George Orwell, in contrast to those who want to distance National Socialism from their own preferred version of socialism:
“National Socialism is a form of socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker.” [1]
Also, and in fuller detail:
“Internally, Germany [under the Nazis] has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and — this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism — generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly.”
Sources:
[1] George Orwell, Collected Works, vol. XII, p. 159.
[2] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), Part Two, Section 1.
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Related: My Nietzsche and the Nazis on the intellectual antecedents of National Socialism.
Here’s a similar quote by Orwell:
“[T]ill very recently it remained the official theory of the Left that Nazism was ‘just capitalism.’ . . . Since nazism was not what any Western European meant by socialism, clearly it must be capitalism. . . . Otherwise they [the Left] would have had to admit that nazism did avoid the contradictions of capitalism, that it was a kind of socialism, though a non-democratic kind. And that would have meant admitting that ‘common ownership of the means of production’ is not a sufficient objective, that by merely altering the structure of society you improve nothing. . . . Nazism can be defined as oligarchical collectivism. . . . It seems fairly certain that something of the same kind is occurring in Soviet Russia; the similarity of the two regimes has been growing more and more obvious for the last six years.”
— Orwell, George. 1941. “Will Freedom Die with Capitalism?” The Left News. April 1941: 1682–1685. (Rpt. in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison. London: Secker & Warburg, 1998: 458–464.)
Quoted in Makovi, Michael. 2015. “George Orwell as a Public Choice Economist.” The American Economist 60(2): 183-208, at 191.
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. **It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the **Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world
Not that difficult an issue, Robert: Orwell thinks National Socialism combines elements from both. The posted quote is directed to those who want to forget or deny Nazism’s significant socialist elements. The deniers are the honesty-challenged ones.
Robert, you are very confussed about the socialist final goal. It has never been the equal rights of workers. The real interest of the socialism is to dominate the world by a little “elite” circle called NOMENKLATURA, were all the people is equaly poor and without rights, except the “elite”…as it was demostrated in the died USSR, the old PRC and right now in North Korea and Cuba….
There are no an intelectual socialism, just a real criminal socialism.
Compared with the socialism, the nazism is almost the same. Just one one political party, all the production resources under the government hands, no human rights, and the dominant “elite”, the head of the nazi party…with the added of racism….
Both, socialism and national socialism, are simply deep left ideas with a same final goal and no too much differents ways: to dominate the world by with no democracy systems….
@Sergio Vega
I suspect Robert subscribes to the theory that real Socialism has never been tried. So he compares socialism in theory with real Nazism and comes up with his gotcha. The fact that every real world instance of Socialism comes up much like Nazism doesn’t dent his world view. Murdering Kulaks and class enemies is acceptable if they are blocking the road to heaven. Don’t you know that all humans sins will magically melt away in utopia?
@TDK, Just as much, free market capitalism has never been tried, only selectively. The birth of capitalism involved the Enclosure Movement and Poor Laws, taking away land that people ‘owned’ in the Rothbardian sense of ownership, mixing labor with land, and giving that to the feudal ruling class.
Deprived of land, by FORCE if not fraud, unless one also believes the King is a descendant of God Almighty, then with the added bonus of making it illegal to be unemployed and broke, the solution was to go to work for early capitalists, enforced by the State. Giving up one’s children to parish care, with forced labor for the kids too, was often part of the deal. Parents without income, and now without land, couldn’t afford to feed their children.
The State has since then been instrumental, for good and for bad, with all aspects of growing Capitalism, constraining rights of people who would be “labor”, and curtailing free market competition.
Yet one would find few people of libertarian or capitalist leanings who would wish to abolish the Internet (since dev was largely govt funded) (thanks to Al Gore and Newt Gingrich for privatizing that public Cold War network commons), or reverse modern agriculture (studies resulting in Green Revolution were govt funded), or reverse 20th century War victories (govt organized war economy), or eliminate patent and IP protections (which are useful but certainly aren’t a product of any Invisible Hand), or any number of other industrial machine and technological advances which came from Govt funded engineering and science.
I would say, the majority of people who would oppose the country being 100% Principled on libertarian ideals, rejecting reparations for deeds done in the context of 14th Century markets, they would be CORRECT about relaxing their idealism in favor of pragmatism.
At the same time, myths about how well markets work in the absence of Govt, ought to be set aside like we all set aside intentional bloodletting for reducing the “fire element” in the body (based on only 4 elements, earth air fire and water).
Scott Adams did a podcast recently, which I hated, where he posited that Antifa was just about some young people out for some violence. Giving them a pass for their evil behaviour because they weren’t political, just young and stupid.
Then I started churning through the idea that Socialism (and Communism), in the end, are distilled down to one thing: violence.
We must shut our ears somewhat to the pretty words, and judge an idea on its effects. Aristotle calls this practical wisdom. And the effects of socialism are generally, violent.