much or more of a threat to civilization than full-blown socialism.

If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering State on the free market that drains its capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the fascist State has been called The Vampire Economy. It sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once thriving economy.

Government under fascism becomes the cartelization device for both workers and the private owners of capital. Competition between workers and between businesses is regarded as wasteful and pointless; the political elites decide that the members of these groups need to get together and cooperate under government supervision to build a mighty nation.

Under fascism, society as we know it is left intact, though everything is lorded over by a mighty State apparatus. Whereas traditional socialist teaching fostered a globalist perspective, fascism was explicitly nationalist. It embraced and exalted the idea of the nation-state.

As for the bourgeoisie, fascism doesn’t seek their expropriation. Instead, the middle class gets what it wants in the form of social insurance, medical benefits, and heavy doses of national pride.

It is for all these reasons that fascism takes on a right-wing cast. It doesn’t attack fundamental bourgeois values. It draws on them to garner support for a democratically backed all-round national regimentation of economic control, censorship, cartelization, political intolerance, geographic expansion, executive control, the police State, and militarism.