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Communities




Progressive-Socialist-Democrat Party v. The National Socialist German's Worker's Party?

Debate Information

Progressive - Socialist - Democrat Party of the United States

There is hardly a lower life-form among mankind than the one who openly serves Satan by advocating for the mutilation of babies in the womb; openly and unashamedly advocates for unconscionable forms of sexual perversion and the defilement of God's Covenant of Marriage through same-sex unions; openly and radically espouses the horrors, death, suffering and debasement of Leninism-Socialism/Marxism-Communism.

Ladies and Gentleman of America, I give you the Progressive-Socialist-Democrat Party of the United States - Hitler's ideology lives-on as Satan celebrates victory...



smoothieVaulkPlaffelvohfenAlofRI



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    Arguments


  • Happy_KillbotHappy_Killbot 5557 Pts   -  
    PlaffelvohfenAlofRI
    At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
    Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
    Through a long process of evolution this life 
    developed into the human race.
    Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .

    All of that so we can argue about nothing.
  • smoothiesmoothie 434 Pts   -  
    @RickeyD Got any sources to back up your graph or should we just take the christian mom facebook post as evidence?
    AlofRI
    why so serious?
  • VaulkVaulk 813 Pts   -  
    @Happy_Killbot

    It's incredible what you can do when you take things out of context.


    "If there's no such thing as a question then what kind of questions do people ask"?

    "There's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies through the veil of logical fallacies disguised as rational argument".

    "Oh, you don't like my sarcasm?  Well I don't much appreciate your stup!d".


  • TKDBTKDB 694 Pts   -  
    @RickeyD

    I'm going to guess, that it will be Bernie Sanders verses POTUS Donald Trump in the 2020 Election Cycle.

    Here's a recent article, that elaborates on Bernie Sanders:

    https://townhall-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/townhall.com/columnists/ianhaworth/2020/02/08/bernie-sanders-the-communists-lie-of-democratic-socialism-n2560981?amp_js_v=a3&amp_gsa=1&amp=true&usqp=mq331AQCKAE=#aoh=15812194108098&amp_ct=1581219785776&referrer=https://www.google.com&amp_tf=From %1$s&ampshare=https://townhall.com/columnists/ianhaworth/2020/02/08/bernie-sanders-the-communists-lie-of-democratic-socialism-n2560981 



    OPINION
    "Bernie Sanders - The Communist's Lie of Democratic Socialism "

    "Since Bernie Sanders burst onto the mainstream political scene in 2016, a debate has raged amongst both his supporters and critics regarding where his true political allegiances lie. Many critics argue that the senator from Vermont is a devoted communist. His supporters will dismiss this as right-wing slander, stating that Sanders is a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist!”

    "Only a few days ago, Newsweek published a piece titled “Bernie Sanders Is A Democratic Socialist Not A Communist, Here’s the Difference” which perfectly demonstrated the Left’s blind acceptance of the senator’s ideological self-declaration, instead focusing on the definitional differences between communism and socialism."

    "Dr. Eileen Hunt Botting told Newsweek that Democratic socialism "aims to use democratic government to promote a more fair and egalitarian distribution of social goods and opportunities among all people in a society,” and that “Sanders, like Elizabeth Warren, is far closer to Scandinavia than to Venezuela on his democratic socialist proposals, such as 'Medicare for all.'"

    "Bernie Sanders and his supporters are well practised in using Scandinavia to justify their growing list of demands, often applying the attributes of Nordic countries in support of their definition of “socialism.” The fact that the free-market success of these countries was actually negatively impacted by so-called “democratic socialist” policies is a detail they prefer to ignore."

    "The problem here is that too many are willing to accept Bernie Sanders’ recent “democratic socialist” rebrand without question, allowing Sanders to stand on the shoulders of Scandanavian capitalism to laud an ideology which would drag such societies into ruin. If we scratch beneath the surface of the kooky Brooklynite, we find an ideology completely indistinguishable from communism."

