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FeDeWould-be t1_itpzjc6 wrote

Reply to comment by PositiveStrength5694 in The philosophy of Martin Heidegger who argued that the Technological mindset has destroyed our relationship to the world so that Nature is seen as so many resources to exploit. He presents an alternative: a poetic relationship to the world by thelivingphilosophy

I’m probably taking it too literal then, capitalism does what Heidegger was talking about in an incredibly literal way, but deeper than that it is true that we have some shit going on with that also

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Meta_Digital t1_itq2b6s wrote

Heidegger isn't always consistent as a person. I agree that there is an inherent critique of capitalism in his works more broadly, especially in his critique of emerging technology (which to me feels compatible with Marx), but the guy was also a Nazi. He asks interesting questions and makes interesting observations, but it's like none of that informed his life.

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yang_gang2020 t1_itq4lbr wrote

Criticism of capitalism is very compatible with Nazi ideology

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Meta_Digital t1_itqabi7 wrote

Okay I'll bite. What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?

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cristobaldelicia t1_itqjirc wrote

Doesn't look like the poster is going to answer, but such people forget how ruthlessly anti-Communist the Nazis were. From the beginning of Hitler's power, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, was appointed to hunt and imprison Communists. That was soon changed to include Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and whoever else the Nazis declared an enemy. Nazis have nothing to do with leftist international socialism. A lot of Americans are too dense to appreciate the difference and see the word "socialist" and go crazy.

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Meta_Digital t1_itqjs6x wrote

Exactly, and the same misunderstanding is happening again now with regards to Russia and the anticommunism of Putin.

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yang_gang2020 t1_itrsgil wrote

One can be anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist at the same time. Communists do not hold a monopoly over criticism of capitalism.

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platoprime t1_itqhqy9 wrote

>What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?

I think they were upset about their belief that Jews were running it?

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Meta_Digital t1_itqizv3 wrote

Sure, but that's not a critique of capitalism, that's just anti-semitism. They purged the Jews and ran a hypercapitalist society that was backed by capitalists around the world. Meanwhile they also purged the socialists and communists (to them a Jew, a "cultural Bolshevik", and a communist were all the same thing).

Meanwhile, Heidegger's philosophy contains elements that are inherently critical of capitalism, though it's never explicit.

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platoprime t1_itqj88t wrote

Yeah I'm not the person who you replied to. Sorry I was just being facetious.

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Meta_Digital t1_itqjefk wrote

Haha, yeah I figured as much. It's really hard to claim that fascism is critical of capitalism in any imaginable way.

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that_blasted_tune t1_itqoshv wrote

Intertwined in the antisemitism and what made it so attractive to the antisemetic people was that they could put the failings of capitalism onto Jewish people.

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bac5665 t1_itqqddr wrote

Well, once you prohibit a class of people from participating in a marketplace, you're not practicing capitalism anymore. You're not letting the marketplace decide the efficient owners of capital.

So Naziism is, by definition, a critique of capitalism.

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Meta_Digital t1_itqr2k5 wrote

The "marketplace" isn't a person who decides things. It's just whoever controls the market. Whether it's a cabal of wealthy billionaires or the state, it doesn't really matter.

In the end, all capitalism is, is a system that separates people into employers and employees. You got that and you got some form of capitalism.

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bac5665 t1_itqtrdr wrote

So did Communism under Lenin, under Mao, and under Castro, so that's just not a useful definition.

You should actually read some Adam Smith. You might learn something.

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Meta_Digital t1_itqwa94 wrote

Yeah none of them achieved a socialist economy.

Edit: Also, Smith wrote before the word capitalism even appeared.

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bac5665 t1_itqy434 wrote

So capitalism is something we define only by how it's practiced, but socialism and communism are only defined by theory, and any attempted implementations should be called something else if they don't conform to theory?

Am I understanding you correctly?

And Smith is called the father of capitalism. His works are the foundation for the theory of capitalism, every bit as much as Marx is for communism. Just because the term for Smith's new system wasn't used in English until the 1850s doesn't change the historical lineage of that system.

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Meta_Digital t1_itr56mu wrote

Nobody but Stalin claimed achieving socialism, and you can believe him if you'd like I guess.

