A Letter To America's Fools.
In the 19th century as socialism became the latest rage in European politics the was no distinction made between communism and socialism. There were different types or interpretations of socialism but there was little distinction in the terms of their description. Different protagonists had their own preferences but the terms remained interchangeable even in Marx's writings. By 1875 Marx began to refer to what he called lower and higher forms, earlier vs. later forms of his imagined future perfected society. Nowhere however did he differentiate these states as socialism vs. communism.
Under Marx's theory all societies were predestined to progress from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
In Germany Marx was not the first proponent of "State Socialism". That falls to the likes of Johann Karl Rodbertus who was the first advocate for state control of both production and distribution. This idea was then taken up by Ferdinand Lassale who's work popularized it into what only later became known as "socialism of the German pattern". This German form became distinguished from the Russian form in that it nominally maintained private ownership of production and markets etc.
This private ownership was at best superficial as the system had was built on economic intervention and control over the entrepreneurial functions of the property owners. Businesses could not speculate as to future conditions so as to best allocate their resources in ways they felt would maximize profits.
This was no different than in the Soviet Union. All speculation, resource allocation and economic calculation is done by the state.
In Germany shop or business owners were called "Betriebsfüher". The state tells these "owners" what they are to produce, how to produce it, at what prices and from whom they can purchase and at what prices and who they can sell to. The state controlled what wages must be paid and with whom they may deposit their profits and operating funds.
Any market exchange was a fraud. All prices, wages and interest rates were fixed by state authority.
They were in fact only quantitative terms used as part of state determinations of each citizen’s income, consumption and standard of living.
The state, not the consumers or market forces, directs production. The "Central Board of Production Management" was in complete control. Citizens and owners alike were nothing more than civil servants. This was socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism. Some of the terms of a market economy were retained, but their actual functionality was entirely different from what they mean in an real market economy.
It was the Soviets that played the leading role in creating the myth of Nazi Germany as a capitalist state. The Nazis weren't trying to hide the socialist methods or system. They were simply implementing it according to a different pattern than the Soviets
The Russians began early on, even before the revolution to redefine the meanings of socialism and communism to better fit their own political agenda and to allow then to lable the German form as end stage capitalism.
By naming his new party Communist Lenin was able to distinguish his Bolsheviks from rival socialist formations. The two terms were still used interchangeably but this became Lenin's way of saying that his party and only his party was the "true socialist" one. Still it was not until 1928 under Stalin that the Communist International began to publicly draw distinctions between both communism and socialism and between communist and socialist.
The new Stalinist interpretation of Marxism declared that there was another stage between capitalism and communism. That stage was socialism and that was the stage that the Soviet Union was in. This was what Stalin called "Socialism in a single state." That this verbage is semantically indistinguishable from Hitler's "National Socialism" seems lost on those, including the communists, who insist that the Nazis weren't socialists.
Marx's original distinction between early and late stage communism went into the ash heap. Where previously the late stage could only be achieved by humans "evolving beyond class consciousness", under Stalin's new interpretation "true communism" could only be achieved by global conquest. Any state standing against it was defined as fascist and an impediment to this "true communism." Out of this grew the conflict between the German and Russian patterns of socialism, i.e. World War II and the cold war that followed.
By this new interpretation the Soviet Union only itself was socialist but the party was Communist because they were the enlightened ones working for the ultimate goal of communism; global domination.
Thusly when the German Panzer began to roll across the Russian steepe. The Stalinists used this new paradigm to declare German socialism, which had never been Marxist, to redefine it as capitalism in spite of the fact that both it and Marxist interpretations had grown out of the same origins.
Accordingly the Nazis were, as previously stated, in late stage capitalism.
At this time much of the so-called intelligentsia in the west was very much enamored with both Stalin and the Soviet Union. For them this new narrative became a most convenient and welcomed lie. That this new paradigm wasn't based in any economic pattern but rather a political interpretation was for them of no consequence. The Nazi were now "capitalists" simply because they didn't fit into the Soviet/Marxist (Stalinist) world view.
This became the "big lie", well one of them at least, of the post World War II era. That it still persists today is part and parcel of the tragedy of present day political conflict.
For that I blame both the dominance of communists on college campuses and the failure of both globalism in general and Bush 41 to hold the communists and communism to account for 70+ years of crimes against humanity that stacked the bodies of it's victims in piles exponentially higher than the Nazis ever did.
So get your head out of your nether regions and have the courage to question the orthodoxy you have been fed by communists and fools.
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