Thread on why Rainer is full of shit, on the fall in living standards, and how most elements of the Holocaust were independent of capitalism—please read to the end for this one—bc capitalism obviously played a key role, i’m just saying we should specify it. https://twitter.com/rainer_shea/status/1295912515407196160

living standards did not increase under Naziism. This is obviously the case when their victims are included & for the 6 years of the war (many of post war rebuilding), out of the 12 of the Nazi regime (Or 16 or so of their arc), but it’s also true for favored demographic pre war

Profit rates, the stock market, and the rest boomed, and unemployment fell, but incomes & wages actually fell, not rose. Of course, after the war, the Nazis planned to enslave the entirety of Eurasia & Eastern Europe, work them to death & give their land to Germans.

They also wanted to eventually depopulate Africa, control the MENA region, and were willing to let Japan hold their region, and even the US to hold its region, with Italy & other European fascists & a broken UK & France under its proxy power.

But the fact is that:
1. Anti-Judaism existed in Europe for 2000 years
2. Modern Antisemitism & the Jewish Question had existed for 500
3. Notions of ‘Civilization’, barbarians & superiority went back 2000 years
4. Modern racism went back 200

5. Scientific racism, antisemitism & eugenics went back to the 19th century
6. Settler colonialism, white supremacy, contemporary imperialism and colonialism went back around 500 years

7. Anti-communism, anti-socialism went back to the 19th century
8. Fascism reaches back to reactionaries (Maistre) & Syndicalists (Sorel) but it’s unique modern form went back to Mussolini

9. The German conflict with Britain and with the Russian Empire, followed by the USSR goes back to their respective rises—they were geopolitically incompatible as rising hegemony, and conflict with one hegemon emerging was inevitable in the state system

10. WWII was, in many ways, an extension of WWI, mixed with the reaction to the USSR, rise of socialism, anarchism & communism, the US’ ascendancy, the geopolitics I mentioned before, with WWI traceable to geopolitics, imperialism, int’l law, & capitalist crisis

Thus, all the key elements in the causal story of WWII and the Holocaust already existed in Europe. Most of them were independent of capitalism (in theory & conceptually—obvi empirically they were all tied up).

Even white supremacy & settler colonialism need not require capitalism to exist, and even anti-communism, need not be capitalist in nature. Now, again, obviously capitalism was tied up with all these things but it was a relation of sufficiency not necessity.

What’s more:
1. The Nazis intended to carry the genocide to its end and eliminate Jews all over the world
2. They did so even at military, social, economic, logistical, etc cost to themselves but directly & in terms of trade offs & losses

3. It sped up, not slowed down, with the end of the war, even as it was clear the Germans were going to lose. They wanted to complete the Final Solution as much as they could before their inevitable defeat.

4. The death camps, roundups, and Holocaust were costly directly & indirectly, & did not turn a profit, except for the slavery, which only did so relative to the labor shortage caused by the war, although it WAS self sustaining economically & redistributed resources to Germans

In other words then, the whole enterprise was not absolutely profitable, and only became relatively profitable later, so it cannot he accounted for this way. It however was self sustaining which means it can’t be explained by wartime deprivation or resource scarcity.

5. The Nazis went out of their way to knowingly acquire the territories in which the largest number of ‘undesirables’, Jews, Romani & Slavs, existed.

6. The Nazis never really took emigration & external deprivation seriously—they actually banned it—but only did it to force the Allies to offer assistance, and thus appear as Jewish servants, or to fail to do so, so they could be blamed

7. Instead the stripping of citizenship and internal deportation was the plan. And while explicit eliminationism did not arise until later, it was already immanent here.

If their plan was merely to ‘rid’ themselves of ‘undesirables’ they wouldn’t aim to conquer & encapsulate the lands where they existed in the majority, they wouldn’t ban their emigration or expulsion, and internal deportation wouldn’t have been the preferred means.

As Nirenberg argues, anti Judaism is where the rubber meets the road between the ‘base’ & ‘superstructure’, and was historically the preferred intellectual, theological, explanatory, social, & legal means to mediate the contradictions & puzzles of society.

As Postone argues, antisemitism, emerging later, was immanent in capitalism, especially in its liberal democratic form, because it was the preferred means to resolve the contradictions between capitalism’s ideology & its actual base & contradictions.

Thus capitalism played the following roles:
1. Sped up the imperialism & crises that caused WWI & WWII
2. Was threatened by communism, socialism & anarchism, which fascism was meant to save it from
3. Endeared the elites, petty boug & upwardly mobile professions to the Nazi party

4. Funded and profited from the Nazis, the war, the labor repression, and later slavery
5. Inherited using anti Judaism to mediate social contradictions, through its structural use of modern antisemitism

The first four are extrinsic & sufficient, not necessary & intrinsic relations. The fifth is intrinsic but also sufficient (as it inherited it from the older forms, and also used other forms of scapegoat making & ideology).

Thus capitalism played a sufficient, not necessary role, in all its major ways, and most of these roles were extrinsic rather than intrinsic.

The Nazis celebrated the bans on immigration in the UK, US, and Palestine. And drew up plans to send the North Africa corps to go to Palestine and kill the Jews already there, and to convince the US & UK to collaborate in the Holocaust or to implement it once they conquered them

Between that and the bans on emigration, the internal deportations, the conquering of these majority territories, their speeding up the Final Solution when they were losing, at monetary & military cost, & that the camps were not absolutely profitable, only later relatively so

But were self sustaining (so that scarcity & war time deprivation can’t explain them), it’s clear their aims went far beyond capitalism, far beyond their own territories & far beyond mere ‘getting rid of undesirables’.

If their plan was as Rainer says their modus operandi would have been to pressure the US & UK to lift their immigration bans, & would have allowed external migration.

If they wanted to speed it up they would have to have let the emigrants keep their property and such, but if they wanted to profit from it, they would have required the emigrants to pay & give up their belongings

Half of Germany & Austria’s population fled in this time, mostly to the US, secondarily to the UK, Palestine, Latin America, etc. more than half to places Germany eventually intended to fight.

What’s more, if the aims were economic their plan would have worked in reversed—it was Jewish professional’s, middle class, petty & haute boug, higher earning skilled workers etc who were able to leave but poorer, older (or younger), less educated etc couldn’t leave.

If the plan, therefore, were actually economic it would have been one of deportation, outmigration and forced labor from the beginning. They would’ve taxed Jews if middle & upper means’ exit but not those of lower means.

They would’ve pressured the other countries to lift their bans, and even conceding that conquering the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews were was nexesssriky for their plans, they would’ve let them emigrate, wouldn’t have devoted resources to it & would have

largely treated Jews the way they did Poles—Which is primarily & exclusively through forced labor—the attritionist plan, which was only implemented in parts & places, and was reserved primarily for Poles & Soviets (but don’t be deceived, it was still incredibly murderous)

We can see parts of this in the way that by the end of the war, they needed to scale back full exterminstionism in some places & switch back to the enslavement model especially for the skilled workers.

One has to wonder what the economic rationality of getting rid of half of your country’s physicians, scientists & academics in your Urban areas is, or why eliminating a highly skilled assimilated subset of your labor population.

Theoretical physics, altho not practical or engineering physics, for example, collapsed under the Nazis. Italy saw a renaissance in physics during its fascist period, only to destroy it wholesale when they implemented anti Jewish laws on German request.

Ironically the physicists, chemists, engineers, professors, academics, scholars, doctors, skilled laborers, mathematicians, computer scientists, translators, soldiers & tacticians That did manage to escape played key roles in the machinery that destroyed the Nazis

While small in absolute number, Jews all over signed up for military service at higher rates in the US, UK, USSR, Canada, & (Spain, Poland & France where applicable) and participated in every country’s partisan movements

Said intellectual, passive, partisan, and higher rates of military service didn’t win the war but they also weren’t insignificant either.

The truth is the Final Solution & Holocaust were totally irrational from a functionalist—if by that we mean economic, military, or social—perspective. Functionalism in terms of geopolitics, ideology, anti communism & raisons d’etre fares better, as does structuralism.

A latent intentionalism & scapegoat theory also plays a role but its specific character depends on the rest.