The Nazis as Socialists

In my new column for Complete Colorado, I discuss the relationship between Nazism and socialism. I take the position that Nazism is a type of socialism, distinct from Communism and hostile toward it, but also similar to it in important respects. “Socialism” is the broader category in this context.

I recognize that the terminology can be slippery and that many people equate socialism with its “left wing” and especially its Marxist variants. If that is how you understand “socialism,” then obviously it makes no sense to say that Nazism is socialist. But then you need some broader term, such as “statism,” to recognize the ways in which Nazism and Communism are similar.

Otherwise, if you say that fascism and socialism are fundamentally different, and that all of politics tends toward one of those poles, then you leave no room for an alternative to a system in which the state is dominant in people’s lives (leaving aside fantasies of a “withering” of the socialist state). There is no room for a system based on individual rights, Constitutional republican government, and liberal capitalism.

I put “left wing” in quotes earlier because I am extremely skeptical of categorizing modern political views on a “left-right” spectrum. Those terms date to Eighteenth Century France, where “right” refers, by seating at the National Assembly, to supporters of the monarchy, while “left” refers to supporters of revolution. Today, “left” means roughly Marxist or Progressive or welfare statist or democratically “socialist.” But what does “right” mean? People use it to refer to liberal capitalism, religious conservatism, and fascism, but liberal capitalism and fascism are fundamentally different. Of course the enemies of liberal capitalism are all too happy to pretend that capitalism is akin to fascism.

Those on the “left” accuse me of making a similar error, of finding a family resemblance between Communism and fascism where, they say, none exists. But there is a real similarity—a reliance on a very-powerful state to the detriment or minimization of the rights and autonomy of the individual. As I point out in my article, how one comes down on the semantics will largely depend on how one views socialism versus liberal capitalism. (Of course critics of capitalism will argue that “liberal capitalism” is a contradiction in terms, but they’re wrong.)

Semantic Cheap Shots

The already-notorious Gazette editorial calling the Nazis socialists relies on an inappropriate semantic stretching to smear today’s Progressives. The claim is basically this: “The Communists are socialists, the fascists are socialists, and, look, the ‘democratic socialists’ also are socialists! So Bernie Sanders is basically like a Nazi.”

Our conceptual schemes should assist our understanding of reality, not impede it. America’s “democratic socialists”—basically enthusiastic welfare statists—are nothing like either the Marxist ideologues, who called for the complete nationalization of the means of production, or the bloodthirsty Stalinist Communists, or the genocidal Nazis.

I think the intended smear is basically what many Colorado left-leaning politicians and activists were responding to (see my article for quotes). The Mountain States Anti-Defamation League Tweeted:

The @csgazette editorial board’s politicization of Holocaust education is appalling & unacceptable. Distorting Hitler’s violent bigotry & the fascism of the Nazi party to make a point about modern socialism is inaccurate & dangerous. Colorado readers deserve better.

It is unclear to me what the ADL means by “modern socialism,” but it seems to be something like democratic socialism, as opposed to the mass-murdering Communist regimes. (I’m not sure what the ADL would say about Venezuela.)

This is hardly the first time that someone on the “right” has tried to smear “leftist” opponents as Nazi-adjacent. The headline of a 2019 Intelligencer article by Ed Kilgore summarizes another case: “Mo Brooks Identifies Democrats, Media With Hitler.” Brooks called Hitler a socialist and at the same time criticized “Socialist Democrats and their fake news media allies.” Obviously that comparison is bullshit.

The error, though, is not in describing the Nazis as socialist, but in trying to tie totalitarian socialism (of any flavor) to today’s “democratic socialists” and Progressives.

I found Kilgore’s introduction to the topic interesting:

Left-of-center political writers have long observed a sort of unwritten rule about critiques of Donald Trump: Don’t compare him to Adolf Hitler, or his followers to Nazis. That line has held firm despite all the revelations of alt-right racists and fascists who regard the 45th president as their leader; his own refusal to condemn murderous rioters chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville; his instinctive solidarity with white nationalists in Europe and elsewhere; and his Nuremberg-style rallies and rambling, demagogic tirades. The reason for this reticence with respect to a political leader that many writers intensely loath has been simple: Whatever else he and his supporters are, they aren’t advocating genocidal war and mayhem, and should not casually be compared to totalitarian mass murderers.

Of course, especially after the 2020 elections, many leftists have outright called Trump and his supporters fascists or Nazis. I do think the term “fascist” (or perhaps “proto-fascist”) fits the Trumpist movement pretty well. At least the Trumpists are a lot closer to the actual Nazis than are the likes of Bernie Sanders. If you think that is a stretch, feel free to rewatch the videos of the January 6 Capitol assault.

Noonan’s Article

In my article, I discuss some other commentary on the topic. Here I’ll comment briefly on today’s article by Paula Noonan, titled, “Genocidal Hitler, Nazis weren’t socialist.”

Noonan’s main argument is that the fascists were not Communists and so therefore were not socialists. That’s wrong for reasons discussed; the Nazis are a type of socialists distinct from other types. Noonan also says the Nazis embraced the term socialism “as a ploy to trick workers.” No doubt the Nazis were expert propagandists, but they also were socialists in a meaningful sense. Noonan offers no meaningful counterargument.

