NetsNJFan87 wrote:I disagree, political and economic freedom are different things. Chile was a brutal political dictatorship, but was economically free.
This separation of politics from economy is really something fantastic. It was the state apparatus itself that effectively carried out the coup on behalf of those in control of the economy. It was a political expression of the same class dictatorship that already existed with economy as its foundation. They already had both economic and political power, which can't be separated anyway. What changed was that the political power tore down its own parliamentarian facade and temporarily adopted an openly terroristic and openly dictatorial
form. This would not have happened without the Allende government that threatened the economic foundation of the class dictatorship of the Chilean bourgeoisie and US imperialism. Had there not been such an alien democratic government (that is alien to state apparatus protecting the economic interests of the rich and democratic from the perspective of the economic interests of the poor), then that state power could've retained its "pluralistic" parliamentarian facade.
However the point I'm trying to get across is that political power can't exist without an economic foundation, and that dictatorship requires both.
I don't understand the question; in general or particular to this discussion.
You seemed to conclude "collectivist indifference" from a feature you find similar between fascism and communism - "state oriented dictatorship". Even if this was a common feature (which I don't accept), lumping them together (with the nominal "exception" of economics) on the basis of a shared feature is just arbitrary. To put it simple, there are no two things that don't have anything in common. You may list perceived or real common features between fascism and communism and I can do the same with fascism and, say, social-democracy or conservatism. At best this may accumulate data to be analysed and to be put into a context, but such doesn't constitute an analysis by itself.
Politically, I do think Communism and Fascism have been similar. While yes, economically they have differed, but I don't see any different between getting sent to a Fascist death camp or a communist gulag.
What do you think politics is? I think it's about the ways how people organise themselves in a society, and it's a high time for me to know if it's here where our disagreement boils down to. But if there's no fundamental disagreement here, then how do you exclude economy from the sphere of politics? Economy is definitely a component (I'd say the foundation or base) of society, not something "outside" or independent of it.
I think you're making a moralistic argument with the "death camp or gulag" thing, rather than proving a political similarity. It was not some abstract individual who was sent to the death camps or "gulags" but real people of very real groups. What was the difference in these two cases, if not political?
Besides, honestly I don't believe you wouldn't choose going to prison labour camp instead of a nazi death camp if those really were the only options available to you.
This is what I am evaluating, not Marxist vs. Fascist literature.
Yes I know that. What I'm asking you to do is to compare communist and fascist regimes by looking at how they function vis a vis the economic base of the society, because that's what determines the political content of the two.
You really think Stalin's paranoid Russia and Hitler's Germany were that different?
Again you include moral judgements like "paranoid". Yes the two were completely different and I bet you're not as ignorant about history as your question would imply. One was a capitalist state (without parliamentarianism) and the other a socialist state. The social conditions on which both regimes were formed were completely different, almost from "another era".