I just don't understand why you people keep doing this. Italian fascism boasted both left-wing and right-wing socioeconomic policies, but fascism is right-wing. While communism is a system based around a theory of economic equality and advocates for a classless society, fascism is an uber-nationalistic, top-down system, with rigid class roles and is ruled by an all-powerful dictator. <--- Not to be confused with Stalinism. There is similarity:
Fascism & Communism = centralized government, planned economy, anti-democratic.
But these items alone do not dictate their natures as simply left-wing or right-wing. Italian Fascism followed a nationalist policy based on three principles: order, discipline, hierarchy. None of this exactly screams out to be labeled as "the left." It's totalitarian nature opposes socialism for its definition of a class struggle. Thus, Italian Fascism maintained the class system of social hierarchy, whereas a left-wing movement seeks to shatter the classes as a means to create worker's rights and general equality.
- Italian Fascism required respect for national tradition and a clear sense of a shared past (without the Antisemitism of Germany's National Socialism).
- Italian Fascism promoted traditional gender roles.
- Italian Fascism created a corporatist economic system in which captains of industry still remained capitalists.
- Italian Fascism considered the means of production as privately owned but directed by the State.
- Italian Fascism allowed for private property.
- Italian Fascism opposed trade unionism, unless brought under the orbit of the State where they were formed into guilds within the corporative system.
- Mussolini wanted the public appearance of being admired by the Pope, thus legitimizing religion (Catholicism) within his State.
These items are obviously conservative in nature. Fascism's doctrine diametrically opposes Marxism, Liberalism, and Democracy. It developed around the same time as communism. Both sought to replace capitalism, materialism, and individualism. This is where we see the similarities that I listed above. However, whereas communism sought to empower the worker in an unrealistic stateless community, fascism sought to keep the worker fixed within his class in order to strengthen the totalitarian nation, less so the capitalist employer. Fascism is therefore opposed to socialism, which is about a class struggle. Don't confuse the existence of socialist-type systems for left-wing socialist doctrine. Even the U.S. contains, within its highly democratic and capitalist nature, plenty of socialist systems. The U.S. is both right-wing and left-wing in its nationalistic, capitalist, liberal democracy. But this cannot be confused for simply left-wing in the same vein as leftist political movements of the communist/socialist persuasion.
The failure of the elite in Europe was argued to have led to World War I. The failures of capitalism and democracy was argued to have led to the Great Depression. One by one, the new democracies in Europe fell victim to either communism or fascism as a means to create a new future where everyday
citizens could experience security that the old systems (democracy, monarchy, tsarism, etc.) failed to provide. But here is where we start to see similarities again in the form of Hitlerism and Stalinism as dictators, which does not rely upon a left-wing or right-wing label. But Italian and German fascism were right-wing. Here are the fundamental differences:
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