- 15 Mar 2015 22:26
#14536494
Communist theory is (on the whole): materialist, internationalist, historically determinist, anti-clericalist, collectivist, and it upholds a democratic socialism. Whether the 'really existing socialism' of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc met all of this criteria is up for debate - Stalin's 'socialism in one country' was essentially a masked nationalism hiding behind internationalism, and it wasn't democratic or libertarian. The underlying goal for communism is however internationalism, and so any nationalist sentiments coming from Marxists can essentially be described as a façade used to hold that system together by drawing support from the local people's affinities and persuasions (love for their own country). Communism's target audience is the working class.
Fascism insofar as it has manifested as an ideology and movement in the past can be described as: anti-materialist, (Jacobin) nationalist, anti-determinist, modernist (fundamentally, behind its traditionalist discourse), collectivist, non-democratic socialist (corporatism, opposed to the 'absolute democracy' of communist theory) authoritarian, militaristic. Typically its electorate has been the middle classes, which to a degree rely on working class support.
I have observed that communists are less willing (if willing at all) to acknowledge any sort of overlap between communist and fascist movements as they manifested historically, whilst many fascists will happily take pride that Stalinism was 'an expression of Russian nationalism', or that Ceaușescu's leadership in Romania was a patriotic form of 'national communism' which accomplished a great many things for that country.
Ultimately, it depends on who you ask - there are different shades of leftist and rightist, so they will give you different answers. As I've outlined above however, whilst the two ideologies are revolutionary, they begin from radically different points of views - fascism came after communism and it was a reorientation of socialism away from internationalism and materialism. Another theme that will crop up when discussing these two ideologies from their respective proponents is how similar their opponents' ideology is to liberalism: communists will accuse fascists of colluding with liberals; liberals will accuse communists and fascists of being equally reprehensible; fascists look to liberals and communists, as self-proclaimed inheritors of Enlightenment philosophy and thinking, as being similarly detestable.
It's also amusing when postmodernist 'New Left'/'smash the system' types battle it out and argue about this sort of thing with so-called 'national communists'/orthodox Marxists.