Posted on 11/25/2007 11:50:06 AM PST by ECM
The Nazis were Marxists, no matter what our tainted academia and corrupt media wishes us to believe. Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Ku Klux Klan, Maoists, radical Islam and Facists -- all are on the Left, something that should be increasingly apparent to decent, honorable people in our times. The Big Lie which places Nazis on some mythical Far Right was created specifically so that there would be a bogeyman manacled on the wrists of those who wish us to move "too far" in the direction of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
You forgot (from the article):
17. Proposed to seize all unearned income for use by the State.
Since banking, interest on loans, the ownership of stock, and all manner of sources of unearned income are the very foundation of a capitalist economic system, this point alone proves the Nazis were Leftists.
Calling socialists Marxists is not a great leap at all. Since Marx was the ultimate teacher of the society over and above the individual, all the variants toward Totalitarianism can accurately be called Marxists.
In the 16th and 17th Centuries, Catholics and Protestants warred with each other—and had some significant religious differences. That didn’t mean they were both not rightly called Christians.
By that logic, Al Capone must not have been a gangster because the only people he killed were other gangsters.
There was only one significant difference between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. German socialism was nationalistic while Soviet socialism was internationalist. Those differing policies were not accidental. Germany had a nearly homogeneous population united by a common language and history. Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution was a vast multi racial and multi ethnic territory with no unifying language or culture. If Hitler had been Russian, he would have been the internationalist just as Stalin would have been a nationalist in Germany. They each pulled the levers they needed to gain and consolidate power.
As far as their economic policies and view of the role and power of government over the people, they were virtually identical. The fact that they made war on each other means nothing.
Huh??????? If anything, it was 10 times bigger in the 1930s.
Nazi = National Socialist - ‘nuf said
Let the ignorant among us (including me) in on who that is.
The eventual goal of Socialists is the same as communists: the public confiscation of private property, which includes any income, ‘earned,’ or ‘unearned.’
Communists chug the whole bottle. Socialists get there one shot at a time.
The real difficulty with attempting to view mid-20th-century industrial society in Marxian terms was that he was writing from the perspective of the early industrial revolution - those predictions specifically delineated in the 1848 Manifesto were outdated by the time he published the first volume if Capital. Illiteracy, starvation, immiseration, alienation, falling profits - those looked like slam-dunks when he and Engels were looking at them from the outside in the mid-19th century. Most Marxist commentators of the 1930's and beyond were viewing the Great Depression as a manifestation of those predictions but in fact what was actually happening to the working classes at the time was nearly the opposite.
The term "proletariat" simply no longer means what Marx meant by it, and he defined it fairly closely (in fact, it's one of the few terms in his work that tend to remain pretty much the same throughout. Such things as "relations of production" do not).
All IMHO, of course...
SOne thing this kind of analysis brings into sharp focus—and the “traditional” understanding of Marxism and Nazism cannot fathom—is the current condition of Communist China.
If Fascism/Nazism is opposite of Communism than a nation of 1.2 Billion must not exist today, as a burgeoning “capitalist” country, with an oprressive militaristic Communist government. “Smart” totalistarians will use market forces, even as the government attempts to totally control idividuals’ lives behind the scenes.
Only when its understood that Fascism/Nazisism sits next to Communism, does the movement of China into successful captolistic enterprise make sense. Freedom for business does not necessarily mean liberty of conscience.
China is simpler than many have portrayed it.
Essentially, Mao saw what failed in the USSR: isolationist central control of the economy. He tore those pages out of Marx’s instruction manual for tyrants, and employed international ‘trade’ in order to have an income (using slave labor as his ‘capital’) but controlled his country centrally on the inside. Thus the ChiComs have a good income and totalitarian control within.
The goal is the same, tyranny over the people by a few who rule. It never was the goal and never will be, to ‘free the working class.’
I don't think that Marx defined the proletariat as "illiterate." His definition was those who were 'wage slaves' and who owned no property with which they could provide for their own subsistence. His was an urban/industrial definition of people no longer tied to the land, but to a wage. They could be illiterate laborers just off the farm or skilled and literate mechanics, clerks or low level managerial. The commonality was that they were tied to a wage and possessed no capital. Even Marx would have agreed that the industrial revolution and capitalism caused an increase in literacy by moving people out of the peasant life and into urban environments where literacy was not only much easier to access but also held a economic value, even for the proletariat.
(2) less immiserated, (3) enjoying rising, not falling wages, and (4) capable of considerable class mobility (that also was definitional all by itself).
It was precisely in those decades after the 1st World War in Germany and most of Western Europe when the "misery index" for the proletariat was rising, wages were falling, and class mobility seemed to be an illusion when Marx's ideas reached their zenith. Hitler and the Nazis simply adapted Marx's ideology into terms that would sell better to the German people as a whole -- nationalism and racism layered on to the ever present class-envy theme.
The Russian revolution was something that Marx would not have recognized or even predicted since Russia in 1918 was barely an industrial nation and capitalism was more the exception rather than the rule.
I have read Skousen’s book and can also strongly recommend it!
I think envy is also the reason why the former USSR has not been able to overcome its leftist past and is sinking back under a totalitarian vise again. Envy is a hard habit to break and one which dictators always love to manipulate for their own benefit. It is easier to believe someone else has advanced through trickery rather than think oneself without talent. The sad truth, though, is that ultimately envy will get you in the end. It is a spiritual problem that brings a sickness of soul and personality. As old Solomon put it, “A sound heart is life to the body, But envy is rottenness to the bones.” Prov. 14:30.
> (Marx proposing that eventually the state would “wither away,” one of his more nonsensical and historically invalid notions).
Maybe Marx put that notion in to get support from gullible anarchists, do you think?
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