This is why the frothing antileftists of the far right would be really served to read Marx for once, because one thing that Marxist works make abundantly clear is this:
Well, It would be nice but it won't work out that well.
If Libertarians and Marxists discuss the
symptoms of the close relationship between government and business, there is a huge amount they can agree on. The power exerted by the military-industrial complex and constantly fighting wars overseas to increase profits, the expansion of prisons as a source of for-profit cheap labour, draconian police powers to keep down labour as social conditions deteriorate, the influence of corporations and lobbyists over government and policy, etc.
But when you get to the
causes and therefore the
solutions of the integration of business and the state
, the ideological analyses get you completely different results;
Libertarians will claim that the problem is the state and the state has to be reduced in size and with less intervention in the economy. They want to go back to the competitive stage of the development of capitalism, perhaps by breaking up corporations in to smaller entities to increase competition. They will place the blame for the great depression on the federal reserve, monetary policy and government intervention, whilst claiming the New Deal didn't actually make things better but make it worse through
more intervention. This is a betrayal of the "founding principles" of classical liberalism in the eyes of libertarians, as a government of the people, by the people and for the people is usurped by corporate interests. Freedom and Democracy is restored by going
back to those founding principles and again putting the people in control.
Meanwhile Marxists believe the problem is capitalism and that to is impossible to return to the competitive stage of development, as monopolies are a natural development of capitalism. Breaking up companies through anti-trust/competition laws doesn't reverse the trend towards bigger business, but is only a temporary set back. As monopolies get bigger, so economic crises get more severe and the state has to step in to regulate the market which can no longer regulate itself by competition. The great depression was capitalism's fault and the new deal was the capitalist state trying to plug holes on an already sinking ship.
Additionally, Marxists believed that the state was capitalist and represented the exploiting classes from it's inception. The founding fathers may have been liberals, but they were slave owners and property owners who wrote a constitution with anti-democratic sympathies such as an originally un-elected senate, the electoral college, and a series of constitutional checks and balances that favour conservative approaches to legislation and impede radical social and economic policies. The (unelected) supreme court later developed powers of judicial review and FDR found New Deal legislation held up by a conservative justices in the 1930's. This is when he threatened to pack the court with justices sympathetic to his policies. In the Marxist view, the nature of these interventions will always serve the ruling class, with the new deal principally working for business whilst providing some "compromises" to check the workers' dissent so they don't threaten the system as a whole. The conflict between the supreme court and FDR (and the Democratic and Republican Parties) is a conflict
within the capitalist ruling class itself over the extent of intervention, rather than of abolishing capitalism altogether. Marxists therefore want to change the nature of the state by having a "workers' state" and then have the "workers' state" take control of the corporations and run the economy on the basis of an economy plan.
So whilst libertarians and Marxists oppose the same tendencies towards fascism in the modern state, they have opposing solutions to it. Libertarians say fascism is left-wing because it expands the state, Marxists say fascism is right-wing because the state is subordinate to capitalism. These differences aren't really that helpful in actually defeating fascism as a common objective and is just confusing to try to decide who is right in the end.