On Mon, 26 Oct 1998 14:25:21 -0500 "Charles Brown"
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes:
>"Nuremburg" ? The Nazis mass
>murders were not an alternative
>political strategy to capitalism. Nazism
>was capitalism. Fascism is a form
>of capitalist rule.
You know, I've always had trouble with the Nazism = Capitalism equation. I'm no fan of capitalism, but let's not forget that Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialist German Worker's Party. And then of course, there's the rather inconvenient fact that Mussolini used to be a socialist.
I know, I know: according to Marxist orthodoxy, Fascism is supposed to be an extreme form of capitalism that occurs under conditions of economic crisis, but I'm sorry, I don't buy it.
There's a tendency among revolutionary socialists to dissociate themselves from atrocities committed by nominally socialist regimes. So by a few leaps of logic...VOILA!...these crimes weren't really committed by socialists! They were committed by state-capitalists/bureaucratic centralists!
I'm not saying that all socialists are complicit in such atrocities, but please, let's stop blaming every spontaneous outbreak of widespread madness in history on the forces of capitalism. Hitler may not have had the support of the majority of German people, but he did have a sizable amount of support from the so-called "proletarian" classes. Yeah, yeah, big business supported Hitler. But if there's one thing I've noticed about big business, it's that it tends to support anyone in power, regardless of their professed ideology. Or haven't you noticed all of the corporations who are aching to do business in Cuba?
Bottom line, folks: let's do away with the notion that all the bad guys in history are de facto capitalists. It's infantile, and it's intellectually lazy.
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