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Re: CHAT: Support/Oppression of Conlanging

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 19, 2002, 3:03
Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>: > > > > > > >Wasn't he? > > > > This's, of course, a question of definition. "Fascism" has become one > > of those political derogatives that people more or less automatically > > bash political enemies with. However, the almost completely state-run > > economy and society that Stalin created wasn't that similar too those > > of Germany and Italy during the 30s, which all agree where Fascist. > > Really? What I've been taught is that the two economic systems, despite > superficial differences, were in fact extremely similar. Hitler's Germany > was largely as much state-run as the Soviet Union. The difference is > that it was on a less visible level.
Here's what my friend, something of an expert about all things Nazi and Soviet, has to say about Nazi and Soviet economics. I've stitched it together from an AIM chat, so it may not flow as well as it would otherwise. "Hitler, in essence, froze the system he had in place--even strengthened it somewhat. The system he had to work is relatively similar to what's going on in South Korea right now: either Really Hugely Gigantic corporations, or small single-proprietorships. (Part of the Nazi platform, oddly enough, was to destroy all the department stores. I don't think anything came of that.) Nothing structurally was done to the system. A lot of businessmen lost everything--these would be your Jews, your men of conscience, and the businessmen who were part of the various plots to kill Hitler--but these were transferred to other Germans, not the state per se. During the war, semiobviously, there was a good bit more of a command system to the economy. But that's normal in this sort of thing (except for carrying a bit more of a threat with it, it wasn't substantially different from the US "asking" Chrysler to build tanks). But you could still own property, give and receive loans, set your own prices, and so on and so forth. Except of course for during wartime, it was, in essence, a capitalist system. It also bears noting that the early Nazi ideology was very populist/socialist. It railed against "interest slavery," and wanted to destroy all the banks and lending institutions, not just the Jewish ones. Hitler, though, wanted businessmen to support his ideological goals to the hilt--in exchange, they would be left alone by the government. At least that was sort-of the idea. Some in the government wanted to control prices and production, but they were typically ignored. There were lots of little bureaucrats with theoretical power over business in the third reich. So many, in fact, that none of them could really do anything... It gets confusing because, of course, of the second word that made up NSDAP: Socialist. The Nazis built up this bizarre ideology that letting the big monopolies survive and make gobs of dough wasn't "capitalism" but some new form of German Voelkisch economics. I can't figure out the ideology, but the end result...think China today. [It was] a totalitarian system, which by and large lets businesses do whatever they want as long as they don't try to mess around with politcal opposition. The government retains, but doesn't do much with, the power to regulate business (and by "regulate" I mean "control absolutely"). "The Soviet system--by which we mean what Stalin replaced the NEP with--was of course quite different. Even the whole concept of what "money" was was quite different. Under the Stalinist/Soviet system, money wasn't a store of any value, it was just an accounting device. A Ruble was what things were priced with; it didn't really bear any rational connection with supply, demand, or anything nasty like that. [It was] a pure command economy. Everyone works for and sells through the state. What is produced is dictated from above. Theoretically (that word again) very bright people in Gosplan (the state planning agency) would be able to figure out what everyone needed, where they needed it, and so on and so forth. This never really worked out. Some similarities between the Third Reich and the USSR: 1. Both broke the unions and replaced them with state apparats. The German one was totally weird. Kraft Durch Freude, it was called. It was the organization in charge of the Volkswagen--or as it was then called, the KdF-Wagen. It was also in charge of a cruise line, ski slopes, and all sorts of other miscellaneous garbage purportedly for the benefit of workers. [For the Soviet Union,] There were no "unions" as such; ideologically, everyone was in the same big union. Everyone was a "worker" of some sort--manual labor, intellectual labor, agricultural labor... that was the important thing about Collectivization. After collectivization, those who once were farmers became workers in a state industry. 2.Slave labor helped enormously on both fronts...essentially all the canals and railroads were built by "criminals" of real or imagined crimes. The Nazi and Soviet approaches to insufficient demand were different, in some ways: "The German approach to the Depression on a local level is interesting and I think illustrative. After the depression, and the coincident inflation then deflation of the currency, the economy was in the toilet. There were the famous seven million unemployed, and hordes of further underemployed. On one day--March 24, 1934 I believe--all the officials at the Gau level and lower (think counties-through-villiage) stood in front of their constituents and begged them to hire people, take out loans, and spend spend spend! to get Germany out of the depression... this is a very totalitarian way to apply Keynesian theory. The problem: not enough people are spending money, mostly because they don't have a whole lot. Solution: get people employed and paid, and buying. Tactic: cajole/ threaten/bribe them to hire, earn, and spend. This actually worked pretty well. The speeches were superbly written (from above, of course) and everyone in the country felt it was their patriotic duty to hire people, pay them good wages, and spend like crazy." "The Soviet Union dealt with low productivity by --for once-- appealing to individualistic impulses. This was the Stakhanovite movement, named after one Ilya Stakhanov, a coal miner in the Donbass who, by dint of hard work and preparing himself physically and mentally, came to be the most productive coal-mine-jackhammerer on the planet. If one were to prove himself a Stakhanovite, one got all sorts of neat-o priveliges. Like moving around, foreign travel, being able to shop at stores that actually had stuff in them, that sort of thing. The State was also not above giving extra money or privileges to people in order to get them to work in remote places or industries. If you were willing to move to Irkutsk or Magnitogorsk or some other godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, you would be paid more. Unless it was *really* bad, and they couldn't get anyone to go there, in which case it'd just be turned over to the Gulag. Digging canals, mining uranium, that sort of thing. The State was also into gigantism. Almost all the tractors in the USSR were built in one plant in Stalingrad, for example. (Of course most of America's carpets are made in one or two towns in southern Georgia, so this can happen by accident as well. But the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Works were no accident...) Of course the personal whim of the Dictator of the Moment can change everything. 1927: send academics abroad and invite foreign ones in so we can learn foreign practices. 1930: find everyone we sent abroad and have them shot because they're polluted with capitalism. He concludes by saying: "Separating ideology from 'what really happened' in either of those two, especially the Third Reich, is often tricky when you're trying to find out what it 'really' was." ===================================================================== Thomas Wier "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n / Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..." University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers