On "Hitlers Socialism" by TIK Anonymous 28-05-23 13:46:22 No. 17546
I was told that this video on 'Hitlers Socialism' by TIK was an absolute gotcha to Marxists and I know his channel and he does some good vids so I thought I'd give it a watch at least and immediately he says he was once a Marxist Socialist and he was taught that stuff at university and then his definition of capitalism is muh free market and that the state manipulating prices and planning stuff therefore means it isn't real capitalism as opposed to, you know, MCM (he correctly points out that yes markets don't equal capitalism automatically), using 2021 right libertarian definitions that would mean that almost any actually existing capitalist economy isn't really capitalist (even neoliberal ones).
Anonymous 28-05-23 13:49:16 No. 17549
>>17547 wat
we need to discuss the opposition and their arguments
Anonymous 28-05-23 14:01:43 No. 17552
>>17550 I hate those meme pages because Guerins sources are ass, but this guy is right, YouTube is like even more babied educational vhs tapes.
You know how like in 1999 you'd watch an eyewitness video but not retain an ounce of info?
That's moder youtube political videos based on pre existing politics.
If it isn't original, it's likely dumbed down and misses the point completely and sadly right wingers don't read. So they never know what the fuck they're talking about, I'm sure by this point this is TIK's 3rd video about Hitler being socialist and maybe in like the first one there was a good point or two brought up like Hitler being in Eisner's funeral but by now the motherfucker is 100% lying out his ass. No one, no one dedicates 3+ videos to this one fucking topic.
Anonymous 28-05-23 15:09:32 No. 17562
In my opinion this is one of the most important and useful pieces of Marxist theory in the past few decades.
One thing I constantly encounter amongst young millennial and zoomer Socialists especially of the more woke/idpol variety is that they have absolutely no understanding of the concepts of relative risk and self interest, raised or lowered expectations, plausibility, assessment of leverage power etc - stuff that is very obvious to working class people and especially trade unionists. So many young earnest revolutionaries think that the people don't revolt because basically of brainworms and that they just need to read more books and get why capitalism is bad or whatever. No, there's instrumental rationality and logic there which needs to be understood. People look at the forces around them and leverage power they have - filtered through media and bullshit of course - and decide what they think is realistic accordingly.
It is a lack of this understanding that led, for Chibber, in part, to the ultimate post '68 cultural turn in the Left - to explain why western workers wouldn't revolt, leftoid students and grads decided it must be muh hegemony brainworms and racism (rather than that shock horror social democratic keynesianism in a booming economy was doing well for them relatively speaking) so they went in search of fetishised new inherently revolutionary classes and subjects - far off foreign struggles, women, sexual minorities, racial minorities etc etc etc. This process is still going on today. And I think it also serves as a sort of form of avoidance for a Left which is increasingly rooted in universities - anything to avoid engaging with people where they actually are and your own working class instead of fetishising sub groups of it.
There really needs to be a risk and Socialism 101 lecture derived from this book to kick the idpol out of people, the idealism, the frustrated seething that at its worst turns people towards LARPing and revolutionary adventurism. That and getting people to do boring long term community activism and trade union work.
TLDR 1968 was over half a century ago, the '68 new left was sort of a dead end
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674245136 I would recommend 'confronting capitalism' also by chibber for a bit of a more normie broad intro
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2705-confronting-capitalism Anonymous 28-05-23 15:16:46 No. 17565
>>17560 >fascist states were more interventionist and more developmentalist They WEREN'T.
That's the point of examining the historical economic record of countries like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. That is, in an era where state developmentalism was being conducted on a mass scale and the neoliberals were decades away from taking control, that these very same fascist states were the first to implement privatization policies going far to the right of even advanced capitalist states like Britain or the United States which during that same period were ensuring greater and not lesser state control.
>emergency measures to smash a militant working class who had attempted a revolution in a crumbing bourgeois democracy that couldn't govern effectively in the context of the mass murder and imprisonment of all organised independent labour and the organised socialist and communist resistance and as part of a drive for war and plunder abroad. Yes this is the standard definition I wasn't contesting that although I will argue that Fascism does not necessarily result in war and expansionist tendencies because otherwise how would you explain Franco's Spain staying out of WW2 or Pinochet's Chile not annexing their neighbors?
Anonymous 28-05-23 15:49:37 No. 17589
>>17588 >There is no argument refer to
>>17575 which you never refuted.
This is my last reply.
