Economics of fascism

The economics of fascism refers to the economic policies implemented by fascist governments.

Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist. Baker argues that there is an identifiable economic system in fascism that is distinct from those advocated by other ideologies, comprising essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. Payne, Paxton, Sternhell, et al. argue that while fascist economies share some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization. Feldman and Mason argue that fascism is distinguished by an absence of coherent economic ideology and an absence of serious economic thinking. They state that the decisions taken by fascist leaders cannot be explained within a logical economic framework.

An inherent aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigisme, meaning an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence over investment while often subsidizing favorable companies, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, apart from the nationalizations of many industries, fascist economies were based on private individuals being allowed property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.

In an effort to bring about a more productive corporate-worker state under revolutionary syndicalist principles of French Marxist Georges Sorel, fascism turned to economic collaboration of the classes, opposing class struggle. This newly revised approach, which was responding to the theoretical crisis of Marxism, sought to create a “productivist” posture where “a proletariat of producers” would be critical to the “conception of revolutionary politics” and social revolution. Since Italy’s economy was generally undeveloped with little industrialization, Fascists and revolutionary syndicalists, such as Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, argued that the Italian working class could not have the requisite numbers or consciousness “to make revolution.” They instead followed Karl Marx's admonition that a nation required “full maturation of capitalism as the precondition for socialist realization.” Under this interpretation, especially as expounded by Sergio Panunzio, a major theoretician of Italian Fascism, “Syndicalists were productivists, rather than distributionists.” Fascist intellectuals were determined to foster economic development in order for a syndicalist economy to “attain its productive maximum” that was identified as crucial to “socialist revolution.” Fascism, which historian Zeev Sternhell referred to as a “revision of Marxism” was a revolutionary movement that included an economic collectivity component in order to “fuse socialism with nationalism.”

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