In the latter 20th century the USA effectively instituted central planning, just via the private sector. In the latter 20th century, banking and finance were centralized through deregulation that removed barriers to interstate banking and the various capital flow inhibitors that had existed fully for ~140 years since the 1830s, allowing …
In the latter 20th century the USA effectively instituted central planning, just via the private sector. In the latter 20th century, banking and finance were centralized through deregulation that removed barriers to interstate banking and the various capital flow inhibitors that had existed fully for ~140 years since the 1830s, allowing a small number of financial institutions to dominate investment and capital allocation. This concentrated control over credit, investment, and mergers, favored supers over smaller and medium firms. At the same time, interlocking directorates created a management superstructure that made coordination between large firms, limiting competitive pressures while coordinating decision making related to investment allocations and many other things. Big consultancies, which serve as gatekeepers to corporate strategy, further reinforced this by standardizing business practices and ensuring that only a handful of firms dictated industry wide decisions.
Business schools also played a role in socio-professionally homogenizing corporate leadership, producing executives trained in the same ideologies, reinforcing managerial consolidation, and ensuring that corporate decision-making adhered to a centralized logic rather than competitive market forces. Meanwhile, various other forms of cartelization, such as industry-wide lobbying for nationally harmonized regulatory (and remember, the word regulatory applies to several very different things), regulatory capture, or informal agreements enabled by all of the above, further insulated dominant firms from competition while coordinating activity, turning industries into private-sector equivalents of planned economies.
This is private sector central planning: a system where key economic decisions are made not through open market competition and politically and economically diffused decision making by large and diffused groupings of variegated actors but through a tightly controlled network of financial institutions, corporate boards, and consulting firms and other that coordinate strategies, allocate resources, and shape markets from the top down. The structure of economic power has shifted from a decentralized, competitive environment to one where market outcomes are largely dictated by a concentrated elite operating within a quasi-coordinated system that mirrors central planning, except it's done by private entities rather than the gov (although the gov plays a big role but 1) this concentration has made those actors drivers of state decision making and 2) the state itself has become very centralized by the removal of states and localities from real economy economic matters and 3) the govs themselves have seen similar homogenizing of decision makers along with stark declines in broader population and small/medium business representation)
I think the notion of finance-capital as central planning is hugely over-stated, not least because of the development of the venture capital market in the US.
Yes, a lot of parasitism comes via regulation, but the point I have been making is that a lot of this is networks and signalling rather than anything that can be usefully seen as central planning.
If you such a narrow view of central planning, then Nazi Germany in the 1930s would not qualify as centrally planned either. The Nazi economy had heavily on networks of industrialists, cartels, and private firms that matched state priorities but maintained significant autonomy. Hitler’s regime avoided full-scale nationalization in favor of using regulatory control, incentives, and strategic partnerships with key industries to achieve its economic goals. Much of the coordination happened through informal mechanisms, voluntary matching with state policy, and private sector collaboration rather than actual top down command structures. If you that central planning requires direct state control over industries and decision making, then the Nazi economy, at least before the war, would fall outside that definition, just as you say the US economy today is not centrally planned
As for the arg that the development of the VCs in the US goes against the claim that finance capital operates as central planning, I think you may be missing that VCs, even much more than "traditional" finance, do a whole lot of structured coordination. The big VCs tend to set up ecosystems their investee firms operate within in, and the don’t just provide capital; they impose management frameworks, industry standards, and strategic direction on startups, effectively embedding them within the broader corporate and financial ecosystem, and create standardizations of business practices in the. VC firms, consultancies, and interlocking directorates, and others create a centralized framework where major economic decisions are dictated not by freewheeling competition but by a small, interconnected elite that coordinates across industries. The fact that this coordination happens through networks and signaling does not negate its centralizing effects; if anything, it strengthens the case that economic decision-making is concentrated within a structured system that functions much like central planning, just under a private-sector model rather than a government-run one
It was partially centrally planned. The Nazis had actual Four Year Plans. I am not particularly worried about possibilities of central planning. I am much more concerned with some version of what I would call the Latin America Option—use of regulation, preferences, etc to favour those who are well-connected.
There is clearly some of that already: in fact, quite a lot. But it is still nowhere near Latin American levels.
There was no meaningful autonomy for factory owners in the Third Reich because non-compliant businesses were denied their centralised resource allocations, including raw materials and labour. Owners were effectively demoted to middle-managers, for as long as they followed Party orders.
