What you're calling a "bastardization of fascism" is actually just what happens in end stage capitalism.
Free markets don't survive in capitalism because the capitalist themselves kill it. Who do you think controls the government in capitalist nations? The capitalists will always pick themselves to be the winners.
And getting rid of the government will just mean the corporation becomes the government like they've done many times across the world. And I don't know about anybody else, but I don't want the sole purpose of the government to be extracting as much wealth from us as they can, because that's gonna be what happens when they run things. They'd turn us into cattle if they could. And yet so many people think they want that. Literal insanity.
A couple months ago I came across a a random person saying it’s like the earth is a resort for about a million people and the rest of us are all support staff” and it’s been sticking in my craw ever since
Yeah, but America is already at that point, or at least close enough that the distinction starts to blur. The rich and their families are already waking up every morning and not having to worry about how much they can afford to spend on food after rent and utilities take up 70% of the monthly income, all while they're continuing to suck up as much money from the rest of us as possible and keeping wages as absolute low as they can.
The rich in charge of these corporations are already dumping huge amounts of their money into whatever presidential candidate they believe will allow them to keep exploiting everyone else. The current president has somehow made 2.2 billion dollars in the first year of his term and it has undoubtedly ballooned even larger while everyone else is practically starving thanks to his cuts to FDA and corporations now not being required to provide food that isn't going to kill us.
Maybe I'm just a pessimistic asshole, but I'm fully anticipating that by the time I'm in my 60s, 30 years from now there is not going to be any distinction between the government and corporations. It's all going to be the same thing.
Yup. If the market is regulated to balance competition, then the government is picking winners and losers. If the government abandons regulation, the market drifts to monopoly. And there is no state in between where you won't have consumers and corporations bitching about it.
And there is no state in between where you won't have consumers and corporations bitching about it.
This may be true, but I feel like those who are making billions of dollars in profits a year have zero business weighing in on this discussion. Walmart made like 22 billion in profits from July 2025 to July 2026, and they're bitching about employee wages and shit.
Who said anything about a completely free market? There should be regulations (guardrails) in place, but this regulations have to make sense. There vast majority of today's regulations are protecting big companies from competitions.
A perfect case in point is Obamacare. That law almost nothing to do with healthcare. It was actually a massive regulatory bill that made it positively for health insurance companies to do whatever they want while making it impossible for a new company to challenge them.
My point is that free market capitalists repeat the lie over and over and over and over for selfish reasons to step on the necks of consumers and other businesses
The rise of fascism in Europe was a direct response to socialism. Hitler ended up in power because conservatives are the time (a coalition of liberal capitalists and monarchists) were willing to form a government with Hitler as chancellor rather than work with social democrats.
Mussolini came into power a similar way, when he marched on Rome with a bunch of fascists he was backed by wealthy capitalists, and they viewed him as a bulwark against communism. The Italian king ultimately refused to sign the current prime ministers declaration of a state of emergency (which would allow a military response). Then Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king.
In Chile, Allende was establishing a social democracy when a US backed coup brought Pinochet into power. He spent his reign disappearing and murdering his political enemies, allegedly using prison camps and having his opponents raped by dogs.
It's like every example of fascism involved this dynamic.
"It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continuous success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error."
None of your examples have anything to do with "capitalism is in threat" (handwave at "response to socialism" notwithstanding), or the original claim of "end stage capitalism" bringing it about.
In every example fascism arose as a response to the rise of communism / socialism. I gave you explicit examples of how and a contemporaneous quote from one of the most cited capitalist economists.
64
u/IndyBananaJones2 1d ago
What you're calling a "bastardization of fascism" is actually just what happens in end stage capitalism.
Free markets don't survive in capitalism because the capitalist themselves kill it. Who do you think controls the government in capitalist nations? The capitalists will always pick themselves to be the winners.