Al Gore 2008 Effort Begins (new website launching tomorrow)

Four years ago the will of the people was thwarted when the U.S. Supreme Court's intervention prevented Florida from counting their votes and handed the White House to George W. Bush. Vice President Gore addressed the nation urging Americans to unite behind President Bush and give him the opportunity to govern effectively. Unfortunately George W. Bush did not reach out to his opponents and govern from the middle, but instead enacted radical right wing policies that divided our nation in two. Eight years of peace and prosperity under Clinton/Gore gave way to war and recession.

Now, after a long and divisive campaign, Bush has emerged the winner in another tight race, claiming to have a mandate. With Republican gains in the House and Senate, the 55,743,908 people who voted against George W. Bush are in danger of losing their voice in the legislative sessions ahead.

Now, more than ever, America needs a national leader capable of serving as the standard bearer for a more progressive agenda. One person has stood up for all of us as the conscience of the Democratic party: A man who immediately spoke out against the loss of our civil rights in the Patriot Act, the first major political figure to speak out against the proposal to invade Iraq, the voice of reason in the face of a storm of ideological rhetoric: Al Gore.

Today we are launching a campaign to elect Al Gore as the 44th President of the United States of America and we hope you will join us in this historic effort.

A new website will launch on Monday, November 8th, with a new name. Please join our mailing list below and keep informed about this, only the first step in a long and exciting campaign.

Then let me help. I don't mean it like the nuts on the left do when they say "Bush is Hitler" or some other crap, I mean strictly speaking the modern neo-conservative GOP agenda is closest to fascism in idealogy. Don't have knee jerk reactions to terms that are not fully understood.

The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that

* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual,
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition,
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and
* espouses nationalism and sometimes racism or ethnic nationalism.

In an article in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Giovanni Gentile and attributed to Benito Mussolini, fascism is described as a system in which "The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad.... For the Fascist, everything is within the State and... neither individuals or groups are outside the State.... For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative."

Mussolini, in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925, stated the following maxim that encapsulates the fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".)

Nazism is usually considered as a kind of fascism, but it should be understood that Nazism sought the state's purpose in serving an ideal to valuing what its content should be: its people, race, and the social engineering of these aspects of culture to the ends of the greatest possible prosperity for them at the expense of all else. In contrast, Mussolini's fascism held to the ideology that all of these factors existed to serve the state, and that it wasn't necessarily in the state's interest to serve or engineer any of these particulars within its sphere as any priority. The only purpose of the government under fascism proper was to value itself as the highest priority to its culture in just being the state in itself, the larger scope of which, the better, and for these reasons it can be said to have been a governmental statolatry.

While Nazism was a metapolitical ideology, seeing itself only as a utility by which an allegorical condition of its people was to be achieved, fascism was a squarely anti-socialist form of statism that existed by virtue and as an end in and of itself. The Nazi movement spoke of class-based society as the enemy, and wanted to unify the racial element above established classes. The Fascist movement, on the other hand, sought to preserve the class system and uphold it as the foundation of established and desirable culture. This underlying theorem made the contemporary Fascists and Nazis see themselves and their respective political labels as at least partially exclusive to one another.

Today, however, this difference is not made often in terminology, even when used historically. This is mostly because both ideologies have ceased to be society-driven movements of their own anywhere in the world today. Outside of their internal reasoning, their own opposing ideas have no part to play in modern politics, and could be said to be arbitrarily alien to the liberal states currently dealing in defining political concerns.

As a political science, the philosophical pretext to the literal fascism of the historical Italian type believes the state's nature is superior to that of the sum of the individuals comprising it -- individuals exist for the state, rather than the state existing to serve them. The resources that individuals provide from participating in the community are conceived as a productive duty of individual progress serving an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore, all individuals' business is the state's business, and the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual.

In its Corporativist model of totalitarian but private management, the various functions of the state were trades, conceived as individualized entities making up that state. Further, it is in the state's interest to oversee them for that reason, but not direct them or make them public because such functioning in government hands undermines the development of what the state is. Private activity is in a sense contracted to the state so that the state may suspend the infrastructure of any entity in accordance with their usefulness and direction, or with health to the state.

Fascist movements have historically been composed of small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats, and the middle classes. Fascism also met with great success in rural areas, especially among farmers, peasants, and in the city, the lumpenproletariat. A key feature of fascism is that it uses its mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class - parties of the left and trade unions.