I fully agree that today's VC's are part of the system, not outside of it. Small business owners become effective employees of their backers, even operating from buildings owned by the VC. That's nothing new. It's why Henry Ford bought back shares in his company as soon as he could afford to.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply. Respectfully, the claim that there was "no meaningful autonomy for factory owners" in the Third Reich is quite oversimplified. Where it can become more more accurate -- but still not not the whole picture -- is in regards to very big business/the cartels, Germany had what they called "cartel laws" that formally enabled them, during the latter 19th and early 2th century USA big biz fought hard to get them here but never succeeded (btw thats one of many pieces of evidence that we were once, at the very least, far more democratic than we are now), but they had them in Germany and the Third Reich strengthened them, there was a complex relationship between Nazi leadership and big business. While the Nazi state exercised significant control over resource allocation, especially during the war, the major industrialists and cartels had considerable autonomy in decision-making and at the same time the private sector remained relatively diffused (Berghahn, 2004). By the way, some of the same with the broader historiographical debate on whether German business leaders were "reluctant or willing collaborators."
Large firms, particularly in heavy industry and chemicals (such as IG Farben), actively engaged with the regime, benefiting from rearmament policies and war mobilization. But they werent simply middle managers just obeying orders; they had agency in shaping policies and often matched up with Nazi goals for their own economic gain. And while there was much consolidation, mid sized biz did indeed remain, albeit diminished, while he gov's influence was undeniable, especially through Four Year Plan and the allocation of resources. but private capitalist enterprises continued to exist, even during the war, and the regime relied on their cooperation and expertise. The involved system of controls and interference, while extensive, couldn't prevent waste, jurisdictional conflict, corruption, or deviations in planning (Bracher, ch. 7, 1970), indicating that individual entities decision making still played a serious role. And it should be very emphasized that throughout the 1930s and even into the early 1940s (they were confident they would win and didnt event enter full economic mobilization for war until well into the war against ussr!) the four years plans and rearmament accounted for way below total production and decision making regarding what consumer facing and industry facing products to make and where.
But much of these nuances reinforces me broader argument about private sector central planning. In Nazi Germany, large firms had huge influence, and decision-making was often fragmented across different power centers, state agencies, party organizations, and business elites, rather than being dictated in a purely top-down manner. This is like the USA's modern private sector, where financial institutions, consulting firms, interlocking directorates and others shape economic planning outside formal state mechanisms but are themselves largely dominated by a very tiny share of the pupation who are in many cases networked and in others at least have overlapping personal interests.
References:
Writing the History of Business in the Third Reich: Past Achievements and Future Directions by Volker R. Berghahn. Appears in the book Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (2004)
The German Dictatorship: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM by Karl Dietrich Bracher. (1970)
Thanks for your comment, Mike. I would agree that power was diffused in the Third Reich, but contingent on Party approval of individuals, and so there were no private property rights as we would understand them. Obviously, Jewish business and home owners, and political dissidents, had no property rights at all, not even ownership of their own bodies, which proves that ownership was contingent rather than a constitutional right for all.
I agree that some factory owners supported national socialism, as an alternative to Bolshevism which would have seen them lose control entirely, or the disaster of the free market in the Weimar years. And those supporters were not just in Germany. That doesn't mean national socialism was a capitalist plot to trick the workers into a fake socialism, as Marxists generally argue.
It's my view that the Third Reich, the US administration during the New Deal and the CCP under Deng all wished to avoid the mistakes of both Leninism and capitalism which had left the proletariat queuing for bread. They learned that revolutionaries don't make the best factory or farm managers, and learned to back off a little, allowing managers with relevant experience to remain nominally in charge of enterprises, as long as they expressed politically correct views and didn't offer any resistance. Companies such as chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck were praised for being model national socialist enterprises in the Leistungskampf.
Hi. Regarding your first two paragraphs here: Agreed! But regarding the last one there are some points to be made, that even if one were to say are just nuances, nonetheless have profound importance for not just historiography but also for contemplating the future course of the world today.
