Current Events > Would you consider MLK Jr to be more liberal or conservative? What about Hitler?

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Questionmarktarius posted...

Feudalism is just power derived from power. It invents "nobility" as an excuse for itself.

feudalism occured because it was impossible to rule and govern over large swaths of land back in the middle ages, since communication and travel were such crap. so you doled out bits of land and power to people you could potentially trust to do the fiddly bits of governing in the area you couldn't directly govern yourself.

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They were both SOCIALISTS

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ufoivy posted...

Fiscally Socialist and socially anti-Semitic does not equate to conservative lol, otherwise Karl Marx would also fall under your ridiculous false and historically inaccurate label.

Actually the Nazis were huge proponents of privatization. Im starting to think you have no idea what socialism is.

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ufoivy posted...

Fiscally Socialist and socially anti-Semitic does not equate to conservative lol, otherwise Karl Marx would also fall under your ridiculous false and historically inaccurate label.

hitler was not fiscally socialist

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ufoivy posted...

The Nazi Party platform literally called for seizure over the means of production and nationalization of entire industries and services, fuck outta here. Furthermore, they also called for increased tariffs that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump love so damn much lol.

I dont care whether it was their stated platform or not, I care about what the Nazis actually did, which was heavily privatize.

In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, a number of academic works were devoted to the analysis of economic policy in Germany under the rule of the National Socialist Party. One major work was Maxine Yaple Sweezys (1941) The Structure of the Nazi Economy. Sweezy stated that industrialists supported Hitlers accession to power and his economic policies: In return for business assistance, the Nazis hastened to give evidence of their good will by restoring to private capitalism a number of monopolies held or controlled by the state (p. 27). This policy implied a large-scale program by which the government transferred ownership to private hands (p. 28). One of the main objectives for this policy was to stimulate the propensity to save, since a war economy required low levels of private consump- tion. High levels of savings were thought to depend on inequality of income, which would be increased by inequality of wealth. This, according to Sweezy (p. 28), was thus secured by reprivatization. . . . The practical significance of the transference of government enterprises into private hands was thus that the capitalist class continued to serve as a vessel for the accumulation of income. Profit-making and the return of property to private hands, moreover, have assisted the consolidation of Nazi party power.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.20.3.187

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Dunno, don't care

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capitalism and conservatism are not mutually inclusive

conservatism as it has become known in america (trumpism aside) is a rather recent development, buckleyite fusionism - free markets, anticommunist, with lip service to small government and traditional values, proto-neolibertarians if you will - dating back to the 50s, rising to political prominence in the 60s, and actually beginning to gain power in the late 70s onward

before then, conservatism was a different beast - small government in its opposition to new deal policy, noninterventionist within reason, and pro-business for sure, but economically in line with the american school of economics, where "free markets" applied to domestic policy if anything, while trade was characterized by high tariffs - economic nationalism, if you will, and a far cry from modern capitalism, whether of the keynesian, chicago, or austrian varieties

with that said, when pinning down hitler's ideology, important to understand that there were two hitlers: "mein kampf hitler" and "hitler in power," the former a racist totalitarian socialist, the latter a racist totalitarian centrist, his policy evolving to reflect the constraints and pressures of real-world governance

while it can be safely assumed hitler was an authoritarian, the question ultimately boils down to whether nationalization of industry and indeed the doctrine of political corporatism is leftist or rightist - liberal or conservative too relative of terminology for discussions of this nature

on a scale of socialism (left) to capitalism (right), nationalization is arguably center-left, but political corporatism is a bit more difficult to pin down, as it is by definition the intercessor between labor and capital

without introducing a third dimension to the political compass to better model the coordinates of third-positionist systems, i'd argue that it's straight-up authoritarianism, its position on the left-right spectrum depending on the degree of market interventionism on behalf of the body politic or big capital that a particular corporatist regime entails

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Trying to compare 1930s Europe (or really anywhen Europe) to the strange and bizarre politically-factioned clusterfuck the US has wandered into, is just folly and frustration.

coh posted...

Fascism is a form of socialism

Fascism separates different groups of people into different classes and treating them differently. That's the exact opposite definition of socialism.

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coolboy11 posted...

i wonder if people will ever learn about the many others in the movement besides MLK Jr.

But we don't need black history studies !!

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sktgamer_13dude posted...

Its right-wing socialism.

It's not socialism if you separate people into different classes then treat them differently because of that. There's no 'shared misery' with fascism.

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TheMikh posted...

Literally everything you wrote is wrong.

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ufoivy posted...

The Nazi Party platform literally called for seizure over the means of production and nationalization of entire industries and services, fuck outta here. Furthermore, they also called for increased tariffs that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump love so damn much lol.

Not if it meant that he wasn't redistributing the resources back to the entire population. By definition that makes it anti-socialist.

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lydiaquayle posted...

Fascism separates different groups of people into different classes and treating them differently. That's the exact opposite definition of socialism.

Sounds a lot like intersectionality, weirdly enough.

lydiaquayle posted...

Fascism separates different groups of people into different classes and treating them differently. That's the exact opposite definition of socialism.

The misunderstanding comes from what socialism inevitably ends up being: "the state apparatus" and "everyone else".