The Plank Test: Why Fascism Sits Closer to Communism
by Zoltanous
Introduction
People get trapped in labels because they treat “socialism” as a moral tribe instead of an institutional architecture. Switch the lens from slogans to mechanisms and the picture sharpens immediately. Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, listed ten transitional “measures” often called the “10 Planks.” They were proposed for specific historical conditions, not as timeless dogma. But they work as a brutally useful diagnostic anyway, because they read less like utopia and more like a checklist of state consolidation. The question is simple: how far does a regime go in centralizing property, credit, labor, education, and infrastructure such that the state becomes the operating brain of the economy?
Run that diagnostic and you get the uncomfortable result: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany can look structurally adjacent to communist systems, not because they preached Marx, but because they converged on the same toolkit. The ideological paint differs. The machinery overlaps. The planks aren’t “communism” by themselves. They’re capacities.
Can the state override property as a right, not merely regulate it as a privilege?
Can it steer credit, transport, and communications as unified levers?
Can it plan production and allocate labor at scale?
Can it fuse education to state goals and labor discipline?
In other words: who holds the steering wheel, regardless of what name they put on the dashboard? For clarity, here are the 10 Planks from Marx and Engels (paraphrased slightly for brevity, but faithful):
Abolition of private property in land; rents applied to public purposes.
Heavy progressive income tax.
Abolition of inheritance rights.
Confiscation of property from emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of credit via a state monopoly bank.
Centralization of communication and transport under the state.
State ownership or extension of factories and production instruments; common planning for land improvement.
Equal obligation to labor; industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture and manufacturing; erase town country distinctions via population redistribution.
Free public education; end child factory labor; integrate education with production.
I’ll score each regime out of 10 based on functional alignment, not ideological intent, and I’ll explain the fits and misses. The scores are weighted toward operational reality during peak periods. This is not about slapping labels on ghosts. It’s about showing where governing technologies converge even when the rhetoric is sworn enemies.
Nazi Germany (8/10)
The Nazis didn’t cite Marx, but their rearmament driven economy built massive state levers over property, labor, and production. The point is not that the Third Reich copied Bolshevism in doctrine. The point is that it installed a very similar control surface over society, then used private actors as operating units inside a political program.
Plank 1 (Land abolition): Partial fit. Private land ownership persisted formally, but the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended Article 153 of the Weimar Constitution, stripping away protections that guaranteed property and required compensation for expropriation. That matters because it changes the status of property from a right that constrains the state to a category the state can override in an emergency legal environment. In practice, the regime then piles administrative control onto agriculture through the Reich Food Estate (1933), centralizing planning, fixing prices, and restricting sales and transfers. Land was routinely requisitioned for state projects (Autobahn, military bases), and outputs were directed toward autarky and war priorities. Not universal abolition on paper, but the functional result is that land and rural production are subordinated to public purposes as a matter of regime discretion.
Plank 2 (Progressive tax): Strong fit. The Nazis inherited and expanded Weimar’s progressive tax system, with rates up to 50% on high incomes by 1939, plus war surcharges. The mechanism is straightforward: extraction scales upward and is used to fund state priorities, especially militarization.
Plank 3 (Abolition of inheritance): Weak fit. Inheritance remained legal as a general institution. But it is not untouched. Jews and political enemies had assets seized through Aryanization and other measures, and wartime controls constrained transfers. Still, this is not a universal abolition plank. It’s selective destruction aimed at enemies and targets, not a general redesign of inheritance as such.
Plank 4 (Confiscation from emigrants and rebels): Strong fit. The Reich Flight Tax (1931, expanded under the Nazis) could confiscate up to 90% of emigrants’ assets and was used heavily against Jews fleeing. Political “rebels” and dissidents, especially communists and other enemies, faced routine property seizures. Confiscation becomes a normal regime instrument, not a rare legal exception.
