h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Fascism is not the opposite of communism; Capitalism is the opposite of communism; Fascism is the opposite of anarchism."


It's not that simple at all. Communism and capitalism are only polar opposites if we look exclusively at economics. If we look at (for example) attitudes to race and egalitarianism then fascism and communism become polar opposites. If we focus exclusively on economics then fascism becomes around equal to Keynsianism and therefore ends-up close to postwar Western Europe which, I needn't bother to say, is grossly incorrect.

"You can have capitalist-anarchists and communist-anarchists, you can have capitalist-fascists and communist-fascists. Try to think of them like x,y axes on a graph."

Not really. Anarcho-communists are more correctly referred to as "libertarian socialists" because communists and communism are fundamentally authoritarian despite their rhetoric. This was noted by the 19th-century Anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin who referred to communist doctrine as "red bureaucracy". Whether or not you can have pro-capitalist (as we understand capitalism now) fascists is debatable because fascists tend to want to protect their nation state and ethnicity and a genuine freemarket economy is a threat to both of those things; it also would allow elements hostile to far-right ideologies to gain power and influence. It's for this reason that the fascists saw capitalism as something to work with and control rather than either oppress or give free-reign. You could arguably have capitalist-fascists in nation state A if nation state A was pretty-much exclusively reaping the benefits of the market economy but even then I'd say it's debatable - what if many of the businesses are run by homosexuals, ethnic minorities, liberals? The fascists would feel the need to step-in and control them.

And communist-fascists simply can't exist for the reasons I mentioned above - fascists are completely opposed to the collapse of nation-states and racial and social egalitarianism that communist ideology entails. The closest you had was the Strasserist faction of the Nazi party who were sympathetic to socialistic ideas about state control of the economy and businesses, although they were eliminated by Hitler in the night of the long knives because they threatened his support amongst the middle classes and business community (and Hitler was always more sympathetic to bourgeois ideas anyway, he's actually quite odd amongst fascists in having never had any sort of dalliance with socialism at all).

The "politics is a graph of x and y with x being social freedom and y being economic freedom" isn't as good a system as it thinks it is. How does religious fundamentalism fit on the graph? Where does anarchism go?