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Thread: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

  1. #61

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    No, the Nazis were not socialists. They adhered to centuries of German philosophy that prioritized social order and rigid social stratification above anything else.
    I find it hilarious how this argument actually proves just another similarity of Reich with marxist regimes.
    In this case it is appealing to a less "bourgeois", but still somewhat folkish traditions - Stalin loved old Rurikovite aesthetics, and when Russians started defecting to German side in 41-42, he had a complete ideological switcheroo, and instead of being a rabid rusophobe he begun pretending to be some kind of "Russian patriot". Of course it was merely an act, as both Lenin and Stalin hated Russians and Russian culture, but I guess Stalin liked not being killed by Germans more then he disliked Russian people {proven by the fact that he committed the biggest genocide against Russian people in XX century, only comparable to Mao's genocide of Chinese people). Interestingly enough, we also see modern Communist China embrace its pre-revolutionary traditions. So now, Reich adhering to old German social order stuff is literally what marxist regimes do.
    Last edited by Heathen Hammer; August 27, 2021 at 10:32 AM.

  2. #62
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cope View Post
    Bismarck’s state socialism was conservative and pragmatic as opposed to Marxian/prophetic/revolutionary. It was a response to industrialization, an attempt to outflank the SPD and an effort to impose some degree of national economic centralization. In political terms it was traditionalist and monarchical; economically it mirrored (to a certain extent) mainstream American democratic socialism and British parliamentary socialism in that it supported tariffs, nationalization of certain sectors (e.g. rail) and worker protections without advocating communistic solutions. It is usually credited with laying the foundations of the German welfare state.
    So, you can understand the difference between a government implementing a socialistic law to keep the masses from revolting, and a socialist government! Thank God.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cope View Post
    Schaffle's claim that "the collectivist principle, whether realizable or not, is essentially a State principle" is reasonably close to the National Socialist interpretation of socialism. The first definition of socialism presented above (any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy) also suits in the sense that the NSDAP de facto "owned" the major industries by virtue of the control it exerted over them.
    That would be true, if a) German capitalism as a system hadn't been implemented under the assumption that the Kaiserreich could intervene and direct its efforts in the first place, as you yourself state in the first quote; b) if the Nazis really exercised control over the major industries. I've already given you multiple sources where German industrialists flat out refused the demands of the regime and the Nazis couldn't do anything about it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    Huh? You’ve repeatedly insisted (including in this very post, above) that because German capitalists willingly supported the Nazis, Temin couldn’t have compared Soviet expropriation to Nazi terror, even though this was a point Temin explained himself, most recently in post 44:
    Take Temin's argument for a second. He writes both regimes used negative and positive incentives. As positive incentives, Temin states that both regimes gave out money. So far, so good. As the 'stick' though, Temin suggests that both regimes used terror; as Soviet terror, Temin claims expropriation (which indeed would be terrifying for a capitalist, I have to agree). But the Nazis did not terrorize, or expropriate the industrialists - they terrorized the so-called non-productive 'asocials': Jews, Roma, homosexuals, communists, socialists, anarchists, unionists and so on and so on. I've already shown you that scholars refuse the claim that German industrialists were terrorized by the Nazis, instead claiming they were willing participants of the regime. Moreover, sources I gave you prove that whenever the industrialists did not want to do something the Nazis couldn't do anything about it. Whatever instances the Nazis did use coercion on industrialists have been proven to have been cases where certain industrialists used the state to clubber other industrialists. It was, as was shown, a competition between private empires.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    I guess I overlooked that you’re straight up arguing the Nazis were not totalitarians? If so, that’s hands down the most bizarre true Scotsman fallacy I’ve ever seen on this forum. And I’m the dishonest propagandist?[...]What’s irrelevant is this incoherent rambling about how Hannah Arendt is a liar because you think Nazism is just pretend socialism. As she wrote and I discussed in detail, Nazism and Bolshevism are both internationalist, utopian, totalitarian ideologies of which the quest for world domination was an integral part. Calling me dishonest while dying on the hill of “not real socialism” is a well worn cliche, and the opposite of the principled intellectual stance you’re trying so desperately to present it as.
    You, again, missed the point. Let me bold it out to you

    Quote Originally Posted by Kritias View Post
    It's not irrelevant if they depict an elite-backed dictatorship with mass popular support as a totalitarian system, where every aspect of German society was repressed. To the contrary, German society has been shown not only to support the regime, electing it democratically, but also that the German capitalists chose to impose it for their own benefit. The trappings might be similar, the intentions were world apart. The trappings don't make the priests, as we say.
    You need to understand that following WW2, many scholars tried to make sense of the incomprehensible disaster that had happened. In their attempt they promulgated many Nazi myths flying under the radar, most definitively inadvertedly as modern scholars claim. Examples of this is the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, the myth that ordinary Germans did not know about the death camps, the myth that the German army was so honorable they couldn't go back on their oath irregardless of war crimes and atrocities etc.

    Nazi totalitarianism is more based on the concentrated effect of the State Propaganda that depicted the Nazis as all-powerful force rather than based in reality. What we know for a fact today was that the Nazi regime did not repress its own citizens but only those minorities they had depicted as "non-productive". The problem with Arendt and others is that the explanation of totalitarian bureocracy as the moving force for genocide ("The Desk Killer", as Aichmann is called in one of her works) doesn't explain why ordinary Germans were killing people face-to-face and in some cases with extreme sadism and a sense of pleasure. It's not that the Nazis weren't totalitarians - it was that they were way worse than that.

    Utopia is equally shaky as a claim. What we know for a fact is that Hitler did not advocate for some 'Utopia' but for the return to the pre-Weimar period, where morality and community were 'characteristics' of the German empire. What Hitler proposed to accomplish this was to get rid of those who were held as responsible for the defeat in WW1. I quote from the article "Agency and structure in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust":

    According to Gellately (2001) in March 1933, less than eight weeks after becoming Chancellor, Hitler called for a ‘moral purification’ of German politics restoring social values, social harmony and order by attempting to create a racially based ‘community of the people’. For the Nazis the German people had lost their values and sense of community in the Weimar years. The Weimar Republic was characterised by the Nazis as a place where crime, drugs and organised criminal gangs were rife. Pornography, gay and lesbian lifestyles became acceptable within urban areas, particularly Berlin, and a new distinctly un-German culture was emerging in avant-garde forms of artistic work in music, performing arts and painting. The Nazis also identified ‘asocials’ such as Communists and others who were ‘politically criminal’, rapists, habitual criminals, repeat sex offenders, homosexuals, beggars, vagrants, the unemployed, prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts as threats to the community and gave the police force powers to remove these people into the protective custody of the military-style concentration camps for rehabilitation and re-education. As Germany prepared for war the camps grew in size and increasing numbers of Jews were incarcerated on grounds of ‘race defilement’.[...]The Nazis promised a return to pre-Weimar culture and this stance was popular amongst many German people. To gauge the degree of popularity Gellately points to the elections and plebiscites that the Nazis conducted, such as the national plebiscites to withdraw from the League of Nations and unite the post of Head of State with the Head of Government both of which were given the support of over 90 per cent of the German people. The ‘Day of the Police’ was introduced by the Nazis in 1934 as an opportunity for German people to celebrate the role of the police in maintaining public safety; such celebrations were also widely accepted and enjoyed.
    The internationalist claim is equally shaky. What the Nazis advocated for was directed towards the German nation, not internationally, just as you can see above. As for world domination - seriously, this is just a Bond Villain accusation and it isn't even true that Arendt wrote that. What Arendt actually claimed is that totalitarian regimes seek total domination - which meant the subjugation of individual moral agency and social plurality inside the regimes. Against this, I'd suggest reading the book "Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality and Resistance".
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  3. #63

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    . What the Nazis advocated for was directed towards the German nation, not internationally, just as you can see above.
    Again, similar to Stalin's "building of socialism in one selected country".

  4. #64

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    So, you can understand the difference between a government implementing a socialistic law to keep the masses from revolting, and a socialist government
    Sig worthy. Cope was referencing, as I did, the Cambridge article on German State Socialism in the 19th century, which was also included in a literal dictionary definition of socialism. Thank God indeed.
    That would be true, if a) German capitalism as a system hadn't been implemented under the assumption that the Kaiserreich could intervene and direct its efforts in the first place, as you yourself state in the first quote; b) if the Nazis really exercised control over the major industries. I've already given you multiple sources where German industrialists flat out refused the demands of the regime and the Nazis couldn't do anything about it.

