Why Hitler was no socialist, but the rich want you to think so
Voltaire famously remarked that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. He was correct. Just because states, parties or individuals call themselves something, it doesn’t make it real. Yet, there still are people who believe that, because the Nazis called themselves National Socialists, then they must have been socialists. They were not.
The most recent iteration of this old and widely debunked myth came from no-one else than Alice Weidel, co-leader of Germany’s far-right party AfD. In an interview with Elon Musk last week, she claimed that Hitler “was this communist, socialist guy”. This comes from the leader of a party whose members have repeatedly displayed neo-Nazi sympathies, but never mind. Gaslighting has become a prevalent method of our political age. That goes hand in hand with twisting the meaning of words to suit your political purposes.
Actual historical evidence leaves no room for doubt as to the character of the Nazi regime: it was one of the most aggressively pro-big business regimes in the history of capitalism.
Sure, when they were in opposition, the Nazis adopted the term ‘socialist’ and some shallow anti-capitalist rhetoric because they wanted to channel the mass dissatisfaction with the capitalist status quo. Socialist parties were hugely popular in Germany at the time, gaining on aggregate at least a third of the vote throughout the ‘20s and early ‘30s. They were deeply embedded among the popular masses that the Nazis knew they had to appeal to if they wanted to win power. Hence, the Nazis engaged in the same type of populist demagogy that we see today with far-right parties like the AfD claiming to be against ‘the elite’, despite the very elite backgrounds of their leaders and donors.
But that demagogic rhetoric was just that – rhetoric. Despite the propensity of political scientists and pundits today to take political discourse at face value, we need to go beyond it and look at what political actors actually do when they get into power. On the eve of the 1933 elections that brought the Nazis into power, they were facing financial bankruptcy, prompting Goering to summon the country’s top industrialists and ask for money. At the meeting held in February 1933, Hitler promised that his government would eliminate all trade unions and workers’ parties, as “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy”. He was partially correct: Germany’s class contradictions at the time – not only between labour and capital but also between rival fractions of the capital – could only be solved in favour of finance-industrial capital through a brutal dictatorship. Hitler must have been persuasive enough to make big cartels like Krupp and I.G. Farben to donate millions to save the party from bankruptcy.
After seizing power, the Nazis rewarded that generosity tenfold, kickstarting a decade-long economic policy in favour of the big monopolies. By the end of 1933 already, they passed a law whereby all companies had to join a cartel, followed four years later by a decree that dissolved all businesses with a capital below $40,000. Thus, although the core of their electorate was among the small business owners threatened with proletarisation by the big crisis of 1929, once in power, the Nazis only reinforced the subjugation of the petty bourgeoisie to big business.
As promised, they also banned all independent trade unions and workers’ parties, murdering tens of thousands of militant workers along the way.
They had already attacked the organised working class before seizing power, but now the Nazis were able to do so systematically. They set up instead a state-controlled trade union that professed the false unity between workers and capitalists. But it’s never the workers who benefit from that false unity. In the first five years of Nazi rule, they ended up working longer hours, while their real wages decreased by about 25%. Over the same period, by contrast, the rate of return on capital in industry grew exponentially, at a higher rate than any other developed capitalist country at the time. That was private capital rather than state-owned. Hence, the gains in profitability saw the rich getting richer, with the top 1% increasing their share of the national wealth by more than 50%.
But the Nazis went further and privatised several state-owned enterprises, from banks to steel to the airplane industry. Thus, not only did Hitler’s government defend and reinforce the power of big capital but extended it. Foreign-owned companies were also left in peace. It may come as a shock to some, but even after the US joined the war, US corporations like Ford, General Motors or ITT continued their economic operations on German soil. That included ITT’s subsidiary owning shares in the German aircraft-manufacturer, Focke-Wulf – the same company that was producing some of the military planes bombing Allied troops. Incredibly, years after the war, both ITT and General Motors received from the US government millions of dollars as compensation for the destruction of their plants by Allied bombing. You can’t make this up. Big business has no higher allegiance than profit.
Sure, the Nazi version of capitalism may not fit the laissez-faire model of capitalism that many people on the right idealise. But really existing capitalism doesn’t care about their feelings.
In reality, there are many versions of capitalism, from all sorts of libertarian utopias to Keynesian social democracy to the variegated state capitalism that characterised all fascist regimes. What they all share, though, as the key defining feature of the capitalist system, is the pursuit of profit as the overarching goal of economic activity and the – at least partial – private control over that profit. Nazi Germany made no exception.
Yes, the Nazi state was more interventionist than other capitalist states but that didn’t make it socialist. Socialism is not when government does stuff.
Nazi interventionism was on behalf of private property and profit maximisation. The war effort itself was primarily motivated by the objective need of German big monopolies to expand abroad and appropriate new markets, labour and resources. Still today, the fortunes of many of Germany’s super-wealthy go back to that era.
The Nazi political economy was antithetical to socialism in every crucial aspect, as the latter entails public ownership of the means of production in the service of social needs rather than profit. The Nazi theory and practice also ran against any notion of equality or internationalism, which sit at the core of the socialist ethos. The so-called ‘collectivism’ of the extreme right is just a different way to dress up and legitimise the undisputed rule of a tiny elite over the majority. These two political traditions could not be further away from one another. Yet, this kind of historical revisionism that equates them rears its annoying head now and again.
Many of those who entertain this revisionism (the capitalist-without-capital types who roam social media day in, day out) may do so out of sheer ignorance. But the likes of Musk and Weidel do it purposefully.
It serves them in two ways at the same time. On the one hand, since they are rabidly anti-socialism, equating socialism with fascism help them dispel people’s fears about the fascistic overtones of their politics. Ahead of the snap elections next month, AfD’s leader has a particular incentive in doing so, as her party has been repeatedly exposed for its ties with neo-Nazi circles. On the other hand, the “Hitler was a socialist” fallacy helps, of course, discrediting socialist ideas, as far-right populist parties like AfD are firmly on the side of business, aiming to double down on neoliberal policies such as market deregulation and low taxation.
Just like the Nazis did in the past by calling themselves ‘socialists’, far-right populists today say they’re on the side of the many but still ultimately serve the interests of the rich. In a book published nearly three decades ago, Michael Parenti called out this far-right demagogy better than most of the commentators today:
“Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a ‘New Order’ while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.”
Photo: (source: Public domain)
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