(I posted this dissertation on Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism yesterday on a SI oil & natural resources thread ...where it was really OT. It was a response to a highly intelligent poster who may at some later time be able to respond. Much more appropriate here, please respond - anyone - if you chose.)
Lone Clone,
In 3 separate posts you have equated fascism and capitalism :
<<<…capitalism and the various forms of fascism are a very good fit if you only consider the interest of capital>>>
< <<If communism and socialism are the same, so are
capitalism and fascism.>>> and
<<< Communism is socialism enforced by state power. Fascism is capitalism enforced by state power.>>>
George Orwell wrote that the first duty of the modern intellectual is to puncture “the smelly little orthodoxies….now contending for our souls.” IMHO, yours are in need of puncturing.
FASCISM AND COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM ARE COLLECTIVIST IDEOLOGIES ARISING FROM THE SAME EUROPEAN-BASED INTELLECTUAL FORCES; THEY HAD NOMINAL, NOT SUBSTANTIVE, DIFFERENCES. FROM CENTRALIZED CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY AND A DISDAIN FOR FREE MARKETS AND “INDIVIDUALISM,” TO PARTY RALLIES AND ORGANIZATION, THEY WERE MIRROR IMAGES OF EACH OTHER
(Most of the authority for the points outlined below are found in “The Road to Serfdom” first published in England in 1944 by the “Austrian School” economist, Friederich Hayek whose principle thesis was that the advanced state of socialism in post WWI Germany facilitated and made possible Hitler’s rise. However, I am going to start with quotes from Wilhelm Ropke who fled from Germany in 1933 after having publicly equated Nazism with the end of culture and civilization.)
1. “National Socialists” (Hitler’s party) was not just a name; nor was its rise simply a reaction fomented by those whose privileges or interests were threatened by the advance of “real” socialism.
2. Nazi and communist collectivism, argued Ropke, had not arisen out of thin air ; that the age of reason and scientific rationality in the 18th and 19th century had generated an “irrational rationality.” The power of man’s reason to master the secrets of nature had created a growing belief that man could likewise learn the secrets of the “laws” of society and then bend and reshape that society in any shape and form that his reason suggested would be “better, fairer, and more just.” “Man would control his own destiny by redesigning the social order through centralized planning and regulation.”
3. Even before the unification of Germany in 1871, Prussia’s paternalistic society – organized from the top – was admired by early French socialists, but deplored by German poets, who noted that “no other state has ever been administered so much like a factory…”
4. From 1871, under Bismarck, and on through WWI, Germany enacted the world’s first and most comprehensive set of security nets involving industrial accident insurance, compulsory public education, medical care and powerful unions. The crucible of WWI vastly extended the power of the state and weakened laissez-faire capitalism.
5. An amazing fact: In 1928 the German government (state and federal) “directly” controlled an astounding 53% of the nation’s total income. (Official government figures)<Compare that to the roughly 25% in the U.S. today!>
6. This was used to finance the most comprehensive welfare state anywhere; the world looked to Germany as the paragon of working socialism just as it looked to Sweden in the 50s and 60s. The clearest proof of this is the early writing of Reinhold Neibuhr, a Yale educated minister and leader of the militant faction of the Socialist Party of America, who in 1932 said that Germany was “where all the social and political forces of modern civilization have reached their most advanced form." “ (“Moral Man and Immoral Society”)
7. As it was the most socialist nation at the time, it is no surprise that the German Weimar Republic was the very first nation to recognize Lenin’s USSR. Because of their congenial politics, Lenin offered the German Army the use of secret proving grounds near Kazan (east of the Volga) for testing tanks, planes and poisonous gas, all prohibited to Germany’s tiny 100,000- man army by the Versailles Treaty. It was here that the military genius, Hans von Seeckt, the real creator of Blitzkreig, developed his tactics and weapons. This secret compact continued from 1921 to 1933. (James Corum, “The Roots of Blitzkreig.”)
8. According to Hayek, by the 1930’s, practically all Germans had become “socialists”, liberalism in the 19th century sense of Adam Smith, John S. Mills and Lord Acton having been driven out.
9. When Hitler came to power in 1933, far from seeking to reverse the welfare state, he broadened and extended it. According to one WSJ article by a German writer of 2006 (which I have not yet been able to put my hands on), Hitler who was as paternalistic as any socialist, and as late as 1944 was expanding non-military social benefits to the detriment of his war effort.