    I've already shown you that scholars refuse the claim that German industrialists were terrorized by the Nazis, instead claiming they were willing participants of the regime. Moreover, sources I gave you prove that whenever the industrialists did not want to do something the Nazis couldn't do anything about it. Whatever instances the Nazis did use coercion on industrialists have been proven to have been cases where certain industrialists used the state to clubber other industrialists. It was, as was shown, a competition between private empires.
    This is just a repetition of the same lies. Your sources described how German capitalists cooperated willingly with the Nazis. They did not claim, as you have, that Nazi terror as an economic tool wasn’t a thing. Temin himself discusses these issues in detail, and how the methodology differed from Soviet expropriation. It’s been covered extensively at this point.
    Quote Originally Posted by Temin
    The Nazis also used terror as an instrument of state policy. Historians have detailed the violence against Jews and other groups. But this was not the whole of the Nazi program. Terror was also used to control groups and organizations central to German society and economy. Hitler is supposed to have told Schacht, "The primary cause of the stabilization of our currency is the concentration camp" (Hayes, 1987, p. 380). The standardized allocation form described above included penalties for noncompliance. It declared that, "Acquiring materials except for Four-Year Plan purposes will be regarded as economic sabotage." Under Nazi rules, this language threatened death or a concentration camp for any manager who pursued his own ends
    (Reichsamt fiir Wirtschaftsaufbau, 1937b) .
    Exceptions prove the rule.
    You, again, missed the point. Let me bold it out to you
    Repeating the exact same lies over and over again while insisting I misconstrued said lies is tedious. Arendt’s commentary is not based on myths just because you say so, neither is it “shaky” because you’re determined to discredit her entire book because it completely undermines your narrative. Your own sources do not lay claim to these wild categorical disqualifications you do. Quoting from them and then extrapolating something they did not actually say is just silly.

    Quote Originally Posted by Arendt
    It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists. Their nationaUst propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never al- lowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics. Nazi "nationalism" had more than one aspect in common with the recent nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provinciaHsm of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their "movement," international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific terri- tory. And not only the Nazis, but fifty years of antiscmitic history, stand as evidence against the identification of antisemitism with nationalism. The first antisemitic parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century were also among the first that banded together internationally. From the very beginning, they called international congresses and were concerned with a co-ordination of international, or at least inter-European, activities.

    The form of government the two movements developed, or, rather, which almost automatically developed from their double claim to total domination and global rule, is best char- acterized by Trotsky's slogan of "permanent revolution" although Trotsky's theory was no more than a socialist forecast of a series of revolutions, from the antifeudal bourgeois to the antibourgeois proletarian, which would spread from one country to the other.^ Only the term itself suggests "per-mancncy." with all its semi-anarchistic implications, and is, strictly speak- ing, a misnomer; yet even Lenin was more impressed by the term than by its theoretical content. In the Soviet Union, at any rate, revolutions, in the form of general purges, became a permanent institution of the Stalin regime after 1934.'' Here, as in other instances, Stalin concentrated his attacks on Trotsky's half-forgotten slogan precisely because he had decided to use this technique.' In Nazi Germany, a similar tendency toward per- manent revolution was clearly discernible though the Nazis not have time to realize it to the same extent. Characteristically enough, their "per- manent revolution" also started with the liquidation of the party faction which had dared to proclaim openly the "next stage of the revolution"
    Nazi racism is entirely irrelevant to Arendt’s rationale here, which was discussed in my initial post.
    Last edited by Lord Thesaurian; August 27, 2021 at 12:47 PM.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  5. #65

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    I wonder how he will rationalize the fact that Communist China has Han racial nationalism as part of its ideology, all with putting "subhumans" into camps for forced labor, eugenics and probably murdering them in great numbers too.

  6. #66

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    I wonder how he will rationalize the fact that Communist China has Han racial nationalism as part of its ideology, all with putting "subhumans" into camps for forced labor, eugenics and probably murdering them in great numbers too.
    The icky socialisms don’t count as socialism. Bolshevism isn’t icky because they had reasons for mass murder that weren’t racist. And besides, don’t you know how awful capitalism is? Total hypocrisy! This is all very intellectual stuff. Anyone who doesn’t see that is probably a Holocaust denier.
    Last edited by Lord Thesaurian; August 27, 2021 at 12:58 PM.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  7. #67
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    So, your argument is basically… everything is just lies? Fine. Let me show you why you have been wrong about Arendt. Do you remember when I told you that you needed to read the whole thing, and not just select passages from it? This is why. I quote from Arendt’s article “Imperialism: Road to Suicide. The Political Origins and Use of Racism”.

    Indeed, the alliance between capital and mob could only be effected through the concept of race and race-unity. The two great forces that seemed in the beginning to thwart the ambitions of this alliance and the full development of an imperialist policy — the tradition of the national state, and the labor movement — proved helpless in the end.[…] Today we see that the main threat is the political structure of the imperialist machine, the chief problem how to destroy ideologies that induce peoples to help and serve them. Imperialist politics long ago veered from the path of obedience to economic laws, which are discarded once the “imperial factor” takes the center of the stage. Only a few elderly gentlemen in high finance still believe in the inalienable rights of profit; and the mob, believing only in race, tolerates them for the sake of their financial support, which is granted — even when all hope of profit has vanished — to protect at least the remains of former riches. For in the alliance between modern capital and the mob, the initiative has passed to the latter, whose race-worship and cynicism as to moral values have triumphed over the nineteenth-century faith in infinite profits. The recognition of the mob and its power in politics has resulted in the discarding of all hypocrisy — which after all was at least a compliment to virtue. Domestic and colonial policy can no longer be kept strictly separate. No longer is it possible to avoid the boomerang effects of “empire building” on the home population, and on the foundation and structure of the national state. The British imperial system is becoming obsolete. Organization by race, which is the true heart of Nazism, is inevitable if imperialist policy is to be supported by masses and not only by capitalist interests. The mob, on the other hand, growing in numbers in all “civilized” countries and already complete with its own intellectual elite, but without any social or other base or structure of its own, can be re-organized and set in motion only as a race — as white men (or black or yellow or brown). He who was formerly an Englishman can end by becoming a “white man,” now that so many Germans have become “Aryans.” The failure of the German venture in no way guarantees that other peoples and nations will not disappear into races.
    As you can see, Arendt laid the blame for Nazism on Imperialism, the ‘rapacious’ profit-seeking through colonization, and the instilling of a racist ideology to conduct said colonization: Nazism in her thought was a natural progression of European colonialism. Capitalism in deterioration indeed. Arendt herself writes this a little further down. I quote from the same article:

    Destruction is the most radical form of domination as well as of possession. No philosophizing devotee of power has dared to express this with the same sublime detachment as Hobbes — founding the equality of man on his ability to kill. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property; for one possesses definitely and for all time only what one destroys. And only what one possesses through destruction can be really and definitely dominated. For its own sake and for all our sakes, bourgeois society has never recognized nor actually accepted this last secret of power — until just now. […]The seeming disparity between cause and effect which characterized the birth of imperialism is thus not a matter of accident. The occasion — superfluous capital created by over-accumulation, which needed the mob’s help to find safe and profitable investment — set in motion a force that had always been contained in the basic structure of bourgeois society, though hidden by nobler traditions. At the same time, completely unprincipled power-politics could not be practiced until a mass of people was available who were free of all principles and so numerous that state and society could not care for them. Add to this the fact that this mob could be organized only by imperialistic politicians, and inspired only by racial doctrines, and we can see how the illusion arose that imperialism alone could settle the grave domestic, social, and economic problems of our time.[…] The Nazis’ strategy during this war has set the stage for the first demonstration of the strategy of suicide. In Nazism we saw the first case of a thoroughgoing imperialist policy, whose lust for conquest is governed by the principle “All or Nothing,” and whose wars end in “Victory or Death.” And we also saw the workings of its peculiar, curious logic by which the All inevitable reverts to the Nothing, and even Victory cannot end but in Death. Following its own law, the power-accumulating machinery built by imperialism can only go on swallowing more and more territory, destroying more and more peoples, enslaving and involving more and more human beings — until finally it ends by devouring itself. This inner law of imperialism, its hidden drive to suicide, its insane fascination with death as such, was revealed during this war in the mass-slaughter of the Jews. […] Global destruction and the suicide of mankind are not mere accidental results of political errors or war, to be avoided by more careful planning. They are inherent in the ethos of imperialism. If imperialism is allowed to continue its course, it can hardly be expected to revert to its first harmless beginnings or to retain its more moderate forms.
    Now, Arendt’s argument starts coming off like my argument, doesn’t it? Let’s continue a with the article “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism”.


