“Fascism Is Leftist” Is a LibertAryan Fairy Tale — Let’s Burn It Down

“Fascism Is Leftist” Is a LibertAryan Fairy Tale — Let’s Burn It Down

A point-by-point autopsy of Allen Gindler’s attempt to launder history through Austrian School economics

There is a parlor trick that has been making the rounds in libertarian think tanks, right-wing podcasts, and the comment sections of anyone who just discovered Ludwig von Mises. It goes like this: Fascism was actually socialist. The Nazis were leftists. Hitler was a man of the left. Repeat it with enough confidence and enough footnotes from the Mises Institute and it starts to sound like suppressed history rather than what it actually is: ideological CYA dressed up in academic drag.

Allen Gindler’s paper “Fascism: Left, Right, or Neither?” published in The Independent Review is a textbook specimen of the genre. The Independent Review is the journal of the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank in Oakland whose ideological commitments are stamped on every page. It exists to promote free market economics. Of course it publishes papers arguing that the 20th century’s most notorious anti-communist, anti-Marxist, union-crushing, industrialist-backed political movement was actually a creature of the left. You almost have to admire the audacity.

This argument isn’t original to Gindler, and it isn’t limited to obscure academic journals. I covered a nearly identical version of it when Dinesh D’Souza and PragerU ran the same play for a mass audience. As I wrote then, D’Souza’s whole operation is “right-wing therapy” for conservatives who need history to be less threatening — and the “fascism was left-wing” routine is the therapy session that never ends. The Lost Cause of Fascism: D’Souza’s Comfort Lies for the Right

Gindler writes for a narrower audience than D’Souza and deploys more footnotes, but the argument is structurally identical. Both are performing what I called “ideological forensics rather than objective history.” Both are working the same laundering operation: take the most devastating 20th-century indictment of the right, that fascism emerged from within conservative politics, was funded by conservative capital, and was enabled by conservative institutions, and reassign the whole bill to the left. Gindler just dresses it in QCA methodology and citations to Mises instead of PragerU video graphics.

Let’s go point by point.

The Source and Its Baggage

Before the substance, spend a moment on where this argument comes from and why it exists.

The Independent Review is published by the Independent Institute. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are not just references in Gindler’s paper. They are the load-bearing walls. Gindler cites Mises, Hoppe, and Rothbard as authoritative sources for his definition of socialism. Citing the Mises Institute to establish what socialism means is roughly equivalent to citing the American Petroleum Institute to establish the scientific consensus on climate change. They have a stake in the answer, and the answer is always the same.

Why does the libertarian right need fascism to be a creature of the left? Because if fascism is left-wing, then the political tradition that produced it is the left’s problem, not the right’s. The industrialists who funded Hitler, the conservative politicians who enabled Mussolini, the Catholic Church hierarchies that signed concordats with both regimes: none of that has to be reckoned with. The argument is a get-out-of-history-free card. Gindler’s academic apparatus provides the card stock.

With that established, let’s get into the actual claims.

Point One: The Semantic Fallacy of “National Socialism”

Gindler’s claim: “The term National Socialism was not a marketing ploy… Hitler and his cohorts were socialists because they advocated for the subordination of the individual to the collective.”

Gindler tips his hand immediately. His entire definitional framework for socialism rests on three factors: collectivization of property, wealth redistribution, and “collectivization of consciousness,” which he defines as the forced subjugation of the individual to collective ideology. By defining socialism to include any doctrine that subordinates the individual to the collective, Gindler has constructed a category so broad it swallows Sparta, the Roman Catholic Church, and every nationalist movement in human history. That is not political science. That is a word game with extra steps.

I made this same point about D’Souza’s version of the argument: treating the word “socialist” in “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” as if it is a notarized contract is exactly as rigorous as concluding that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must be a democracy because it says so in the name. The German Democratic Republic wasn’t democratic. The People’s Republic of China isn’t a people’s republic in any meaningful sense. The Holy Roman Empire wasn’t particularly holy, Roman, or much of an empire. The Lost Cause of Fascism Political branding is cheap. Authoritarian movements slap feel-good labels on the door while practicing the opposite inside.

Hitler was explicit, on the record, about what he meant by “socialism.” In a 1923 interview with journalist George Sylvester Viereck, Hitler stated: “Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism.” He was not talking about the socialization of the means of production. He was talking about Volksgemeinschaft, the racial community, the unity of the German people defined by blood and soil. His “socialism” was an ethnic and nationalist concept, not an economic one.

As I documented previously, Mussolini’s own trajectory makes the same point. He began as a socialist journalist and was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914 for supporting Italy’s entry into World War I. He then built paramilitary squads that literally beat socialists in the streets. By 1932, his Doctrine of Fascism declared outright: “Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which clings rigidly to class struggle.” The Lost Cause of Fascism A man who gets thrown out of the socialist party and spends the next two decades having his followers beat up socialists is not, by any reasonable standard, a socialist.

The Nazis’ first major political acts after the seizure of power were the arrest of Communist Party officials, the violent dissolution of the Social Democratic Party, and the physical destruction of the independent trade union movement. On May 2, 1933, barely three months into Hitler’s chancellorship, stormtroopers and SS men simultaneously occupied union offices across Germany, beat union leaders, and seized union funds. The organizations that represented actual socialist and labor politics in Germany were the first things the Nazis destroyed (Evans, 2005).

If you come to power and your first order of business is to physically annihilate the socialists, you are not a socialist. This should not require elaboration, and yet here we are.

Gindler sidesteps this by arguing that Marxist internationalism was “a political myth” and that nationalism appears in both left and right doctrines. Sure, nationalism shows up across the spectrum. But that observation doesn’t rescue his argument. It demolishes it. The Nazis’ racial nationalism was not decorative. It was the engine of the entire project. The economy existed in service to the race war, not the other way around. A framework that treats that as a peripheral detail is not a framework for understanding fascism. It is a framework for avoiding understanding fascism.

Robert Paxton, whose The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) remains the most rigorous comparative study of fascist movements, is direct: fascism was defined above all by its rejection of Enlightenment universalism, the idea that all humans share equal dignity and rights. Socialism, across every variant from Bernstein to Lenin to Gramsci, is a universalist doctrine. Fascism was its explicit negation. Calling one a variant of the other is not analysis. It is trolling with footnotes.

Point Two: The “Shop Manager” Myth vs. The Profit Motive

Gindler’s claim: “Entrepreneurs were reduced to the status of ‘Betriebsführer’ (shop managers)… They were no longer masters of their own property.”

Gindler borrows this framing directly from Mises, who argued that the Nazi economy represented a “German pattern” of socialism: nominally private ownership with state direction amounting to de facto nationalization. It is a clever argument. It is also contradicted by the actual behavior of German capital under the Nazi regime.

Start with what the German business community did in 1933. On February 20, barely a month after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, a group of Germany’s most powerful industrialists met with Hitler and Hermann Göring. Present were representatives of IG Farben, Krupp, AEG, Bayer, Siemens, and other leading firms. Göring told them frankly that the coming election would be the last for a long time, possibly a hundred years. The industrialists then collectively donated three million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party’s election campaign (Turner, 1985). These were not men being coerced into subordination. They were investors buying a product.

What did they get for their money? The destruction of organized labor. The banning of strikes. The arrest of union officials. Wage controls that held labor costs down while corporate profits soared. Historian Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006), the most comprehensive economic history of the Nazi state, documents how firms like IG Farben, Krupp, Thyssen, and Daimler-Benz became enthusiastic partners in rearmament, often proposing projects to state procurement officials rather than merely receiving orders. IG Farben was not a passive recipient of Nazi economic policy. It was an active co-architect of it, including the construction and operation of a synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz using slave labor, from which the firm profited directly (Hayes, 2017).

The profit motive did not disappear under the Nazi regime. It was supercharged, at the cost of workers’ rights, occupied territories, and millions of lives.

As I previously noted in examining this same argument, German economic historians Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner documented that the Nazi economy was better described as “commanded capitalism,” private ownership under authoritarian direction, rewarding cronies and punishing enemies, with rearmament as the organizing priority. The Lost Cause of Fascism The state directed production, yes. The profits flowed to private owners, yes. Those two facts coexist because it was not socialism. It was capitalism with a gun to the workers’ heads and a state acting as the ultimate customer.

Gindler’s “shop manager” framing conflates regulation with expropriation. Every major capitalist economy involves state direction of production in various forms: military contracting, industrial policy, tariffs, subsidies. The United States government directed the entire American manufacturing economy during World War II, telling Ford and General Motors what to build and at what prices. Nobody calls the American wartime economy socialism. The Nazi case was more extreme in degree but not categorically different in kind from what any state does when it mobilizes for total war.

The decisive difference between socialism and what the Nazis built is not complicated. In a socialist economy, the state owns the means of production and the profit flows to the state or the collective. In the Nazi economy, private firms retained ownership, retained the profit, and retained the ability to accumulate capital as long as their activities aligned with state priorities. R.J. Overy documents this plainly in War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994). That is not socialism. That is capitalism wearing a uniform.

Point Three: The Privatization Problem That Won’t Go Away

Gindler’s claim: “The Nazi model represents a variation of the socialist theme… property was socialized in all but name.”

This is the claim that collapses most completely when confronted with the historical record, and it is the one Gindler works hardest to obscure by simply not mentioning the contrary evidence.

Here is a fact that should end the “Nazi socialism” argument every time it comes up: the word privatization was coined to describe Nazi economic policy.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The English term “privatization” is a translation of the German Reprivatisierung, which described the Nazi government’s deliberate program of selling state-owned assets to private investors beginning in 1933. Economist Germa Bel documented this exhaustively in a 2010 paper in The Economic History Review titled “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany.” While the rest of the Western world, including the United States under the New Deal, was expanding state ownership of industry in response to the Great Depression, the Nazi regime moved in the opposite direction.

What did the Nazis privatize? State-owned stakes in the four largest commercial banks in Germany. The national railway system. Steel and mining works. Municipal enterprises. By the mid-1930s, the regime had transferred significant public assets into private hands, primarily to reward political allies and generate revenue for rearmament. The beneficiaries were not workers. They were the same industrialists and financiers who had helped bring Hitler to power.

Bel’s conclusion is unambiguous: the Nazi privatization program was ideologically driven, designed to favor a specific class of private owners and to demonstrate the regime’s commitment to private enterprise over state ownership. A socialist government does not do this. A government that is dissolving state ownership to reward its capitalist backers is doing something categorically different.

As I noted previously when making this point against D’Souza, the regime’s treatment of Jewish-owned property tells the same story from the other direction. “Aryanization” was not socialist redistribution. It was racist plunder, taking property from Jewish owners and handing it to “Aryan” business owners at fire-sale prices. Crony capitalism with jackboots, not Marxist collectivization. The Lost Cause of Fascism The USHMM is explicit on this: Aryanization systematically transferred private property from one set of private owners to another, with the state acting as enforcer and occasional middle-man, not as collective owner.

Gindler does not engage with Bel’s research. Tooze does not appear in his bibliography. Overy does not appear in his bibliography. These are not obscure sources. They are the standard references in any serious economic history of the Nazi period. Their absence is not an oversight. It is a methodological choice that tells you everything about the project Gindler is actually engaged in. You cannot accidentally miss all of the most important contrary evidence. That takes effort.

Point Four: The Labor Question — Suppression Is Not Empowerment

Gindler’s claim: “The Nazi state exerted total control over the labor market… which is a hallmark of socialist planning.”

Let’s be precise about what the Nazis did to German workers, because “total control over the labor market” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that formulation while hiding what actually happened behind it.

On May 2, 1933, the independent trade union movement, which represented millions of German workers and had been a cornerstone of German civil society since the 19th century, was destroyed overnight. Union offices were seized, funds confiscated, leaders arrested, and many were beaten and sent to early concentration camps. In their place, the regime installed the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), the German Labor Front, which enrolled workers not as a representative body but as an instrument of labor discipline (Smelser, 1988).

The DAF did not bargain on behalf of workers. It did not advocate for higher wages. It did not have the right to strike, because strikes were illegal under the regime. What the DAF did was organize the Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”) program, providing Nazi-approved leisure activities for workers: subsidized vacations, theater tickets, concerts, sports. It was a patronizing morale-management operation designed to manufacture consent, not to advance working-class interests. Bread and circuses with swastikas.

Wages under the Nazi regime were controlled downward. Real wages in Germany in 1938 had not recovered to their 1929 levels, despite the economic boom driven by rearmament spending (Tooze, 2006). Workers worked longer hours, had less legal protection, and earned less in real terms than they had before the depression. The profits from the recovery flowed to shareholders and bondholders. Not to workers.

Gindler’s attempt to frame the destruction of labor rights as a “socialist” feature is a gymnastic feat of logic that deserves a medal for effort and a failing grade for accuracy. Socialism, in every variant from democratic socialism to Marxism-Leninism, begins with the premise that labor should have power over capital. The Nazis’ foundational labor policy was the permanent, violent elimination of that premise. The state controlled labor in the interest of capital. The power relationship was the exact inverse of what socialism claims to accomplish.

Calling that socialism requires either extraordinary intellectual dishonesty or a definition of socialism so completely emptied of content that it refers to nothing meaningful. Gindler’s definition, conveniently, is both.

Point Five: Mises, Hayek, and the Slippery Slope to Nowhere

Gindler’s claim: “Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek correctly identified that the ‘middle of the road’ leads to socialism… the Nazi model was the ultimate destination.”

This is the Austrian School’s foundational political move, and it deserves direct confrontation because it is the engine driving the entire Gindler project.

Mises argued in Human Action and elsewhere that any deviation from laissez-faire capitalism set societies on an inevitable path toward totalitarianism. State intervention in the economy, however modest, necessarily expands until it swallows everything. Hayek made a version of the same argument in The Road to Serfdom (1944). The conclusion they draw is that the Nazi and Soviet economies are functionally equivalent endpoints of the same interventionist logic.

This is the slippery slope fallacy codified as economic theory. It is not history. It is prophecy rendered backward: start from the endpoint you want to explain and work back to find a causal chain that fits.

The empirical problem is devastating. The countries that built the most extensive welfare states and mixed economies in the 20th century, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, post-war Britain, did not become totalitarian. They became among the freest, most prosperous, and most democratic societies in human history. The “middle of the road leads to serfdom” prediction has been tested at scale, across multiple countries, for nearly a century. It failed. Comprehensively. The Mises Institute does not discuss this much.

The deeper problem with Gindler’s use of Mises is that it treats ideological genealogy as economic reality. Mises defined socialism functionally as “one will” directing all production. By this definition, any state that directs any production is socialist. This renders the category analytically useless. Under Mises’s definition, the Tennessee Valley Authority makes Roosevelt’s America socialist. Military contracting makes Eisenhower’s America socialist. The interstate highway system is socialism. At some point, a definition that classifies everything classifies nothing.

The Nazi economy was a specific historical formation with specific features: racial capitalism, predatory expropriation of Jewish-owned property redistributed to “Aryan” business owners, a military-industrial complex fueled by slave labor and territorial conquest, and a political elite that systematically enriched itself through the machinery of state. Calling it socialism flattens all of that into a cartoon. It erases the specific victims: Jewish business owners whose property was stolen rather than socialized, workers whose wages were suppressed to increase shareholder returns, occupied peoples whose resources were looted to fund the German war machine.

Gindler’s Misesian framework cannot see any of this because it was not designed to see it. It was designed to produce one output: state intervention equals socialism equals totalitarianism equals the left. Everything else is noise.

Point Six: The QCA Framework — Objectivity Theater

There is one more methodological claim in Gindler’s paper that deserves attention: his use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as the basis for his political spectrum theory.

Gindler presents his three-factor model, collectivization of property, wealth redistribution, and collectivization of consciousness, as the output of a rigorous, mathematically grounded analysis that “minimizes research subjectivity.” Because the model uses set theory and logical operators, he argues it transcends ideological bias.

This is objectivity theater, and it is convincing only if you do not look at it closely.

QCA is a legitimate social science methodology. Its outputs are only as good as the initial variable selection and formalization. Gindler chose his three variables. He formalized the “provisions of political doctrines” into those variables. He decided that “collectivization of consciousness,” his catch-all for any state that promotes collective over individual values, belongs in the model. These are not mathematical facts. They are theoretical choices made by a scholar working within a specific ideological tradition, and they are choices that guarantee the answer he wants.

If you start with Austrian School definitions of socialism and apply them consistently, you will classify any sufficiently authoritarian state as socialist. That is what the definitions are designed to do. The QCA formalism does not change that. It launders it.

A genuinely neutral analysis of where fascism sits on the political spectrum would have to grapple with the following facts, none of which appear meaningfully in Gindler’s paper:

Mussolini was funded to power in significant part by Italian landowners, industrialists, and the agrarian elite who wanted protection from socialist land reform and labor organizing (Snowden, 1989). Hitler was brought to power with the support of Hindenburg, the German conservative establishment, and major industrial capital (Turner, 1985). Fascist movements across Europe violently suppressed socialist parties, communist parties, and labor unions as their first order of political business. The Vatican signed concordats with both the Italian and German fascist regimes. Traditional conservative institutions, the aristocracy, the military officer class, the established churches, the landed gentry, coexisted with and often thrived under fascist regimes in ways they demonstrably did not under socialist ones.

