What is fascism actually?

[SacRedMan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOPhd9LCJPQ&feature=related

http://mises.org/daily/2903

Whether fascism was capitalist or anti-capitalist, labor or anti-labor, no one could say until the leaders themselves decided upon a course of action. It was improvised as the movement went along. It is a government system that accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and which organizes the economic life of the people into industrial and professional groups to subject the system to control under the supervision of the state.

More information on http://mises.org/

[palotin]

Fascism does have ambivalent and flexible rhetoric. Ludwig von Mises himself was chief economic advisor to Engelbert Dollfuss's Austrofascist regime, so I suspect the editors of the website you link to know this better than most.

That said, it also has ideological constants that remain in different national and chronological contexts. Richard Griffin has argued that fascism is 'palingenetic ultra-nationalism'; that is, it invariably argues that the nation has been in a period of decadence and that some particular party or movement alone has the power to reverse this decline and restore the nation to its past glory.

To draw out a number of the implications here, we see the positing of a moral community in crisis and the claim to a singular understanding of that community and power to save it. Fascism will always oppress any attempt to define the national community in different terms than their own. Because the nation is in crisis and at constant risk of death, this claim to define the community is not just an academic issue. As such, the fascists will not tolerate an independent labor movement. While it may make appeals to the dignity of the working man, fascism can never be pro-labor.

The quotation you give is an obvious attempt to deny fascism's place in Right-wing intellectual sphere. It was not just an apolitical will to power with a highly flexible rhetorical methodology.