Right-wingers love to insist that members of Adolf Hitler’s party were socialists. But Nazism’s real economic policies upheld hypercapitalist principles rooted in social Darwinist ideas about the value of human life. They weren’t socialists at all. One of the most tiresome arguments levelled against socialism claims that Nazism was somehow “socialist,” and so something the Left needs to answer for. Adolf Hitler’s men marshalled the economy for war, put the state above the individual and, as the killer argument, they even called themselves “National Socialists.” Checkmate? Not quite. Even aside from the fact that other conservative and liberal parties actually voted for full powers to Hitler in 1933, his regime was characterized by massive interventions to help out private business. And the social Darwinism championed by the Nazis, counting the “unproductive” as mere wasteful expense, obeyed the logic of judging human life by the yardstick of profit.
In 2009, Israeli historian Ishay Landa published the book
The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, an extensive study of the economic and social interests the Nazis really pursued. In this
interview with Jacobin, he explains what the term “socialism” meant to Hitler, how his political and economic views were connected — and why we can see the dangers of economic liberalism in Elon Musk today.
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Originally Posted by Ishay Landa
They were strongly capitalist. The Nazis placed great emphasis on private property and free competition. It’s true that they intervened in the free market, but it was also a time of a systemic failure of capitalism on a global scale. Almost all states intervened in the market at the time, and they did so to save the capitalist system from itself. This has nothing to do with socialist sentiment: it was pro-capitalist. In a way, there’s a parallel there with the way big banks were bailed out by governments after the 2008 financial crisis broke out. That, of course, did not reflect socialist intentions in any way, either. It was merely an attempt to stabilize the system a little bit.
Social Darwinism is actually a form of hypercapitalism. It takes from capitalism the focus on competition as a struggle of all against all. And the Nazis argued: “Well, that’s just the way nature is.” This was not a break with capitalism, but an intensification of economic views. Capitalism, in the Nazis’ view, is simply a part of nature. So, it is not just a matter of political domination, but of naturalizing economic contradictions. Hitler then said that it is above all “the Jew” who is trying to play a little trick on nature in order to make the struggle for survival superfluous. The will to tamper with the economy made Jews insidious, from the Nazi point of view.
Even the Shoah is related to economic considerations. For in Nazi ideology, Jews were seen as the ultimate obstacle. Obstacle to what? To capitalism, not least. They were considered the backbone of Marxism. The Nazis construed Marxism as an essentially Jewish conspiracy against the capitalist economy — and thus against the natural order. Of course, the Shoah was the result of many factors and the culmination of various Nazi obsessions, phobias, and hatreds. But among all these, one shouldn’t lose sight of this socioeconomic factor.
By the term “socialism” they didn’t mean anything that we would even remotely recognize as socialist, but rather their policy of intervening in the free market for the benefit of the capitalists. By the term “Marxism,” on the other hand, they meant social democracy and the protection of basic workers’ rights. In Mein Kampf, Hitler says that his antisemitic world view was finally formed the moment he realized that the Jews were the masterminds of social democracy. Nazi discourse was a very convenient — if cynical — way of manipulating concepts and ascribing them completely new meanings.
This is actually not so new, and has a long history. Already during the time of fascism there were attempts to portray the Nazis as socialists, for example by Ludwig von Mises. But in general, the efforts to establish a direct link between Marxism and National Socialism was a minority position. Then, beginning in the 1980s, a turning point occurred when a revisionist current began to emerge in fascism studies. It sought to link fascism much more strongly with the political left, with revolution and with anti-capitalism. This happened at a time when neoliberalism was beginning to dismantle the welfare state. Which made this ideological move very convenient. Advocates of this policy could say: “The Nazis actually stood for an authoritarian form of socialism!” Attacking the welfare state could thus be presented as an anti-fascist act, a resistance to Nazism and a purging of its political residues.
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