Anonymous 28-05-23 17:33:49 No. 17594
>>17565 My point is compared to modern capitalist states
But even if they were, it wouldn't change that they were capitalist states and not ones engaged in a socialist project or even a non capitalist state because 'state intervention in the economy' and 'some sort of indicative planning' don't make an economy 'not capitalist'. That's my point
Anonymous 28-05-23 17:35:43 No. 17595
>>17571 I mean…what if they do help workers? You don't need to be a 'succdem' to recognise that yeah of course social democratic policies help workers - if you think Sanders is 'betraying' the working class because he wouldn't in power pull a huge lever saying 'overthrow the capitalist system', you're a first day communist brainlet sorry - that's not how this works. that's not how any of this works.
a side point but thought I'd drop it in
Anonymous 28-05-23 17:38:49 No. 17596
>>17582 The Road from Mont Pelerin :>The very fact that ordoliberalism developed a large part of its theoretical foundations within the temporal and geographical bounds of Nazi Germany raises the important question, If and to what extent were ordoliberals influenced by Nazi Germany in general and by Nazi economic policy considerations in particular? Repeated claims that the Freiburg school and Ludwig Erhard were a staunch part of the opposition to the Nazis—claims that buttressed the legitimacy of the social market economy—deserve closer scrutiny. >What certainly can be rejected as a mere cover-up is the claim that the ordoliberals who did not emigrate from Germany opposed, or even persistently resisted, the national socialist regime (e.g., Willgerodt 1998; Wegmann 2002, 55–72; Goldschmidt 2005). With the exception of the documented emigrants (Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow), such a revisionist history of the wartime ordoliberals is not supported by facts. Papers published in Freiburg between the mid-1930s and the beginning of the 1940s unquestionably reveal that ordoliberal concepts were designed to be implemented under the auspices of a Nazi government. In particular, Böhm’s book on the order of the economy (Die Ordnung der Wirtschaft als geschichtliche Aufgabe und rechtschöpferische Leistung), published in 1937, leaves no room for speculation in this regard (Abelshauser 1991; Haselbach 1991, 84f.; Tribe 1995, 212; Ptak 2004, 90f.). The very lack of a consistent economic policy under the Nazis—the Nazis’ economic policy oscillated wildly between planning and competition at least until the war—reinforced the ordoliberals’ hope of finding a sympathetic hearing for their authority-supported model of competition (Herbst 1982; Abelshauser 1999). >At the same time, the economists who were on the road to ordoliberalism were not (necessarily) National Socialist economists. In spite of the totalitarian character of Nazi-Germany, it is very important to recognize and understand that different lines of economic thinking coexisted in Nazi Germany. Any analysis should therefore address the question of economics in Nazi-Germany in order to adequately address distance from and complicitness with the ruling powers and philosophies, as well as the changing perspectives and fortunes of individual economists over time. One must consider the multiform ways of relating to the Nazi regime (1) before and after 1933, when parliamentarian democracy and labor movement opposition were eliminated; (2) before and after 1938, when the pogroms against the Jewish population started in earnest; and (3) before and after 1942, which marked both the year when the Holocaust decision was taken and when the war fortunes turned against the Nazis in Stalingrad (Walpen 2004, 93f.). >After 1942, many people in Nazi Germany recognized that the war was lost and so attempted to distance themselves from the ruling Nazis (Roth 2004). Even if this was in a sense opportunistic, moving into opposition against the regime at that juncture did cost many lives, including the liberal economist Jens Jessen. Several members of the Freiburg school were questioned by the Gestapo, and some were imprisoned. However, any late participation in oppositional activities can hardly exonerate those right-wing liberal economists who had accommodated themselves to the regime before 1942 and deliberately lent their economic expertise to the Nazis for the bulk of the era. While early theoretical considerations of ordoliberalism were congenial to Nazi efforts to curtail certain special interests and trade unions in particular, the ordoliberal framework that promoted a strong and independent state could just as well be turned against the Nazi usurpation of power. This perspective was easier to articulate after the Nazis were toppled, but it should be noted that few expressed it before 1942. >With regard to more narrowly defined economic issues, the early ordoliberals were continually at odds with other schools of economic reasoning that operated during the Nazi era. As a rather coherent theoretical circle within the ordoliberal spectrum, the Freiburger Schule particular tried to promote a competitive order before and even during wartime. By developing policy advisory roles, they saw a chance to fill the economic theory vacuum in Nazi Germany with an authoritarian competitive order. Even though one cannot assume a broad, overall congruence between ordoliberal positions and National Socialist ideology, the authoritarian element, which Böhm characterized as kombinierte Wirtschaftsverfassung (“combined economic constitution”) (1937), represents a much visited point of intersection with National Socialist ideology regarding regional self-sufficiency. Despite the ordoliberals’ growing skepticism about Nazi Germany during the later phases of the wartime economy in particular, hope remained that the residual market economy could be preserved to create pro-market conditions that could be implemented after