Unlike the pre–World War II period, when many groups openly and proudly proclaimed themselves fascist, in the post–World War II period, the term has taken on an extremely pejorative meaning, largely in reaction to the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis.

Today, very few groups proclaim themselves as fascist, and the term almost universally is used for groups for whom the speaker has little regard, often with minimal understanding of what the term actually means. The term "fascist" or "Nazi" is often ascribed to individuals or groups who are perceived to behave in an authoritarian manner; by silencing opposition, judging personal behavior, or otherwise attempting to concentrate power. More particularly, "Fascist" is sometimes used by members of the Left to characterize some group or persons of the far-right or neo-far-right, or the far left activists as a description of any political or cultural influences perceived as "non-progressive," or merely not sufficiently progressive. This usage receded much following the 1970s, but has enjoyed a strong resurgence in connection with Anti-globalization activism.

Fascism, in many respects, is an ideology of negativism: anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, etc. As a political and economic system in Italy, it combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-communism.
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The origin and ideology of Fascism

Etymologically, the use of the word Fascism in modern Italian political history stretches back to the 1890s in the form of fasci, which were radical political groups that proliferated in the decades before World War I. (See Fascio for more on this movement and its evolution.)

The Doctrine of Fascism was written by Giovanni Gentile, an idealist philosopher who served as the official philosopher of fascism. Mussolini signed the article and it was officially attributed to him. In it, Frenchmen Georges Sorel, Charles Peguy, and Hubert Lagardelle were invoked as the sources of fascism. Sorel's ideas concerning syndicalism and violence are much in evidence in this document. It also quotes from Joseph Renan who it says had "pre-fascist intuitions". Both Sorel and Peguy were influenced by the Frenchman Henri Bergson. Bergson rejected the scientism, mechanical evolution and materialism of Marxist ideology. Also, Bergson promoted an elan vital as an evolutionary process. Both of these elements of Bergson appear in fascism. Mussolini states that fascism negates the doctrine of scientific and Marxian socialism and the doctrine of historic materialism. Hubert Lagardelle, an authoritative syndicalist writer, was influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who, in turn, inspired anarchosyndicalism.

There were several strains of tradition influencing Mussolini. Sergio Panunzio, a major theoretician of fascism in the 1920s, had a syndicalist background, but his influence waned as the movement shed its old left wing elements. The fascist concept of corporatism and particularly its theories of class collaboration and economic and social relations are very similar to the model laid out by Pope Leo XII's 1892 encyclical Rerum Novarum. This encyclical addressed politics as it had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and other changes in society that had occurred during the nineteenth century. The document criticized capitalism, complaining of the exploitation of the masses in industry. However, it also sharply criticized the socialist concept of class struggle, and the proposed socialist solution to exploitation (the elimination, or at least the limitation, of private property). Rerum Novarum called for strong governments to undertake a mission to protect their people from exploitation, while continuing to uphold private property and reject socialism. It also asked Roman Catholics to apply principles of social justice in their own lives.

Seeking to find some principle to compete with and replace the Marxist doctrine of class struggle, Rerum Novarum urged social solidarity between the upper and lower classes, and endorsed nationalism as a way of preserving traditional morality, customs, and folkways. In doing so, Rerum Novarum proposed a kind of corporatism, the organization of political societies along industrial lines that resembled mediaeval guilds. A one-person, one-vote democracy was rejected in favor of representation by interest groups. This idea was to counteract the "subversive nature" of the doctrine of Karl Marx.

The themes and ideas developed in Rerum Novarum can also be found in the ideology of fascism as developed by Mussolini.

Fascism also borrowed from Gabriele D'Annunzio's Constitution of Fiume for his ephemeral "regency" in the city of Fiume. Syndicalism had an influence on fascism as well, particularly as some syndicalists intersected with D'Annunzio's ideas. Before the First World War, syndicalism had stood for a militant doctrine of working-class revolution. It distinguished itself from Marxism because it insisted that the best route for the working class to liberate itself was the trade union rather than the party.

The Italian Socialist Party ejected the syndicalists in 1908. The syndicalist movement split between anarcho-syndicalists and a more moderate tendency. Some moderates began to advocate "mixed syndicates" of workers and employers. In this practice, they absorbed the teachings of Catholic theorists and expanded them to accommodate greater power of the state, and diverted them by the influence of D'Annunzio to nationalist ends.

