Louis Proyect writes (and others follow up): >> The fascist system was based on capitalist property relations. >> "Corporatism" was the form that capitalism took in Spain, Portugal, >> Italy and Germany. It does not matter that Hitler called himself a >> National Socialist. Those were just words. He was a capitalist politician.
I have two intellectual diversions during the day: this list and a Leo Strauss list. Both have topics that periodically come up and gender a lot of repetitive heat. On the Strauss list, one of the topics is whether Nazi Germany was "capitalist." Ultimately, I come down that it was not capitalist, because "capitalism," to the extent it has any substantive meaning, means, following Aristotle (and I believe Marx as well), an ideology that liberates the greed impulse and advocates accumulation for no purpose other than accumulation (what Strauss called the "joyless quest for joy"). Capitalism cannot be confused with a social system based upon private property relations, because that would mean every country with private property relations would be "capitalist," and even Marxists don't believe that. Therefore, the fact that Germany maintained private property relations as the dominant form of the economy does not mean, ipso facto, Germany was "capitalist." National Socialism was not an ideology that the goal of the German people should be to accumulate bigger and better SUV's and big-screen TVs as an end in itself -- National Socialism treated the economy/private property relations as instrumental to other "loftier" goals David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
