Op-Ed: There’s No Such Thing As “Libertarian Socialism”

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Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs recently released a familiar critique of National Socialism under the title “Putting The ‘Nazis Were Socialist’ Nonsense To Rest.” 

This critique comes from a man who describes himself as a Libertarian Socialist, and has hitched his wagon to the lame, jazz-handing horse that is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Fortunately, now that us Third Positionists have our own publication, National Justice, we can respond to these tired clichés. In turn, I hope to address each of the three core values Robinson ascribes to Socialism in his article and clarify National Socialism’s record on each value. 

Though Robinson cuts a comic figure strolling through the French Quarter in his Willy Wonka suits, he strikes me as more idealist than malicious. In 2017 Robinson had the audacity to criticize modern architecture, specifically the trash produced by the Jewish architects criminals Peter Eisenmann and Frank Gehry. 

Unfortunately Robinson shares his site with hateful Jews who use the platform to deconstruct White/European identity and project the Jewish fear of Nazism onto cheerleaders and men who don’t talk politics at work. I would be more than happy to discuss the pro-worker aspects of National Socialism with Robinson on the People’s Square podcast. But I suspect I must content myself with limiting my response to the pages of National Justice.

German National Socialism is not the only “Socialism” Robinson attacks. Robinson draws the distinction between his Libertarian Socialism and the Socialism of the Eastern Bloc by arguing that worker control of industry, not government control of industry, is required by his Libertarian Socialism. Per Robinson: “Socialists want to see a world in which the people who do the labor have control over their workplaces. This is also why ‘communist’ countries that are authoritarian dictatorships should not be called ‘socialist’ even if they claim the label for themselves.” 

Rather than evaluate governments on the basis of state control of the means of production, Robinson’s three core tenants of (Libertarian) Socialism are: 1) a classless society, 2) anti-racism and woman’s liberation, and 3) anti-militarism. All three elements can be nicely nestled within the Anarcho-Communist currents of the DSA. Of course, the drawbacks of this definition are made apparent when economically leftist regimes like Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Syria must use authoritarian force against color revolutions stirred up by the CIA and the Catholic Church. The result is that rather than supporting the real-world Socialism of Syrian Baathism or the Sandinistas, the DSA supports fictive Kurdish trans-sexual militias and bourgeois LGBT Nicaraguan students that exist on a lifeline from Washington.

Instead of accepting a more appropriate label of Liberal Syndicalism or Anarcho-Communism, Robinson seeks to redefine Socialism in a manner that conveniently excludes National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism. While Robinson accuses the NSDAP of coopting the Socialist label, Robinson himself seeks to turn Socialists from focusing on state control of industry to Brooklyn gender and race squabbles. Unlike Robinson, I have a state that I can point to as an example of my ideology in practice. I am willing to take up the defense of German National Socialism with all its triumphs and shortcomings.

National Socialists and Class

Robinson states that first of his three core values of Socialism is the establishment of a classless society. Here definitions become important as National Socialists seek the abolition of class but the maintenance of a hierarchy. Adolf Hitler, once a penniless day-laborer in Vienna, had no use for the privileges and customs expected by the German elite and aristocracy. Irrespective of birth, Hitler sought to elevate the most courageous, intelligent, and able into the leadership class of Germany, writing in Mein Kampf:

“It will be the task of the Peoples’ State so to organize and administer its educational system that the existing intellectual class will be constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those persons who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are employed in the service of the community. For neither the State itself nor the various departments of State exist to furnish revenues for members of a special class, but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them. This will be possible, however, only if the State trains individuals specially for these offices. Such individuals must have the necessary fundamental capabilities and will-power. 

The principle does not hold true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to all those who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of a people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in training the best brains for those branches of the public service for which they show a special natural aptitude and in placing them in the offices where they can do their best work for the good of the community. If two nations of equal strength and quality engage in a mutual conflict that nation will come out victorious which has entrusted its intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents and that nation will go under whose government represents only a common food trough for privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its individual members are not availed of.”

The National Socialist regime brought together nationalists from across the class spectrum. Hitler and Göring distinguished themselves as soldiers, not businessmen. Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, and Richard Walther Darré were born of German merchants abroad. Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, and Heinrich Himmler hailed from the middle class. Robert Ley came from the peasantry. With the late-coming exception of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German aristocracy was never within the inner circle of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) after the seizure of power. 

