The difference between socialism and fascism is that of Coca Cola and Pepsi; same shit, different branding, same collectivist audience. They are in brutal conflict with one another because they claim ownership of the same ideas and follower-mentality people. They are brands with identical core offerings, desperately seeking perceived differentiation to stand out from competition.
Anything other than branding, buzzwords and aesthetic, the ideologies of socialism and fascism are fundamentally identical. Let’s break them down…
Both socialism and fascism carry the following inalienable definitive characteristics:
1. Boogieman scapegoat
Hating a small group of rich people who allegedly exploit the working class is a concept that is central to both fascism and socialism. One calls them “the Jews”, the other calls “the bourgeois”. Socialism and fascism both blame everything on this elite class, and gross generalisations paint innocent people with the same red brush.
This “elite group” is targeted for justified hate, and is used as a convenient scapegoat for all the world’s ills. A mixture of generalized truths, half-truths, twisted truths and lies serve to grant an entitled victimhood mentality in the followers of socialism and fascism, since they get to blame everything, even their own mistakes, on the scapegoat group. Violence and hate against the scapegoat is permitted and encouraged in both socialism and fascism. And it is tempting to do so, because when you are unaccountable, and too cowardly to acknowledge your role in your own suffering, it is more desirable to blame others, and deflect responsibility.
These hated groups also serve as a boogieman to stir fear in desperate scared people who feel the need to relinquish their freedoms to anyone who promises them safety. The irony is that the ones they should really fear are those to whom they give this ultimate power through wilful submission.
The concept of the scapegoat boogieman (and in extension, victimhood) is the driving force being socialism and fascism. Without a devil, these ideologies cannot exist. Without the fear of an internal or external satanic enemy, there is no need for individuals to sell out their freedoms in exchange for the alleged “safety” that socialism and fascism promise.
2. Totalitarian state
The state, in both socialism and fascism, has absolute totalitarian authority to impose anything onto its people, with threats and/or acts of violence. This means that socialism and fascism are inevitably dictatorships by definition. In both ideologies, the perverse idea of the “greater good” reigns supreme, which means that any individual liberties can be grossly violated, as long as a convenient and arbitrarily defined “greater good” might occur… maybe, potentially. No one is allowed to question how great this “greater good” is, or for whom it is so great anyway.
This total allegiance to the state my sometimes take the form of nationalism, such as the “fatherland” of fascist Germany, or the “motherland” of socialist Russia. But nationalism is but one manifestation of the state-worshipping totalitarian nature of socialism and fascism.
Nationalism is not the only expression of state-worship inherent in socialism and fascism. How state worships manifests depends on the appetite of the population that socialism/fascism intends to appeal to. When a population’s culture find religion more appealing to their tribal identity than nationalism, then state worship takes the form of theocracy, such as in Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, whose rulers are treated as sole representatives of the divine; how convenient for them.
State worship under fascism and socialism may also manifest itself in the form of technocracy, by which people assume it is a virtue to idealize the self-appointed “experts”, or whatever the unquestionable shamanic dogma of “the science” is. This is scientism (the dogmatic religious perversion of actual science), and it works just as fanatical (if not more) as ultra-nationalism and supremacy.
Totalitarian authoritarianism is at the core of socialism and fascism; it is what defines them. The whole point of fascism and socialism is the appointing of “elite rulers” or aristocrats who can supposedly manage society better than society can manage itself.
3. Collectivist group identity
Fascism and socialism both promote the concept of the group defining the individual, and not the individual defining the group. This means that group identity supersedes the individualist sense of self, and the forest takes priority over the tree. This mentality justifies any atrocity at the expense of individuals when the justification evokes some generic “greater good” of an arbitrarily defined bigger group. This is why socialism and fascism (and all authoritarian systems) inevitably lead to atrocities and genocide; they sacrifice the real individual to the altar of an arbitrarily conceived group that doesn’t exist objectively.
Individual thought is dangerous in socialism and fascism because it breaks the collective unity of the hive. Dissenting voices are persecuted and silenced, and any cruelty against dissenters is excused, because they threaten the sustainability of these collectivist ideologies.
