The Politcal Economy of Fascism

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/27/the-political-economy-of-fascism/
Date Written:  2017-10-27
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21641

For all of the millions of words written about the fascist danger posed by Donald Trump, there are very few devoted to an actual analysis of fascist economics both as ideology and state policy.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

It is useful to remember that Mussolini was a Socialist Party parliamentarian who broke with his party over its failure to support Italian participation in WWI. Like many on the Italian left, Mussolini was drawn to the political philosophy of George Sorel, the syndicalist prophet of violence that George Ciccariello-Maher champions today as a fix for the left’s problems. Sorel, like Mussolini, shared Alceste De Ambris’s syndicalism but moved to the right under the influence of French ultra-nationalist Charles Maurras who was the leading ideologist for Action Française, the magazine of a fascist group of the same name that backed the treasonous Vichy regime. I am sure that George Ciccariello-Maher will not evolve in a similar fashion.

Mussolini’s economic policies can be described as corporatism, an ideology that advocates capitalists and the working class working together to advance mutually beneficial nationalist goals. Despite Trump’s attempts to represent himself as the savior of miners and construction workers, the actual policies being pushed by his economic advisers can hardly be distinguished from Reagan and Thatcher era privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and all the rest. Goldman-Sachs bankers like Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin pray at Milton Friedman’s altar, not a syndicalist like George Sorel.