Nothing is better than love: how not to repeat Weimar in Greece

Rather than a fateful error arising from the jockeying of more centrist political agents, the Nazis’ victory was assured and sustained because capital needed their kind of idiots to pursue its (at that time) necessary kind of survival-through-suicide. It needed a party who could preside over the systematic evisceration of social reproduction, restructure the domestic economy so the poor were on sub-subsistence rations and redirect production increasingly into unproductive activities, culminating in the rise of a military economy. The Nazis were all about wasting constant and variable capital – things and people – on an expanding scale, which then as today was what the continued accumulation of capital dictated.

We see something indeed similar – and vaster – going on globally and in Greece right now. One would scarcely guess this from Mason’s piece, informative though it is about some of the surface details and the wider mood in Greece. Sohn-Rethel’s book on the Nazi economy would be more useful reading right now than the Weill opera Mason discusses.

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/fifth-column/nothing-better-love-how-not-to-repeat-weimar-greece