Hitler biographers universally acknowledge the Führer’s contempt for the German monarchy and his aristocratic generals. In one comic anecdote provided by David Irving, after witnessing a particularly disgusting display of royal opulence on a state visit to Italy, Hitler increased the pensions of the Social Democrats who overthrew the Kaiser. Hitler also put the Hapsburgs in concentration camps, knowing that the Liberal powers would happily trade fascist revolutionaries like Father Tiso, Horia Sima, and Benito Mussolini for inbred monarchs. Finally, after the 20 July assassination plot by conservative aristocrats, Hitler unhesitatingly ordered the greatest purge of European nobility since the Russian revolution.

The conspiracy theories that the NSDAP was funded and controlled by German industrialists can be traced in part to the 1941 book I Paid Hitler. Purportedly written by Fritz Thyssen, the book was in fact written by an internationalist Jew, Emery Reves. It claimed, among other falsehoods, that Adolf Hitler was a Rothschild bastard. On the right, libertarians and goldbugs took up Antony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler which relies on fabricated documents to claim the Jewish Warburg banking family funded Hitler. Whether Sutton in 1976 or D’Sousa in 2020, conservative historiography on the NSDAP is a shoddy hamster wheel meant to keep right-wingers running after the chance to pin Hitlerism on the Rothschilds, Warburgs, or Soros. An excellent piece by National Vanguard describes the historiography of NSDAP fundraising and the bad actors involved.

Membership dues and tickets to speeches were always the primary sources of NSDAP funding. The main industrial supporters of the NSDAP, namely Krupp and IG Farben, only made coerced financial contributions after Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The March 1933 post-inauguration contribution of 2,071,000 Reichsmark (“rm”) by reluctant industrialists to the NSDAP would have been dwarfed by the 12,000,000 rm owed from the .50 rm basic monthly membership fee paid that year by the party’s two million members. This does not count donations for charitable relief, uniform purchases, and membership fees for internal party organizations. Much has been made of Thyssen’s contribution of 100,000 rm to the National Socialists in 1923, but by 1939 Thyssen was in exile, and after the invasion of France, Thyssen and his family were comfortably confined in Dachau. 

Willy Wonka Syndicalism versus Blood-and-Soil Socialism 

Robinson’s dream of an economy run on democratically-managed workplaces and co-ops is a pipe-dream that could never exist on a nation-state scale. Unless you count the Italian Social Republic (and I do not think Robinson does) large scale Syndicalism has never existed beyond a handful of factories and credit unions. It is next to impossible to assess the unrealized economic system that exists only in Robinson’s 241 page fictional memoir, but I would say it would be the mirror image of National Socialism. Adolf Hitler’s government ruthlessly managed the allocation steel, oil, labor, and foreign exchange within the Third Reich, but government policy on sexual health, gender relations, and German reunification reflected the views of the broad mass of his people. Conversely, Libertarian Socialism would leave its nation’s market open to crises and collapse, while presumably governing against the grain of popular support on fringe racial and sexual issues.

Modern industrial nations must be planned in a top-down system, capitalist or Socialist. The only question is whether it is corporations or the government in the driver’s seat. Within a corporation like Wal-Mart or Amazon, workers respond to the production targets and prices set by executives. I suppose the workers could democratically elect those executives, but the point stands that the internal structure of a corporation is a planned economy. In turn these corporations broadly dictate a Liberal Democracy’s economic initiatives. Under the traditional “command economy” the process is at least a little more transparent with the German or Soviet government directly telling corporate units what to produce and openly setting state policy in accordance with those economic goals.

 

The “free market” may be the second greatest myth concocted in the 20th Century. Consider the response of the United States to the 2008 Recession or the Coronavirus. There industry leaders used their clout in Washington to extract a bailout from the state. This dependence of “private industry” on government support is an ongoing process. Entire industries in the United States and Western Europe: shale oil, green energy, and mechanized agriculture, to name a few, are unprofitable without state support. Therefore the question is: why shouldn’t those dependent industries be subject to state planning? 

Some measure of central planning is necessary because only a centralized economy can compete against other centralized economies. In response to the plunge in oil demand from the Coronavirus, OPEC is attempting to reduce production and keep oil prices high. At the same time Russia is doubling down on oil production in an attempt to kill off American shale oil. The ostensibly private American oil industry is faced with a choice: demand Trump bail them out (which he will) or go bankrupt. [note: while revising this article Trump moved to raise prices by purchasing oil for the strategic petroleum reserve] Free market economics are nowhere to be found!

Whatever the speculative benefits a “democratic workplace” may hold, unless production is centrally managed, Robinson’s fantasy economy will be crushed by an opposing state that can allocate and subsidize production at will. Only a centralized state or a U.S.-style corporate oligopoly are capable of managing an industrial economy. It is an either/or, and as a real Socialist I prefer state control over letting Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Bloomberg command my economy. At least the vodka guzzling apparatchik managing my factory won’t replace me with a Mexican tranny.

