It’s important to distinguish between what we might call “cartoon socialism” — the imaginings of reactionaries and the uninformed — and the earnest twenty-first century socialist vision, how things would actually work. For example, cartoon socialism sounds like this: “They want total equality! To make everyone have the same wealth!”

Well, my philosophy of socialism — and modern democratic socialism in general — does not call for a perfect distribution of wealth. Not a one-time nor regular redistribution to ensure everyone is financially equal. But it does call for a society that establishes prosperity for all, resulting in a great reduction of inequality through tax-based redistribution and doing away with capitalist owners. While some will earn and own more wealth than others, all will have a comfortable life through guaranteed jobs or income, the co-ownership of one’s place of work, universal healthcare and education, and so on. Similarly, to narrow in on another myth, ownership of the workplace isn’t simply about dividing up every cent of revenue among the workers.

What’s useful about stopping to play in the sandbox of cartoon socialism is that it drives certain truths home in a powerful way. Say you took the net wealth of all U.S. households — $147 trillion at the end of 2022 — and divided it up among all 131 million households. Each household would have $1.1 million in assets. Not bad, considering “the bottom 50% [of households] own just 1% of the wealth in the U.S. and have a median net worth less than $122,000.” Nearly half the nation is poor or close to poor, with incomes in the $30,000s or lower. The “bottom” 80% of Americans have about 16% of the total wealth (all possessing less than $500,000). We would go from 12% of Americans being millionaires to essentially 100% overnight. Yet such a dramatic redistribution is not the strategy to abolish poverty that most democratic socialists advocate (the pursuit of greater personal wealth offers some benefits to any economic system that entails currency and consumption, i.e. the individual who leaves her current worker cooperative [see below] to launch a new enterprise, hoping she can earn more; this new business may be quite valuable to society, and, given the diversity of human motivations, may not have existed without the possibility of personal enrichment). Many, myself included, don’t even call for a maximum income. But the hypothetical makes the point: we have the means to create a much better civilization, one where all are prosperous. (With such means, is it moral to allow the material miseries of millions to persist?) Heavier taxation on the top 10-20% of Americans, where nearly all the wealth is currently pocketed, as well as on the largest corporations (worker cooperatives later) will be the actual redistributive program, funding income, jobs, healthcare, education, and more for the lower class and everyone else (see What is Socialism? and Guaranteed Income vs. Guaranteed Work). Reactionaries can thank their lucky stars the “All Millionaires, Total Equality” plan isn’t presently on the agenda.

Likewise, consider worker ownership of businesses. In 2022, Amazon made $225 billion in profit (new money after expenses). Walmart became $144 billion richer. Apple made $171 billion in profit. The lowest-paid employees at the first two firms made a dismal $30,000 a year full time. Amazon had 1.5 million employees, Walmart 2.3 million, Apple 164,000. Outsourced labor working in miserable conditions overseas of course helps fuel these companies and should also be made wealthy, but for this illustration official employees will demonstrate the point. If these corporations were socialized, workers could use such profits to award themselves a bonus of $150,000 (Amazon workers), $63,000 (Walmart workers), or over $1 million (Apple workers). That’s on top of an annual salary, and could be repeated every year, sometimes less and sometimes more depending on profits. But that’s not exactly how modern worker cooperatives function. Like everything else, what to do with profits is determined by all workers democratically or by elected managers. Like capitalist owners, worker-owners have to balance what is best for their compensation with what is best for the enterprise as a whole. In cooperatives, as I wrote in For the Many, Not the Few: A Closer Look at Worker Cooperatives, worker-owners decide “together how they should use the profits created by their collective labor, be it improving production through technology, taking home bigger incomes, opening a new facility, hiring a new worker, lowering the price of a service, producing something new, and all other conceivable matters of business.” Predictably and properly, worker-owners do take home larger incomes and bonuses. But the idea that businesses will never grow, or will collapse into ruin, because the greedy workers will divide every penny of revenue amongst themselves is cartoon socialism, belied by the thriving cooperatives operating all around the globe today. The point is that ordinary people have greater power to build their wealth. Why tolerate scraps from a capitalist boss when you can rake in cash as a co-owner in a socialist society?

