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I'd argue that the most common and consistent definition of fascism is "people who are willing to oppose communist revolutionaries with force".
Outside of the WW2 context it's usually what people on the left mean when they say it.
I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.
(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)
And so we circle back to ye olde "national socialism".
The problem with this definition is that it indeed won't please the only people who have an interest in using the label of "fascist" in the first place.
Hardly the only people. There are plenty of leftists with an interest in condemning right-wing figures as fascists who would also regard themselves as being against communism - from mainstream Dems who don't even go as far as calling themselves socialists or anti-capitalists, to radical leftists of a more libertarian-adjacent, anarchist bent.
Fundamentally that's more about lumpers vs splitters.
For insiders obviously The People's Front of Judea (PFJ) and the Judean People's Front (JPF) are completely different. Outsiders will generally lump them together.
Or how Antifa is not a thing, it's just a bunch of independent and completely different groups who happen to hold training sessions they all attend, connect to share tactics, cooridinate together at events under the idea of "diversity of tactics"...
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above. Certainly, they're not going to be relevantly interchangeable with them when it comes to whether they'd endorse "fascism is basically just a mutant strain of communism".
Why not? Were anarchists not a core constituency of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution? Do Anarchists now not trace their lineage back to ideological progenitors who failed the Bolshevik test, just the same as the rest of the trotskyists and socialists and communists?
The truth, I think, is that the ideology is not and has never been load-bearing. Observably, where ideology has imposed unacceptable real-world tradeoffs, the overwhelming majority of leftist ideologues have ditched the ideology rather than accepting the losses. Ideology is a means to an end, nothing more.
If you're being this maximally cynical and high-level, then trying to analyze political ideologies at all, as more than a red flag and a blue flag waved furiously by two warring, unprincipled tribes, loses all meaning. We were talking about the extent to which fascism as a system can be defined as an offshoot of communism, and it seems to me that this is a topic of conversation that necessitates focus on the theoretical systems themselves. If ideologies don't matter then the proper definition of fascism as an ideology doesn't matter either.
Your statement:
...indicates that you recognize that some ideological differences are marginal, and assert that some are significant. I am asking you why the Anarchists belong in the "significant differences" category while the Trotskyists do not, given that both Trotskyists and Anarchists followed what appear to me to be identical trajectories in the defining example of communist revolution.
If you want to map meaningful ideological differences, you first need to establish that they exist and are significant. Did Trotsky break with Stalin because their ideological models were incompatible and a dispassionate pursuit of sociopolitical truth through a rigorous Rawlsian veil of ignorance led them to tragically incompatible conclusions and thus to lethal conflict? Or was it a simple matter of it not being possible to share absolute power?
I would argue that ideology can matter in some instances. There are people who opposed both Communist Russia and Fascist Germany, and the Anarchists, and the Trotskyists, for consistent ideological reasons.
Then there are people who broke with the Nazis or the Soviets only because the leopard started eating their face in particular. The fact that a lot of these people were still carrying water for the Khmer Rouge or the Maoists in the 1970s indicates to me that it's not really about ideological details as such. If your ideology is based around the idea of unrestrained and unaccountable wielding of absolute power to secure good things and remove bad things, and that any negative consequences apparently caused by such wielding are either imaginary or the fault of counter-revolutionary forces that your ideology bears no responsibility for, as Enlightenment thought observably has for hundreds of years, then searching for deeper ideological motivations is hallucinatory. You seem to recognize this for Trotsky. Why is Kropotkin different?
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