Noonan writes, “Hitler led a crony capitalist state. His government was the opposite of socialist.” Here she abuses both of the terms “capitalist” and “socialist.” An economy controlled fundamentally by the dictator of a muscular state is, definitionally, not capitalist. If you disagree with that, then you need some substitute term for a liberal free-market economy, which then definitely would not apply to Hitler’s economy. “Socialism” means, fundamentally, the nationalization of the means of production. But the means of production can be effectively nationalized either directly or by state control of nominally private property. The consequences are comparable.

Noonan helpfully remarks on Stalin:

In the tyrant’s effort to industrialize Russia, he stole Ukraine’s grain to feed his workers while starving millions of Ukraine’s farmers and laborers. He collectivized farms in his misguided, ultimately homicidal belief that farmers united to serve the state would increase food production to support his industrial workers. We’re seeing a repeat of Stalin’s imperialism in tyrant Vladimir Putin’s violent and immoral invasion of Ukraine today.

Commentary on the Nazis as Socialists

That some people are idiots about calling the Nazis socialists does not imply that the Nazis are not socialists. They are, in the sense indicated. Here I review some relevant commentary.

In my new piece, I quote Ludwig von Mises from a later edition of Socialism:

The philosophy of the Nazis, the German National Socialist Labour Party, is the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anticapitalistic and socialistic spirit of our age.

In my column from a couple of years ago, I quote the economist George Reisman, a student of Mises, from Reisman’s book Capitalism:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Nazi Germany was a socialist country and that the Nazis were right to call themselves National Socialists. . . .In Nazi Germany, the government controlled all prices and wages and determined what each firm was to produce, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to turn over its products. There was no fundamental difference between the Nazis and the Communists. While the Communists in Russia wore red shirts and had five-year plans, the Nazis in Germany wore brown shirts and had four-year plans.

The philosopher Leonard Peikoff writes of the Nazis in his 1982 book The Ominous Parallels:

The Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”

By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals.

Of course, many people on the left will reject Peikoff’s analysis because he was an advocate of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

Rand herself tended to talk about fascism and socialism as distinct but related:

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it—at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens. . . .

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis—and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-Nazi axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-Nazi axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national “greatness.” The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-Nazi axis merely extols leadership—leadership without purpose, program or direction—and power for power’s sake.

In an article published by the Foundation for Economic Education, Michael Rieger argues:

So why, then, would the Nazis call themselves “socialists”? . . . In establishing national socialism, the Nazis sought to redefine socialism yet again. National socialism began as a fusion of socialist ideas of a technocratically-managed economy with Völkisch nationalism, a deeply anti-Semitic form of German nationalism. In their burgeoning ideology, the Nazis saw both capitalism and communism as unhealthily materialistic and based in selfishness rather than national unity, traits they negatively associated with Judaism. Oswald Spengler, one of the main intellectual influences of Nazism, went so far as to call Marxism “the capitalism of the working class.” The Nazis’ redefinition of socialism was realized through the Völksgemeinschaft, which served as a means of connecting the individual to the state.

Rieger argues that the Nazis nevertheless “weren’t strictly socialist” because they “considered both capitalists and workers necessary.” But this relies on an equivocation of the term “capitalist.” A Nazi-controlled industrialist working for the cause of a genocidal war state is nothing like a true capitalist working within a free market to meet the needs of consumers.

Rieger sensibly adds:

Unlike Marxists, democratic socialists don’t believe in total government ownership of the means of production, nor do they wish to technocratically manage the economy as the Nazis did.

A 2020 article by Alberto Mingardi from the Library of Economics and Liberty addrersses the question, “How ‘socialist’ was national socialism?” Mingardi reviews:

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek considers “The Socialist Roots of Nazism.” Bruce Caldwell has written extensively on the circumstances at the time Hayek was writing what today is his most renowned work. Hayek wanted to refute the view, which gained dominance in the Thirties, that German Nazism was in essence a kind of capitalist reaction against rising socialism. The “socialism” bit in “National socialism” was seldom considered relevant.

Hayek was wary that prominent British thinkers thought Nazism was simply “vile” and, thus, had little to do with a noble set of ideas such as socialism. Instead, he saw a radical reaction to the “old” liberal system and the rule of law. Hayek’s contention remains controversial. . . .

John Lukacs, a distinguished historian of Nazism who highlighted the fact that the most salient characteristic of Hitler and his regime was Nationalism (“it was a national mentality, and not class-consciousness, that attracted people to Hitler”), pointed out that “Hitler was not the inventor of National Socialism, but he recognized the compatibility – and indeed, the marriageability—of two great movements.” “It was not only that for him nationalism was the dominant partner in the marriage; he was convinced that modern populist nationalism can—and indeed must—be socialistic” (quotations from The Hitler of History). . . .

[Hitler’s True Believers by Robert] Gellately points out that The Road to Serfdom “looked only briefly and selectively at the intellectual roots of national socialism” and that “Hayek used the charge of ‘socialism’ as a kind of libertarian indictment against Nazism.” Yet Gellatelly’s book explores the matter thoroughly and points out that “Germany on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 continued to have a socialist-oriented political culture.” “Almost without exception, the Nazis emphasized all kinds of socialist attitudes, to be sure a socialism ‘cleansed’ of international Marxism and communism.” The book explores the ideological roots of Nazism, which of course are not confined to socialist sentiments but include them.

Calling the Nazis socialists will remain contentious, especially when some who call Nazis socialists do so to score cheap political points. But, in an important sense, yes, the Nazis were socialists.

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