    "Communism is a political theory deriving from Marxism which calls for class warfare in pursuit of a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person is provided for according to their needs. Given that every Bernie Sanders speech includes a call for “revolution” to overthrow the millionaire and billionaire class, why are so many so eager to ignore his historically-familiar rhetoric?"

    "Despite speaking the language of communism, Bernie Sanders continues to hide behind the shield of “socialism.” He even adds the somewhat redundant prefix of “democratic,” as if that alleviates any moral concerns. “It’s not murder, it’s democratic murder” would hardly lead to an acquittal. However, it’s deeply important to understand that socialism and communism exist along the same spectrum, and along the same path. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, stated that “The goal of socialism is communism.” Bernie Sanders may claim to be a socialist, but says nothing of his goals beyond delivering socialism to American shores."

    "In order to understand Bernie Sanders’ motivation, we must look at his past. While journalists at Newsweek will claim that “Democratic socialists obviously esteem democracy and social justice and reject a need for a trade off," is it obvious that this applies to Bernie Sanders?"

    "After all, this is a man who warmly praised the communist regimes of Cuba and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Neither of these regimes held democracy or social justice in high esteem, so surely a “democratic” socialist would have abhorred the horrors of communism? Surely a gentleman who respected freedom and democracy would never honeymoon in such a country?! "

    "For most of his life, Bernie Sanders was politically irrelevant. This allowed him to embrace the radical and immoral ideologies of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and Trotsky without having to answer any difficult questions. However, Sanders can no longer candidly admit the goals of his ideology. Instead, he hides beneath the thin veil of “democratic socialism,” and happily avoids any challenges to this unsubstantiated claim. While the evils of communism are still universally understood, Sanders intentionally takes advantage of political ignorance when it comes to communism’s cousin, socialism."

    "If someone talks like a communist, and acts like a communist, they are - in all likelihood - a communist. Don’t be distracted by the promises of free healthcare, education, and housing. Those promises have been made before, and are nothing more than honey on the end of an ideological sword which has claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of people."

    "Communism is evil, socialism is evil, and “democratic evil” is still evil."

    @RickeyD

    Now watch CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and some of the other Liberal news media outlets, start singing their praises towards Bernie Sanders, and carrying his Liberal water for him?

    The Trump Impeachment Liberals, waged their Political Civil War with Trump, pretty much up until he got Acquitted.

    Now watch Bernie Sanders, wage his own Political Civil War with Trump, from now, all the way up until the upcoming 2020 Election day?

    The next 2020 Election, is going to put the history of the 2016 Election Cycle to shame. 



    smoothieDee
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    Neither Nazis or Democrats are socialists. Nazis are fascists and killed socialists, both in society as a whole as part of the holocaust and within their own party during the Night of the Long Knives. Democrats are liberals who believe in a typical regulated mixed market economy.

    The Nazis famously had quite a lot of guns and Hitler deregulated possession of rifles and shotguns as it was the previous non-Nazi Weimar Republic that placed a de jure total ban on weaponry. The democrats are doing the opposite and trying to limit access to guns, but this is centred around restricting the most deadly weapons and stopping the most dangerous type of people from getting guns rather than "no guns".

    I'm not sure what censorship the Democratic party is meant to be instituting so can't even comment there.

    The idea that the Democratic party has "media mind control" is laughable seeing as Fox News is a prime source of disinformation that Republicans buy into. 

    The Nazis were anti-choice and stropped abortions in most circumstances for Aryan women, reducing the number of abortions by around 90% and limiting them to basically to protect the life of the money (Source: https://www.academia.edu/1378119/Abortion_and_Womens_Legal_Personhood_in_Germany_A_Contribution_to_the_Feminist_Theory_of_the_State). The Democrats have the opposite view and are trying to expand access to abortion services.

