Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "“But Hitler Crushed the Trade Unions!”" video.

@parlyramyar Again, false dilemma. Socialism involves collectivization, but not all collectivization is socialism. Socialism is opposed to capitalism, but not all that is opposed to capitalism is socialism. There are alternatives that are neither capitalist nor socialist. Feudalism (in the Marxist sense) is one such. Another I have pointed out in the past is the centralized Bronze Age palace system. A key component of socialism is control of the means of production by workers . In state socialism control is exercised by the state on behalf of workers, and the state itself is, at least theoretically, representative of the workers. (Of course this was never true in the Soviet state, but that is a flaw in the Soviet system as it developed in practice.) Socialism is about economic class, specifically, the working class. Nazism is not socialism (or capitalism) because nothing is controlled on behalf of or by workers OR capitalists and nothing is determined by economic class. Workers exist to serve the state, not the other way around. So do capitalists and their businesses. The state serves Hitler's mystic conception of the German volk , which is an ethnic class, not an economic one. In Hitler's flawed understanding of Nietszche, the volk effects its will to power through war, the state is the means of waging war, and the Party subordinates the state and everyone in it to this aim. As Orwell pointed out, the Nazis had some economic policies that were capitalist and some that were socialist, but in no case was this because any economic philosophy drove policy, it was because those policies were whatever Hitler and his party decided would produce the maximum efficiency of production in service to the state and thus to the war machine. TIK will never understand Hitler or the Nazis and their policies as long as he approaches them from the standpoint of rational economics and fails to understand what really underlay ALL of Hitler's philosophy and policy, which is the flawed interpretation of Nietszche and Darwin that held that the ultimate, and only valid, meaning of life was the struggle for superiority between ethnic groups.
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@parlyramyar This basic point cannot be emphasized too much: for socialists of all stripes, ethnic and religious conflict is a distraction from the only really meaningful conflict, that between economic classes. For Hitler and the Nazis, class conflict was a distraction from the only really meaningful struggle, that between ethnic groups. Those world-views are diametrically opposed. This is why Hitler despised both communism and capitalism - he saw both communism and capitalism as nothing but tools for the inferior (in his view) Jewish race to exercise control over the superior Aryan race.
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Sure, the DAF had some real control. But that just begs the question: who was in control of the DAF? It was party officials, not workers or workers' representatives.
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@jrton1366 I think he believes that taxation for the purpose of redistribution of wealth is socialism - that is not the same as saying all taxation is socialism.
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@bludfyre "I would argue that "fascism" is socialism for a narrowly-defined ethnic or national group" I agree completely. That is why fascism is not socialism. Socialism is aimed at the betterment of the working class, fascism (and nazism, to the extent it is a different thing from fascism) is aimed at the betterment of an ethnic group. Socialism is entirely about economic class conflict, fascism is about a different breakdown of classes of people based on race or ethnicity, not economics. TIK fallaciously argues that socialism is not about bettering conditions for workers because its policies actually make things worse for workers. He is correct in that premise -socialism does not, in fact, work - but wrong in his conclusion. The fact that socialism makes things worse for workers is an inherent error in socialism, not a thing that makes socialism not socialism, or a thing that defines socialism. You can't say, as he does, that because socialism makes things worse for workers, any system that makes things worse for workers is socialist. That is the commutative fallacy.
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@MarkErikEE You are correct that socialism is all about the workers. You are wrong in thinking Nazism was about workers. Hitler and the Nazis had to appeal to workers to get elected, but it was always about the German people as an ethnic group, not any particular class. Capitalists, managers, and professionals were part of the German volk every bit as much as workers were. It wasn't socialism with a side of nationalism, it was nationalism with a side of socialism, and in some other ways, a side of capitalism. Everything Hitler wrote and said in his adult life supports this view - class was nothing, race and nationality (which were inseparable for Hitler) were everything. The Bolsheviks were not national socialists, they were international socialists. The dispute between Stalin and Trotsky wasn't about nationalism, it was about whether communism should consolidate its gains in the nation it already controlled before trying to spread to others, or whether it should always try to spread to other nations from the moment it gained power in one. Stalin took the former view, Trotsky the latter. Of course for Stalin it was always really about his own personal power, as Orwell described, but that doesn't really speak to Stalin's ideology so much as his lack of a genuine one. (Which also distinguishes Stalin from Hitler, for whom his nationalist and racist ideology was the only point to having power.) You can't hope to understand Hitler without starting with what he took from Nietszche and Darwin (mistakenly in both cases, but those were his core beliefs).
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@parlyramyar You're not paying attention. Again, socialism and collectivism are not the same thing. Socialism is about economic class. Nazism was about race. The two views are incompatible. Collectivism that is not based on economic class is not socialism. If you redefine socialism to mean any form of collectivism, you have negated socialism as a meaningful concept. You might as well define capitalism as socialism because capitalists believe that capitalism is better for workers.
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@mrmoofle Nazism was as well.
