The Moscow Kremlin, the working residence of the President of Russia.
Wikimedia Commons/Минеева Ю. (Julmin) (retouched by Surendil)

Will Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini have the last laugh on history? There seems to be an almost universal rush among almost all the nations on Earth to become more like their prototypical fascist regimes. And no current nation on Earth is more like those 1930s fascist powers than the Russian Federation.   

The Characteristics of Fascism

It was the socialist Benito Mussolini who gave Fascism its name. The word fasces, from the Latin fascis, means a bound bundle of wooden rods, often with an axe protruding from the rod bundle. It originated with the ancient Etruscans and was later adopted by the Romans as the symbol of a magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.

In ancient Rome fasces were carried before magistrates, the highest of which was the Dictator,  to symbolize their power over life and death. Mussolini adopted the fasces as the symbol for his Italian Fascist Party both because of its connection to ancient Rome and because of its symbolism of strength and unity.

The German and Italian versions of fascism in the 1930s were characterized first and foremost by the supremacy of the state over the individual citizen. In particular, that supremacy extended over all the nation’s economic institutions. Although the ownership of companies might formally be held by private individuals, control over them was firmly held by the state, sometimes by expropriation from private owners, sometimes by regulation, and sometimes by exerting a strong directive influence over investments. It is a kind of economic organization that is sometimes called dirigisme.

Although ownership and management of companies might putatively be in private hands, nevertheless the totalitarian government control of companies led the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek to say there was no real difference between fascism and socialism. In chapter seven of his book The Road to Serfdom [E2] (which begins with a quote from Hilaire Belloc that “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”), Hayek writes,

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable. While we need probably not be afraid that such an authority would exploit this power in the manner in which a private monopolist would do so, while its purpose would presumably not be the extortion of maximum financial gain, it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distribution between districts and groups and could, if it wished, discriminate between persons to any degree it liked. If we remember why planning is advocated by most people, can there be much doubt that this power would be used for the ends of which the authority approves and to prevent the pursuits of ends which it disapproves?

Does any of this seem familiar from our own recent historical experiences? It should.

What then should we mean when we use the word “fascism”? Historical experience suggests the following definition:

Fascism is a form of socialism with the following characteristics:

1. The national economy is entirely under the control of the central government, irrespective of the formal, nominal ownership of the means of production.
2. Individual freedoms exist only so far as the state is willing to give them.

Often a third characteristic is added to the effect that nationalism is the main foundation of fascism. For example, this is a picture of fascism espoused by the article on fascism in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Certainly, the two most prominent examples of fascism in the twentieth century were hotbeds of nationalist fervor.

How you think about this depends very much on what you think is important in classifying the political ideologies. My own notion of what is important concerns what roles government should play in society and what powers should be granted it to fulfill those roles. The more of a role a person desires from government, and therefore the more power that person is willing to grant government to fulfill its roles, the farther to the Left that person is. In contradistinction, a person farther to the Right desires less government and therefore a government with fewer powers. With this point of view, how much nationalism drives a state’s actions is more of an ancillary characteristic (albeit a very important one!) than a fundamental attribute. It is certainly possible for a fascist regime to be extremely nationalistic, but there can also be fascist governments not so nationalistic that nevertheless have totalitarian control of the economy. The only difference between a fascist and a communist government would then be on the nominal ownership of the means of production.

The Threat of Russian Fascism

This view of fascism is completely congruent with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For a short while after the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, there was a great deal of hope Russia might evolve in a more neoliberal direction. Unfortunately, after about a decade of mistakes and rising economic hardship, an ailing Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of the Russian Federation, being succeeded in power by Vladimir Putin. Putin, a onetime colonel in the KGB, seems to possess an earlier, more authoritarian model for Russia. With Putin, Russia has an economy directed more by crony capitalism than by real capitalism. In fact crony capitalism is almost the exact opposite of the real thing, with the Russian state exercising absolute control over the economy through control of the crony capitalists.

Having transitioned from Soviet communism to an extremely nationalistic, crony-capitalist state, Russia now resembles Nazi Germany even more closely than did the old USSR.

With as much control over the Russian economy as he desires, Putin is restrained only by the limitations of the economy itself in how he allocates resources to his military and navy.  While those restraints might restrict his capability for military expansion, he still presents a challenge for the West. Presently, Russia is probing the West militarily in three different areas: (1) the Baltic Sea states, (2) Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine, and (3) Syria. Just as Russia resembles Nazi Germany in its economic organization and totalitarian treatment of its citizens, it also resembles Nazi Germany in its need to expand its imperium.  Not only that, but the Putin regime has been working to co-opt a growing Russian nationalism to form it into an “imperial nationalism”. How more fascist can Russia become?

Europe and the United States

It is very understandable how Russia might want to build an authoritarian, fascist state that is similar to the more familiar communism of yesteryear. What then is the excuse for the United States and Western Europe stumbling toward a fascist organization? Why should they want to evolve toward a more authoritarian, socialist organization?

To evolve toward socialism implies a very great faith in the ability of governments to solve social problems, particularly those that are economic in nature. Yet the historical record could not be more clear about government control of an economy: it just does not work. This lesson has been taught by the Great Depression in the United States, both in its creation and its durability; by the causes of the Great Recession of 2008-2009; by the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw block; by the lost decades of little or no growth for Japan; by the economic effects of the Dodd-Frank Act; and by the economic decline of Europe, particularly of France.  Nor, as the recent history of China and India have demonstrated, can a country come only a little way from socialism toward free-markets and expect consistent improvement. The continued resort to state intervention in the economy to stimulate growth truly represents the triumph of hope over experience. Or was it the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different to result?

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