The government of the soviet union was not controlled by the workers it was controlled by the party. Just like the government of Germany was controlled by the party. Nominally they both ruled on behalf of the workers, in reality they ruled on behalf of themselves. If you say the German government was not socialist then neither was the Soviet Unions despite what they said.
There is a grain of truth in this. The National Socialist were neither a left wing or right wing party. They were a syncretic party. From wikipedia “Hitler and other proponents as well as scholars of Nazism projected and perceived it as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but politically syncretic.” From the left they took socialism from the right they took nationalism. So if your a socialist then they were a right wing party because they were nationalists and if your a nationalist then they were on the left because they were socialists. I have never claimed they were a left wing party because that would be as wrong as claiming they were a right wing party. However denying that they were socialists is as wrong as denying they were nationalists.
If you can claim that a party that called itself socialist, proclaimed its enmity versus all thing bourgeous and capitalist, and when it took power had the government take over the economy is right wing by any fact based definition you either don’t know what right wing means or what fact based means.
You’re right. Gregor Strasser was killed in 1934. His brother Otto escaped and fled Germany. But neither had much of a say in the policies of the Nazi Party after Hitler took over and pushed them aside.
German capitalists funded and supported the Nazis because the Nazis were anti-communists. Are you seriously claiming that Walther Funk, for example, was a socialist? You can keep calling blue “red” all you like, but everyone else is going to keep on calling it blue.
You are calling complete gov’t control of the economy “socialism” but what it is is totalitarianism. Which comes in both left-wing and right-wing (Nazi Germany, Peron’s Argentina, Pinochet’s Chile, etc etc) varieties. Right wing totalitarianism is not “socialism” no matter how much you want it to be. And socialism is not totalitarianism. They’re different things.
The National Socialists were supported by dues paid by part members until they gained power and were in a position to take bribes. I don’t know as much about the ideology of Walther Funk as you do but even if he was not a socialist Hitler, Rohm, and Goebells all were socialists. Totalitarianism is more than government control of the economy, it is government control of all aspects of life. Socialism has to do with economic policies and is defined by wikipedia as “Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership, control of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy, and a political philosophy advocating such a system.” In Nazi germany the state controlled the means of production and there was a cooperative management of the economy.
I don’t think that’s too different from the Nazis actually-as pointed out on many occassions, on paper the Nazis did use demagogic, socialistic tactics. The main differences were that the Nazi ruling class were far more dependent on the Old Guard then the Communists.
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That’s true, most Nazis and fascists don’t consider themselves socialists at any rate, they consider themselves Third Positionists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position
And once again, no, that isn’t true. The Nazis didn’t nationalize most businesses. The original owners kept their businesses and continued make money by selling their products to the government and other customers.
The Nazis didn’t control the means of production. People like Friedrich Flick, Carl_Krauch, Gustav Krupp, Hermann Schmitz, and Fritz Thyssen controlled the means of production. If you think these guys were socialists, then you don’t know what socialism is.
The government in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy did control the means of production, just not directly. Industry was supposed to serve the state, not a customer base or investors.
Also, Nazi Germany was socialist enough in that they expanded the welfare state. While I agree that socialism is properly defined as government ownership of the means of production, many people have called the welfare state socialist, both on the right and the left for different reasons, so a case can be made that the socialism of Germany was genuine, if not quite as socialist as what the Communists were going for.
Like I said, you can invent a definition of socialism so broad that it will cover anything. Did German corporations sell products to the German government? Of course they did. American corporations sell products to the American government as well but that doesn’t make the United States a socialist country (except to the kind of people who claim Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama are socialists).
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Hitler himself said, “We stand for the maintenance of private property. We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient or rather the sole possible economic order.” cite
True. I always get a laugh out of right-wingers who call everything collective socialist, and left-wingers who defend socialism by claiming that Sweden is socialist.
However, I do have to question whether leaving industry in private hands, but making it accountable only to the state is really all that different from government controlling the means of production directly. Is there any chance that any of the German industrialists could have crossed Hitler? Is there any doubt he’d just appoint whoever he wanted in their place?
