Marxism and Fascism – Convergences, Divergences, and the Web of Contradictions
The
twentieth century bore witness to two colossal ideologies. Both claimed to
offer humanity a utopian promise — the assurance of boundless happiness, the
end of suffering, the dawn of a perfected society. Yet, what bound them
together was not merely the dream of paradise, but also their common intent to
erase all traditional conceptions of good and evil that civilization had
preserved through millennia.
Marxism decreed that no individual should own any property beyond what was absolutely necessary for survival; no one would have a home or a granary whose doors were closed to others. Human beings were to live collectively, to eat from the same table, in a condition of cooperative fraternity. Wealth, as a private concept, would vanish; capital would cease to exist. All property would rest in the hands of the State. Which, in practice, meant not the faceless abstraction of the “State,” but rather the omnipotent authority of the Politburo — or worse, the single supreme leader. For such a ruler, the words of Louis XIV still echo with uncanny precision: “L’État, c’est moi” — “I am the State.” In both Marxism and Fascism, this tragic truth remained inescapable.
Yet, the origin of this grand illusion is older than Marx or Mussolini; its seed lies in the ancient philosophy of Plato. For Plato had written, in The Republic, that the guardians of the ideal state — those entrusted with rule — must never traffic in gold or silver, must not even touch such precious metals, nor dwell under the same roof with them. This was not a religious injunction, nor the austere practice of some zealous communist cell; it was Plato’s blueprint for a just society, one that Marx would later reimagine for his Politburo. Thus we see how the moonlight of utopia often conceals the snare of tyranny — a snare whose history stretches long, entangled with blood and thought. Indeed, the battle over this vision had already been fought almost two centuries before Marx, between Voltaire and Rousseau. Had the over-clever Marx grasped the full weight of that earlier struggle, perhaps history might have been spared its cruelest repetitions.
Rousseau, the man of feeling, believed humanity to be naturally virtuous and just; it was property, he argued, that had corrupted man into savagery. If men must be bound in chains, let those chains at least be woven into a new kind of polity — one resembling the beehive. In such a hive, every individual, like a worker bee, would labor without distinction, sustaining a collective state whose sole duty was to preserve order and motion. Voltaire, the razor of reason, cut through this fantasy with his philosophy. Knowledge, he insisted, was not equally distributed; those who cultivated learning would inevitably separate themselves from the ignorant, and the gulf would widen. How could such unequal minds coexist in one common hive without discord? Thus Rousseau’s “all men are kings” republic, argued Voltaire, was a chimera, destined to collapse.
Marx and his orthodox disciples ignored this ancient divergence. They refused to admit that from the dawn of civilization, seekers of knowledge had always stood apart — not because of wealth, land, or armies, though those might sustain them, but because of the ceaseless discipline of thought, the cultivated power of the mind. To deny this was to deny human history itself. Thus, by opposing the very principle of individual intellectual distinction, Marxism had already lost before it began — defeated at the threshold of the human mind.
Philosopher Nietzsche, in his fevered search for a new synthesis of Plato, Rousseau, and Marx, instead descended into madness. Just before his final collapse, he is said to have embraced a horse beaten in the street, weeping uncontrollably — as though the chains upon innocent creatures mirrored the shackles of human ignorance. For the next decade of his life, Nietzsche lived in madness, his piercing cry “God is dead, and we have killed Him” standing as a thunderous protest against the old religious certainties of Europe. He exposed how Christianity had been weaponized by empires to subjugate “the darker races” in Africa, clothed under the guise of “civilizing missions.” He despised democracy, calling it a false equality, and predicted a century of uncertainty, upheaval, and war. In his view, power alone was the foundation of national pride and imperial preservation. Without strength, no Platonic state could endure. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, seized upon precisely this Nietzschean celebration of power. And indeed, Nietzsche’s prophecy came true: the world was plunged into two cataclysmic wars. Both communists and fascists hated him, though for different reasons. Unlike Marx, Nietzsche did not concoct a hypocritical dream of the poor rising against the learned; rather, he mourned the inevitable defeat of the weak. His was a harsh, unflinching truth — a truth Darwin had already inscribed in nature. That Marx ignored this eternal law, writing his Communist Manifesto without it, was reckless. By omitting the brutal necessity of force, Marx cloaked his ideology in hypocrisy.
Both Marxism and Fascism proclaimed the destruction of the old world and the birth of a new order. Both sought to recruit new disciples across Europe, to swell the power of the State. And together, in the early twentieth century, these twin ideologies unleashed a storm of violence, slaughtering millions, dragging humanity into gulags and gas chambers.
Political scholar Vladimir Tismăneanu observed how these two ideologies — though born from opposite ends of the spectrum — converged in their extremism, laying the foundations for the monstrous politics of both far-left and far-right. To grasp the barbarism of the last century, he urged, we must revisit its intellectual landscape with unclouded eyes. His long study traced the genealogy and collapse of both systems, guiding us through the totalitarian mindscape they engendered.
The process began in 1848 with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and ended symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In its course, experts estimate, some 185 million human beings perished: one hundred million under communist regimes, eighty-five million in the fires of the Second World War. No other ideology in history has extracted such a toll of innocent lives.