    The current front-runner for the position of presidential candidate is Bernie Sanders, a Jew. There are 7 other Jews in the US senate, all of them democratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliation_in_the_United_States_Senate#Jews_(8). Trump meanwhile has been criticised by the Anti-defamation league for talking like a white-nationalist - https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-condemns-president-trumps-racist-tweets-and-his-use-of-israel-and-jews-as-a. I assume not being white-nationtionalists is why supposedly why the democrats "hate whites" but I've got news for you: The Nazis were white nationalists.

    I can kind of see what you're getting at with nazis worshipping the government although they didn't really, it was more of a personality cult around Hitler and a focus on the nation-state and volk as a whole. Democrats, don;t do this. In fact research has found "In an extensive analysis of several major datasets (including ANES and GSS) over a period of five decades, we find that in the United States, conservatives trust the government more than liberals when the president in office shares their own ideology."

    Not that I think any of the above will make a difference. Anyone too blind to see the obvious wholes in that dumb table isn't going to apply critical thinking.
    PlaffelvohfenAlofRI
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    By nitpicking, you can make any comparison seem valid. For example, @RickeyD vs Hitler:

    Follows totalitarian ideology - Followed totalitarian ideology
    Believes that one group of people (Jews) is beneath others - Believed that one group of people (atheists) is beneath others
    Worships law enforcement - Worshipped law enforcement
    Cannot make a logical argument and has to yell instead - Could not make a logical argument and had to yell instead
    Bases his argumentation off one book (the Bible) - Based his argumentation off one book (Mein Kampf)
    Denies science in favor of pseudo-science - Denied science in favor of pseudo-science
    Does not respect people's freedoms - Did not respect people's freedoms

    Poor Rickey...
    PlaffelvohfensmoothieAlofRIpiloteer
  • DeeDee 5395 Pts   -  


    There is hardly a lower life-form among mankind than the one who openly serves Satan by advocating for the mutilation of babies in the womb


    Thank you for agreeing your god serves Satan ......

    YNumbers 31:17 (Moses) “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women that hath known man by lying with him.” In other words: women that might be pregnant, which clearly is abortion for the fetus.

    Hosea 13:16 God promises to dash to pieces the infants of Samaria and the “their women with child shall be ripped up”.  Once again this god kills the unborn, including their pregnant mothers.

    AlofRI
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -   edited February 2020
    Also just to prempt the "The Nazis were National SOCIALISTS!" rebuttal

    a) The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea isn't actually a democratic republic. Use some common sense about these kind of things.

    b) They called themselves "National Socialists" because socialism was very popular in Germany at the time, not because they actually ideologically cared about socialism.

    C) They did end up attracting members with socialist type policies, but because Nazis were facists and were ideologically opposed to socialism and communism they literally killed them in the Night of Long Knives and purged members of other parties who actually were socialist/communist-aligned like the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the Communist Party of Germany though imprisonment, exile and murder.

    If you believe the Nazis were socialists, you are literally - and I mean LITERALLY - buying into Nazi propaganda 80 years after the fact
    AlofRIPlaffelvohfen
  • Happy_KillbotHappy_Killbot 5557 Pts   -  
    @Vaulk
    Vaulk said:
    @Happy_Killbot

    It's incredible what you can do when you take things out of context.


    That's a 3-way street in this scenario.
    Plaffelvohfen
    At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
    Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
    Through a long process of evolution this life 
    developed into the human race.
    Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .

    All of that so we can argue about nothing.
  • AlofRIAlofRI 1484 Pts   -  
    Anyone can take a word and use it for their own advantage. The Nazis used the word, the communists used the word, the Netherlands ALSO use the word "socialism" in an opposite, and beneficial direction. Just like Rump is using the word "Republican" (OR "conservative") in a completely opposite direction. Any resemblance to the words used by the different parties is purely coincidental.
    Plaffelvohfen
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    Nazis were certainly socialists in terms of their policies and the general collectivist world view, although I can understand new age socialists/communists not wanting their ideology to be associated with such a vile regime.

