Zizek on 'The Two Totalitarianisms,' or, Why Fascism is Worse than Stalinism

I remember taking a 'social studies' class back in high school in which the teacher, who was also the athletic director and the assistant coach for football, basketball and track, wrote on the board "Communism = Fascism = Socialism." This was back in the late 1980s, shorty before the fall of the Soviet Union as it turned out. Even as a teen, I was disgusted by this crude equation, which was never explained properly but was based on the assumption that the three aforementioned political systems were all forms of 'anti-democratic' totalitarianism.

In The Two Totalitarianisms Slavoj Zizek argues that while it is absolutely necessary to condemn the horrific brutalities perpetuated under Stalinism, it is also wrong to simply equate Communism and Fascism as Leftist and Rightist totalitarianism. Zizek declares that, "[i]t is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat."

In a nutshell, Zizek's argument is based on the premise that Communism acknowledges the fundamental class antagonism and posits a model in which all people are, theoretically, equal, whereas Fascism displaces and naturalizes the class struggle as racial conflict and posits a racialized hierarchy in which certain people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) are designated inferior.