XXth century fascism was the west’s capitalists reaction to communists taking power all around them. Rich assholes started financing rabid anti-communists to kill leftists.

An early version of fascism is described in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, in which he describes a failed revolution being followed by a period of terror, when anyone the cops thought was involved with workers movement could be killed in the street.

From the end of WWII to now, imperialists have been financing far-right groups to counter communists/leftist/progressive groups wherever they seem to be getting some power. See operations Gladio and Condor, and also the Jakarta Method

A great, short book about this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. Or if you’d prefer a short pamphlet about what Fascists are all about and how they came to power in Italy and Germany, there’s a collection of writings by Leon Trotsky called Fascism: What it is and how to fight it. Reading up on how fascism was further funded and used around the world by the United States after WW2 to fight communism is also a great idea, there’s the Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins which gets into this somewhat and generally researching things like the Operation Paperclip and Klaus Barbie and the rehabilitation of former Nazis in NATO etc.

But a short version: fascism is fundamentally a violent reaction against socialism and communism (movements which seek to take power for the working class). It’s footsoldiers tend to be of the petit-bourgeoisie, armed and organized by the Big Bourgeoisie (capitalists) to violently destroy any opposition to capitalism when capitalism inevitably fails to meet the needs of a functional society. The Nazis came to power by promising to destroy communism in Germany, obtaining funding and support from domestic and international capitalists to do so, and making good on that promise by using armed force to destroy leftist movements in the streets and eventually taking state power and using that state power to unabashedly persecute and kill communists and leftists. The first concentration camps were opened to hold communists, socialists and trade unionists.

First and foremost, the Sturmabteilung was mainly formed out of the Freikorps, which was formed and used to crush the Spartakusbund and communist uprisings in 1918 Germany. The Nazis and Italian Fascist Party’s first targets were always trade unions and the communist parties. The famous poem records the actual order of Nazi Priorities

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

As Moshe Postone elaborated in his analysis of Structural Anti-Semitism, that anti-semitism and using the Jew as a scapegoat allowed the separation of positive sides of modernity and capitalism (mass consumer goods, relative autonomy, etc.) from the negative aspects (alienation, volatility due to speculative finance, the parasitism of rent seeking, etc.) and say that the positive aspects were real capitalism, while the negative aspects were due to the Jewish controlled finance (a.k.a. cosmopolitanism, crony capitalism, woke-ism, etc.). Additionally, things like Judeo-Bolshevism allowed the Nazis to avoid questions like “who do we hate more, Jews or communists”, and how they were opposed to finance capital and communism simultaneously.

But to be more direct, Fascism is fundamentally the white blood cells of capitalism. Where major cataclysms like the great depression, hyper-inflation, or the broader alienation of capitalist life prevents people from really believing in capitalism as this ever present progress that provides a “rising tide that lifts all boats”. Fascism comes in to prevent any structural critiques or implication of capitalism by using scapegoats like the Jews controlling the banks or immigrants coming in and taking jobs. Fascism’s fundamental material basis and mass support is based around people that don’t want to give up on the idea of capitalism and their position in it (which is why the Petit Bourgeois is the most important basis of fascism and reaction) despite having to deal with the failures and consequences of capitalism by deflecting the blame onto socialism and some other group like the Jews. “The problem with the economy is that we still haven’t privatized (Privatiserung) and deregulated enough of the economy. There is still some occluded socialism somewhere.”

One train did once, so that’s basically correct

The fascists in Italy would grab a target, beat them, and force them to drink large quantities of castor oil

Not far off from what think is ideal child-raising conditions, then.

A masterpost on the Italian Fascists’ atrocities? It may take me a few days, but I’ll give it a shot.

thank u dr kawashima

Smh @ ableist hexbear tankies. No I will not rotate the picture or the series of cubes and god damn your funky iq tests!

no, I mean North Cairo

Eyyyyy I’m enforcing privatization ovah ere

Yeah, I can see that. Just inherent nationalism and racism but it’s acceptable because gommunism bad

He tried to fund that bridge in Kentucky when a local sent a letter to him cause the US government wouldn’t, so make that three

Only no, make fun of Mussolini by all means, but dont think CCP and Soviet actions arent any different, both wanted to eradicate minorities and built concentration camps, both were against the lgbtq.

