The Nazi Economy

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Jan 4 08:55:16 PST 2000



> the current USA?
>>> <Apsken at aol.com> 01/04/00 09:17AM >>>

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.

((((((((((((((

CB: So is Doug criticizing Keynes as well as Liu on this point ? Is Keynes wrong trying to praise the Nazi economy without praising the slave labor system in his introduction to the book ?

CB



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