Liberal Capitalist Democracy by Nayar Krishnan;

Author:Nayar, Krishnan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Fascism had a large working-class backing in the German case; but this was essentially recruited to consolidate a social order with other layers of society dominant. Nazism drew deep on middle-class nationalism and hatred of the threat of equality posed by the working class.

Hitler indulged in the language and histrionics of revolution, using “bourgeois” as an insult, but he was revolutionary only in the racial sense and as a radical moderniser of reaction. He was the establishment’s man who eventually became its master. In office in 1936, he would remark disdainfully that he had never intended to shore up “bourgeois” society:

We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world … Had Communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated rotten elements from among the ranks of our “upper ten thousand” … one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while.127

Despite such “revolutionary” hankerings, in real life Hitler’s opposition to the bourgeoisie remained a pose. He retained the main capitalist economic and social structures he had inherited, while destroying all that could have undermined them: democracy, the labour movement, the “Marxists”—a label that for him included, as we have seen, the SPD, utterly subservient to capitalism.

In any industrialised state, jobs have to go to people mainly on a meritocratic basis and not because of birth. But it says everything that meritocracy had to be argued for in the Nazi regime, one many Western historians underline heavily was a form of modern egalitarianism. Hitler explicitly rejected the ideal of social equality except in the sense that Aryan Germans of any social class should have the right to rise by merit into the Nazi elite, itself to be obeyed without question by the inferior folk below, just as it owed unquestioning obedience to the Führer.

Capitalist democratic polities reject the ideal of a classless society, but allow the working class to agitate for it. Communist states impose autocracy on all classes but enshrine working-class leadership and the ideal of classlessness. Nazism took a path distinct from either of these: it rejected class conflict; while bellowing that it wanted classlessness, it made clear this was about how people thought and behaved toward fellow Aryan Germans, not an overturn of social structures as under Communism.

Historians do not generally specify the precise nature of the Nazi idea of “social equality”, which related to individuals, not classes, and explicitly rejected the aim of classlessness embraced by the Communists. Hitler was pretty clear about what he meant by social equality:

Next to me stand German people from every class of life who today are part of the nation’s leadership: former agricultural workers who are now Reichstatthalters; former metalworkers who are today Gauleiters, etc. Though, mind you, former members of the bourgeoisie and former aristocrats also have their place in the Movement. To us it makes no difference where they come from; what counts is that they are able to work for the benefit of our Volk.

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