the war. Miksch as a journalist and Müller-Armack and Erhard as political advisers directly dealt with issues concerning the wartime economy and planning for the postwar period, and like many other economic professionals were at least indirectly entangled in National Socialist policies of expansion during much of the 1930s and 1940s (Ptak 2004). Tribe (1995) has mapped the respective attitudes of neoliberals ranging from Republican resistance (Röpke) to staunch conservatism (Eucken) and active Nazism (von Stackelberg). Other researchers try to excuse cooperating ordoliberals by speaking in rather obscure ways of exiles and “half exiles.” In any case, Wegmann (2002) and others who insist that a huge distance be maintained between ordoliberals and the Nazis fail to understand the considerable overlap of ordoliberal and Nazi critiques of parliamentarian democracy, trade unions, and the Communist Party in particular. >Reading the early critiques of parliamentarian democracy in the oeuvre of German ordoliberals and Austrian school neoliberals reveals the obscure authoritarian tendencies that were operating just beneath the surface of many neoliberals. These tendencies have reemerged time and again in eras of perceived danger to the neoliberal cause. These weaknesses for repressive regimes recur in the history of neoliberalism, as evidenced by Hayek’s and Friedman’s support of “free market economic policies” under the leadership of Pinochet in Chile, for example (see Fischer, Chapter 9 in this volume). The Great Transformation in 1944:>There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. Just as cotton manufactures—the leading free trade industry—were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state. The thirties and forties saw not only an outburst of legislation repealing restrictive regulations, but also an enormous increase in the administrative functions of the state, which was now being endowed with a central bureaucracy able to fulfil the tasks set by the adherents of liberalism. To the typical utilitarian, economic liberalism was a social project which should be put into effect for the greatest happiness of the greatest number; laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved. True, legislation could do nothing directly, except by repealing harmful restrictions. But that did not mean that government could do nothing, especially indirectly. On the contrary, the utilitarian liberal saw in government the great agency for achieving happiness. In respect to material welfare, Bentham believed, the influence of legislation “is as nothing” in comparison with the unconscious contribution of the “minister of the police.” Of the three things needed for economic success—inclination, knowledge, and power—the private person possessed only inclination. Knowledge and power, Bentham taught, can be administered much cheaper by government than by private persons. It was the task of the executive to collect statistics and information, to foster science and experiment, as well as to supply the innumerable instruments of final realization in the field of government. Benthamite liberalism meant the replacing of parliamentary action by action through administrative organs. >For this there was ample scope. Reaction in England had not governed—as it did in France—through administrative methods but used exclusively Parliamentary legislation to put political repression into effect. “The revolutionary movements of 1785 and of 1815–1820 were combated, not by departmental action, but by Parliamentary legislation. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the passing of the Libel Act, and of the ‘Six Acts’ of 1819, were severely coercive measures; but they contain no evidence of any attempt to give a Continental character to administration. In so far as individual liberty was destroyed, it was destroyed by and in pursuance of Acts of Parliament.” Economic liberals had hardly gained influence on government, in 1832, when the position changed completely in favor of administrative methods. “The net result of the legislative activity which has characterized, though with different degrees of intensity, the period since 1832, has been the building up piecemeal of an administrative machine of great complexity which stands in as constant need of repair, renewal, reconstruction, and adaptation to new requirements as the plant of a modern manufactory.” This growth of administration reflected the spirit of utilitarianism. Bentham’s fabulous Panopticon, his most personal utopia, was a star-shaped building from the center of which prison wardens could keep the greatest number of jailbirds under the most effective supervision at the smallest cost to the public. Similarly, in the utilitarian state his favorite principle of “inspectability” ensured that the minister at the top should keep effective control over all local administration. >The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith’s “simple and natural liberty” compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair. Witness the complexity of the provisions in the innumerable enclosure laws; the amount of bureaucratic control involved in the administration of the New Poor Laws which for the first time since Queen Elizabeth’s reign were effectively supervised by central authority; or the increase in governmental administration entailed in the meritorious task of municipal reform. And yet all these strongholds of governmental interference were erected with a view to the organizing of some simple freedom—such as that of land, labor, or municipal administration. Just as, contrary to expectation, the invention of laborsaving machinery had not diminished but actually increased the uses of human labor, the introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range. Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire.
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