/lit/ - Literature

>fascism was just capitalism in decay!

>fascism was just capitalism in decay!

>Prof. A. J. P. Taylor, the eminent British historian, and hardly a Nazi sympathizer, writes:

>"Fascism, it was claimed, represented the last aggressive stage of capitalism in decline, and its momentum could be sustained only by war. There was an element of truth in this, but not much. The full employment which Nazi Germany was the first European country to possess, depended in large part on the production of armaments; but it could have been provided equally well (and was to some extent) by other forms of public works from roads to great buildings. The Nazi secret was not armament production; it was freedom from the then orthodox principles of economics . . . the argument for war did not work even if the Nazi system had relied on armaments production alone. Nazi Germany was not choking in a flood of arms. On the contrary, the German Generals insists unanimously in 1939 that they were not equipped for war and that many years must pass before “rearmament in depth” had been completed."

>Answering predictions of ruin by orthodox economists throughout the world, Hitler explained that Germany had not withdrawn from world trade but had bypassed the international financial system by means of barter, stating:

>"If certain countries combat the German system this is done in the first instance because through the German method of trading their tricks of international currency and Bourse speculations have been abolished in favor of honest business transactions. . . . We are buyers of good foodstuff and raw materials and suppliers of equally good commodities!"

>More recently a professional economist, Henry C K Liu[18], who can hardly be suspected of Hitlerism, analyzed the methods by which Germany emerged from the Depression:

>"The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. In fact, German economic recovery preceded and later enabled German rearmament, in contrast to the US economy, where constitutional roadblocks placed by the US Supreme Court on the New Deal delayed economic recovery until US entry to World War II put the US market economy on a war footing. While this observation is not an endorsement for Nazi philosophy, the effectiveness of German economic policy in this period, some of which had been started during the last phase of the Weimar Republic, is undeniable."
https://counter-currents.com/2011/08/breaking-the-bondage-of-interesta-right-answer-to-usury-part-4/
https://counter-currents.com/2012/11/two-volumes-by-gottfried-feder/

>>22890402
>fascism was just capitalism in decay!

>Another important point which has now become well established in the historical literature is that despite the official National Socialist ideology on woman's role in society, girls and young women in the youth movement gained new experiences and responsibilities very much outside the domestic sphere. The experience of exercising authority within the organisation collided with the official image of women as mothers, tied to church, children and the chip-pan.
>In this context the HJ generation also argued that there had been a stronger 'social side' to National Socialism than later generations and most outsiders have been willing to acknowledge. Such things as the training competitions, for example, the fact that there were no school fees for the poor, the introduction of coeducation, competitions for the most social factory or more generally working for 'the community' were cited as examples.
>What was the psychological state and social condition of German youth as the war came to an end? There is little doubt that the Nazis' comprehensive youth programme had left a deep impression. More than any previous regime, the Third Reich had created a unified youth, with mentality, attitudes and values that transcended differences of class and region
>Many of the respondents - and not just the enthusiasts - dwelt on the fact that they had been involved in useful and socially meaningful activity. They helped on farms or in land reclamation or collected metal for recycling; they looked after elderly members of the community, collected for the Nazis' 'winter help scheme', knitted for the poor or sent parcels to soldiers at the front. Because of the blanket condemnation of the HJ in the post-war period, our interviewees were at pains to emphasise this positive useful side. Respondents of both sexes believed that their HJ activities had been a lot more worthwhile than the activities of modern youth who 'just hang around outside discos' and did nothing useful.
- Alexander von Plato, "The Hitler Youth generation and its roles in the two postwar German states," in Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770-1968 (Cambridge, England, 1995), 29

>>22742091

>>22651828
A take so stupid that it has actually hobbled Marxist analyses of fascism for 100 years, because it's so "catchy" and they can't resist resorting to it.

>>22630573
We only witnessed the revolutionary phase of fascism in the 20th century, its equivalent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but even then its successes were massive: it succeeded everything the communists promised and more, creating post-bourgeois organic societies. Mainstream anti-fascist histories even admit this, admitting for example that the first generation of post-fascist youth were essentially classless, and "rationally" collaborative and self-sacrificing rather than cynically competitive by default. If not for their pluralistic nationalism, they'd look identical to the communist's ideal "new man." But the pluralistic nationalism is in fact what makes it work: they aren't "rationally" collaborative at all, as Marx's lame secular humanism desired, instead they are IDEALISTS, interested in SUPRA-rational participation in the national unity, as parts in an organic whole (in which neither the parts nor the whole can be reduced to eachother but are dialectically interrelated). Bourgeois cynicism, the "war of all against all," is defeated by negating its materialistic, reductionist premises, not affirming them as Marx did. It's defeated by affirming what is great in man, not by intensifying the 19th century malaise over materialism and atheism as the communists did.

