The Nazi Economy

[Ulhas Joglekar]

Ken Lawrence is right about the shift from the relative surplus value to the
absolute surplus value discussed by Sohn-Rethel in The Economy and Class
Structure of German Fascism. My question is: Is fascism almost impossible
today,since the relative surplus value is the dominant and decisive form of
surplus value in the contemporary capitalism?

Ulhas

----- Original Message -----
From: <Apsken at aol.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2000 7:47 PM
Subject: The Nazi Economy


> Daniel Davies wrote,
>
> >  Every time *this* comes up, I register disagreement by bringing up
Hjalmar
> >  Schacht, Hitler's Reichsbank chairman in the relevant period and one of
the
> >  few people to have been acquitted at Nuremberg.  The only relevant Nazi
> >  econonomic policy in the 1930s was aggressive monetary expansion,
financed
> >  by default on overseas debt.  Hence, (possibly) M. Sawicky's analogy
with
> >  the current USA?
>
>     Evidently no one pays attention, then. The last time I saw someone
post
> such an absurdity, I urged that all parties to the debate consult (German
> left communist) Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Economics and Class Structure of Nazi
> Germany. In that book Sohn-Rethel demonstrated that the most productive
> modern industries (such as Siemens) were incapable of recovery under
ordinary
> capitalist remedies, while the most backward and traditional ones (Krupp,
> Thyssen, I.G. Farben) recovered only by plundering the state treasury with
> war production. The Nazi regime "solved" this economic dilemma by shifting
> from the production of relative surplus value to the production of
absolute
> surplus value, by shifting from a liberal bourgeois system of "free" labor
to
> the Nazi system of slave labor. Hence Doug Henwood is correct, and the
> snipers have not grazed his point with any of these potshots.
>
> Ken Lawrence