4. Centrally planned economy
In both socialism and fascism, a handful of self-announced “experts” can supposedly determine the precise demand, and therefore supply, of all goods and services of an entire economy, forever. They assume they can do it better than free-market dynamics can do it in real time. This hubris is why the more the government intervenes in the economy, the more the economy is suppressed; this is why people in countries with immense resources, like Venezuela and Congo, are mostly poor despite their vast economic potential.
A centrally planned economy is absolute totalitarianism, because in both socialism and fascism, the state truly owns all means of production. Any alleged “property” is just land assigned to people to work on (just like in feudalism); if they don’t work hard enough, then that land is allocated elsewhere. No true property or ownership of income exists under fascism or socialism.
5. Welfare
Both fascism and socialism presume that it is the role and prerogative of the ruling class to give handouts to the people, which are taken from the people in the first place in the form of taxes, fees and restrictions. Fascists and socialists alike don’t understand that forcibly taking from the rich hurts the poor, even if the poor get some free scraps from that seizing. Most taxation is wasted on corruption anyway, and the economy-suppressing effect of taxation hurts the poorest the most. So, in the case of welfare, the cure is the disease.
Fascism and socialism’s highest ideals are jobs for everyone (even unproductive jobs that no one asked for), free healthcare, free education, and free housing. And I am using the word “free” very loosely here, because nothing is truly free. What you get for free you’ve already paid for, and you will pay for tenfold.
In both instances of fascism and socialism, welfare functions as hush-money to enable the pillaging of an economy by the ruling class, without much resistance. It is giving the plebs their minimal bread and circuses to keep them content in their Stockholm syndrome. And Stockholm syndrome it is, since they love their oppressor just because he is sometimes kind to them in between severe abuse.
People who assume they need welfare are those without an individual identity, the people who never felt confident enough to make it in the world, and who therefore retain a child-like mentality of always needing to be taken care of by the adults. However, this "being taken care of” further entrenches them in their self-imposed debilitation of not being self-reliant.
What’s worse is that the totalitarian state’s welfare come at the cost of a suppressed economy, which makes it even more difficult for people to be self-reliant. This is the vicious cycle by which totalitarian socialism and fascism solidify their grip on the people: these ideologies promise to solve poverty through welfare, this way exploiting people’s naivete. Through welfare programs, they suppress the economy to create more unemployment, inflation and poverty, so welfare benefits lose their purchasing power. Welfare then renders society reliant and addicted to state handouts, when it was the state handouts that impoverished them in the first place. This is exactly how an addictive drug works: you need the drug to mitigate the pain that the drug caused you; and on it goes.
6. Censorship
Both socialism and fascism are intolerant in their core. They cannot allow open debate or free speech because, in open fair logical discussion, they lose. The only way they prevail is through systematic propaganda, one-sidedness, and violent oppression of antithetical viewpoints. Truth is not on the side of fascists and socialists, which is why both respond with hate, vitriol and psychological abuse, such as shaming, threats and guilt-tripping, to silence other ideas. Fascism and socialism feel threatened by opposing views because they are insecure. Their visceral reaction is triggered by the cognitive dissonance in their psyche, as the two antithetical beliefs of their brainwashing and the truth collide.
History shows how socialists and fascists alike enforce selective banning of ideologies and beliefs that threaten their narratives. In every instance of socialism and fascism, censorship is “justified” using arbitrary bizarre fallacies and illogical emotional arguments. It is then enforced through the use of violence for “the greater good.”
7. Health certificates and social credit scores
As an amalgamation of socialist/fascist totalitarianism, welfare and intolerance, the health certification is an abomination that both fascists and socialists adore. To assume that someone’s default state of being somehow violates the deludedly perceived “rights” of others is an insult to reason and science. And this is what the health certificate does: it is an arbitrary standard by which someone’s “health status” is arbitrarily defined, measured, enforced and controlled. Health statuses change according to arbitrary bizarre logic, and therefore, anyone can become an enemy of the collective at any given moment.