I agree that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state. A business executive who openly resisted the Nazi regime would have almost certainly been removed just as any other person would have been.
But military officers who defied the Nazi regime were removed and/or killed. Would you say that’s evidence that Nazi Germany was a non-militarist system?
The fact is that most German industrialists continued their pre-Nazi routines without change. They ran their companies, they build and sold their products, and collected their profits as they had been before the Nazis took power. It’s a strange form of socialism if it’s identical to non-socialism. And these businessmen expected this - it’s not like they were hostages doing what they were told in fear for their life. Most of them had supported Hitler’s rise to power because they saw him as a pro-business politician. And they continued to support him throughout the Nazi reign so it’s not like they felt they had been lied to.
In fact, about the only class of people he didn’t persecute to a degree were the industrialists, even though by the start of the war at the latest it was well within his power to do so. That he chose to leave them alone even when he had absolute power is a testament to his lack of socialism, or more precisely, his oppotunism* and lack of any idealism on the economic axis (HAH!). Socalist ideas, capitalist ideas, all were okay as long as they were in service to his racial and nationalistic theories.
Heck, I’m not even socialist and if I were him, I would have controlled the economy more than he did because it was wartime and I had the power to. Who would have stopped me?
*And of course the oppotunism of the apolitical industrialists.
My reading is that to the Nazis, economic issues took a back seat to nationalism issues, which included racism and militarism. Any “socialism” that can be unearthed is going to be far far far too far removed from anything that can be associated with the present-day Left.
OTOH, there are plenty of examples across a wide spectrum of issues where the present-day (or recently departed) Right parallels the Nazis. Don’t make me list them.
Of course there are moderation vs extremism issues here, which also apply when you parallel the Left with communism. Liberalism is fundamentally moderate, so while it’s the opposite of fascism, it’s still strongly at odds with communism.
So if Naziism and communism do intersect at some point, it’s at a point diametrically opposed to where liberals are. Not a lot of goose-stepping during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
There are also areas where the American left intersects with fascism, such as believing that business should serve state interests. There’s also this weird line of thinking among the American left that corporations should be patriotic. This is going to sound flip, but when you combine nationalism with socialism, what do you get?
Whatever “wing” they were/are the Nazis were blatantly and undeniably conservatives. Conservatism tends to be placed in the “right wing” out of either convenience or laziness or whatever.
As far as I know nobody seriously believes that the Nazis’ problem was that they were too liberal. At least nobody who doesn’t deserve to be pointed and laughed at.
True, but the same can be said for the Communists. The only difference between fascism and communism that I can see is that one is nationalist while the other is internationalist. And wasn’t it just so easy to put aside their differences when they wanted to divide up Eastern Europe? I dare say Communists were never that cozy with socialists or social democrats.
It should also be noted that the Nazis lied to the right as well. They initially started out supporting the return of the monarchy, and no sooner did they take power, they finked. lot of conservative Germans were deceived into supporting them because they wanted the Kaiser back.
What do you mean by control? They were told what to make, how much to make, how much they could charge and how much they could pay workers. If you think that is capitalism you don’t know what capitalist means.
In what sense were they conservatives? They had no desire to maintain the status quo. They sought the total transformation of German society.
They were not conservatives in the modern American sense because American conservatism is about individualism which is the exact opposite of what Naziism was about.
Except that isn’t what happened.
I don’t why I keep bothering trying to argue with you using facts. I should just make things up like you’re doing.
So the Nazis weren’t socialists. They were registered Republicans. Hitler, Himmler, Goering - they all voted for Thomas Dewey. That’s why Roosevelt declared war on them.
If that was the case then the Nazis would not had returned the banks to their former owners (nationalized by the former Weimar Republic) and people like Krupp would be a memory, of course what happen was that they got even slave labor to get by during that “transformation”
That only works by ignoring what the Nazis actually did, once again the truth is not as absolute as many American conservatives think.