The Nazis were not socialists. Their entire goal was to latch onto a popular political movement and redefine it to fit their needs(as all fascists typically do).
They did not support worker ownership of the means of production and the right for workers to work for themselves. Hitler repealed legislation that nationalized industry in Germany, and oversaw the expansion of private industry. The first modern implementation of privatization on a grand scale took place under the supervision of the Nazis. The word "privatization" was coined to describe a central tenet of Nazi economic policy. The Nazis raided and imprisoned union leaders and broke up trade unions. They repealed worker rights.
Behold Hitler's own words:
"There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago."
—Hitler, explaining that he vehemently opposes the Left, and believes only Rightists like himself can make Germany great again.
"Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not."
—Hitler, literally admitting his "socialism" is a whole new thing and has nothing to do with the usual definition of the word.
"The ideology that dominates us is in diametrical contradiction to that of Soviet Russia. National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people."
—Hitler, trying so hard to explain that he isn't a socialist, that he opposes socialism, and that the term National Socialist is something he made up and only has meaning within the context of its own paradigm.
"We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility."
—Hitler, spelling it out in very clear terms that he wholeheartedly supports private ownership of property, i.e. capitalism, and opposes worker ownership of property, which he calls "Bolshevism", i.e. real, actual socialism.
"What right do these people have to demand a share of property or even in administration?... The employer who accepts the responsibility for production also gives the workpeople their means of livelihood. Our greatest industrialists are not concerned with the acquisition of wealth or with good living, but, above all else, with responsibility and power. They have worked their way to the top by their own abilities, and this proof of their capacity – a capacity only displayed by a higher race – gives them the right to lead."
—Hitler, attacking the notion of worker ownership of property and licking capitalist boot.
emizeko
美国梦是个人发财的梦
讲究冒险
通过个人奋斗达到所谓的成功
成为有产者
然后去剥削别人
中国梦是共同富裕
追求的是人民幸福
换句话说
美国梦是个人梦
是为美元的梦
中国梦是人民梦
是为人民服务的梦
这就是二者的本质区别
以后不要在我面前提起美国梦
俗气
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
—John Rogers
(cw: sectarianism)
Anarchists like to put themselves on the same side as socialists, yet anarchism is fundamentally is not a socialist ideology. Socialism is based on the socialization of production, which is something anarchists reject. They are very individualist and view society as oppressive to the individual and want to break up society into small independent units.
A wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer.
—Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism
Anarchists are more concerned with morality than actual concrete reality. They have the liberal mindset that the political and economic system is merely a reflection of the beliefs and ideas of that society and has no connection to the society's material conditions, and therefore to change a political or economic system, all that is necessary is changing people's ideas.
Because of this, they think building a utopia merely requires imagining that utopia in your head and convincing everyone else of it, and by extension, any country that has failed to achieve a utopia has only done so due to a moral failing on their part. They think the reason every single socialist experiment failed to achieve some imagined utopia is because of moral corruption, that the leadership was just evil and immoral.
They extend this idea not to just the leaders of those countries, but anyone who supports those countries. If you defend any actually-existing socialist country, they will assume you must only do so because you are morally inferior, they will accuse you of being an "evil tankie" and whatever other insult they can imagine to try and attack your character, rather than your arguments, because in their mind, they don't believe you believe what you believe due to good arguments. They believe you believe what you believe due to a moral failing.
Let's stop talking in generalities and take a look at a very concrete example: economics. Going back to Smith's LTV, we understand how capitalist economies are capable of, to some degree, balancing resources to convert the supply into the goods and services demanded, and how market pressures push companies into buying and selling roughly at cost of production. A planned economy can also balance resources because, in principle, they would have access to the information and computational power needed to directly calculate costs of production and allocate resources efficiently to achieve similar, and with sufficient infrastructure and technology, even better, results.
Many anarchists will propose some economic system outside of markets and economic planning, what they call the "gift economy". They don't propose this system because they arrived at it objectively through a rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism as Marxists arrive at their understanding, no, they propose it because it sounds morally good to them.
