(cross post from the politics forum - figure it has historical value)
It's a simple argument. Hitler wanted control of the state to pursue his ends. Capitalism, which allows and encourages private ownership, is incompatible with a state-directed mission. Hitler's war machine took over private enterprises and directed them towards Nazi ends. Socialism by definition is state ownership of the means of production. It is his own brand of socialism, the main difference with Marxism being it would be comprised of a unified race, rather than a unified class. In one instance he says "There are no such things as classes: they cannot be. Class means caste and caste means race."This seems to be one of his main bones of contention with Marx.
Quotes, from Wikiquote:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
From 1922 speech:
Quote:
The Jews have shown real genius in profiting by politics. This capitalistic people, which was brought into existence by the unscrupulous exploitation of men, has understood how to get the leadership of the Fourth Estate into its own hands; and by acting both on the Right and on the Left it has its apostles in both camps. On the Right the Jew does his best to encourage all the evils there are to such an extent that the man of the people, poor devil, will be exasperated as much as possible— greed of money, unscrupulousness, hard- heartedness, abominable snobbishness. More and more Jews have wormed their way into our upper-class families; and the consequence has been that the ruling class has been alienated from its own people.
From same speech:
Quote:
At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it "National Socialist.' We said to ourselves that to be 'national' means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be 'social' means so to build up the state and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honorable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it.
In 1931:
Quote:
To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.
Idealizing of Sparta, an ancient socialist state. Interestingly he really admires the racial value of the Spartans even though I believe most helots were also Greek, but I could be wrong.
Quote:
At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
As you can also see in some of the above quotes, Hitler borrows quite a bit from Marx, including seeing Jews as representative of Capitalism. This from Marx, On the Jewish Question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the...e%20real%20Jew.
Quote:
Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.[...] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. [...] In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
A common objection is that private businesses contributed to the Nazi state. This is partly true. Hitler and the Weimar Republic before him did privatize companies to increase productivity during the massive depression they were in. But, Hitler took control of those companies with heavy regulation. From wiki:
Quote:
Privatization and business ties
The Great Depression had spurred increased state ownership in most Western capitalist countries. This also took place in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic.[39] But after the Nazis took power, industries were privatized en masse. Several banks, shipyards, railway lines, shipping lines, welfare organizations, and more were privatized.[40] The Nazi government took the stance that enterprises should be in private hands wherever possible.[41] State ownership was to be avoided unless it was absolutely necessary for rearmament or the war effort, and even in those cases “the Reich often insisted on the inclusion in the contract of an option clause according to which the private firm operating the plant was entitled to purchase it.”[42] However, the privatization was "applied within a framework of increasing control of the state over the whole economy through regulation and political interference,"[43] as laid out in the 1933 Act for the Formation of Compulsory Cartels, which gave the government a role in regulating and controlling the cartels that had been earlier formed in the Weimar Republic under the Cartel Act of 1923.[44] These had mostly regulated themselves from 1923 to 1933.[45]
This only shows the danger of state ownership of business (socialism).
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