Adam Tooze’sThe Wages of Destructionhas received a fair amount of scholarly attention since its publication in 2006, particularly among historians. What has received much less attention, however, are the many theoretical insights to be gleaned from Tooze’s history of the inner-workings of the Nazi war economy in the lead-up to the Second World War. This is particularly true of the numerous theoretical subjects and themes covered by Tooze of direct relevance to Marxist theories and understandings of Nazism. From his analysis (...) of the relationship between Nazi economic policies and Hitler’s geopolitical objectives to the relations between capital and state to the specificities of Nazism as a distinct ideological and cultural apparatus to the role of the Nazi regime in triggering the 1939 cataclysm – in all these ways, Tooze’s work speaks to a number of core issues at the heart of Marxist debates on Nazism, fascism, and the causes of the Second World War. This introduction outlines a number of these themes and more in Tooze’s work, contextualising them within extant Marxist debates on Nazism, before then going on to highlight some of the main arguments and criticisms advanced in the symposium. (shrink)

In this article, the author introduces readers to the Catalan Marxist Andreu Nin and his writings on Italian fascism. While this is an introduction to Nin it also makes the argument that his writing is of particular importance, since it clarifies the class nature of fascism, sorting out in detail the way the fascists recruited and used the middle class (petite bourgeoisie) to build a mass movement and rise to power, and then proceeded to build a corporatist state that served (...) the interest of the Italian bourgeoisie. (shrink)