Plank 5 (Credit centralization): Strong fit. The Reichsbank is brought under direct regime control post-1937 after Schacht is pushed out, and credit is steered toward rearmament through mechanisms like MEFO bills and state guaranteed finance. Private banks persist, but they operate inside a state directed credit environment where political priorities decide the flow of capital.
Plank 6 (Communication and transport centralization): Strong fit. The Ministry of Transport under Dorpmüller oversees railways (already largely state owned) and the Autobahn buildout as state infrastructure, while communications are centralized through Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, combining censorship with control of media and telecom. Transport and information are treated as strategic nervous systems of the regime.
Plank 7 (State factories and planning): Strong fit. The Four-Year Plan (1936) under Göring is the clearest institutional expression of state directed production. The regime expands state owned enterprises, including the Hermann Göring Works as an autarky and steel vehicle, while coercing private firms into state plans through contracts, raw material allocations, licensing, and priority scheduling. Firms can still be privately titled and still be operating as components of a national program.
Plank 8 (Labor obligation and industrial armies): Strong fit. The German Labor Front (DAF, 1933) replaces independent unions with a state controlled labor model. By 1939, labor conscription through the Reich Labor Service functions as an industrial army for farms, factories, and war production, and forced labor from occupied territories massively expands the coercive labor base. Labor becomes mobilizable policy, not simply a market relation.
Plank 9 (Agriculture manufacturing integration and population shift): Partial fit. Policies like Blut und Boden promote rural settlement and attempt to bind agriculture to national industry and autarky goals, including synthetic substitutes tied to resource strategy. But there is no full abolition of the urban rural distinction in the plank sense. The direction exists, the comprehensive redesign does not.
Plank 10 (Public education, child labor ban, integration with production): Strong fit. State schools and the Hitler Youth structure youth formation as a regime project. Child labor restrictions are expanded from Weimar era law, and education is linked to labor and military preparation through vocational training designed for the war economy.
Misses: No full land abolition on paper and no general abolition of inheritance, and some private autonomy persists in non strategic sectors. But the foundational point is the constitutional and legal move: property protection is suspended early. The Reichstag Fire Decree explicitly suspended Article 153 of the Weimar Constitution (along with Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, and 124), which had guaranteed property rights, required a legal basis and compensation for expropriation, and protected against arbitrary state interference. Once those safeguards are gutted, ownership operates less like an inviolable right and more like a revocable privilege. That is why the plank test yields a high score even in a regime that kept private firms on the surface.
Fascist Italy (7/10)
Mussolini’s corporatism claimed to “harmonize” classes, but it centralized control into state syndicates, state banking, and state holding companies, converging on the same machinery the plank test is measuring. And if you want the Italian case scored honestly, you cannot stop at 1922 to 1943. You have to include the RSI, because the Salò phase is Fascism in its most explicit “social” posture, trying to harden corporatism into a more direct system of enterprise control and worker incorporation. It is still Fascism, It is just Fascism under military collapse, occupation pressure, and radical legitimation crisis.
Plank 1 (Land abolition): Partial fit. Land remained private, but the Battle for Grain (1925) imposed state quotas, reclamation projects (Pontine Marshes), and rent controls for public autarky goals. Under the RSI, emergency conditions hardened the logic: requisitions, rationing, and command allocation expanded the state’s practical reach over rural output even without formally abolishing land titles.
Plank 2 (Progressive tax): Strong fit. Inherited and ramped up progressive taxes, with surtaxes on wealth during the 1930s to fund empire-building. Under the RSI, the fiscal state becomes more extractive and emergency oriented, with the war economy forcing tighter control over what is produced, moved, and consumed.
Plank 3 (Abolition of inheritance): Weak fit. Inheritance stayed legal, though taxes and seizures targeted enemies (anti-fascists). The RSI talks “social” but does not cleanly abolish inheritance as a general principle.