The problem is, a gift economy fundamentally has no way to balance resources. If I could take whatever I want without expectation of returning sufficient materials, you would inevitably have huge shortages in the economy.
Shortages are avoided in market systems by requiring direct recuperation of cost upon consumption (payment), while centrally planned systems may recuperate cost immediately, but since they are centrally planned, resources from one sector can be allocated towards another, i.e. health care could be provided free at the point of service but funded by another sector of the economy, and it would balance out, because planning is centralized and able to do such a thing.
A gift economy lacks both of these features. It has no planning capabilities nor any market capabilities to regulate consumption of resources. It's not that economic calculation can't be done, it's that in a gift economy, economic calculation never even takes place. Once you begin to introduce any sort of mechanism for economic calculation, you inevitably end up with either a market system or a planned economy. The only way economic calculation could be done away with entirely is if we had a post-scarcity society, i.e. the conditions to achieve full communism, which obviously doesn't exist.
Of course, this is just one example. Anarchists believe in many things and not all believe in gift economies, but it's an example of something many anarchists fundamentally believe in purely on moral grounds despite it being nonsense economically.
Anarchism is fundamentally based in decentralization which plenty of Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Che Guevara already criticized this concept as nonsensical and pointed out how decentralized production is the basis for capitalism and will inevitably return to capitalism.
Anarchism is an incredibly self-contradictory ideology that fundamentally is based in morality without any concerns for concrete reality. It's concerned with trying to force reality to fit into an idealized utopia rather than deriving answers from concrete reality itself. Political and economic systems are not in our heads, they're in the real, material world, and they have to operate and maintain complex social relations and modes of production. You can't build a political and economic system based on morality any more than you can build a smartphone based on morality.
by zhenli真理
Now consider these excerpts from the aforementioned Guardian article:
For a reliable benchmark about the power of the party in China, you only need to listen to wealthy entrepreneurs hold forth on politics. These otherwise all-powerful CEOs go to abject lengths to praise the party. To take a few companies listed in a single article in the South China Morning Post, Richard Liu of e-commerce group JD.com predicted communism would be realised in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalised. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, said that everything the company possessed was given by the party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, which builds earthmovers, went even further, saying his life belonged to the party. [14]
Just as the lack of dignity of American workers isn’t merely superficial, but symptomatic, the same is true of the lack of dignity of Chinese capitalists. The periodic execution of corrupt capitalists and the humiliation of Jack Ma matter. Chauvinistic “Left” intellectuals may dismiss them as performative, but Western capitalists accustomed to impunity understand the threat loud and clear. The dignity or indignity experienced by different classes testifies more to the class character of a state than musings about its leaders’ sincerity.
Friendly reminder the first mobile phone was invented between 1954 and 1957 by Soviet scientist Leonid Kupriyanovich.
It was the basis for the world's first 0G mobile network, "Altai", which was built in 1963 and available in large cities all across the USSR by 1965. It is still in use to this day.
In the 70s and 80s emergent satellite technology revolutionized mobile communication and forever changed the world as we know it. The first satellite, "Sputnik", was designed, manufactured, and launched in the USSR in 1957.
My phone was manufactured in China, and connects to a 5G mobile network running exclusively on Chinese equipment despite the fact it presents a known national security threat because Western manufacturers can't even replicate the technology.
Capitalism only exists in the 21st century because American capitalists got rich enough selling toaster ovens and clunkmobiles to a WW2 devastated Western Europe to fund a ridiculous war machine over-powered enough to spread mayhem throughout the world as a means to an end of propping up its bloated corpse for a little while. That system is falling apart now and will collapse in on itself before the end of this century. It's already falling behind.
August 15 is Liberation Day in Korea. #OTD in 1945, 35 years of Japanese colonialism came to an end.
Over 75 years later, Korea remains divided and occupied. To understand why, we have to look at what happened from 1945-1950 on both sides of the 38th parallel.
Evo Morales, a man accused of “dictatorship” for repeatedly winning popular elections, summarized it well in 2019, after his party was temporarily ousted from power in a US-backed coup:
As far as I can tell, American democracy deceives its people into voting, but neither the government nor the people actually govern. It’s the transnational corporations who govern. [12]
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism