What Is Fascism? The Definition They Won't Teach You
Larry Alex Taunton | 3 Oct. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km7o6zZV5UE
Which is the Fascism you want defined?
Italian Fascism or the movement in large?
I hope you are not both enlarging it to include National Socialism and then narrowing it so as to make everything else if not outside at least irrelevant.
Italian Fascism was different things to different people. What Pius XI approved as a legitimate régime in 1929 was Fascism and what he condemned in Non abbiamo bisogno is also Fascism ... at least became elevanted by Il Duce to that after that encyclical, at the time it was an Education Minister's opinion on Fascism.
The general movement has more to do with what Pius XI approved.
1) Corporatismo (Italian sense, look it up, don't confuse with US usage of "corporations") is good in the case of a society divided into workers and employers for a large part of the population.
2) Dictatorship is at least licit as a form of government.
3) Abortion is banned, at least excepting the saving of a mother's life.
I agree with all three. I think Austro-Fascism and Franco express some aspects in a more Catholic way, but the Italian version for a time had some record of humane dealings with opposition and with punishment.
You are aware that Alessandro Serenelli was released on parole under Mussolini? He was not required to enter a monastery from the side of authorities, and he had lived on good terms with the victim's mother prior to that.
Crime, 1902. Sentence, 30 years. One year off for all, at WW-I victory for Italy (one in which the future Duce participated at the expense of my dear Austria, you know Southern Tyrolia). Two more years off for good behaviour. 27 years. 1902 + 27 = 1929. The year Il Duce and the Pope signed the Vatican treaty.
- I
- justspazzin 64
- @justspazzin64
- Codsw
eallop. Fascism was BORN out of socialism. Socialism is LEFT-WING. Mussolini was a member of the Italian communist party. This is not rocket science.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @justspazzin64 You are not a rocket scientist, I suppose.
You are not a historian, I know for certain.
Mussolini was a top member of the Italian Socialist Party, according to his own wikipedia, which links to PSI (Partito Socialista d'Italia), which says:
The Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI) was a social democratic and democratic socialist political party in Italy
This was in 1912. Both Fascists and Communists are split offs from this party, but different ones. In 1911 Mussolini to his great honour had protested against Italy's war in Libya which featured the first bombing from air planes, carried out against civilians. In 1913, Mussolini, while rooting for Marx, also rooted for John Hus (Giovanni Hus il veredico is a work of his from this time).
Now, Franco never was member of a Communist or Socialist party. Neither was Salazar. Neither was Dollfuss. Neither was Schuschnigg. THEIR common ground with Mussolini came from Catholic social teaching, not from Marx. A precursor of Franco in Spain, the gang leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, considered Marx a "talented Jew, who saw the problem of Capitalism, but not the solution ..." (to Capitalism / to this problem).
I noted as a first question to the video whether Larry meant Italian Fascism or whether he meant Fascism as a more general movement. And found to my chagrin, he was so inept he extended Fascism all the way to Hitler (who actually was a Communist comrade of Eisner in the Munich Soviet) and then defined Fascism in general from Hitler, perhaps not surprising since he went to Berlin to study the subject and Berliners are so guiltridden for Hitler that they don't even clearly perceive any other Fascism except in a Hitler haze.
- justspazzin 64
- @hglundahl Mussolini was a member of the Italian Communist/socialist party who both founded the doctrine of fascism and coined the term. It's just a simple fact. Hence fascism was born out of socialism. Socialism is left-wing, not right wing.
@hglundahl "You are not a rocket scientist, I suppose."
Nope, and nowhere claimed to be a rocket scientist. And it's a good thing you don't need to be a "rocket scientist" to understand the SOCIALIST origin of fascism.
"You are not a historian, I know for certain."
Define "historian." Are you engaging in an appeal to authority logical fallacy?
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @justspazzin64 " the Italian Communist/socialist party"
Are two different ones.
I'm saying "you are not a historian" as an euphemism for "you are egregiously wrong on history". You are not a mathematician if you think "2 + 2 = 5"
"who both founded the doctrine of fascism"
No. If you mean the Sansepolcro programme, 1919, yes, he founded it, but didn't stay with it.