Plank 4 (Confiscation from emigrants/rebels): Strong fit. Political dissidents and “subversives” had property confiscated; emigration was restricted with asset penalties. Under the RSI, the state’s relationship to enemies becomes even more punitive, with property seizure tied to political loyalty and the conditions of civil conflict.
Plank 5 (Credit centralization): Strong fit. The 1936 Banking Law nationalized major banks under IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, 1933), which bailed out and controlled credit for the state. The RSI inherits this architecture and pushes this further: credit is not treated as an independent market function, but as a lever subordinated to regime survival and war production.
Plank 6 (Communication/transport centralization): Strong fit. State monopolized railways (Ferrovie dello Stato) and built autostrade; media was centralized under the Ministry of Popular Culture (1937). Under the RSI, this becomes even more overtly command based: censorship, propaganda, and emergency transport prioritization tighten because the regime is literally fighting for logistical existence.
Plank 7 (State factories/planning): Strong fit, strengthened under RSI. IRI became a massive state holding company owning banks, steel, shipping, effectively nationalizing key industries during the Depression. Autarky plans (1930s) dictated production. The RSI then tries to push beyond “state direction” toward enterprise socialization as a formal program, with the regime asserting that large firms should be reorganized so that control rights are no longer purely private. Even where implementation was uneven in wartime, the institutional claim matters: the firm is not sovereign, it is a political unit.
Plank 8 (Labor obligation/industrial armies): Strong fit, strengthened under RSI. The Charter of Labor (1927) created corporative syndicates under state control, banning strikes and allocating labor. Conscription for public works (land reclamation) functioned as “industrial armies.” Under the RSI, labor discipline hardens further: the “social” rhetoric is paired with tighter coercion, forced mobilization, and a stronger attempt to integrate workers into regime controlled structures while keeping independent union power illegal.
Plank 9 (Agri-manufacturing combo/population shift): Partial fit. Ruralization campaigns shifted population to farms, integrating agriculture with industry (chemical fertilizers for grain self-sufficiency), but unevenly. RSI war conditions intensify the blending of production goals, but the population redistribution plank is still only a partial match rather than a systematic national redesign.
Plank 10 (Public education/child labor ban/integrated production): Strong fit. State schools under Gentile’s reforms (1923) were free and public, banned child labor (expanded laws), and fused education with Fascist indoctrination and vocational training. Under the RSI, the educational and youth apparatus remains openly instrumental, tied to political formation and mobilization rather than liberal civic autonomy.
Misses: Italy is less aggressive than the USSR on inheritance and land in the literal plank sense. But if you treat the “peak period” as the full arc that includes the RSI, the score rises because RSI Fascism tries to convert corporatist mediation into something closer to enterprise level socialization and direct regime claim over the firm. That does not make it Marxist. It makes it structurally closer to the same state toolkit.
Why the score is higher when you include RSI: Pre-1943 Italy already clusters high on planks 5 through 8 via corporatist labor control, the 1936 banking policy, and IRI’s state holding dominance in key sectors. The RSI then adds the explicit “social” turn, where Fascism tries to formalize a model of worker incorporation into governance and to reframe property and enterprise as conditional instruments of the state. Even if war and occupation constraints made full rollout patchy, the direction of travel is unmistakable. On the plank test, that pushes Italy from 6/10 into the 7/10, flirting with 8/10 territory depending on how heavily you consider RSI as the regime’s final and most radical expression.
The Soviet Union (9/10)
This is the closest literal match, because Bolshevik policy was explicitly built around the same direction of travel the planks describe: property absorption, centralized credit, centralized planning, labor obligation, and the conversion of education into a production pipeline. The USSR is not “the planks perfectly implemented” in some clean schematic sense, but it is the regime that treats them most like a governing blueprint.
Plank 1: Strong fit. Collectivization (1928 to 1933) and dekulakization dismantled private landholding in practice; agriculture was reorganized into kolkhozy (collective farms) and sovkhozy (state farms), with procurement quotas and outputs subordinated to state plans and urban supply priorities.
Plank 2: Strong fit. Progressive taxes existed in the transitional NEP environment and on residual private activity, but the mature Soviet model increasingly replaces “taxation” with direct extraction through administered prices, procurement quotas, and state wage distribution, meaning the state captures surplus structurally rather than only through formal tax schedules.
Plank 3: Strong fit. Inheritance was severely restricted in the revolutionary period, especially for bourgeois property and productive assets. Later, limited inheritance reappears in narrow forms (personal goods, savings), but not as a robust institution of intergenerational capital formation. The key plank logic still holds: inheritance is not treated as a protected engine of private power.
Plank 4: Strong fit. Property confiscation was routine against designated enemies. Kulaks, “wreckers,” political opponents, and emigrants or exiles were stripped of assets en masse, and property seizure was not a side-effect but a governing technique of class war and state consolidation.
Plank 5: Strong fit. Gosbank functioned as a state monopoly credit institution in practice, with lending and investment subordinated to plan targets rather than market risk. The USSR does not “steer” credit the way corporatist systems do, it replaces credit with allocation.
Plank 6: Strong fit. Transport and communications were nationalized and treated as strategic infrastructure: railways, shipping, telegraph, later radio and other communications systems. The important piece is not simply ownership, but the plan’s ability to use these networks as instruments of integration and control.
Plank 7: Strong fit. The Five-Year Plans (1928 plus) represent the institutionalization of plank seven. Heavy industry, factories, and “the instruments of production” were overwhelmingly state owned, and output, investment, and land improvement were organized according to national targets rather than decentralized decision.
Plank 8: Strong fit. Labor was treated as obligation and mobilizable resource. The system deploys coercive labor via gulags and also ideological mobilization through “shock worker” campaigns and labor hero narratives. Functionally, this is exactly what plank eight means: labor is not merely a market contract, it is a duty the state can organize at scale.
Plank 9: Partial fit. Forced industrialization and collectivization push huge population movements, and the regime deliberately tries to fuse agriculture with industry through planned supply chains and industrialization drives. But the town country distinction is not abolished through an orderly “equable distribution” so much as blurred through rapid, uneven urbanization, relocations, and coercive resettlement, including chaotic demographic consequences.
Plank 10: Strong fit. Universal free education becomes a core state function, child labor is curtailed formally, and schooling is tied to production through polytechnic and vocational training, with the broader goal of producing technical cadres for industrialization rather than cultivating liberal autonomy.
Miss: Plank 9 is the least clean fit because the Soviet process is not a balanced redistribution so much as a brutal and uneven transformation. This is where the deeper structural lesson belongs: Soviet planning runs into persistent problems of calculation, incentives, and what Kornai later theorizes as soft budget constraints, where enterprises are not punished like true market actors for inefficiency and therefore behave differently across supply and demand. That is not a trivial academic quibble. It is one of the regime’s central operational pathologies. This helps explain why fascist command systems might keep nominally “private” enterprise shells: not as a concession to liberalism, but as a technique for preserving usable accounting signals, managerial initiative, and flexibility while still monopolizing direction.
Communist China (6/10)
China today isn’t Mao’s command economy, but it’s no liberal market order either. It’s a hybrid where private wealth exists inside a political model that reserves the decisive levers, especially land, finance, strategic industry, and information infrastructure.
Plank 1: Strong fit. Land is not privately owned in the Western fee simple sense. Urban land is state owned and rural land is collectively owned. What individuals and firms typically hold are transferable land use rights within a framework where the state retains decisive authority over conversion, development, zoning, and major projects. That means the base layer of economic sovereignty is public, even when market activity happens on top of it.
Plank 2: Strong fit. A progressive income tax exists and functions as a modern state fiscal tool, with brackets reaching up to 45%. The practical point is not just the rate schedule. It’s that taxation is one of several instruments through which the state shapes distribution and behavior alongside regulation and planning.
Plank 3: Weak fit. Inheritance is protected in law and private property is formally recognized, which breaks from the literal plank demanding abolition. You can tax inheritance and still preserve it as an institution. China does. So this is a real miss in strict plank terms.
Plank 4: Partial fit. China is not built around a universal “confiscate emigrants and rebels” plank as a standing constitutional principle. But in politically sensitive contexts, the state can impose asset freezes, seizures, or enforcement actions against dissidents and targeted groups, and it can use financial controls as an extension of political discipline. The Hong Kong crackdowns are the most obvious contemporary illustration of that logic in action.
Plank 5: Strong fit. Credit is dominated by a state heavy banking system. The Big Four state owned banks hold an outsized share of lending and are steered through policy signals, regulatory direction, and macro targets. The PBOC sits at the center of monetary policy, while lending priorities frequently reflect political objectives and development strategy, including large state programs and external initiatives like Belt and Road. Private banks exist, but the credit system’s commanding heights remain politically directed.
Plank 6: Strong fit. The state treats communications and transport as strategic infrastructure. Telecom and internet governance includes extensive filtering and control, often summarized by outsiders as the Great Firewall. Transport is similarly state planned and state built at scale, especially high speed rail, ports, and logistics corridors, with clear national integration goals.
Plank 7: Strong fit. SOEs dominate the strategic sectors, especially energy, steel, transport, telecommunications, defense related industry, and many heavy industrial supply chains. Five-Year Plans provide the planning spine, setting targets and priorities that guide investment, industrial upgrading, regional development, and land use. Even where private firms are major players, the macro direction is shaped by plan and policy, not just market signals.
Plank 8: Partial fit. China does not impose a universal labor obligation in the literal “industrial armies” sense. But it does have institutional mechanisms that allocate and shape labor at scale. The hukou system structures migration and access to services, effectively governing labor mobility. And the state can mobilize labor and capital rapidly for large projects, especially infrastructure booms, disaster response, and targeted campaigns, which functionally resembles centralized labor coordination without being a formal nationwide labor draft.
Plank 9: Partial fit. China has pursued one of the most dramatic urbanization projects in modern history, using planning, land conversion, and infrastructure investment to drive population movement into cities and city clusters. This blends agriculture, industry, and services in planned development zones. But it is not a clean abolition of the town country distinction through an “equable distribution” so much as a managed, sometimes uneven reallocation toward urban cores and megacity regions.
Plank 10: Strong fit. China has compulsory education for 9 years and heavily integrates education with state goals, including vocational education tied to industrial strategy and labor market planning. Child labor is formally banned and enforcement is treated as part of state governance, even if violations still occur in practice as they do in many countries.
Misses: Private property protections and constitutional inheritance protections dilute full alignment with the literal planks. But the plank test is about operational sovereignty, not purity of ideology. On that axis, China remains structurally state led because the state retains leverage over land frameworks, credit allocation, strategic industry, transport and communications, and political oversight that can override private autonomy when priorities change.
The United States: 1/10
America implements policies that rhyme with individual planks without collapsing the boundary between society and state. That is the distinction that matters. You can find overlaps in a modern administrative republic, but you do not find the permanent conversion of the whole economy into a command hierarchy.
Plank 1: Weak fit. Private land ownership is foundational. Eminent domain exists, but it is procedurally constrained, typically compensated, and litigable. The state can take, but it has to justify, and it cannot treat land as a standing public rent system in the plank sense.
Plank 2: Strong fit. Progressive federal income taxation exists as a normal feature of the state (1913+), and it functions as a durable extraction and redistribution tool rather than an occasional emergency measure.
Plank 3: Weak fit. Inheritance remains legally protected and socially central. The estate tax exists, but it is not abolition. It is a partial constraint on transmission, not a structural ban on intergenerational private power.