    Both in this article and in the later book, Arendt says that what set off the era of imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was that the European bourgeoisie was no longer content to accumulate capital under the benign noninterference of the state and instead seized the reins of state power for the sake of expanding investments abroad. Her pointed condemnation of the capitalist elite's rapacity gives her account a passing resemblance to the influential theories of earlier writers like H. Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg. Unlike them, however, Arendt takes remarkably little interest in the workings of the capitalist economy as such, let alone a Marx-inflected analysis of it."* Her concern with capitalism is restricted almost entirely to the ethos of the ruling bourgeoisie, and its concomitant understanding of political power. Imperialist policies may have begun simply as an attempt to use military force to safeguard foreign investments; nevertheless, she argues, "the resulting introduction of power as the only contents of politics, and of expansion as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause. . .had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires and secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes" (138).
    And later in the same article:

    Arendt argues that it was this abiding, unavowed belief in the legitimacy of domination by force of sheer collective violence that made the imperialist financiers and politicians so readily able to draw upon the active participation of the "mob"—the denizens of the frankly criminal milieu that thrived in the bowels of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalism, a motley assortment of "armed bohemians" who share the respectable bourgeoisie's possessive individualism without the latter's inhibited propriety, and who bypass the much-vaunted ethic of work in favor of more or less organized violence.^ (Note that she uses the term "mob" not in the word's older sense of the merely uncouth and disorderly poor, but with the slang connotation of a specifically criminal underworld.) She holds that the bourgeois elite’s inevitable collusion with this mob in agitating for imperialist adventures abroad, and, when successful, the mob's involvement in actually managing those adventures, is what ultimately transforms the mere exploitation of markets into a rapacious drive for the outright subjugation of native peoples—a Hobbesian accumulation of power for its own sake.
    From all the above, you can see that Arendt’s stance on Nazism as a whole was far different than what is presented in your argument. In fact, it is surprisingly close to mine. Arendt traced the origins of Nazism on the extension of imperialism and the ‘rapacious’ nature of Bourgeois society for aggressive economic expansion. However, she decided for some reason to negate Nazism from that to totalitarianism in her book On the Origins of Totalitarianism. Her negation however, does not really work because of various issues the Stalinist regime had that the Nazi regime didn’t and vice versa. I quote from the same article:

    Together with Arendt's surprisingly scanty treatment of totalitarian genocide, this circumstance points to a second unexpected aspect of this phase of her thought: her theoretical account of totalitarianism is more closely modeled on Stalin's rule than Hitler's, at least in a few important respects. She may discuss the Nazis at somewhat greater length—in itself no surprise, as she had far more documentary evidence to work with—yet it is the Bolshevik case alone that provides her most pertinent illustrations of certain key aspects of her theory. It was Stalin, after all, who had made famous the phrase "it is no accident" as the all-purpose device of ideological explanation (a fact she curiously neglects to mention); her entire analysis of the totalitarian movement's "refusal to recognize the fortuitousness that pervades reality" could be regarded as an extended gloss on his success with that formula (351-2). […]Although the ostensible subject of this passage is "a Nazi or a Bolshevik,"
    the particular spectacle that she has in mind is of course the Moscow Trials (and the countless repetitions of this same phenomenon in the interrogation cells of the N.K.V.D.). She (correctly) never suggests that Hitler demanded any such thing of his movement's members.'^^ The lack of a close parallel for this in the Nazi dictatorship is a reflection of a basic difference in the two totalitarian regimes, namely, that acquiescent Germans outside the proscribed categories of targets—and certainly the Nazis themselves—were largely immune from the violence of Hitler's terror, while Stalin's struck most ferociously at the most loyal of Bolsheviks—including (and for a time, especially) the agents of his secret police.
    The reason for this mismatch was that the book was two different projects merged into one. I quote from the same article:

    There is a straightforward explanation for the book's unruly organization. It is that Arendt arrived at her basic views on totalitarianism only after she had already written nearly all of what would become parts I and II. Until then, the chapters of those first two parts were to have led not to an analysis of totalitarianism, but instead to one of Nazism, which at the time she understood as the direct successor to imperialism.4 Her decision to treat Nazism as a species of totalitarianism instead—and to extend her purview to the Bolshevik version of it as well—occurred at about the same time she abandoned that view of the former, sometime around 1947. But to accommodate this twofold change, she did little more than graft a new theory onto the trunk of the old, adding a completely new third part to the nearly complete text of the manuscript as written. The reason "Totalitarianism" so confounds readers' expectations is that she revised the previously written part of the text just enough (chiefly in the first chapter of "Antisemitism" and the last two of "Imperialism") to avoid any outright inconsistency with the claims of the new third part, but without any alteration to its basic contents or organization— which thus continue to reflect the priorities of an earlier phase of her thought. In a similar way, the new chapter on "Ideology and Terror" added in later editions represents still another phase of Arendt's thinking on the subject, displacing without fully dislodging the arguments of the one before.
    So, as you can see what you called ‘lies’ is actually fact. Hannah Arendt composed her theory of Totalitarianism on Stalin’s reign of terror, not Hitler – and she blurred lines between the two to equalize them for some reason. The only fact we know is, she had a lot of material for another book that tied Nazism to imperialism, which she decided to cram in this book, but that caused her argument to negate the monstrosity of the Nazis she herself recognized earlier in her work to the brutal Stalinist dictatorship. And as for the credits on calling Stalin Totalitarian, I think they should really go to Leon Trotsky. I quote from Trotsky’s book “The Revolution Betrayed”, published in 1937, page 99-100:

    The members of the present Politburo occupied secondary posts throughout the history of the Bolshevik party. If anybody in the first years of the revolution had predicted their future elevation, they would have been the first in surprise, and there would have been no false modesty in their surprise. For this very reason, the rule is more stern at present that the Politburo is always right, and in any case that no man can be right against the Politburo. But, moreover, the Politburo cannot be right against Stalin, who is unable to make mistakes and consequently cannot be right against himself. Demands for party democracy were through all this time the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they were hopeless. The above-mentioned platform of the Left Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written into the Criminal Code "punishing as a serious state crime every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism." Instead of this, there was introduced into the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself. Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the memory of the older generation. And together with it had disappeared the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become "totalitarian" in character several years before this word arrived from Germany. "By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity," wrote Rakovsky in 1928, "the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party." Since those indignant lines were written, the degeneration of the regime has gone immeasurably farther. The G.P.V. has become the decisive factor in the inner life of the party. If Molotov in March 1936 was able to boast to a French journalist that the ruling party no longer contains any factional struggle, it is only because disagreements are now settled by the automatic intervention of the political police. The old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it.
    Trotsky, one of the harshest critics of Stalin, kept calling the take-over "Bonapartism" and "The Soviet Thermidor". And I think he is right in suggesting this, as I have already written earlier in this thread.