“Yeah, socialism is about getting rich — by stealing,” the reactionary says. A common perspective, but consider two points. First, the transformation of the American workplace could indeed be said to involve theft: individuals and small groups of people will lose ownership of their businesses (a slightly less painful transition might center around inheritance laws, with firms passing to all workers instead of a capitalist’s offspring; no one who created a business would have it wrestled away from her until death). But the obvious riposte is that capitalist ownership is theft. As I put it in How Capitalism Exploits Workers:

In the beginning the founder creates the good or provides the service (creating the wealth), but without workers he or she cannot produce on a scale larger than him- or herself. Would Bill Gates be where he is today without employees? The founder must hire workers and become a manager, leaving the workers to take his place as producer. The capitalist exploits workers because it is they who create the wealth by producing the good or providing the service. For the capitalist, the sale of each good or service must cover the cost of production, the cost of labor (worker compensation), and a little extra: profit the owner uses as he or she chooses. Therefore workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. This is exploitation. The wealth the workers produce is controlled and pocketed by the capitalist. The capitalist awards herself much while keeping worker wages as low as possible — to increase profits. The capitalist holds all decision-making power, making capitalism authoritarian as well as a grand theft from the people who generate wealth. Capitalism is the few growing rich off the labor of the many.

The only way to end this is to refashion capitalist businesses into cooperatives. To rob the thief. “Taking back what was taken from you” is a bit simplistic, given that the workers did not start the business and put in the blood, sweat, and tears to do so, but to a large degree this framing is true. Exploitation begins the moment the founder hires a non-owner and it continues every day thereafter, growing larger and larger with more people hired to produce goods and enact services, until companies are making hundreds of billions in new money a year, with owners awarding themselves hundreds of millions per year, while the workers who make it all possible, who make the engine go by producing something sellable, get next to nothing. They do not control or enjoy the profits they create. So one is forced to make a moral choice: permit the few to rob the many every single day and make themselves extremely wealthy, leaving the many with crumbs…or permit the many to rob the few (who previously robbed them) just once, helping all people to be prosperous forever. Not a difficult decision.

Second, there’s the other sense of theft under socialism, the taxing of the rich to redistribute money to the many in the form of free income, medical treatment, college, and so forth. “You want to steal from the rich to benefit yourself!” This is closely tied to the “Taxation Is Theft” mantra of the libertarians. On the one hand, this has some truth to it — money is taken from you without your direct consent. On the other hand, we live in a democracy, and there was no tax that emerged from nothingness, none divorced from the decisions of representatives. “Taxation Is the Product of Democracy” would be more accurate. (Socialism will also be a product of democracy, or it will not exist. And it will let you vote on tax policy!) Jury duty may be a theft of your time, but it was created through representative democracy and could be undone by the same — but isn’t because it is deemed important to a decent, functioning society. Now, once again, it could be noted that much of the wealth owned by the rich was stolen from the workers who made it possible. So redistribution makes some sense in that regard. But those against taxing the rich to fund universal services typically do not have much of a leg upon which to stand anyway. Sure, if you do not believe in any form of taxation whatsoever — no local, state, or federal taxes, meaning no U.S. military, no functioning governments, no free roads or highways, nor a million other things of value — then you can honestly crow that taxation is theft. At least you’re being a person of principle. But as soon as you allow for some kind of taxation as necessary to a modern society, you’ve essentially lost the argument. Then it simply becomes a disagreement over what taxes should be used for (bombs or healthcare) and how rates should be enacted (extremely progressive, progressive, regressive [includes flat taxes], extremely regressive). Theft is a nonissue.

“Heavier taxes on the rich is theft” is an entirely empty statement unless you believe all taxation is theft and must be abolished. If you don’t believe this, then you won’t make much sense: why would taking more be theft but taking not? If taking some isn’t stealing, it is difficult to see any justification for why taking more would be. As if swiping one item from the store is fine, but three wrong! As if a certain dollar amount or percentage tax rate magically reaches the level of theft. And why exactly is seizing a limited percentage from a middle-income family not theft while taking a larger one from a rich family is? Isn’t it involuntary either way? “Some” taxes are “necessary,” but “more” are “unnecessary” doesn’t work either, as how necessary something is deemed doesn’t impact whether it was stolen (see next paragraph). People can disagree on how progressive or regressive taxes should be. But the “theft” rhetoric, for all but the most crazed libertarian anarchists, is illogical.

Further, “Using taxes on the wealthy for Universal Basic Income is theft” makes as much sense, whether much or little, as “Using taxes on the wealthy for the highways or military is theft.” If all taxation is theft, fine. But for other conservatives, is it only theft depending on what the money is used for? If it’s a road, that’s not stealing…if it’s a direct deposit in the account of a poor family, it is? Both a highway system and a UBI would be beneficial to Americans. Isn’t this just a disagreement on what a government “for the people” should offer? Over what is necessary for a good society, a simple opinion? A difference may be that roads can be used by all, and a military protects all, but a direct deposit belongs to one person. Public v. private use. The socialist may counter that true UBI and other services like healthcare and education would be distributed and available to everyone — but would have to admit that the personal rewards for a wealthy person will be small compared to her personal (tax) cost. Is this an impasse? The conservative considers taxes for private use to be theft, for public use not theft; the Leftist considers neither theft. It all still feels a bit silly. Taking for purpose A is robbery, but taking for purpose B is not? In either case, money is seized from the rich against their will. It should be growing clear that any conservative who acknowledges some taxes are necessary has little rational basis for accusing the socialist program of tax-related theft. Such thinking is incoherent. They simply disagree with socialists on what tax rates and purposes should be, no theft in sight.

