 If you ask 100 random people on the street what fascism is, despite the streets all being empty right now thanks to the coronavirus, I'd wage a good money that you wouldn't get the correct answer back. It's very likely that you yourself watching this video might not even know, so let me help. When the word fascism is first heard, our minds immediately go to Hitler's genocide with the racism, antisemitism and all other forms of unimaginable violent bigotry behind it and with good reason. It quickly highlights the indescribable danger of authoritarianism, but Germany was not the only fascist country in Europe at that same time. Fascism first began in 1922 in Italy under the dictatorship of the world's angriest potato Benito Mussolini. This original fascism was still explicitly racist like its German counterpart of National Socialism, but with more of an emphasis on racial superiority rather than purity. They did impose segregation in their captured territories in Africa and asserted a claim of superiority for the white race, but had a much more assimilatory view than their German counterparts who obsessed over racial purity and cleansing. There were comparatively few Italian laws made to persecute people based on race and religion until Italy and Germany grew very close in the late 30s and the lead up to war. And even when more laws were made they weren't enthusiastically enforced as it was seen that Germany was more elbowing them into the position. The objective of Italian fascism was far more straightforward, absolute national domination through militarism. To crush all of their neighbours who didn't fall in line and to conquer the Mediterranean and restore the ancient Roman Empire. The goal of expansion was called spaziovitale, meaning living space, and it was exactly the same as Hitler's Laban's realm, the reason to expand into Eastern Europe to provide new land for their people to settle on. So how could Italy, an impoverished country with massively agrarian economy lacking in technology and still recovering from the First World War, hope to dominate such a large part of the world? That question lay entirely at the feet of their economic policy. To take the words straight from the potato's mouth Mussolini said, fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is the merger of corporate and government power. If that quote hits close to home for you then you'll see exactly where I'm going. If a dictatorial government could harness the direction of the wealth generated by big business their expansion would appear seemingly limitless. This is the same approach Hitler had to economics despite his espoused hatred of the dismal science. Where these two kinds of fascism are differing in their application to racial theory they are locked arm in arm when it comes to economics. There are many primary sources from Hitler and the Nazi ministry of economics that essentially say corporate business and especially heavy industry must exist to serve the will of the government and follow their orders. If these businesses say they are unable to meet these demands the government will appropriate the entire business and either takeover management and production themselves or give it all to a party lobbyist yes man who says they can do it themselves. This points to sound very similar right now with the talk of using the defense production act in America to combat the coronavirus. So now we have a basic understanding of the fascist economic structure let's talk about what the capitalist structure is and you'll see where I'm getting at. In my studies capitalism has been defined as a system where individuals, firms and their shareholders own property privately and compete with other actors in the market in a competition of financial profit and loss. So here comes the question was fascism capitalist? I can answer this with a rhetorical question if your private property is only private until a central authority says it's not how is it your private property in the first place? Private property is defined as property that can be excluded from or exchanged at the discretion of the owner. It's a concept that directly stands against the notion that somebody is allowed to remove it from you without your consent even if that person calls himself an agent of the government and tries to justify this action as for the public good or the will of the people. So in an environment where property can be legally taken by force you have an effect completely remove the requirement and it is a big requirement of capitalism which is the private ownership of property. Does this not sound at least somewhat familiar to what we currently live under in Britain, Europe, the United States and indeed most of the world? Your money is undeniably your private property earned by providing goods and services to the market. In the case of employment you contractually agree to sell your labor with the employer at an agreed upon rate but before you receive this money some of it is legally removed without the consent of yourself or your employer and entirely by force. If you cannot exclude or exchange this private property as you choose with no interference then as we said before how is it even private property at all? If even our money is not excludable to the central authority then how is a single thing that we buy to be considered private property? If we grow vegetables on our own land but the land is taxed in the exact same way how is that even truly private property? You can exclude others from it or eat it yourself but if you decide to then make a business out of this and willingly exchange these vegetables for money guess what if the government finds out they'll chase you to the ends of the earth in order to remove a portion of this privately acquired