There seems to be some confusion on this board on this topic. I think the fact that these words have “ism” at the end that might be the source of this confusion.
Let’s be clear: Communism and Socialism are economic schemes. Socialism is the overtaxing parasite that weakens an economy and creates enough unemployment to fool people into thinking that free markets do not work (they do) and that the only way to stop the suffering is to give complete control of the marketplace to the government and let them control both production and distribution of everything we need (Communism).
That, of course, is a completely ridiculous and unsustainable economic scheme that only has a chance of working if you eliminate human nature and free will and everyone works to the very best of their capabilities merely to warrant the exact same reward as everyone around them, no matter how meager their individual efforts.
The practice of forcing people to go along with this scheme is known as fascism. Another way to say fascism is “force-ism” or, frankly, totalitarianism, dictatorship, etc. It’s essentially slavery. The closest thing we have to fascism in the united states is our prison system, where many rights are vastly curtailed, but honestly, American prisoners have more rights than people living in fascist regimes.
Here’s where the confusion comes in: Hitler was a fascist. He was because he was a dictator. But he was not a communist. He let business and trade go on as usual within germany but he was always watching and if he ever saw something he didn’t like or suspected anything or saw something he wanted for himself he would merely take it, kill or imprison whoever, etc. and nobody had any rights or legal recourse to oppose him.
Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were also fascist dictators, but they preached and tried to implement communism as their economic models. Of course they had to murder anyone who didn’t want to play ball and that’s exactly what they did.
But take note: communism needs fascism simply to be implemented because there will always be people who don’t want to play ball, so communist regimes are always fascist, but like Hitler, not all fascist regimes try to implement communism.
Fascism = dictatorship/totalitarianism. No rights. Only privileges at the behest of the person/people in charge.
Communism = an economic scheme that ignores human nature and never works and always results in economic collapse
Socialism = A wannabe dictatorship government overtaxing its citizens to fool them into thinking free markets don’t work and that Communism is the only way to eliminate poverty, crime, and suffering. “The Royal Road to Communism”
Take the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). They have communism in their name but they abandoned communism years ago. They’re still fascist though. They still control everyone, but they’ve embraced a kind of crony capitalism in order to survive economically. Thus, communists are always fascists but fascists are not always communists and sometimes even former communists (like China).
Another thing: when you think of left vs. right imagine a scale with totalitarianism/dictatorship/centralized one world government on the far left and complete anarchy with zero enforceable contracts or laws or anything on the extreme far right. We on this board believe that we should be free to do as we please as long as we don’t infringe on the rights of others and we do see a need for a neutral third party (government) who works for us (not us for them) to resolve disputes and prosecute crimes but that’s about it. Leftists want a welfare state where daddy government tells us what we can and can’t do and gives us what we need no questions asked.
All communists and fascists are leftists. Period.
(My alt account as you can tell by my user names)
I think there are a number of reasons for this confusion.
In America at least, the Communists (usually college students) are clearly in favor of fascist policies like censorship to keep people from dismantling their Communist wet dreams. Since they're clearly fascist communists, some people think fascism and communism are the same thing--that they're both economic schemes. They are not. Communist regimes of course use fascist actions like censorship to stifle dissent and make people think it's a good idea when it clearly isn't, but there's a difference between an economic scheme and a method of control. There's clearly overlap but I think the distinction is important. Communism is an economic argument/scheme/system, whereas Fascism is really any attempt by a government to deprive others of their basic freedoms of speech, movement, commerce, etc. It's institutionalized violence against freedom.
The Left, as part of their fear-mongering anti-freedom smear campaigns, have convinced these idiot college students that Far Left = Communism and Far Right = Fascism. But that's a nonsensical false dichotomy (like saying math is on the left and birds are on the right). Therefore, when you hear them saying they're fighting Fascism, what they're really saying is they're fighting the Right. They just don't know it. They point at Hitler, an obvious fascist, and say he's far right. But that's just calling black white. Political models and economic models have overlap, but they're not the same thing. Fascism, as I said is "force-ism." It's a government approach to its citizens. It's top-down, centralized control over everyone. From a governing perspective, Far Left = Fascism/Totalitarianism and Far Right = No government at all/Anarchy. Leftists also tend to believe that Communism is a good idea and refer to free (meaning voluntary) markets with the Marxist pejorative "Capitalism", whereas those on the right tend to favor as little government control as possible to allow the free market to flourish naturally.
The overlap, combined with the "-ism" at the end of the words, linguistically causes a lot of confusion. But don't be confused by "-isms." Would you think Mormonism was an economic model simply because of the "-ism" at the end? Clearly not. So don't be fooled by that.