Marxism, Tismăneanu argues, was doomed from the outset, for it ignored the psychological and spiritual depths of man. By denying the individual’s right to interiority, by trivializing the hunger for meaning, it violated the sanctity of human consciousness. Lenin, when he transformed Marx’s theories into political weapons, sanctified totalitarianism at every turn. The October Revolution of 1917 revealed the full force of this reality: without Lenin’s fierce will, no totalitarianism would have arisen in that form. His regime did not transcend colonialism; it merely perfected its brutality under a new guise. By suppressing personal knowledge, reducing the individual to an atom, and trying to crush all of civilization’s accumulated wisdom into a single manifesto, Lenin opened the door to the apocalyptic upheavals of the twentieth century.
Thinkers like Steven Pinker have shown how communism’s ideals correlated with violence and mass murder. Marx had failed to understand capitalism’s true nature: though imperfect, it contained within it the seeds of prosperity. To socialize all means of production was not to create wealth, but to manufacture poverty. Worse still, under communism, entire populations could be condemned as “enemies of the people” merely for their birth into the wrong class or ethnicity — just as Hitler’s fascism condemned Jews to extermination.
Thus, as an ideology, Marxism bears deeper culpability than fascism. For fascism, born in 1919 Italy, died with Mussolini and Hitler. Marxism, however, spread across nations, reshaping continents. Mussolini himself had defined fascism in religious terms: a binding of man to a higher law, integrating the individual into a conscious spiritual community. Robert Paxton, the historian of fascism, added that fascism thrived on the humiliation and suffering of peoples, channeling their despair into violence, purification, and dictatorship.
Tismăneanu noted how both communism and fascism required scapegoats: for communism, it was class; for fascism, it was race. Both promised a glorious future — communism envisioned the eternal reign of the proletariat through the Politburo; Nazism dreamt of a thousand-year Reich. In communism, all ideas were bound to the Party; in fascism, all flowed from the magnetic personality of the Leader. In both, the perfect devotion to ideology became the illusion of moral salvation, drawing the masses into their orbit like the medieval Church once did when it summoned men to die in the name of God. Here, the “god” was replaced by either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the supremacy of race.
When all politics is reduced to a formula, the results can be catastrophic. The twentieth century thus produced the two greatest ideological errors of human history — errors that legitimized genocide, extinguished thought, and annihilated individuality. Millions perished, not for what they did, but for the single “crime” of surrendering reality to utopia.
And here, Nietzsche returns to haunt us. For he alone, amidst the frenzy, recognized that civilization’s hard truths cannot be erased by fantasy. Knowledge, power, and history are not dreams, but disciplines forged in struggle. To balance them with honesty is perhaps the only path by which mankind might find peace.
Marxism decreed that no individual should own any property beyond what was absolutely necessary for survival; no one would have a home or a granary whose doors were closed to others. Human beings were to live collectively, to eat from the same table, in a condition of cooperative fraternity. Wealth, as a private concept, would vanish; capital would cease to exist. All property would rest in the hands of the State. Which, in practice, meant not the faceless abstraction of the “State,” but rather the omnipotent authority of the Politburo — or worse, the single supreme leader. For such a ruler, the words of Louis XIV still echo with uncanny precision: “L’État, c’est moi” — “I am the State.” In both Marxism and Fascism, this tragic truth remained inescapable.
Yet, the origin of this grand illusion is older than Marx or Mussolini; its seed lies in the ancient philosophy of Plato. For Plato had written, in The Republic, that the guardians of the ideal state — those entrusted with rule — must never traffic in gold or silver, must not even touch such precious metals, nor dwell under the same roof with them. This was not a religious injunction, nor the austere practice of some zealous communist cell; it was Plato’s blueprint for a just society, one that Marx would later reimagine for his Politburo. Thus we see how the moonlight of utopia often conceals the snare of tyranny — a snare whose history stretches long, entangled with blood and thought. Indeed, the battle over this vision had already been fought almost two centuries before Marx, between Voltaire and Rousseau. Had the over-clever Marx grasped the full weight of that earlier struggle, perhaps history might have been spared its cruelest repetitions.
Rousseau, the man of feeling, believed humanity to be naturally virtuous and just; it was property, he argued, that had corrupted man into savagery. If men must be bound in chains, let those chains at least be woven into a new kind of polity — one resembling the beehive. In such a hive, every individual, like a worker bee, would labor without distinction, sustaining a collective state whose sole duty was to preserve order and motion. Voltaire, the razor of reason, cut through this fantasy with his philosophy. Knowledge, he insisted, was not equally distributed; those who cultivated learning would inevitably separate themselves from the ignorant, and the gulf would widen. How could such unequal minds coexist in one common hive without discord? Thus Rousseau’s “all men are kings” republic, argued Voltaire, was a chimera, destined to collapse.
Marx and his orthodox disciples ignored this ancient divergence. They refused to admit that from the dawn of civilization, seekers of knowledge had always stood apart — not because of wealth, land, or armies, though those might sustain them, but because of the ceaseless discipline of thought, the cultivated power of the mind. To deny this was to deny human history itself. Thus, by opposing the very principle of individual intellectual distinction, Marxism had already lost before it began — defeated at the threshold of the human mind.
