In message <CMM.0.90.0.909482936.kbevans at panix3.panix.com>, boddhisatva
<kbevans at panix.com> writes
> Who voted for Hitler and supported the initial Nazi movement and who
>supported the full-blown Hitler regime are quite obviously two different
>questions.
I agree, but for different reasons. I consider the elections prior to the Nazi takeover to be the more authentic reflection of public opinion than those afterwards. After all, the voting taken before the imprisonment of working class leaders in the concentration camps (the first to be so detained) was relatively uncoerced. Voting in plebiscites or other fascistic exercises in rallying the populace, by contrast, reflects the extremes of coercion and terror that the Nazis subjected working people to.
> There is no reason to suppose that working class people are
>*more* sophisticated in the question of who their real enemy is than any
>other class of people. Clearly history proves otherwise.
To the contrary, the working class demonstrated in fact their political sohistication in continuing to oppose the destructive political programme of the far-right. The middle classes, by contrast, sacrificed the entire countr on the alter of Hitler's demagoguery, out of their own sectional hysteria.
> Obviously a
>majority and probably a vast majority of Germans supported the Nazi state.
>Whether they did this because they were being German patriots during
>wartime, German ideologues, working-class dupes or evil-minded capitalists
>is, to some extent, moot.
What rubbish. The working class opponents of fascism paid with their lives and their liberty. The working class was coerced into silence. In a state of extreme depoliticiasation at the hands of this terror it might be argued that the populace could be pesuaded out to wave flags on the street, but this hardly constitutes popular support.
The argument you put forward is that of Lord Vansittart, the German nationalist emigre, who popularised the argument of 'collective guilt'. As Hannah Arendy rightly said against Vansittart, 'if all are guilty, then none is guilty'. Vansittart's formula obviates the actual culpability of Hitler's active supporters in the middle classes and amongst the capitalists.
> Germans now clearly see the sin of Nazism as
>a sin - and a vast, thoroughly capitalist majority at that.
But Nazism was not a 'sin'. We know that because it was supported by all the major churches. Religious obscuratism is of no help here. Nazism was a strategy of destroying working class organisations by mobilising a mass base amongst the middle classes around a pro-capitalist programme of national chauvinism. Today's official German ideology distances itself from the formal trappings of Fascism, but not from the system that gave rise to it.
>
> The question of whether Nazism was purely an expression of
>capitalism is simply a foregone conclusion. It wasn't.
It is only a foregone conclusion because it is unaceptable to the ideologues of capitalism to tell the truth about the degraded and destructive measures capitalism resorted to. In fact the Nazis substantially enhanced German capitalism. Profits rates were increased many times over. Work was militarised, leading to ever greater rates of exploitation. Slave labour from Poland was put to work. German and E European Jews were worked to death to enrich German capitalists. The material basis of the post-war German economic miracle were the profits generated under the dictatorial conditions of Nazi Germany.
>At least to some
>undeniable extent, a socialist "ideology" was mixed in, however twisted.
This is trivial and beneath you.
>Furthermore, the Nazi war machine had in common with other war machines
>the characteristic of the state over-reaching strict property rights to
>forward its aims - only more so. Clearly a capitalist had no means to
>refuse a Nazi order. The bourgeoisie as capitalists were subject to the
>bourgeoisie as state warriors. The real capitalist bourgeoisie went to
>war with Hitler, after all. That was no accident. Hitler was a violent
>statist and capitalism had progressed beyond the stage where it could
>function under such a regime.
I'm a little confused by your categories here but I think the sense is just foolish. You take as read the exact counterposition of state and capital, whereas in fact the priority of the rights of the state against individual capitalists is endemic to all capitalist societies. The fact of a state with powers is not a disproof of the capitalistic character of fascism, but a proof of the same.
The capitalists supported and welcomed Hitler's assault on the working class. They supported and encouraged his plans for expansion into the East. They supported and profited by his enslavement of Poles and Slavs and destruction of Jews.
It would be wrong to say that capitalism = fascism, because there have been many forms of capitalist state. But it is unavoidable that in the historical conditions of Germany after the first world war, the capitalists made a wager on Hitler's petty bourgeois NSDAP. -- Jim heartfield