Why are Communism and Fascism generally considered to be opposites and why was it decided that Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany would be enemies when their governments appear to be similar?

It appears that I’ve been summoned to talk about fascism again. I’ve actually thought about how to answer your question since yesterday and I think that I can write something that’s adequately theoretical but not too speculative at the same time. It seems that you’ve taken the position that most people do when talking about ideologies – to conceptualize them simply as checklists of ideas and practices that can be compared against each other. I’ll argue that ideologies are much deeper constructs, and that we have to look at their essential core – their reason to exist – to actually be able to understand and analyse them.

A major problem with thinking of ideologies as checklists is that it is very susceptible to being influenced by ideological thought itself; the ‘natural’ comparison between Nazi Germany and the USSR is largely an ideological construct from the Cold War period. If we want to play that game, we could also point out the commonalities between western democracies of the early 20th century and the Nazi state – both upheld a capitalist economic system and property rights, both maintained hierarchical class structures, both had imperial ambitions, official ideologies of racial supremacy and segregation (especially in the context of the United States) etc. On the other hand, countries like the USSR and USA shared (sometimes nominal) commitments to democracy and the right of nations to self-determination, an official belief in the state and its functionaries as servants to the people rather than vice versa and so on.

As you can see, it’s very easy to draw comparisons between disparate ideologies depending on your own ideological beliefs. So how can we circumvent this? I think it’s important to really get to the core of what an ideology is and why they come about in the first place. Ideologies may indeed incorporate checklists of beliefs and practices, but why is it that they get inspired and then take root in the first place? The French philosopher Louis Althusser provides an excellent summary of what I’m trying to get at in his essay, On the Young Marx:

(1) Every ideology must be regarded as a real whole, internally unified by its own problematic, so that it is impossible to extract one element without altering its meaning.

(2) The meaning of this whole, of a particular ideology (in this case an individual’s thought), depends not on its relation to a truth other than itself but on its relation to the existing ideological field and on the social problems and social structure which sustain the ideology and are reflected in it; the sense of the development of a particular ideology depends not on the relation of this development to its origins or its end, considered as its truth, but to the relation found within this development between the mutations of the particular ideology and the mutations in the ideological field and the social problems and relations that sustain it.

(3) Therefore, the developmental motor principle of a particular ideology cannot be found within ideology itself but outside it, in what underlies (l’en-deça de) the particular ideology: its author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history.

What Althusser is getting at here is that ideologies can’t be fully understood through the platforms they propose, but through the problems that they arise to solve, that they are social and historical formations that must be understood in a social and historical context. The various checks on the checklist of an ideology only can only be made sense of if we look at the bigger picture and think about what social, historical, political problems gave birth to it – that is to say that we can’t just compare random elements of an ideology without making them unintelligible in relation to the problematics that they are trying to solve.

So to answer your question more directly, we have to restart and posit: “what are the problematics that fascism and communism developed in relation to?” instead of “in what ways were fascist and communist dictatorships similar?” At their fundamental core, both ideologies were birthed from the same problem but sought to solve it in radically different ways: industrial society’s alienation of humankind – essentially how people are dehumanized by their relationship to modern society. For Marxist communism, this could only be solved through the fundamental restructuring of society and the economy to end economic exploitation and stratified social classes that were seen as the cause of alienation; this would be accomplished by the creation of a state ruled by the working class which would eventually end in the abolition of all classes and the state along with them.

Fascism’s drive to purge alienation took a very different route – less concerned with economic exploitation and social hierarchy, fascists thought that people were alienated in part because industrial modernity restricted their ability to exert their will on the world. The fascist solution was to advocate for the total sublimation of the individual to the state, to create a society where the will of the people and will of the state were one and the same. But, as Althusser says above, ideologies also come into existence in relation to the existing ideological field. When fascism came into the political field after the First World War, European society seemed at risk of falling to communist revolution; it was in this context that fascism developed as what Ernst Nolte described as an “anti-Marxism”: a revolutionary counter-revolution that would attempt to fundamentally restructure society, but one that would maintain the property rights and socio-economic hierarchies fundamental to capitalism at the same time. The short answer, then, is that communism and fascism are considered opposites because fascism developed as a response and reaction to communism itself.