The title of this article is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek. Socialism is about broadening democracy, ending exploitation, preventing economic crises, saving the environment, wiping out poverty, meeting medical needs, and many other things. But why should capitalism be the ideology to center a “get rich” framing? Sure, it allows the few to grow insanely wealthy off the labor of the many. But socialism allows the many to keep more of the profits created by their labor, and enjoy the financial and other benefits offered by a State that exists to meet human needs. It spreads the wealth and makes far more people well-off than capitalism. When you’re giving yourself a $50,000 or $500,000 bonus in December and your children resume university courses in January for free, you’ll wonder why you ever defended the old ways. Socialism is the way to get rich, and it’s time to advertise that unashamedly.

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In Christianity and Socialism Both Inspired Murderous Governments and Tyrants. Should We Abandon Both?, we observed the flawed idea that authoritarian socialist nations like the Soviet Union started as democratic socialist societies. By recognizing that socialism since its inception has existed in different forms advocated by different people (bottom-up, democratic, peaceful vs. top-down, authoritarian, violent), just like Christianity and other religions past and present (peaceful missionary work, coexistence, and church-state separation vs. violent conquest, forced conversion, and authoritarian theocracy), and by looking at history, the slippery slope argument disintegrated.

The societal changes socialists push for have already been achieved, in ways large and small, without horrors all over the world, from worker cooperatives to systems of direct democracy to universal healthcare and education, public work programs guaranteeing jobs, and Universal Basic Income (see Why America Needs Socialism). These incredible reforms have occurred in democratic, free societies, with no signs of Stalinism on the horizon. The slippery slope fallacy is constantly applied to socialism and basically any progressive policy (remember, racial integration is communism), but it doesn’t have any more merit than when it is applied to Christianity [i.e. peaceful missionary work always leading to theocracy]. Those who insist that leaders and governments set out to implement these types of positive socialistic reforms but then everything slid into dictatorship and awfulness as a result basically have no understanding of history, they’re just completely divorced from historical knowledge. Generally, when you actually study how nations turned communist, you see that a Marxist group, party, or person already deeply authoritarian achieved power and then ruled, expectedly, in an authoritarian manner, implementing policies that sometimes resemble what modern socialists call for but often do not (for example, worker ownership of the workplace is incompatible with government ownership of the workplace; direct democratic decision-making is incompatible with authoritarian control; and so forth). It’s authoritarians who are most likely to use violence in the first place; anti-authoritarians generally try to find peaceful means of creating change, if possible. (Which can take much longer, requiring the built consensus of much of the citizenry. This is one reason authoritarian socialist countries exist but no true democratic socialist society. It’s quicker to just use force. The latter needs more time.)

Note that citations are provided in the original article. Now, all this was worth a bit more commentary. If you can show someone that, despite some socialistic reforms, there hasn’t been a democratic socialist (libertarian socialist, market socialist) nation yet in human history, only authoritarian socialist (communist) ones, that there was no devolution from one to the other, the next question is Why? Why has communism existed and succeeded, with State control of all workplaces, the abolition of the market, and totalitarianism, but not democratic socialism, where workers control their workplaces, the government offers universal healthcare, education, and jobs or income, and citizens enjoy participatory democracy?

The answer was touched upon at the end of the quote above. It’s about time and values. All this is a bit like asking why there hasn’t been a Mormon theocracy yet, or a nation with Mormonism as its official religion, or a country with a majority Mormon population (saying Tonga is majority LDS is a bit of a stretch). Mormonism, a sect of Christianity, began in the 1830s, at the same time socialism was born under Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others (Marx was still a boy). There hasn’t been a nation with a (serious) majority Mormon citizenry because it hasn’t grown popular enough over the past 200 years. There has never been an LDS theocracy or an officially LDS nation because 1) the belief system has yet to become popular enough, or 2) there has been no group that has overthrown existing power structures through violence or been willing to use force and oppression after legitimately ascending to power. The same can be said of democratic socialism — neither option has occurred as of this moment. In contrast, number 2 was reached by authoritarian socialist leaders and groups, even if number 1 wasn’t beforehand. (Unlike Mormonism, traditional Christianity had both enough time and the right ideologues to achieve both high popularity in some places and to violently crush anyone who stood in its way in others. So did Islam.) This all makes a great deal of sense. As noted, if authoritarians are more likely to use violence, they have a fast-track to power. To the ability to swiftly enact societal transformations. And without the consensus of the population, they may have to rule with an iron fist to get everyone in line.