Fascism did all this simply by abandoning the nonsense elements of communist socialism and by sublimating what was valid in it. Mussolini was often considered one of Italy's greatest Marxist and syndicalist thinkers prior to his creation of fascism. So were many other Italian Fascist socialists.

>>22630233
Incorrect, sorry. Fascist corporatism were well-developed for example, as was the doctrine of the total state. See Carl Schmitt's writings on the latter for example. Also as I said in the above paragraphs, fascism actually carried out the communist revolution that the Bolsheviks couldn't, no matter how hard they tried. The Bolsheviks were operating from faulty premises: man is a terrestrial animal. The fascists simply went back to the older view of man, as a microcosm of a beautiful macrocosm, with limitless metaphysical potential. There are direct links between Papini's fascism and his pragmatism, and through him, William James' openness to a new metaphysics and to the exploration of unexplained phenomena, for example.

Fascism is fundamentally optimistic, open. It was the doctrine of the 20th century, only smothered by an unholy alliance of its two enemies (two sides of the same coin): materialist atheist all-dissolving communism and materialist atheist all-dissolving capitalism.

>>22054327
>Fascism is liberalism in decay.
A take so stupid that it has actually hobbled Marxist analyses of fascism for 100 years, because it's so "catchy" and they can't resist resorting to it.

>>21878615
And for the record Mussolini also broke up the mafia, which not only instantly came back after the Allies defeated Fascist Italy, but was actually aided and propped up by the Allies because the finance leviathan only understands governance in terms of economic vassal states and oligarchies. It can't deal honestly or have an honest trade relationship with another nation, it can only think in terms of "what is the local stagnant oligarchy that has the most cronyist control over corrupt politics in this country, and how do I give it a few luxury goods/status symbols, like admission to Harvard and Oxford, in exchange for it letting me dominate this country indefinitely from the comfort of my foreign stock exchange?"

>>21342145
>Prof. A. J. P. Taylor, the eminent British historian, and hardly a Nazi sympathizer, writes:

>"Fascism, it was claimed, represented the last aggressive stage of capitalism in decline, and its momentum could be sustained only by war. There was an element of truth in this, but not much. The full employment which Nazi Germany was the first European country to possess, depended in large part on the production of armaments; but it could have been provided equally well (and was to some extent) by other forms of public works from roads to great buildings. The Nazi secret was not armament production; it was freedom from the then orthodox principles of economics . . . the argument for war did not work even if the Nazi system had relied on armaments production alone. Nazi Germany was not choking in a flood of arms. On the contrary, the German Generals insists unanimously in 1939 that they were not equipped for war and that many years must pass before “rearmament in depth” had been completed."

>Answering predictions of ruin by orthodox economists throughout the world, Hitler explained that Germany had not withdrawn from world trade but had bypassed the international financial system by means of barter, stating:

>"If certain countries combat the German system this is done in the first instance because through the German method of trading their tricks of international currency and Bourse speculations have been abolished in favor of honest business transactions. . . . We are buyers of good foodstuff and raw materials and suppliers of equally good commodities!"

>More recently a professional economist, Henry C K Liu[18], who can hardly be suspected of Hitlerism, analyzed the methods by which Germany emerged from the Depression:

>"The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. In fact, German economic recovery preceded and later enabled German rearmament, in contrast to the US economy, where constitutional roadblocks placed by the US Supreme Court on the New Deal delayed economic recovery until US entry to World War II put the US market economy on a war footing. While this observation is not an endorsement for Nazi philosophy, the effectiveness of German economic policy in this period, some of which had been started during the last phase of the Weimar Republic, is undeniable."
https://counter-currents.com/tag/breaking-the-bondage-of-interest/

Keep dreaming about spontaneous LGBTQ+ worldwide communism while getting those fancy gatekeeping degrees at bourgeois universities

>>21025708
Myth

>>21011035
"It was claimed" is a concessive clause

>>20976948
Fascism unironically works.

>>20963158
>in the support of capital by fascist regimes but also by capitalists' support of fascism in the 1920s.
Myth

>>20935787
No, that is a jumbled and vague reformulation of the classic 1920s-1930s Marxist position that fascism is capitalism in decay, which is empirically untrue. All of the Marxist projections necessary for proposing it are empirically untrue, most centrally the usual untrue Marxist projection that economic growth would halt, causing crisis, causing communism. Economic growth not only didn't stop, it accelerated under fascism. All the conspiracy theories about fascists being subject to big business are empirically untrue in the eyes of mainstream scholars.

You won't read this, you will reply glibly as usual but I'm not talking to you. I'm talking past you, to the kind of person who actually wants to know the truth, and who is willing to listen to either of us equally.