    I for one have no problem with capitalism being associated with brutal regimes, such as that of Pinochet. I understand that the world is a bit more complex than that, and capitalism being or not being present in a given society in itself is not sufficient for it being a free and prosperous society.
    Socialists have some instinctive fear that their ideology will be exposed as not the ultimate solution to everything (especially since it has not worked anywhere it has been tried), hence they use the best mental gymnastics they can come up with to dismiss every inconvenient historical example as "not true socialism/communism". "True socialism has never been tried. When it actually is tried, then we will live in a paradise!" Yeah, sure.

    I stopped taking socialists/communists seriously a long time ago. They are like Christian/Muslim fundamentalists, holding on to their dogmas that have nothing to do with the realities of the world and defy the most basic elements of logic. Unfortunately, they will keep trying their experiments again and again, devastating societies, and always blame everything on others. This is a sad reality of our lives: humans are outstandingly terrible at learning from their mistakes.
    Plaffelvohfen
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    MayCaesar said:
    Nazis were certainly socialists in terms of their policies and the general collectivist world view, although I can understand new age socialists/communists not wanting their ideology to be associated with such a vile regime.

    I for one have no problem with capitalism being associated with brutal regimes, such as that of Pinochet. I understand that the world is a bit more complex than that, and capitalism being or not being present in a given society in itself is not sufficient for it being a free and prosperous society.
    Socialists have some instinctive fear that their ideology will be exposed as not the ultimate solution to everything (especially since it has not worked anywhere it has been tried), hence they use the best mental gymnastics they can come up with to dismiss every inconvenient historical example as "not true socialism/communism". "True socialism has never been tried. When it actually is tried, then we will live in a paradise!" Yeah, sure.

    I stopped taking socialists/communists seriously a long time ago. They are like Christian/Muslim fundamentalists, holding on to their dogmas that have nothing to do with the realities of the world and defy the most basic elements of logic. Unfortunately, they will keep trying their experiments again and again, devastating societies, and always blame everything on others. This is a sad reality of our lives: humans are outstandingly terrible at learning from their mistakes.
    Ampersand said:
    Also just to prempt the "The Nazis were National SOCIALISTS!" rebuttal

    a) The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea isn't actually a democratic republic. Use some common sense about these kind of things.

    b) They called themselves "National Socialists" because socialism was very popular in Germany at the time, not because they actually ideologically cared about socialism.

    C) They did end up attracting members with socialist type policies, but because Nazis were facists and were ideologically opposed to socialism and communism they literally killed them in the Night of Long Knives and purged members of other parties who actually were socialist/communist-aligned like the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the Communist Party of Germany though imprisonment, exile and murder.

    If you believe the Nazis were socialists, you are literally - and I mean LITERALLY - buying into Nazi propaganda 80 years after the fact

  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    @Ampersand ;

    I have never said that Nazis were socialists because of what they called themselves. I said that they were socialists because their policies and their world view were socialist.

    As for c), it is very common for authoritarians to exterminate each other in their struggle for dominance. Socialists are especially well known for killing each other, and Soviets and Chinese nearly had a full-on war at some point over their ideological disagreements.
    Wars have been fought between Christians over some minor disagreements, between Muslims over some minor disagreements... Socialists are no different. Hitler and Stalin were best friends, until they grabbed all the land they could without running into each other.

    These all are just different totalitarian collectivist ideologies, each striving for eliminating all opposition, taking informational dominance and subduing the entire population by forcing a harsh violent system on them. That you guys are so keen on killing each other over ideological disagreements is pretty natural.
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    Ah yes the famously socialist policy of vowing to destroy socialism, destroy all socialist countries and killing all socialists from within your own party and killing, exiling or forcing into hiding the socialists in the nation as a whole. I mean there isn't really anything more Hitler could have done to prove he hated socialism short of getting a tattoo that literally spelt it out..