    So, there you have it. That’s why you needed to read the entire book. Because it doesn’t make sense, unless you know the full story of how this book came to be in this form. Of course, Cold War enthusiasts jumped on it and used it to declare the USSR an Empire of Evil decades after Stalin had died and the country had reverted back to its supposed style, all the while curtailing the scathing argument Arendt herself proposed on how Nazism came out of capitalism.
    Last edited by Kritias; August 27, 2021 at 08:17 PM.
    Under the valued patronage of Abdülmecid I

  8. #68

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kritias
    So, your argument is basically… everything is just lies? Fine. Let me show you why you have been wrong about Arendt. Do you remember when I told you that you needed to read the whole thing, and not just select passages from it? This is why. I quote from Arendt’s article “Imperialism: Road to Suicide. The Political Origins and Use of Racism”.
    To prove I misrepresented Arendt’s book, you’re referencing…..not the book? Your own citations expand on what I already discussed in my initial post and later in the thread, often verbatim, to challenge and refute your claims. What I called “lies” is your sophistic extrapolations from random excerpts that have little to do with the arguments you attempt to use them for. Judging by the portions you’ve bolded in juxtaposition to your assertions, I have to wonder if you even understand these things you read.
    As you can see, Arendt laid the blame for Nazism on Imperialism, the ‘rapacious’ profit-seeking through colonization, and the instilling of a racist ideology to conduct said colonization: Nazism in her thought was a natural progression of European colonialism. Capitalism in deterioration indeed. Arendt herself writes this a little further down. I quote from the same article:

    And later in the same article:

    From all the above, you can see that Arendt’s stance on Nazism as a whole was far different than what is presented in your argument. In fact, it is surprisingly close to mine. Arendt traced the origins of Nazism on the extension of imperialism and the ‘rapacious’ nature of Bourgeois society for aggressive economic expansion. However, she decided for some reason to negate Nazism from that to totalitarianism in her book On the Origins of Totalitarianism. Her negation however, does not really work because of various issues the Stalinist regime had that the Nazi regime didn’t and vice versa. I quote from the same article:

    The reason for this mismatch was that the book was two different projects merged into one. I quote from the same article:

    So, as you can see what you called ‘lies’ is actually fact. Hannah Arendt composed her theory of Totalitarianism on Stalin’s reign of terror, not Hitler – and she blurred lines between the two to equalize them for some reason. The only fact we know is, she had a lot of material for another book that tied Nazism to imperialism, which she decided to cram in this book, but that caused her argument to negate the monstrosity of the Nazis she herself recognized earlier in her work to the brutal Stalinist dictatorship. And as for the credits on calling Stalin Totalitarian, I think they should really go to Leon Trotsky. I quote from Trotsky’s book “The Revolution Betrayed”, published in 1937, page 99-100:

    So, there you have it. That’s why you needed to read the entire book. Because it doesn’t make sense, unless you know the full story of how this book came to be in this form. Of course, Cold War enthusiasts jumped on it and used it to declare the USSR an Empire of Evil decades after Stalin had died and the country had reverted back to its supposed style, all the while curtailing the scathing argument Arendt herself proposed on how Nazism came out of capitalism.
    Do you enjoy citing things and then completely misrepresenting the implications of what your own quotations from them say, or do you just enjoy reading my responses? Arendt’s commentary looks nothing like your argument that Nazism:

    A) was not totalitarian
    B) was not internationalist

    She said the opposite of that, as per my last post. No one claimed the Nazis weren’t imperialist, so I’ve no idea what this giant strawman of yours is supposed to be aimed at in the first place. Arendt wrote and I discussed in detail how Nazism and Bolshevism are both so inherently imperialist as to be hell bent on world domination by their very nature, a claim you specifically called “shaky” multiple times. To claim her argument is in line with yours while simultaneously insisting she’s wrong is hilarious.

    Anyway, the nature of Bolshevik and Nazi (totalitarian) imperialism was discussed in my initial post. Judging by your fallacious diatribes about how your cited articles expose “negations” in her argument, you read neither my posts nor her book:

    From post 25:

    On Totalitarian Imperialism

    Imperialism on the whole was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that "administrative massacres" could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.

    Such recollections of the past may serve to remind us of how much greater the chances of success are for an imperialism directed by a totalitarian gov- ernment……No dichotomy of principle, therefore, between home rule and colonial rule will impose restraint on totalitarian imperialism, and if it, too, has to fear certain boomerang effects from its imperialist adventures, they have other causes. Boomerang effects in totalitarian imperialism, naturally, are distinguished from those of national imperialism in that they work in the opposite di- rection—the few, faint-hearted stirrings of unrest in Russia probably were caused by events in Poland and Hungary—and so do the measures the gov- ernment is forced to take to combat them. For just as European imperiahsm could never transgress certain limits of oppression even when the effective- ness of extreme measures was beyond doubt, because public opinion at home would not have supported them and a legal government could not have sur- vived them, so Russian totalitarianism is forced to crush opposition and with- hold all concessions, even when they may pacify the oppressed countries for the time being and make them more reliable in case of war, because such "mildness" would endanger the government at home and place the conquered territories in a privileged position.

    However, these and other distinctions between Western national and Russian totalitarian imperialism do not go to the heart of the matter. For the immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British, Dutch or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually suc- ceeded, and therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in the form of the so-called pan-movements—pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism—was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only does totalitarianism, nazism no less than bolshevism, owe a heavy debt to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism in matters of ideology and organization; their expansion program, though global in scope and thereby distinguished from those of the pan-movements, follows the aims of continental imperi- alism. The main point here is that the strategy of expansion follows geo- graphic continuity and extends from a power center to a widening periphery which then is supposed to gravitate "naturally" toward its center. This co- hesive extension could of course never have tolerated a dichotomy between home government and colonial rule; and since continental imperialism in- tended to found its "empire" in Europe itself, it did not depend upon a color line to distinguish between "higher and lower breeds"; instead it pro- posed to treat European peoples as colonials under the rule of a master race of Germanic or Slavic origin.

    Contrary to your assertions, Nazi and Bolshevik imperialism, “totalitarian imperialism,” was categorically different from the old European imperialism, which, as I’ve mentioned, she characterized as morally “glorious” by comparison. For emphasis, I again point out that contrary to your assertion, she specifically says Nazism and Bolshevism are not “a natural progression of European colonialism,” but something entirely different. The
    “progression” she points to is German and Russian efforts to subjugate the European continent itself.

    As your own citations allude to, totalitarian imperialism frees itself from the moral and political contradictions that undermined European imperialism by behaving as a tyrannical colonizer both at home and abroad. This is a function of totalitarian internationalism as distinct movements. Nazism and Bolshevism, she says, are specifically not like British imperialism, both for that reason and because they were based on an entirely different imperial model in the first place. Your citations corroborate her characterization of imperialism. They have nothing to do with your perennially bizarre attempts to shoehorn every subject onto your capitalist vs socialist dichotomy so you can “prove” that everything you don’t like is capitalist.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  9. #69
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    So, your argument now is “I’m not talking about her work in general, just this one book which supports my argument – don’t bring up the others that destroy her argument?”.

    Right.

    I wrote that Arendt’s work in OoT negates Nazism. You called that a lie. You were just shown her earlier work is completely 180 degrees different from what she claims in OoT. You were also shown that the first two parts of the book were originally meant to be a separate book from the third part; you were also shown that the theory of totalitarianism was aimed to describe Stalinist terror (which, we already knew since 1937, nothing new there…); and finally, that by negating Nazism to cram it in her book about totalitarianism, a lot of theoretical problems occur. Let’s go through them:

    i. In no part of her analysis does Arendt explains how or why one form of totalitarianism comes to dominate over the other. In the case of Germany, Hitler had to compete with the KPD – if both movements are totalitarian, internationalist, and utopian what makes the average, apolitical, wordless, isolated German choose one over the other? The answer to this comes from her earlier work: communism is a mass movement, while Nazism comes from the alliance of capital with the mob. One comes from ground up, the other from top down. If that’s the case, then:

    ii. Arendt doesn’t explain why cycles of counter-revolution massacres happened in the USSR, but not in Nazi Germany. Her argument of terror is that what constitutes reality changes according to the whims of the leader; that yesterday’s staunchest allies are today’s enemies; and the mass of peoples need to redefine what’s true to accommodate for this change. This constant change of reality never happened under Hitler. In fact, the enemies of the state remain the same through the 12 years of the Nazi regime. The answer to this, again, comes from her earlier work – the alliance of capital and mob is a top-down organization, where bourgeois society motivated the mob to call out for expansionist adventures and targeted certain subgroups of people for extermination. The enemies in the Nazi regime were always known and remained constant until the war was lost. Stalinist terror, on the other hand, underwent frantic periods of massacres, followed by lulls of ‘normalcy’, in this way resembling the Terror under Robespierre - but spread out over a longer period of time. It also casts Arendt’s thought here in some doubt – wasn’t the French revolution under Robespierre equally totalitarian? In her attempt to equate the Nazis to the Soviets, she states that totalitarianism was a ‘modern’ (in her times) phenomenon. But that doesn’t account for the French revolution.

    iii. A central part of her argument lays with the concentration camps as ‘laboratories’ of experimentation for total domination. In Arendt’s argument what both regimes were doing in the concentration camps was experimenting on ways for dominating humanity, to be used on a wider scale outside the concentration camps. She claims that what the outcome of the experiment was, it would be then used on the wider population under the regime. But that’s completely absurd when you remember that what the Nazis did in the concentration camps was to simply kill people off. If any experimentation took place, that was done by companies like IG Farben to test new products. Total domination through mass murder would then mean that both Nazis and Soviets ultimate plan would be… to kill of everyone alive, including themselves? Of course, the problem lays with the fact that she attempted to equate the gulags to the death factories and that these two were completely different things. In her attempt to find an equalizing principle, she actually managed to downplay the death factories, contrary to what she was writing in 1947 about them.

