Nazism's Marxist Roots

Over at the UM Clergy Facebook page there has been an ongoing thread about the virtues or lack thereof of socialism, especially so-called "democratic" socialism. So here is a basic, beginning read for people interested in contemporary American politics, since many surveys show that young Americans are substantially positive toward implementing socialism in the US. 

First, there is no real usefulness in speaking of our political divisions as between the Left and the Right. They are convenient labels but not very informative. In particular, to say that socialists are on the Left while neo-Nazis are on the Right is grievously misinformed. Marx and his theoretical successors were the political ancestors of socialism and communism, as all acknowledge - but Marxist theory was the ancestor also of both Fascism and Nazism. And the founders of those two parties said so.

When the media and others characterize the conflicts between Antifa (supposedly on the Left) and the "alt-Right" as clashes between groups at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they do us no service. They are both authoritarian-supremacist groups with deep Marxist roots, and each wants to rule over the other. (What did you think they would do, hold hands and sing kum-bah-ya?)

We are calling one side the "alt-right" for no other reason than it's easier to keep score, I guess, like we call one team a home team and the other visitors, but they're both baseball teams. What we really have is two Marxist-born groups having at each other because neither will countenance a competitor.

Yes, some demonstrators here or there carried Nazi flags, just as some of the counter-demos carried hammer-and-sickle Soviet flags. In fact, those flags are almost interchangeable. Everyone knows and acknowledges that Soviet Communism was based on Marxism, hence Marxism and its spawn today are "Left," but everyone also apparently thinks that Fascism and Nazism apparently just sprang up out of thin air with no relation to political theories and contexts that came before, and that Fascism and Nazism were and are "Right."

Untrue. Both Fascism and Nazism were founded on Marxist theory and belonged firmly on the Left side of the spectrum, according to their founders. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler gave a series of interviews to a trusted party member named Hermann Rauschning, in which Hitler explained Nazi theory, founding and outlook. By the end of the decade, Rauschning had left the party and fled to the United States. There he published a book entitled The Voice of Destruction, also known as Hitler Speaks, summarizing his interviews (New York, NY, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940).

Below is a set of quotes in which Hitler himself explains Nazism's Marxist roots. Note that Hitler even invited German Communists to join the Nazi party, saying he would welcome them.

"I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order."

"It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it…. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will."

Hitler was clear in his conversations that Nazism was Left-Socialist and that even Communists were urged to join with him:

"But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one."
Otto Wagener, in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 26

"After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism."
Otto Wagener in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 288

As for Fascism, it was the name of the political party founded by Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini, the century's preeminent fascist, invented the word to describe his national political system. As a young man, Mussolini was politically groomed and nurtured by Marxists. He became an active member the Communist International. He corresponded with Vladimir Lenin almost until Lenin died. Mussolini broke from the Comintern for two main reasons. First, he saw little chance of it succeeding in bringing forth international communist revolutions. Second, he rejected the "international" part because he realized that what that really meant was "Russian controlled." Benito was an ardent Italian nationalist and opposed subordinating Italian socialism to Russian oversight.

In 1932, Mussolini wrote this definition of fascism:

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

..The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone ... .

That is practically the template of today's extremes of both "Left" and "Right."

The symbol of the Italian fascisti party, using a bundle of reeds and an ax
copied from an ancient symbol of the Roman imperium.

Jeff Goldstein on FB:

I told you all before and I’ll repeat it now: the alt right is not conservative, and it is every bit as driven by identity politics and blood essentialism as the prog left.

Antifa, BLM, CAIR, the New Black Panthers, La Raza, the Pussy Hatters, the KKK — these are all identity movements and all formed and animated by the kind of identity politics championed by the left, and legitimated by the likes of Edward Said and other academic cultural Marxists who recognized the way to power was to divide, and then control, particular identity groups, whose narratives they seek to create and police.

The alt-right is only “right wing” in the continental sense. The American conservative is classically liberal, while the American progressive is Fabian socialist.

Don’t listen to labels; follow the assumptions made by each movement — the alt right, the prog left — and you’ll soon recognize that they are the same. This is tribalism, no more and no less. What we are witnessing is an attempt to corrupt the ideals of a propositional nation based on individualism and individual universal rights (and that’s how our Constitutional republic is designed to operate) — a lesson Google’s pillorying of a software engineer as “anti-diversity” should have made clear.

You should reject this archaic collectivism from whatever group espouses it, because in the end it is simply anti-individualism dressed in mob attire to bolster cowardice and bigotry in numbers.

As a clarification, I am not saying that Nazism was founded on nothing but Marxism. Of course there were other influences, and Nazism's antisemitism did not spring directly from Marxism. However, Marxism did and still does carry with it its own strain of Jew-hatred. Much modern Jew-hatred has sprung from the Left, not the least of which has been the Nazis. Dennis Prager's book about antisemitism, Why The Jews?, has an entire chapter on leftist Jew-hatred. Marx himself was no friend to the Jews and he was the venue by which a lot of old tropes about Jews and money got turned into bankers and capitalists manipulating the world.

Even so, antisemitism was endemic across most of western Europe and went all the way back to the Black Plague years, centuries before, when the Jews got blamed for the plague.

And it's been pretty well covered how German Teutonic mythicism shaped a lot of Hitler's ideology on the supremacy of Aryan blood and German destiny. But as for the political workings of Nazi government and economic structuring, there was not a lot of daylight between what the Soviet communists did and what Hitler did. Unlike the Soviets, Hitler did not outright seize and nationalize industries and businesses, but he did wholly dictate terms of business to them, what they could manufacture, how much they could charge, who would get first claim on output, whom they could hire. German industry remained private in name only. And if they were smart, business owners joined the Nazi party, just as Soviets knew that to become plant managers and plan supervisors proven reliability as a party member was a basic requirement.

Here is an excellent question:



See also, "Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian," at the Mises Institute site, and Encyclopedia Britannica's explanation of the theoretical foundations of National Socialism, which included but was not limited to ordinary political socialism.

There is a lot more about what the top Nazis said about their Marxist foundation.

From Dissecting Leftism, a blog by  John J. Ray, Ph.D., who describes himself as a "former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society" and "former anarcho-capitalist."

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.) ...

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists.

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

At RealClearPolitics: "Leftists Become Incandescent When Reminded of the Socialist Roots in Nazism."

So why did Hitler and Stalin war upon each other? It was not over ideology per se. It was basically much as if James and Jesse had fought each other over who would run the James gang: no matter who won, it would have been still the same outlaw gang as before. There was a deep racist and Aryan supremacist strain to Germany's contempt for most of the peoples east of them, too. But in manner of actual governance, Germany was very socialist. 

And remember, from a guy who ought to know:
 

Update: "I sat down with historian, sociologist, and author Dr. Rainer Zitelmann to learn about the misunderstood economic philosophy of Adolf Hitler and the true meaning of national socialism. Drawing from his book “Hitler’s National Socialism,” Rainer explains how Hitler’s economic policies blended the planned economy of Stalin’s Soviet Union with social Darwinist beliefs, attempting to harness the benefits of competition toward the single-minded objectives of the state. We explore the key differences between national socialism, fascism, and communism, and why many people today fail to grasp the lessons of 20th-century totalitarian regimes."