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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3830 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book. Mostly a familiar portrait of another "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" case, which once again illustrates that just because you've been kicked out for failing to keep up with the perpetual revolution, that doesn't actually make you "right wing." (Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too, and at one point uses the phrase "the left's soft bigotry of low expectations.")

Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too

Is he necessarily wrong?

I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist."

This is not appreciably different from Stalin's view of "socialism", or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, to my understanding. I've seen no historical examples where theory was actually load-bearing in any sort of grand sense. Like, there's nothing actually in Marx that requires lysenkoism or any other specific evolution. Stalin beats trotsky and bukharin not because he has a better understanding of Marxist theory, but because he's crueler, more paranoid, and more vicious, and these are in actual fact the traits that Marxism rewards. The theory is word-game Calvin-ball; you can get from Das Kapital to whatever arbitrary power-structure you prefer, there are no actual constraints beyond momentary, relative expedience.

To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

"We know how to solve all our problems. Problems that aren't solved are the fault of specific people with names and addresses." It does not seem to me that "Class Struggle" is appreciably more real in any meaningful sense than "race struggle", and they both boil down to fixing everything by purging the bad people. That's the obvious commonality between the two, and between them and the French Revolution as well.

The NSDAP were a socialist revolutionary vanguard party. To the degree that there is no "coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing" it is even less coherent to pass them of as "right wing". Sure they were vaguely center-right with in the specific context of the Wiemar Rebulic but that's more an indication of how much of a basket-case German interwar period politics were rather than a commentary on the Nazis themselves.

Outside of the Wiemar Republic the various NSDAP-aligned bund groups tended to code as far left and would often caucus with and recruit from thier more explicity socialist/marx-inspired brethren.

Is he necessarily wrong?

Yes, if you have a passing familiarity with Weimar-era politics. The Nazis' allies were right-wingers - primarily Hugenberg's DNVP, but also the right-wing faction of Zentrum that included Bruning and Papen (until he was kicked out for being too right-wing) and various right-coded figures in Hindenberg's inner circle (particularly Schleicher, who favoured a military government once it became clear that a DNVP-led government was never going to win a majority in the Reichstag). The Nazi's sworn enemies were left-wingers (both the SPD and the KPD, although the Nazis occasionally co-operated with the KPD on purely negative projects intended to weaken the Weimar Republic).

Nobody who was around at the time had the slightest shadow of a doubt that Hitler was right-wing. Some of the more perceptive liberals, and even a few perceptive democratic socialists (like Orwell) grokked that the difference between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism was less important than it looked - but even Orwell writes from the perspective that the right-left and right-wrong axes are separate, and that Nazis were right-wrong and Communists were left-wrong.

although the Nazis occasionally co-operated with the KPD on purely negative projects intended to weaken the Weimar Republic).

The sheer buffoonery of the KPD is a constant source of amazement for me. From labeling every other party in the Weimar Republic fascist - including a multitude of other left-wing socialist parties - to declaring the Social Democrats their primary enemies and "social fascists" while begrudgingly cooperating with the literal fascist NDSAP.

My understanding is that they were acting on orders from Moscow in all those cases. So they only looked like buffoons.

According to Communist doctrine, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes possible when the capitalist regime is undone by its inherent internal contradictions and can no longer sustain itself. German Communists believed that the NSDAP are simply the goons of the capitalist class and will inexorably contribute to this process with their antics, so temporarily cooperating with them on certain matters* and egging them on in general was seen as acceptable, as it serves the final goal. "The worse, the better."

Again, I'm not making this up. The KPD leadership were actually convinced that the Nazis will be incapable of consolidating their rule once they seize power, because the revolution will certainly follow.

Also, the SocDems were the main political power in the Weimar regime, at least until its final years. Since the Communists wanted to topple this burgeois republic, they saw the SocDems as the main enemy, as they were the main political obstacle. They also, of course, saw them as the dirty traitors of the Revolution of 1918-19. In reality, of course, there was nothing for the SocDems to betray, as they never signed up for a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist order in the first place.

*I remember finding in an otherwise forgettable history book pictures of a rent strike co-organized by the local NSDAP and KPD party leaders in November 1932 in Berlin, with their respective banners put up next to one another on the forefronts, to just give one example. I couldn't find anything about it online though.

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