(This takes approximately four minutes to read.)

I suspect that at some point capitalist apologists are going to learn of businesses’ support for fascism and shrug their shoulders, replying that businesses are merely tools and humanity can use tools for both good and evil purposes, much in the same way that one can handle a scalpel for either surgery or murder.

This hypothetic argument would certainly be easier to take seriously than simply redefining capitalism in such an idealistic manner as to render it nothing but a utopian fantasy, but it, too, has its problems.

First of all, we may concede that occasionally somebody does start a business with good intentions in mind. Arunachalam Muruganantham is a great example of that, but for now let us instead turn our attention to Oskar Schindler since, while I am much less sure that he started out with good intentions, he is nevertheless more topical for this subcommunity.

Oskar Schindler was a relatively benevolent capitalist who saved one thousand two hundred Jews. No-one can deny him that accomplishment. Nonetheless, even if we choose to overlook the less pleasant aspects of his history, it is precisely his exceptionality that ought to raise questions: why weren’t there more capitalists like him in the Axis powers?

The simple reason is that a business’s primary purpose is to make money, not help humanity, somewhat like how a scalpel’s primary purpose is to perform surgery rather than commit homicides, to return to the crude analogy from earlier. For businesses, it was cheaper and therefore more profitable to give neoslaves little (if anything) to eat than to give them an adequate diet along with adequate wages. Quoting Marc Buggeln’s ‘Slave Labor in Nazi Germany’:

In the case of the concentration camp prisoners, the main advance payment by the companies or authorities was not a purchase price, but the establishment of a camp. In some cases, this entailed greater costs, which required the continued use of prisoners to pay off. However, this cost compensation was not linked to an individual prisoner, but to the deployment as a whole. Since dead prisoners were usually replaced by the SS, the death of a prisoner was not related to the costs of camp construction.

The principle of a daily rental fee instead of a labor hourly rental fee was designed to demand a high daily output from the prisoners. The daily rental fee for a male auxiliary laborer from the concentration camp was four Reichsmarks, and the hour of labor cost 0.50 Reichsma[r]ks for an eight-hour working day and 0.33 Reichsmarks for a twelve-hour working day. This meant that a concentration camp inmate still worked more cheaply for a twelve-hour working day than for an eight-hour day, if he only worked 70 percent of the eight-hour day.

The choice of the daily rental fee method was thus an incentive from the outset to exploit the prisoners’ labor as much as possible each day. From the point of view of the companies, the wear and tear of prisoners was irrelevant for their cost and profit calculations as long as they did not possess special skills that only a few other prisoners could demonstrate. Only then was the death of a prisoner a direct disadvantage. These special skills were mainly knowledge that had already been incorporated in school, training, studies, and work.

(Emphasis added.)

The tendency towards cheap and diuturnal labour is one of capitalism’s structural defects; it persists to this day, most obviously in the example of Imperial America’s prisons, wherein the living conditions for the supply of cheap labor are low. No, modern prison labor is not as deadly and intense as Axis neoslavery was, but that is beside the point. There was no financial incentive then to give ordinary labourers good living standards, and there is no financial incentive now.

This ties in with one of the most important reasons to study fascism’s history: nearly all of capitalism’s defects that were phenomenal in the Fascist era remain unresolved: the temptations to superexploit workers, profit from warfare, reduce wages, cancel social welfare expenditures, break strikes, smash labour unions, secure large businesses, and so on — all of those temptations remain and capitalists sometimes continue to act on them, hence why I believe that most capitalists would, upon closer examination, find surprisingly little disagreeable about the Fascist empires: the upper classes prospered more than ever.

Indeed, using a business to benefit humanity tends to be far less rewarding than using a business primarily for profit. Oskar Schindler did not become rich as a result of rescuing 1,200 people. In fact, after his later business ventures failed, he was in dire straits and had to rely on some of the people whom he saved so as to avoid homelessness. In this case, his business benefited him only indirectly at best, and it was the very capitalist system which he used that threatened his livelihood.

My goal in contributing to this subcommunity is not to induce guilt by association, contrary to what a casual observer may conclude. I suspect that that is an aim that some of us have in mind when teaching others about fascism, since capitalists enabling as well as profiting from Fascism should be reason enough to abolish capitalism (I would go so far as to argue). Even so, most of the phenomena that I mentioned earlier would be self-evidently wrong with or without Fascism, making guilt by association redundant.

Finally, I need to comment on antisocialists’ ultimate response to any and all of their opposition, the escape hatch to which they always run when somebody backs them into a corner: no matter how awful life may be under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, life under a dictatorship of the proletariat would be even worse. I reply to this counterargument unoften since antisocialists have demonstrated time and time again that they have no problem making up nonsense on the spot while dismissing months of serious research out of hand as if it were nothing. If these antisocialists are haut-bourgeois or petty bourgeois, then they are hopeless. If they are lower-class, then capitalism’s horrible economic pressure is the factor likeliest to drive them to reexamine the alternatives. Otherwise, there are better things to do than engaging with them.

In conclusion, the fact that capitalists supported Fascism is important because the Fascists gave them nearly everything that they wanted most. Neofascists, if they want to stay in power, can easily repeat that placation since capitalists’ desires have shifted very little since the Fascist era.