Traditionalist or reactionary critique
In spite of their differences, the opponents of the French Revolution like Burke, late monarchists like Ch. Maurras, or the German thinkers of the Conservative Revolution in the 20th century, shared a common distaste for Human Rights. All these opponents dismiss the notion of the universality of the human species. "In my life, I've seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; as for Man, I must confess I've never met him (..)" (J. de Maistre, 1796) They prefer the supposedly real abstraction of the soil, the nation, the people, the Volk, etc. to the more obviously abstract abstraction of the modern voting citizen. To them, human beings can only be "brothers" and "sisters" if they belong to a certain group or origin. That group can even be (German) labour in E. Junger's The Worker (1932), but it's still limited. Communism, on the contrary, is the possibility of the universal.
Our critique addresses the State, democratic or dictatorial. Reactionary critique addresses the democratic State. Fascism has a deep hatred of democracy and, if it comes to power, it does away with political competition, but what it hates about the democratic system is parliamentary procedures, not the State institutions which fascists seduce, conquer, occupy and fortify, thereby taking to their extreme potentials which exist in all parliamentary regimes.
Communism opposes democracy because communism is anti-State. Fascism only opposes democracy, because fascism is pro-State. We object to democracy as a form of the State, whereas reactionaries object to it as a political form they consider too feeble to defend the State. Mussolini and Hitler destroyed parliamentarianism in order to create an overriding central executive and administrative power. Communists have had to deal with parliamentarianism as one of the forms (and not a feeble one) of government and repression. Reaction denounces free will and bourgeois individualism to replace them with (old or new) forms of oppressive authority, whereas the communist perspective aims to realize the individual's aspirations for a freedom that is both personal and lived out with others.