    Hitler and Stalin were ideological enemies as fascism and the USSR version of socialism saw each other as the ultimate threat. Hitler spoke for many years before Operation Barbossa about needing to destroy the slavic nations and "Jewish-Bolshevism" while the USSR pushed plenty of anti-fascist literature and spoke out against the Nazis regularly. The Molotov-Ribbentrop, the short period of alliance between the two countries, only came about as a way for them to fight each other at a later date when they each thought they would be better equipped to destroy the other. Stalin wanted a military alliance with France and Britain believing war was inevitable, but Britain and France tried to pursue peace instead and wouldn't go along with it so the alliance was thought of as a way to get breathing room and time to prepare for a later inevitable war with Germany while Germany wanted to ensure it didn't fight a two-front war when it had to deal with France.

    The Nazis were fundamentally racist nationalists and their goals were around strengthening Germany, destroying other races and maintaining a tight ideological control over the nation through whatever means necessary. While they were certainly collectivist in the sense that they wanted to suborn people's individuality to the overall good of the Third Reich (Or at least the overall good as interpreted by a load of racist mass-murderers), I'm not sure you actually know what collectivism means.

    Collectivism is a philosophical/ideological point of view based upon people prioritising the group rather than the individual. Socialism is an economic set-up revolving around public ownership of the means of production in a manner which provides people with unequal levels of compensation which will vary based on their individual efforts. While socialist set-ups can be collectivist, they can also be individualist - just like capitalist economic set-ups. The economy and the ideological underpinnings of what you are trying to achieve with a certain socio-economic arrange and why are two very different things. Compare 1945 and 2020 USA for examples of how a similar overall economic set-up of a mixed market economy can be run with drastically different aims and goals in mind.
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    @Ampersand

    Like I said, authoritarians like killing each other, and like you said, people easily flip what they call others and themselves in the name of political convenience. The socialists Hitler was killing were simply socialists of a different kind than Hitler himself: internationalist socialists, versus national socialists.

    Same goes for Hitler-Stalin tense relations, where in public they called each other names, but in practice collaborated on a large array of things, including very-very tight economical interaction, selling and donating raw resources to each other and organising combined military research projects. Their relations were similar to those between Germany and Japan, until they finally clashed in their conquests.

    You are changing definitions for convenience. Socialism is "public ownership of means of production" with no other additives; the definition of socialism does not say anything about levels of compensation. "Public ownership of means of production" means "collective ownership of means of production"; seeing it as individualist takes quite a bit of mental juggling. It is true that collective voluntarily can decide to operate by individualistic principles, but fundamentally the power still belongs to the collective, which is the defining feature of socialism. Much like in capitalism a company owner can voluntarily decide to organise it as a collective cooperative, yet it still remains an individualistic system at its core.

    Socialists are very resistant to being associated with Nazi Germany, and even sometimes with Soviet Union or North Korea - yet you do not need to fear that association. It is okay for your system to have been tried with disastrous results in the past; it in itself does not completely undermine its viability, albeit it obviously raises some red flags about practicality of that ideology.
    You are using various irrelevant arguments, such as "Hitler spoke against socialists" or "Nazis hated slavs", to try to deflect the discussion from the fact that the German system in practice was fully compatible with the formal definition of socialism. Production was almost completely controlled by the Party, which, in turn, reflected the will of the public; there is no going around this fact.
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    You simply repeat that Hitler was socialist but still can't give an actual rationale it.

    Your statements about Hitler and Stalin are again objectively wrong and are as I've explained. Up until August 1939 the two countries were enemies, their trade had dwindled, they had propaganda against each other and saw each other as enemies. For slightly less than two years while the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was in effect trade picked up and they were publicly friends, but we know privately Hitler was only using it as a cover so he could deal with France and then come back and attack the USSR later (as that is literally  what happened so there is no possible dispute over it) and most historians agree Stalin was doing the same but that he had assumed war with France would take longer than it did. In summary they always considered each other enemies but at one point for less than two years both found that an alliance of convenience would the other seemed the best way to eventually destroy them.

