Socialism! That is really an unfortunate word.
– Adolf Hitler (quoted in Dietrich Orlow, The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History
, p. 88
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.
I was going to try to get good old Montagu to contribute a personal note about his own fascist flirtations, after his long and unaccountable absence from the blog. No dice.
So I’ve solicited some commentary from Oswald Spengler, at least.
Today we are beginning to realize that Marx was only the stepfather of socialism. Socialism contains elements that are older, stronger, and more fundamental than his critique of society. Such elements existed without him and continued to develop without him, in fact contrary to him. They are not to be found on paper; they are in the blood. And only the blood can decide the future. But if socialism is not Marxism, then what is it? The answer will be found in these pages. Some people already have an idea of what it is, but they are so diligently involved with political “standpoints,” aims, and blueprints that no one has dared to be sure. When faced with decisions, we have abandoned our former position of firmness and adopted milder, less radical, outmoded attitudes, appealing for support to Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the like. We take steps against Marx, and yet at every step we invoke his name. Meanwhile the time for fashioning ideologies has passed. We latecomers of Western civilization have become skeptics. We refuse to be further misled by ideological systems. Ideologies are a thing of the previous century. We no longer want ideas and principles, we want ourselves.
Hence we now face the task of liberating German socialism from Marx. I say German socialism, for there is no other. This, too, is one of the truths that no longer lie hidden. Perhaps no one has mentioned it before, but we Germans are socialists. The others cannot possibly be socialists.
Oswald Spengler, Prussianism And Socialism (1920)
Following up my really really long post on why historians think the Nazis are right-wing, I owe a post on why the Nazis styled themselves ‘National Socialists’. Why ‘socialist’, given the obvious left-wing associations? What were they thinking? I don’t buy that it was just nonsensical, like the North Korean state calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic. It was an attempt to appropriate the word, to wrest a positive symbol out of the enemy’s grasp. It’s worth thinking about … but not too hard, of course. Most political party names are kind of nonsensical, or at least not accurately descriptive. They get picked early and, as Spengler wisely notes,
To the theoretical mind, the most important part of a revolution is its beginning, when forces are arrayed in clear and definite opposition to each other. The skeptical mind prefers, however, to study the final phase of a revolution, for it has much greater significance and is psychologically more instructive.
I don’t really think the Nazis were Spenglerians, by the by, but his Prussianism and Socialism (published the same year the German Workers Party became the National Socialists) certainly provides a classic, Weimar case study for re-framing ‘socialism’ in non-Marxist way. Spengler was part of the so-called Conservative Revolution in Weimar.
I don’t have time to write my full, promised post today [the promised post finally arrives here]. And, actually, my thoughts are somewhat tentative and inchoate. So I’m just going to select some Spengler for you, because it’s interesting. And you can use the comment box to express any thoughts you have about why the Nazis thought they were socialists; conservative revolutions; or Oswald Spengler’s philosophy.
Some bits from Decline of the West
Hard as the half developed Socialism of today is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form language of politics, as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity, touches on a deep metaphysical problem — on the fact, affirmed in the grant of unconditional validity to the causality principle, that the soul is the complement of its extension.
Who is Spengler’s ideal socialist? Cecil Rhodes comes pretty close.
He stands for the political style of a far ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of every Civilization that has fully ripened
How so?
Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Caesars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway between Napoleon and the force men of the next centuries, just as Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and Caesar. Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person — for his real power was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office — who exercised a dominant influence in the state at a time when the state idea was giving way to the pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the archetype of opposition Caesarism; with him there came to an end the idea of state service and there began the “will to power” which ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Caesar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding. But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial success, and only that. Of this Romanness within himself he was fully aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength and purity as this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo, royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all powerful yet stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road systems, his syndicates, his armies, his conception of the “great duty to civilization” of the man of brain — all this, broad and imposing, is the prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the history of West European mankind will be definitely closed.
One final bit. Non-Cecil Rhodes related:
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,” and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise.
In short:
It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and — using the word in a novel and deep sense — socialism. All world improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world improvers.