It is when a so-called authoritarian state cuts through the parliamentary puppet-game to enact the people’s will, as was the case with the National Socialist revolution, that real economic change occurs. Gotz Aly, who has served as a visiting researcher at Yad Vashem, provides a good overview of Hitler’s economic populism in his book Hitler’s Volksstaadt. All the more astonishing is the fact that these policies were undertaken while the world economy was mired in the Great Depression.

According to Aly, the National Socialists:

When Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933, he took charge of a country with 6 million registered unemployed. That number understates the gravity of Germany’s depression. The number of Germans in full time employment had fallen from 20 million in mid-1929 to 11.4 million in January 1933. Under Adolf Hitler, total employment increased from an average of 12.5 million in 1932 to 18.3 million in 1937. Even as 6 million Germans re-entered the work force (plus Austria and the Sudetenland’s legions of unemployed), real weekly earnings for German workers grew by 18-19% between 1933 to 1938 according to studies done by Gerhard Bry and Dietmar Petzina.

The National Socialist recovery was not accomplished by a retarded program of tax cuts as Trump proposed to fend off the Coronavirus Recession. Rather, the German economic miracle was accomplished with state work creation projects that employed 630,163 Germans at their peak in March 1934. The NSDAP also expanded the federal and local government payroll by 597,000 between 1933 and 1937, while simultaneously employing 373,000 Germans as full-time employees in quasi-public party organizations according to Richard Overy. Hitler further capped annual dividends at 6% of capital, closed the majority of Germany’s stock exchanges, and banned the trading of foreign stocks by German citizens. 

Robinson may hand wave away these monumental SOCIALIST accomplishments by complaining that the German people did not get to vote on a poo-poo platter of parliamentary candidates, or that workers at the Herman Göring Steelworks did not get to vote on company production targets. Tellingly, Robinson writes “the public sector is good to the extent that it’s democratic, just like the private sector is bad to the extent that it’s undemocratic.” Yet I know that if the workers of this country could have an up-or-down vote on whether to torch tranny propaganda and ban child drag queens, the results would scare Robinson’s bowtie off, just as they did in 2016

Anti-racism and Socialism 

Robinson claims anti-racism as the second core value of his Socialism, but rarer than the Syndicalist factory is the billionaire who opposes mass immigration. From Sergey Brin to Donald Trump, America’s billionaire class is united in calling for more immigrant labor. It is precisely because intersectionality is a barrier to worker’s organization that every single Fortune 500 company is pursuing an affirmative action plan. Fantastical claims that immigrants entering the workforce will be organized later does nothing to change the fact that capitalists in America are using immigrants as scabs now. 

The consistent opposition to amnesty from the AFL-CIO and pre-2016 Bernie Sanders is proof enough that Robinson’s “democratic workplaces” would be hostile to immigrant scabs. The people of dark-blue California rose up to prohibit illegals from receiving government services under Proposition 187, until the measure was struck down by a Jewish federal judge. According to a 2018 Harvard Harris poll, 63% of Americans want to see legal immigration lowered below half a million per year, far below the 1.1 million the Trump Administration has permitted annually. Why does Robinson assume that his “democratic workplaces” would be any less hostile to immigrants than the general public? Likewise, how many affirmative action policies would survive an up-or-down vote on the factory floor.

Funny enough the four figures cited by Robinson as tarring Socialism by associating it with National Socialism—Ludwig von Mises, Bryan Caplan, George Reisman, and Jamie Dimon—are of Jewish descent or in Dimon’s case, at least married to a Jew by a Rabbi. No doubt the greatest fear of libertarian and left-wing Jews alike will be that Nationalists and Socialists set aside their differences and discover their goals are complimentary. While Robinson’s DSA pushes a welfare state open to 7 billion people, Kosher Conservatives like Yoram Hazony espouse an American Nationalism that is combined with tax breaks to international corporations and wars for Israel. The contradictory ideological slop offered by the DSA and TPUSA will inevitably be rejected by voters who crave a synthesis of social conservativism and economic Socialism.

Women’s liberation… from wage labor

Robinson also includes women’s liberation in his second core value of socialism. If the objective of Socialism is to maximize the right of women to kill their unborn children, have sex without judgement or consequences, and compete for employment on an equal basis with men, then that objective has already been achieved under liberal capitalism. In California and New York, the centers of American finance capitalism, not only is abortion legal, Medicaid and insurance companies are required to cover the procedure. 

