"The fascist state is not satisfied with reducing the workers to slavery and making a general massacre of wages possible. It restores capitalist profits in another way: through various economic expedients.
"Expedients" is the word. It is not a question of taking measures to set in motion once more, however feebly, the "normal" machinery of capitalism. It is not a question of reestablishing profits from the production and distribution of new wealth. It is, quite simply, a matter of restoring their revenues to capitalist enterprises by artificial means and at the expense of the masses.
These expedients, of course, are by no means specifically fascist or National Socialist. They are twin brothers to those used in other countries, differing only in degree and not in kind.
What we are about to describe is not peculiar to fascism, and there is not, contrary to what the plebeian demagogues say, any kind of "fascist" or "National Socialist" economy. The fascist economy is only a sharpened form of the so-called "guided" capitalist economy, first tried in Germany during the First World War under the name Kriegswirtschaft (War Economy).
Nor are these expedients in any way "anti-capitalist." Only the naive could ever have believed that fascism is an actual economic revolution, outmoding capitalism. But the massive scope of these measures drags the fascist state in deeper than foreseen at first. It must more and more reject solutions reputed to be "liberal" or "orthodox."
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...When fascism takes power, overflowing with gratitude for big business which financed it, its words and its deeds exhale the purest sort of laisser-faire economic doctrine. It announces its intention of favoring and protecting in every possible way private property and individual initiative. It rejects with horror the idea that the state might meddle in production. But the fascist state stands aside only so long as Messieurs Capitalists request it not to interfere in their private affairs. It imposes on them the
lightest possible taxes, the most tenuous sort of control. But it is always ready to come running whenever these gentlemen cannot pull through by themselves.
In any such crisis, it is immediately at their service, "socializing" their losses, refloating their enterprises, and keeping them alive with its orders. In short the course of events soon forces fascism to give
its program a serious wrench. Carried away by its eagerness to resurrect big business profits, it finds itself embarked, above all in Germany, on a huge armament program. Fascism speedily gets caught up in a system of wheels within wheels which insensibly conducts it from laissez-faire capitalism to autarky and a wartime economy.
Thus, starting from a desire to assure private enterprisemaximum freedom, fascism is compelled to gradually bureaucratize the economy and is more and more trapped in the contradiction between what it would like to do and what it must do.
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shoutout to @TheBearEXE for sharing this first on the hellsite
...Groping tortuously forward, it succeeds
in maintaining the capitalist system, but only by restricting each individual capitalist's freedom of movement, and by sacrificing the other branches of the economy on the altar of heavy industry. Only the great capitalists continue to draw their profits, while the economy as a whole is paralysed and individuals of every class are ruined or put on
short rations.
It is a well known fact among doctors that certain
cures seem for a moment to overcome the disease; but the disease takes its revenge. Driven from one site in the body, it reappears elsewhere or in a different form. For a moment, fascism, by repairing the profit-making mechanism, seems to banish the illness that capitalism suffers from. But this only aggravates the disease.
Charged with saving the system, it ends by plunging it into a worldwide holocaust.
Nor is this denouement peculiar to fascism. Every ex-
pedient that capitalism has resorted to in other countries has sooner or later led to the same result. Thus the authors of the "New Deal" in the United States temporarily succeeded in restarting the capitalist machine only by arms purchases even more gigantic than those in Germany.
With the return of peace, American capitalism could survive only by remaining on a war footing - a nuclear war footing - that imperils the future of the whole planet."
-Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business