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/* Fascism and National Socialism */
By the time the war was over, it had become impossible even to discuss the issue: “The word 'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’," wrote Orwell. “Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism?”<ref>George Orwell, "[http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit Politics and the English Language]," ''Horizon'', vol. 13, issue 76 (April 1946), pp. 252-265, reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Eds., ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=zaxG_3ivhVAC The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell, Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950]'' (David R. Godine, 2000) ISBN 1567921361, pp. 132, 139</ref> Particularly in the United States, the word "fascism" had become confused with the rights of private property and economic freedom, which had previously been called "liberalism";<ref>"The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership in the means of production.... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand." Ludwig Von Mises, ''[http://mises.org/books/liberalism.pdf Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition]'' (Irvington, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education and San Francisco: Cobden Press, 1985), p. 19. It was in this sense that Mussolini wrote, "Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere" (Benito Mussolini, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=GOzmAAAACAAJ The Doctrine of Fascism]'' [Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1935], p. 15); that cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote, "Italy had several years earlier begun the transition from a liberal free-market system to a state-run or corporatist one" (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=Z3GV5_n1h04C Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939]'' [Macmillan, 2006] ISBN 080507452X, p. 22); that Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote, "It was the union of the anticapitalist forces of the Right and of the Left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal." Friedrich August Hayek, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=qg61T_I1mwsC The Road to Serfdom]'' (University of Chicago Press, 2007) ISBN 0226320553, p. 182</ref> meanwhile, the word "liberalism" had been redefined to denote the very "state-capitalist" mixed economy that characterized Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. "As a supreme, if unintended compliment," quipped Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter,<ref>Schumpeter "believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes," as it made possible the existence of "a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class’s existence." [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Schumpeter.html Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950)], ''The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics'' (Liberty Fund)</ref> "the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label."<ref>Joseph Alois Schumpeter, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=igM8E4gZ_coC History of economic analysis]'' (Psychology Press, 1994) ISBN 0415108888, p. 372</ref> This debasing of meaning, making reasoned discourse and clear thinking impossible, was precisely what Orwell was illustrating in his novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' by means of "Newspeak."<ref>Newspeak, wrote Orwell, was "devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.... The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words." George Orwell, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=-XNPiuSgL2kC Nineteen Eighty-Four]'' (Infobase Publishing, 2006) ISBN 079109300X, p. 104</ref>
These policies that are today called "liberal"—big government, high taxation, regulation, state intervention in or control of the economy, public-private partnerships, state control over the use of private property, etc.—were all pioneered by the fascists, who called this economic system ''corporativismo'' (corporativism). Contrary to revisionist socialist propaganda, the name has nothing to do with incorporated firms, but refers to the medieval system of guilds, theoretically modernized as syndicalism. Corporativist ideas had been popular with British socialists and Fabians, as well as American progressives such as Herbert Croly, Edward Bellamy and Colonel House, since the late 19th century. Far from being capitalist, corporativism was stridently anti-capitalist. “So substantial are the limitations under which private property and capital are exercised in Italy, that the conception of ‘capitalism’ is avowedly destroyed and replaced by ''corporativismo'',” wrote Herbert Steiner in his classic 1938 study of fascism.<ref>H. Arthur Steiner, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=1LqtuYl43dwC Government in Fascist Italy]'' (McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1938), p. 92</ref> Even Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas admitted, "the fascists "fascist revolutions definitely abolished ''laissez-faire'' capitalism in favor of one or another kind and degree of state capitalism."<ref>Norman Thomas, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=dJBWAAAAMAAJ A Socialist's Faith] (Norton, 1951), pp. 55</ref> “The programme of the Fascists, as drafted in 1919, was vehemently anti-capitalistic,” wrote Ludwig von Mises. “The most radical New Dealers and even communists could agree with it.”<ref> Ludwig von Mises, ''[http://mises.org/books/socialism.pdf Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis]'' (Yale University Press, 1951), p. 576</ref> It demanded “Suppression of incorporated joint-stock companies, industrial or financial. Suppression of all speculation by banks and stock exchanges,” and “Control and taxation of private wealth. Confiscation of unproductive income.”<ref> Count Carlo Sforza, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=5a0EHPh-X-YC Contemporary Italy - Its Intellectual and Moral Origins]'' (Read Books, 2007) ISBN 1406760307, pp. 295-296</ref>
==Fascism==
