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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4075 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

Still on This Star of England.

Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread starts off as a surprisingly typical communist screed, but it starts distinguishing itself after it denies the labour theory of value, saying that new forms of production must yield new forms of consumption. An interesting discussion of liberty soon follows. He has a keen eye to underappreciated people, which ameliorates his otherwise combative style.

Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book. Mostly a familiar portrait of another "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" case, which once again illustrates that just because you've been kicked out for failing to keep up with the perpetual revolution, that doesn't actually make you "right wing." (Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too, and at one point uses the phrase "the left's soft bigotry of low expectations.")

Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too

Is he necessarily wrong?

I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

The NSDAP were a socialist revolutionary vanguard party. To the degree that there is no "coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing" it is even less coherent to pass them of as "right wing". Sure they were vaguely center-right with in the specific context of the Wiemar Rebulic but that's more an indication of how much of a basket-case German interwar period politics were rather than a commentary on the Nazis themselves.

Outside of the Wiemar Republic the various NSDAP-aligned bund groups tended to code as far left and would often caucus with and recruit from thier more explicity socialist/marx-inspired brethren.

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