Understanding Nazi Germany's Socialism

I want to preface this by saying that I did

a 30 minute plus video deep dive on this years ago. You should go check that out.

And it's still true. Yes, the Nazis were socialists.

And no, that does not mean they were Marxist.

And it does not mean modern socialists are all Nazis. Let's get that out the way.

Now, why do people constantly get this wrong?

It's because they treat socialism like it has only one like ballot form.

Usually it's Marxism and anything outside of that gets hand waved away.

Historically, that's nonsense.

Socialism has always been this family of ideas and socialists have constantly fought

other socialists.

Proudhon fought Marx, Marx fought LaSalle, Lenin fought the Mensheviks,

Stalin killed Trotskyists.

The whole they killed other socialists has never been an argument

against the fact that they were actually socialists. So let's define this cleanly.

At its core, socialism rejects true private ownership of means of production

and prioritizes the collective over the individual.

No matter how they claim to be anti state,

the state determines how property is used,

who benefits, and in what quantities,

always in the name of the common good.

And this is exactly what Nazi Germany did.

Under the Nazis, businesses were not privately owned in any meaningful sense.

Yes, names stayed on buildings, but the state...

Dictated prices, the wages, production quotas,

suppliers, buyers, profits, and labor allocation.

If you didn't comply, your business was seized or abolished.

That is state control of means of production, and it's not capitalism.

And again, if you look at the history of socialism, statism is not

separated from it.

You have those like the Ferdinand LaSalle's of the world that were openly statists,

and then you have others trying to redefine what statism actually is to pretend to

be separated from it.

On the other hand, capitalism requires exclusive control and voluntary exchange.

The Nazis had neither. They had price controls, wage controls, production mandates,

massive welfare programs, labor, forced nationalized industries, central planning.

Even Hitler explicitly rejected free enterprise and economic liberalism.

Repeatedly, he openly said the individual must serve the community,

not the other way around.

That's socialism. Now, was it Marxist socialism?

No, it was more nationalistic. socialism.

A collectivist, anti capitalist system built around race instead of class,

same economic structure, different justification.

Socialism for whites, if you want to be blunt.

And before someone says, but they privatize things, no.

If the state tells you how to run your business, what to produce, how much to sell,

who to sell to, and at what price, you don't own it. You're a manager for the state.

That's not privatization, bros.

That's socialism with extra paperwork.

This is why the economists like Ludwig von Mises, who fled Nazi,

explicitly classified Nazi Germany as a form of socialism.

He distinguished it between the German model and the Russian model,

but not between socialism and capitalism. Different flavors, same disease.

And this pattern repeats throughout history.

Socialism promises to collect the good,

but it centralizes power, crushes dissent,

purges enemies and leaves massive suffering in its wake.

Nazis weren't an exception, they were a variation.

So no, we don't get to say that it wasn't real socialism just because

it ended badly.

And you don't get to call it capitalism when private property

didn't exist in practice.

You can say that it wasn't your socialism, whatever. But historically,

economically, and philosophically, the Nazis were socialists.

And denying that doesn't protect the truth,

it just protects bad ideas from accountability.