Statism versus Völkisch Nationalism
The conventional bundling of Italian Fascism with German National Socialism rests primarily on superficial resemblances and historical contingency: mass rallies, leader cults, militaristic aesthetics, one-party dominance, state-managed economies, and totalitarian control, reinforced by their shared anti-Bolshevik stance and wartime Axis alliance. These aesthetic and organisational traits, however, are hardly distinctive. They appear across nearly all twentieth- and twenty-first-century totalitarian regimes, whether Marxist or anti-Marxist, from Stalin’s parades and Mao’s spectacles to North Korea’s choreographed displays. Treating Fascism and National Socialism as natural siblings on the basis of such surface features, while regarding widely divergent Marxist systems as members of one flexible family, reveals a deeply inconsistent taxonomy.
A clearer ideological analysis, grounded strictly in objects of devotion, the causal direction of who creates whom, and the actual telos of remaking a people versus serving a people, shows Fascism and Stalinism belong together within a Statist family, while National Socialism belongs in a Völkisch family alongside such ideologies as contemporary Xiism (the CCP under Xi Jinping). Fascism correctly understood has more in common with Stalin’s socialism in one nation than it does with National Socialism. This is evident when examined through upstream foundations rather than aesthetics and wartime alliances.
A common category error in ideological taxonomy is the conflation of shared motivations or historical context with definitional substance. Anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism supplied powerful reactive impulses for both Italian Fascism and National Socialism, as did the broader crises of interwar Europe. Yet motivations explain why such movements arose; they do not determine what those movements elevated as their upstream sacred object, their causal hierarchy, or their political telos. Fascism and National Socialism both opposed liberalism and Bolshevism, but one treated the State as the creative ethical totality that forges the nation from above, while the other positioned the organic Volk as the generative reality that the state merely serves and preserves. Lumping them together on the basis of common enemies flattens these foundational divergences into a single “anti-” family, much as one might erroneously group disparate philosophical systems solely by what they reject rather than by what they affirm as primary. This error sustains the conventional bundling while obscuring the much cleaner Statism-versus-Völkisch axis.
At the foundational level, the object of devotion within a totalising ideology determines everything else. In both Fascism and Stalinism, the upstream sacred is the institutional machinery of the party or state itself. Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini articulated this explicitly in The Doctrine of Fascism from 1932: “It is not the nation which generates the State. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.” The State is the all-embracing ethical reality, the supreme creative force. Individuals and pre-existing social forms are relative; the totalitarian State is absolute. It does not merely govern; it remakes human content, character, and faith. The people do not possess inherent national will; the machinery instead confers it. The existing population is raw material to be disciplined and transformed.
Stalinism mirrors this structure, with the Communist Party as the machinery. The Party, as vanguard, exists to impose a blueprint upon the nation. The telos is the creation of the New Soviet Man: selfless, collectivised, industrialised, loyal above all to the Party-State. Collectivisation, Five-Year Plans, purges, and cultural engineering all treated the peasantry, intellectuals, and ethnic groups as raw material to be broken down and recast. The policy of Socialism in One Country marked the decisive turning point when Stalinism fully embraced Statism and shed much of the Marxist internationalism that it was born from. What began as a tactical retreat after the failure of European revolutions quickly hardened into the operating core of the system. Trotsky and the old Bolshevik internationalists denounced it precisely as a betrayal, a nationalist degeneration that replaced world revolution with the building of socialism within the borders of a single fortress-state. The Party machinery in one country became the permanent sacred reality that had to be defended and expanded at all costs, rather than a temporary instrument destined to wither away as classical Marxism had envisioned. Internationalism was subordinated and reduced to little more than rhetorical cover for Soviet power. Socialism in One Country was in practice far closer to a form of defensive statism and nation-building than to the border-dissolving, stateless end-goal of Marxism, even if the rhetorical clothing remained red.
