Do you think fascism is something unique? Different from capitalism in some way?

Fascism is not unique or different from capitalism. It is capitalism converted into a format that allows the highest level of extreme violence to be carried out against its enemies. It occurs when capitalists feel threatened by socialists, gaining monetary support, media and backing from the bourgeoisie who recognise the need to use ultra-violence to exterminate the revolutionary threat to their existence. It is not a separate or unique thing to capitalism. It is still capitalism.

We only need to look at the places where fascism was not defeated to see proof of this. The fascists won in Spain and in Chile, they were not defeated like they were in Italy or Germany. What happened there? Did fascism ever become anything unique? No it did not. The fascists maintained and even increased capitalism, the term "privatisation" comes from Hitler himself. Over time in the countries where fascism won, once they defeated the left, exterminated them and their leadership, rendered them inert and no longer a threat to their bourgeoisie, these countries simply morphed back into liberalism which is a more efficient form of exploitation and extraction. Once the ultra violence was no longer required they morph back into "friendly" versions.

It is this that you are seeing when we discuss fascists and liberals in the same breath. They are allies in their support for capitalism and opposition to socialism.

And who exactly becomes the fascists? They don't simply spawn out of a spawning pool. They were liberals until the media, money and influence of the bourgeoisie backing the conversion of society to fascism successfully radicalises them to the cause.

I never finished writing my response. ADHD and too many tabs :/

We lump them together because liberal and conservative politicians are unanimous on a lot of topics we care about.

off the top of my head, US politicians from both parties:

• do nothing about climate change
• want owners rather than workers to control production -- this is sort of a big deal to communists!
• serve (and often are themselves) business owners, bankers, and landlords rather than working people
  • Clinton deregulated finance and contributed to the 2008 crisis, allowed huge corporate media mergers, and tried to privatize social security
  • Obama let Citigroup pick his 2008 cabinet, did fuckall to help foreclosed Americans, and presided over the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history
  • Biden has done next to nothing to protect American workers from COVID, and rail workers are still on-call 24/7 with only eight sick days a year
  • 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare but it remains politically impossible
• support wars and coups
  • Clinton bombed and sanctioned Iraq back to the stone age, causing around 1.5 million deaths
  • liberal media helped sell the Iraq war, which caused over a million further deaths in Iraq
  • Obama obliterated the once-prosperous country of Libya, and there are now open-air slave markets
  • Biden continues to support the siege in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands
• support massive wealth extraction from the global south
  • IMF and World Bank loans that enforce austerity and depress wages

and on social issues, democrats are one half of a one-way ratchet: republicans make it worse, democrats do not make it better

...But anyway, the bottom line here is that we're socialists. We want workers to control production. Liberals, and conservatives, don't.

you might disagree with the points I raised, and that's fine — just realize that we communists do have our reasons to lump liberals and conservatives together. It’s not just vibes. We have an actual coherent perspective lol.

They are all liberals. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. They are all ideologically committed to capitalism.