Flirting With Relevance

One of the more persistent memes are that I have encountered, especially since the economic meltdown of 2008, is the notion that fascism means rule by corporations. This is usually mixed in with other anti-capitalist rhetoric, but the equation of fascism to corporations was novel to me. Given the level of political naivete that normally circulates on the old interwebby tubes, I initially dismissed it as a bit of mental flatulence from some college sophomore with more time than political sophistication.

The notion proved irritatingly persistent, even though, as a student of that period history, I knew it was bullshit. I was curious, however, so I decided to a little research to find out where this idea came from. The dictionary definition of fascism was no help.

“a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”¹

That didn’t say anything about corporations, so already things were not looking good for these anti-capitalist school children. I only had to go as far as the first line of the Wikipedia entry on fascism to find out where they went off the rails.

Fascism comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology [emphasis mine].²

Then there is this unsourced, probably apocryphal quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini:

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.

Okay, I can see where a superficial reading of the word “corporatist” would lead the uninformed to conclude that fascism had something to do with corporation. After all, to the committed anti-capitalist, corporations represent virtually all that is evil in the world, so anything offering an unsavory linkage between capitalism and fascism must seem like manna from heaven.

There’s only one problem. There’s no documented evidence that Il Duce ever said anything of the sort, but actual facts are strictly optional in online political debates.

The intellectually curious, not content with such simple-minded demagoguery, would go further and actually look up what was meant by the word corporatist.

Corporatism is a system of economic, political, and social organization where corporate groups such as business, ethnic, farmer, labour, military, patronage, or religious groups are joined together into a single governing body in which the different groups are mandated to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the multiple groups within the body.³

Hmm, doesn’t sound much a “merger of state and corporate power” to me. It sounds more like a strong central authority brings together the disparate elements of a society, which normally would be at odds with each other, and compelling them to cooperate for what the authority sees as the greater good.

The word “corporatism” is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. This meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, but rather a general reference to anything collected as a body.³

In other words, corporatism has nothing to do with business entities, but rather entails unifying the various “organs” of a society, such labor, business, farmers, the church, and the military into the “body” of the state. I suppose that the concept does not require an authoritarian government but such goals are probably unrealistic without such a government.

So, rather than being a system where corporations, unchecked by government, rule society, fascism is a form of corporatism where business, like all other institutions, are subservient to the state.

There are other forms of corporatism, too. The system of consolidating many labor unions into a single labor federation is another form of corporatism. Ecumenical councils with representation from many different faiths, could be seen as form of religious corporatism.

In short, the equation of fascism with corporations is just the sad result of the political illiteracy of the anti-capitalists and bears no resemblance to reality.

1. Meriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, retrieved August 27, 2009 [↩]
2. Fascism. (2009, August 27). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism [↩]
3. Corporatism. (2009, August 24). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism [↩] [↩]