Reading a book that makes the claim that after WWI Europe was dissatisfied with, among other things, capitalism for being dominated by the military states and industrialists.
My question is: If the normal people are dissatisfied with capitalism, why was fascism, which heavily utilizes capitalism to 'serve' the state, seen as attractive? Wouldn't a communist state be more attractive to a continent that was tired of capitalism?
People weren't tired of capitalism, people were tired of the problems of capitalism IE the internal contradictions of capital and their subsequent crises. This dissatisfaction (which of course became extremely prominent soon after the 1929 economic crisis) was then used by the fascists. Because fascism as an economic idea is at its core class cooperation through totalitarianism - by unifying people under a nation the internal struggles between the classes of the nation dissappear - at least is the theory. This theory was of course favourable in the eyes of the german capitalist class instead of a communist revolution.
The german enlightenment philosopher Herder said it very well "In the state [Reich] there is but one class - the people [Volk]. Both the farmer and the king are a part of this class." This philosophy was then boiled down to the nazi motto of "One state, one people, one leader" - "Ein reich, ein volk, ein führer".
But then to justify this unifying under the nation and disregarding all internal competition between the material classes you have to find a way to rationalize why the system had failed so completely - the fascists had to find a cause for the crises of capital (and in the case of Germany they also had to find a cause for the defeat in WW1), which became the communists, the jews, the gypsies, the disabled, the beggars, the weak etc.
I can write a lot more about how the internal contradictions of capital create a vacuum that either the communist or fascist movement can fill, but that's not really about the history of Europe in the early 1900s as much as a general and more philosophical discussion.
Source: Mason, Timothy. National Socialism and the German Working Class, 1925 – May 1933 (1977)
Can be found here https://libcom.org/files/Mason%20working%20class.pdf