Radicals who are not authoritarian socialists, and are less likely to use force to get what they want (again, what they want is something rather different), have no such shortcut. The Frenchman Ernest Lesigne wrote in his 1887 poem “The Two Socialisms” that one socialism “has faith in a cataclysm,” whereas the other “knows that social progress will result from the free play of individual efforts.” Most democratic socialists have little interest in cataclysmic violent revolution; at most, only a great nonviolent national strike. Instead, they must educate the populace, change the minds of the majority. They must push for reforms. It takes far longer, but — not that democratic socialists desire this either — you won’t have to rule by terror when it’s all over. A slow, peaceful transition not only wins but requires the consent of the governed. And as mentioned in the beginning of the quote, this metamorphosis is underway. Places like Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Europe are moving away from free market capitalism and toward social democracy, which is a stepping stone to democratic socialism. America has drifted as well, though not as far. If a couple centuries is not enough, we’ll see where we’re at in 500 years or 1,000. There is no magic number, no predictable date of victory. Just because democratic socialism hasn’t happened yet does not mean it won’t, nor does this fact discredit the idea — Mormonism is not untrue or bad because it is not yet hugely popular, any more than embryonic Christianity in A.D. 100. Capitalism took a very long time to become the dominant world system, replacing feudalism. The full realization of the next stage will experience the same.

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Socialism seeks to make power social, to enrich the lives of ordinary people with democracy and ownership. Just as the workers should own their workplaces and citizens should have decision-making power over law and policy, universities under socialism would operate a bit differently. The states will not own public universities, nor individuals and investors private ones. Such institutions will be owned and managed by the professors, groundskeepers, and other workers. There is a compelling case for at least some student control as well, especially when it comes to free speech controversies.

Broadening student power in university decision-making more closely resembles a consumer cooperative than a worker cooperative, described above and analyzed elsewhere. A consumer cooperative is owned and controlled by those who use it, patrons, rather than workers. This writer’s vision of socialism, laid bare in articles and books, has always centered the worker, and it is not a fully comfortable thought to allow students, merely passing through a college for two, four, or six years and greatly outnumbering the workers, free reign over policy. There is a disconnect here between workers and majority rule, quite unlike in worker cooperatives (I have always been a bit suspicious of consumer co-ops for this reason). However, it is likely that a system of checks and balances (so important in a socialist direct democracy) could be devised. Giving students more power over their place of higher learning is a positive thing (think of the crucial student movements against college investments in fossil fuels today), as this sacred place is for them, but this would have to be balanced with the power of the faculty and staff, who like any other workers deserve control over their workplace. A system of checks and balances, or specialized areas of authority granted to students, may be a sensible compromise. This to an extent already exists, with college students voting to raise their fees to fund desired facilities, and so on.

One specialized area could be free speech policy. Socialism may be a delightful solution to ideological clashes and crises. I have written on the free speech battles on campuses, such as in Woke Cancel Culture Through the Lens of Reason. There I opined only in the context of modern society (“Here’s what I think we should do while stuck in the capitalist system”). The remarks in full read:

One hardly envies the position college administrators find themselves in, pulled between the idea that a true place of learning should include diverse and dissenting opinions, the desire to punish and prevent hate speech or awful behaviors, the interest in responding to student demands, and the knowledge that the loudest, best organized demands are at times themselves minority opinions, not representative.

Private universities are like private businesses, in that there’s no real argument against them cancelling as they please.

But public universities, owned by the states, have a special responsibility to protect a wide range of opinion, from faculty, students, guest speakers, and more, as I’ve written elsewhere. As much as this writer loves seeing the power of student organizing and protest, and the capitulation to that power by decision-makers at the top, public colleges should take a harder line in many cases to defend views or actions that are deemed offensive, in order to keep these spaces open to ideological diversity and not drive away students who could very much benefit from being in an environment with people of different classes, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and politics. Similar to the above, that is a sensible general principle. There will of course be circumstances where words and deeds should be crushed, cancellation swift and terrible. Where that line is, again, is a matter of disagreement. But the principle is simply that public colleges should save firings, censorship, cancellation, suspension, and expulsion for more extreme cases than is current practice. The same for other public entities and public workplaces. Such spaces are linked to the government, which actually does bring the First Amendment and other free speech rights into the conversation, and therefore there exists a special onus to allow broader ranges of views.

