During the era of the Italian and Nazi regimes, the overwhelming majority of political analysis, historians, sociologists, economists, and other scholars across various disciplines in a range of different countries, repeatedly drew the conclusion that both the Italian and German forms of fascism were capitalist.

Reviewing 20 years of scholarly commentary on the fascist economies of Italy and Germany, from 1926 to 1946, we find that regardless of personal ideology, both capitalist and Marxist scholars typically identified the fascist economies as some form of capitalism rather than socialism, consistently using the same definitions of capitalism and socialism, and that they were identified as socialist typically only by libertarians and members of the Austrian School, a model of radical economic individualism, who tend to use different definitions of capitalism and socialism, and apply them inconsistently.

A 1926 article in the American journal Current History and Forum, quoted Mussolini stating “We must accustom ourselves to think that this capitalist system with all its virtues and defects will continue to rule the world for centuries”, and declaring explicitly “Capitalism has a future of which Fascismo recognizes and approves”.[9] The same article also quoted Mussolini stating “you must face the most serious problem of this century, that of the relations between capital and labor - the problem which Fascism has solved by placing capital and labor on the same level”.[10]

In 1927, a report by the United States World War Foreign Debt Commission observed that in Mussolini’s fascist Italy the capitalist elites, which it described as a plutocracy, “works hand in hand with the court party to sustain the Fascist sway”. The report noted that “capitalism in Italy has a character and constitution peculiar to that country”, and that the capitalist elite “finances the Fascist Party and the Fascist press”, in order to “receives privileges which consolidate its own position”.[11] The astute observation that under fascist regimes capitalists submitted to operating under certain restrictions, while receiving certain privileges in order to maintain their position of authority in the economy, has been noted by many commentators on fascist economies, over many decades.

In his book The Nazi Dictatorship, published in 1932, Cambridge scholar Roy Pascal explained that although earlier on some members of the Nazi party had anti-capitalist tendencies, “this anti-capitalistic theory was completely abandoned once Hitler came to power, and has played no part in the fashioning of present-day Germany”.[12]

In her 1934 article International Socialism: The End of an Era, Helen Byrne Armstrong contrasted “the extremes of the modern world - the system of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the state capitalism of Italy and Germany on the other”. This identification of fascist Italy and fascist Germany as state capitalist was typical of the time.[13]

In 1934, American Democrat William Sirovich gave a speech to the New York House of Representatives, in which he not only condemned communism and socialism, but also condemned Nazism. In the process, he also gave his assessment of the Nazi economy, writing “State capitalism instead of private corporate capitalism finds its greatest expression and operation today in Germany”.[14] Sirovich, despite being opposed to both socialism and communism, clearly identified the fascist economy of Nazi Germany as state capitalism.

In 1935, historian Carmen Haider, considered an expert on Italian fascism, wrote “Fascism is the defender of a declining capitalism”.[15] Haider was not a Marxist, though she was concerned about the potential for big business and laissez-faire capitalism to breed fascism in the US, a concern shared by other economists and political scientists at the time, as well as some leading US capitalists.[16]

In 1935, social anthropologist Robert Briffault identified fascism as explicitly capitalist, warning of the danger of “an attack of the fascist capitalist world against the Soviet Union” which he said would require “the defence of human life and human values against the attacks of fascist capitalism”.[17]

A 1935 article by Hungarian professor Alexander Krisztics, who actually opposed communism, explained that the clearest difference between fascism and socialism “is the fact that fascism is based on private property, while socialism is based on public property”. He went on to write that socialism “does not permit any revenue from capital or earned profits”, and “permits only public ownership as the source of general prosperity”.[18] Krisztics described Italian and German fascism as “private and public ownership existing alongside of each other”, contrasting it with socialism, which he said was “based upon public ownership exclusively”.[19]

In a 1935 article, American economist John R. Commons, who was a social reformer but not a Marxist, expressed his belief that although Marx didn’t know the words fascism and Nazism, “he used equivalent words, such as monopoly capitalism or state capitalism”.[20] In Commons’ view, fascism was nothing like socialism, but just a form of capitalism concentrated in a monopoly of private corporations enabled by the state. Similar to Carmen Haider, Commons believed that these monopolistic companies “are the legal foundations of what ultimately becomes fascism or state capitalism”.[2

A 1935 article by political scientist Charles W. Pipkin described how the coercive power of the state was used to maintain capitalist class relations. Citing English economist Harold Laski, Pipkin observed that these capitalist class relations had “never been challenged in the system of Fascism either by Hitler in Germany or by Mussolini in Italy”.[22]

A 1936 article by American political scientist Albert Lepawsky noted astutely “Of the two major planks of the National Socialist program - nationalism and socialism - the trend of events in Germany today emphasizes nationalism and not socialism”.[23]

Journalist John Gunther’s 1936 book Inside Europe noted that “Fascism as Mussolini introduced it was not, probably, a deliberate artifice for propping up the capitalist structure, but it has had that effect”, observing that capitalists under fascist Italy had traded certain privileges to the state, in exchange for better control of their workers. Importantly, Gunther described Italian fascism as the opposite of Russian socialism, writing “The whole colour and tempo of the Fascist revolution, in contrast to that in Russia, is backward”.[24]

In 1936, an article in the American left leaning journal The Modern Monthly defended US president Theodore Roosevelt against claims by communists that he was a fascist. The article contrasted Roosevelt’s support for the working class with fascism’s support for capitalists, arguing that fascism “has one purpose to perform: to save capitalism by putting down the workingclass when the latter threatens to destroy it”.[25]

The same article acknowledged that “Capitalists never like Fascism”, and that they “accept Fascist capitalism with the greatest of reluctance, and then only because they have no alternative”. However, it also noted that capitalists’ objection to fascism was not because it was anti-capitalist, but because “Fascist capitalism, leading as it must eventually do toward state capitalism, puts too much power into the hands of the state”.[26]

In 1936 Marxist economist Nikolai Bukharin wrote “The Italian fascists claim that there is no capitalism in Italy, but a special kind of order which is neither capitalism nor socialism”, and said that Hitler and his followers “declare that in their country they have national socialism”.[27] However, he observed that in both Italy and Germany the capitalist class continued to exist, and that both Mussolini and Hitler had left the capitalist oligarchs in their positions, the complete opposite of socialism.

u/kieslowskifan has a great answer here addressing how the Nazis addressed the economy in ideology and practice.