Robinson writes that “because socialists deplore hierarchy and exploitation, the domination of women by men has historically been an important socialist concern.” Yet Robinson sees no problem in encouraging women to enter the wage-labor workforce. Democratic workplace or not, women will either be exploited by powerful men or otherwise use sex to get ahead in the workplace. The credible sexual exploitation accusations leveled at Joe Bernstein of Buzzfeed, Jack Smith IV of Mic, and Bernie Sanders campaign staffers, are evidence enough that the “wokest” workplaces will be filled with perverts. 

The solution is not to condemn women to be leered at by Brooklyn tech-cels, but to plan our society in a manner that encourages women to lead in the domestic sphere. By a 56% to 39% margin, American mothers responded to a 2015 Gallup poll that they “prefer the homemaker role” over “prefer[ing] to work outside the home.” Amazingly, 54% of employed mothers answered that they prefer to be homemakers, suggesting the decline in women staying home is a product of Neoliberalism’s plummeting standards of living, not a feminist awakening. This comes despite the intense pathologizing of stay-at-home mothers undertaken by physically repulsive Jewish feminists like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin.

Robinson’s women’s liberation shtick has already been tried by finance capitalism. The United States has planned its educational system and economy around treating women the same as men. Women are encouraged to defer childrearing for college and careers. We know the consequences! One in four American women are on anti-depressants and alcohol use disorder is up 83.7% among women since 2001. Despite having the right to abortion, free birth control, and access to executive positions, between 2000 to 2016 the U.S. suicide rate among women and girls increased by 50 percent!

What happens when a society defends a mother’s right to be a homemaker? Well the declining numbers of unemployed were not the only measure of Germany’s improving economic outlook. Through a combination of economic recovery and monetary incentives, the number of marriages jumped by a quarter from 1932 to 1938. In 1933 Germany’s depression-era birthrate bottomed out at 14.7 live births per thousand population. Hitler’s exhortations for German couples to bear more children must have had some immediate effect, because the birthrate jumped to 18.0 in 1934 and increased steadily to 20.4 in 1939. By comparison the World Bank estimates that NATO-occupied Germany had 9.5 births per thousand in 2017, with roughly one-in-four babies born to foreign-born mothers.

When Adolf Hitler offered German women marriage loans conditioned on the wife leaving the workplace, 365,000 women took up his offer in its first year-and-a-half. By the end of 1938, 1,121,000 marriage loans had been extended, typically at 1% interest and with the provision that each child born to the newlyweds would result in the forgiveness of a quarter of the loan. The Gallup polling suggests that American women would be just as enthusiastic to trade making Power Points for making babies, given adequate financial security.

National Socialism and Anti-Militarism

Robinson considers anti-militarism to be the third core value of Socialism and cites Socialist opposition to World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq. If opposing American foreign meddling is required of Socialists, then American National Socialists and the America First Committee were at the forefront of anti-militarism during World War II. 

David Duke has been among the most consistent voices against war with Iraq and Iran. Where Robinson’s favorite “anti-imperialist” Chomsky, has demanded a contingent of U.S. soldiers remain in Syria to protect “Kurdistan,” the Alt-Right has been unequivocal: All U.S. Troops Out. And after Donald Trump’s airstrikes on Syria, the Alt-Right held the only anti-intervention protest in North America. ANTIFA counter demonstrated, presumably in support of Donald Trump.

I am confident in defending the record, not only of American National Socialists, but of National Socialist Germany. Robinson claims that economics aside, National Socialist Germany’s militarism disqualifies it from being Socialist as “The features that horrify us about Nazi Germany generally relate to their racist militarism: They were homicidal maniacs who tried to conquer the world.”

The accusation that National Socialist Germany intended to conquer the world is grade school drivel that I am disappointed Robinson stoops to repeat. Supposedly to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, the colonial powers of Britain and France declared war on Germany. Both powers together occupied a fourth of the Earth’s surface, but out of righteous indignation, guaranteed Poland’s right to persecute 98% German Danzig. Likewise, Germany’s struggle with the Soviet Union was with an ideological opponent who explicitly sought to spread communism throughout the world. 

An accusation by Britain, France, the USSR, and the US of waging a war of aggression is the equivalent of being prosecuted for cannibalism by Jeffrey Dahmer, Alfred Packer, Hannibal Lecter, and the German homosexual who killed his lover and sautéed his penis. Robinson devotes almost as much space in his article attacking Communism as National Socialism, but like every other Liberal believes Stalin was good only through the years 1941-1945.