Italian Fascism emphasised a spiritual and cultural conception of the nation rather than a strictly biological one, treating race and identity as malleable and forgeable through the State. Mussolini and other early Fascists openly mocked Nazi biological racism as “Nordic nonsense” and crude “pseudoscience” in the years before the Axis alliance forced greater alignment. This spiritual-cultural approach to forging identity through the state stands in clear contrast to National Socialism’s explicit biological emphasis. National Socialism inverts the arrow. The Volk, the organic racial-biological people, is the eternal, upstream reality. The state and Party are merely subordinate tools. Adolf Hitler made this explicit in Mein Kampf: “The state is a means to an end. The only purpose of the state is the preservation and promotion of a community of physically and mentally equal creatures.” The great purpose of the state is to protect those racial elements which create culture. “You are nothing, your people is everything.” Remaking of the people through eugenics, the Hitler Youth, and purification did occur, but it was always in service to the Volk’s inherent potential, not to impose an alien blueprint from above. Hitler examined Italian Fascism and chose to improve it precisely because he saw the Statist error: elevating the machinery above the organic people. National Socialism sought to correct this inversion.
Contemporary Xiism follows the same logic, with Han Chinese continuity and civilisation essence as the supreme object of devotion. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is not a downstream product of the Party’s machinery but the upstream sacred that the Party serves. Xi Jinping has centred this repeatedly: the Party’s mission is to realise the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, making the people prosperous and the country strong. Han demographic security, cultural standardisation, suppression of centrifugal elements such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, and civilisation continuity are the primary drivers of policy. The Party and state apparatus are instruments for advancing this organic-national essence, not the creators of it. Marxist rhetoric persists, but the telos has shifted toward Volk-like preservation and elevation of the Han people.
In both National Socialism and Xiism the causal direction runs from the people or nation, whether the German Volk or Han Chinese continuity, to the machinery of the state or Party. The apparatus exists to serve, strengthen, and fulfil the organic substrate. Both systems still exhibit the tendency to reduce the actual living people to a cost paid for their own supposed greater benefit, whether through wartime sacrifices, demographic engineering, re-education, or suppression of dissent but this does not erase or reverse the upstream relationship between nation and state; it merely proves that the relationship between them can be slippery in practice and that even organic-nationalist ideologies are capable of instrumentalizing individuals. The foundational causal arrow remains intact: the national essence is treated as the eternal reality that justifies the costs, rather than the machinery inventing the nation from above.
Fascism and Stalinism, on the other hand, share a constructivist, remaking telos in which the machinery engineers a superior human type. Mussolini’s New Man and Stalin’s New Soviet Man both treat existing populations as plastic to be reshaped and replaced with something fundamentally new. Specific programs illustrate this clearly: in Italy the Opera Nazionale Balilla and Gioventù Italiana del Littorio sought to mold children and youth into disciplined, state-integrated Fascist citizens through rigorous physical, ideological, and cultural training. In the Soviet Union the Komsomol youth leagues and Stakhanovite shock-worker campaigns aimed to forge selfless, hyper-productive socialist citizens who had transcended old bourgeois or peasant mentalities. Both systems sought to replace the existing human material with an engineered new type. This stands in contrast to National Socialism and Xiism, which share a preservationist or organic telos centered on serving the people’s essence. National Socialism pursued racial purification and Lebensraum to advance the Aryan Volk’s inherent destiny. Xiism pursues technological, demographic, and civilisation strengthening to fulfil Han continuity and national rejuvenation. In both, intervention serves the upstream Volk rather than replacing it. Observers have long noted these practical convergences between Fascism and Stalinism under labels such as Red Fascism or National Bolshevism, highlighting how the shared Statist machinery and remaking drive produced similar totalitarian outcomes despite surface ideological clothing. These labels capture real methodological similarities but often seem to miss the deeper upstream metaphysical convergence.
Economically the sibling relationship between Fascism and Stalinism is further visible. Fascism’s corporatism preserved directed private property and profit so long as they served the overarching goals of the State, organising society into state-mediated syndicates of workers and employers to eliminate class struggle. Stalinism pursued full collectivisation and central planning that abolished private ownership in the means of production. Yet in both systems the economy ultimately answered to the machinery rather than to any organic national or class reality. The State or Party directed resources to reinforce its own creative power and remaking projects. National Socialism, by contrast, subordinated economic policy explicitly to the biological needs and expansion of the Volk, including autarky, rearmament, and the ruthless exploitation of conquered territories for racial survival and living space. Although Fascism and National Socialism both adopted heavy state managerialism in the economy, their motivations differed sharply.