You can be communists but dont be tankies. Dont try one language and one culture everywhere, also stop veing against the lgbtq.

Dont ask me, im not American.

Im not liberal, im a socialist.

And im not American either :)

Fascists and tankies are the same to me, neither have voting rights and both want to eradicate minority cultures. Only wanting a homogeneous societies.

Im a socialist myself, but CCP ideology just means only a few people get to stay in power just like feudal lords.

We need a more fair distribution of malarkey

Putting Uigyurs in concentration camps, being against the LGBTQ, colonising Tibet and eradicating their language and culture. Disputing borders with every neighbour. Claiming control for the entire South China Sea.

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@TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml

Incredible to describe genocide* as basically being hijinks.

*Disclaimer I don’t think there’s a genocide going on in the PRC, but if I was I wouldn’t describe it as “antics”

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A party of 90 million members and 500,000 municipal level labor cohorts voting in local and regional elections to create a central goverment that defuses most of its authority to regional economic blocs is far more democratic than any of the horseshit top down neoliberal technocracy that passes as “democracy” in the west

Full disclosure I’m half educating half trolling:

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has a better constitution than the US. Instead of a president appointing all of the heads of executive departments people get to vote for them.

Harvard University’s Ash Center released a 2020 study of Chinese public opinion showing that, as of 2016, “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing,”

[…]

Li: At the moment, the Chinese the party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change. I mean, I make the joke: “in America you can change the political party, but you can’t change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.” So, in the past 66 years, China has been run by one single party. Yet the political changes that have taken place in China in these past 66 years have been wider, and broader, and greater than probably any other major country in modern memory.

Pilger: So in that time China ceased to be communist. Is that what you’re saying?

Li: Well, China is a market economy, and it’s a vibrant market economy. But it is not a capitalist country. Here’s why: there’s no way a group of billionaires could control the Politburo as billionaires control American policy-making. So in China you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, capital — the interests of capital and capital itself — has risen above the American nation. The political authority cannot check the power of capital. That’s why America is a capitalist country, and China is not.

from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

also hey look, you’re in this picture:

Marxists view “success” as improving people’s lives, i.e. increasing the amount of wealth each individual has, getting people out poverty, improving life expectancy, improving literacy, improving home ownership rates, improving access to health care, so on and so forth.

Liberals view “success” as bringing people “freedumb and democrazy”, even if that entails completely destroying their living standards, killing tons of people, driving people into immense poverty, preventing their country from developing.

But it makes no sense because if “democracy” comes from the Greek, “demos kratia,” meaning, “people’s power.” If the people actually had the power, why would they not use the political institutions to improve their livelihoods? So how do liberals reconcile this contradiction that you can have “democracy” while at the same time not having expected outcomes from democracy?

They resolve this contradiction by reducing “democracy” down to mere rituals. If you perform the rituals, you’re a “democracy.” If you don’t, you’re a ”dictatorship." The actual outcomes of the rituals don’t matter, if people’s lives aren’t improving, if they’re even getting worse, it’s all justified as long as people are performing the correct rituals.

This makes liberal understanding of “democracy” better understood as a state religion rather than any actual real desire to give power to the people. They, in fact, always, consistently, praise the destruction of living standards as long as those rituals get to be performed. Libya is a great example of this, but so is all of eastern Europe, so is the million who died of COVID in the US while they call China “authoritarian” for protecting its people.

So if you look at global poverty over the last (say) 40 years or so, there’s been a downward trend. Take China out, no downward trend. The World Bank likes to crow about how their policies have lead to the lowest levels of poverty in history, but if you look at places like sub Saharan Africa and Latin America where the World Bank and the IMF have been most active, poverty has been stagnant at best and actively increasing at worst - something the UN has remarked upon repeatedly.

So what gives? If China is just like any other capitalistic country, why is poverty going down there so much faster than anywhere else? Is the fact that China has been so apparently successful at reducing poverty and food insecurity an endorsement of authoritarianism?

Apart from what everyone else has posted I’d just like to add that China is the only country (with means) that takes climate change seriously