To what extent can fascism be viewed as a blend of nationalism and socialism?

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To what extent can fascism be viewed as a blend of nationalism and socialism?

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To some extent, fascism displays a mix of the values which nationalists and socialists rate as important. For example, fascism combines the socialist distrust of capitalism and communism with a strong, often militant, feeling of patriotism so evident in some strains of nationalism. However, there are some ways in which fascism appears to diverge completely from nationalism and socialism and embrace its own ideologies, such as in the case of anti-Semitism and the cult of the leader.

Fascism is difficult to analyse as an ideology, since it lacks any form of rationalism, which it rejected after the period of the Enlightenment had not brought the promised results. It has no coherent core of ideas like the other ideologies and it is therefore better to describe fascism more as a political movement rather than an ideology.

In many ways, Fascism has openly embraced many of the features of a socialist society. Indeed, the Nazi party in Germany called itself the ‘nationalist socialist party’. Fascism’s affinity with socialism is based largely on the fact that many fascists were extremely distrustful of capitalism and the power of big business. Fascism therefore espouses a kind of corporatism, seen most prominently in Italian fascism, which extends the political control over industry and organized labour.

Fascism also views the state as extremely important: the state becomes the active agent for ameliorating social problems. However, unlike fascism, socialism espouses a mixture of state and private ownership of business. Fascism extends this and believes in the total state control of business and labour.

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Fascism also encourages common ownership and collectivism, but collectivism not for the community as a whole but as a sacrifice for the state. Fascists hoped that this collectivism would encourage social harmony because they too were disillusioned with the nineteenth century class ridden society. This leads on to the fascist banning of trade unions – after all, these would not be necessary when there were no longer class tensions within the state.

The idea of the dominating state even extends to such rights as equality, which socialists would hold as one of the most important of their beliefs. In Fascism, ...

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