If you meant the book he wrote "on the topic," most of it was a rehash of an older book by Gentile, who was a Hegelian.
In 1931 or so*, Pius XI condemned that doctrine, but could as yet not call it Fascism, because it was Gentile's opinion of Fascism and only functioned where Gentile had authority, as minister of Education.
I condemn it too.
This book is absolutely not the founding of Austrofascism, where you should instead go to the Catholic priest Mgr Seipel, both Volk, Staat, Nation and Wirtschaftsethische Lehre der Kirchenväter.
AND Quadregesimo Anno by Pope Pius XI.**
Spanish and Portuguese Fascism are also not founded by Mussolini or Gentile.
- * footnote:
- June 29, 1931, to be precise. NON ABBIAMO BISOGNO
- ** footnote:
- Signed the fifteenth day of May, in the year 1931, QUADRAGESIMO ANNO
- justspazzin 64
- @hglundahl "" the Italian Communist/socialist party"
Are two different ones."
Socialism is communism lite ...soft communism. That is the only discernable difference. Socialism is left-wing.
"Democracy is indispensable to socialism." -Vladimir Lenin.
"Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen." -Leon Trotsky.
"The goal of socialism is communism." -Vladimir Lenin.
"Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense." -Vladimir Lenin.
"Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.... These organisations (i.e. fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins." --Joseph Stalin.
@hglundahl "you are egregiously wrong on history".
Codswallop.
@hglundahl My claim that fascism was BORN out of socialism, that socialism is LEFT-WING, and that Mussolini who founded the ideology of fascism was a member of the Italian socialist/communist party ...all still stand as fact.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @justspazzin64 The one you cited who was moderately correct was Stalin.
Fascism, National Socialism, Social Democracy are related.
Social Democracy had Eugenics in Scandinavia, like National Socialism up to 1945. Social Democracy has abortion, like Communism.
Fascism as such had neither that kind of eugenics (just pro-natal policies, which are good) and also not abortion.
Fascism didn't produce any Holodomor or Irish "Potato Famine" unlike Communism or Capitalism.
- II
- justspazzin64
- "Which is the Fascism you want defined?
Italian Fascism or the movement in large?"
Mussolini the anti-capitalist is the sole source of fascism. There is no other source or definition of "fascism" except Mussolini's own description, period. The VERY first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I. Mussolini himself DEFINED "fascism."
According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's own account, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan (Fasci di combattimento), which became the 'National Fascist Party' two years later. Fascism was born directly and exclusively out of left-wing socialism. Anyone who believes fascism is "right-wing" has been extensively lied to and brainwashed. By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that ‘Stalinism (communism) and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena’." Even Stalin himself claimed there was no real distinction between 'democracy' and fascism: "Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.... These organisations (i.e. fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins." --Joseph Stalin.
There’s No Denying the Socialist Roots of Fascism, Foundation for Economic Education, Emmanuel Rincףn, November 27, 2021:
"fascism is a form of socialism. As such, it does not engage in a fight between left and right, but between different leftists ideologies. ...
...Giovanni Gentile, a neo-Hegelian philosopher, was the intellectual author of the “doctrine of fascism,” which he wrote in conjunction with Benito Mussolini. Gentile’s sources of inspiration were thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and also Karl Marx. ...
Gentile went so far as to declare “Fascism is a form of socialism, in fact, it is its most viable form.” One of the most common reflections on this is that fascism is itself socialism based on national identity.
Gentile believed that all private action should be oriented to serve society. He was against individualism, for him there was no distinction between private and public interest. In his economic postulates, he defended compulsory state corporatism, wanting to impose an autarkic state (basically the same recipe that Hitler would use years later)."
The Two Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, A. James Gregor, Hoover Institution, Arnold Beichman, August 1, 2000:
"Recalling that Mussolini began his political career as a distinguished Italian socialist, Gregor writes: "Fascism’s most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy’s most radical ‘subversives’ — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism."
Even Nikolai Bukharin, the leading Soviet ideologist whom Stalin purged, began to have misgivings about the Revolution and began to allude to the fascist features of the emerging system. Gregor writes:
'By the early 1930s, the ‘convergence’ of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike. . . .
