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Here's the most misused quote of the last 20 years. I see a lot of US and British leftists totally misunderstand this and try to say it applies to monder Britain and the US. This is totally inaccurate and leads to utterly false conclusions. The following thread deals with this.
When Mussolini refers to "corporate power" he is not referring to corporations as you and I understand them. He is referring to the Italin (and Spanish later) fascist policy trying to unify capital and labour inside one organisaiton. This springs out the fascist denial of class.
The idea draws on Mussolini and his closest allies experience coming out of the pre war Italian syndicalist movement as well. They adapted that when they abandoned class struggle and so the coporations were the attempt to merge labour and capital into one body.
The idea expressed by Mussolini and Gentile (the Fascist intellectual) that the unity of capital and labour would overcome class conflict. The fascist corporate state was the attempt to overcome the contradictions of Italian capitalism by extinguishing class conflict.
The idea was also that the state would direct production to a certain degree whilst capitalists still got to make profit. Mussolini believed that this could overcome the backwardness of Italian capitalism.
Ultimately, despite some achievements in the form of public works projects the coprorate state fails due to resistance from the Italian ruling class who ultimately ditched Il Duce when it looked like he was the losing bet.
By thinking that the mature/rotten capitalism of the US is fascism misundertsands the nature of both. The Italian ruling class turned to Mussolini to resolve a situation of acute class conflict and to crush the workers organisations. That has not happened in the USA.
Trump ain't a fascist and neither are his opponents. What the Democrats are is the political expression of the ruling class still operating within bourgeois demcratic channels even if these are now corrupt.
Fascism comes from the outside of the state forces, initially, and takes the form of an oppositional mass movement composed usually of the middle class and elements of the working class who have been hurled into crisis by an economic collapse.
The ruling class then bring this movement into the system to revitalise and religitimise it. They then turn the movement loose on the working class organisations to destroy them thus resolving (for them) the heightened contradictions.
This is different in many forms to what you have in the USA. There you have two parties of the ruling class each still existing largely as oligarchic operations. Fascism comes from a mass street based movement that then merges with the existing state.
Leftists throwing around the term fascism at either Trump or Biden miss the point. The horrors you see the US commit on it's own population and elsewhere are the outgrowth of a capitalism functioning as per normal.