Make of all this what you will. I’ll try to craft some further thoughts of my own before too long.
{ 63 comments }
david 05.04.15 at 11:09 am
Socialism-as-rational-progress-triumphing-over-petty-corruption came ashore in America under the term ‘progressivism’, didn’t it, with a likewise indulgence in eugenics, prohibition, and yet expanded suffrage, anticorruption reforms, trust-busting and the rationally managed economy, didn’t it?
Stephen 05.04.15 at 11:13 am
I read as far as “we Germans are socialists. The others cannot possibly be socialists”, after which I found it impossible to take Spengler seriously.
david 05.04.15 at 11:19 am
(whoops, mangled an attempt to merge clauses)
Anyway – it wasn’t until much later when the US Progressives maneuvered the ethnic city machines and Dixiecrats out of the flotilla of New Deal agencies, which shows how unreliable extrapolations about political identity can be. But if Gregor Strasser had been more energetic, etc etc.
Pat 05.04.15 at 11:38 am
The last two quotes are exactly where I’d turned in my copy of Decline of the West. (I’ll brag that I completed the book, but I won’t go so far as to say I understood it.)
One thing it seems I remember of politics in Spengler’s era was that it really did seem that everyone was just a different kind of socialist. There were the socialist democrats, and democratic socialists, and the independent socialists, and on and on. The Centre and the communists didn’t use the word, but they easily could have and were pretty clearly close to the socialist parties (the Centre was often in the government coalition with the SPD). And given the prominent growth of socialism in the previous era, under Bismarck’s regime, it’s always seemed to me that Spengler’s “we are all of us socialists” seemed like a fair paraphrase of recent German events.
As much as I hate to agree even on a trivial point with the first quoted speaker, it is unfortunate that “socialism” as a tag has lost so much of its descriptive content. I used to quip that “socialism” was used by the Russians to mean Marxism-Leninism, by Europeans to mean public schools and minimum wages, and by American conservatives to mean that the second thing was the same as the first.
bob mcmanus 05.04.15 at 11:40 am
Frederick Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital 2014
The abstraction of the collective subject with a shared desire is what creates the social; that it is an abstraction is what creates hierarchy.
Placeholder 05.04.15 at 12:12 pm
I posted it in that last commentary but I think it’s actually more appropriate to this one. It puts what the National Socialists meant in context of both their right-wing rivals and their left-wing enemies, the owners of the term. Mein Kampf, VII:
“The fact that we had chosen red as the colour for our posters sufficed to attract them to our meetings. The ordinary bourgeoisie were very shocked to see that, we had also chosen the symbolic red of Bolshevism and they regarded this as something ambiguously significant. The suspicion was whispered in German Nationalist circles that we also were merely another variety of Marxism, perhaps even Marxists suitably disguised, or better still, Socialists. The actual difference between Socialism and Marxism still remains a mystery to these people up to this day. The charge of Marxism was conclusively proved when it was discovered that at our meetings we deliberately substituted the words ‘Fellow-countrymen and Women’ for ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ and addressed each other as ‘Party Comrade’. We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeoisie and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims.
We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation, our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings–if only in order to break them up–so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.â€
Montagu Norman 05.04.15 at 1:14 pm
Well, I am mostly concerned with the technicalities of financial arrangements. But it is clear to me that Hjalmar Schacht and Adolf Hitler are the bulwarks of civilization in Germany.
Anarcissie 05.04.15 at 1:31 pm
I think you all need a definition of socialism. In one period of my wayward youth I was taught that socialism meant ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers, or by the people generally’. Later, in reciting this definition, I often encountered derision and rebuke, and not only from conservatives. However, if you allow for a certain amount of abstraction of ‘ownership and control’ you can easily get to Naziism (through the mystical notions of the Volk and the Führerprinzip) or Bolshevism (through the mystical notion of the vanguard party of the working class). It turned out that my wayward instructors had sneakily imported liberal ideas like equality, freedom of expression and association, and democracy into my idea of the notion of socialism. An idea as rubbery as this should have many uses.
