Fascism. It's fascism, which is one of the early 20th century evolutions of marxism.

Soviet-style communists (properly, Marxist -Leninists) want the State to directly own and operate the means of production, under the central planning of the Party, to reach the ideologically set goals that the Party sets. That proved early on to be a daunting exercise.

Fascism, on the other hand, is a system where central planning is done all the same, just without the farcical pretense of being able to micromanage the economy "scientifically", and focusing on the ideological goals instead.

The fascist State "just guides" the economic actors in control of the means of production, invoking whatever "Common Good" each particular regime chooses to legitimize itself (the Nation, Religion, the Working Class, the War on Terror, Anticommunism...). They are free to operate - as long as they paint within the ideological lines.

Since in an industrial and postindustrial society the corporation is the economic actor primarily owning the means of production, fascism is more often than not corporatist, as is often referred to as "Corporatism", because by influencing corporations, the State can move society towards the ultimate ideological goals the most. It doesn't mean that all other actors, like workers, are neglected.

On the contrary, where the corporation provides the State with its power to mobilize and direct resources, the working masses provide it with taxes and legitimacy to rule and to set the ideological goals. In Soviet Russia, or in China when Mao took over, the agrarian peasant majority could hardly fund the State, so they stuck to State ownership of the means of production. As China progresses to an urban middle-class society, massive tax extraction becomes possible and the regime progresses to a sort of fascist corporatism.

In the West, fascism could not be called fascism after the War, so it was called "social-democracy". The "democracy" part actually refers to the mechanism by which the corporatist fascist state, given the peculiar historical context of the West, found the easiest to draw legitimacy from.

In China, the Party rules -- or else... In Europe, there is no need for a "Party", and the different cliques and currents within the orthodoxy present themselves as different options

But other than ritualistic voting and parliamentary bureaucracies, there isn't really any difference between Europe and China. Especially as technology is getting to a point where they can achieve the same result as in China, just more softly.

In China and Europe the State is virtually unlimited. There are no institutional or social boundaries to what it can do, only material and economic.

In today's Europe, like in communist China, or in the Soviet Union, or in Nazi Germany, there is one orthodoxy that is funded by the State, and anything outside of it is frozen, or fought with maximum hostility.

In China, the State for several decades drew in the war effort and the revolution. As those two become exhausted memories, it now draws on the economic betterment of the population and a very raw and primitive ultranationalism. Just like Europe in the 30's. European fascism is a couple of steps ahead, and it chooses to appeal to nebulous, but not less grandiose "common goals" that justify crushing individual rights and individual life projects.

So to be clear, I'm not saying what we have is not socialism or communism. I'm saying fascism is just another form of socialism and communism more suitable to an industrial and postindustrial society in a historical path like ours. nostr:note1xhm99kg36072js77k99flusl2wwhctaerha8r3rm8eaez7mxcf7q6ukmtz