Can Corporatism and Fascism be used, at least in an economic sense, synonymously? Recently the term corporatism has been getting a lot of run, especially as in rebuttal to the OWS "ant-capitalism" sentiment (as in, "we don't have capitalism, what we have is CORPORATISM"). Ron Paul, also, is always quick to use the term, which btw I'm not at all convinced very many people know what he's talking about.
I know that fascism is an extremely loaded term for most people, and many will immediately think of nazism when you talk about fascism. But all that aside, my understanding is that fascism is simply the private ownership of the means of production with an underlying state control. The state sets up terms of international trade, imposes tariffs and such, taxes and regulates. The state can, and does, set production quotas in certain industries, or prices (including wage rates), and during episodes the state determines as being "national emergencies," it can even nationalize large companies or entire industries. In short, it is the legal marriage between private business and state. Is this not corporatism? Or are there other differences I'm forgetting?
I think that the main difference between corporatism and fascism is that corporatism is about corporations controlling the state and fascism is about the state controlling corporations for profit, to put it very basically. But that is realy very close to getting in to definition semantics. Because these sorts of state and corporate relationships generally work both ways anyway.
examples:
Corporatism to me would be the over the top campaign contributions, the revolving door between pharma and fda etc.
Fascism would be the ISP with a government monopoly, in the uk we have BT and we have Transport for london, which is an ex public organisation that now operates for profit but it enjoys all the benefits of a public organisation.
The directional thing is interesting. I'll have to consider that for a bit. thanks