Nazi Socialism: What's at Stake?

After getting ChatGPT to score Nazi Germany’s economic freedom, I prompted it to ponder the bigger issues. While the current version of ChatGPT is less ideological than it was in 2022, almost everyone admits that it leans left. Here is ChatGPT’s summary of research on the ideological leanings of ChatGPT:

ChatGPT’s default political output is best described as center-left to left-libertarian / culturally progressive, especially on environment, civil rights, immigration/diversity, inequality, and gender/sexuality issues. It is not best described as Marxist, party-loyal Democratic, or consistently economically socialist.

Given this orientation, I wondered how many questions I’d have to ask to get the model to reach what I consider the correct interpretation of the historical facts. It’s like the classic ‘80s question, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” The answer, for both ChatGPT questions and Tootsie Pop licks, turns out to be exactly... three.

“How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”

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BC: What does this suggest about the debate on whether National Socialism was indeed socialist?

GPT: It suggests a limited but important pro-“yes” point: National Socialism was plainly anti–free-market, anti-liberal, and highly collectivist/statist. My estimated EFW trajectory would make Nazi Germany fall from merely unfree in 1933–35 to below the bottom of the modern EFW distribution by the late 1930s, mainly because the regime crushed sound money, trade freedom, legal security, and economic regulation scores.

But it does not by itself prove that Nazism was “socialist” in the orthodox Marxist or social-democratic sense… So the fairest conclusion is:

National Socialism was not laissez-faire capitalism; it was not orthodox Marxian socialism; it was a racially nationalist command-and-control economy with private titles often left in place but private economic decision-making heavily subordinated to state objectives.

In the debate, the EFW-style reconstruction supports the claim that the Nazis were economically collectivist and anti-market. It weakens the common rebuttal that “they were just capitalists with racist politics.” But it also supports the historian’s caveat: they generally preferred state direction over state ownership, which makes “socialist” a defensible but potentially misleading label unless carefully defined.

BC: Don’t most modern socialists prefer state direction over state ownership? It seems like the Nazis deserve the name socialist at least as much as they do.

GPT: Yes, that is a strong point. The argument “the Nazis weren’t socialist because they usually left private title in place” is too crude. Socialism has often meant social or state control, not necessarily 100% state ownership. Britannica’s current definition explicitly says socialism involves major productive property being “owned or controlled” by the state, and adds that socialists have long disagreed over how much must be publicly owned and how control should be exercised…

My bottom line: Nazism deserves the “socialist” label about as much as many state-direction versions of socialism if the criterion is extensive political control over economic life. It deserves it much less if the criterion is worker ownership, egalitarianism, internationalism, or democratic control. The cleanest label remains something like racial-nationalist state socialism or fascist command capitalism, depending on which feature one wants to emphasize.

BC: But then modern socialists would have to deny that Marxism-Leninism was ever socialist, right?

GPT: Yes. That is the basic inconsistency.

A modern socialist can coherently say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not democratic socialism.”

But it is much harder for him to say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not socialism at all.”

Why? Because Marxism-Leninism checks nearly every conventional economic box for socialism: public/state ownership of the means of production, central planning, suppression of private capital, anti-profit ideology, collectivized agriculture, and one-party rule justified in the name of the proletariat. Britannica’s broad definition of socialism is public rather than private “ownership or control” of productive property, and the Stanford Encyclopedia describes socialism as centrally involving social ownership of the means of production. Soviet law made public ownership of the means of production a key feature, and the 1936 Soviet constitution explicitly called the USSR a “socialist state of workers and peasants.”

So if the anti-Nazi argument is:

“Nazism was not socialist because it was dictatorial, nationalist, anti-egalitarian, anti-worker, and not genuinely democratic,”

then the same test would also exclude Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc. That is a very high-purity definition of socialism. It may be morally attractive to socialists, but it is not how most historians, political scientists, or ordinary language use the term.

The better distinction is:

Socialism as an institutional family: yes, Marxism-Leninism is socialist; Nazism has some socialist/statist features but is less centrally socialist because it preserved more private ownership and was not oriented toward class abolition.

Socialism as a moral ideal of democratic worker control: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism both fail, though Marxism-Leninism at least claimed continuity with that ideal while Nazism explicitly rejected egalitarian Marxism and class internationalism.

Socialism as state control over economic life: Marxism-Leninism clearly qualifies, and Nazi Germany comes much closer than anti-Nazi semantic defenses usually admit.

This is why the “Nazis weren’t socialist because they weren’t democratic/egalitarian/worker-controlled” move proves too much. It protects socialism from Nazism only by also protecting it from most real-world socialist regimes.