Fascism is not corporatism

One sees this supposed quote from Benito Mussolini around the internet:

Fascism should more properly be called “corporatism”, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.

The term “fascism” is notoriously difficult to define and commonly abused as a mere synonym for totalitarianism when it is better understood as a more specific phenomenon with its own distinctive qualities. (Indeed, in their early stages even the unmistakably fascist movements of the Nazis and Mussolini’s Italian Fascists did not admit to a totalitarian agenda.) But this quote about “corporatism” is a fabrication and its characterization of fascism is misleading.

The Skeptical Libertarian reveals Mussolini didn’t even say it, and that the faux quote is misleading about the relationship between the state and the economy under Mussolini’s fascism:

Il Duce himself makes clear they are quite separate concepts, with corporatism being a necessary feature of a fascist state. But more seriously, Ruppert thinks “corporations” mean modern limited liability companies (what we today mean by corporations), and that these business entities “merge” with or take over the state and use it for their own benefit.

This is just plain wrong, and it demonstrates why this quote is not just false but misleading. “Corporations” were not individual businesses. Under fascist corporatism, sectors of the economy were divided into corporate groups, whose activities and interactions were managed and coordinated by the government. The idea was to split the difference between socialism and laissez faire capitalism, letting the state control and direct the economy from the top-down without itself owning the means of production.

[⋯]

Economic fascism was direct state control and planning of the economy, not subsidies or special favors dished out by politicians in a democracy to businesses in an otherwise free market, which is what people in the United States mean by corporatism today. Fascism was not a business takeover of government but rather the opposite …

Corey Robin looks at this in his post Three Theses (not really: more like two graphs and a link) on Nazism and Capitalism which features this striking quote from Germà Bell in The Economic History Review:

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.

Tim Clancy offers a lengthy debunking:

Benito Mussolini created the word “fascism”. He defined it as “the merging of the state and the corporation”. He also said “a more accurate word would be ‘corporatism’”.

This was also the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to excluse any mention of corporations.

— Adam McKay, director of The Big Short

Seen this circulating a few times so here we go. Feel free to share. As in all things, trying to convince me of your ideology from a starting point of historical ignorance is like a flat-earther trying to convince me how they’re going to build a rocket ship.

First off, the meme plays off a column from 2010 that has been debunked repeatedly over the last 14 years for being objectively wrong in every way imaginable. For instance, the dictionary has always been owned by the same group since 1964, it changed its legal structure in 1987.

But perhaps more importantly, McKay and this meme does not understand what corporatism is or means, trying a quick-con of making you think it's like a modern meaning of the word ‘corporation’. /facepalm

Corporatism in this context is from “corpus” or Latin for the body. It was a political method of ordering “bodies” or groups of the population within a political-economy. This includes things like the division between nobility, merchants/towns, and rural peasants or serfs. It can also be smaller, ‘chartered’ bodies such as the Catholic church chartering military or monastic orders. It could even be the concept of the Three Estates in France. From ancient times until the revolutionary era, corporatism (under many forms) is kind of the status quo for both political and social orderings in Europe from the fall of the Roman Republic until ~1642. They may differ country by country, but generally some divine right of kings monarch sits on top aligned with the dominant religious power, there are a few social classes representing the bodies of population by social and economic and political position underneath them, and these “bodies” are how society is ordered.

Beginning in 1642 two revolutionary waves sweep through the European powers and their colonies. The first is a political revolution focused on the nature of political liberty, the structure of political power, and a successful shift from the divine right of kings to the political power of the population, usually represented by middle and upper class (depending on where you were standing.)

This era began with the English Civil Wars 1642-1652 that opened the door, through which charged the Americans in the American Revolutionary War 1775-1783, which influenced the French who revolted 1789-1799, which weakened French power overseas enabling the Haitian Revolutions 1791-1804, which overlapped with the rise of Napoleon, his seizure of power and his imperial campaigns 1799-1815) that upended political orders wherever he conquered. And as Napolean weakened Spain through occupation, the Bolivarian campaigns or Spanish American wars of independence saw most of Spain’s South American colonies gain independence 1809-1833. Skipping the lull after the English Civil and starting with the American Revolution this six decade period is one of the most intense and successful introduction of new political theories and reorderings of the political status quo in history up to this point across three continents.

But … these are largely political revolutions. Alongside these efforts were attempts to change the social order of thing. Broadly speaking how social classes of elite / aristocrat / high class, middle class, and working classes which arose out of the industrial era acted and interacted with each other. The historical concept of corporatism as a way of ordering classes became a headless body during the French Revolution as the three estates got blown apart. (See what I did there.)

