Fascism

Fascism ( /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism. Fascists seek to unify their nation based upon suprapersonal connections of ancestry and culture through a totalitarian state that seeks the mass mobilization of the national community through discipline, indoctrination, and physical training. Fascism utilizes a vanguard party to initiate a revolution to organize the nation upon fascist principles. The fascist party and state is led by a supreme leader who exercises a dictatorship over the party, the government and other state institutions. Fascism views direct action including political violence and war, as a means to achieve national rejuvenation, spirit and vitality.

Fascism recognizes the occurrence of class conflict, and advocates a resolution to end the division of classes within a nation and secure national solidarity. However fascism publicly favours proletarian culture, and claims that cultural nationalization of society emancipates the nation's proletariat, and promotes the assimilation of all classes into a proletarian nation.

Fascism advocates a state-controlled and regulated mixed economy; the principal economic goal of fascism is to achieve autarky to secure national self-sufficiency and independence, through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. It promotes regulated private enterprise and private property contingent whenever beneficial to the nation and state enterprise and state property whenever necessary to protect its interests.

Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views. Fascists have commonly opposed having a firm association with any section of the left-right spectrum, considering it inadequate to describe their beliefs, though fascism's goal to promote the rule of people deemed innately superior while seeking to purge society of people deemed innately inferior is identified as a prominent far-right theme. Fascism opposes multiple ideologies, such as communism, conservatism, liberalism, and social democracy.

Read more about Fascism:  Etymology, Definitions, Criticism of Fascism

Famous quotes containing the word fascism:

    Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    The strategic adversary is fascism ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
    Michel Foucault (1926–1984)