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With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germ

by tlogan 1y ago

With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germany was the first non-communist country to officially make May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a national public holiday.

ty6853 1y ago
I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.
- cenamus 1y ago
  Well it was a (total) war economy, not communism lite.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists. Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world. Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else. Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else. The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
    - lenerdenator 1y ago
      > Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else. The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different. At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
    - zmgsabst 1y ago
      There are people who think looking at the structures of power, eg the role of the state, is more useful than looking at propaganda when discussing politics. In the behaviorist sense that what people do is a better revelation of their beliefs than what they say. In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        The Bolsheviks literally carried out a coup against socialists, and murdered a long range of socialists and communists who took up weapons against them to try to prevent their dictatorship. In that perspective it's clear that these are not singular ideologies, but sets of ideologies were individual variations often have very little in common.
        zmgsabst 1y ago
        That same experience of the inner party murdering and subjugating the outer party who enabled them played out across multiple communist regimes.
        1y ago
  - schmidtleonard 1y ago
    Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else. Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't. They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
      - schmidtleonard 1y ago
        It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.) More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
        ty6853 1y ago
        I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach. I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
- vman81 1y ago
  Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is nominally democratic.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government. They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class. Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated. All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish" (And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology) So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
  - schmidtleonard 1y ago
    Ditto for the Niemoller poem. They love it so much as a template that most of them completely forgot what it said before they scribbled over it: First they came for the Communists... Then they came for the Socialists... Then they came for the trade unionists... Then they came for the Jews
    - ty6853 1y ago
      All of which also happened in some 'communist' countries. the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
- sambeau 1y ago
  Incorrect. Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki_how_socialist_was_national_socialism.3F https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki...
  - standardUser 1y ago
    > One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances.... The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent Not unlike the amorphous political movement plaguing America currently.
peterhadlaw 1y ago
National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi)
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  Well sure. It's like MAGA calling themselves conservative while throwing out all conservative values.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    MAGA don't throw out traditional conservative values (reinforcing the power of traditional racial, religious, and economic elites at the expense of other groups seeking a downward distribution of power), they throw out the libertarian values that got blended in and labeled as “conservative” values when a minimal winning coalition could not be formed purely around the overt embrace of actual traditional conservative values.
rtkwe 1y ago
Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.
- vidarh 1y ago
  Note that the spread of Labor Day owed a lot to intentional efforts to counter May 1st as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre. So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.
nahuel0x 1y ago
You can read a detailed analysis of the Nazi manipulation of the May Day and how it was totally anti-socialist here: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism
Disposal8433 1y ago
[dead]
regularization 1y ago
Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
So, how do you interpret that?
- tlogan 1y ago
  My interpretation of the above fact is this: Be cautious when you hear people loudly proclaiming “we’re for the working class” (Republicans) or “down with the oligarchs.” (Democrats) This shows us that bad guys have used pro-worker language to gain public support, only to later strip away freedoms and centralize the power. In short when a guy like Soros or Trump says they are for working class do not trust them.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    i mean, what it sounds like you're trying to say is "the owner class will lie to the working class when it benefits them"... which I agree with... but the way you reached this conclusion is that you disagree with the framing of contemporary US right-wing conservative activity as fascist? even when Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two private citizens who are very close to the levers of power, are on camera sieg-heiling? even when the president of the united states pardoned paramilitary actors like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front members who actually did real violence? even when people are being sent to a concentration camp in another country with no due process? even when people who protest this administration's policies and actions are being targeted for professional blacklisting (lawyers, judges) or arrested and held without due process (eg, mahmoud khalil)? if these actions are not close enough or akin to the actions of the Nazis (or other fascist movements) for the impact of these things to supersede a very pedantic definition of either term, then you must be willfully ignoring the intent behind applying those terms - they might not be "Nazis" but they're doing the things Nazis did, and that's extremely bad and worth comparison.
cess11 1y ago
This is such a bizarre lie. No, the Reich did not make International Workers' Day a holiday. It made May 1st the Day of National Work and prohibited all celebrations except those arranged by the nazi state, especially celebrations by worker organisations.

