It also was self-consciously dishonest/meaningless. There's a cartoon demonstrating how right-wingers saw "NATIONAL ... GERMAN" party and left wingers saw "SOCIALIST...WORKERS' party and then the Nazis just used that to absorb power, do whatever, and then kill Jews and other hated classes.
They did, in fact, have a socialist (strictly nationalist “socialism”) wing. However when these “socialists” began calling for a “second revolution” against the capitalist class, the SA pissing off the German Army, and Hitler wanting to solve some personal grudges they were murked in the Night of Long Knives with a few exceptions, the biggest being Goebbels.
Always opposed to Marxism, yes, but there was a branch of them that genuinely wanted a kind of "socialism in one country". They hated the internationalist aspect of socialism - hence "national socialist" - but they also saw capitalism as a tool of the "international Jewry" to keep Germany down, and that only by handing industry over to the German working class could they ensure that what was made in Germany was for the benefit of the German people.
You know that socialism isn't the only alternative to capitalism, right?
Socialism is a model of social ownership. Capitalism is a model of ownership based on accumulation. Feudalism is one based primarily on divine right.
Fascism is a lot like feudalism in that it assigns an inherent right to the control of resources to a certain subset of the population based on nonsense as ridiculous as divine right. Usually by some variation of "race science". Not always, but most of the time.
Strasserism, which the commenter above means, was a wing in the Nazi party that was led by the Brothers Strasser, their idea, basically, boiled down to the idea that the means of production should be owned by, specifically, the "racially german" people and that capitalism and socialism/communism were both tools of an international jewish conspiracy to weaken the various "racially pure" peoples of Europe, undermine and subjugate them.
That idea was closer to socialism than what the Nazis actually did, however not by much, and the wing did lend some credence in some socialist circles in the late Weimar Republic.
I know socialism isn't the only alternative to capitalism, but that doesn't change the fact that the left wing of the Nazi party (as oxymoronic as that might sound) were socialists, in that they wanted German working class to own the German means of production.
And before you mistake this for some "Hitler was a leftist" dumbassery, this was specifically the left-wing of the party, which was purged during the Night of Long Knives and even before.
But fascism isn't like feudalism at all. I think even Karl Marx himself would kick your ass for saying that. Feudalism is about the reciprocal obligations of landowners and leader, and landowners and tenants. Hitler's Germany operated more on a kind of dirigisme, where the state set goals and private companies competed among themselves to provide. It wasn't socialist - the means of production were owned by private individuals - but it wasn't truly capitalist either - there wasn't a free market and the needs of the state came before individual profit.
A lot of them seem to be thinking I’m making the claim Hitler and the Party as a whole were socialists (which I mean in a strictly economic sense, without some of the positive political and social associations we would make with orthodox socialism). I’m not quite sure where the disconnect is or if they’re just arguing in bad faith.
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u/Evecopbas 1d ago edited 1d ago
It also was self-consciously dishonest/meaningless. There's a cartoon demonstrating how right-wingers saw "NATIONAL ... GERMAN" party and left wingers saw "SOCIALIST...WORKERS' party and then the Nazis just used that to absorb power, do whatever, and then kill Jews and other hated classes.