Like god the US invaded Iraq, isn’t that authoritarian? Isn’t everything political authoritarian? you really think you got something special?

Isn’t it neat how we can talk about the US invading Iraq? Isn’t it neat that I live in the US and can openly criticize the Iraq War?

Now compare that to living in China and talking about Tiananmen.

Buddy, isn’t literally every fuckin thing?

No, most things are not.

Like god the US invaded Iraq, isn’t that authoritarian?

Yep, it sure is.

Isn’t everything political authoritarian?

Does everything political eventually boil down to some amount of people imposing their view of society on the rest under threat of violence? Yes.

Is that what authoritarian means? No.

To quote Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

I never said there is no acceptable amount of force to be exerted in society, but I do have strong preferences on the criteria by which a society chooses by whom, how, and how much force.

What determines whether a government is authoritarian or not is who can wield this force, how those people are selected, who can they apply this force on and within what parameters.

An authoritarian state will by design, explicitly seat this power in the hands of few, often unelected, individuals, and pose very little limitations on it.

(Neo)liberal states are absolutely capable of allowing such drifts that they become de-facto authoritarian, the US is very much doing that, but it’s not by design and it’s something a liberal/neoliberal should be pushing against, by virtue of being an unintended consequence. An authoritarian would only object to this drift if it happened to go in a direction they didn’t favour.

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but how though, fascism isn’t just some weird image of authoritarian

You are correct, hence why I specified “Classical Fascism”, as in Mussolini and Gentile’s original vision of Fascism, an offshoot of Marxism by way of Georges Sorel, which then goes on to reject the exclusive use of Marxist materialist analysis to interpret history and current events.*

The latter is the only explicit departure from strict Marxism in Fascism, as all other aspects can be found in some shade of communism or another.

Marxist-Leninist communism, to my understanding, has 3 main characteristics: It presupposes a vanguard, it presupposes a state whose job is to command the economy, it does not allow any enterprise outside of the state.

The latter is important to this comparison although it is not exclusive to ML Communism.

To quote the man himself:

Here I wish to reaffirm with no weaker energy, the formula I expounded at the scala in Milan everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.

We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.

Note that Corporative in this context refers to the italian word “corporation” meaning “Trade guild” or “Union”. Source: Am Italian.

The ideology of fascism is fundamentally totalitarian. The state controls the economy and to properly control the economy it has to control all facets of life. It has to control consumption, which means it has to control personal life and individual finances. It uses an internal market but it strives for autarchy, a state of complete self-reliance that would in turn allow a closed cycle economy that could indeed be completely controlled.

It is a command economy that allows markets to exist in certain respects as it recognises them as a useful tool. Much like China has been doing recently.

As for the vanguardis aspect, you won’t find explicit references to a party doing this, because Mussolini’s rhetoric already assumes the totalitarian control over the government he eventually achieved, you will however find explicit quotes on the level of direction on personal life the state is supposed to have, and I would say it sounds very much like a vanguard:

A State which is fully aware of its mission and represents a people which are marching on; a state which necessarily transforms the people even in their physical aspect. In order to be something more than a mere administrator, the State must utter great words, expound great ideas and place great problems before this people (Di­ scorsi del 1929, Milano, Alpes, 1930, p. 183).

It is Fascism which has refashioned the character of the Italians, removing impurity from our souls, tempering us to all sacrifices, restoring the true aspect of strength and beauty to our Italian face. (Speech delivered at Pisa, May 25, 1926, in Discorsi del 1926, Milano, Alpes, 1927, p. 193).

So there you have it. On the important points of governance (Role of the state in the market, role of the state in personal lives, role of the individual in politics), ML and Fascists have many important similarities.

If the Italian fascist regime thought the market system they had in place were a worse alternative, they would have pivoted to just about whatever they thought would work, because Fascism explicitly does not care about which political tools they employ but only the result those methods yield.

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* Though let it be clear that a rejection of materialist analysis does not mean ignoring it but also including immaterial aspects to this analysis such as culture, religion, belief, traditions, etc. See the following quote for clarity:

In politics Fascism aims at realism; in practice it desires to deal only with those problems which are the spontaneous product of historic conditions and which find or suggest their own solutions. Only by entering in to the process of reality and taking possession of the forces at work within it, can man act on man and on nature.

All quotes are sourced from The Doctrine of Fascism. Authored by Benito Mussolini and partly ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile. I read the original as well and can vouch for the translation being substantially correct, even with some mistakes like the use of the word corporation, which is a false friend between Italian and English.

What does capitalism being authoritarian have to do with this? Just because they stated the fact that ML is authoritarian doesn’t mean that capitalism is not.

All governance is force.

How this force is distributed, what forms of it are acceptable, and who directs its use determines whether a government is authoritarian.