Very much off the top of my head, I suppose 'obvious' one would say: liberal capitalism allows for a petit bourgeois culture to arise, and some wide parameters of freedom to develop. It allows people with will and desire to forge their own economic life and to establish a base by virtue of their hard work, intelligence, etc. Those seem positive aspects.
Communism I can't say too much about because I have not lived under it. But I did spend some time in Nicaragua in the late 90's and developed a friendship with an old Sandinista who spoke of going to Cuba in the early days of the Sandinista revolution. He said it was a strange but welcome experience to be in a culture in which you felt free of the sense of financial scamming. According to him people thus related more sincerely. I suppose that would be a positive aspect. In Venezuela in the early 2000s I also met old Chilean activists who'd fled Chile in the aftermath of the 70's coup and they described their involvement with Chilean Socialism as similar to a love-affair: a romantic adventure with all the heady ups-and-down of love, or a social love-affair. I can only imagine that social solidarity and working in concert for a giant cause would represent a 'positive' experience.
I have been working my way through
The Doctrine of Fascism by Moussolini and find lots of interesting facets:
Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is immanent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it has also an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence in the world as a human will dominating the will of others, unless one has a conception both of the transient and the specific reality on which that action is to be exercised, and of the permanent and universal reality in which the transient dwells and has its being. To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.
Arising_uk wrote:Hmm...and yet you berate others for simplistic historical explanations?
When one generalises, one generally always commits a certain error. But in order to converse, without endless footnotes, we have to generalise. If I 'berate' anyone, it is with at least fairly good intentions, and not to berate the individual. If my statement is a reduction, I see no reason why I should not welcome being called on it. I am no expert in European Fascism so my statement might have been simplistic, or partial. I see one aspect of Fascism's rise as an attempt to construct resistance to encroaching Marxism and Communism, and this is certainly true in Italy. So, the statement does not seem unfair. But any statement of that sort requires filling out.
Hmm... not knocking Luther but that's a long string to push back to the Greeks and Romans as by 'n large this radical definition came in opposition to much of what you describe as Western culture or at least the structures in place at the time, it appears mainly to do with war and the latterly the change in working practices which would put this change more firmly in the Historical Materialist camp I'd have thought?
Yet my point was only to highlight that something quite dramatic and powerful occurred then, and something that - at least to my understanding - allowed for transformative changes to come forward allowing for production that has shaped and reshaped the world. I understand Europe as Mediterranean culture: Greek, Roman, and Judaic passed through an Alexandrian melting pot which comes to fruition in Northern Europe and in the Teutonic cultures that came under this cultural influence.
"...as by 'n large this radical definition came in opposition to much of what you describe as Western culture or at least the structures in place at the time".
Can you explain further?