Fascist/socialist health certificates feed into a social credit score, which is brownie points with the state. They are the state’s carrot and stick to reward obedience and disobedience, accordingly. This incentivizes citizens to turn on each other as they try to one-up one another for state favouritism at the expense of everyone else. In essence, this incentivizes dishonesty and evil within the populace, which divides people, and renders them conquerable.
So, if socialism and fascism are so similar, why do they pretend to hate each other? Because they are brands in competition. Those who claim ownership behind each brand aren’t willing to share their following. If anything, their audiences are the same type of people, and so their competition is fierce and unrelenting. The audience of socialist and fascist propaganda is of a particular psychological profile: collectivists, group identitarians who prefer a given cookie-cutter tribal identity than an earned meaningful individual identity.
Collectivists, easily manipulable as they are, become the ‘useful idiots’ (as Lenin described them) who empower the state, which promises to be their surrogate daddy, and satisfy their unmet childhood needs.
Group identity that denies an individual sense of self is at the core of socialism/fascism. And people in power don’t like sharing power. This is why we get offshoots, rebrands and forks of each ideology: From socialism, we get communism, democratic socialism, Trotskyism, the greens, liberals, anarcho-socialists, antifa, etc. From fascism, we get technocracy, theocracy, self-appointed patriots, closeted homo-erotic military juntas, Trumpism, etc. All these are rebrands of state worship, or in other words, the longing for a daddy to take care of broken children with no identity, no security, no hope.
Socialists/fascists claim to value principles of freedom, yet they make convenient ad-hoc excuses for the state’s power projections whenever their propagandists tell them it’s fine. For the socialist fascist, the state is absolute authority, benevolence and omnipotence; socialism/fascism is therefore a religious cult.
Today, democratic governments have a mixture of some free market, and a lot of state intervention, also known as socialism or fascism. Democracy is yet another dictatorial system whereby people are given the illusion of choice by “selecting” their dictator aristocrats every few years from a false dichotomy of two-party systems. Democracy is a blend of socialist and fascist messaging, whereby social welfare are presented in a patriotic way when it serves veterans for example. Also in democratic propaganda, patriotism is not nationalism when it means bombing children abroad for big oil interests.
Democracy is socialist because it corrupts people into selling their votes for privileged at the expense of others. Democracy is fascist because it imposes laws that oppress the vast majority of people for the benefit of a few “leaders.” People under democracy assume they are free because propaganda renders them brainwashed and unable to see the hypocrisy.
Democracy, unlike pure socialism and fascism, is dishonest in its totalitarianism. For example, you are relatively free to supposedly own a business, but you still have to pay property taxes, corporate taxes, all kinds of other taxes, and also abide by arbitrary regulations that are made by corrupt politicians who legislate in a way that favours their donors, thus creating monopolies/oligopolies. Democracy is fascism and socialism in that it is empowered by totalitarian oppression, injustice, poverty, hate, and war.
This means that all forms of government, be it monarchy, dictatorship, communism, aristocracy, democracy, or whatever, are inherently socialist and fascist in nature. All approaches to governance require totalitarian authority to impose social structure through threat rather than incentive. All governments arbitrarily redistribute wealth according to fascist/socialist principles. All governments define themselves by a collectivist group identity that is socialist and fascist in nature.
Socialism and fascism are not opposites; they are synonymous. Their opposite is freedom, self-governance, voluntaryism. We get socialism/fascism because, in principle, we believe in force more than we believe in collaboration. We assume violence is the answer to structure society because we don’t yet understand how we can do it better (and more morally) through incentive. And so, socialism/fascism is what we get.
Is there hope for our species?
Thank you for reading. Kindly like, comment, share.
Fantastic take. I’ve always thought these two are opposite sides of the same coin.
"A centrally planned economy is absolute totalitarianism, because in both socialism and fascism, the state truly owns all means of production. Any alleged 'property' is just land assigned to people to work on (just like in feudalism); if they don’t work hard enough, then that land is allocated elsewhere. No true property or ownership of income exists under fascism or socialism."
Brilliant. Thank You.