When Henri De Man's Italian translation of Au-dela du marxisme emerged, Mussolini was excited and wrote the author that his criticism "destroyed any scientific element left in Marxism". Mussolini was appreciative of the idea that a corporative organization and a new relationship between labour and capital would eliminate "the clash of economic interests" and thereby neutralize "the germ of class warfare.'"

Renegade socialist thinkers, Robert Michels, Sergio Panunzio, Ottavio Dinale, Agostino Lanzillo, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Michele Bianchi, and Edmondo Rossoni, turning against their former left-wing ideas, played a part in this attempt to find a "third way" that rejected both capitalism and socialism.

You basically have 2 statist visions of society in American and European politics. Europe, because of it's long proximity to Soviet communism, tends towards the communist/Marxist statism. America, under the GOP is tending towards the fascist vision. These two visions are incompatible and at war with each other, but both are fundamentally similiar in that the state dominates all aspects of it's citizens lives. The unelected bureaucrat of virtually any federal agency has more power over your daily life than any absolutist monarch in history via the appartus of the managerial "liberal" state.

Fascism developed in opposition to socialism and communism, although some early Fascists were themselves former Marxists. In 1923, Mussolini declared in The Doctrine of Fascism:

... Fascism [is] the complete opposite of... Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production....

Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

... "The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans.... If classical liberalism spells individualism," Mussolini continued, "Fascism spells government."

--Benito Mussolini, public domain, from The Internet Modern History Sourcebook (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html)

While certain types of socialism may superficially appear to be similar to fascism, it should be noted that the two ideologies clash violently on many issues. The role of the state, for example: socialism considers the state to be merely a "tool of the people," sometimes calling it a "necessary evil," which exists to serve the interests of the people and to protect the common good. (Certain forms of libertarian socialism reject the state altogether.) Meanwhile, fascism holds the state to be an end in of itself, which the people should obey and serve, rather than the other way around.

Fascism rejects the central tenets of Marxism, which are class struggle, and the need to replace capitalism with a society run by the working class in which the workers own the means of production.

A fascist government is usually characterized as "extreme right-wing," and a socialist government as "left-wing". Others such as Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Hayek argue that the differences between fascism and totalitarian forms of socialism (see Stalinism) are more superficial than actual, since those self-proclaimed "socialist" governments did not live up to their claims of serving the people and respecting democratic principles. Many socialists and communists also reject those totalitarian governments, seeing them as fascism with a socialist mask. (See political spectrum and political model for more on these ideas.)

Socialists and other critics of Arendt and Hayek maintain that there is no ideological overlap between Fascism and Marxism; they regard the two as utterly distinct. Since Marxism is the ideological basis of Communism, they argue that the comparisons drawn by Arendt and others are invalid.

Mussolini completely rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle or the Marxist thesis that the working class must expropriate the means of production.

Mussolini wrote in his 1932 treatise, The Doctrine of Fascism (ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile): "Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State." 1 (http://www.constitution.org/tyr/mussolini.htm)

Italian fascist leader Mussolini's own origin on the left, as a former leader of the more radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party, has frequently been noted. After his turn to the right, Mussolini continued to employ much of the rhetoric of socialism, substituting the nation for social class as the basis of political loyalty. These rhetorical devices seem to have been the last remnants of Mussolini's non-fascist past.

It is also frequently noted that Fascist Italy did not nationalize any industries or capitalist entities. Rather, it established a corporatist structure influenced by the model for class relations put forward by the Catholic Church. Indeed, there is a lot of literature on the influence of Catholicism on fascism and the links between the clergy and fascist parties in Europe before and during World War II.

Although Italian fascism proclaimed its antithesis to socialism, Mussolini's own history in the socialist movement had some influence on him. Elements of the practice of socialist movements he retained were:

* the need for a mass party;
* the importance of building support among the working class; and
* techniques relating to the dissemination of ideas, such as the use of propaganda.

The original Fascist Manifesto contained within it a number of proposals for reforms that were also common among socialist and democratic movements and were designed to appeal to the working class. These promises were generally disregarded once the fascists took power.

Critics point out that Marxists and trade unionists were the first targets, and the first victims, of both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler once they came to power. They also note the antagonistic relationship which resulted in street fights between fascists and socialists, including:

* the 1936 Battle of Cable Street in London of Trotskyists and members of the Communist Party of Great Britain against Mosely's supporters, and
* street fights in Germany prior to Hitler's coming to power.

A more serious manifestation of the conflict between fascism and socialism was the Spanish Civil War, mentioned earlier in this article.

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