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The mistake you're making is ignoring the even more massive elephant in the room, the fact that the DAF was a means for the state to control workers, not a means for workers to control the state or the workplace. The fact that DAF was often adversarial to management does not mean it was controlled by the workers. This is the difference between the DAF and a real labor union. The quote you put up at 12:03 shows this - corporate management was taking directives from government officials, not workers' representatives. A labor union isn't just an organization of workers, it is an organization run by workers or by representatives elected by workers. In general you always seem to fall into the trap of reasoning that Hitler had to either be a capitalist or a socialist, and therefore that you can show he wasn't a capitalist, he must have been a socialist. This is a classic false dilemma fallacy. The Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist, they were a third system in which neither the interests of capitalists nor those of workers controlled policy, they were both subordinated to the militarist state. Everything done by the DAF was intended to benefit the state and its war machine - if it advocated for better conditions for workers, that was solely because it had determined that better conditions would make workers more productive in support of the war effort. George Orwell, as good an authority on communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism as I think there has ever been, put it best: the Nazis borrowed from both capitalism and socialism whatever policies they thought would make the economy more efficient in serving the state.
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@TheImperatorKnight That's not the point of socialism, it's the outcome of socialism, which is a different thing. Socialism is an inherently flawed concept.Socialists are mistaken in thinking their policies will benefit workers, but that is still their belief, and if they don't believe that, they aren't really socialists. I don't know about the UK, but in the US union leaders and representatives are elected by the workers. Of course there is corruption in the process, as there is in everything that humans do. But the unions are NOT controlled by the state the way the DAF was. Unions that are controlled by the state, whether the state is nominally socialist or not, are not really unions.
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@parlyramyar No, it is not. You are playing word games with the meaning of socialism. if socialism = collectivism there would be no need for the word "socialism". We have two words because they are two distinct, though often related, concepts.
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@parlyramyar I have an education to back up what I say. Plainly you do not. Socialism is a form of collectivism. But there are other forms as well. I have named several. Bronze Age Egypt was not socialist by any stretch of the imagination, but it was collectivist.
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At 32:12: there was no peacetime for the Nazi state: there was wartime, and intervals during which the state prepared for the next war. War was ALWAYS the priority of the Nazi state. War was the way in which the volk effected its will to power, and the state was the engine by means of which the volk waged war. This was always the very center of Hitler's philosophy and policies, made very clear in Mein Kampf and in every action he took after seizing power. This is the key difference between the Nazi Party and the Labour Party as far as economic policy is concerned: you may be correct that the policies of Labour do not, in fact, improve conditions for the workers, but Labour's policies are nevertheless driven by the (erroneous) belief that these policies will make workers better off, not because they increase the state's power for its own sake.
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Disagreeing with the Party on anything was no longer a thing that unions could do. That means DAF was a sham and a means of state control over both workers and employers, not a union.
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@larrypage2793 It didn't. It operated in the government's interest. Any benefits that came to the workers did so only to the extent the Nazis thought it would make them more productive in support of the war effort.
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@wtice4632 Or perhaps the Bolsheviks and their puppet governments were also not really leftists in practice by 1945, but solely concerned with their own power as Orwell described.
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@weareeverywhere8851 It doesn't make him a socialist either. He represented a third way.
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@parlyramyar That is nonsense. Socialism is not just collectivism, it is control of the means of production by the workers.
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@jrton1366 That's a very silly belief then. Every government in the history of the human race has employed taxation of some sort. A category that includes everything is meaningless. I am curious what he would make of the imperial Japanese government of the 1930s and 40s. It was certainly collectivist, but calling it socialist would be absolutely absurd. Like the Nazis but more so, the Japanese nationalists subordinated EVERYTHING to the war effort, which existed for its own sake. War was not waged for economic reasons, economic objectives were pursued in order to make the state better able to wage war. Domination of other nations was not a means, it was an end in itself.
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@roberthermann97 Socialism is workers' control of the means of production. There are other forms of economic organization that involve government control that are not socialism - Bronze Age palace economies are one example I've cited many times.
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@destubae3271 That simply isn't true. You people are just making up a BS definition of socialism that no socialist and no one with any actual credentials in economics, history, or political science would ever accept. If you're going to make up a new concept, make up a new word to describe it, because "socialism" already has a meaning and it's not what you claim it is.
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@roberthermann97 Yes, I am, because they are examples of systems that have government control of the means of production but are not socialism.
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@Biggiiful That's nice, except every socialist I've ever known or even spoken to, including a number of professors and grad students in the relevant fields, disagrees with you.
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@Biggiiful Saw this today and thought of this debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxhT9EVj9Kk Now to be clear here, I am not a socialist, I despise Noam Chomsky and disagree with just about everything he says, but if you say socialism is one thing and one of the most prominent socialist theorists of our times says it is something completely different, I am going to take the socialist's word on what socialism actually is. And he says quite clearly that socialism is NOT government control, it is WORKERS' control of the means of production. As Chomsky says here, the Soviet Union started out on that principle and then changed into something else which he insists was not socialism. Hitler didn't even start out with workers' control and never pretended that was any part of his platform. (There were Nazis who were genuine socialists, but Hitler succeeded in purging them all from the party by 1934.)
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@gg_rider I have, innumerable times, given the reason National Socialism is neither communist nor, in the sense the word is used today, socialist: because communism and socialism are by definition about class struggle, with other divisions like race and nationalism being treated as distractions from the real issue, while National Socialism was about race and nationality, with class being treated as a distraction from the real issue. The fact that National Socialism has "Socialism" in its name is about as significant as the fact the North Korea has "democratic" in its name. As to fascism, I would say you have to treat that label the same way we treat communism: there is capital C Communism, which means the specific movement and party in the USSR and those other movements and parties (like CPUSA) that are subordinate to it, and small c communism, which means all the many other movements and parties that share a certain amount of doctrine with big C Communism but also differ from it, especially in terms of how the doctrine is put into practice. Likewise Mussolini's Fascism and the broader category of global fascism.
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