By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that ‘Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena' ..."
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The Socialist Roots of Fascism: The Case Against Socialism, Case For Conservatism, Ryan Wiseman, 27 August 2024:
"In fact, as part of his [Mussolini's] strategy to propagandize and push fascism, he wrote a book, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions. Among the other leftist things he said in the book, he wrote that “The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. . . . It is opposed to classical liberalism . . . [which] denied the State in the name of the individual. ...
...And it goes on. One of the propagandists for Italian fascism was an apologist by the name of Fausto Pitigliani. He said: “The function of private enterprise is assessed from the standpoint of public interest, and hence an owner or director of a business undertaking is responsible before the State for his production policy.” In other words, once again, businesses and industries weren’t free to determine their own directions in order to best meet their customers’ needs, but instead the elite that ran the state controlled what direction a business would take, based on their own ideas of what the public interest was."
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Yes, They Were Socialists: How the Nazis Waged War on Private Property, Mises Institute, John Kennedy, 07/05/2022:
"How did the National Socialists combat private property in Germany? The first step came shortly after the Nazis took control, when they abolished private property. Article 153 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed private property, with expropriation only to occur within the due process of the law, but this article was nullified by a decree on February 28, 1933.
With this, the new National Socialist government had complete control of private property in Germany. While they did not take complete control of the lands like the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, the Nazis issued quotas for industries and farms, and later they reorganized all industry into corporations run by members of the Nazi Party. ...
Conclusion
The Nazi government took control of the economy, which is what one expects from socialism."
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The Socialist Roots of Fascism, UK Dispatch, LB
Aug 12, 2025:
"The truth, however, is that socialism is not anti fascist at all. On the contrary, fascism has always been a form of socialism.
Benito Mussolini, the architect of fascism, used socialism as a foundation to create fascism. In his book, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Mussolini wrote that “The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. . . It is opposed to classical liberalism . . . (which) denied the State in the name of the individual.”
The National Socialism used by fascists like Mussolini allowed private business to survive as long as it was directed by government subsidies and policy, a form of socialist control more commonly known as “crony capitalism,” where government rewards its political friends rather than allowing the operation of a free market.”
Similar to Marx in “The Communist Manifesto,” in his 1928 autobiography, Mussolini bemoaned liberal capitalism, stating that “The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity.”
Later on, in a 1945 speech in Milan, six days before his death, Mussolini described his fascist movement as follows: “In this case, there can be no doubt: we are the working class in struggle for life and death, against capitalism. We are the revolutionaries in search of a new order. If this is so, to invoke help from the bourgeoisie by waving the red peril is an absurdity.”
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“If there is one thing all Fascists and National Socialists agreed on, it was their hostility to capitalism.” —Eugen Weber, historian of fascism.
- Hans Georg Lundahl
- @justspazzin64 Christianity is not favourable to Capitalism either.
You call out Communism or Socialism for the Holodomor?
I'd go with Communism. Capitalism committed a very similar crime in 1847 to 1853 on Ireland.
People didn't starve because no one grew anything else than potatoes.
Everyone who grew potatoes for himself grew wheat for his landlord.
And in that time, landlords stood on the contract. Tenants needed wheat to survive? Too bad, not on the contract.
Potatoes was it.
When it came to giving relief, the government put that down to low levels, in order to keep what modern Capitalists would call "accountability" ...
Being hostile to Capitalism is not a sin, and Leo XIII called that out, indirectly, by reminding of the principle that man works to live and therefore has a right to wages amounting to decent livelihood. Rerum Novarum, if you want to look it up.*
You presumably cite three works because you can't reach the conclusion from the facts you know.
Minor quibbles, there is not just one ideology of Fascism and Mussolini didn't found all of them.
@justspazzin64 Some more quibbles.
You didn't cite even one history of Italy, for the period, not even one biography of Mussolini, but several analyses on the very ideological level, which are not necessarily the least selective or most objective.
On top of that, you cited Gentile, while obviously back in 1931 his ideology could not yet be solidly identified with Fascism. Which I already stated.
On top of that, you brought in National Socialism, which is a different ideology. But it's possible that Trotsky pioneered including that in Fascism.
- * footnote
- RERUM NOVARUM, May 15, 1891.
"In fascism, there is private property, but the private property is only a bit of an illusion because it's controlled by the state."
Wait, if the state can sue and heavily fine an employer for giving too low (or too high) wages, or for overworking the workers in hours, does that make "private property an illusion"?
If that's the case, private property has only existed since very recently even in the champions of it.
"there's usually a strong um anti-semitic element in fascism"
No antisemitism in Italy prior to 1938, and then it was basically, Jews converting to Catholicism can't marry ethnically Italian Jews.
1922 - 1942 = 20 years.
1938 - 1942 = 4 years.
No antisemitism in Portugal, meaning at all, under all the years of Salazar (1933 -- 1974).
No antisemitism in Spain, from 1939 to 1980 (formally the state type continued after Franco's death some years, by 1980 at least, Spain is Parlamentarian, though some resent it.
Both countries were countries of refuge for Jews under WW-II.
Some more antisemitism in the very marginal Integralismo of Brazil, which was never in power, and in Rexism, which was only in power as a puppet régime to Hitler. The same can be said of French Fascism as of Rexism.
The Swedish Fascist Engdahl, who was never in power directly, but claimed to have influenced Social Democracy through one who was member of both parties, took a very clear distance from Hitler after hearing of the camps, and his other remaining model apart from Il Duce, namely Perón, was not an antisemite either.
Did Larry Taunton learn his lore on fascism from some college conversation, or from the Marxist Umberto Eco's 14 points?
Austrofascism theoretically was antisemite, and didn't hurt Jews. He made some limitation on their, as on other ethnic minorities' rights to start new business (only if the extant ones were less than a certain percent of the branch). This was probably one of the reasons why Hitler hated Dollfuss and despised Schuschnigg. He also tortured Schuschnigg by psychiatric harrassment, after the Anschluss.
"Communism has always had a strong anti-semitic element and it may not be written into their you know into their you know equivalent to the Westminster confession But it's always it's always been there."
That's how they recruited Jews to Red Army officers and Cheka agents?
Stalin was antisemite, it was also he and Lysenko who rid Russian Communism of Eugenics, which Lenin had plotted on a research stage.
Austrian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Fascism, like Peronism, didn't have Eugenics unless you count pro-natalism and anti-abortion as that.
As in Italy, in Argentina the more extreme reproductive-social technologies associated with eugenics in northern Europe, especially sterilisation, met with considerable cultural, religious and political resistance, The eugenists within the Association followed the Catholic line from conviction and/or necessity. But since it was through women, or more precisely motherhood, that the future biotypological identity and health of the nation was seen to be mainly produced, eugenists developed their own form of negative eugenics for the regulation of female biotypes. Gender was in fact a critical variable, because it was through the socialisation of maternity towards eugenic goals that women’s proper role in the modem state was thought to be defined. The Argentine eugenists much admired Mussolini’s state rhetoric and programme of ‘family protection’, a programme whose pro-natalist, anti-abortion, and anti-feminist ideology was highly congruent with their own.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019165999290087S/pdf?md5=78514568b005a672d10a46a947985b60&pid=1-s2.0-019165999290087S-main.pdf
3:25 Marx didn't want to get rid of people of Jewish background, perhaps ethnic distinctiveness, but he did attack the Jewish confession.
Some would count that as Antisemitism ....
3:34 Tell me again, when exactly were Italian small farmers forcefully collectivised in Italy?
You know, what Lenin did once, and Stalin did again to them.
Under Tito, small farmers weren't, large landowners were, even that didn't happen in Italy, unless you can give me news of it.
Under Franco, small farmers were fiscally disadvantaged and encouraged to sell to bigger farmers, to an extent that Carlism wouldn't have done, but Franco was not as bad as de Gaulle (let alone Mitterand) and the French weren't as bas as Swedes, and we in our turn weren't as bad as actual Commie régimes.
4:50 If you want to research Fascism, what were you doing in
Berlin?
Hitler was in a Commie régime in 1919.
Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Dollfuss and Schuschnigg never were that, nor was Perón.
(To be continued? I halt here, directly after a very obvious blunder!)
