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Originally Posted by loquitur
It says Mussolini moved from socialism and developed fascism. I didn't think that was a particularly controversial historical point. The controversial point these days is how much socialism was imported into Fascist thought, and how significant the imported elements were.
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Fascism was often thought of -- mostly by fascist ideologues themselves -- as the Hegelian sublation of liberal capitalism AND socialism. Right wing thinkers believed capitalism didn't work, and in the Great Depression, who could argue otherwise? Socialism was wrong, but the crisis demanded action. You could say that fascists were post-socialist, but that 'post' is there for a reason.
You should also realise that there are different types of fascists and several axes to fascist thought. There's a populist/national axis, a militarist axis, a control axis. These cut through other ideologies obliquely. Some liberals ended up as fascists. Others fight it.
Another result is that fascism itself is cut into factions. On fascism's left wing you have someone like Kita Ikki, who seems to have been genuinely interested in poverty. Interestingly, his scheme for "rebuilding" Japan inspired many of Tanaka Kakuei's pork barrel projects, projects which became the financial motor of the postwar right. On the other extreme you have the pure militarists, like the S. American fascists so popular in Washington.
This is one reason why mapping the early 20th c. terms into a one-dimensional scheme such as the neo-liberal anxiety about the state and collective action -- i'm thinking of those Chicago boyz cited above -- you end up with absurd formulations like fascist = socialist.
I'm curious what will happen with this anxiety about collective action as the neo-liberal engineered economy swirls further down the toliet.