If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.
Lots of arguments about this one.
Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.
Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.
So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?
It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.
National.
International.
To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.
But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.
Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.
The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.
Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.
This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.
Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.
Update, 12 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] WELL, THEY CALLED THEMSELVES THAT: Were the Nazis socialists? […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » WELL, THEY CALLED THEMSELVES THAT: Were the Nazis socialists? Related (From Ed): A Brief Compa — May 12, 2026 @ 01:31
I got into it with Spartacus at Time Ghost over that. His excuses come down to “Because we say they aren’t socialists”, and really like all socialists, everywhere, they failed to succeed in taking control of all the means of production, letting (some) folks own things (as long as they did as the Gov’t told them, that is), but the biggest crime was of course, “Turning Rightwing” by attacking the Soviet earlier than Stalin expected. The biggest crime is left unsaid. They made the other Socialists look bad!
Comment by JP Kalishek — May 12, 2026 @ 05:38
I was surprised that Sparty was unwilling to acknowledge that, but the Timeghost team has a mild-but-noticeable bias about not directly equating Soviet or other Warsaw Pact actions with the actions of the US, the UK, or France. I suspect it’s an instilled concern not to over-agitate the Reds from the time when they still had relatively vast numbers of heavily armed troops just across the border in Eastern Europe.
Comment by Nicholas — May 12, 2026 @ 10:25
Gerd Weinberg in history of WW II makes this very clear. The basic assumption of Marxist socio-economic theory was the class struggle. For Nazism, it was the Darwinian struggle of races – a primitive biological motor. The murderous apparatuses built up on these foundations while different in some respects were remarkably alike in effect – notably the extermination of perceived enemies. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” policy was as nationalistic as the Nazi worship of the Fatherland, most explicitly when attacked by their erstwhile ally Germany. Despite their alleged internationalism, communist nations appear just as likely to attack each other than their western adversaries: e.g. Chinese Russian border clashes, Chinese punitive attack on Vietnam, Russian suggestions to the Nixon administration that nuking China might be a good thing.
Whatever theory totalitarian regimes cloak themselves in, the results are the same.
Comment by Mark Weinburg — May 12, 2026 @ 07:32
Winston Churchill in the prellude book on his series on World War II called communism and naziism “the twin bastard children of socialism.”
Comment by Lee Murrah — May 12, 2026 @ 08:45
Well said…I have thought for many years that the main difference between Naziism/fascism and communism was the designated Other Who We Must Hate. For the Nazis, it was ethnic groups — Jews, Gypsies, etc. For the Communists, it was The Bourgeousie.
Comment by Steve — May 12, 2026 @ 09:18