My colleague Dan Hannan argues that Hitler was a socialist. It's a popular idea among libertarians, often used to shame the opposition – after all the Nazis did call themselves National
Socialists. But, then again, Tony Blair once said he was a socialist, too. So labels can be misleading.
That Hitler wasn't a socialist became apparent within weeks of becoming Chancellor of Germany when he started arresting socialists and communists. He did this, claim some, because they were competing brands of socialism. But that doesn't explain why Hitler defined his politics so absolutely as a war on Bolshevism – a pledge that won him the support of the middle-classes, industrialists and many foreign conservatives.
Dan asserts that Hitler was a socialist with reservations, that:
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.
Yet, by this very definition, Hitler wasn't a socialist. Marxism is defined by class war, and socialism is accomplished with the total victory of the Proletariat over the ruling classes. By contrast, Hitler offered an alliance between labour and capital in the form of corporatism – with the express purpose of
preventing class war. Marxists regarded this as one of the stages of capitalist development and few at the time legitimately interpreted the Third Reich to be a socialist society. The radical George Bernard Shaw, for example,
certainly expressed sympathy for Hitler when he came to power but later described the dictator's socialism as fraudulent – as a way of buying off the inevitable revolution. He wore, in Shaw's opinion, "the latest mask of capitalism."