Plank 4: Weak fit. Confiscation is not normalized as a political category for “emigrants and rebels.” Asset forfeiture exists, but in theory it is tied to criminal enforcement and due process, not a regime practice of punishing dissidence as such.
Plank 5: Partial fit. The Federal Reserve centralizes monetary policy and provides system wide liquidity functions, but it does not create an exclusive state monopoly bank that absorbs all credit into a single administrative pipeline. Private banking competition persists and capital allocation is not formally replaced by plan.
Plank 6: Partial fit. Communications and transport are regulated and federally shaped. The FCC is a key governance node for communications, and federal funding builds and coordinates major transport infrastructure like the interstate highways. But this is regulation and subsidy, not full centralization of the means of communication and transport into a single state owned apparatus.
Plank 7: Weak fit. The US has public lands and large state projects (TVA is the classic example), plus wartime mobilizations that temporarily look plan like. But there is no standing national plan that permanently absorbs production, investment, and factory management into a unified command structure. Private enterprise remains the default operating unit of the economy.
Plank 8: Weak fit. There is no general labor obligation and no institutional equivalent of “industrial armies” as a permanent principle. The draft existed historically in wartime, but that is intermittent military mobilization, not a normal economic system of work duty.
Plank 9: Weak fit. No forced redistribution of population, no planned abolition of town country distinctions. Urbanization is mostly driven by market dynamics, migration, and private development, not national population engineering.
Plank 10: Partial fit. Public K-12 education is widespread and effectively free at the point of use. Child labor is federally restricted (1938), and vocational education exists and can be linked to labor market needs, though it is not generally organized as a direct arm of state production.
The gap: Constitutional constraints, legal contestability, and dispersed ownership prevent “contingent” property and labor from becoming the default condition of life. America overlaps on taxes, central banking functions, public schooling, and heavy regulation, but without the permanent command spine that turns those overlaps into an integrated regime system, it falls short of plank level governance.
Conclusions
If you define “socialism” as worker emancipation, class power, or egalitarian purpose, then fascism is not socialism. But that is not what this diagnostic is measuring. It is measuring where economic sovereignty sits: whether property and enterprise operate as independent centers of decision, or as delegated franchises functioning inside a political command hierarchy. On that structural axis, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany converge with communist systems more than liberal ones. Not because they shared a moral horizon, but because they built comparable state capacities: the ability to steer credit, discipline labor, set production priorities, and treat ownership as contingent on political objectives. Fascism kept private titles and corporate logos, but it steadily redefined what those titles meant. The proprietor still existed on paper, yet the regime increasingly held the real option to compel outputs, redirect inputs, and veto transfers in the name of national goals.
The Soviet Union made the command relationship explicit by collapsing most private autonomy into direct state ownership. Fascist systems often preferred a different arrangement: leave nominal private ownership intact while absorbing control rights into ministries, cartels, syndicates, and plan offices. That hybrid structure was not a concession to freedom. It was a technique. It preserved administrative signals, managerial initiative, and accounting clarity while still subordinating the economy to political command. In that sense, the “private sector” becomes less a sphere of independence than a set of instruments, useful because they work, not because they are sovereign.
Modern China shows how the same understanding can survive without the older ideological packaging. It tolerates substantial private activity, but the commanding heights of credit, land, and strategic industry remain politically supervised, and the party retains decisive leverage over firms when priorities change. The United States, by contrast, can rhyme with individual planks while still failing the deeper test: its courts, elections, and dispersed ownership make it harder to build a permanent command spine that swallows the whole economy. It has state functions, not a state economy. So the point is not that “left” and “right” are identical. The point is that once regimes pursue total political control, they reach for the same toolkit. Labels describe justifications, institutions describe results. Judge by machinery and the categories blur: different myths, similar levers. The real dividing line stops being left vs right and becomes command vs autonomy, delegation vs sovereignty, conditional ownership vs protected rights.