Whereas the political revolutions were, to varying degrees, fairly successful at introducing and cementing new ideas of political thoughts. The social components of these revolution, introducing and cementening new ideas of social-economic class arrangements were not. People forget the ferocity and strength of the Cromwellian social revolution. Probably because it preserved a fraction of the time his severed head did and was pretty much ended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which restored the monarchy. Beginning from here going forward, revolutions in this era focused largely on political liberties and where social and economic liberties were fought for, they didn’t survive and become practiced to the extent the political liberties were. Male American citizens may have gained the right to vote, but class was very much still a thing and we still had slaves.

As the political revolution era peters out without significant change in social orders, this then leads to an era of largely social revolutions, not like disco or grunge or MySpace social revolutions, but efforts to change the economic or social order between the classes that had previously been managed through corporatism. Repeated failed uprisings and riots across Europe in 1830, 1848, Paris Commune in 1870 etc. And whereas the political revolutions had worked, none of these social revolutions really had traction.

This is the “question” the political theoriests in the latter half of the 19^th and first part of the 20^th centuries are trying to answer. Marx’s class conflict is just one of those answers. A resurrected corporatism was another answer, often presented in contrast to the class-conflict ideas of Marxism. Corporatism advocated class-collaboration, integration between the “bodies” … be they education systems, guilds, associations. By way of example workers unions that negotiated with the companies is a form of corporatism, as it it brought together in negotiated settlements working and middle classes versus a revolution of the workers seizing the means themselves. Syndacatilism, communism, socialism, corporatism, anarchism and many other *isms arise in this period both trying to figure out a way to reorder and resolve the underlying social-economic class conflict that the political revolutions hadn't addressed.

Another wave of revolutions kick off in 1870-1920 in Latin America that combine these new ideas of political reform as a means of getting to social reform. They’re super complicated and fascinating in their own right, but the TLDR is they preview a method and form of uprising that Europe hadn’t successfully seen that would later be copied in Russia in 1905 and 1918.

And it’s in the Russian revolution of 1918 was the first to ‘crack the nut’ of a European region successfully combining a major political reordering (toppling the tsar) with significant social-economic reordering (communism.) Late in the game, fascism emerges out of the socialist and syndacatlist branches of this effort 1910s-20s and in reaction to the communist revolution in Russia and building upon the strong ethno-nationalist trends that began in the late 19^th century and were such a key part of WWI. It begins taking full shape in Italy under Mussolin well before Hitler adopts it.

And fascism is its own unique political economy. Too many words are spilled by bespawling loitersacks trying to claim fascism to socialism or capitalism or something else … mainly as a means to take the moral highground in opposition to whatever it is they are claiming is ‘fascist’. But fascism is not any of those things.

It’s different. It may pull words and concepts from all of these strands, which is why Nazis are the nationalist socialist party and their first platform has explicitly socialist sounding tenets (not they were ever implemented and soon dropped.) Likewise you can find references to private enterprise in Mussolini’s writing. But fascism is its own answer to this problem of political and social ordering. And their answer is everything is subsumed by a totalitarian chauvinistic ethno-nationalist state power. And corporatism, the ordering of bodies or classes of the population, is one of those things that gets subsumed as a means of exercising totalitarianism through fascism.

Specific to this alleged quote by Mussolini. It’s possible he said it, but doubtful (see Chip Berlet on Mussolini On The Corporate State for efforts to find it), because his approach to Fascism was that the state subsume the corporatist entities not ‘merge’ with them (emphasis added):

The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. (p. 14) [⋯] Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State (p. 15) [⋯]The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State. (p. 41).

Fascism is its own unique form of political-economy, different from socialism or capitalism, despite the frequent intermingling of these words.

Remember, any socialist trying to tell you fascist corporatism is like ‘modern corporations’ so that you'll vote with them is like a flat earther telling you they can build a rocketship. Likewise any Trumper telling you Fascism is just socialism so “totally don’t worry bro about these strong-man chauvinistic ethno-nationalist authoritarian traits you’re seeing among me and my friends because no way we’re socialist” is like a creationist telling you how how to understand evolution in order to sell you an Ark they’re building. They don’t know what they're talking about, so how can they think they have the solution? The goal of any political ideology is not to help you understand a complex world so you can make it better, but dumb you down so whatever overly simplified solution they offer starts to look ‘common sense’.