With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germany was the first non-communist country to officially make May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a national public holiday.
Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.
No, the Reich did not make International Workers' Day a holiday. It made May 1st the Day of National Work and prohibited all celebrations except those arranged by the nazi state, especially celebrations by worker organisations.
i mean, what it sounds like you're trying to say is "the owner class will lie to the working class when it benefits them"... which I agree with...
but the way you reached this conclusion is that you disagree with the framing of contemporary US right-wing conservative activity as fascist?
even when Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two private citizens who are very close to the levers of power, are on camera sieg-heiling?
even when the president of the united states pardoned paramilitary actors like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front members who actually did real violence?
even when people are being sent to a concentration camp in another country with no due process?
even when people who protest this administration's policies and actions are being targeted for professional blacklisting (lawyers, judges) or arrested and held without due process (eg, mahmoud khalil)?
if these actions are not close enough or akin to the actions of the Nazis (or other fascist movements) for the impact of these things to supersede a very pedantic definition of either term, then you must be willfully ignoring the intent behind applying those terms - they might not be "Nazis" but they're doing the things Nazis did, and that's extremely bad and worth comparison.
I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.
They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated.
All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish"
(And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology)
So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
It's worth adding that the change of the name to NSDAP also happened before Hitler consolidated control and "Socialist" was added over his objections.
With respect to people repeating this idiotic claim, it dates at least back to the 70's in various places, seemingly as a counter for groups on the right that wanted to create distance from the nazis.
All of which also happened in some 'communist' countries.
the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
Sure, and I actually wouldn't call the leadership of the USSR at that time (Stalinists) socialists either. It wasn't even that they wiped out those "who weren't Bolshevik aligned". The entire 1917 Bolshevik leadership was exterminated by Stalin by the end of the 20s.
(And frankly people who grew up in the Eastern Bloc in USSR-times were not taught this in history class, either. Or they got a distorted version of it)
What was established there in the late 20s and early 30s was very much a return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job.
"Socialism in one country" and the efforts around it was the re-establishment of Great Russian Nationalism and a cult around a leader as the motive force of everything. Underneath that there was some usage of aspects of "Marxist" ideology, so it's not nearly as clear as what happened in Germany, but it's not dissimilar.
There's a reason why the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was able to be signed.
I'd be willing to consider them "socialist" in the way that Marx used socialism. There's after all a whole chapter in the Communist Manifesto dedicated to forms of socialism that were all wildly different ideologies, ranging from the utopian to the outright feudalist.
In that Marxist sense, that "socialism" has a very limited implication about a very limited set of concepts around putative public ownership of the means of production, one could call the Stalinists socialist. But by that use, then one should be aware that it's a trait of a set of ideologies that otherwise have pretty much nothing to do with each other.
And indeed, he called out the "return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job" explicitly in describing "feudal socialism".
A later preface (by Engels, I think? I think it was one of the prefaces from after Marx death) points out that they used the word "communist" because the word socialist at the time had become largely associated with some of those ideologies that they did not want to be confused with. And of course "communism" has since become equally overloaded by ideologies so different their adherents have pretty much nothing in common.
Already before Lenin died, there was already the notion of "left" and "right" communism, as two incompatible camps that were not even single ideologies, but sets of ideologies. Hence Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" that covered a range of "left" communist ideologies (because the Bolsheviks were considered "right" communists)
It's more complicated than that, because after Lenin, the USSR and countries in its sphere like East Germany considered themselves not to be Communist but rather socialist, as they believed that true Communism was an end goal to be achieved in the future like "We will achieve Communism by the year 2000"
Fair enough, though this also throws away 150/200 years of convention. In the end, the buckets and labels serve little purpose. What is important is to point out that "fascists are just socialists" is a garbage slogan/slander that obscures the reality of history behind an ideological cover that serves only the purpose of implying that any collective action inevitably turns into tyranny. Or something.
The reality is that "actually existing libertarianism" is just as or more liable to degrade into authoritarianism as it hands over blanket authority to the private market -- and, eventually, the form of the state that arises when said market goes into crisis. As we've seen in practice many times, and with the way a whole class of American "libertarians" have embraced the triumph of the will motive force behind Trumpism in the present day. (Or lined up behind Pinochet, etc. in the 70s)
I mostly agree with you - the point I made is mainly one to make with people who get really insistent on that labelling, as a means to point out that even if they believe Stalinism is socialism, that still doesn't mean it's the same socialism as whichever flavour they're trying to equate it to.
Fully agree with you regarding the "fascists are just socialist" canard.
With respect to libertarianism, I like to taunt US libertarians by pointing out that the first liberatarian was Joseph Dejacque, a French anarcho-communist, who, of course, given his anarchist background, praised Proudhon for the view that property is theft - and requires state power to oppress those who reject it - but criticized Proudhon as a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for not going far enough in his rejection of authority.
They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government.
They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class.
Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
> The 'communist' countries generally did these same things.
There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted because what you say is correct. As a socialist, I can’t really disagree with what you other than “there’s no real facism” but I guess what you mean by that is something like Mussolini’s vision for society differed from what he actually presided over after the fascists achieved state power.
That’s some good propaganda! As much as I disagree with him and his views, Goebbels sure was a skilled polemicist. The German Propaganda Archive is an excellent historical resource that I wasn’t aware of until now. Thanks for the link!
> One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances.... The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent
Not unlike the amorphous political movement plaguing America currently.
Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists.
Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world.
Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else.
Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
> Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
There are people who think looking at the structures of power, eg the role of the state, is more useful than looking at propaganda when discussing politics. In the behaviorist sense that what people do is a better revelation of their beliefs than what they say.
In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
The Bolsheviks literally carried out a coup against socialists, and murdered a long range of socialists and communists who took up weapons against them to try to prevent their dictatorship. In that perspective it's clear that these are not singular ideologies, but sets of ideologies were individual variations often have very little in common.
I mean... actual Marxists should subject so-called Marxist-Leninist states to a Marxian materialist analysis, as Marx would have expected them to, and would have, himself. Discounting what they called themselves and what their motivations were, and looking at the material causes and effects and the actual reality on the ground.
Which is why parent-of-you commenter is missing the mark about my comments. I'm not making a "no true Scotsman" argument, and talking about "those weren't really socialist" blah blah. The reality is that material forces in the early 20th century pushed many places into these forms which looked much like each other, and had little to do with the ideologies held in the head of the parties and people involved and more to do with the combined and uneven nature of the economies of Russia, etc. and the structure of imperialism/colonialism at the time.
I'd point the finger back at parent-poster -- it's not about the essences of"progressivism" and "socialism" and "fascism" ideologies having some common net effect, or common DNA. That, too, is unscientific and idealist (in the philosophical sense) and frankly false.
It's about what productive forces and the state of the world looked like in the 20s and 30s, which also forced entire societies on trajectories regardless of what the leadership of said countries said about themselves.
And circling back, the value of "Trotskyism" as an intellectual current (when it's not debased by weird cultism) is not in the personhood of Trotksy himself or the fact that he somehow was some saintly figure (he was not), but in that he offered up a materialist, Marxist, analysis of what the USSR had become and how it had gotten there. Which had little to do with the people or their ideas, but the material forces that had made those people, their ideas, and their actions possible.
Technocratic managerialism is the common structure between them that channeled societal forces in similar directions — we can’t ignore the structure the governments took in analyzing their outcomes.
> The reality is that material forces in the early 20th century pushed many places into these forms which looked much like each other
The name of that form is technocratic managerialism — of which progressivism, communism, and fascism are different ideological interpretations of that common form.
And they had particular failure modes due to that form.
Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
"deeply stratified class hierarchy" - you have no idea how it was in the Soviet Union, it was nothing short of a cast system. It was so normalized you can see it clearly in the movies of that period.
Is every attempt at socialism the same to you? Do you not see a meaningful difference between Laos and the Soviet Union? Or China and the Soviet Union?
Are all they same to you? The Soviets were as close to socialism as it gets. It WAS the socialism in its purest possible form. This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.
See, to you these things are some abstract ideas, a beautiful theory. To me it is practice - this is what I lived in and lived by. So yes, I can tell the difference between SU and Laos. Laos has never been even close.
The official position was that China (along with Yugoslavia) wasn't truly socialist (they were referred as "opportunists" - google that), a kind of socialist-capitalist-feudalist hybrid. Vietnam, Laos, and DDR were considered developing semi-socialist. Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Albania were the "true" socialists though.
The arguments were pretty solid. I think it was a fairly correct classification as it was based on who owned and managed the means of production. Only USSR, Romania and Bulgaria (and Albania) had a nearly total ban on private ownership.
Again, it wasn't about who was "better" or "purer" in some superficial sense, but there was a formal criterion: who owns the means of production.
So, if I put on my old soviet socialist hat, I would describe Laos as developing socialist semi-feudal state transitioning from the military communism phase to some opportunistic mixed capitalist form, kind of like NEP. In short, it's not a question whether it is socialism or not, but rather where it fall on the spectrum, and more importantly - in what direction it is developing.
No, I mean a superficial similarity. The ideological aspect drives all aspects of government.
Did you come to the understanding you have through careful consideration and thought? Are you open to re-consideration of the ideas you have about this?
Many socialist and communist ideologies are explicitly opposed to even the existence of a state, and/or want a weak state. Some of them see state control of capital as inherently instituting class rule, and so consider it inherently a threat to their goals. In other words, while you will find ideologies that call themselves socialist that favor a state, the a strong state or even the existence of one is not a defining feature of socialism.
It is, however, an inherent, defining feature of fascism.
At least a dozen different socialist ideologies have entirely different answers to that. First you'll need to decide what you consider a state. Some - e.g. anarchists and other libertarian socialists reject the state outright, and don't want anything to replace it. Others reject "only" top down/involuntary authority, or want any replacement to be minimal in scope (e.g. communes).
A defining trait of a national state is sovereignty over a territory and control of the use of violence in that territory, and those are both traits that multiple socialist ideologies explicitly reject.
Whether or not you believe any of the variations can work is orthogonal to the point that socialism is not a singular ideology, but a spectrum of ideologies that where many reject the state, and so the existence of one is not a defining trait of socialism.
Insisting that it is, is a bit like insisting that capitalism is the same as fascism because capitalism too relies on a state (to enforce property rights). If anything, capitalism is inherently tied to the existence of a state because of the need to enforce property rights that many socialist ideologies reject. But very few socialists would equate capitalism with fascism (some would).
If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't.
They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.)
More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned:
JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach.
I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
MAGA don't throw out traditional conservative values (reinforcing the power of traditional racial, religious, and economic elites at the expense of other groups seeking a downward distribution of power), they throw out the libertarian values that got blended in and labeled as “conservative” values when a minimal winning coalition could not be formed purely around the overt embrace of actual traditional conservative values.
