Statism: Whether Fascist or Communist, It's The Deadly Opposite of Capitalism

The political spectrum–Left vs. Right–must be defined in terms of statism vs. individual liberty

By Harry Binswanger

Over the last few years, a new and immensely clarifying concept has entered public discussion: “statism.” It has been said that he who controls language controls history. The growing use of “statism” may portend a political sea change, because it pierces a major Leftist-created smokescreen: the placing of fascism on the Right.

This twisting of language and facts has reached ludicrous levels. On November 9th, The New York Times featured a page-one article whose headline blared: “Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled.” But it turns out that these alleged Rightists “want to strengthen not shrink government and they see the welfare state as an integral part of their national identities.” The article reveals that “The platform of France’s National Front … reads in part like a leftist manifesto.”

We need a rational way of setting up the political spectrum. We have to have some axis of measurement in terms of which we can locate the political meaning of particular ideas and policies. I have no objection to calling this spectrum “Right vs. Left.” I have every possible objection to defining the extreme Right as fascism and the extreme Left as communism.

Suppose that someone proposed a Right-Left axis for eating, saying that the extreme Right is to eat arsenic and the extreme Left is to eat cyanide. The choice would only be: which poison do you want to die from? And the “moderates” would then be those who eat a mixture of arsenic and cyanide. What would be omitted from this setup? Food.

The political equivalent of the arsenic-cyanide spectrum is the fascism-communism spectrum. What is omitted from the setup? A free society–which means: capitalism. What is the actual opposite of capitalism? Statism.

The term “statism” was tirelessly promoted by Ayn Rand. A computer search of her published works for “statism” or “statist” gives over 300 hits. She described statism as the idea that “man’s life and work belong to the state–to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation–and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own, tribal, collective good.”

Fascism and communism are two variants of statism. Both are forms of dictatorship. Neither one recognizes individual rights nor permits individual freedom. The differences are non-essential: fascism is racial statism and communism is statism of economic class.

Communism advocates the abolition of private property; socialism advocates government ownership of the means of production. Fascism leaves that property in private hands–then shackles those hands, every economic decision being directed by the state. Property rights are non-existent under fascism.

“All property is common property,” wrote Nazi spokesman Ernst Huber, “The owner is bound by the people and Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community. … There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state.”

Both communism and fascism establish total censorship and tolerate no freedom of thought–thus rejecting rights in the spiritual realm as well. Nazi writer Friedrich Sieburg stated: “There are to be no more private Germans … each is to attain significance only by his service to the state.”

Few on the Left care to remember that “Nazi” is a shortening of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei: National Socialist German Workers Party.

Whether the dictatorship claims the mantle of the Aryan race or the proletariat matters little to the individuals crushed by it. To search for some trivial superiority of Soviet gulags over Nazi concentration camps, or vice-versa, would be morally obscene.

So, we observe a fundamental difference: one system grants the state unlimited power, holding that the individual is the rightless slave of the state; the other system holds individual rights to be supreme and inalienable, with the state limited to a single function: the protection of those rights from physical force and fraud.

That is the distinction that must be made. We can expect no clarity in political discussion until the pure, consistent poles are identified: the opposition between dictatorship and liberty, between the individual as the nothing and the individual as sovereign. “Left” and “Right” have to be defined accordingly.

But “Left” and “Right” are informal shorthand. The actual terms are: “statism,” on the Left, and “capitalism,” on the Right.

The term “statism” carries its meaning on its face. But the term “capitalism” does not and it has to be rescued from a century and a half of distortion, lies–and compromises.

Today’s political-economic system is not capitalism–not pure, consistent, uncontrolled, laissez-faire capitalism. Today in America we live in the Entitlement State and the Regulatory State.

A government that taxes 40 percent or more of our income, that controls our medical care, that regulates business so thoroughly that every firm large enough to afford it has a department of “compliance,” a government that controls the money supply, sets bank reserve-ratios, regulates stock offerings, margin-ratios, home construction, determines what pharmaceuticals and medical innovations can be sold, operates schools and universities, runs the passenger rail system, forbids “offensive” speech, increasingly intervenes in diet, subsidizes agriculture and “green” businesses, imposes tariffs, decides which businesses may merge, and, we have just learned, spies on its own citizens–is not a government remotely consistent with capitalism.

The closest the world ever came to actual capitalism was the United States in the 19th Century, the era of this country’s fastest economic growth. Even in that era, the capitalist, industrial North had to fight a bloody Civil War to end the South’s infamous anti-capitalist institution: slavery.

To defend capitalism is a task for another time. The point of this column is deeper. It is that the political spectrum–Left vs. Right–must be defined in terms of statism vs. individual liberty.

The growing use of the term “statism” to identify one of the basic alternatives is a very auspicious development. When the public understands what was understood at this country’s founding–that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”–the intellectual revolution will be at hand.