    For a start, the Nazis kept in place and empowered large Capitalists cartels so they certainly don't meet the standard of "public ownership of means of production". They were a mixed-market economy like all Capitalist nations at the time, and hence socialist. The second distinction I added of "with unequal levels of compensation which will vary based on their individual efforts" is something that requires a bit of knowledge of socialism, economics and ideology rather than simply regurgitating from a dictionary. The unequal levels of compensation is what distinguishes Communism from Socialism, both of which would have public ownership of the means of production but have different aims in terms of how society is structured and different criteria for qualification. The simplest formulation is ""From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" where the first half of the saying refers to socialism and how people are compensated based on their ability e.g. based on how much they put in, while the later half refers to the utopianistic set-up of Communism and how goods are held in common to be used by anyone to meet their needs.

    As the Nazis don't even meet the "public ownership of means of production" though, so they aren't socialists even by your more simplistic criteria. Under Nazism they had parts of the economy under state control and parts under private ownership just like any mixed-market capitalist state.

    The one point where you try to make a meaningful point is the last bit where you state "Production was almost completely controlled by the Party, which, in turn, reflected the will of the public; there is no going around this fact." If true that could be relevant. of course, it's false. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capitalisback/CountryData/Germany/Other/Pre1950Series/RefsHistoricalGermanAccounts/BuchheimScherner06.pdf:

    "MEANINGFUL PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS UNDER THE NAZI REGIME
    The notion that private firm property during the Third Reich had been preserved only in a nominal sense and that in reality there was almost nothing left of the autonomy of enterprises as economic actors is severely flawed in at least three respects: Despite widespread rationing of inputs, firms normally still had ample scope to follow their own production plans
    Investment decisions in industry were influenced by state regulation, but the initiative generally remained with the enterprises. There was no central planning of the level or the composition of investment, neither under the Four Year Plan nor during the war. Even with respect to its own war- and autarky-related investment projects, the state normally did not use power in order to secure the unconditional support of industry. Rather, freedom of contract was respected. However, the state tried to induce firms to act according to its aims by offering them a number of contract options to choose from."

    Completely contrary to your claims! I'd also note that you define socialism as ownership of the means of production and as you're unable to prove that, you immediately shift the goalposts to production being "controlled" rather than owned by the state as if literally every single state on earth doesn't have varying forms of control over the businesses that operate within it - allowing you to apply meaningless criteria to and label whichever countries you want as socialist. This seems to be part of your mental ouroboros loop where you believe socialist = totalitarianism so therefore all totalitarians = socialists.
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    @Ampersand

    What matters is not formal claims from the state and formal classification of economical entities, but the practical functionality of the system. In mixed economies, such as that of modern Germany, business owners have full control over their enterprise and are only limited by general regulations issued by the state. In Nazi Germany, however, the system was imitated from Mussolini's corporate state system, which, in turn, was based on the rule of state-controlled trade guilds. What this meant in practice is that business owners had to complete the orders from the Party, could have their property taken away at any moment in time for, say, military purposes, could be replaced by state-issued owners for arbitrary reasons, etc... It may not have been a central-planned economy overall, but it was a central-controlled economy. Ultimately, Party ran everything and owned everything (if you look up the definition of "ownership", it perfectly applies here) - and Party, in turn, allegedly represented the interests of the public.

    Now, you can argue that the Party actually did not represent the interests of anyone but the ruling class. That is true; by extension, one could argue that political representation in principle is rare, and even in liberal democracies representation is an illusion, and ultimately the ruling class runs everything. But that is a semantic difference and depends on what exactly we mean by "representation".

