>>1840027>>1840032Okay so elaborating a bit more on Nazism, Fascism, and Anti-Capitalism.
In the case of the Nazis they had one
extremely good method for ensuring loyalty within elite strata, and that was good old fashioned nepotism. With a lot of Jewish people losing employment (especially in things like academia and white collar work) you could get far by just putting on the arm band, going to a few meetings, and flashing your party membership. Now I would characterize the Nazi party as much further to the Right than the Italian Fascists; for example the guy in charge of the German Labor Front, Robert Ley, was a drunk who'd wantonly embezzle union dues. By contrast the first head of the General Confederation of Fascist Syndical Corporations, Edmondo Rossoni, was a syndicalist that worked with the IWW, said that Capitalists would eventually be rendered obsolete, and scared industrialists enough that one of them mused on funding the Communists to fight the Fascists.
That said, the form that "anti-capitalism" took in the Nazi regime was fairly simplistic. The "Strength Through Joy" program implemented by Hitler and Ley was more or less an attempt at tiding workers over with bread and circuses. More interesting might be the creation of the Volkswagen and German autarky. The former was a case of Hitler demanding auto producers create a car for the German Public valued at about 1,000 marks I believe. When they said it wasn't feasible, the state stepped in to direct production. This was something of a PR victory for the Nazis and a chance to flex some supposed "socialist" credentials. Automakers couldn't produce an inexpensive, well-functioning car for cheap, so the state set itself towards it and succeeded. Then there's the matter of Autarky, which is tangentially related to the "Sea Power vs Land Power" conflict that pops up throughout the study of foreign affairs and geopolitics. Heartland theory, too. The interesting thing is that while "Sea Power vs Land Power" was developed predominantly by the British and Americans (sea powers both) and frankly biased in its analysis, it was later grasped on to by individuals from Land Powers and flipped on its head.
Sea Power vs Land PowerApologies if that sounded incoherent, allow me to explain. British intellectual Hartford J. Mackinder analyzed geopolitics as a kind of conflict between "Sea Powers" of the West and "Land Powers" of the East. He attributed to "Sea Powers" a kind of innate liberalism, prosperity, and "civilized" quality that emanated from the relative freedom of the open ocean. He contrasts this with the East, which was the site of huge conflicts between nomadic warrior tribes that caused waves of migration Westward. To Mackinder, the "East" represented a kind of asiatic autocracy, militarism, and barbarism. In regards to Germany, in particular, he divides it. The Western German principalities, through trade via the Hanseatic League, had the "civilized" qualities of the Western, Sea Power nations. On the other end of Germany you had Prussian militarism as the representative of a kind of "asiatic autocracy" which he saw as perpetually in a life-or-death struggle with the civilized world.
Now what's interesting is that figures like Spengler (and Dugin today, I believe) flipped that dichotomy on its head. Rather than being mere "barbarians" Spengler claimed that Land Powers, again represented in Germany by militaristic Prussia, had a kind of noble collectivism in contrast to the individualist Sea Powers. The individual finds meaning via service to the collective whole. Values like self-sacrifice and discipline were noble traits to Spengler, in contrast to the turbulent and self-interested nature of sea powers. Finally, Spengler claimed that Land Power distinguished between trade and war, whereas to sea powers trade was a weapon in asymmetrical warfare. Spengler would go on to say that when a Land Power fights war, it usually goes for a decisive battle and discriminates between combatants and non-combatants, such that if your country were defeated, the civilian population wouldn't be purposefully endangered unless they chose to fight. To Spengler, the "sea power" method of warfare doesn't discriminate between combatants and non-combatants; they would sanction an entire country to starve civilians and soldiers both.
Understand that dichotomy, and German Autarky can make sense as a rational pursuit of sovereignty against the asymmetrical warfare of sea powers. Dugin shares those sentiments and applies them to a Russian context.
Fascist Corporatism and Anti-CapitalismBy contrast to the Nazis and their simplistic ideas of Capitalism and Socialism, (let's not forget Hitler essentially said "Socialism" to him meant "the common good" and Spengler called Marxism "the Capitalism of the working class"), Fascist Corporatism was at least more theoretically advanced. It at least had more foresight than simply reacting to problems as they occurred. It maybe had its highest theoretical expression in Oswald Mosley's economic thoughts and had a complicated history in Fascist Italy. If I remember correctly, ᴉuᴉlossnW didn't see corporatism as necessarily an end unto itself, so much as a means of quelling the turbulent social situation in Italy. In contrast to Hitler, ᴉuᴉlossnW was arguably more flexible with his enemies: pardoning some, hiring some, imprisoning others, releasing a few, etcetera.
The goal of corporatism was to replace class conflict with class collaboration. The premise being by giving workers and management both representation, with the all-powerful state acting as an intermediary, you could curb the worst excesses of Capitalism without a wholesale violent revolution. How the corporate form ultimately looked was subject to some vastly different interpretations; Lawrence Dennis in America perceived it as almost "buying off" the huge industrial enterprises. They would be absorbed into the state and lose some independence, while ultimately keeping their lives and property. Mosley took a more in-depth analysis, asserting that the ultimate goal of his Corporate state was to create a closed off internal market within the British Empire that would simultaneously allow wages to rise, work days to shorten, and ultimately: "world peace." I'm more familiar with his writings than most others given the relative ease in coming across English texts (given he was, y'know, English).
Mosley almost seems to graze Marxist economic thought. Certainly, a few of his followers were familiar with Marx. For example on war, I believe he asserted most wars were caused by nations seeking new markets as a result of overproduction which, it seems, is not too alien to Lenin's writings on Imperialism. Mosley very much believed in the state as a kind of "scientific manager" and it's reiterated in a lot of his writing. He emphasized the need to balance a nation's productive capabilities with consumption, his appeals to corporatism were an outgrowth of a kind of technocratic thought. He saw liberal democracy as ultimately unable to overcome economic crises in part because of the individual ignorance and inefficiencies of elected politicians. By turning the machinery of state over to technical experts and scientific management, he believed he could overcome the recurring crises of Capitalism without necessarily abolishing private property. He seems to believe way too much in the merit of managers, however, as he snidely remarked that Communism would mean having janitors and menial laborers making executive-level decisions.
In Summary some Fascists approached economic thought that almost appear anti-capitalist, but they'd never make the plunge into full Communism. Lawrence Dennis in particular seemed broadly sympathetic, as he decried America's imperialism in central America, repeatedly railed against Capitalism, but ultimately saw Fascism as the way forward, I think in part because the appearance Communism had in Western countries was that of causing a bloody civil war, murdering the entire upper class, then rebuilding from the ruins. To some extent it almost seems humanistic! An inability to wholly liquidate the ruling class and a hope that you could overcome them without killing them. I don't know enough to know whether anything from the autarky to the corporatist system could have succeeded; I'm not smart enough for that. But the results in ᴉuᴉlossnW's Italy were mixed. Even he admitted that the ruling classes fought tooth and nail against his more radical ideas, and it took them openly starting a civil war to state the "true" Fascist revolution could begin (at which point he nationalized something like 75% of Italy's economy) which was likely too little, too late.