Montagu Norman 05.04.15 at 2:03 pm
Ron Chernow (1990): _The House of Morgan_: “Jack Morgan appealed to Monty Norman…
>…whom he believed to be the one person outside Germany with any influence over [Hjalmar Horace Greeley] Schacht. Norman wasn’t so upset by the German actions and was willing to make allowances for the Nazis. He continued to harbor more hostility toward France than toward Germany. In July 1934, he arrived in New York looking sickly and dispirited. He immediately telephoned Russell Leffingwell and took a cab down to 23 Wall. Leffingwell summarized their meeting for Lamont:
>>Monty says that Hitler and Schacht are the bulwarks of civilization in Germany and the only friends we have. They are fighting the war of our system of society against communism. If they fail, communism will follow in Germany, and anything may follow in Europe.
>This high regard for German culture had led Norman to back the 1924 Dawes loan in the first place. But the admiration now persisted under altered circumstances. As we shall see, most Morgan partners took a relatively benign view of German intentions, although there were skeptics from the start. The cynically acute Grenfell first penetrated Schacht’s disguises, already believing in 1934 that he was building up stocks of raw materials with which to prepare Germany for war…
>Source: RCL [Russell C. Leffingwell], Group 1030, Series I, Box 4, Folder 96, memorandum to Thomas W. Lamont, July 25, 1934.
stevenjohnson 05.04.15 at 2:03 pm
Given the prevalence of Classics in the educated classes for so many years, the original meaning of “allies” for the Latin word “socii” surely had an effect. I think the problem would be to show how it couldn’t have. Socialism is then a word that had connotations of a society based on unity rather than a bellum omnium contra omnes, or even the cash nexus.
It was I think another expression for the “fraternite” in the slogan “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” It certainly seems that most of the strenuous opposition to “socialism” of every sort rather tends to favor hierarchy.
There is a latent tension between such wooly good feeling for your brothers and any Fuehrerprinzip, I suppose. But it’s like the fatherhood of God implying the brotherhood of man, a fraternity of equals before God. Or the King, or der Fuehrer. So I think the latent tension can stay latent, save for those in a position to aspire to the throne.
Stephen 05.04.15 at 2:06 pm
Pat@4: I could accept the idea that in the 1920s “socialist” had in Germany become a hurrah-word that could be applied to pretty well any brand of politics. What threw me was Spengler’s statement that not only were all Germans socialists, but equally that no non-German could be a socialist. Fruitcake, obviously.
chris y 05.04.15 at 2:11 pm
Trying to agree a definition of socialism is a fruitless endeavour, I think. Even people who regard themselves as socialists embrace an enormously wide range of ideologies and objectives. Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto consists of a typology of soi-disant socialisms current at the time of writing, many if not most of which Marx and Engels regarded as profoundly reactionary. A similar exercise could have been undertaken at any time since.
Barry 05.04.15 at 2:28 pm
“…, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.”
A guy named Corey has discussed this in depth; perhaps he could be persuaded to discuss it here?
TM 05.04.15 at 2:33 pm
Haven’t you done enough damage already?
William Berry 05.04.15 at 2:40 pm
@Pat, last paragraph:
That understanding will still do for the great majority of (U.S.) Americans, at least.
William Berry 05.04.15 at 2:51 pm
@Stephen: “Fruitcake, obviously.”
I read Spengler decades (early ’70s) ago; I was deeply interested in the history of the “blood and soil” theme in European history at that time, led to it from my studies in English Lit, and particularly by my interest in the weird politics of one of the three or four greatest poets in English, W.B. Yeats.
I thought Spengler was a fruitcake back then; I’m pretty sure he has always been a fruitcake.
Anarcissie 05.04.15 at 3:00 pm
I think we have solved the problem of whether the Nazis were socialists. Human beings are social; the Nazis were borderline human; therefore, the Nazis were socialists. Are, there are still some around.
We have also decided that Spengler was a fruitcake.
This has been a very productive session.
William Berry 05.04.15 at 3:09 pm
“This has been a very productive session.”
About as productive as you’d expect from anyone in my part of the world; I have only just started my second cup of coffee.