money and take it for themselves. Anybody who can try to call this system private should try out for the Olympics as a world-class mental gymnast so if all I said is true we fundamentally cannot be living in a capitalist society as we speak. Capitalism requires that private property goes unmolested and in order for that to happen the markets must be left completely to work on their own as they are absolutely capable of doing. In purely technical terms you could argue that we have private property in that the means of production are privately owned but if you're basing such a broad and important argument concerning all aspects of human interaction on technicality alone then it has no weight in the real world. That being said I'm not saying that we live in a fascist society either it would be absurd to try and compare our lives to those who lived under the crushing boots of the Italian and German governments of the era. In societal terms we live a mostly free life and must remain thankful for it. It's easy to think that you're completely oppressed until you remember the conditions that people in large parts of the non western world such as Russia and China have to endure. This is why the comparison I'm making between fascism and our current system is purely about the economic structure. What we have is not capitalism as I've shown but it's also not reading off the him sheet of fascism. What we instead have is an evolution of the word Mussolini himself used corporatism. It has evolved to serve an inverted end but through remarkably similar means. The end of what we have is to empower the absolute wealthiest and the politicians at the expense of everybody else. We can see there's no better than our current time when our governments have gone absolutely crazy with throwing out money to try and soften an inevitable economic recession that they themselves caused. The US government is currently underway on a six trillion dollar stimulus bill part of which being that most adults will receive up to 1200 dollars but when you divide the total expense of the bill by families you'll realize that the actual amount is about 12 times what the actual families will receive. Something clearly isn't adding up. What's happening here is that the absurdly massive financial institutions and industries and the politicians themselves are being given an ungodly amount of our money. Stolen money that was taken from people without their consent. It's completely backwards that as soon as a government created economic bubble bursts the wealthiest institutions immediately need billions of our money in order to survive with minimal operating costs for just a few months. Because Delta Airlines for example was too irresponsible to put aside money for a few months of recession at low operating costs their burden is now on our backs for the foreseeable future because this cycle will never stop unless it is forced to and it has to be forced to because the ones with power the politicians and the 1% just get richer every single time from this. I can't remember who said it but it is perfectly described as privatized profits and socialized loss. The cartel at the top will never fail because they can just keep earning and recklessly spending knowing that their cronies in government will open the public purse at the slightest notion that revenue streams might slow down. Remember back to the definition of capitalism that firms compete via the mechanism of profit and loss. If in reality your property is not private and that the largest firms are not subject to loss then only one requirement of capitalism is actually met in our systems the fact that firms exist at all and that is far from exclusive to capitalism firms existed in fascism and even in most theories of market socialism. Saying that firms exist and can make profit is so far from justifying our system as capitalist that it's just laughable and it's why I hate to see us libertarians defending some of the main beneficiaries of the corporatist structure which are the businesses that call themselves too big to fail. There is no such thing as too big to fail in capitalism it can only exist in corporatism because as Mussolini said it is a merger of corporate and government power. Fascists absolutely despise capitalism so anybody who is for this merger cannot be a capitalist. Do not defend this merger and make excuses for the monstrous behavior of the mega corporations because they are the fabrications of the government and are on the exact same level as any other tyrant by participating in the exact same games as them. As Thomas Massey has recently put it perfectly in response to this insane massive spending and stimulus bill he tweeted something absolutely perfect the stimulus package that just passed is the biggest wealth transfer from the common folks to the super rich Wall Street and bankers in the history of mankind done in the name of a virus with 1200 checks as the cheese in the trap this will be obvious in short order what he is describing here is exactly what I mean by we currently live in a system of evolved corporatism where corporatism was Mussolini's idea of bringing together the classes to stop the class conflicts of Marxism what we have is a corporatism designed to spread the classes even further and benefit the ones at the top at the expense of the bottom no other system devised can be so evil in its output thank you for listening and I hope this makes my point clear please feel free to use this video as a rebuttal resource for socialists and communists who blame libertarians for what they call capitalism so they can see it's an entirely different thing either corporatism or crony capitalism it is not free market and it is not what we stand for let us all be anti-fascist together