Philosopher Nietzsche, in his fevered search for a new synthesis of Plato, Rousseau, and Marx, instead descended into madness. Just before his final collapse, he is said to have embraced a horse beaten in the street, weeping uncontrollably — as though the chains upon innocent creatures mirrored the shackles of human ignorance. For the next decade of his life, Nietzsche lived in madness, his piercing cry “God is dead, and we have killed Him” standing as a thunderous protest against the old religious certainties of Europe. He exposed how Christianity had been weaponized by empires to subjugate “the darker races” in Africa, clothed under the guise of “civilizing missions.” He despised democracy, calling it a false equality, and predicted a century of uncertainty, upheaval, and war. In his view, power alone was the foundation of national pride and imperial preservation. Without strength, no Platonic state could endure. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, seized upon precisely this Nietzschean celebration of power. And indeed, Nietzsche’s prophecy came true: the world was plunged into two cataclysmic wars. Both communists and fascists hated him, though for different reasons. Unlike Marx, Nietzsche did not concoct a hypocritical dream of the poor rising against the learned; rather, he mourned the inevitable defeat of the weak. His was a harsh, unflinching truth — a truth Darwin had already inscribed in nature. That Marx ignored this eternal law, writing his Communist Manifesto without it, was reckless. By omitting the brutal necessity of force, Marx cloaked his ideology in hypocrisy.
Both Marxism and Fascism proclaimed the destruction of the old world and the birth of a new order. Both sought to recruit new disciples across Europe, to swell the power of the State. And together, in the early twentieth century, these twin ideologies unleashed a storm of violence, slaughtering millions, dragging humanity into gulags and gas chambers.
Political scholar Vladimir Tismăneanu observed how these two ideologies — though born from opposite ends of the spectrum — converged in their extremism, laying the foundations for the monstrous politics of both far-left and far-right. To grasp the barbarism of the last century, he urged, we must revisit its intellectual landscape with unclouded eyes. His long study traced the genealogy and collapse of both systems, guiding us through the totalitarian mindscape they engendered.
The process began in 1848 with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and ended symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In its course, experts estimate, some 185 million human beings perished: one hundred million under communist regimes, eighty-five million in the fires of the Second World War. No other ideology in history has extracted such a toll of innocent lives.
Marxism, Tismăneanu argues, was doomed from the outset, for it ignored the psychological and spiritual depths of man. By denying the individual’s right to interiority, by trivializing the hunger for meaning, it violated the sanctity of human consciousness. Lenin, when he transformed Marx’s theories into political weapons, sanctified totalitarianism at every turn. The October Revolution of 1917 revealed the full force of this reality: without Lenin’s fierce will, no totalitarianism would have arisen in that form. His regime did not transcend colonialism; it merely perfected its brutality under a new guise. By suppressing personal knowledge, reducing the individual to an atom, and trying to crush all of civilization’s accumulated wisdom into a single manifesto, Lenin opened the door to the apocalyptic upheavals of the twentieth century.
Thinkers like Steven Pinker have shown how communism’s ideals correlated with violence and mass murder. Marx had failed to understand capitalism’s true nature: though imperfect, it contained within it the seeds of prosperity. To socialize all means of production was not to create wealth, but to manufacture poverty. Worse still, under communism, entire populations could be condemned as “enemies of the people” merely for their birth into the wrong class or ethnicity — just as Hitler’s fascism condemned Jews to extermination.
Thus, as an ideology, Marxism bears deeper culpability than fascism. For fascism, born in 1919 Italy, died with Mussolini and Hitler. Marxism, however, spread across nations, reshaping continents. Mussolini himself had defined fascism in religious terms: a binding of man to a higher law, integrating the individual into a conscious spiritual community. Robert Paxton, the historian of fascism, added that fascism thrived on the humiliation and suffering of peoples, channeling their despair into violence, purification, and dictatorship.
Tismăneanu noted how both communism and fascism required scapegoats: for communism, it was class; for fascism, it was race. Both promised a glorious future — communism envisioned the eternal reign of the proletariat through the Politburo; Nazism dreamt of a thousand-year Reich. In communism, all ideas were bound to the Party; in fascism, all flowed from the magnetic personality of the Leader. In both, the perfect devotion to ideology became the illusion of moral salvation, drawing the masses into their orbit like the medieval Church once did when it summoned men to die in the name of God. Here, the “god” was replaced by either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the supremacy of race.
When all politics is reduced to a formula, the results can be catastrophic. The twentieth century thus produced the two greatest ideological errors of human history — errors that legitimized genocide, extinguished thought, and annihilated individuality. Millions perished, not for what they did, but for the single “crime” of surrendering reality to utopia.
And here, Nietzsche returns to haunt us. For he alone, amidst the frenzy, recognized that civilization’s hard truths cannot be erased by fantasy. Knowledge, power, and history are not dreams, but disciplines forged in struggle. To balance them with honesty is perhaps the only path by which mankind might find peace.
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