There’s a long-running argument, online and elsewhere, about how socialist the National Socialists (otherwise known as Nazis, whose full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [*see NOTE below]) were.
The Nazis certainly weren’t conventional socialists, if there can be said to be such a thing. But they were indeed some sort of socialist—as briefly described in this previous post.
Now we have this article at the Federalist, which tackles the question once again and answers that the Nazis were indeed socialists, and certainly on the left side of the political spectrum. Here are some excerpts:
From the moment they enter the political fray, young right-wingers are told, “You own the Nazis.” At best, the left concedes it owns communism. This comforts a little, because even if far higher in body count, communism supposedly rebukes the scourge of racism. But it’s all a lie…
… The right consists of free-market capitalists, who think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property rights, and are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies and government solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions, such as church, as needed checks on state power…
The left believes the opposite. They distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in strong property rights.
They believe it is the government’s responsibility to solve social problems. They call for public intervention to “equalize” disparities and render our social fabric more inclusive (as they define it). They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance, income inequality, minimum wage, access to health care, and righting past injustices. These people talk about “democracy”—the method of collective decisions.
By these definitions, the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.”…
As Hayek stated in 1933, the year the Nazis took power: “[I]t is more than probable that the real meaning of the German revolution is that the long dreaded expansion of communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognized because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden by the difference in phraseology and the privileged groups.”
Nazism and socialism competed with the Enlightenment-based individualism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and others who profoundly influenced the American founding and define the modern American right at its best…
Much much more at the link.
It is true, however, that Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis, both in Germany and elsewhere. But—as the Federalist article points out—this does not change the fact that both were primarily on the left. They were definitely different (as could be seen, for example, by the distinction between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR). But it was in part a turf war. Both were devoted to statism vs. individualism, and both believed in government control of business as well:
The Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It calls for “equality of rights for the German people”; the subjugation of the individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery”; “confiscation of war profits”; the nationalization of industry; profit-sharing in heavy industry; large-scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the “free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman Law; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich…
In “Mein Kampf,” he states that without his racial insights National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.” Nor did Hitler eschew this sentiment once reaching power. As late as 1941, with the war in bloom, he stated “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same” in a speech published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Nazi propaganda minister and resident intellectual Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis would install “real socialism” after Russia’s defeat in the East.
Very few people in this country are aware of these facts. The left’s propaganda machine has been teaching that Hitler was a man of the right for a long, long time, and for the most part that propaganda has been successful.
[ * NOTE: To get the exact name for the Nazi Party—I knew it was more than “National Socialists,” but I wasn’t 100% sure what it was—I went to Wiki, as evidenced by the link I offered in the text of my post. However, as though to demonstrate the point in the last paragraph of my piece, this is the way the Wiki entry begins [emphasis mine]:
National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism…is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.
Far-right groups? The article goes on to describe the socialist roots and socialist aims of Nazism, without seeing the irony there.
By the way, there is a Wiki talk page that discusses the Nazi right/left issue, although “discusses” is really not the right word. Here’s what it says under FAQs:
Why does this article say that the Nazis were right wing?
Because that is the consensus of reliable sources, in this case historians and political scientists.
But the word “socialist” is right in their name!
The word “socialism” has different meanings in different contexts. The phrase “national socialist” as used by the Nazis referred to a nationalistic view that the German people should prosper at the expense of others, or more specifically, that the interests of the German people were the paramount concern of the party. The meaning of “socialist” was not “communal ownership of property” as it is generally used to mean today, but “of or pertaining to a society” in the more general sense.
There’s much much more in which the Wiki folks firmly reject the “Nazis are leftist” arguments. I don’t have time to read all the links, but if any of you feels like tackling it, I encourage you to do so. My guess is that they reject all sources (including one contemporary to the Nazis, such as Hayek, or the writings of Goebbels—hey, what did Goebbels know about Nazism?), and pay attention to historians and social scientists many of whom are invested in leftism and have their own motives for disowning the Nazis.
Wiki does add this:
But what if I find a large number of very reliable sources all claiming that Nazism is left wing?
Then you will be more than welcome to show them to us, so that we can see that they are very reliable and that they assert that Nazism is a left wing ideology. If they are, then we will change the article.
Get it? They have to be very reliable, and anyone on the right is probably considered to be inherently unreliable. But I would suggest that anyone who wants to put in a little bit of work should research those Wiki links that point to previous discussions of the issue, and see how Wiki has handled it in the past, and try again to introduce this information.
One thing that is actually less relevant is what the Nazis called themselves. The “Socialist” in the name is far less important than what the Nazis did.]