We're taught our whole lives that the 1930s New Deal era was a centralized technocratic dictatorship but this is demonstrably false. 1930s America remained thoroughly politically and economically decentralized and the deliberation and decision making architecture of its economy and governmental system remained dominated by a diffused, decentralized, and heterogenous private sector and decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member political parties with real grassroots participatory governance structures, including on serious economic, scientific, educational/training, etc. matters and since all those spheres allowed enough leeway for real localized variability, that participation substantively meant something. It can be debated how much "democracy' it had, and in what spheres, but it can not be denied that even in the 1930s the United States of America's Old Republic was far, far more decentralized, heterogeneous, and democratic than Nazi Germany, the USSR, or even its western European allies, and it was enough to make so that its best label is that was a decentralized democratic republic who mostly operated on a private sector basis and its private sector (along with governmental) was decentralized, variable, and governed by combination of competitive market structures and limited but still substantial true democratic participatory governance structures
Its very difficult to everstate how radical and contrary to the American tradition the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era was (I say so called, because it was/is not new, its actually a very, very old system). Our system was radically transformed in the 1970s/1980s: the advent of the Neoliberal Era in the USA was far more radical than commonly understood, for example, its most profound structural transformations were in banking and finance, dismantling systems that, with few exceptions, were not New Deal era constructs as we are typically taught, but rather institutions that had existed in some cases since the nation's founding and others that had been established by the Jacksonians in the 1830s and 1840s. The USA was never a Keynesian state in the European sense; even at the height of the New Deal in the 1930s, it retained a politically semi-decentralized, economically semi-decentralized, and scientifically semi-decentralized structure with deliberate redundancy and policy variability, including in economic governance. Unlike Europe, where state-led economic planning was more centralized, the U.S. system maintained substantial regional and institutional diversity well into the postwar decades. The neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s did not simply undo a mid-century Keynesian order but instead marked the dissolution of deeply ingrained mechanisms of economic diffusion, financial checks, and local policy autonomy. features that had long balanced national integration with fragmentation, generating competition, innovation, and resilience and were deep and fundamental elements of a long evolving socio-political project that note that descended from the European Enlightenment.
Darkly ironically, nominally Communist China from the 1980s until at least 2019 (but probably still today, but Xi and the powerful special interest groups around him at the national center have been working hard to change this, as evidenced by the results of the recent Third PLenum) in some of the major dimensions more closely resembled the USA's Old Republic than contemporary America does
Thanks for the reply. I did not mean to imply that the New Deal and European national socialism or the contemporary CCP were similar. I note that in practice, all three systems advocated for a drive towards modernity, in the construction of highways, bridges and dams for example. They certainly poured a lot of concrete, but the methods were different, I hope, particularly in the use of slave labour. This contrasts with the conservation politics of the green movement.
It wasn't the New Deal that was the bureaucratic success, it was the war effort that followed. Nor was it the triumph of centralized production planning, but the willing enlistment of private enterprise in the fulfillment of the one goal set by the State. Fascism doesn't require dragging everyone along kicking and screaming - it works just fine when everyone agrees on the goal. Its just tough to maintain that unity.
We're taught our whole lives that the 1930s New Deal era was a centralized technocratic dictatorship but this is demonstrably false. 1930s America remained thoroughly politically and economically decentralized and the deliberation and decision making architecture of its economy and governmental system remained dominated by a diffused, decentralized, and heterogenous private sector that was primarily governed by truly competitive market structures and diffused public sector that was primarily governed by decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member political parties with real grassroots participatory governance structures, including on serious economic, scientific, educational/training, etc. matters. And no I'm suggesting this was some fairytale true everyone democracy and no I'm not suggesting there were no big powerful interests in the economy, but back that stuff was real and we were actually a decentralized democracy, and our private sector was indeed actually diffused, heterogeneous in practices, diverse in types, deliberately redundant, and primarily governed by competitive market structures
What the New Deal sought (vainly) was what WWII delivered in terms of the ascendancy of the PMC, technocratic governance, and all that goes with that. The war effort made everyone believe that the government could do great things.
In regards to this sentence you wrote here: "That doesn't mean national socialism was a capitalist plot to trick the workers into a fake socialism, as Marxists generally argue." I just thought of a line that stood out to me when I read one of the books I referenced in an earlier reply here, some years back, its from page 331 of "The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structures, and Effects of National Socialism", I'll put it within the sentences before and after it for context and wrap the line in ***:
"At any rate, in 1933, almost one-third of the NSDAP membership --750,000-- were workers. ***The NSDAP was not just another capitalist party, as some oversimplified analysis maintains***. The founding and activity of the German Labor Front (DAF) must be seen in this light. It had been formed to counteract the special interests of National Socialist employees' organizations (like the NSBO)."
