What is National Socialism?¶
Core Argument¶
In What is National Socialism?, the chapter argues that fascism is not the rule of the petty bourgeoisie but the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital, a counter-revolutionary shift that leaves the social system intact. The office of kingship or leadership is not a quality of the individual but an interrelation between people—an individual supply meeting collective demand. Hitler succeeded not because of his personality but as the focus of anonymous historic forces; a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
The rapid growth of German capitalism before the First World War created new layers of the petty bourgeoisie while ruining others, stripping the middle classes of independence and reducing them to living off crumbs from the monopolies. After 1918, war passed into revolution, but Social Democracy prevented the proletariat from completing it, and the Communist Party proved incapable of leading a new revolution. The postwar chaos hit the middle strata as cruelly as the workers, eroding all official creeds, especially democratic parliamentarism. The banner of National Socialism was raised by upstarts from the lower and middle commanding ranks of the old army, who refused to return to modest posts. Hitler began with grievances and complaints, not a ready-made programme, uniting all types of dissatisfaction in the beggar’s bowl of National Socialism. The Nazis fused the petty bourgeoisie through its common hostility to the proletariat.
The theory of race is a vapid variety of chauvinism; nationalism in economy comes down to impotent outbursts of antisemitism. The programme of petty-bourgeois illusions is dissolved in ritualistic acts. Hitler’s tasks are assigned by monopoly capital: preparation for war. The Nazi police regime’s impotence in the national economy forces it to shift its efforts into foreign policy, corresponding to the aggressive inner dynamics of German capitalism. Hitler’s sudden turn to peaceful declarations can deceive only utter simpletons. No other method remains for transferring responsibility for internal distress onto external enemies and accumulating nationalist explosive force under the dictatorship’s press. This part of the programme, outlined openly before the Nazis took power, is now being fulfilled with iron logic. The date of the next European catastrophe will be determined by the time needed for German rearmament—not a question of months, nor of decades. Europe will be plunged into war within a few years unless Hitler is forestalled in time by Germany’s internal forces. Fascism cannot be reformed; it can only be overthrown.