FBXL Social

Reviewing a fascinating work about Hitler's socialism.

It's very interesting because it suggests that the nation in "national socialism" is assumed as a blood and soil sort of thing, and thus the word national there doesn't make sense in a post-war world where the general consensus does not consider race as part of the nation. Thus, "national socialism" can be understood instead as racial socialism where all people of the Aryan race are brought under one communal banner. Fascism then can be understood as what we would consider today a "national socialism" where everyone within the nation is brought under one communal banner, and Marxism can be understood as "class socialism" where all people of the proletariat class are brought under one communal banner.

All 3 cases are socialism, all 3 extensively cite marx in justifying their ideology, all 3 oppose capitalism in ways that just look different.

So for the purposes of what we're discussing, call socialism taking control of the means of production and the economy for the purposes of sharing the thriving of communitarian group. In this case, it obviously matters greatly which communicating were you talking about. Many people have made arguments that the Roman empire, or ancient Greece had elements of socialism, because they, through the democracy or through the Republic, had social programs intended to assist citizens of the country. Now they may be true, but both of those civilizations were heavily slave-based economies. So if we were to say that there was socialism in these two civilizations, then it obviously is not the case that socialism requires a Marxist framework. In that case, the communitarian group ends up being defined by a group that could be smaller than half of existing population depending on which point in those civilizations you lived in.

So your socialism ends up looking completely different if you are looking at class perspective, trying to ensure that everyone in the working class gets the benefits, or the people, but sharing that a certain race gets all the benefits, or the nation, making sure that all the patriotic citizens of a certain geopolitical region get the benefits. In spite of that, all of these things end up looking roughly similar.

Racial socialism ends up referring to individual capitalist ideology as "Jewish" because they have to fit everything within their own worldview, and so the jews become particularly hated because they represent the opposing ideology. Incidentally, Marxism is considered "international socialism" and under this ideology it's also considered a tool of the Jews, a tool of capitalism.

This is part of one of the key elements of socialism: nobody hates a socialist more than another, different socialist. Just ask a Stalinist about Trotsky, or read about the political history between Communist China and Soviet Russia, or read about the purges of Spanish socialists by Spanish communists during the Spanish civil war, or the history between Cambodia and Vietnam, or between Communist Vietnam and communist China, or between Tito and Stalin, or between Moscow and Ukraine, or Moscow and Georgia, or Moscow and the Baltic states, or Moscow and Kazakhstan, or Moscow and Uzbekistan.

Some people might point to things that appear capitalist under Germany's racial socialism. For example, "privatization". I ask: if Donald Trump "sold off" the United States postal service to the Republican Party, would you consider that true privatization? Because thats what much of the so-called "privatization" was in Nazi Germany. As well, they implemented universal price controls, universal rent controls, nationalized the big labor unions and destroyed the private ones, and implemented corporate taxes as high as 90%. The government directly operated the central bank. It was a socialist economy controlled by the state whether a private individual has their name on the deed or not.

I don't think that it was quite as clear the fact that Germany was under socialism because most of the world was under a total war economy, which in many ways mirrors socialism. In a hypothetical future where Germany was able to achieve a stalemate and continue to exist under its national socialist ideology, I think that it would have been much clearer as other world economies such as America returned to liberal capitalism just how different a nation under German national socialism looked, and how many similarities it had with class socialist countries such as the Soviet Union.

The socialism of national socialism is why Germany had to go to war. By 1939, they were well and truly running out of other people's money and so had to head out and invade other countries to take whatever they had to fund the socialist state they created.

Given the axiom "the purpose of a system is what it does", it could be said that the west is in fact a struggle between 3 forces: liberal capitalism, national socialism (using the above definition) and international socialism. Liberal capitalism is losing (as proven by the massive decline in free enterprise from being 90% of the economy and very little regulation to only 50% of the economy and overwhelmingly regulated). National socialism is represented by the neoconservative and allegedly neoliberal branches of the Republican party, as well as the allegedly neoliberal wing of the Democratic party, and international/class socialism is obviously represented by the socialist wing of the democratic party. It may appear that woke identitarian leftism should be part of racial socialism, but it is not -- it is merely conventional class socialism using intersectional identity as a surrogate because it becomes clear that capitalism as a class conflict ultimately makes no sense as a model because customers, owners, and workers all end up relying on each other. Even this new surrogate is falling apart because that surrogacy is a lie first and foremost and that once you get past that the underlying class argument has been proven wrong.

To clarify, when I say national socialism I mean in the sense that fascism is national socialism and German national socialism is not. I tend to believe that racial socialism died with Nazi Germany. The closest thing we have today is China with its no immigrants policy, but China is closer to national socialism (again, separate from Germany's term) in that everyone who is a part of China is part of the people of China including people like slavs from regions bordering China and Russia and many other ethnicities. Of course this view could seem to be disputed by the uigur genocide, but I would argue the problem with the uigurs to the CCP isn't that they are aren't Han, but that they are perceived as being outside of the state.

I think that looking at things through this frame makes a lot more sense to explain a few different things that we see today.

First, differentiating between Italian fascism and German national socialism in this way ends up helping us to understand that they are strongly distinct ideologies that just happen to be on the same side of a certain war. Had Stalin been able to convince Hitler that their form of class socialism also represented racial socialism, then perhaps all three could have been on the same side of the war, and just as easily if Mussolini did not believe that Italy had been wronged in World war 1, national socialism in the form of Italian fascism could have ended up on the allied side of World War II. Most people forget that Franco's Spain ended up surviving as a state under fascism until the 1970s when Franco died of old age and it could have continued but for the fact that his successor changed Spain into a liberal democracy instead.

This time differentiation also helps split up different policies between the three in such a way that makes a lot more intuitive sense. Given that racial socialism, national socialism in the fascist sense, and class socialism all come from a different route they all lead to different places, and so their outcomes will appear different.

For an example of how this differentiation can help us understand existing socialist regimes better, let's look at communist China.. ostensibly, at first communist China was following class socialism, through most of Mal's life. But we saw as a result of that was the typical outcomes of class communism, where a whole lot of people died. On the end of miles rain, eventually China seems to have changed into a sort of national socialism where different classes are more or less encouraged, but everything is under the umbrella of one state. Although we have examples such as the weaker genocide that appear to suggest a form of racial socialism, the fact is that there are many ethnic groups within China, and the ones that are singled out by racist policies are typically ones that are not beneficial to the state, rather than ones that are not part of the pure racial hierarchy. As a white American you can never get Chinese citizenship, there simply isn't a pathway for it. Despite that, if you are part of a group that somehow ended up part of the Chinese empire, such as white slavs in the north, you are fully accepted as part of the Chinese communist regime because it isn't about creating a unified ethnic empire, but rather creating one nation that everyone is subservient to.

Another thing that it's really useful for is differentiating between essentially what is and is not fascist. Once you recognize that only things that make sense underneath the umbrella of fascist national socialism can be fascist, been all the things that don't make sense under that umbrella must therefore be something else.

Another thing is that it looks to me like socialism vs. liberal capitalism is a sort of slave morality vs. master morality. Do you think you're competent enough to succeed on your own? If so, then you want to have a system that rewards merit and competence with success first and foremost. If not, then you want a system that rewards your group membership with success first and foremost.

I also tend to think that this frame sort of makes German national socialism self refuting. If you believe your race is made up of superior Supermen, why wouldn't you want a system that rewards the best by default? The contradiction is that of all the different ways that racial superiority could be implemented in terms of a state, a form of national socialism based around a slave morality just doesn't seem to align with the concept of a master race.

All of this being said, I think that there is still work to do in terms of recognizing that there are things other than socialism and capitalism. The fact that those two economic systems ended up becoming the core conflict of marxism, and thereby informed fascism and German national socialism into seeing the world in the same way, most of History did not have socialism or capitalism. There have been examples of centralized controls of resources that did not represent either capitalism or socialism in any way, and there have also been examples of completely decentralized control of resources that similarly does not fit under either capitalism or socialism.

The video suggests you cannot have totalitarianism without socialism, and I'm inclined to disagree. Politically, it is the easiest way to get buy-in from a society for totalitarianism, but I think that you can still have economic systems without such a thing. For example, the Spanish colonial states that were purely extractive likely didn't have any measures of socialism, they just used military force to take everything from South America and bring it back to Spain. Looking at the region that is modern day haiti, it was entirely a slave state, and I would definitely argue there wasn't much socialism there, only violent extraction. Rather than being justified by redistribution to a communitarian group, it was instead redistributed to the rulers. Absolute monarchies also can have totalitarianism without socialism.

https://youtu.be/eCkyWBPaTC8

Yes, the conception of a nation as just a geographical area and a democratic government slapped on top is I think a product of the modern period's colonialism, resulting global empires such as the English, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent powers like France, and existing nations like the United States that don't have those long histories and relatively unified ethnicity. In that sense, premodern states were effective ethnostates.

I'm using the word in the modern sense since that's how we use it today because it helps people (including myself) who were confused by the concept of national socialism in a postmodern world that doesn't see nations that way colloquially anymore.

I'm hypocritical in my distaste for the use of the word neoliberal in such a way that it represents an effective growing of government while pretending to do the opposite by reducing public services. I recognize that that is how it is come to be known now, however.

Something a lot of leftists don't seem to realize is that the social liberalism is just a tool for the destruction of capitalism. In every example on record they'd open up to degenerates until they're in power then they call that behavior anti-revolutionary and crack down. Every time. I could see a winning ideology that proposed socialism but also was against the absolute degeneracy of the Weimar Republic being tempting for communists who want to get closer to socialism and see what the Weimar republic showed them as capitalist decadence and decline suggesting all capitalism was about to collapse.