Planning for the continual mass extermination of potential slave labor even when the Germans were starting to lose the War is economically irrational for Capital™ to be solely culpable. There has to have been an idealist component — not a strict material one — to explain why: the Nazis continued the industrial slaughter of Jews, which in Hitler's racist ideology.
>jews are literate minority>dumbass church says the jews are the only ones who can practice usury>they make bank off this and become disproportionately wealthy/powerful>main ethnicity resents this and becomes anti-semitic>eventually material conditions become so bad in germany due to versailles treaty and reparations that disenfranchised germans come to power>immediately start enacting their revenge fantasywhat was so difficult about that
>>18615368Jews were not overrepresented in Banking in Weimar times: commercial banks (Grossbanken) were overwhelmingly run by Gentiles; Jews however were overrepresented in private (but not commercial) lending. The stereotype of the Jewish userer exploiting the German people is an antisemitic myth.
>>18615352read The Extermination of the European Jews by Christian Gerlach
>>18615352>There has to have been an idealist component — not a strict material one — to explain why: the Nazis continued the industrial slaughter of Jews, which in Hitler's racist ideology.Of course. But Marxism isn't strictly materialist like that. It's ~dialectical~ materialism, after all. Not mechanical materialism (where people act like robots). It doesn't say that everything people do has an immediate material benefit either. Ideology is also historically produced and acts as a force and can materially shape behavior. Does that make sense?Moishe Postone's theory is that the Nazis personified the Jews as the abstract, impersonal domination of capitalism. So it was like a pseudo (reactionary) anti-capitalist revolt, misrecognized (from his Marxist influenced perspective) because capitalism fundamentally isn't controlled by a particular group of people, it's a system or a "social relation." But the commodity form itself has a dual character, it contains both concrete use-value and abstract exchange-value, which are united as part of the same system. Or two aspects of the same system.The "historical" part also comes in because Nazi antisemitism has historical roots predating the Nazis which they transformed into state practice during a major crisis of capitalism. Really what "historical materialism" does is just explain the Holocaust as a historically specific social process rather than it just being "evil" because Marxists don't actually believe in "evil" as a concept with any historical explanatory power. Like "evil entered the world" or whatever. That can be a moral judgement but Marxism is supposed to be scientific, it's not like the Nazis were possessed by evil spirits is all.
>>18615902>>18615368Jews were also communists. The communist uprising in Bavaria was led by jews. Nazis were anti-communist because at the time it was a form of ideological imperialism trying to make European nations subjects of the USSR, and jews were among the most prominent agents of it. Jews being an inherent outgroup meant that they didn't have as much loyalty to the nation state, and thus had no problem with backstabbing their host nations for the sake of foreign power's globalist ideology.
>>18615913Not to mention (((Bela Kun))) in Hungary.
>>18615352when we said "socialism or barbarism" we weren't kidding
>>18615924>Capitalist USA: People have constitutional rights.>Stalin's USSR: You get killed because your specific sub-faction of true Stalinism triggered him this week.
>>18615902>Moishe Postone's theory is that the Nazis personified the Jews as the abstract, impersonal domination of capitalism.How does this interact with the Nazis' charge against "Jewish Bolshevism" when Communism is the material opposite of Capitalism? I also feel like Postone's thesis ignores the ideological (idealist) component of Hitler's antisemitism and that Hitler personal convictions in the blood libel he was spewing, even before he came to power.
>>18615352Not a Marxist but the Nazis had a lot of economic incentives for the Holocaust. >mass extermination of potential slave labor even when the Germans were starting to lose the War is economically irrationalNo, because the German state and military industry didn't have a labor shortage, they had a shortage of capital and resources. What resources they could extract from the Jews, they did, there were for example slave labor operations to make synthetic oil, since the oil shortage was one of the main issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossenb%C3%BCrg_concentration_campThey would also confiscate cash and whatever valuables Jews had and either used it to fuel the war industry (to pay weapons manufacturers). They would also use Jewish real estate to pay off Nazi loyalists (which meant they could save on currency, which again could be used to settle accounts with manufacturers).Sure, in the long-term, it is bad to kill off a labor force but it's not like corporations prioritize long-term benefits over short term gains either.
