• GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Fascist states famously sold off large amounts of state assets to capitalists. Nazi Germany even inspired a new word for this, called “privatization” because they did it so much

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    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Quite the opposite for Nazi Germany for the most part. The corporations became a central part of the state. The alternative name that Mussolini coined for fascism was corporatism for that very reason.

          • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Well, they are right. Fascism was very much predicated on state enforced privatization. That’s what ‘Corporatism’ means. A political ideology where society is organized like a body - corpus - and each part is sovereign. Private Companies would thereafter be the lords of their respective sectors. Fascism isn’t defined by close relations between the Private and the Public sectors because that’s actually true for all forms of industrialized societies. Even and in many ways especially the early adopters of industrialization. British free trade ideology was limited to the United Kingdom, while India was run as a resource and tax farming colony for the benefits of British Capital. The State, with its armies and political supremacy, is no less important there.

            This is an important distinction to be made because Fascism was invented to enforce social harmony in face of class struggle. It is meant to subsume all political discourse of clashing interests between bosses, employees, landlords, farmers, urban workers, service workers, and so on into the body of the nation. In a fascist society you’re not supposed to question the political order, as, for an example, bankers know best about the banking system which is why the State enforces their rights and power over their employees, and ensures that as much economic power is privatly held as possible.

              • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                It depends on wether you’re working with a conception of history or if you’re working with present-day definitions of common american political parlance. Corporatism did not straight up mean privatization. Only it was a political project with the aim to promote and secure private sovereignty over each sector of the economy. A society organized as a body - corpus. That is what Corporatism meant. You have the head, you have the arms, and the legs. Each part autonomous, and sovereign over it’s sector. Just as the fingers don’t tell the brain what to do, the employees must not contest the employer’s ownership of their labour. If one knew what to do with finance or production, one was a factory owner or a banker. These last elements were to be empowered and secured by the Fascist state, an entity born entirely to subsume class struggle into nationalist fervour. Hence Corporatism.

                The reason why Corporatism was not defined by the interdependence of State and Private Corporations is because it couldn’t have been. As that would have been no different from Liberal or Socialistic States. All Industrialized economies are predicated on the state, on it’s monopoly of violence, on it’s ability to enforce property, contracts, to secure the money supply, and to galvanize social economic efforts. This even moreso true in the time period, as all the Liberal states of Europe were predicated on colonialism, just as the United States was predicated on manifest destiny. There’s no capitalism or industrialization without state action. Corporatism’s innovation - which is really an echo of early modern political thinking - was in ideologically subjugating civil society to the wishes of the private.

                Nowadays people are too quickly to call any state they dislike ‘corporatistic’, ‘corporativistic’, or something along those lines because, ultimately, we live in society that is organized around those ideas. Every country from the liberal west to the post colonial east at one point played along Corporatist rules. Even when those Corporatist states were dismantled - early in the US, after the 80s oil shocks elsewhere - we continued to conceptualize the economy and our roles within it according to what the fascists had in mind. So the word loses all meaning. People will say the US is corporatist now because the State intervenes in the economy. Except it always did, and the hopes that the government would stop caring about social harmony and welfare, and limited itself to enforcing contract and property only, was always there. We merely live in a post Soviet acceleration.

                • commiecapybara [he/him, e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Wasn’t fascist corporatism basically inspired by functionalism? I vaguely remember reading about how Durkheim rejected materialism and class conflict in favor of a form of corporatism.

                  • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    It’s a wide discussion, you can see arguments of all sorts. You can estabilish where it came from, what were it’s contemporary philosophical and aesthetic influences, what were the material conditions that led to it, and how far back you wish to place each of them. One can go so far as to say that Corporatism is an echo of pre capitalist Europe, and the guild economies of centuries past.

      • commiecapybara [he/him, e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        “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."

        In other words, the Nazis specifically took certain businesses that were formerly nationalized and then privatized them.

        For further reading:

        • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Corporatism where the employers play a central role in the running of the state was a foundation of fascism.

                  • commiecapybara [he/him, e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Again, if you have evidence to the contrary, you can contact the author of the research paper, or you can submit your findings to a peer-reviewed academic journal. Here are some further academic sources that also support the claim that the Nazi economy was heavily engaged in privatization, and some relevant quotes:

                    “After the 1931 banking crisis the survival of the four German great banks was safeguarded only by a huge injection of taxpayers’ money. In return, the great banks were partly nationalized and the two worst affected, the Dresdner Bank and the Danat Bank, were merged. Re-privatization was, however, started only a few years later and finalized under Nazi rule in 1937.

                    Source: After the Crisis: Nationalisation and re-privatization of the German great banks 1931–1937

                    “There occurred hardly any nationalizations of private firms during the Third Reich. In addition, there were few enterprises newly created as state-run firms.”

                    “The foregoing discussion is clearly corroborated by an analysis of Nazi intentions. Available sources make perfectly clear that the Nazi regime did not want at all a German economy with public ownership of many or all enterprises. Therefore it generally had no intention whatsoever of nationalizing private firms or creating state firms. On the contrary the re-privatization of enterprises was furthered wherever possible.”

                    Source: The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry