Practically, the Nazi's did not nationalize a single industry. I have read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" three times. Please tell me what industries the Nazi's nationalized. Socialists nationalize industries. I can give you a host of examples of socialists nationalizing industries. These are practical examples. The only reason the world "socialist" is in the name National Socialist Party was because of the appeal that socialism had to the working man of the time. It was a mere ruse developed from El Duce's former socialist experiences and Hitler's takeover of a small, ineffective revisionist socialist party. Both men thoroughly rejected Marxism and saw the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to the world and both expected Britain and the United States to ally with them ultimately to fight the Soviets--true Socialists.
I will not be posting further on this subject as it is one that is well settled, in fact, not even seriously argued, by political philosophers. If you want to discuss the idea that a new spectrum is more pertinent to modern times, and why, I am all ears. I find America torn between more and more powerful fascists and more and more powerful socialists and I see little progress on the libertarian front. In fact, most Americans seem truly afraid of real freedom. I wish everyone had a gun and I would let everyone out of prison. The governments sole duty would be to protect my constitutional rights against governmental instrusion and to find and prosecute anyone who commits violence, theft or fraud against me.
Maybe we can phrase it this way. The Nazis had far, far more in common with our Democratic Party than it did with right-wing faction of the GOP.
I believe Marx said as much. The question is how seriously you want to take him or can take him. The idea of the "withering away of the state" looks like a myth, religion or fantasy.
More moderate socialists pretty clearly thought that for the time being there would be more government and more regulation and control of the economy. Perfect freedom might be the eventual goal, but how it would be achieved was unclear. It's likely that the Fabians and Social Democrats didn't think it could be achieved in their lifetime. But understand too, that "freedom" in their lexicon had different meanings than it did in conservative or libertarian ones.
Revolutionary Communists often did have timetables for the arrival of pure communism. But it never seemed to arrive. There was always some enemy, some saboteurs or spies or subversives to be rounded up in order to realize the dream. I think they deluded themselves. Their concepts were vague and elastic enough that even the worst of tyrannies might proclaim that the stateless, utopian future was just around the corner.
What I'm headed to is the idea that socialism was a more complex idea than nationalization of industry in the ostensible pursuit of utopian freedom. Look to pre-Marxian socialists and you'll find their communes organizing people's lives in great detail, for their own good. Marx tied socialism more closely to the philosophical and religious strivings of his own day for freedom and redemption from alienation, but it's not clear that this theoretical emphasis really affected the practiced of democratic socialism or revolutionary socialist dictatorship.
One could make a case that Nazism did have things in common with socialism. Certainly the tiny pre-Hitler party gave greater support to nationalizations and expropriations. The line about the Nazi party in power was that rather than nationalize industry, they nationalized the people. Of course, Hitler kept his hands off the incomes and investments of the industrialists, but there does seem to be some statist overlap or continuity between the Nazis and socialists. Not to say that they were or were only and essentially socialists, but they were both part of a more statist early 20th century atmosphere.
The political atmosphere a century ago was far more statist than what we see today. The Webbs, early fabian socialists divided the political world into "A's" and "B's" -- anarchists and bureaucrats -- and they, like many others at the time were emphatically on the side of the "B's."
Were the Nazi's rivals and competitors, the Bolshevik Communists, "true socialists?" Certainly Democratic Socialists would dispute this.
Was racism the distinguishing factor between left and right? Read George Watson on socialist thought of a century ago. It's always the belief of present-day progressives that their ideological ancestors shared their views on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class and the rest, but it's not always the case.
Was Nazism devoted to state worship? Emphatically so. And yet, in the world the Nazis would have created, the actual, historical German state and its provinces would have been subsumed or submerged or dissolved in a much greater empire. Their devotion to power and to the New Order was paramount and unquestioned, but the actual state as it had been known would "wither away" in the new racial order.
For the record, I think Peikoff is wrong. He oversimplifies too much, and ignores things like imperialism and the the wars of the era that strengthened a non-socialist, rightist statism. But those who would deny links between socialism or national socialism are also oversimplifying. The horrors of the 20th Century have connections to long standing Western ideologies. Arguing that one side is completely innocent and all the guilt on the other side may please ideologues of one stripe or another, but it makes people ignore some of the lessons that we can learn from the tragedies of the past.
In the atmosphere that existed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, even decent people with impeccable ideological origins ended up embracing one form or another of barbarism. The struggles of the age led people to one extreme as a means of defeating another. "Extremes" need not be polar opposites, though there's something in the human mind that leads us to conceive of them in that way when the opposition of each to the other is so strong