Re: CHAT: Support/Oppression of Conlanging

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