Perry Anderson also has a review of Eric Hobsbawm's memoirs. Yet I read a sentence like:
There have been few such vivid evocations of the electric atmosphere of the revolutionary Left in Germany in those months. It is little wonder that memories of the final, guttering parade of a doomed KPD through the twilight of Berlin should have marked [Hobsbawm] more deeply than schooldays in the becalmed London of the National Government.
and I think, "Perry is playing hide-the-ball." Why no mention of the fact that the KPD--the German Communist Party--was then "doomed" because it and the Nazis had together achieved what they had both worked for: the destruction of Weimar democracy? Why didn't it "mark" Hobsbawm with the lesson that unthinking obedience to a paranoid Russian dictator--who had prescribed to the Comintern the anti-democracy policies of its "third period"--is a bad idea?
Posted by DeLong at September 30, 2002 02:16 PM | Trackback>The extremely, extremely smart and amazingly prolific Niall Ferguson uses the occasion of the publication of British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's memoir to ask--seriously and thoughtfully--just why is it that we have some sympathetic tolerance for the likes of Eric Hobsbawm (who spent the 24 years from 1930 to 1954 in enthusiastic and unthinking corpse-like obedience to the every whim of Josef Stalin) while we would have no tolerance at all for an equivalent enthusiastic and unthinking corpse-like obeyer of Adolf Hitler (even if he had written "the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history"). <
That's a good question, as they say. In economics parlance, the difference comes down to product differentiation in political space since the Communists and Nazis were close competitors in serial elections in Germany in the early 1930s. In terms of civilians killed by government, excluding war dead, the best scholarly estimates for Soviet Union in the period 1917-1990 come in the range of 50 to 60 millions, which compare with 20 millions for the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. In favour of the Soviets it can be claimed that their annual rate of killing was smaller but they did have prior credit for the concept of category homicide of political opponents with the policy, officially adopted in 1929, of "eliminiating the kulaks (better-off peasants) as a class."
Strip away the nationalist and racist features of the Nazi Party's fundamental programme adopted in 1920 [J Noakes + G Pridham (eds): Nazism 1919-1945, Vol. 1; University of Exeter Press (1983), p. 14ff] and what remains is basically a socialist programme that does not look overly eccentric when compared with the manifestoes of socialist parties in W Europe after WW2. Recall that Hitler in his rhetorical rants condemned "Bolshevism", not "socialism". In Robert Conquest's recently published study of Stalin, he refers to a report-back to the Foreign Office by the British ambassador to Nazi Germany in 1936 about the contingent of ex-Communists in a march past of the Nazi SA [the Brown Shirts] being the best turned out.
Recall too that Stalin had no problem with the Soviet Union contracting a "Friendship Treaty" with Nazi Germany in late September 1939 after Britain and France were already at war. So amicable were relations between the two treaty partners that protocols provided for the exchange of liaison officers along the mutual border between Soviet and German forces across what had been Poland's territory, an arrangement which continued until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 [Norman Davies: Europe; OUP (1996), p. 1000ff].
There is certainly evidence, not least from passages in Mein Kampf, that Hitler was pathologically anti-semitic but that was not evidently true of all the Party's founding membership, some of whom did profess commitments to socialist principles. One challenging interpretation of the Party's political motivation is this from Prof Brustein: "The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realise that pure racial anti-Semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-Semitic, and ultra-nationalist movements that abounded in post-1918 Germany. Instead, I would suggest, the Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party's programs, which, in an uncanny fashion, integrated elements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy with twentieth-century Keynesian economics. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life, including the economy." [W Brustein: The Logic of Evil - The Social Origins of the Nazi Party 1925-33; Yale University Press (1996), p. 51]
If the connection with Keynesian economics appears offensive, I can only say that there is evidence supporting the connection. Keynes visited Weimar Republic Germany in January 1932 [DE Moggridge: Keynes; Routledge (1992), p. 539-40] and later wrote in the New Statesman: "Gemany today is in the grips of the most powerful deflation any nation has experienced. . ."
While in Germany, Keynes gave a lecture in Hamburg. Probably unbeknown to him, Nazi Party activists were in the audience for his lecture. It should not be surprising if there were.
Readers will perhaps recall that in 1929 Keynes had co-authored a Liberal Party pamphlet for the elections in Britain that year, with the title "Can Lloyd George Do It?", which advocated a public works programme to reduce unemployment. Keynes had also been a member of the Macmillan Committee which reported in July 1931. In that report, Keynes favoured expansionist policies but with existing exchange rates, supported as necessary by import controls.
The story continues: "A speech delivered in the Reichstag by Gregor Strasser [a leading Nazi deputy] on May 10, 1932, aroused general astonishment: it included proposals of a detailed project for the creation of employment by means of public works, to be financed by what was defined as 'productive credit expansion.' Shortly afterward these proposals appeared as the official Intermediate Economic Program of the [Nazi] party . . Actually, the Nazi programme of 1932 included not a few proposals and practical suggestions implemented after January 1933 [when Hitler became Chancellor]. On the other hand, a paper written by Schacht [president of the Reichsbank 1933-9 and economics minister 1934-7] in the same year shows that he explicitly rejected the reduction of unemployment by means of government-initiated public works. All Schacht had to offer towards the liquidation of unemployment was belt-tightening, the lowering of wages and the settling of the unemployed in villages or cottage holdings . . ." [Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics; Berg Publishers Ltd (1990), p. 40-1] Schacht was thoroughly able and an astute fixer by several accounts, but he was an entirely orthodox banker.
In fact, the spending programme on public works and rearmament by the Nazi government from January 1933 on was hugely successful in cutting unemployment. "The effect was rapidly to reduce unemployment from 6 million in October 1933 to 4.1 million a year later, 2.8 million in Febuary 1935, 2.5 million in Febuary 1936, and 1.2 million in Febuary 1937." [CP Kindleberger: The World in Depression 1929-1939; Allen Lane (1973), p. 240] Inflationary pressures on prices and wages were contained by administrative controls. External imbalances were contained by trade licensing and foreign exchange controls, enabling the Gold parity of the Reichmark to be maintained, in distinctive contrast to Britain's suspension of the Gold Standard in September 1931 [see Kindleberger chp. 7 for an outline of events in 1931].
Of course, the Nazis cannot claim credit for pioneering a prices and incomes policy - I am aware of several earlier attempts, starting with, "Edward III's ordinance (1349) to restore pre-plague wage levels and discourage mobility among an emancipated labour force [which] was quickly turned into a parliamentary statute (1351)." [KO Morgan (ed): The Oxford History of Britain; OUP (1993), p. 216] One downstream outcome of that was the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which is still celebrated by leftist historians as an early manifestation of revolutionary radicalism.
Convergence or Dialectical contradictions?
Posted by: Bob Briant (UK) on September 30, 2002 04:19 PMA memory lapse lead me to overlook that Hammurabi's legal code in ancient Babylon c. 18th century BC included elements of a statutory prices and incomes policy (eg Article 221. If a physician heal the broken bone or diseased soft part of a man, the patient shall pay the physician five shekels in money; 239. If a man hire a sailor, he shall pay him six gur of corn per year; 242. If any one hire oxen for a year, he shall pay four gur of corn for plow-oxen) as well as a criminal law and legal protection of property rights. Text of the Code is from recent editions of MS Encarta. I suppose the really interesting question is as to why these elements were considered necessary.
Bob Briant should learn something about history. "Charge what the market will bear" is not a universal rule. Limits on prices are found in nearly every human society with markets.
As for the similarity of the Nazi and Socialist programs, with enough vagueness everything is the same. From a certain, nutty, point of view, any divergence from Thatcherism can be considered socialism, so that the Combination Acts, the Talmudic injunctions to pay a living wage, Nazi price controls, and Jimmy Carter's gasline rationing are the same.
Posted by: citizen k on October 1, 2002 02:24 PMI enjoyed the bit in Frances Wheen's recent new biography of Karl Marx (WW Norton, 2001)about Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, believing Marx was a police spy - probably correctly in the author's opinion. But then Marx,living in asylum in London from 1849 on, eked out a penurious existence for his family from occasional journalism and subventions from Engels, who ran a successful family textile business in Manchester (UK).
Suddenly, the purpose of all the abuse in the Communist Manifesto directed against other socialist ideologies across Europe becomes transparently clear. Marx needed to differentiate his product in a competitive market to improve his income prospects.
Posted by: Bob Briant (UK) on October 1, 2002 05:25 PM