    iv. Her treatise on the leader is also affected by the equalizing between Nazis and Soviets. Hitler’s status as the unquestionable leader ever since he became the leader of the movement seems more in line with what Arendt claims. To the contrary, even Stalin had to submit himself to the image of an even greater, ever-present leader – the dead Lenin. Portraits, photos, busts, statues of Lenin is the characteristic of Marxist-Leninist regimes and parties throughout the globe, and this honor was bestowed to Lenin posthumously. Most of Stalin’s speeches pay lip service to how great a leader Lenin was, and how his ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’ will lead the USSR forward. It’s not until Stalin won the war that a similar status is conferred upon him solely, until the end of his life. Prior to 1945, whenever Stalin makes an appearance as a propaganda prop he’s right next to Lenin, Marx and Engels. After 1945, the latter three disappear completely into the background. Even though there had been a concentrated effort by Stalin and his posse to make him into a cult figure as soon as 1934, the Bolshevik movement in general wasn’t based on cult worship. Which leads to the next problem,

    v. Arendt’s logic does not leave room for any other interpretation on Cult worship other than the total domination of the party. While this is true for Hitler, it’s somewhat more complicated for the USSR. The Russian peasantry demonstrated similar fascination for the czars, and Lenin’s cult seems to have similar characteristics to the adulation of dead Russian rulers of the past. It's sometimes not easy to distinguish what's a cultural phenomenon and what's a political phenomenon, and it seems Cult of Personality in the USSR was a combination of both. I quote from the article “Religion, Bolshevism, and the Origins of the Lenin Cult. Russian Review, 40(1), 35”:

    The fact that these significant features of the cult of Lenin appear in a simple folk tale indicates that much of the form and inspiration for that cult derived from the traditional culture of the Russian peasant. In particular the belief that Lenin was alive despite his apparent death was evident in a variety of popular stories: an Uzbek tale of 1925 described Lenin as wandering in the mountains searching for truth, and in 1926 a village correspondent from the northern Caucasus reported a local legend which held that "Lenin lives, but he secretly walks the earth and watches over Soviet power ..." and that another person had been buried in his place.2 These stories of Lenin's life after apparent death resemble the famous legend widely current in the decade following the death of Alexander I in 1825, which maintained that Alexander was not dead, that he had chosen to wander the Russian land disguised as the hermit Fedor Kuzmich, and that the corpse sent to St. Petersburg from Taganrog was that of a sailor.3 The uniformity of fantasy surrounding the deaths of the two Russian rulers indicates that although the deaths of Alexander and Lenin were separated by almost exactly a century, with a major revolution intervening, the Russian peasantry remained consistent in its political attitudes. The emotional power as well as the structural form of the Lenin cult derived, in part, from the peasant propensity to personify centralized political power and revere it in the person of the tsar, the "naive monarchism" eloquently discussed by Daniel Field in Rebels in the Name of the Tsar.4 A similar spontaneous popular veneration for Lenin which began during his lifetime was organized and promoted by the Communist Party and government during Lenin's illness and after his death to help mobilize and socialize the population. The success of the Lenin cult as a stabilizing and legitimizing force in Soviet political life is due in some measure to the extent to which its contours were shaped by traditional peasant culture.
    It also doesn’t explain why Cult of Personality happens in non-totalitarian, traditional authoritarian regimes, or even democracies. It seems Arendt hadn’t seen ie Mustafa Kemal’s pictures everywhere in Turkey when she was writing this section of the book.

    vi. Arendt uses the term ‘Bolshevism’ to contrast the Soviets with the Nazis. This means that her argument is targeted against the complete history of the communist party in the USSR, from Lenin to Stalin. What she doesn’t show however is any argument that Lenin was operating under the same system Stalin built for himself; under Lenin there was no cult of personality, no evident continuous change of the truth, no arbitrary executions of party members, making her argument rather weak if she intended to repudiate the entire communist system in USSR as totalitarian. Her argument is even weaker since she doesn’t take into account that Stalinist terror happened in an already established system; her argument simply doesn’t explain how the stages of totalitarianism happened in the USSR, and instead infers that the same stages that happened in Germany happened in the USSR. The main problem with this is, Germany was a liberal democracy that democratically elected Hitler, while the USSR was already authoritarian. Based just on societal difference, the process can’t be the same.

    Having gone over these problems, let’s go over your strawman. What I wrote was that Arendt’s argument in 1947 is similar to mine. Not that her book is similar to my argument; the book isn’t even similar to her own argument in 1947! Back then she understood Nazism as the extension of imperialist aggression of bourgeois society, specifically writing that the alliance of capital to the mob, based on race-politics like “Aryans” vs everybody else, made the Nazi horror possible. We know for a fact she was working on two different projects, one about the theory of totalitarianism under Stalin, the other this alliance of capital and mob spawning Nazism. We also know for a fact that she merged these two projects into one, negating both her arguments at the same time. The evidence for this is that throughout the OoT, her main focus remains the Nazis – she doesn’t spend nearly as much time on the USSR, because she crammed another unfinished book inside her older one.

    Your argument is based on a flawed, Frankenstein (because it was made of different book parts) collection of a book that reached celebrity status during the 1950s because it was politically expedient for it to be used. It was the Cold War, and there was a machine of people spitting out anti-Soviet literature. Since then, her work on OoT has been heavily criticized as I have already showed you. The fact that she wrote a book which takes a 180 degree turn on what she was writing just a few years before, casts a lot of doubt about the reasoning behind this book - especially since her thinking turns up negating the Nazis by comparison. If you still don’t understand the argument, which is possible, read the excerpts from the last two posts and combine them to reach what I’ve been writing to you for a couple of days now.

    PS. Arendt claimed in 1947 that Nazism is the extension of capitalism, when capital seizes government for their own benefit and utilizes the bigotry of people to distract the lower classes on foreign enemies and promising foreign adventures. That’s what ‘the alliance of capital and mob’ means. The word capital is there, so you won’t miss it a second time now I pointed it out for you. Read the excerpts again.
    Last edited by Kritias; August 28, 2021 at 09:24 AM.
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  10. #70

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Morifea View Post
    Methinks some of the participants should read Adam Tooze`s "Wages of Destruction". ImHo the best book about the German economy before and during WW2.... and you would never cast a doubt on how capitalistic the German economy in those Time was.
    The NSDAP’s domestic economic policies were largely guided by realpolitik and short-term imperialist objectives. Tooze lays out National Socialist economic theory particularly in agrarian terms (where blut und boden and Lebensraum – which were the backbone of Nazi ideology - are most relevant). He does not leave readers with the impression that the NSDAP was ideologically capitalist; in fact the opposite is true.

    In the name of freedom, nineteenth-century liberals had broken the fundamental bond that connected the German people to the soil. They had uprooted millions of peasants and turned land itself into a commodity, to be freely bought and sold. It was this capitalistic expropriation that had set in motion the disastrous process of migration and degeneration that had depleted the German countryside.

    Much like Hitler, Backe saw National Socialism as having been assigned the role of overcoming the contradictions of nineteenth-century capitalism and achieving a reconciliation between the German people and the economy that sustained them.

    In Backe’s vision, Darré’s racial agrarianism melded with a more conventional critique of capitalism as a transformative historical force. Drawing on a populist anti-capitalist canon, beloved of both right and left, Nazi ideologists conjured up images of grain being burned and tipped into the sea, thousands of hectares of land lying uncultivated, whilst at the same time armies of unemployed Europeans and Americans went hungry. Like Hitler, Backe saw the mission of National Socialism as being the supersession of the rotten rule of the bourgeoisie. Far from being impractical, Backe’s ideology provided a grand historical rationale for the extreme protectionism already implemented by the nationalist agrarians. Far from being backward looking, Backe’s vision assigned to National Socialism the mission of achieving a reconciliation of the unresolved contradictions of nineteenth-century liberalism. It was not National Socialism but the Victorian ideology of the free market that was the outdated relic of a bygone era.

    Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction (pp. 172-5).
    On 26 September 1933 Darré and Backe had submitted to the surprised cabinet a radical proposal to secure for ever the landholding of the German peasantry. The Draft Reichserbhofgesetz enshrined Darré’s Blut und Boden ideology in German law. For the purpose of protecting the peasantry as the ‘Blood Source of the German People’, the law proposed to create a new category of farm, the Erbhof (hereditary farm), protected against debt, insulated from market forces and passed down from generation to generation within racially pure peasant families…

    Whereas Hugenberg and the nationalists were loyal to the landowner interest, the ‘agrarian bolshevists’ who were now in control of the Ministry were rumoured to be planning a massive programme of land reform to break the stranglehold of the aristocracy on the east. Of all the economic measures taken by Hitler’s government in its first years, the Erbhof law was the measure marked most distinctively by specifically Nazi ideology.

    Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction (p. 184).



  11. #71

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kritias
    So, your argument now is “I’m not talking about her work in general, just this one book which supports my argument – don’t bring up the others that destroy her argument?”.
    Your false accusations of Arendt having fundamentally contradicted herself don’t destroy anyone’s argument but yours.
    I wrote that Arendt’s work in OoT negates Nazism. You called that a lie.
    Because it is. Your assertion is an abject disgrace, and not just because you have the audacity to accuse others of not reading/misrepresenting her work.
    You were just shown her earlier work is completely 180 degrees different from what she claims in OoT.
    This is a lie. You asserted this with no evidence in another lame attempt to discredit her work, even though doing so wouldn’t substantiate your false claim that the Nazis weren’t totalitarian in any case.
    In no part of her analysis does Arendt explains how or why one form of totalitarianism comes to dominate over the other. In the case of Germany, Hitler had to compete with the KPD – if both movements are totalitarian, internationalist, and utopian what makes the average, apolitical, wordless, isolated German choose one over the other?
    As has been explained to you numerous times, Nazi racism is not the reason Arendt describes it as totalitarian, nor is the fact Germans went Nazi instead of communist.

    Accordingly, points ii-v are completely irrelevant since Arendt never claimed Nazism was exactly the same as Bolshevism, and her discussion of the nature of totalitarianism is not contingent on mirrored parallels with the Russian Civil War (the idea there was no resistance to the Nazis is stupid anyway), nor the difference between the gulags and Auschwitz, nor that the Soviets had reasons for systematic extermination of millions of people that weren’t inherently racist. The idea that Stalin didn’t have a cult of personality during his lifetime is also wrong and dumb. Literally the first two sentences of the Wiki article: “Joseph Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent feature of Soviet culture in December 1929, after a lavish celebration of his purported 50th birthday.[1] For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet press presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, with Stalin's name and image appearing everywhere.”
    Having gone over these problems, let’s go over your strawman.
    Your rhetorical appeals to consequence are problems with your argument, not hers.
    What I wrote was that Arendt’s argument in 1947 is similar to mine. Not that her book is similar to my argument; the book isn’t even similar to her own argument in 1947!
    That’s a lie though. Like I said, all your citations did was discuss things she wrote. They did not substantiate your claim at all.
    Your argument is based on a flawed, Frankenstein (because it was made of different book parts) collection of a book that reached celebrity status during the 1950s because it was politically expedient for it to be used
    My argument is based on Arendt’s book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and on empirical economic analysis of Soviet and Nazi economic planning from an MIT economist. Your argument is based on deliberate misrepresentations of the content of those sources.
    Arendt claimed in 1947 that Nazism is the extension of capitalism, when capital seizes government for their own benefit and utilizes the bigotry of people to distract the lower classes on foreign enemies and promising foreign adventures. That’s what ‘the alliance of capital and mob’ means. The word capital is there, so you won’t miss it a second time now I pointed it out for you. Read the excerpts again.
    Guess what Chapter 10 of her book is about? You know, the one you read? The words, “The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite” are even in the table of contents, so you won’t miss it a second time now I pointed it out for you. Read it again.
    Last edited by Lord Thesaurian; August 28, 2021 at 11:53 AM.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  12. #72

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    The answer to this comes from her earlier work: communism is a mass movement, while Nazism comes from the alliance of capital with the mob.
    Lenin's regime was brought to power by capitalists, and Lenin's party lost the elections in Russian Provisional government, so it was never a mass movement, so by your logic Lenin is a Nazi lol.
    NSDAP came to power to ineptitude of Weimar government and vicious inhumanity of Soviet Union causing German public to turn away from their own reds and preferring least worst options they had at that point, or so they thought. 20s Hitler sounded like Swedish socdem and nobody expected Hitler would go full Lenin with starting wars and sending people into concentration camps in the near future.

  13. #73

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    Lenin's regime was brought to power by capitalists, and Lenin's party lost the elections in Russian Provisional government, so it was never a mass movement, so by your logic Lenin is a Nazi lol.
    NSDAP came to power to ineptitude of Weimar government and vicious inhumanity of Soviet Union causing German public to turn away from their own reds and preferring least worst options they had at that point, or so they thought. 20s Hitler sounded like Swedish socdem and nobody expected Hitler would go full Lenin with starting wars and sending people into concentration camps in the near future.
    The Bolsheviks seized power from the Provisional Government in Oct 1917. They held Constituent Assembly elections in Nov 1917 which they lost comprehensively (the total Bolshevik vote share was a little over 22%). They then used military force to close the Assembly after only a single session at the start of 1918.
    Last edited by Cope; August 29, 2021 at 03:43 AM.



  14. #74
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    Your false accusations of Arendt having fundamentally contradicted herself don’t destroy anyone’s argument but yours...Your assertion is an abject disgrace, and not just because you have the audacity...This is a lie. You asserted this with no evidence in another lame attempt... As has been explained to you numerous times...
    So, your argument has now devolved to a flurry of insults? Right-o. I've given you all the sources I used. They are free access. Feel free to read them yourself and prove us I am misleading/misrepresenting them. Until then, your valuations of my posts are just your opinion - not facts.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    Accordingly, points ii-v are completely irrelevant since Arendt never claimed Nazism was exactly the same as Bolshevism, and her discussion of the nature of totalitarianism is not contingent on mirrored parallels with the Russian Civil War (the idea there was no resistance to the Nazis is stupid anyway), nor the difference between the gulags and Auschwitz, nor that the Soviets had reasons for systematic extermination of millions of people that weren’t inherently racist. The idea that Stalin didn’t have a cult of personality during his lifetime is also wrong and dumb. Literally the first two sentences of the Wiki article: “Joseph Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent feature of Soviet culture in December 1929, after a lavish celebration of his purported 50th birthday.[1] For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet press presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, with Stalin's name and image appearing everywhere.”
    Firstly, I wrote Stalin had a cult of personality even before the war, but that it only grew to absolute status after the Soviets won the war. You can see that from the monumental works dedicated to Stalin throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following WW2. Stalin died in 1953. The fact that you took from my writing that I suggested 'Stalin didn't have a cult of personality during his lifetime' is exemplar of your approach to this debate. Read again, read slower.


    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    My argument is based on Arendt’s book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and on empirical economic analysis of Soviet and Nazi economic planning from an MIT economist. Your argument is based on deliberate misrepresentations of the content of those sources.
    I've given you more than 10 different sources in this thread, all of them different scholars. Are we all lying to you?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    Guess what Chapter 10 of her book is about? You know, the one you read? The words, “The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite” are even in the table of contents, so you won’t miss it a second time now I pointed it out for you. Read it again.
    Maybe you should read what I wrote more carefully. I wrote what Arendt writes in 1947 is 180 degrees different than what she writes in 1951 onwards. That's exceptionally (and suspiciously) rare for a scholar to do. You can compare the two chapters and judge for yourself. I've given you all the tools, now it's up to you.

    PS: You keep calling Temin "an MIT economist" as if MIT professors are infallible. I take it you'd also have to agree with Noam Chomsky then. In particular, with an interview Chomsky gave stating the ties between the Nazis and capitalist corporations? He's from MIT, too, so you HAVE to agree - right?
    Last edited by Kritias; August 30, 2021 at 12:48 PM.
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  15. #75

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    gave stating the ties between the Nazis and capitalist corporations?
    Non-argument: from Lenin getting aid from Kaiser and foreign banks and Stalin's industrialization and lend-lease, to modern-day American military-industrial complex arming terrorist groups, capitalist corporations deal with literally anyone, as long as it makes profit.

  16. #76

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kritias View Post
    So, your argument has now devolved to a flurry of insults? Right-o. I've given you all the sources I used. They are free access. Feel free to read them yourself and prove us I am misleading/misrepresenting them. Until then, your valuations of my posts are just your opinion - not facts.

    I've given you more than 10 different sources in this thread, all of them different scholars. Are we all lying to you?
    The audacity to claim your argument is backed up by sources is especially comical given key assertions like “the Nazi system was not totalitarian” and “western capitalist countries simultaneously did everything bad the Soviets did and for similar reasons” are just a couple of the many things you’ve casually pulled out of thin air, even though I specifically asked for any source making those assertions when you made them. Projecting the dishonesty of your sophistry onto your interlocutors is all you have left.

    I never claimed your sources are “lying,” I’ve pointed out in each case why your sources don’t support the lies you’re trying to shoehorn onto them, like the assertions I referred to above. Your own quotations from your sources “prove” it. Each time this has been pointed out, rather than defending your claims, you make new ones. It doesn’t matter how many sources you claim to have if you can’t refute the 2 I have to support my factual and clear cut position, not counting Wikipedia and a dictionary. Falsely accusing a renowned scholar and Holocaust survivor of intellectual dishonesty and Nazi apologism, all while accusing me of disregarding sources that you have misrepresented to service your false narrative, is the end stage of your failed argument. For example:
    Firstly, I wrote Stalin had a cult of personality even before the war, but that it only grew to absolute status after the Soviets won the war. You can see that from the monumental works dedicated to Stalin throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following WW2. Stalin died in 1953. The fact that you took from my writing that I suggested 'Stalin didn't have a cult of personality during his lifetime' is exemplar of your approach to this debate. Read again, read slower:

    Her treatise on the leader is also affected by the equalizing between Nazis and Soviets. Hitler’s status as the unquestionable leader ever since he became the leader of the movement seems more in line with what Arendt claims.
    Stalin’s cult of personality/status as an all knowing and all powerful leader was “a prominent part of Soviet culture beginning in 1929.” That’s basic enough to be in a Wiki article. Your attempt to establish a dichotomy to invalidate Arendt’s comparison of Nazism and Bolshevism is representative of your argument as a whole: presenting details which are supportive of or even irrelevant to her commentary as contradictory to it, based on sources that make no such assertion. Hitler and Stalin were totalitarian cult figures during their entire tenure as “supreme leaders.” That’s just a fact. Similarities abound, and Arendt discussed how specific similarities factor into her commentary on totalitarianism. No source you’ve presented disputes this.
    Maybe you should read what I wrote more carefully. I wrote what Arendt writes in 1947 is 180 degrees different than what she writes in 1951 onwards. That's exceptionally (and suspiciously) rare for a scholar to do. You can compare the two chapters and judge for yourself. I've given you all the tools, now it's up to you.
    Again, you claimed her book is fundamentally inconsistent with her earlier commentary on the subject, and cited sources that make no such claim. I quoted the evidence directly from her book refuting your assertion. I also cited the chapter where she discusses your reference to the alliance between the mob and the elite to demonstrate that rather than contradicting herself, she incorporated it into her book, contrary to your assertion that she misrepresented her own work in order to service “Cold War propaganda.” People can indeed read for themselves. Your argument is based on the hope that they won’t.
    You keep calling Temin "an MIT economist" as if MIT professors are infallible. I take it you'd also have to agree with Noam Chomsky then. In particular, with an interview Chomsky gave stating the ties between the Nazis and capitalist corporations? He's from MIT, too, so you HAVE to agree - right?
    On the contrary, I’ve pointed out Temin’s credentials as a reminder that your personal opinion that his commentary is “absurd” is not a counter to his argument, which you’ve only managed to misrepresent thus far in any case. Whether or not you agree with him is irrelevant.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  17. #77
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    This is stooping to surrealism. Let me spell it out.

    1. I'm not saying the Nazis are something less than totalitarian, but something more. Arendt was claiming that too, in 1947. I've given you multiple quotes from various sources that show the alliance between capital and the Nazis, which also refute the totalitarian argument. Even Chomsky's interview on the last post supports this. Totalitarian means the ordinary Germans were "forced" to commit the crimes they committed, because of an all-engulfing government; they were not. The only ones suffering the horror of the Nazi regime were those the Nazis viewed as "un-productive". Everyone else, by large, supported the regime and were living by it. More, the regime seems to have been way weaker than originally suspected, relying more on an image of strength rather than its enforcement. To say it simply, the view that the Nazi regime was totalitarian is based on how the Nazis wanted to be viewed, instead of how they really were. And after the war, the totalitarian argument was a great absolution for the German national identity. I have given you sources for all of the above.

    2. I've already proven to you that Arendt has been accused of negating the Nazis, even her argument of the centrality of Jews in the nation-state has been called to question more than once for rehashing Nazi propaganda. I've given you quotes on this. Also, Holocaust survivor is usually a term reserved for those who were captured, sent to the camps and survived; not those who were arrested, detained, but managed to flee to the United States. That doesn't negate her suffering, and fright, terror, despair when she got caught twice. And I do not in general disagree with her work; I'm pointing out her thesis on this particular book is completely contradicting her earlier work, and by changing it she's negating the Nazis compared to her earlier work (read point 1 again). Doing such a 180 is kind of suss...

    3. During the war Stalin still had to subject himself to the image of Lenin; you can see it in war footage before 1945 and his recorded speeches where he pays lip service to Lenin, never mind I have already given you quotes about this. Stalin started creeping in the forefront before the war, but he still needed to share the scene with Lenin, Marx and Engels. Once the war was won, Stalin's cult skyrocketed along with his popularity as one of the three leaders of victory to the point he eclipsed (and sidelined) other Soviet symbols. Most of the monumental statues of Stalin in Armenia (1950), the Czech Republic (1955), Germany (1951), Hungary (1956), Poland (1951), and Romania (1959) are erected after WW2 and some even after his death. This was the peak of Stalin worship, before Khrushchev exposed him and the country de-Stalinized. It's hilarious that you call me a liar and to prove this you take the sentence before this part,

    To the contrary, even Stalin had to submit himself to the image of an even greater, ever-present leader – the dead Lenin. Portraits, photos, busts, statues of Lenin is the characteristic of Marxist-Leninist regimes and parties throughout the globe, and this honor was bestowed to Lenin posthumously. Most of Stalin’s speeches pay lip service to how great a leader Lenin was, and how his ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’ will lead the USSR forward. It’s not until Stalin won the war that a similar status is conferred upon him solely, until the end of his life. Prior to 1945, whenever Stalin makes an appearance as a propaganda prop he’s right next to Lenin, Marx and Engels. After 1945, the latter three disappear completely into the background. Even though there had been a concentrated effort by Stalin and his posse to make him into a cult figure as soon as 1934, the Bolshevik movement in general wasn’t based on cult worship.
    But again, this is an exemplar of how you approached this debate. Keep repeating the same thing, and call me liar about things that if you took the time to read you'd see I am not even claiming.

    4. No, that's wrong. In 1947 Arendt specifically blames the bourgeois society of taking over the state for their own benefit, to expedite even more rapid outward expansion. She called the Nazi regime the 'road to suicide' of imperialism. In her 1951 book, she does a 180' claiming that nazis are the product of a different sort of process than the extension of bourgeois imperialism and that there was instead a 'temporary alliance' between the ruling classes and the mob. I have given you quotes straight from her work to prove this. You can't deny this.

    5. I've given you sources that deny Nazi terror on businessmen, and ordinary Germans; and a multitude other sources that takes down the arguments promoted by Temin. Read them and point 1 again.

    So, to mis-quote you for once,

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Thesaurian View Post
    Whether or not you agree is irrelevant.
    Last edited by Kritias; August 30, 2021 at 03:31 PM.
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  18. #78

    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kritias View Post
    This is stooping to surrealism. Let me spell it out.

    1. I'm not saying the Nazis are something less than totalitarian, but something more. Arendt was claiming that too, in 1947.
    Then you should quote her saying at any point ever in her life that the Nazis were not totalitarian because they were actually “more than totalitarian” lmao. Her commentary on Nazi imperialism and the elite/mob alliance is literally in a book about Nazi and Bolshevik totalitarianism, with direct references to her earlier work you cited. Inventing a whole new rhetorical dichotomy between totalitarianism and “more than totalitarianism” is a perfect example of how willfully ignorant and dishonest your argument is.
    I've given you multiple quotes from various sources that show the alliance between capital and the Nazis, which also refute the totalitarian argument. Even Chomsky's interview on the last post supports this.
    “Capitalist complicity in the Nazi regime = Nazis were not totalitarian” is not something anyone you’ve cited has claimed. Please find it and quote it directly, no essay needed. I’d be interested to know how many people on Earth are willing to commit intellectual suicide by contradicting something basic enough to be in any encyclopedia entry on Nazism.
    Totalitarian means the ordinary Germans were "forced" to commit the crimes they committed, because of an all-engulfing government; they were not.
    No source you have cited claims that the Nazis were not totalitarian. Totalitarianism means “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.” It has nothing to do with forcing people to commit crimes. The idea that any voluntary subservience to the state at any level disqualifies a government from being totalitarian is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time and not something any of your sources asserted. Naturally, your premise would mean no society ever, including the Soviet one, was totalitarian.
    The only ones suffering the horror of the Nazi regime were those the Nazis viewed as "un-productive". Everyone else, by large, supported the regime and were living by it.
    None of your sources claim this. That would be wrong and incredibly stupid. The Nazis sentenced tens of thousands of ordinary Germans to the camps for political crimes.
    More, the regime seems to have been way weaker than originally suspected, relying more on an image of strength rather than its enforcement. To say it simply, the view that the Nazi regime was totalitarian is based on how the Nazis wanted to be viewed, instead of how they really were. And after the war, the totalitarian argument was a great absolution for the German national identity. I have given you sources for all of the above.
    Which of your source claimed the Nazis were not totalitarian? A direct quote will suffice.
    2. I've already proven to you that Arendt has been accused of negating the Nazis, even her argument of the centrality of Jews in the nation-state has been called to question more than once for rehashing Nazi propaganda. I've given you quotes on this.
    Arendt tends to be a controversial figure in Israel. The article you cited mentioned the controversy, it did not substantiate the emotive accusations, and specifically said it did not intend to. By your logic, I may as well allege you’re rehashing Nazi propaganda by having the audacity to claim Nazi totalitarianism is a post war fabrication. In any case, none of the sources you allude to for taking issue with Arendt’s work do so on the basis that the Nazis were not in fact totalitarian, nor that she ever said they were not totalitarian and later contradicted herself by saying they are. That’s just you making up your own parameters for basic concepts so you can shoehorn source material onto your outrageous claims.
    Also, Holocaust survivor is usually a term reserved for those who were captured, sent to the camps and survived; not those who were arrested, detained, but managed to flee to the United States. That doesn't negate her suffering, and fright, terror, despair when she got caught twice.
    I’ve never seen any source claim Arendt was not a Holocaust survivor. The point is that your attempts to discredit her commentary on totalitarianism by accusing her of Nazi apologism amount to a crude smear, nothing more.
    And I do not in general disagree with her work; I'm pointing out her thesis on this particular book is completely contradicting her earlier work, and by changing it she's negating the Nazis compared to her earlier work (read point 1 again). Doing such a 180 is kind of suss...
    None of your sources assert Arendt’s book is a 180 on some fundamentally different, earlier position she had on totalitarianism.
    3. During the war Stalin still had to subject himself to the image of Lenin; you can see it in war footage before 1945 and his recorded speeches where he pays lip service to Lenin, never mind I have already given you quotes about this. Stalin started creeping in the forefront before the war, but he still needed to share the scene with Lenin, Marx and Engels. Once the war was won, Stalin's cult skyrocketed along with his popularity as one of the three leaders of victory to the point he eclipsed (and sidelined) other Soviet symbols. Most of the monumental statues of Stalin in Armenia (1950), the Czech Republic (1955), Germany (1951), Hungary (1956), Poland (1951), and Romania (1959) are erected after WW2 and some even after his death. This was the peak of Stalin worship, before Khrushchev exposed him and the country de-Stalinized. It's hilarious that you call me a liar and to prove this you take the sentence before this part,

    But again, this is an exemplar of how you approached this debate. Keep repeating the same thing, and call me liar about things that if you took the time to read you'd see I am not even claiming.
    The verbose sophistry you use in an attempt to deflect something as simple as a basic fact from a Wiki article is an exemplary of how you approached this debate: repeating the same lies, and avoiding defense your claims.
    Quote Originally Posted by Wiki
    Joseph Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent feature of Soviet culture in December 1929, after a lavish celebration of his purported 50th birthday.[1] For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet press presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, with Stalin's name and image appearing everywhere.
    The fact Lenin is on display in the Red Square to this day like a national patron saint is completely irrelevant to Arendt’s commentary and to your claims.
    4. No, that's wrong. In 1947 Arendt specifically blames the bourgeois society of taking over the state for their own benefit, to expedite even more rapid outward expansion. She called the Nazi regime the 'road to suicide' of imperialism. In her 1951 book, she does a 180' claiming that nazis are the product of a different sort of process than the extension of bourgeois imperialism and that there was instead a 'temporary alliance' between the ruling classes and the mob. I have given you quotes straight from her work to prove this. You can't deny this.
    The sections you quoted from her earlier work are discussed in her book, often verbatim, including with regards to imperialism. I’ve quoted some of it more than once. If you’re going to quote her earlier work and claim it is “a 180,” the bare minimum you would need to do is quote exactly where in her book any number of those specific contradictions are, side by side. It should be easy to do without your editorialized commentary needed to bridge the gap. Until then, your spurious accusations are nothing short of libel.
    5. I've given you sources that deny Nazi terror on businessmen, and ordinary Germans; and a multitude other sources that takes down the arguments promoted by Temin. Read them and point 1 again.
    And I’ve pointed out those sources discuss, as Temin does, voluntary cooperation with the Nazis. Your sources do not deny Nazis used terror on businessmen nor on Germans overall, because that would be wrong and dumb. The only other counterarguments any of your sources made against Temin was to take things he himself mentioned as caveats out of context and claim those caveats were actually counterarguments, which suggests at a minimum that they don’t know what a caveat is, or they simply disagree that he can include them as caveats in the first place.

    I’m glad you’ve boiled the essence of your argument down to its sheer absurdity through repetition. It’s more transparently counterfactual than I could have anticipated at the outset.
    Last edited by Lord Thesaurian; August 30, 2021 at 10:37 PM.
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  19. #79
    Morticia Iunia Bruti's Avatar Praeses
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Although Kritias has already proven many times, that Nazis were no socialists, lets take a look at Otto Strasser:

    Over the following years the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser did much to grow the party by tying Hitler’s racist nationalism to socialist rhetoric that appealed to the suffering lower middle classes. In doing so, the Strassers also succeeded in expanding the Nazi reach beyond its traditional Bavarian base. By the late 1920s, however, with the German economy in free fall, Hitler had enlisted support from wealthy industrialists who sought to pursue avowedly anti-socialist policies. Otto Strasser soon recognized that the Nazis were neither a party of socialists nor a party of workers, and in 1930 he broke away to form the anti-capitalist Schwarze Front (Black Front). Gregor remained the head of the left wing of the Nazi Party, but the lot for the ideological soul of the party had been cast.

    Were the Nazis Socialists? | Britannica

    So obviously the Nazis were only socialists by name to attract workers, but not ideologically.
    Last edited by Morticia Iunia Bruti; August 31, 2021 at 04:48 AM.
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  20. #80
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    Default Re: Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

    Its worth working out what you dislike about different systems. I dislike the irrational racism of Nazism which led to such incredibly evil murder. In my view it is a disgusting perversion of many wonderful strains of European thought, especially German Romanticism.

    Bland idiocy like asserting "Nazis were Socialists" is stupidly wrong, and obscures the nature of Nazi evil by conflating it with other rotten systems like Stalinism and Maoism (which used the theory of Marxism and other Socialist thought to justify their atrocities).

    Both Nazism and Socialism are attractive to some because they appeal to good parts of people, like protecting kin or sharing with humanity. So there's always a chance wretched scum will parade the same lies to corrupt people in the present day who yearn to prot4ect their kin or share with other humans.

    Keeping a clear vision of what is wrong with those past movements helps us remain alert to present and future threats. Weak minded blather obscures those threats.
    Last edited by Abdülmecid I; September 01, 2021 at 04:41 AM. Reason: Continuity.
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