480
PARTISAN REVIEW
tions. That
pr~fits,
as Miss Sweezy conclusively shows, have risen
sharply
under the Naz1s has
only
a
formal
significance if the State controls
the
properties producing them-and the disposal of the profits themselves–
as completely as has been the case since
1936.
Neumann's
Behemoth
is much more ambitious than Miss Sweezy's
monograph, being, in fact, the most complete and scholarly description
of Nazi society that yet exists in English. (Though I think Mills over·
rates it; to redress the balance, one should read Karl Korsch's review
'in the current
New Essays.)
"Totalitarian monopoly capitalism" is
Neumann's not very enlightening term for the Nazi system, which he
describes as "a private capitalistic economy regimented by the totalitarian
state." His case for its capitalist nature rests mostly on two conten·
tions (I) that the control of the economy remains with the great trusts
and cartels; (2') that labor is still "free" in the sense in which Marx
distinguished capitalist free labor from feudal and slave labor.
(l)
Neumann shows that the "imposing edifice of German business
otganization-trusts, cartels, trade associations-has been carried over
from Weimar with little change, and that,
within this structure,
private
capitalists still run things. But that monopoly capitalism has managed
to preserve a considerable degree of autonomy and (unlike other classes)
can to some extent defend its interests · even against the Nazi State–
this is not decisive, for the same could be said of the Army. The real
point is what class or group
at
the top
makes the general policy decisions
whicl). organized business carries out, and it is just at this crucial point
that Neumann gives up the fight. "The chief organ of the war economy
is Goering," he writes on p. 247, adding that "the two most important
agencies of the whole war economy" are the Four Year Plan -Office and
the Ministry of Economics. These are military-political, not business,
agencies, whose personnel consists of State bureaucrats, Party leaders,
and military officers. They are headed respectively by Goering and by
Funk, also a Party man.*
(2) Neumann agrees with Marx and Weber that "free labor dis·
tinguishes capitalism from any previous economic system." His idea of
what constitutes the freedom of labor is, however, very limited: "a clear
distinction between labor and leisure time, which introduces the element
of calculability and predictability into labor relations." (As against the
feudal contract which "was a contract of faith, involving the whole
• In 1937 Funk succeeded Dr. Schacht as Economics Minister, and in 1939 he
displaced him as President of the Reichsbank. These were significant shifts, since
Schacht was the leading spokesman for private business, and yet Neumann barely
mentions them. In a book of over 500 pages, Neumann devotes only one brief
paragraph to the whole development of Nazi economy from the "Schacht Period"
of 1934-5 through the inauguration of the Second Four Year Plan in 1936, and he
actually fails even to mention that the business community backed Schacht and
was in general opposed to the Plan. It was in the years 1935-7 that the transition
from monopoly capitalism to bureaucratic collectivism took place in Germany, and
yet Neumann fails even to note the existence of a serious conflict between businesss
and the Party in those years. A major weakness of his book is its failure to ·give
any sense of historical development.