    As for your last notion, no, I do not think that socialism = totalitarianism. There are many kinds of non-socialist totalitarianism (Islamism and Christian fundamentalism are examples of such; Japan of the 18th century provides another example, that of "cultural totalitarianism"), and while socialism itself is a totalitarian ideology, it can in principle be practiced in a non-totalitarian way, much like there are interpretations of Christianity that are fairly liberal, despite the ideology itself being rooted in the totalitarian assumption of the supreme rule of one supernatural entity.
    When implemented nation-wide, however, in practice though socialism is bound to result in a totalitarian state, for various reasons related to how human populations respond to various incentives. But that is beside the point, and none of this has anything to do with me calling Nazi Germany a socialist state. Granted, Nazi Germany was also arguably less socialist than Soviet Union, albeit more socialist than Imperial Japan.
  • DeeDee 5395 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    I’ve argued both sides of this before and it’s yet another topic still fiercely debated. One thing  that cannot be denied though is the fact Hitler consistently preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist “exploitation” by capitalists , particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their programs called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. 
    MayCaesar
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    So your argument now is that although by definition the Nazis weren't socialist... we should call them socialist anyway due to your own vague personal criteria that you've pulled out of thin air? You've descended into a purely semantic argument with no relevance.

    Of course even by your own made-up criteria you are still wrong as your argument relies on private businesses only having nominal control of how their businesses functioned with everything truly being run by the state. You of course provide no evidence to back up such as assertion.

    The thing is in my very last post I already provided a review of the nazi economy by economics professors that showed private businesses still had real non-nominal control over how they were run because the Nazis specifically went out of their way to maintain a private sector e.g. the exact opposite of socialism. Even by your own definition, Nazis were capitalists. 
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5965 Pts   -  
    @Ampersand

    No, my argument is that they are by definition socialists. I think I made it pretty clear. Capitalism is an economical system based on voluntary exchanges between consenting parties, while socialism is an economical system based on collective ownership of means of production. Mostly nominal (I have never said that it was exclusively nominal and even made it clear that *some* business freedoms were preserved in most cases) private ownership of means of production does not make a system capitalist; actual private ownership does.

    If you want a review of the Nazi economy by economics professors that explains clearly why it was socialist and how exactly quasi-private enterprise worked there, here is a good place to start:
    https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian

    Here is a peer-reviewed publication by another professor outlying the elements of central control over the economy in Nazi Germany in comparison to that in Soviet Union, with clear parallels:
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/2597802?seq=1 

    Strictly speaking, yes, it was a mixed economy; every economy I know of was/is mixed. Only in this case the mix contained a bit too much socialist ingredient to my taste. Since you are a communist, obviously for you the "too much" threshold is quite further down that path, so we will likely never agree on the definition.
    If you want to claim that Nazis were partially capitalist and partially socialist, then I will not dispute this notion, although I disagree with such a grey characterisation.
  • DeeDee 5395 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    Hitler and Goeballs certainly seen themselves as Socialists .... "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions" Hitler was a Socialist

    Socialist Goebbels Quote

    ""England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved and oppressed people. Child labour is still a matter of course there. They have only heard about social welfare programs. Parliament occasionally discusses social legislation. Nowhere else is there such terrible and horrifying inequality as in the English slums. The Lords and City people can remain the richest people one earth only because they constantly maintain their wealth by exploiting their colonies and preserving unbelievable poverty in their own country."

  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    Just a reminder, you agree that the core basis of any socialist state is public ownership of means of production. You are also now arguing that public ownership of the means of production has nothing to do with socialism and actually it's to do with the level of government regulation. Those are two contradictory and mutually exclusive statements.

    Not only that but exactly what level of government regulation qualifies a country as socialist is of course nebulous and vague and only ascertainable by your peculiar whims. So far you've let us know that despite all the tens of thousands of regulations applicable in modern Germany that doesn't qualify, but Nazi Germany does.

    Now ideologically you're very anti-regulation, so despite your protestations that you aren't making a simplistic "socialism = bad" by conflating socialism with regulations and viewing regulation of business as inherently negative that's exactly what you're doing. 

    We're literally at the point where if there was a textbook definition of a utopian socialist economy with the workers operating each being part-owners of the businesses they worked in - you wouldn't define it as socialist because it doesn't meet your new arbitrary criteria.