A framework that produces “fascism = left-wing” while leaving all of the above completely unexplained is not a successful analytical framework. It is a framework built to reach a predetermined conclusion while wearing a lab coat.

The Real Function of This Argument

Step back and ask: why does this argument exist, and who does it serve?

The “fascism is left-wing” thesis has a clear genealogy. It was pioneered in the postwar period primarily within the libertarian tradition, by Mises, by Hayek, and by their followers, as a way of defending laissez-faire capitalism against the critique that it had produced the conditions for fascism’s rise. The argument performs a political sleight of hand. It takes the most devastating 20th-century indictment of the right and reassigns it to the left.

The argument has found new life in the 21st century because it serves contemporary political purposes. If fascism is left-wing, then comparing contemporary right-wing movements to historical fascism is not just wrong but backwards: a sign of ignorance or bad faith. The argument functions as a shield. Every time someone notices that contemporary authoritarian nationalism shares features with historical fascism, the “fascism is left-wing” thesis can be deployed to dismiss the comparison before it lands.

That is why D’Souza and PragerU run this play for mass audiences. That is why Gindler runs the same play in an academic journal. The target audiences are different. The function is identical. As I wrote about D’Souza’s version: this is not history. This is right-wing therapy with footnotes. The Lost Cause of Fascism

Gindler’s paper gives the argument academic respectability it does not deserve. The footnotes are real. Some of the historical observations, that the Nazi state was intrusive, that Mussolini built a welfare state, that corporatism limited property rights, are accurate as far as they go. But the framework that organizes those observations is designed to produce a specific political output, and that design is visible in what the paper ignores as much as in what it includes.

It ignores Tooze. It ignores Overy. It ignores Bel on privatization. It ignores the political sociology of fascism’s rise: who funded it, who enabled it, who benefited from it. It defines socialism in a way that excludes the people and movements that have always called themselves socialist and includes the movements that violently destroyed them.

That is not history. That is politics wearing history’s clothes, and it has been wearing them long enough.

Conclusion: Receipts Matter

Allen Gindler is a smart writer working within a coherent intellectual tradition. The Austrian School’s framework for analyzing political economy is internally consistent, rigorously developed, and completely inadequate for understanding fascism as a historical phenomenon. It is a framework built to defend one answer and everything else in the analysis is subordinated to that defense.

The “fascism is leftist” argument fails on its own terms. The Nazis:

• Coined the term privatization and implemented the most aggressive privatization program in the Western world during the 1930s.
• Provided massive, profitable contracts to private firms that retained ownership, autonomy, and profit.
• Destroyed the independent labor movement on behalf of industrial capital.
• Were brought to power with the financial and political support of conservative industrialists and the traditional right.
• Explicitly defined their “socialism” as racial community, not economic reorganization, and explicitly rejected Marxist class analysis.
• Carried out “Aryanization,” the racist transfer of Jewish-owned property to “Aryan” private owners. Not collectivization. Plunder.

A political movement that does all of these things is not socialist in any meaningful sense of the word. It is something specific: an authoritarian nationalist movement that weaponized the state in service of racial capitalism, preserving and extending private ownership for the racially approved while expropriating, enslaving, and murdering those deemed outside the national community.

That is what fascism was. The Austrian School’s definitional maneuvers cannot change it, no matter how many logical operators they deploy. The receipts exist. They have always existed. Gindler and his colleagues simply choose not to read them.

Bibliography

Bel, Germà. “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany.” The Economic History Review 63, no. 1 (2010): 34–55.

Buchheim, Christoph, and Jonas Scherner. “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry.” The Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (2006): 390–416.

Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Gindler, Allen. “Fascism: Left, Right, or Neither?” The Independent Review 27, no. 1 (Summer 2022): 75–98.

Hayes, Peter. Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hayes, Peter. Why? Explaining the Holocaust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1949] 2008.

Mussolini, Benito. The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

Overy, R. J. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

Ragle, Brian. “The Lost Cause of Fascism: D’Souza’s Comfort Lies for the Right.” Medium, September 7, 2025. https://medium.com/@brian.ragle/the-lost-cause-of-fascism-dsouza-s-comfort-lies-for-the-right-58baa1a29c71

Smelser, Ronald. Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988.

Snowden, Frank M. The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking, 2006.

Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Aryanization.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryanization

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Fascism.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1