But under socialism, the conversation changes. Imagine for a moment that college worker-owners gave students the power to determine the fate of free speech controversies, student bodies voting on whether to allow a speaker, fire a professor, kick out a student, and so forth. This doesn’t solve every dilemma and complexity involved in such decisions, but it has a couple benefits. First, you don’t have a small power body making decisions for everyone else, an administration enraging one faction (“They caved to the woke Leftist mob”; “They’re tolerating dangerous bigots”). Second, the decision has majority support from the student body; the power of the extremes, the perhaps non-representative voices, are diminished. Two forms of minority rule are done away with (this is what socialism aims to do, after all), and the decision has more legitimacy, with inherent popular support. More conservative student bases will make different decisions than more liberal ones, but that is comparable to today’s different-leaning administrations in thousands of colleges across the United States.

Unlike in the excerpt above, which refers to the current societal setup, private and public colleges alike will operate like this — these classifications in fact lose their meanings, as both are owned by the workers and become the same kind of entity. A university’s relationship to free speech laws, which aren’t going anywhere in a socialist society, then needs to be determined. Divorced from ownership by states, institutions of higher learning could fall outside free speech laws, like other cooperatives (where private employers and colleges largely fall today). But, to better defend diverse views, worthwhile interactions, and a deeper education, let’s envision a socialist nation that applies First Amendment protections to all universities (whether that preserved onus should be extended to all cooperatives can be debated another time).

When a university fires a professor today for some controversial comment, it might land in legal trouble, sued for violating First Amendment rights and perhaps forced to pay damages. Legal protection of rights is a given in a decent society. Under socialism, can you sue a student body (or former student body, as these things take a while)? Or just those who voted to kick you out? Surely not, as ballots are secret and you cannot punish those who were for you alongside those against you. Instead, would this important check still be directed against the university? This would place worker-owners in a terrible position: how can decision-making over free speech cases be given to the student body if it’s the worker-owners who will face the lawsuits later? One mustn’t punish the innocent and let the guilty walk. These issues may speak to the importance of worker-owners reserving full power, minority power, to decide free speech cases on campus. Yet if punishment in the future moves beyond money, there may be hope yet for the idea of student power. It may not be fair for a university to pay damages because of what a student body ruled, but worker-owners could perhaps stomach a court-ordered public apology on behalf of student voters, mandated reinstatement of a professor or student or speaker, etc.

With free speech battles, someone has to make the final call. Will X be tolerated? As socialism is built, as punishment changes, it may be worth asking: “Why not the students?”

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In Why America Needs Socialism, I offered a long list of ways the brutalities and absurdities of capitalism necessitate a better system, one of greater democracy, worker ownership, and universal State services. The work also explored the importance of internationalism, moving away from nationalistic ideas (the simpleminded worship of one’s country) and toward an embrace of all peoples — a world with one large nation. Yet these ideas could have been more deeply connected. The need for internationalism was largely framed as a response to war, which, as shown, can be driven by capitalism but of course existed before it and thus independently of it. The necessity of a global nation was only briefly linked to global inequality, disastrous climate change, and other problems. In other words, one could predict that the brutalities and absurdities of international capitalism, such as the dreadful activities of transnational corporations, will push humanity toward increased global political integration.

As a recent example of a (small) step toward political integration, look at the 2021 agreement of 136 nations to set a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% and tax multinational companies where they operate, not just where they are headquartered. This historic moment was a response to corporations avoiding taxes via havens in low-tax countries, moving headquarters, and other schemes. Or look to the 2015 Paris climate accords that set a collective goal of limiting planetary warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, a response to the environmental damage wrought by human industry since the Industrial Revolution. There is a recognition that a small number of enormous companies threaten the health of all people. Since the mid-twentieth century, many international treaties have focused on the environment and labor rights (for example, outlawing forced labor and child labor, which were always highly beneficial and profitable for capitalists). The alignment of nations’ laws is a remarkable step toward unity. Apart from war and nuclear weapons, apart from the global inequality stemming from geography (such as an unlucky lack of resources) or history (such as imperialism), the effects and nature of modern capitalism alone scream for the urgency of internationalism. Capital can move about the globe, businesses seeking places with weaker environmental regulations, minimum wages, and safety standards, spreading monopolies, avoiding taxes, poisoning the biosphere, with an interconnected global economy falling like a house of cards during economic crises. The movement of capital and the interconnectivity of the world necessitate further, deeper forms of international cooperation.

Perhaps, whether in one hundred years or a thousand, humanity will realize that the challenges of multi-country accords — goals missed or ignored, legislatures refusing to ratify treaties, and so on — would be mitigated by a unified political body. A single human nation could address tax avoidance, climate change, and so on far more effectively and efficiently.