by tlogan 1y ago

ty6853 1y ago

I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.

cenamus 1y ago
Well it was a (total) war economy, not communism lite.
dismalaf 1y ago
[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists. Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world. Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else. Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else. The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    > Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else. The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different. At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
  - zmgsabst 1y ago
    There are people who think looking at the structures of power, eg the role of the state, is more useful than looking at propaganda when discussing politics. In the behaviorist sense that what people do is a better revelation of their beliefs than what they say. In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      The Bolsheviks literally carried out a coup against socialists, and murdered a long range of socialists and communists who took up weapons against them to try to prevent their dictatorship. In that perspective it's clear that these are not singular ideologies, but sets of ideologies were individual variations often have very little in common.
      - zmgsabst 1y ago
        That same experience of the inner party murdering and subjugating the outer party who enabled them played out across multiple communist regimes.
        1y ago
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
  Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else. Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't. They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
    - schmidtleonard 1y ago
      It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.) More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
      - ty6853 1y ago
        I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach. I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
vman81 1y ago
Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is nominally democratic.
alabastervlog 1y ago
They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government. They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
- ty6853 1y ago
  The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class. Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated. All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish" (And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology) So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
  Ditto for the Niemoller poem. They love it so much as a template that most of them completely forgot what it said before they scribbled over it: First they came for the Communists... Then they came for the Socialists... Then they came for the trade unionists... Then they came for the Jews
  - ty6853 1y ago
    All of which also happened in some 'communist' countries. the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
sambeau 1y ago
Incorrect. Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki_how_socialist_was_national_socialism.3F https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki...
- standardUser 1y ago
  > One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances.... The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent Not unlike the amorphous political movement plaguing America currently.

peterhadlaw 1y ago

National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi)

amanaplanacanal 1y ago
Well sure. It's like MAGA calling themselves conservative while throwing out all conservative values.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  MAGA don't throw out traditional conservative values (reinforcing the power of traditional racial, religious, and economic elites at the expense of other groups seeking a downward distribution of power), they throw out the libertarian values that got blended in and labeled as “conservative” values when a minimal winning coalition could not be formed purely around the overt embrace of actual traditional conservative values.

rtkwe 1y ago

Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.

vidarh 1y ago
Note that the spread of Labor Day owed a lot to intentional efforts to counter May 1st as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre. So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.

nahuel0x 1y ago

You can read a detailed analysis of the Nazi manipulation of the May Day and how it was totally anti-socialist here: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism

Disposal8433 1y ago

[dead]

regularization 1y ago

Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

So, how do you interpret that?

tlogan 1y ago
My interpretation of the above fact is this: Be cautious when you hear people loudly proclaiming “we’re for the working class” (Republicans) or “down with the oligarchs.” (Democrats) This shows us that bad guys have used pro-worker language to gain public support, only to later strip away freedoms and centralize the power. In short when a guy like Soros or Trump says they are for working class do not trust them.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  i mean, what it sounds like you're trying to say is "the owner class will lie to the working class when it benefits them"... which I agree with... but the way you reached this conclusion is that you disagree with the framing of contemporary US right-wing conservative activity as fascist? even when Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two private citizens who are very close to the levers of power, are on camera sieg-heiling? even when the president of the united states pardoned paramilitary actors like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front members who actually did real violence? even when people are being sent to a concentration camp in another country with no due process? even when people who protest this administration's policies and actions are being targeted for professional blacklisting (lawyers, judges) or arrested and held without due process (eg, mahmoud khalil)? if these actions are not close enough or akin to the actions of the Nazis (or other fascist movements) for the impact of these things to supersede a very pedantic definition of either term, then you must be willfully ignoring the intent behind applying those terms - they might not be "Nazis" but they're doing the things Nazis did, and that's extremely bad and worth comparison.

cess11 1y ago

This is such a bizarre lie. No, the Reich did not make International Workers' Day a holiday. It made May 1st the Day of National Work and prohibited all celebrations except those arranged by the nazi state, especially celebrations by worker organisations.