    In regards to your sources I'll skip past the first one that is just an opinion piece by an objectivist nutcase and focus on the second, which like my own source I already provided earlier is also a peer reviewed journal article. What's particularly interesting is that you've gone for a quite old cold war era article when anti-sovietism was at its peak and my peer reviewed journal article is a decade and a half later and actually specifically references and rebutts the key points of your article, e.g.



     Thus in a recent dissertation on machinery firms in Chemnitz during the Nazi era, it is concluded with regard to the prewar period: "Even if price control, shortage of raw materials and slowly declining freedom to dispose of workers-the latter becoming fully effective only during the war-restricted entrepreneurial autonomy: In its principal strategic decisions the management still was autonomous." That is proven by the actual production, which was in large part not geared to the regime's priority of rearmament, even after the middle of the thirties.26 It is clear, therefore, that under the Four Year Plan of 1936 the state did not use iron and steel allocation as an obvious and potent means to strictly plan the composition of industrial production.27 Contrary to an explicit statement by Temin, the state could not use its exclusive access to the capital market for this purpose either.28 Industrial enterprises normally generated enough financial means through large profits and high depreciation earned that they could finance their genuine needs without resorting to the capital market.29 Despite the encompassing organization created to execute it, the Four Year Plan, therefore, was not at all comparable to Soviet Five Year Plans. Its ambition mainly was to rapidly increase the output of a few basic products by import substitution in order to reduce the dependence of the Third Reich on imports of strategic importance.30 Even in doing that the state largely abstained, as we will see, from the use of force.

    26 Schneider, Unternehmensstrategien, pp. 79-159; compare Schneider, "Business Decision Making."
    27 That, however, is maintained by Temin ("Economic Planning," p. 576).
    28 Ibid.
    29 Spoerer, Scheingewinne.
    30 This was demonstrated already by Petzina, Autarkiepolitik. 
    Not only that but even in isolation your own article contradicts your assertions on key points, for instance when challenged on it you've backed away from the idea that Nazi Germany private industry was nominal and said "I have never said that it was exclusively nominal and even made it clear that *some* business freedoms were preserved in most cases". The problem is that the entire thrust of your sources argument is that it was meant to  nominal.

    Similarly you focus on collectivism as a rationale for why Germany was socialist, but your Temin's work actually challenges this assumption - pointing out with agriculture as an example how the Nazis proceeded "without the disruption of collectivization" by instead putting marketing boards in place with the ability to purchase produce with monopoly rights.

    I can only assume that you didn't read the full article and didn't realise you were shooting yourself in the foot, as it specifically contradicts your rationales even if via a different route Temin ended up with a similar (false) conclusion.
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    Dee said:
    @MayCaesar

    I’ve argued both sides of this before and it’s yet another topic still fiercely debated. One thing  that cannot be denied though is the fact Hitler consistently preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist “exploitation” by capitalists , particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their programs called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. 
    In this period of history, pretty much every national was engaged in nationalisation to some extent or another. Germany was actually unique in that in the mid-30's it was more capitalist than most Capitalist countries and went in reverse and started privatising wide swarths of the industry.

    Source: "Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany", Economic History Review (2009) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9f15/66baaa11ed1eec378b4068a2596603522709.pdf

    "In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s."

    Dee said:
    @MayCaesar

    Hitler and Goeballs certainly seen themselves as Socialists .... "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions" Hitler was a Socialist

    Socialist Goebbels Quote

    ""England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved and oppressed people. Child labour is still a matter of course there. They have only heard about social welfare programs. Parliament occasionally discusses social legislation. Nowhere else is there such terrible and horrifying inequality as in the English slums. The Lords and City people can remain the richest people one earth only because they constantly maintain their wealth by exploiting their colonies and preserving unbelievable poverty in their own country."

    What you have to remember is that they had a crazy definition of what counted as socialism that has nothing to do with what any normal person considers socialism. Even people at the time recognised it as not actually socialism and Hitler linked it back to some weird germanic-feudal nationalism that seems to have made sense in his warped brain.

    "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

    "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

    "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. (https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatinterviews1)

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