Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:48, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The passage you are citing at me is mostly my own writing. And please also see Fascio, which contains a lot of what it sounds like you mean to write.

I say that the example is egregious because I believe Fascism to be genuinely rightist. This is not like Stalin declaring Trotsky a rightist. Given the rest of the paragraph, it is (ironically) the case that anything but an egregious case of calling someone leftist or rightist constitutes an egregious example of the phenomenon you are talking about! -- Jmabel | Talk 22:20, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

I was about to add the stuff from the Volokh conspiracy myself when I saw you'd already done it. Good work and welcome to Wikipedia. Dave (talk) 16:19, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

I hope you like the additions I made Dave (talk)

I appologize. I'd been pretty busy for the last couple months with various projects here, and hadn't had time for doing much editing here on Wikipedia - at least not much that required too much mental energy. I'm startin to get back in the swing of things now, and I'll try to catch up on that whole issue here soon... Blackcats 04:18, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You are accusing me of being ahistorical, when you are claiming that feudalism and mercantilism are forms of socialism? That's rather astounding. BTW, could you create a user page? The red link becomes tiresome. john k 1 July 2005 07:15 (UTC)

Fair enough, I'm sorry to have caricatured your views. But mercantilism clearly does fit into your definition of socialism: "the belief that the organization and allocation of production should be a political question." The mercantile policies of seventeenth/eighteenth century England, France, and so forth were not simply about currency manipulation. They were entire economic programs - for instance, they demanded that colonists buy manufactured goods from the metropole, and that metropolitan manufacturers buy their raw materials from national colonies. I don't see how this doesn't fit into the idea of "the organization and allocation of production should be a political question." Beyond this, my opposition to calling the Nazis socialists does not arise out of any reified notion of what socialism is. It arises out of the fact that what the Nazis did was not considered socialist by contemporaries, whether or not said contemporaries were themselves socialists. Although there were anti-semitic socialist-types in the early Nazi party - the Strasser brothers are a good example - these elements were largely without influence by the time Hitler actually came to power. After the Night of the Long Knives, they were virtually extinct. The socialist elements of the Nazi party did express their ideas in the party's official platform, and this platform did worry many a "respectable" German conservative who was uncertain whether to support the Nazis. But the fact is that from at least the Young Plan campaign of 1929 on, the Nazi Party relentlessly allied itself to the forces of the "national opposition" on the right - to the German National People's Party, to the Stahlhelm, to all manner of other right wing cranks. And the right wing groups welcomed them with open arms. The DNVP and the Nazis made common cause in attacking the center-right Brüning government from the right. When the Conservatives themselves came to power in the Papen government in mid-1932, the Nazis continued to oppose them - but the group with which they cooperated most in opposition was not the Communists (despite the singular anomaly of their joint support of the Berlin Transit strike at the end of 32), but with the Centre Party, and the Nazis always made clear that what they wanted was a government of the proper "national elements," but one which would be clearly led by Hitler, to do with as he pleased. The Conservatives agreed that the Nazis, as by far the most popular "nationally correct" (i.e. right wing) movement, should play an important role in any "government of national consolidation" (or whatever it was, exactly, that they called it), but wanted to retain more control for themselves. This conflict lasted until Hitler was finally appointed Chancellor, with the support of the DNVP and former Chancellor Papen, at the beginning of 1933.

Once in power, it is hard to see any particularly socialistic elements of the Nazi economic program. As I noted before, by 1934, the socialistic elements within the Nazi party had been entirely purged, as had those elements which supported radical changes like the abolition of the army and its replacement by the SA (Hitler had Röhm, his socially progressive fighter for gay rights friend, as Nobs would have it, shot in 1934, you'll recall). Instead, Hitler very quickly allied himself with the old imperial elites - the Prussian officer corps, the big industrialists, and so forth. Economically, there was obviously a plan for rearmament, but beyond that, Nazi "central planning" was a joke. Göring's Five Year Plan hardly accomplished anything, and Germany's rearmament was barely more effective than Britain's or France's (in terms of pure production - the Germans probably did a better job organizing it). Politically, Hitler soon brought the Army and the industrialists more fully into line with Nazi ideas, and particularly staffed the army with his cronies, but he was never able to make himself fully in control of either. The big industrial concerns willingly worked with Hitler to make Germany great again.

During the war itself, central planning did get better under Speer, but it was much less efficient than that of Britain. Germany didn't manage to really convert itself to a war-time economy until 1942 (although I've heard some disputes of this statement). The basic fact is that the only way the Nazis can be conceived of as having followed a socialist policy while in office is if any armaments program whatever is to be considered as socialist. Whatever the wacky ideas of some of the less successful members of the Nazi Party, in power the party simply did not pursue socialist policies at all.

As to its name, I think that the Nazis themselves were always very clear that "National Socialism" was something quite different from "Socialism" or "Social Democracy." National Socialism was a replacement for socialism - instead of the evil class conflict espoused by socialism, National Socialism was based on solidarity within the nation, which was supposedly the true form of "socialism." But I think everyone at the time was fairly clear on the presence of those scare quotes around the "socialism" in national socialism - that is, national socialism was not a nationalistic variant of socialism (a description that might be used for, say, Baathism), but an entirely separate thing for socialism, which was described as being "socialist" only in the sense that Nazis were claiming that the actual Socialists were misusing the word socialism. The Nazis saw no commonalty between themselves and the parties of the left in Germany, whom they saw as their principle enemies. Furthermore, as I pointed out before, non-Nazis in Germany at the time did not see the Nazis as being socialists. The KPD and SPD saw them (inaccurately, I think), as reactionaries, or as bonapartist tools of the faltering bourgeoisie. The right saw them as potential allies in a national revival. It is true that right-wing parties occasionally campaigned against the Nazis by claiming that they were secretly socialists, but it is also clear that their actual actions when not in a political campaign - constantly courting the Nazis to try to get them to join a right-wing coalition government - shows that this was only so much rhetoric on their part. The Centre Party and the Catholic hierarchy decried the Nazis as pagan or anti-Christian, but they did not call them socialists so far as I am aware. I also cannot recall any instances of right-wing Germans accusing the Nazis of socialism after they were in power. Far from it - Nazi support among traditional elites only grew in the time between their taking power and the beginning of the war.

I just don't see any way that the Nazis can be called left-wing, or socialist, except when one is using an extremely reified, static, view which simply defines socialism as the absence of laissez faire liberalism. Before going to bed, I will note, however, that referring to the Nazis as right wing, without qualification, is nearly as pernicious. While, I think, Nazism and Fascism were clearly movements "of the right," in some vague sense, they were also movements with goals and policies which were quite different from those of the traditional right, and one should certainly not conflate the two. john k 1 July 2005 08:34 (UTC)

See my reply @ User talk:Sam Spade#Socialist_Apologetics. Cheers, ¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸ 4 July 2005 18:07 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on the Austrian School category. However please note that the wikipedia:categorization guidelines indicate that we should avoid putting an article into a category and a subcategory. Thus a person would not be listed both as an "economist" and an "American economist". The latter, being the more precise, is the preferred category. Someday a more logical categorization system will be invented. Meantime, that's the general practice. Cheers, -Willmcw 21:44, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

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