On the other hand, global capitalism may lead to a one-nation world in a far more direct way. Rather than the interests of capitalists spurring nations to work together to confront said interests, it may be that nations integrate to serve certain interests of global capitalism, to achieve unprecedented economic growth. The increasing integration of Europe and other regions provides some insight. The formation of the European Union’s common market eliminated taxes and customs between countries, and established a free flow of capital, goods, services, and workers, generating around €1 trillion in economic benefit annually. The EU market is the most integrated in the world, alongside the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, both earning sixes out of seven on the scale of economic integration, one step from merging entirely. Other common markets exist as well, being fives on the scale, uniting national economies in Eurasia, Central America, the Arabian Gulf, and South America; many more have been proposed. There is much capitalists enjoy after single market creation: trade increases, production costs fall, investment spikes, profits rise. Total economic and political unification may be, again, more effective and efficient still. Moving away from nations and toward worldwide cohesion could be astronomically beneficial to capitalism. Will the push toward a one-nation world come from the need to reign in capital, to serve capital, or both?

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How socialist were the National Socialists?

We know there will be times when an organization or national name doesn’t tell the whole story. As Jacobin writes, how democratic is the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea? It’s hardly a republic either. (Hitler once asked, “Is there a truer form of Democracy” than the Reich — dictators, apparently, misuse terms.) Or look to the Likud, the National Liberals, one of Israel’s major conservative parties. And if the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were Christians, do they represent Christianity at large? So let us examine the Nazis and see if they fall into this category.

The first task, as always, is to define socialism. Like today, “socialism” and “communism” were used by some in the early 20th century to mean the same thing (communism) and by others to mean different things. As a poet from the 1880s put it, there are indeed “two socialisms”: the one where the workers own their workplaces and the one where the government owns the workplaces. We must remember these different term uses, but to make it easy we will simply be open to both: “Were the Nazis socialists?” can therefore mean either. There is more to it than that, of course, such as direct democracy and large government programs. But these additions are not sufficient qualifiers. There will be whining that the Nazi regime had large government programs and thus it was socialist, but if that’s the criteria then so were all the nations fighting the Nazis, including the U.S. (remember our huge public jobs programs and Social Security Act of the era?). Advanced societies tend to have sizable State services — and you can have these things without being truly socialist. If one has even a minimal understanding of socialist thought and history, then the conclusion that no country can earnestly be called socialist without worker or State ownership of business is hardly controversial. To speak of socialism was to speak of the elimination of private ownership of the means of production (called “private property,” businesses), with transfer of ownership away from capitalists to one of the two aforementioned bodies.

The German Workers Party, founded in 1919 in Munich by Anton Drexler and renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1920, included actual socialists. Gregor and Otto Strasser, for instance, supported nationalization of industry — it’s simply not accurate to say the rhetoric of ending capitalism, building socialism, of revolution, workers, class, exploitation, and so on was solely propaganda. It was a mix of honest belief and empty propagandistic promises to attract voters in a time of extreme poverty and economic crisis, all depending on which Nazi was using it, as we will see. Socialists can be anti-semites, racists, patriots, and authoritarians, just like non-socialists and people of other belief systems. (I’ve written more elsewhere about the separability of ideologies and horrific things, if interested, typically using socialism and Christianity as examples. The response to “Nazis were socialists, so socialism is pure evil” is of course “Nazis were also Christians — Germany was an extremely religious nation — so is Christianity also pure evil? If the Nazis distorted Christianity, changing what it fundamentally was with their ‘Positive Christianity,’ advocated for in the Nazi platform, is true Christianity to be abandoned alongside true socialism if that has been distorted as well?”)

The meaning of socialism was distorted by Hitler and other party members. To Hitler, socialism meant the common weal, the common good for a community. While rhetorically familiar, this was divorced from ideas of worker or State ownership of the means of production. In a 1923 interview with The Guardian‘s George Sylvester Viereck, Hitler made this clear. After vowing to end Bolshevism (communism), Hitler got the key question:

“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”

“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

Hitler’s socialism, then, had to do with the common good of one race, united as a nation around ancestral Aryan land and identity. What socialism meant to Hitler and other Nazis can only be understood through the lens of racial purity and extreme nationalism. They come first, forming the colander, and everything else is filtered through. In the same way, what Christianity meant to Hitler was fully shaped by these obsessions: it was a false religion invented by the Jews (who Jesus fought!), but could at the same time be used to justify their destruction. Bolshevism was likewise labeled a sinister Jewish creation (was not Marx ethnically Jewish?): “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature…” Further, when Hitler criticized capitalists, it was often specific: Germany needed “delivery from the Jewish capitalist shackles,” the Jews being to blame for economic problems. A consumed conspiratorial bigot, and often contradictory and nonsensical, he would attack both sides of any issue if they smacked to him of Judaism. But we see Hitler’s agreement that National Socialism was the “antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism”: there would still be private property, private ownership of the means of production; the internationalism and the racial diversity and tolerance at times preached by other socialists would be rejected. (So would class conflict: “National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another.”) Racial supremacy and the worship of country — elements of the new fascism, and the latter a typical element of the Right, not traditional socialism — were in order. (If these things were socialism, then again the nations fighting Germany were socialist: Jim Crow laws in America were used as models by Nazi planners, there existed devotion to American exceptionalism and greatness, and so forth.)

