The Socialist Roots Of Nazism

If Sombart’s outburst was at the time too much even for most Germans, another German professor arrived at essentially the same ideas in a more moderate and more scholarly, but for that reason even more effective, form. ProfessorJohann Plenge was as great an authority on Marx as Sombart. His book on Marx und Hegel marks the beginning of the modern Hegel-renaissance among Marxian scholars; and there can be no doubt about the genuinely socialist nature ofthe convictions with which he started.

Among his numerous war publications the most important is a small but at the time widely discussed book with the significant title: 1789 and 1914. The Symbolic Years in the History of the Political Mind.

It is devoted to the conflict between the “Ideas of 1789”, the ideal of freedom, and the “Ideas of 1914”, the ideal of organisation.

Organisation is to him, as to all socialists who derive their socialism from a crude application ofscientific ideals to the problems of society, the essence of socialism. It was, as he rightly emphasises, the root ofthe socialist movement at its inception in early nineteenth-century France. Marx and Marxism have betrayed this basic idea of socialism by their fanatic but utopian adherence to the abstract idea offreedom.

Only now was the idea of organisation again coming into its own, elsewhere, as witnessed by the work of Mr. H. G. Wells (by whose Future in America Professor Plenge was profoundly influenced, and whom he describes as one ofthe outstanding figures ofmodern socialism), but particularly in Germany, where it is best understood and most fully realised. The war between England and Germany is therefore really a conflict between two opposite principles.

The “Economic World War” is the third great epoch of spiritual struggle in modern history. It is of equal importance with the Reformation and the bourgeois revolution of liberty. It is the struggle for the victory ofthe new forces born out ofthe advanced economic life of the nineteenth century: socialism and organisation.

Because in the sphere of ideas Germany was the most convinced exponent of all socialist dreams, and in the sphere of reality she was the most powerful architect of the most highly organised economic system.-In us is the twentieth century.

However the war may end, we are the exemplary people. Our ideas will determine the aims of the life of humanity.-World History experiences at present the colossal spectacle that with us a new great ideal of life penetrates to final victory, while at the same time in England one of the World-Historical principles finally collapses.

The war economy created in Germany in 19

14 is the first realisation of a socialist society and its spirit the first active, and not merely demanding, appearance of a socialist spirit. The needs ofthe war have established the socialist idea in German economic life, and thus the defence of our nation produced for humanity the idea of ‘9'4, the idea ofGerman organisation, the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) of national socialism…. Without our really noticing it the whole of our political life in state and industry has risen to a higher stage.

State and economic life form a new unity…. The feeling of economic responsibility which characterises the work of the civil servant pervades all private activity…. The new German corporative constitution of economic life [which Professor Plenge admits is not yet ripe or complete] is the highest form of life ofthe state which has ever been known on earth.

At first Professor Plenge still hoped to reconcile the ideal of liberty and the ideal of organisation, although largely through the complete but voluntary submission of the individual to the whole. But these traces of liberal ideas soon disappear from his writings. By 1918 the union between socialism and ruthless power politics had become complete in his mind.

Shortly before the end of the war he exhorted his compatriots in the socialist journal Die Glocke in the following manner:

It is high time to recognise the fact that socialism must be power policy, because it is to be organisation. Socialism has to win power: it must never blindly destroy power. And the most important and critical question for socialism in the time of war of peoples is necessarily this: what people is pre-eminently summoned to power, because it is the exemplary leader in the organisation of peoples?

And he forecast all the ideas which were finally to justify Hitler’s New Order: Just from the point ofview ofsocialism, which is organisation,

is not an absolute right of self-determination ofthe peoples the right of individualistic economic anarchy? Are we willing to grant complete self-determination to the individual in economic life? Consistent socialism can accord to the people a right to incorporation only in accordance with the real distribution of forces historically determined.

The ideals which Plenge expressed so clearly were especially popular among, and perhaps even derive from, certain circles of German scientists and engineers who, precisely as is now so loudly demanded by their English counterparts, clamoured for the centrally planned organisation of all. aspects of life. Leading among these was the famous chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, one of whose pronouncements on this point has achieved a certain celebrity. He is reported to have stated publicly that Germany wants to organise Europe which up to now still lacks organisation.

I will explain to you now Germany’s great secret: we, or perhaps the German race, have discovered the significance of organisation. While the other nations still live under the regime of individualism, we have already achieved that of organisation.

Ideas very similar to these were current in the offices of the German raw material dictator, Walter Rathenau, who, although he would have shuddered had he realised the consequences of his totalitarian economics, yet deserves a considerable place in any fuller history of the growth of Nazi ideas.

Through his writings he has probably, more than any other man, determined the economic views of the generation which grew up in Germany during and immediately after the last war; and some of his closest collaborators were later to form the backbone ofthe staffofGoering’s Five Year Plan administration. Very similar also was much of the teaching of another former Marxist, Friedrich Naumann, whose Mitte1europa reached probably the greatest circulation of any war book in Germany.! But it was left to an active socialist politician, a member ofthe left wing ofthe social-democratic party in the Reichstag, to develop these ideas most fully and to spread them far and wide. Paul Lensch had already in earlier books described the war as “the flight ofthe English bourgeoisie before the advance ofsocialism”, and explained how different were the socialist ideal offreedom and the English conception.

