On Fri, 23 Jun 1995 14:59:03 -0700 <LYNN TURGEON, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF
ECONOMICS, HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@ecst.csuchico.edu> said:
>Some evidence on the above subject can be found in Eric Hobsbawm's "The Age of
>Catastrophe" p. 129:
> As for the "monopoly capitalist" thesis, the point about really big
>business is that it can come to terms with any regime that does not actually
>expropriate it, and any regime must come to terms with it.Fascism was no more
>'the expression of the interests of monopoly capital' than the American New
>Deal or British Labour governments, or the Weimar Republic. Big business in
>the early 1930's did not particujlarly want Hitler, and would have preferred
>more orthodox conservatism. It gave him little support until the Great Slump,
>and even then support was late and patchy. However, when he came to power,
>business collaborated wholeheartedly, up to the point of using slave labour and
>extermination camp labour for its operations during the Second World War.
>Large and small business, of course, benefited from the exporpriation of the
>Jews.
> IMHO, this represents a tilt towards Turner's interpretation. Lynn
Listen, this is an *empirical* question. Ultimately, it gets
resolved *in the archives*. None of the authors I cited trade in the
"monopoly capital" thesis, none of them are East German authors. With one
exception, they are practicing historians who try to get access to
archives which are often tightly guarded by companies whose interests are
directly touched by their research. Despite the difficulties involved, they
have over the last decade or so managed to dig up enormous amounts of
documentary evidence which shows Turner's position to be, at the very least,
extremely misleading. "Big Business" is an abstraction and abstractions are
not capable of "wanting" or "not wanting" Hitler or anything else. The
principals of several dominant German concerns, Daimler-Benz and the
Deutsche Bank being chief among them (the directorships of the latter
being, in any case, "intertwined") threw in their lot with the Nazis from
very early on, from *before* the so-called "seizure of power".
It is possible to name names (Stauss, Pietsch, Werlin) -- and precisely in
this sort of debate, it is important to do so. The leading circles of other
concerns were notably hostile to National Socialism. This was apparently
the case for the Siemens directorate, for instance, and Soehn-Rethel
tries to explain why. Indeed, much of the latter's writings on the
matter constitute a kind of Marxist paean to the *virtues* of Siemens
(though, nB, they were written before the war and Siemens' participation
in the slave-labor program). So, the crudities of the "monopoly capital"
approach are certainly not the only alternative to the apologetics of a
Turner.
John Rosenthal
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
