Were the Nazis on the Left or on the Right?

 

Notorious right-winger

There is a battle online currently between people asserting that the Nazi Party was left-wing, and people asserting it was right-wing. The latter is, of course, the more conventional position.

The argument that it was left-wing, however, is obvious: the name of the party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” They claimed to be socialist. Surely the ball is in the court of those who say they were not.

The response on the left is apparently that they were lying. It was a trick to sucker in the working class.

This shows much disrespect for the working class. It also violates the current leftist principle that we must accept everyone’s self-identification. If an apparent man says they are a woman, we must accept this. If they want to be called indigenous and not Indian, we must accept indigenous as correct.

Marxists object that Nazis were not socialists, because socialism means collective control of the means of production, and the Nazis did not nationalize industries.

But ownership is not control.

What they did was change the legal definition of property, so that, while private individuals might technically own things, they did not control them. Everything was subject to the needs of the state. Control was in the hands of the state, including the ability to set wages, prices, levels of production, and dividends—removing the free market and the profit motive. It was socialism in all but a legalistic, technical sense, and then only if you accept only one of several definitions of socialism.

It is standard practice on the left, of course, to exclude any political tendency that differs from their own from their definition of socialism. Maoists insisted that the USSR was not socialist. The Stalinists insisted that Trotskyites were not true socialists. The Bernsteinists insisted that the Bolsheviks were not true socialists. Especially whenever socialism fails to produce desired results, the claim will always be that it was not true socialism.

Another counter-argument is that the Nazis were on the right because they were “nationalists.” This was not socialism, this was “national socialism.”

But if nationalism makes one right-wing, and internationalism makes one left-wing, then the British Empire was left-wing, while Mahatma Gandhi was a right-winger. The IRA was a right-wing organization; in Canada the NDP is right-wing; Washington and Jefferson were right-wingers, and George the Third was the leftist; and Kim Jong Un is on the far right. This defies the common understanding, and amounts to an idiosycratic use of the terms. Nationalism is perfectly orthodox as a part of some leftist ideology.

The modern North American understanding of the political distinction between “left” and “right,” although somewhat ahistorical, is that “left” means increasing the powers and responsibilities of the state and the collective, while “right” means reducing the size and scope of government in favour of the individual. On this scale, even if considered right-wing in their time and place, when “right” and “left” might have had different meanings, Nazism and Fascism stand on the extreme left in our terms.

Another common way to understand the distinction between left and right is that the right is conservative, that is, primarily concerned with conserving, keeping matters much a they have been. The left wants change. “Hope and change.” You know the thing.

By this standard, again, the Nazis were far left. They did not stand for preserving the Weimar Republic, the then-current sysem of government, nor yet for replacing it with the earlier form, the monarchy, that preceded it. They wanted a radical reimagining of society, of the entire world, of conventional morality, even the development of a new human species. They were “futurists.” “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

But the most telling argument that the Nazis were on the political left is that it is the established wisdom that they were on the far right. Here, as everywhere, the rule of thumb is that anything “everyone knows” is true is probably false.