Mussolini said that fascism should be called corporatism because it’s the merger of state and corporate power.
So, are corporatism & fascism the same ideology or are there differences?
Thank you
I really don’t think it’s an ideology anyone holds anymore, I don’t know anyone saying “we’d be better with a more corporatist system”
It is sort of something that you use to describe some political action. Like the progressive era could be described as corporatist.
That being said though, fascism (as it has been traditionally practiced) I think implies corporatism.
Of course almost every intervention short of nationalization I think implies corporatism.
So, corporatism & fascism are not really the same thing?
Not the same thing vis-a-vis a strict definition but they are the same much as “jones is a man, but so is every other person” doesn’t stop jones from being the same as a man.
Just to clarify my understandings of corporatism and fascism:
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Corporatism is when the government colludes with and rigs the market for certain corporations?
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Fascism is when the government imposes very authoritarian regulations on private businesses to the point of nearly direct control?
Am I correct on the definitions?
I’ve read there was some link between very rich “capitalists” and the nazi state… but that’s from my communist reading, so it might be wrong. (the book is Fascisme et grand capital by Daniel Guerin, who was a collectivist anarchist, it’s a book that says that the haute bourgeoisie gave money to the nazi party so that he could protect their financial internet against the proletariat)
Not quite, in corporatism the state creates and protects a number of national councils called “corporations” where the management of specific sectors of the economy is determined by the votes of the industrials, the workers and the state.
Corporatism is so loosely defined it can mean anything from guild socialism to syndicalism to state capitalism.
Fascism has never really had a coherent meaning, except in what it was against: anti-internationalist, anti-democratic, anti-communist, anti-capitalist. Just what fascism is for is vague, except a kind of faux-nationalism.
The way I see it they’re the very same thing. Just as saying ‘anarchy’ and ‘polycentric order’.
I’d say that corporatism is the economic aspect of fascism. Fascism entails several things which corporatism does not: militarism, jingoism, neo-imperialism, anti-intellectualism, restriction of civil liberties, and an oligarchic power structure.
That could be the case, but doesn’t economic corporatism require all these other add-ons? Just for one, internal cartelization requires ex-im restriction, which lower teh international division fo labor, which put countries against each other, which mandate an agressive “at or be eaten” foreign policy. So, these are just two way to look at the same system.
That is right.
Merlin, America is almost corporatist (I’d say it’s still a little more collusionist than corporatist), but it lacks some the distinctive features of fascism. For one, Americans still have many more civil and political liberties than would be allowed in a fascist society. Americans also have the right to vote for elective representatives. No matter how weak of a freedom that is, that still makes the American government a representative democracy, as opposed to an oligarchy.
The biggest difference with Fascism is that in America there is not a society of mass mobilisation. Instead of trying to enlist the people as enthusastic servants of the state, the state is happy to merely keep the people passive.