We should all be in Sunday School.
William Berry 05.04.15 at 3:11 pm
Well, damn’. It is MONDAY, after all.
That’s retirement for you. I just hope it’s not a sign of senile dementia!
bob mcmanus 05.04.15 at 4:33 pm
Human beings are social
Bzzzzt. Assumes facts not in evidence; begs the question; etc. Like most “human nature” or “just pure instinct” it mistakes the descriptive for prescriptive and coercive. Are humans also warlike, competitive, heteronormative, hierarchical, patriarchal? The “social” is an artifact, a means to achieve individual ends and satisfy individual desires. See #5 above. “You want to belong? Of course you do. So we are all here agreed, do thusly to belong.”
This is not mere hairsplitting from a guy who wants to chant sutras in a cave. Understanding the different meanings of “social” is the key to understanding politics and ideologies. Anthropology and sociology precede politics and sociology. They also do not assume that “people want to be together, for warm fuzzies” For one thing, ascribes too much agency.
Marxism, as I understand it, does not assume the social. It’s basis is a) the desire to survive, as in food and shelter; and b) the desire to work, to manipulate the environment. All bad societies use those desires to coerce and exploit; socialism wants to fulfil those desires without coercion or exploitation. Socialism, well, mine own version, wants to negate the social as compulsive.
Stephen 05.04.15 at 5:26 pm
William Berry@14: “the weird politics of one of the three or four greatest poets in English, W.B. Yeats”.
Greatest in 20th century, easily granted.
Weird? Not always: try this:
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
Protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood —
And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
Anarcissie 05.04.15 at 5:28 pm
bob mcmanus 05.04.15 at 4:33 pm @ 18 —
If I must be serious: I believe the social aspect of humans is genetic, so, pretty compulsive. That this profound need can be destructively exploited is no surprise.
Marx was quite an optimist!
Aidan 05.04.15 at 5:44 pm
It’s weird how people seem to forget the first line of Niemoller’s poem.
William Berry 05.04.15 at 8:16 pm
Stephen @19:
Yes, that poem is powerfully evocative of the sense of loss mixed with anger and indignation. Also, Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents”.
A sensitive intelligence could not but be depressed and aghast at what industrial modernity had wrought.
Fairly obviously, the imagined past is mostly metaphorical, though. Think of Masefield’s “Cargoes”, with its “quinquireme of Nineveh”, with its cargo of monkeys, sandalwood, wine, etc. No literary pastoralist ever imagined himself a shepherd.
I am reminded also of the Tolkien stuff recently on CT. Industrial modernity vs. a dying culture of pastoral aristocracy (or, in the formulation of an SF essayist–Shippey?– the pastoral ethic vs. the fabrile).
A longing for a present and a future that will never be, modeled on a past that never was.
William Berry 05.04.15 at 8:25 pm
Incidentally, Professor William H. McNeil’s (U of C, back in the day) masterpieceThe Rise of The West references Spengler, not just in its title, but in its themes. McNeil’s concept of the development of civilizations by means of “cultural diffusion”, through migrations, conquests, trade, etc., is counter to the Spenglerian (and Toynbeean, to a degree) notion of a civilization’s developing according to its own internal logic or dynamic.
Phil 05.04.15 at 10:06 pm
I asked my father once why we said Creeds at churchm and why they took the form they did. He said the way to understand a Creed was as a series of statements each of which settled an argument or ruled out certain alternatives – “we believe in X as opposed to Y and Z“. In a similar spirit, the point of “Nationalsozialismus” (a coinage which wasn’t unique to the NSDAP) is to say that this socialism – unlike the others – is national rather than international.
If that’s why it was national, why was it socialism? I think it was just a question of mobilisation, and of how you organise if you’ve got nowhere to start from. The early leaders of the party saw the NSDAP as organising from the ground up, mobilising the discontented German worker to overthrow an unaccountable and unjust political system, and das heißt Sozialismus.
