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Title: Nazi Privatization
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: January 23, 2009
Language: en
Topics: capitalism; privatisation
Source: Retrieved on November 23, 2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/124

Kevin Carson

Nazi Privatization

Nicholas Hildyard, writing for The Corner House (March 1998), pointed

out the phony nature of most of what passes for “privatization” under

neoliberalism:

While the privatisation of state industries and assets has certainly cut

down the direct involvement of the state in the production and

distribution of many goods and services, the process has been

accompanied by new state regulations, subsidies and institutions aimed

at introducing and entrenching a “favourable environment” for the

newly-privatised industries.

Director Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance made a similar point

about the kind of “privatization” promoted by vulgar libertarian think

tanks like the Adam Smith Institute. The ASI, he wrote in Free Life

Commentary (July 3, 1998), “sells market solutions to statist problems.”

An Adam Smith Institute report… will look at the technical questions of

how to privatise – at what the shape of the new private activity ought

to be, at what special interests need to be conciliated, and so forth.

And the report will often only sketch out the details of a proposal that

will be fully explained in direct consultancy with a company or

ministry….

The old statism was at least mitigated by incompetence. The people in

charge of it were paid too little to feel really important; and much of

their energy was absorbed in disputes with stupid or malevolent union

leaders. They presided over a system that was never very strong, and

that failed to weather the storms of the 1970s.

As reconstructed in the 1980s – partly by the Adam Smith Institute – the

new statism is different. It looks like private enterprise. It makes a

profit. Those in charge of it are paid vast salaries, and smugly believe

they are worth every penny….

But for all its external appearance, the reality is statism. And because

it makes a profit, it is more stable than the old. It is also more

pervasive. Look at these privatised companies, with their boards full of

retired politicians, their cosy relationships with the regulators, their

quick and easy ways to get whatever privileges they want….

As with National Socialism in Germany, the new statism is leading to the

abolition of the distinction between public and private. Security

companies, for example, are being awarded contracts to ferry defendants

between prison and court, and in some cases to build and operate

prisons. This has been sold to us on the – perfectly correct – grounds

that it ensures better value for money. But it also involves grants of

state powers of coercion to private organisations. All over the country,

private companies are being given powers of surveillance and control

greater than the Police used to possess.

….There has been no diminution in the economic power of the State, only

a change in its mode of operation….

With all that by way of preface, you can imagine my reaction when I came

across a paper, titled “Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in

1930s Germany,” by Germà Bel of the University of Barcelona. Here’s an

excerpt:

The Great Depression spurred State ownership in Western capitalist

countries. Germany was no exception; the last governments of the Weimar

Republic took over firms in diverse sectors. Later, the Nazi regime

transferred public ownership and public services to the private sector.

In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in the Western

capitalist countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms

during the 1930s. Privatization in Nazi Germany was also unique in

transferring to private hands the delivery of public services previously

provided by government.

Bel argues that one of the political aims of the privatization

initiatives was to win the support of the German industrialists–or as

Sidney Merlin put it in a 1943 paper quoted by Bel, “facilitate the

accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires by [the

regime’s] foremost members and collaborators.”

Along the same lines, Joseph Stromberg once argued by private email,

based on his reading of Behemoth (by the Frankfurt School’s Franz

Neumann), that the autarky of Fortress Europe wasn’t the Nazis’ goal at

all. It was simply

a temporary way around the Anglo-American ownership of the monetary

system, etc. As they conquered territory, the Nazis extended their model

of state-capitalism into the new areas. I suppose we could credit them

with an early model of top-down globalization…. Not much different than

the American model: tariffs until you control the overseas assets, then

‘free trade.’

Had the Axis won, they’d no doubt have created their own version of the

Bretton Woods agencies and the UN Security Council, and made the

Deutschmark into a global reserve currency.

Neumann and the rest of the Frankfurt School described, as the aim of

fascism, to transcend the internal contradictions of capitalism, in much

the same way that Immanuel Wallerstein argued the feudal ruling class

transcended the internal contradictions of feudalism. According to

Wallerstein, a subgroup of the feudal ruling class reconfigured

themselves as agrarian capitalists, and negotiated the transition to

capitalism, setting themselves up as the core of the new ruling class

over a new social system. Similarly, Wallerstein speculates, a section

of the capitalist ruling class may attempt to survive the collapse of

corporate capitalism from its internal contradictions, by setting

themselves up as the ruling class of a post-market collectivist society.

That’s exactly what fascism attempted to do, according to the Frankfurt

School: to create a post-capitalist, or at least post-market, society

under the control of the biggest finance capitalists. The capitalists,

in the Frankfurt School scenario, attempt to transcend the law of value

and mediate an increasing share of economic transactions directly

through the state rather than the market price system.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the tendency of neoliberal capitalism over

the past few decades, despite all the “free market” rhetoric, has been

to socialize an ever-increasing share of the operating costs of

business, and to insulate big business increasingly from market

competition through a draconian “intellectual property” (sic) regime.

Besides the war economy and the military-industrial complex, the

internal security state and the prison-industrial complex have grown by

leaps and bounds. Consider the irony of Dick Cheney, of Halliburton

fame, pontificating that “the government never made anybody rich.” We

have been evolving, in recent decades, to a system of power in which the

bondaries between the corporation and the state are increasingly a legal

fiction, and the corporate capitalists administer the economy from their

position at the helm of the state.

The main difference between what the Nazis aimed at, and the neoliberal

policies pursued in the Anglosphere, is that “free market” rhetoric

serves a useful legitimizing function for selling the latter. The

Germans, who pursued a similar (if more extreme) model of corporate

welfare statism and crony capitalism, were relieved–thanks to a

different political culture–of the necessity of disguising their

corporatism.