Smith was describing, not prescribing, economics. Maybe you should read him?

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yang_gang2020 t1_itrsd8z wrote

Ever heard of Strasserism? Just because they were pushed out for practical reasons does not mean Nazi ideology and criticism of capitalism are incompatible. Also, I understand that capitalists want Nazis to have been socialists, and communists want them to have been capitalists, Ludwig von Mises in this essay (https://mises.org/library/planned-chaos) lays out their system in a way that does not seem entirely capitalist or socialistic, almost like a “third position”.

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Meta_Digital t1_itrvcsd wrote

I mean there's a ton of nonsense ideologies out there, and the fact that the Nazis were calling themselves "national socialists" in opposition to the "international socialists" (who were the actual socialists the Nazis purged after coming into power) is certainly going to aid in that confusion.

Western capitalists very specifically funded the Nazis to fight against the communists / socialists to the East. It wasn't until the Nazis invaded to the West that this changed. Fascism is the attack dog of capitalism, not a capitalist led transition into socialism (which makes no sense at all).

The communists didn't want Nazis to be capitalists, either. In fact, after the Soviet Revolution, it was hoped that Germany would have a socialist revolution. It went the opposite way, and this spelled disaster for socialism in Russia. It was one of the reasons for the disorder in the USSR; they had to rely on their own feudal lords to run a presumably socialist economy.

As for the article, it's very long and I'll have to check it out later. Keep in mind, though, that capitalism and socialism both can appear in many various forms, not just one. Nazi Germany was certainly one example of a capitalist society. We haven't had any real examples of a socialist society as of yet because it's a rather new ideology and attempts at it have either been sabotaged from the outside or collapsed from internal forces. Not all that different from any historical period of transition where old forms are struggling to maintain control as new forms begin to emerge. So we can speak rather authoritatively on capitalism as it has a few centuries (~350 years or so) of data we can look back on. For socialism we only really have some experimentation at best, and false promises at worst. I'm sure the end of the feudal period looked similarly as new mercantile systems were appearing and being put down by feudal lords who felt threatened by a shift in power structures. We're not really to the point where we have a "third position" because we haven't properly seen the alternative to capitalism, but given enough time it too will come along and replace whatever comes after capitalism whether it's socialism or something else.

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yang_gang2020 t1_itrxwzj wrote

You have stated that 1. Capitalists funded Nazi Germany, 2. that the USSR was disappointed Germany did not have a Bolshevik revolution, and 3. that Nazi Germany was in practice a capitalist regime. While these premises all may be true, these do not lead to, and you have not proven, or even spoken to, the possibility (or impossibility) that there could be a critique of capitalism under the framework of Nazi ideology.

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robothistorian t1_itsk26y wrote

>the possibility (or impossibility) that there could be a critique of capitalism under the framework of Nazi ideology.

It could be argued that the Nazi concept (or at least the valorization by the Nazis of the concept) of "blood and soil", which formed the core of the Völkisch movement could be construed as a proto critique of Capitalism. It reinforced the connection between people and the land they cultivated and was marked by elements of organicism, racialism, agrarianism, and populism. Key Nazi officials like Walther Darré (Minister of Food & Agriculture) and Reichleiter for agricultural policy were strong proponents of this concept. Interestingly, even Heinrich Himmler was a proponent of this though in a highly fantasized (unrealistic) way. Himmler's ideas in this regard were supposed to be the foundations of how "the eastern territories" after the war were to be organised, which was also echoed by Hitler at one point in time (I don't have the reference to this off-hand, but I can dig it up). Edit: I wanted to add that Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories) was another high-level Nazi official who was aligned to these kinds of views.

The point that I am trying to make is this: Nazi ideology to the extent that it existed as a coherent body did position itself against capitalism and communism. It did so by invoking a mythical condition involving what they referred to as "Blut und Boden" (the Blood and Soil concept), which attempted to establish an inextricable link between people and the land they occupy and cultivate. In many ways, this concept valorized "the peasantry", whose culture (ethos, one could say) would be - at least in Himmler's and Hitler's terms - warlike (this being the key "to keep the blood fresh and invigorated").

To this extent at the very least Nazi ideology could be considered to be contra the basic principles of capitalism (and communism).

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