Philosophically the contrast runs even deeper. Fascism drew heavily from Gentile’s Actual Idealism, which viewed the State as the ultimate ethical and spiritual totality, an almost Hegelian absolute in which all human values found realisation. The State was not a mere administrator but the creative ethical reality itself. Hitler’s National Socialism rested instead on a vitalist, almost Darwinian racial organicism in which the Volk was a living biological organism that generated culture, will, and historical destiny. The Volk was generative; the machinery existed only to serve and protect that living essence. This philosophical divergence explains why Hitler saw the need to improve rather than simply adopt the Fascist model wholesale. National Socialism therefore is better understood as the rejection of Fascism and the move toward something truly nationalist.
Fascism is routinely labelled as ultranationalism, yet this is itself a fundamental category error. If the State is the creative force that forges the nation from above, then the ideology cannot properly be called nationalism in the sense of placing the organic nation first. It is Statism. By contrast, National Socialism correctly positions the organic nation as primary and generative, with the state and party serving as subordinate instruments. This is no mere semantic distinction; it defines the entire hierarchy of values and the direction of authority within each system. Stalinism and Maoism are routinely treated as members of the same broad Marxist family in much the same way that Fascism and National Socialism are grouped together, despite the fact that Stalinism actually shares far more in common with Fascism than it does with Maoism. Maoism emphasized chaotic mass mobilization, attacks on the Party bureaucracy, rural peasant revolution, and waves of permanent upheaval such as the Cultural Revolution. Stalinism meanwhile, like Fascism, prioritized centralized machinery, top-down industrialization, rigid hierarchical control, and the systematic engineering of a New Man through the Party-State. The selective taxonomy of the academic consensus consistently overlooks how Fascism and Stalinism both operate as State-ist systems built around machinery that creates and remakes the nation, while National Socialism embodies genuine Nation-alism with the organic Volk upstream.
Modern academic and intellectual discourse has largely failed to make this distinction for several interlocking reasons. Postwar scholarship was heavily shaped by the victors’ narrative and the strategic necessities of the Cold War, which encouraged a clean binary of the democratic West confronting a monolithic totalitarian threat. The left-right political spectrum became a blunt analytical instrument that flattened doctrinal and metaphysical differences into mere positioning on a line. Fascism proved an especially versatile moral category and rhetorical slur, useful for condemning a wide range of enemies while insulating communist experiments from equivalent doctrinal scrutiny. Many scholars treated communist failures as unfortunate deformations or betrayals of a noble idea rather than inherent features of the machinery-first approach. There has also been a persistent over-reliance on observable outcomes, body counts, and aesthetic similarities rather than careful, sustained engagement with primary texts such as Gentile’s philosophical writings or Hitler’s repeated insistence that the state existed only as a means. This has perpetuated a taxonomy that prioritises wartime alliances and surface politics over upstream objects of devotion and causal arrows.
This framework, drawn purely from primary self-understandings and internal logic, avoids postwar consensus smoothing and aesthetic superficiality. It explains why Hitler felt compelled to improve Fascism, why Xiism has drifted toward national rejuvenation, and why the standard taxonomy misclassifies these systems. The real divide is not left versus right or fascist versus communist, but Statism where machinery creates people versus Nationalism where people create and direct machinery. On that axis, the pairs align as described. The evidence from objects of devotion, causal direction, and actual telos confirms that Fascism and Stalinism are far closer siblings than Fascism is to National Socialism or Stalinism is to Marxist-Leninism. Recognising this distinction does more than correct an old misclassification. It restores intellectual honesty to our understanding of the ideologies of the twentieth century and how they are still shaping the world today.
By William Scruton (a.k.a. the Nativist)