Fascism is the implementation of communism.
Communism is, at its base, a perversion of the principles of capitalism, the investment of profits from the application of labor to the raw materials, to produce articles or services of value. However, one essential ingredient was stripped out - the granting of enterprising individuals the right to profit personally from the fruit of his ingenuity or highly motivated efforts. All fruits were to be shared for the common good. The exceptional person was thus thwarted in gaining rightful reward, and sank back to mediocrity.
The Fascist model was a little different, in that the illusion of private ownership of the fruits of ingenuity and motivated effort were permitted, but only so long as the recipient of these rewards remained a good and obedient servant of the State, or more precisely, the Syndicate that was an element of the State. This is crony capitalism at its worst, that locked out new candidates for advancement into these positions unless the previous holder was stripped of his position and sent into some kind of exile or imprisonment, if not executed outright.
The Nationalist Socialism as practiced in Germany differed still further, in that the laboring class, the actual workers, were invested with partial ownership of the enterprises at which they worked, stockholders, whose earnings were tied to the relative success of the corporate entity, and the management level was just a higher-paid member of this same corporate ownership.
All three variations on this statist principle of ownership of the means of capital generation relied on the ultimate use of force to control any dissidents or rebels that would try to contradict the rulings of the elite, until the hopelessness of the situation grew to too great a level to still be controlled any longer, then an internal or external enemy had to be “found”, either resulting in purges or making war on neighboring countries, to steal their wealth for continued nurturing of the State.
Works great until you run out of other people’s money.
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and [already in 1939!] it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. ____________— F A Hayek