But only in his third and most successful war book, his Three Years of World Revolution,2 were his characteristic ideas, under the influence of Plenge, to achieve full development. Lensch bases his argument on an interesting and in many respects accurate historical account ofhow the adoption ofprotection by Bismarck had made possible in Germany a development towards that industrial concentration and cartellisation which, from his Marxist standpoint, represented a higher state of industrial development. The result of Bismarck’s decision of the year 1879 was that Germany took on the role of the revolutionary; that is to say, of a state whose position in relation to the rest ofthe world is that of a representative of a higher and more advanced economic system. Having realised this, we should perceive that in the present World Revolution Germany represents the revolutionary, and her greatest antagonist, England, the counter-revolutionary side. This fact proves how little the constitution of a country, whether it be liberal and republican or monarchic and autocratic, affects the question whether, from the point of view of

historical development, that country is to be regarded as liberal or not. Or, to put it more plainly, our conceptions of Liberalism, Democracy, and so forth, are derived from the ideas of English Individualism, according to which a state with a weak government is a liberal state, and every restriction upon the freedom of the individual is conceived as the product of autocracy and militarism.

In Germany, the “historically appointed representative” of this higher form of economic life, the struggle for socialism has been extraordinarily simplified, since all the prerequisite conditions of Socialism had already become established there. And hence it was necessarily a vital concern of any socialist party that Germany should triumphantly hold her own against her enemies, and thereby be able to fulfil her historic mission of revolutionising the world. Hence the war ofthe Entente against Germany resembled the attempt of the lower bourgeoisie of the pre-capitalistic age to prevent the decline oftheir own class.

That organisation of Capital [Lensch continues] which began unconsciously before the war, and which during the war has been continued consciously, will be systematically continued after the war. Not through any desire for any arts of organisation nor yet because socialism has been recognised as a higher principle of social development. The classes who are to-day the practical pioneers of socialism are, in theory, its avowed opponents, or, at any rate, were so up to a short time ago. Socialism is coming, and in fact has to some extent already arrived, since we can no longer live without it. The only people who still oppose this tendency are the liberals. This class of people, who unconsciously reason from English standards, comprises the whole educated German bourgeoisie.

Their political notions of “freedom” and “civic right”, of constitutionalism and parliamentarianism, are derived from that individualistic conception of the world, of which English Liberalism is a classical embodiment, and which was adopted by the spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie in the ‘fifties, ‘sixties, and ‘seventies ofthe nineteenth century. But these standards are old-fashioned and shattered, just as oldfashioned English Liberalism has been shattered by this war. What has to be done now is to get rid of these inherited political ideas and to assist the growth of a new conception ofState and Society. In this sphere also Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism. In this connection it is an astonishing fact that, in the so-called “reactionary” Germany, the working classes have won for themselves a much more solid and powerful position in the life ofthe state than is the case either in England or in France. Lensch follows this up with a consideration which again contains much truth and which deserves to be pondered:

Since the Social Democrats, by the aid ofthis [universal] suffrage, occupied every post which they could obtain in the Reichstag, the State Parliament, the municipal councils, the courts forthe settlement oftrade disputes, the sick funds, and so forth, they penetrated very deeply into the organism ofthe state; but the price which they had to pay for this was that the state, in its turn, exercised a profound influence upon the working classes. To be sure, as the result of strenuous socialistic labours for fifty years, the state is no longer the same as it was in the year 1867, when universal suffrage first came into operation; but then, Social Democracy, in its turn, is no longer the same as it was at the ti me. The state has undergone a process ofsocialisation, and Social Democracy has undergone a process ofnationalisation.

Plenge and Lensch in turn have provided the leading ideas for the immediate masters of National-Socialism, particularly Oswald Spengler and A. Moeller van den Bruck, to mention only the two best-known names. l Opinions may differ in how far the former can be regarded as a socialist. But that in his tract on Prussianism and Socialism, which appeared in 1920, he merely gave expression to ideas widely held by German socialists will now be evident. A few specimens of his argument will suffice. “Old Prussian spirit and socialist conviction, which to-day hate each other with the hatred of brothers, are one and the same.” The representatives of Western civilisation in Germany, the German liberals, are “the invisible English army which after the battle of Jena, Napoleon left behind on German soil”. To Spengler, men like Hardenberg and Humboldt and all the other liberal reformers were “English”. But this “English” spirit will be turned out by the German revolution which began in 1914.

The three last nations of the Occident have aimed at three forms of existence, represented by famous watchwords: Freedom, Equality, Community. They appear in the political forms of liberal Parliamentarianism, social Democracy, and authoritarian socialism. 2 ••• The German, more correctly, Prussian, instinct is: the power belongs to the whole…. Everyone is I The same applies to many others of the intellectual leaders of the generation which has produced Nazism, such as Othmar Spann, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Junger. On these compare the interesting study by Aurel Kolnai, The War against the West, 1938, which suffers, however, from the defect that, by confining itself to the post-war period when these ideals had already been taken over by the nationalists, it overlooks their socialist creators.

2 This Spenglerian formula finds its echo in an often quoted statement of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi expert on constitutional law, according to which the evolution of government proceeds “in three dialectic stages : from the absolute state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the neutral state of the liberal nineteenth century to the totalitarian state in which state and society are identical” (C. Schmitt, Der Hiiter der Verfassung, Tubingen, 1931, p. 79).

given his place. One commands or obeys. This is, since the eighteenth century, authoritarian socialism, essentially illiberal and anti-democratic, in so far as English Liberalism and French Democracy are meant. … There are in Germany many hated and ill-reputed contrasts, but liberalism alone is contemptible on German soil. The structure of the English nation is based on the distinction between rich and poor, that of the Prussian on that between command and obedience. The meaning of class distinction is accordingly fundamentally different in the two countries. After pointing out the essential difference between the English competitive system and the Prussian system of “economic administration”, and after showing (consciously following Lensch) how since Bismarck the deliberate organisation of economic activity had progressively assumed more socialist forms, Spengler continues: In Prussia there existed a real state in the most ambitious meaning of the word. There could be, strictly speaking, no private persons. Everybody who lived within the system that worked with the precision of a clockwork, was in some way a link in it. The conduct of public business could therefore not be in the hands of private people, as is supposed by Parliamentarianism. It was an Amt and the responsible politician was a civil servant, a servant ofthe whole. The “Prussian idea” requires that everybody should become a state official, that all wages and salaries be fixed by the state. The administration of all property, in particular, becomes a salaried function. The state of the future will be a Beamtenstaat. But the decisive question not only for Germany, but for the world, which must be solved by Germany for the world is: Is in future trade to govern the state, or the state to govern trade? In the face of this question Prussianism and Socialism are the same … Prussianism and Socialism combat the England in our midst.

It was only a step from this for the patron-saint of NationalSocialism Moeller van den Bruck to proclaim the World War a war between liberalism and socialism: “We have lost the war against the West. Socialism has lost it against Liberalism. U 1 As with Spengler, liberalism is, therefore, the arch-enemy. Moeller van den Bruck glories in the fact that there are no liberals in Germany to-day; there are young revolutionaries: there are young conservatives. But who would be a liberal? … Liberalism is a philosophy of life from which German youth now turns with nausea, with wrath, with quite peculiar scorn, for there is none more foreign, more repugnant, more opposed to its philosophy. German youth to-day recognises the liberal as the arch-enemy.

Moeller van den Bruck’s Third Reich was intended to give the Germans a socialism adapted to their nature and undefiled by Western liberal ideas. And so it did. These writers were by no means isolated phenomena. As early as 1922 a detached observer could speak of a “peculiar and, on a first glance, surprising phenomenon u then to be observed in Germany:

The fight againstthe capitalistic order, accordingtothis view, is a continuation ofthe war against the Entente with the weapons ofthe spirit and of economic organisation, the way which leads to practical socialism, a return of the German people to their best and noblest traditions. 1

I Moeller van den Bruck, Sozialismus und Aussenpolitik, 1933, pp. 87, 90, and 100. The articles here reprinted, particularly the article on “Lenin and Keynes” which discusses most fully the contention discussed in the text, were first published between 1919 and 1923.

Fight against liberalism in all its forms, liberalism that had defeated Germany, was the common idea which united socialists and conservatives in one common front. At first it was mainly in the German Youth Movement, almost entirely socialist in inspiration and outlook, where these ideas were most readily accepted and the fusion ofsocialism and nationalism completed.

In the later ’twenties and till the advent to power of Hitler a circle of young men gathered round the journal Die Tat and led by Ferdinand Fried became the chief exponent of this tradition in the intellectual sphere. Fried’s Ende des Kapitalismus is perhaps the most characteristic product ofthis group of Edelnazis, as they were known in Germany, and is particularly disquieting because of its resemblance to so much of the literature which we see in England to-day, where we can watch the same drawing together of the socialists of the Left and the Right, and nearly the same contempt of all that is liberal in the old sense. “Conservative Socialism” (and, in other circles, “Religious Socialism”) was the slogan under which a large number of writers prepared the atmosphere in which “National-Socialism” succeeded. It is “conservative socialism” which is the dominant trend in this country now. Had the war against the Western powers “with the weapons of the spirit and of economic organisation” not almost succeeded before the real war began?

I K. Pribram, “Deutscher Nationalismus und Deutscher Sozialismus”, in Archiv fUr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 49,1922, pp. 298-9. The writer mentions as further examples the philosopher Max Scheler preaching” the socialist world mission of Germany”, and the Marxist K. Korach writing on the spirit of the new Volksgemeinschaft, as arguing in the same vein.