Right, Marxists have long maintained that the Reich abolished unions, when it was obvious that the regime created a nationalised replacement for them, exactly as an authoritarian socialist regime would do for any independent organisation.
In the latter 20th century the USA effectively instituted central planning, just via the private sector. In the latter 20th century, banking and finance were centralized through deregulation that removed barriers to interstate banking and the various capital flow inhibitors that had existed fully for ~140 years since the 1830s, allowing a small number of financial institutions to dominate investment and capital allocation. This concentrated control over credit, investment, and mergers, favored supers over smaller and medium firms. At the same time, interlocking directorates created a management superstructure that made coordination between large firms, limiting competitive pressures while coordinating decision making related to investment allocations and many other things. Big consultancies, which serve as gatekeepers to corporate strategy, further reinforced this by standardizing business practices and ensuring that only a handful of firms dictated industry wide decisions.
Business schools also played a role in socio-professionally homogenizing corporate leadership, producing executives trained in the same ideologies, reinforcing managerial consolidation, and ensuring that corporate decision-making adhered to a centralized logic rather than competitive market forces. Meanwhile, various other forms of cartelization, such as industry-wide lobbying for nationally harmonized regulatory (and remember, the word regulatory applies to several very different things), regulatory capture, or informal agreements enabled by all of the above, further insulated dominant firms from competition while coordinating activity, turning industries into private-sector equivalents of planned economies.
This is private sector central planning: a system where key economic decisions are made not through open market competition and politically and economically diffused decision making by large and diffused groupings of variegated actors but through a tightly controlled network of financial institutions, corporate boards, and consulting firms and other that coordinate strategies, allocate resources, and shape markets from the top down. The structure of economic power has shifted from a decentralized, competitive environment to one where market outcomes are largely dictated by a concentrated elite operating within a quasi-coordinated system that mirrors central planning, except it's done by private entities rather than the gov (although the gov plays a big role but 1) this concentration has made those actors drivers of state decision making and 2) the state itself has become very centralized by the removal of states and localities from real economy economic matters and 3) the govs themselves have seen similar homogenizing of decision makers along with stark declines in broader population and small/medium business representation)
I think the notion of finance-capital as central planning is hugely over-stated, not least because of the development of the venture capital market in the US.
Yes, a lot of parasitism comes via regulation, but the point I have been making is that a lot of this is networks and signalling rather than anything that can be usefully seen as central planning.
If you such a narrow view of central planning, then Nazi Germany in the 1930s would not qualify as centrally planned either. The Nazi economy had heavily on networks of industrialists, cartels, and private firms that matched state priorities but maintained significant autonomy. Hitler’s regime avoided full-scale nationalization in favor of using regulatory control, incentives, and strategic partnerships with key industries to achieve its economic goals. Much of the coordination happened through informal mechanisms, voluntary matching with state policy, and private sector collaboration rather than actual top down command structures. If you that central planning requires direct state control over industries and decision making, then the Nazi economy, at least before the war, would fall outside that definition, just as you say the US economy today is not centrally planned
As for the arg that the development of the VCs in the US goes against the claim that finance capital operates as central planning, I think you may be missing that VCs, even much more than "traditional" finance, do a whole lot of structured coordination. The big VCs tend to set up ecosystems their investee firms operate within in, and the don’t just provide capital; they impose management frameworks, industry standards, and strategic direction on startups, effectively embedding them within the broader corporate and financial ecosystem, and create standardizations of business practices in the. VC firms, consultancies, and interlocking directorates, and others create a centralized framework where major economic decisions are dictated not by freewheeling competition but by a small, interconnected elite that coordinates across industries. The fact that this coordination happens through networks and signaling does not negate its centralizing effects; if anything, it strengthens the case that economic decision-making is concentrated within a structured system that functions much like central planning, just under a private-sector model rather than a government-run one
It was partially centrally planned. The Nazis had actual Four Year Plans. I am not particularly worried about possibilities of central planning. I am much more concerned with some version of what I would call the Latin America Option—use of regulation, preferences, etc to favour those who are well-connected.
There is clearly some of that already: in fact, quite a lot. But it is still nowhere near Latin American levels.
There was no meaningful autonomy for factory owners in the Third Reich because non-compliant businesses were denied their centralised resource allocations, including raw materials and labour. Owners were effectively demoted to middle-managers, for as long as they followed Party orders.
I fully agree that today's VC's are part of the system, not outside of it. Small business owners become effective employees of their backers, even operating from buildings owned by the VC. That's nothing new. It's why Henry Ford bought back shares in his company as soon as he could afford to.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply. Respectfully, the claim that there was "no meaningful autonomy for factory owners" in the Third Reich is quite oversimplified. Where it can become more more accurate -- but still not not the whole picture -- is in regards to very big business/the cartels, Germany had what they called "cartel laws" that formally enabled them, during the latter 19th and early 2th century USA big biz fought hard to get them here but never succeeded (btw thats one of many pieces of evidence that we were once, at the very least, far more democratic than we are now), but they had them in Germany and the Third Reich strengthened them, there was a complex relationship between Nazi leadership and big business. While the Nazi state exercised significant control over resource allocation, especially during the war, the major industrialists and cartels had considerable autonomy in decision-making and at the same time the private sector remained relatively diffused (Berghahn, 2004). By the way, some of the same with the broader historiographical debate on whether German business leaders were "reluctant or willing collaborators."
Large firms, particularly in heavy industry and chemicals (such as IG Farben), actively engaged with the regime, benefiting from rearmament policies and war mobilization. But they werent simply middle managers just obeying orders; they had agency in shaping policies and often matched up with Nazi goals for their own economic gain. And while there was much consolidation, mid sized biz did indeed remain, albeit diminished, while he gov's influence was undeniable, especially through Four Year Plan and the allocation of resources. but private capitalist enterprises continued to exist, even during the war, and the regime relied on their cooperation and expertise. The involved system of controls and interference, while extensive, couldn't prevent waste, jurisdictional conflict, corruption, or deviations in planning (Bracher, ch. 7, 1970), indicating that individual entities decision making still played a serious role. And it should be very emphasized that throughout the 1930s and even into the early 1940s (they were confident they would win and didnt event enter full economic mobilization for war until well into the war against ussr!) the four years plans and rearmament accounted for way below total production and decision making regarding what consumer facing and industry facing products to make and where.
But much of these nuances reinforces me broader argument about private sector central planning. In Nazi Germany, large firms had huge influence, and decision-making was often fragmented across different power centers, state agencies, party organizations, and business elites, rather than being dictated in a purely top-down manner. This is like the USA's modern private sector, where financial institutions, consulting firms, interlocking directorates and others shape economic planning outside formal state mechanisms but are themselves largely dominated by a very tiny share of the pupation who are in many cases networked and in others at least have overlapping personal interests.
References:
Writing the History of Business in the Third Reich: Past Achievements and Future Directions by Volker R. Berghahn. Appears in the book Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (2004)
The German Dictatorship: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM by Karl Dietrich Bracher. (1970)
Thanks for your comment, Mike. I would agree that power was diffused in the Third Reich, but contingent on Party approval of individuals, and so there were no private property rights as we would understand them. Obviously, Jewish business and home owners, and political dissidents, had no property rights at all, not even ownership of their own bodies, which proves that ownership was contingent rather than a constitutional right for all.
I agree that some factory owners supported national socialism, as an alternative to Bolshevism which would have seen them lose control entirely, or the disaster of the free market in the Weimar years. And those supporters were not just in Germany. That doesn't mean national socialism was a capitalist plot to trick the workers into a fake socialism, as Marxists generally argue.
It's my view that the Third Reich, the US administration during the New Deal and the CCP under Deng all wished to avoid the mistakes of both Leninism and capitalism which had left the proletariat queuing for bread. They learned that revolutionaries don't make the best factory or farm managers, and learned to back off a little, allowing managers with relevant experience to remain nominally in charge of enterprises, as long as they expressed politically correct views and didn't offer any resistance. Companies such as chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck were praised for being model national socialist enterprises in the Leistungskampf.
Hi. Regarding your first two paragraphs here: Agreed! But regarding the last one there are some points to be made, that even if one were to say are just nuances, nonetheless have profound importance for not just historiography but also for contemplating the future course of the world today.
We're taught our whole lives that the 1930s New Deal era was a centralized technocratic dictatorship but this is demonstrably false. 1930s America remained thoroughly politically and economically decentralized and the deliberation and decision making architecture of its economy and governmental system remained dominated by a diffused, decentralized, and heterogenous private sector and decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member political parties with real grassroots participatory governance structures, including on serious economic, scientific, educational/training, etc. matters and since all those spheres allowed enough leeway for real localized variability, that participation substantively meant something. It can be debated how much "democracy' it had, and in what spheres, but it can not be denied that even in the 1930s the United States of America's Old Republic was far, far more decentralized, heterogeneous, and democratic than Nazi Germany, the USSR, or even its western European allies, and it was enough to make so that its best label is that was a decentralized democratic republic who mostly operated on a private sector basis and its private sector (along with governmental) was decentralized, variable, and governed by combination of competitive market structures and limited but still substantial true democratic participatory governance structures
Its very difficult to everstate how radical and contrary to the American tradition the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era was (I say so called, because it was/is not new, its actually a very, very old system). Our system was radically transformed in the 1970s/1980s: the advent of the Neoliberal Era in the USA was far more radical than commonly understood, for example, its most profound structural transformations were in banking and finance, dismantling systems that, with few exceptions, were not New Deal era constructs as we are typically taught, but rather institutions that had existed in some cases since the nation's founding and others that had been established by the Jacksonians in the 1830s and 1840s. The USA was never a Keynesian state in the European sense; even at the height of the New Deal in the 1930s, it retained a politically semi-decentralized, economically semi-decentralized, and scientifically semi-decentralized structure with deliberate redundancy and policy variability, including in economic governance. Unlike Europe, where state-led economic planning was more centralized, the U.S. system maintained substantial regional and institutional diversity well into the postwar decades. The neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s did not simply undo a mid-century Keynesian order but instead marked the dissolution of deeply ingrained mechanisms of economic diffusion, financial checks, and local policy autonomy. features that had long balanced national integration with fragmentation, generating competition, innovation, and resilience and were deep and fundamental elements of a long evolving socio-political project that note that descended from the European Enlightenment.
Darkly ironically, nominally Communist China from the 1980s until at least 2019 (but probably still today, but Xi and the powerful special interest groups around him at the national center have been working hard to change this, as evidenced by the results of the recent Third PLenum) in some of the major dimensions more closely resembled the USA's Old Republic than contemporary America does
Thanks for the reply. I did not mean to imply that the New Deal and European national socialism or the contemporary CCP were similar. I note that in practice, all three systems advocated for a drive towards modernity, in the construction of highways, bridges and dams for example. They certainly poured a lot of concrete, but the methods were different, I hope, particularly in the use of slave labour. This contrasts with the conservation politics of the green movement.
It wasn't the New Deal that was the bureaucratic success, it was the war effort that followed. Nor was it the triumph of centralized production planning, but the willing enlistment of private enterprise in the fulfillment of the one goal set by the State. Fascism doesn't require dragging everyone along kicking and screaming - it works just fine when everyone agrees on the goal. Its just tough to maintain that unity.
We're taught our whole lives that the 1930s New Deal era was a centralized technocratic dictatorship but this is demonstrably false. 1930s America remained thoroughly politically and economically decentralized and the deliberation and decision making architecture of its economy and governmental system remained dominated by a diffused, decentralized, and heterogenous private sector that was primarily governed by truly competitive market structures and diffused public sector that was primarily governed by decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member political parties with real grassroots participatory governance structures, including on serious economic, scientific, educational/training, etc. matters. And no I'm suggesting this was some fairytale true everyone democracy and no I'm not suggesting there were no big powerful interests in the economy, but back that stuff was real and we were actually a decentralized democracy, and our private sector was indeed actually diffused, heterogeneous in practices, diverse in types, deliberately redundant, and primarily governed by competitive market structures
What the New Deal sought (vainly) was what WWII delivered in terms of the ascendancy of the PMC, technocratic governance, and all that goes with that. The war effort made everyone believe that the government could do great things.
In regards to this sentence you wrote here: "That doesn't mean national socialism was a capitalist plot to trick the workers into a fake socialism, as Marxists generally argue." I just thought of a line that stood out to me when I read one of the books I referenced in an earlier reply here, some years back, its from page 331 of "The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structures, and Effects of National Socialism", I'll put it within the sentences before and after it for context and wrap the line in ***:
"At any rate, in 1933, almost one-third of the NSDAP membership --750,000-- were workers. ***The NSDAP was not just another capitalist party, as some oversimplified analysis maintains***. The founding and activity of the German Labor Front (DAF) must be seen in this light. It had been formed to counteract the special interests of National Socialist employees' organizations (like the NSBO)."
Right, Marxists have long maintained that the Reich abolished unions, when it was obvious that the regime created a nationalised replacement for them, exactly as an authoritarian socialist regime would do for any independent organisation.