I will not question Robinson’s ideological commitment to American non-interventionism. To his credit Robinson’s website ran an article condemning the Soleimani assassination, and Robinson wrote a solid analysis of how the media and politicians launder pro-war propaganda. Robinson even calls out Ezra Klein’s Vox, Jeffrey Goldberg’s The Atlantic, A.G. Sulzberger’s New York Times, and Yoram Hazony for spreading pro-war propaganda. However, anti-interventionism without the Jewish Question is futile. Robinson’s anti-propaganda article condemns politicians without exposing who bribes them, and he attacks the media without asking who owns it. Both Trump and Obama ran on pulling out of the Middle East. They must have had some hidden incentive to break their promises. Likewise, the media must have some ulterior motive to support warmongering at great cost to its credibility. 

Jewish ethnic interest motivates the media to risk its credibility for wars for Israel, and Jewish ethnic interest leads mega donors like Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban to openly require support for Israel. According to the Jerusalem Post 50% of all DNC funds and 25% of all RNC funds come from Jewish donors. According to an analysis by Steve Sailer of Open Secrets donation data: Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52% were Jewish and 48% were gentile. Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66% of the money came from Jews and 34% from gentiles. Similarly, of the Washington Post’s list of the top 11 Super PAC donors from 2010-2018, 8 are individuals of Jewish descent. Please note that individuals who identify as Jewish are usually estimated to make up 2.2% of the population.

Of the four largest U.S. media conglomerates: Disney is chaired by the Jew Bob Iger, the chair and CEO of Comcast is the Jew Brian Roberts, CBS/Viacom is owned and chaired by the Jewish Redstone family, and while AT&T/WarnerMedia does not have a Jewish chairman or CEO, each of its three media divisions: WarnerMedia Entertainment, WarnerMedia News & Sports, and Warner Brothers Studios have Jewish heads. Together these conglomerates control CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC among hundreds of other channels.

The DSA will flip over couch cushions looking for White workers who said the N-word on Facebook but refuses to link American wars of aggression with Zionist money men. The same bug-man leftists who claim coal miners benefit from White Privilege are terrified at the thought of connecting Jewish big-money donors and media magnates with America’s endless wars in the Middle East. Why is it in a supposedly White Supremacist society, Current Affairs can criticize Whites on a racial level, but not Jews? 

At the end of his article Robinson exposes that his true problem with National Socialism, is not its economic policies, but its treatment of the Jews: 

“Even if Nazis had complete control of production, and control of production was synonymous with socialism, that still wouldn’t tell us that socialism was bad or that socialism is Nazism, because the actual thing that is bad about Nazis is the goddamned Holocaust and not its industrial policy. The fact that a Nazi did something is not proof that it is bad (vegetarian Hitler argument) and if the Nazis had been economic socialists, then the “socialism part” would not have been the bad part about Nazis.”

If Robinson plants his opposition to National Socialism on the Holocaust, he is planting his flag on increasingly shaky ground. System historians are having to pull back the most ludicrous claims about the alleged murder of 6,000,000 Jews. A new book by the “mainstream” historian David G. Maxwell repudiates the most ridiculous atrocity stories surrounding Mengele, which joins the debunked human soap and lampshades myth in the dustbin of history.

Persistent pressure from Holocaust revisionists is forcing Jewish historians to cede ground on the Holocaust myth. In his 2015 1,000-page magnum opus the Jewish Holocaust historian David Cesarani described past Holocaust research as “outdated.” Cesarani placed the combined total number of Jews killed in the Operation Reinhardt camps, Auschwitz, Chelmno, and the Eastern Front at 4,257,000 making him 1/3 of a Holocaust denier. The downward revision of Auschwitz death figures from the Cold War-era total of 4 million to 1.1 million, has been reduced to an “in before.” Less known is the reduction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s estimate of the dead at Jasenovac from 600,000 to 77,000—99,000, or the reduction of the Majdanek death toll from 1.5 million to 296,000 to 79,000. 

In conclusion, Robinson attacks National Socialism because it does not match his Anarcho-Communist fantasy definition of “Libertarian Socialism.” Yet, where Robinson desires a classless society, the modest soldiers of the National Socialist revolution happily dispatched with the Germany aristocracy and blazed the trail for the modern Nordic social welfare states. Where Robinson desires women’s liberation, it was National Socialism that liberated German women from wage-labor. Where Robinson demands Socialists be anti-militant, only the Alt-Right has had the courage to demand All U.S. Troops Out of the Middle East. 

Robinson himself admits that the marginalization of Jews, not economics, is his true gripe with the Third Reich. Like the Conservatives he claims to oppose, Robinson must utilize the Holocaust myth to attack National Socialism. With Holocaust shibboleths falling left and right, the days Robinson can rely on that myth are numbered.

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