Magpie 05.05.15 at 9:21 am
This passage gets as close to an explanation of the “Socialist”, in the “National Socialist” label as I could find. The good thing about it is that it comes straight from the horse’s mouth:
“The fact that we had chosen red as the colour for our posters sufficed to attract them [i.e. socialists and communists] to our meetings. The ordinary bourgeoisie were very shocked to see that, we had also chosen the symbolic red of Bolshevism and they regarded this as something ambiguously significant. The suspicion was whispered in German Nationalist circles that we also were merely another variety of Marxism, perhaps even Marxists suitably disguised, or better still, Socialists. The actual difference between Socialism and Marxism still remains a mystery to these people up to this day. The charge of Marxism was conclusively proved when it was discovered that at our meetings we deliberately substituted the words ‘Fellow-countrymen and Women’ for ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ and addressed each other as ‘Party Comrade’. We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeoisie and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims.
“We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation, our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings–if oniy in order to break them up–so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.” (p. 395)
https://archive.org/stream/MeinKampfByAdolfHitler/Mein%20Kampf%20By%20Adolf%20Hitler%20%20#page/n0/mode/2up
——-
The book was originally written in German. Its English translator, a James Murphy, comments on some important German terms he left untranslated. Weltanschauung is one of them. Roughly, it means “outlook-on-the-world” and Murphy gives various examples of different Weltanschauungen:
“Thus Christianity could be called a WELTANSCHAUUNG, and Mohammedanism could be called a WELTANSCHAUUNG, and Socialism could be called a WELTANSCHAUUNG, especially as preached in Russia. National Socialism claims definitely to be a WELTANSCHAUUNG.”
——-
The book’s author did express his opposition to FINANCIAL capital (not necessarily capital in general). Apparently, he believed financial capital was dominated by Jews (just like the press), conspiring to take over the world (a conspiracy theory that was much older: I believe its first appearance was in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
He also made a point of referring to Marx as “the Jew, Karl Marx”; that wasn’t meant to express his admiration for Marx. For him, somehow, Judaism and Marxism were linked (on this, he wasn’t original, either: with some nuances, Churchill — of all people — expressed similar views). That wasn’t a good thing, either.
——-
I found the last sentence of the first and longer paragraph particularly ironic:
“We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeoisie and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims.”
Things haven’t changed much, it seems.
Magpie 05.05.15 at 9:34 am
Incidentally, now that I mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Wikipedia, that most reliable compendium of universal wisdom, reports that:
“English language imprints
“On October 27 and 28, 1919, the Philadelphia Public Ledger published excerpts of an English language translation as the ‘Red Bible,’ deleting all references to the purported Jewish authorship and re-casting the document as a Bolshevik manifesto. The author of the articles was the paper’s correspondent at the time, Carl W. Ackerman, who later became the head of the journalism department at Columbia University.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#The_Protocols_in_the_West
SamChevre 05.05.15 at 10:51 am
I’d put it simply: the Nazis were nationalist socialists, and you can see it by their opposition:
The communists on one side (also socialist, but internationalist rather than nationalist)
The Junker and the church (especially the Catholics–see Mit brennender Sorge) on the other–the representatives of the old national power structure.
The reason they don’t look like socialists at first is the incident of them losing: that let socialism be defined by the internationalists, and so most people assume socialism must be cosmopolitan, rather than nationalist. There is nothing in “society should be run for the benefit of the workers, not the owners of capital” that requires internationalism.
SamChevre 05.05.15 at 10:54 am
(Finishing–that posted early)
I think Corey Robin’s definition of “conservative” is helpful here: a conservative wants many small hierarchies. Sam’s lemma-the other side is the socialist: a socialist wants one all-encompassing hierarchy.
AcademicLurker 05.05.15 at 4:06 pm
“society should be run for the benefit of the workers, not the owners of capitalâ€
Does that really correspond to the way the Nazis actually ran things? I’m not an expert on the subject, but everything I’ve read indicates that the wealthy industrialists did very well under the Nazis. Hence the fact that so many of them were party members.
TM 05.05.15 at 5:09 pm
“Does that really correspond to the way the Nazis actually ran things?”
It would be hard to answer that question without employing excessive amounts of sarcasm.
AcademicLurker 05.05.15 at 5:26 pm
32: I was hoping that snark was inherent in the question.
Norwegian Guy 05.05.15 at 6:53 pm
“society should be run for the benefit of the workers, not the owners of capitalâ€
This doesn’t require socialism either. I can even imagine some centrist and right-wing politicians agreeing. And if not, they certainly wouldn’t agree with the opposite, that society should run for the benefit of the owners of capital.
But fascists rejected this kind of thinking. They wanted to overcome class antagonism, uniting all classes of the nation instead. Corporatism, they called it.
Regarding fascist economic policy, in some ways it was the opposite of market socialism. They favoured private ownership and a planned economy. Much of it policies that were implemented everywhere in the interwar period, regardless of the party in power.
Anyway, a deviation from purely laissez-faire policies doesn’t make fascists left-wing, more like centre-right or something. Perhaps One Nation Tories, Christian Democrats, even centrist liberals, but not left-wing.
Magpie 05.06.15 at 12:43 am
Sorry, but those who understand the term “German†as a nationality are missing the point.
“German†in this context is closer to the so-called “Aryan race†and to understand that one needs go no further than the fact that there were Nazi parties all over the world: in the U.S. (there was one until recently), in Brazil and Argentina (believe it or not), in the Sudetenland, in Austria, South Tyrol (Italy). All these populations were seen as part of the German Volk.
The nationalism refers to the German Volk. That’s the ideological justification for the Anschluss: Austrians, too, were Germans (at least those without other ethnic background). Hitler wasn’t born in Germany.
In Hitler’s mind, Germans were the inhabitants of Danzig or the Sudetenland, Alsace-Lorraine, the Volga Germans in the U.R.S.S.
One could say that, in a way, the German Volk was the anti-thesis of the so-called “Jewryâ€, which in Hitler’s imagination was a homogeneous, transnational body of Jews who acted in concert, with their own “national†identity. And, according to him, this “Jewry†created Marxism as one of their tools for world domination. He wanted to destroy Marxism as much as he wanted to destroy the Jews: for him, there was no difference.
Geez, guys, the man said so himself. You don’t need to second-guess him.
js. 05.06.15 at 4:48 am
By the way, this is why Nazis, fascists, etc. are properly described as right-wing. Was this a thing you were doing where you give us the easy, obvious answer a post later?
Stephen 05.06.15 at 8:58 am
Desiring a hierarchical society and dreading, indeed acting murderously against, a world of free and equal human beings would seem to be a reasonable description of Stalin and Mao.
Doesn’t make them fascists, though.
Alex 05.06.15 at 10:55 am
Cecil Rhodes as ideal socialist. ok, that’s today’s utterly weird idea.
SamChevre 05.06.15 at 11:16 am
“society should be run for the benefit of the workers, not the owners of capitalâ€
Does that really correspond to the way the Nazis actually ran things? I’m not an expert on the subject, but everything I’ve read indicates that the wealthy industrialists did very well under the Nazis.
Some wealthy industrialists did well; the industrialists who did well tended to be party members. But I’m pretty certain that the average GERMAN worker was much better off, relative to all three of non-Germans, industrialists and the old German Junker elite, in 1939 than in 1932 or 1913.
Asteele 05.06.15 at 12:30 pm
Are you talking about when Stalin and Mao both fought facists in ww2?
Ogden Wernstrom 05.06.15 at 1:55 pm
Thank you, William Berry, for leading me to investigate whether there are new time zones beyond UTC -12. (No, I find that the time zones still span only 26 hours.)
AcademicLurker 05.06.15 at 1:58 pm
I’m pretty certain that the average GERMAN worker was much better off
I think that workers doing well while capitalists (owners of the means of production) get super rich is an example what we generally call…capitalism. The idea that capitalism requires immiserating workers as much as possible or else it’s not real capitalism is just one view.
In fact people used to argue in favor of capitalism precisely because of the claim that it would provide better outcomes for everyone. The notion that the real object of capitalism is to punish the poors because that’s what the baby Jesus wants is mostly a product of the modern American right.
SamChevre 05.06.15 at 3:21 pm
I’m not talking about “everyone gets better off over time”–which is a key defense of capitalism.
I’m talking about “workers get better off relative to factory owners, bankers, and large landowners” as a plausible argument for “run for the benefit of workers rather than owners.”
Marshall 05.06.15 at 3:58 pm
The idea that capitalism requires immiserating workers as much as possible or else it’s not real capitalism is just one view.
Just reading Polanyi here; capitalism wants a free market, including a market in labor. The process of workers bidding against each other for subsistence is de natura immiserating. In Polanyi’s time inter-class tension, if not actual warfare, provided a countervailing force of unionism, but through persistence and manipulation of regulation the capitalists have largely broken that down, so the explicit immiseration of the proletariat resumes.
But the Reich was by no means about a free market, so perhaps it was no more capitalist than it was socialist.
The Other DSCH 05.06.15 at 6:44 pm
Um, depends which workers you’re talking about, SamChevre. “Conscripted” labor in Germany began in 1935.
SamChevre 05.06.15 at 8:42 pm
I capitalized GERMAN for a reason.
The Other DSCH 05.06.15 at 8:48 pm
Indeed, laborers conscripted by the Reichsarbeitsdienst were all GERMAN.
Christ, Uhren, und Schmuck 05.06.15 at 9:10 pm
Perhaps as an ideology Nazism is exactly the same as socialism (socialist humanism), assuming that only the Germans are human beings. Private property and industrialists were allowed because it was their NEP phase.
Christ, Uhren, und Schmuck 05.06.15 at 9:21 pm
…same idea as “all men are created equal” in the declaration of independence. In what sense were Thomas Jefferson et al liberals?
engels 05.06.15 at 9:30 pm
the other side is the socialist: a socialist wants one all-encompassing hierarchy
No, what socialists want is put all the cutest kittens in the world in a big casserole and eat them for dinner.
bob mcmanus 05.06.15 at 9:35 pm
49: Since I am the inarticulate book guy, recommending Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism:A Counter History 2014 which I would have mentioned on Quiggin’s frontier thread because the Losurdo is all about (so far) Locke Calhoun founding fathers Grotius etc but Losurdo focuses on the contradiction (or not) between 18th century liberalism and slavery.
Peter T 05.07.15 at 12:40 am
Minor point: from what I have read, German workers were better off in 1934 than in 1931, but thereafter progressively worse off in money terms, as the German economy started gearing for war (they did get more celebrations and a sense of satisfaction from all the shiny tanks and planes). Labour discipline was tightened, consumption restricted to fund investment in armaments production, foreign currency strictly rationed and so on.
More broadly, while the left-right distinction now is mostly seen through an economic lens, then it was oriented more towards social and national questions.
js. 05.07.15 at 1:15 am
And puppies for dessert!
LFC 05.07.15 at 1:26 am
mcmanus @51
Since I am the inarticulate book guy, recommending Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism:A Counter History 2014 which I would have mentioned on Quiggin’s frontier thread because the Losurdo is all about (so far) Locke Calhoun founding fathers Grotius etc but Losurdo focuses on the contradiction (or not) between 18th century liberalism and slavery.
The Grotius/colonialism link was already done by Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society.
As for the recommendation of Losurdo, it’s not that helpful in the absence of more about the book. The publisher is Verso, and the author is a Continental philosopher, so it’s going to be ‘deep’; that’s about all I can tell at the moment.
I also don’t entirely agree w some of mcmanus @20, but that wd get us off-topic. We can’t have that, now, can we?
LFC 05.07.15 at 1:30 am
js. @53
And puppies for dessert!
Yes, and diced-up baby prairie-dogs sprinkled with cinnamon for breakfast.
Christ, Uhren, und Schmuck 05.07.15 at 6:07 am
@51 “focuses on the contradiction (or not) between 18th century liberalism and slavery”
Slavery. What about exterminating a continent-full of people? The ‘savages’.
Christ, Uhren, und Schmuck 05.07.15 at 6:16 am
Lebensraum and manifest destiny.
bob mcmanus 05.07.15 at 11:40 am
54: I am about halfway thru the Losurdo, and am not yet quite getting his point. It is not so very “continental” or deep, but mostly true history, a collection of facts and quotes with little analysis or commentary. Tocqueville on San Domingo. Acton on the American South. Losurdo appears well-read in the subject, and LFC’s cite is far from the only book. Capitalism and Slavery, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, there are many. Many here would like the Losurdo, he does focus on the importance (or even invention) of racism to justify slavery in the Age of Liberalism.
But he isn’t giving me what I want. It is too easy to say liberalism is just ok fine, and Jefferson, Madison, and Toqueville were simple hypocrites in its application. And that slavery, patriarchy and hierarchy are just a matter of the insufficient extension of perfect liberal principles. My goal, as a Marxist, is to show or understand hierarchy and discrimination as intrinsic and essential to liberalism (Crooked Timber’s brand, not just Burke’s) even in its perfected form. As opposed to communism and democracy.
Conservatives are hierarchical just cause they’re meanies does not work for me.
Geoffrey de ste Croix wanted to show the in the ancient world hierarchy was nearly 100% based on ownership: of land, of slaves (then serfs, which were connected to land, very little manufactures), and clients in patron-client relations, social and political dependents. This connection of hierarchy with property extended through the age of revolutions (Calhoun) and has a lot to do with the justification of slavery: slaves were property.
Then I just read Stephen Fraser’s book on the Gilded Age and his consistent discussion of the abhorrence of “wage slavery”. In both the ancient world and up to and including the industrial revolution working for wages (or working for others), since status was based on rent-earning property, was considered very little better than slavery. To an extent, say at pre-strike Homestead, the worker owned skills and tools and contracted to the capitalist.
Etc. Too long. But the idea is that hierarchy is based on ownership (not particularly on race, gender, etc), and concepts of rent-earning property are dynamic and sunject to change, and that all liberals, be they on the right or left from my perspective, retain that concept of hierarchy based on ownership. Fr the left, do we “have” a right to vote, “own” our bodies? Incidentally, Nietzsche might mark the change to hierarchy based on ownership of creativity and its products.
"The socialists of all parties" 05.07.15 at 1:58 pm
Shouldn’t any discussion of whether or not the Nazi’s were socialists reduce (more or less) to the economic polices they enacted? If that’s case, it would seem there’s good reason to think the Nazi’s were at least moderately socialist (despite any lip service to the contrary), since there was a great deal of government management in economy. Maybe I’m not seeing things the same way as everyone else?
LFC 05.07.15 at 3:16 pm
@58 Thank you for saying something more about the Losurdo.
Jim Henley 05.08.15 at 1:24 am
There are a couple of pieces that together solve this puzzle for me. One is Irving Howe’s quip that fascism was “a Marxist heresy.” The other is a quote of Hitler’s that I read in Alan Bullock’s book on Hitler and Stalin. Hitler avowed to a colleague when challenged that “Yes, I am a socialist, but the only real revolutions are racial ones, not class ones.” That’s not exact but a pretty close paraphrase.
So basically, Nazism was “socialism” with the German race rather than the working class overthrowing its oppressors (Jews/the old international order instead of Capitalists) and taking its rightfully dominant position. If you want to extend the principle behind Howe’s quip, Italian fascism was the Italian nation overthrowing its oppressors – the older imperial powers – and taking its rightfully sort of dominant position to the extent it could get away with it. You can also see the idea of national/racial revolution against the PTB in the militarist period of Showa Japan.
Applying the Howe Quip also allows us to see Franco’s Spain and Latin American authoritarianism as not fascist. They’re just plain old right-wing tyrannies.
hix 05.08.15 at 8:49 pm
Todays print Handelsblatt has a longer article about economic planning for the post war period during the last two war years. The planning included some input by Nazi big shots. Himmler or Goebbels dont remember exactly was explicity opposed to keeping the war central planning system run by Speer, calling it “Bolshewistic”.
[Anyway, a very American debate.]
marcel proust 05.09.15 at 10:19 pm
js wrote:
What, no ponies?
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