Hitler often repeated his view. On May 21, 1935:

National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people… We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility.

In a December 28, 1938 speech he declared:

A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual or the individual effort, or efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community.

He who believed in “Germany, people and land — that man is a Socialist.” Otto Strasser, in his 1940 book Hitler and I, wrote that Hitler told him in 1930 that the revolution would be racial, not economic; that democracy should not be brought into the economic sphere; and that large corporations should be left alone; to which Strasser replied, “If you wish to preserve the capitalist regime, Herr Hitler, you have no right to talk of socialism. For our supporters are socialists, and your programme demands the socialisation of private enterprise.” Hitler responded:

That word ‘socialism’ is the trouble… I have never said that all enterprises should be socialised. On the contrary, I have maintained that we might socialise enterprises prejudicial to the interests of the nation. Unless they were so guilty, I should consider it a crime to destroy essential elements in our economic life… There is only one economic system, and that is responsibility and authority on the part of directors and executives. That is how it has been for thousands of years, and that is how it will always be. Profit-sharing and the workers’ right to be consulted are Marxist principles. I consider that the right to exercise influence on private enterprise should be conceded only to the state, directed by the superior class… The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead. Now you want an incapable government council or works council, which has no notion of anything, to have a say; no leader in economic life would tolerate it.

Otto Strasser and his brother grew disillusioned that the party wasn’t pursuing actual socialism, and upset that Hitler supported and worked with big business, industrialists, capitalists, German princes. Otto was expelled from the party in 1930. Gregor resigned two years later.

The referenced National Socialist Program, or 25-point Plan, of 1920 demanded the “nationalization of all enterprises (already) converted into corporations (trusts),” “profit-sharing in large enterprises,” “communalization of the large department stores, which are to be leased at low rates to small tradesmen,” and nationalization “of land for public purposes.” Hitler clarified that since “the NSDAP stands on the platform of private ownership,” the nationalization of land for public use “concerns only the creation of legal opportunities to expropriate if necessary, land which has been illegally acquired or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies.” Large department stores were largely Jewish-run. And above we saw Hitler’s resistance to profit-sharing. Further, nationalization of businesses would be limited, as noted, to trusts. It could be that the disproportionately strong representation of Jews in ownership of big German companies played a role here, too. Now, a “secret” interview with Hitler that some scholars suspect is a forgery contains the quote: “Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism,” yet even this limits the promise to publicly traded companies, and Hitler goes on, tellingly, to speak of “owners” and their “possessions,” “property owners,” “the bourgeoisie,” etc. that, while “controlled” by the State, plainly exist independently of it in his socialist vision. Nevertheless, the program has a socialist flair, making Otto Strasser’s comment in 1930 comprehensible, yet its timidity vis-à-vis economics (compare it to the German communist party’s platform of 1932) and its embrace of nationalism and rejection of internationalism would understandably make some ask the question George Sylvester Viereck did in 1923.

This socialist tinge, apart from attacks on Jewish businesses, was forgotten when the Nazis came to power. Historian Karl Bracher said such things to Hitler were “little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: ‘unalterable,’ yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation, for land reform…” Indeed, while other Western nations were bringing businesses under State control to combat the Depression, the Nazis in the 1930s ran a program of privatization. Many firms and sectors were handed back to the private sphere. The Nazis valued private ownership for its efficiency. The German economy was State-directed in the sense that the government made purchases, contracting with private firms to produce commodities, such as armaments, and regulated business in many ways, as advanced nations often do, including the U.S. Historian Ian Kershaw wrote: “Hitler was never a socialist. But although he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state.” While the regime incentivized business and regulated it, especially in preparation for war, intervening to keep entities aligned with State goals and ideology, “there occurred hardly any nationalizations of private firms during the Third Reich. In addition, there were few enterprises newly created as state-run firms,” summarized Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner in The Journal of Economic History. Companies retained their independence and autonomy: they still “had ample scope to follow their own production plans… The state normally did not use power to secure the unconditional support of industry,” but rather offered attractive contracts. Socialism cannot simply be regulation of and incentives for private companies, to meet national goals — again, this is what non-socialist states do every day (and the U.S. war economy had plenty of centrally planned production goals and quotas, contracts, regulations, rationing, and even government takeovers).