>>18615929>Capitalist USA: People have constitutional rightslollmao even
>>Capitalist USA: People have constitutional rights>lol>lm-ACK!!
>>18615902> Ideology is also historically produced and acts as a force and can materially shape behavior. Does that make sense?This is just like when new age medicine quacks talk about "energies" >Moishe Postone's theory is that the Nazis personified the Jews as the abstract, impersonal domination of capitalismThey didn't. >But the commodity form itself has a dual character, it contains both concrete use-value and abstract exchange-value, which are united as part of the same system. Or two aspects of the same system.Meaningless woo woo>The "historical" part also comes in because Nazi antisemitism has historical roots predating the NazisThis is what passes for profound leftist intellectualism people. >they transformed into state practice during a major crisis of capitalismIt wasn't. >Marxism is supposed to be scientificIt's not.
>>18616016>They didn'tThey did. Were you born yesterday?
>>18615352Read 'Auschwitz or the great alibi'
>>18615968You get arrested and jailed for saying nigger.
>>18615902Literally nothing marxists say makes logical sense, it's just fart smelling word salad.
>>18615924Socialism IS barbarism though.Giving a small group of people or even the majority of society power to control and enslave you results in barbarism.
>>18615352Why would I bother explaining something that never happened?
>>18615924Mindraped faggot
>>18616421It's theology. Marxism is an abrahamic religion.
>>18615352Germany were not producing nearly enough food to support their workforce and the Jews weren't dying quickly enough in the ghettos so a 'final solution' became a pressing need in order to continue the war effort.
>>18615948>How does this interact with the Nazis' charge against "Jewish Bolshevism" when Communism is the material opposite of Capitalism?They are both aspects of modernity, which is contradictory because capitalism gives rise to its own negation, which is communism. (I don't know if I really believe this, but for the sake of argument ITT.) There's something about Nazi ideology though which is all about trying to escape contradiction which is externalized or personified in an alien element.>I also feel like Postone's thesis ignores the ideological (idealist) component of Hitler's antisemitism and that Hitler personal convictions in the blood libel he was spewing, even before he came to power.It's not idealism to say that Hitler believed in ideas or was motivated by ideas, he obviously did and that's a fact. Historical materialists would be interested in why and how those ideas emerged and why they were politically important in Germany at that time. People tend to think Marxism is economic reductionism and a lot of communists lapse into this themselves, like people are just motivated out of maximizing their material interests, but that's really crude. People do act on ideology it's just that ideology does not come from some supernatural realm, it's not like Santa Claus came up with it or there's some "German soul" or whatever that did it. Or maybe "man" can be a simple economic agent, but institutions in modern society are split in a contradictory way and that has to be worked through. *Jewish tone of accent* Und dat ist zie essence of die dialectic
>>18615352https://libcom.org/article/auschwitz-or-great-alibi
>>18615352They couldn’t. The very existence of Nazism (and even fascism to an extent) totally btfoed Marxism. It’s why they tried to cope by desperately trying to tie the Nazis to capitalism. That shit wasn’t supposed to happen according to historical materialism.
>>18615902Lot of this is post war commie cope. The commies of the late 19th century and early 20th century definitely thought Marxism was a science on par with Darwinism that explained how societies evolved. There was a Marxist archaeologist in the early 1900s for example who absolutely seethed at the idea that prehistoric cave art was from a time before the agricultural revolution, because it opened the possibility that religion existed before then as well and according to Marxists of the time religion was a tool by early agricultural warlords to trick le people into following them and that this was the scientific way that societies evolved.Nazism existing totally btfoed that original form of scientific Marxism. It showed that pure nihilistic hatred and resentment with no basis in class was enough to start a mass movement that plunged the world into war and killed millions.
