>>15175
The Nazi state borrows the excess capital of society and employs it for its own unproductive ends. With this excess capital, it can employ the industrial reserve army and put it to work for those ends. Since the workers cannot consume the product of their labor — which are munitions and war machines — there is no possibility this can lead to any increase in their real wage. Their labor time increases, but no additional wages are forthcoming. Thus, fascist state deficits add to the profits of capital, but can never increase the wages of the working class. Moreover, the munitions and war machines can be employed to destroy the productive capital of rival nations. Since the crisis is caused by overaccumulation of capital within the world market, this destruction eliminates rival capitals and makes it possible for the winner to produce surplus value on a larger scale.
I want to be clear that there is nothing in my argument that says this strategy to address capitalist crisis cannot work. In fact, I have been rather emphatic in the other direction: Fascism represents an advance in the capitalist mode of production. Most Marxists, unfortunately, identify fascism with regression to an earlier stage of development of the productive forces, when it actually represents what Engels calls “production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society.” Engels argued that fascism is most definitely not socialism, but it does solve the problems of socialism “technically”.
“State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”
It was not the working class itself not the fascist state that should have seized power across Europe. Then all that material wealth wasted on planes, tanks, etc. which the average worker could not even afford to buy let alone use could have been reallocated on useful consumer goods. The flower of Europe's youth wasted for nothing.