The betrayal of the program was noticed at the time. A 1940 report said that:

Economic planks of the “unalterable program” on the basis of which the National Socialists campaigned before they came to power in 1933 were designed to win the support of as many disgruntled voters as possible rather than to present a coordinated plan for a new economic system. Within the party there has always been, and there still is, serious disagreement about the extent to which the “socialist” part of the party’s title is to be applied… The planks calling for expropriation have been least honored in the fulfillment of this platform; in practice, the economic reorganizations undertaken by the Nazis have followed a very different pattern from the one which was originally projected.

That pattern was tighter regulation, generous contracts, economic recovery programs for ordinary people, and so on, though the occasional State takeover did occur. All this makes sense given what we’ve seen. The Nazis weren’t interested in the socialism of the Marxists, the communists. Hitler, in his words, rejected “the false notion that the economic system could exist and operate entirely freely and entirely outside of any control or supervision on the part of the State,” but business ultimately belonged to the capitalists.

The Bramberg Conference of 1926 was a key moment for the direction of the Nazi Party: would it go in an earnestly socialist direction or simply use this new, diluted version Hitler was fond of? There were ideological divisions that had to be addressed. Hitler, as party leader since 1921 and with the conference officially establishing Fuhrerprinzip (absolute power of the party leader), was likely to win from the beginning. Gregor Strasser led the push at this convening of Nazi leaders for socialist policies, backed by others from Germany’s northern urban, industrial areas. Leaders from the rural south stood opposed; they wanted to instead lean into nationalism, populism, racialism. One such policy was the seizing of the estates of rich nobles, the landed princes — did the National Socialist Program not say land could be expropriated for the common good? “The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well,” Hitler said. “No questioning of private property!” This was communism, that old Jewish plot. Hitler made sure the idea, being pursued at the time by the social democratic and communist parties, died in its cradle. “For us there are today no princes, only Germans,” he said. “We stand on the basis of the law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of our people.” Again, the rejection of the class war and overthrow of the rich inherent to socialism and instead a simple focus on the Jews — Hitler was “replacing class with race,” as one historian put it, swapping out “the usual terms of socialist ideology.” Hitler was “a reactionary,” Joseph Goebbels realized. After this, Strasser backed off, and the socialist push in the party was quelled.

Similar to State ownership, while the German Workers Party in 1919 spoke of worker cooperatives — worker ownership — the Nazis had no actual interest in this, in fact making cooperative entities targets to be destroyed in Germany and conquered nations because they smacked of Marxism. A dictatorship isn’t going to give ordinary people power.

Outside observers continued to mock Hitler’s socialism — this isn’t simply a tactic of an embarrassed American Left today. As we’ve seen, people of the era noticed the meaning was changed and watched how the Nazis acted when in power. For Leon Trotsky, an actual communist-style socialist writing in 1934, Nazi “socialism” was always in derisive quotation marks. “The Nazis required the programme in order to assume the power; but power serves Hitler not all for the purpose of fulfilling the programme,” with “the social system untouched,” the “class nature” and competition of capitalism alive and well. Stalin said in 1936, “The foundation of [Soviet] society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative, collective farm property. Neither Italian fascism nor German National-‘Socialism’ has anything in common with such a society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.”

When one considers how actual socialists were treated under the Reich, the point is driven home.

Communist and social democratic politicians were purged from the legislature and imprisoned. Dachau, the first concentration camp, first held political enemies such as socialists. In an article in The Guardian from March 21, 1933, the president of the Munich police said, “Communists, ‘Marxists’ and Reichsbanner [social democratic] leaders” would be imprisoned there. The next year reports of the horrid conditions inside emerged, such as that in The New Republic, likewise noting the “Social Democrats, Socialist Workers’ party members,” and others held within. Part of the impetus for the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, in which Hitler had Nazi Party members killed, was too much talk of workers, actual socialism, anti-capitalist ideas. Gregor Strasser was murdered that night. Otto fled for his life.

There is a famous saying that is in fact authentic. Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller of Germany often said various versions of the following after the war:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

One might wonder why the socialists would be coming for the socialists. But if this new socialism simply had to do with race and land, opposing State or worker ownership, it begins to make sense. You have to take care of ideological opponents, whether through a conference or a concentration camp. In response, communists and socialists took part in the valiant resistance to Nazism in Germany and throughout Europe.

The recent articles offering a Yes or No answer to the question “Were Hitler and the Nazis Socialists?” are far too simplistic. Honest history can’t always be captured in a word. Here is an attempt to do so in a paragraph:

Foundationally, socialists wanted either worker ownership of workplaces or government ownership of workplaces, the removal of capitalists. The Nazi Party had actual socialists. But over time they grew frustrated that the party wasn’t pursuing socialism; some left. Other members, including party leader Adolf Hitler, opposed actual socialism, and changed the definition of socialism to simply mean unity of the Aryan race and its collective flourishing. True to this, when he seized power, Hitler did not implement socialism, leaving capitalists in place, and instead crushed those speaking of actual socialism.

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