10. Immediately before Mussolini and Hitler came to power, fascists and socialist/communists physically clashed in the streets. It might be argued that this proves that they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. However, Hayek points out that doctrinal disputes between parties within the same religion or political grouping (e.g.,socialists) are usually bitter when they have only “heretics” to fight.
11. Hayek points to the intellectual history of fascist leaders such as Mussolini, Laval, and Quisling who began as socialists and ended as fascists. And what was true of the leaders was even more true of the rank and file. It was well known that it was easy to convert young communists to the Nazi party and (after 1945 in East Germany) vice versa. Young English and American students often returned from the Continent in the 30’s unsure whether they were communists or fascists; sure only that they hated “Western” greed and decadence.
12. Both Hitler and Mussolini consistently attacked the egotism and selfishness of “Western Civilization” as “shallow.” Explicitly condemned were capitalism, Wall Street, democracy, individualism, free trade and any form of individualism or love of peace. Under Hitler, the German stock market began small and shriveled to nothing.
13. It was Lenin himself who popularized the famous phrase, “Who, Whom?”: Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotment by whom? In a capitalistic society, these decisions are all determined by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” working through automatic price mechanisms and free markets...and by individuals who have no other thought than advancing their own selfish interest but end up advancing the overall social good. (“The remedy for high oil prices is high oil prices.”)
14. In Germany, the “Who, Whom” was decided by the Nazis. Hitler’s “Five Year Plans” for the German Economy (under the direction of Goering) were indistinguishable from Stalin’s “Five Year Plans.” German industrial firms were directed where, when and what to invest in, receiving their capital directly from the state.
15. Yes, I know, under Hitler and Mussolini, certain favored industrialists like Krupp and Porsche, were allowed to keep title to their factories and continued to live rich lifestyles.
16. Just as favored “businessmen” interviewed last week on CNBC were able to claim that “business is booming” in Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela. Just as a Russian 42 year old metals billionaire was able to take over a whole town in the French Alps with his entourage of cronies and prostitutes (rooms at up to $28,000 per night, Russian band flown in for the night) etc., etc., reported last week in the WSJ. Just as Marcos and Sukarno had their “crony capitalists.” And so on.
17. In a collectivist nation, fascist or “socialist, the “Who, Whom” is decided by the state’s bureaucrats. The fact that title to property is enforced by “state power” does not render a society capitalistic.
18. As Ludwig von Mises, another of those Austrian economists. ironically put it some 80 years ago: “The advocates of interventionism (i.e.,collectivism) pretend to substitute for the –- as they assert, ‘socially’ detrimental - - effects of private property and vested interests, the unlimited discretion of the perfectly wise and disinterested legislator and his conscientious and indefatigable servant, the bureaucrat.”
19. Other parallels between the fascists and communists are obvious: (1) Hitler Youth was a carbon copy of the Young Pioneers; and (2) both fascism and communism were obsessed with the “cult of the colossal”: big monuments, huge industrial facilities and giant cities. In this environment of the “big”, men are increasingly reduced to a grey mass with no anchors to the customs, traditions, and values that make up a humane and meaningful existence as a human being. (Per Ropke)
20. Francis Fukuyama, in his “The End of History” endorsed Hayek’s thesis on how fascism arose. In his “State Building” he writes that both fascism and communism are now both viewed by historians as “a stream of development” which tried to “abolish the whole of civil society and subordinate the remaining atomized individuals to its own political ends.”
THE NATURE OF CAPITALISM
21. It is a strange fact that Karl Marx, looking backward, was able to see that it was the institution of private property working through free markets that was a precondition for the development of all our democratic freedoms. (Hayek) According to Max Eastman, it is even stranger that he did not foresee that these freedoms might disappear with their abolition.
22. Adam Smith wrote around 1770: “The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they should employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
23. No socialist has ever renounced state power (compulsion). Saint-Simon, for instance, suggested that those resistant to his proposed planning boards be “treated as cattle.”
24. De Tocqueville put it best: “… Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
LoneClone, you used the quote, “You can never dip your toe in the same river twice” for the proposition that with nations, societal paths,tried on different occasions, never give the same result.
Alongside that, I prefer DeToqueville’s: “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”
Bruce |
