💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarcho-the-roots-of-privatisation.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:45:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The roots of privatisation Author: Anarcho Date: August 28, 2008 Language: en Topics: privatisation, nazism, capitalism Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=137 Notes: Did you know that the Nazis invented privatisation?
The laissez-faire ideological defenders of capitalism are very
forthright in their support for “privatisation.” Many of these are also
keen to argue that Hitler was a left-winger. Rather than look at the
business backers and role of the Nazi regime as provider of serfs to
said capitalists, they simply note that “Nazi” stood for “National
Socialist.” Such are the intellectual times we live in.
Given this, it comes as a surprise that a recent issue of the “Journal
of Economic Perspectives” shows how the first use of the term
“privatisation” was by the Nazi regime rather than, as previously,
thought by Peter Drucker. According to Germa Bel, the term seems to have
been first introduced into academic social science by Maxine Yaple
Sweezy, although its use in English was predated by The Economist in
August 1936, reporting on the Nazi plan of “re-privatisation” of certain
banks. (“The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist
Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20: 3: pp. 187–94).
Bel quotes a major work by Sweezy, “devoted to the analysis of economic
policy in Germany under the rule of the National Socialist Party.”
Sweezy states that industrialists supported Hitler’s accession to power
and his economic policies: “In return for business assistance, the Nazis
hastened to give evidence of their good will by restoring to private
capitalism a number of monopolies held or controlled by the state.” This
policy implied a large-scale program by which “the government
transferred ownership to private hands.” Strange behaviour by
“socialists,” one would think but does fit in with the analysis of
fascism and Nazism as tools of capitalism.
According to Sweezy, one of the main objectives for this policy was to
stimulate the propensity to save, since a war economy required low
levels of private consumption. High levels of savings were thought to
depend on inequality of income, which would be increased by inequality
of wealth. This “was thus secured by ‘reprivatisation’ …. The practical
significance of the transference of government enterprises into private
hands was thus that the capitalist class continued to serve as a vessel
for the accumulation of income. Profit-making and the return of property
to private hands, moreover, have assisted the consolidation of Nazi
party power.” Sweezy again uses the concept when giving concrete
examples of transference of government ownership to private hands: “The
United Steel Trust is an outstanding example of ‘reprivatisation.’”
Bel ends by noting that the “primary modern argument against
privatization is that it only enriches and entrenches business and
political elites, without benefiting consumers or taxpayers. The
discussion here suggests a rich historical irony: these modern arguments
against privatisation are strikingly similar to the arguments made in
favour of privatization in Germany in the 1930s .... German
privatization of the 1930s was intended to benefit the wealthiest
sectors and enhance the economic position and political support of the
elite.”
All of which places the Thatcherite experiment of “free market/strong
state” into some very required historical context. Little wonder
anarchists reject both privatisation and nationalisation.