- 27 Mar 2009 13:17
#1849724
Please do, because otherwise I can't add much besides rejecting "Marxist" straw-men.
Well "some benefitted but not all" can be said of any economy. It's almost like, "sometimes it rains, sometimes it's sunny". It's too general to contain anything to argue about, at least when no one has disputed such truisms.
They had no other tool. Every regime must work with the mode of production their state stands on.
It's Hegelians, not Marxists, who anthropomorphise socio-economic systems. "Tool" implicates not just objective function but conscious purpose. So of course nothing can be a "tool" of capitalism in that sense, but despite lack of purpose things and people tend to be "pawns" of the material source of their subsistence. Pragmatism is the mainstream of imperialist ideology, and the nazi government was no exception.
Nazis of course had aims motivated by nationalism and racism, some even vague "anti-capitalism", but they were no more "omnipotent" than any other regime. By the "dictate" of economic necessities, they like any bourgeois regime had to expand capitalism and had to serve the monopoly capital in order to accomplish or at least appear to accomplish their program of "national socialism" with all its irrationalisms and occultisms. The success or suppression of individual capitalists is not important when the big picture was that the German monopoly capital as a whole greatly profited at the expense of the petty-bourgeoisie, the workers and the neighbouring peoples. Even greater service for capitalism than the aversion of the revolution in Germany, than the forced corporatism and institutionalisation of violent anti-communism, were provided in the international field - starting from the slaughtering of the Spanish Republic and culminating in the war against the Soviet Union. The latter alone would overshadow even the wildest libertarian assertions of nazi anti-capitalism, as the USSR was the first land of socialism, the fatherland of the world proletarian revolution. In retrospect, although USSR managed to kill Hitler's Europe with other Allied powers, the fascist invasion can even be argued to have dealt a mortal blow to Marxism-Leninism in the USSR, consequently splitting and crippling the world communist movement and so on (although I'd rather not make a case for that thesis here).
Now what did I say in my previous post, again?
Note the quotation marks on the "pawn", implicating "servitude" in the objective economic sense instead of some naive caricature of individual-scale boot-licking.
All I'm doing is to counter the "totalitarian" myth of the Nazi system as some sort of "command economy", and especially the West German myth of the Nazis "turning against" the capitalist class once helped to power. This is far from presenting the Nazi government as some "super-capitalist" regime, which would be just an inverted version of the equally idealistic libertarian myth.
Reconsider.
albionfagan wrote:I haven't the book to hand, but in R.Evans' The Third Reich in Power, there's a brilliant chapter on the economy. Dealing intricately with the Nazis attacks on Corporations, and especially the department stores, I'll try and dig it up tomorrow
Please do, because otherwise I can't add much besides rejecting "Marxist" straw-men.
I like how you dismiss many of my points as being too general, without understanding them.
Well "some benefitted but not all" can be said of any economy. It's almost like, "sometimes it rains, sometimes it's sunny". It's too general to contain anything to argue about, at least when no one has disputed such truisms.
Capitalism was the tool of the Nazis
They had no other tool. Every regime must work with the mode of production their state stands on.
not the other way round
It's Hegelians, not Marxists, who anthropomorphise socio-economic systems. "Tool" implicates not just objective function but conscious purpose. So of course nothing can be a "tool" of capitalism in that sense, but despite lack of purpose things and people tend to be "pawns" of the material source of their subsistence. Pragmatism is the mainstream of imperialist ideology, and the nazi government was no exception.
Nazis of course had aims motivated by nationalism and racism, some even vague "anti-capitalism", but they were no more "omnipotent" than any other regime. By the "dictate" of economic necessities, they like any bourgeois regime had to expand capitalism and had to serve the monopoly capital in order to accomplish or at least appear to accomplish their program of "national socialism" with all its irrationalisms and occultisms. The success or suppression of individual capitalists is not important when the big picture was that the German monopoly capital as a whole greatly profited at the expense of the petty-bourgeoisie, the workers and the neighbouring peoples. Even greater service for capitalism than the aversion of the revolution in Germany, than the forced corporatism and institutionalisation of violent anti-communism, were provided in the international field - starting from the slaughtering of the Spanish Republic and culminating in the war against the Soviet Union. The latter alone would overshadow even the wildest libertarian assertions of nazi anti-capitalism, as the USSR was the first land of socialism, the fatherland of the world proletarian revolution. In retrospect, although USSR managed to kill Hitler's Europe with other Allied powers, the fascist invasion can even be argued to have dealt a mortal blow to Marxism-Leninism in the USSR, consequently splitting and crippling the world communist movement and so on (although I'd rather not make a case for that thesis here).
they were not 'pawns', that infers that Capitalism and Capitalists dictated the Nazis aims and actions, which is frankly ridiculous and I would have thought even an indoctrinated robot such as yourself could admit it.
Now what did I say in my previous post, again?
jaakko wrote:Hitler was a dictator of a bourgeois state, and the nazi regime had to be a "pawn" of capital like any regime intending to rule on the basis of a capitalist mode of production.
Note the quotation marks on the "pawn", implicating "servitude" in the objective economic sense instead of some naive caricature of individual-scale boot-licking.
All I'm doing is to counter the "totalitarian" myth of the Nazi system as some sort of "command economy", and especially the West German myth of the Nazis "turning against" the capitalist class once helped to power. This is far from presenting the Nazi government as some "super-capitalist" regime, which would be just an inverted version of the equally idealistic libertarian myth.
albionfagan wrote:Obviously not.
Reconsider.
"It's like if the Terminator listened to Imagine too many times."
-'Frank_Carbonni' on communism
-'Frank_Carbonni' on communism
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