Gottfried Feder
Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) was a German engineer-economist, author of Manifesto for the Abolition of Interest Slavery (1919) and the NSDAP's original economic theorist — the man whose anti-usury lecture converted Hitler to the party in 1919.
Doctrine
- Distinguished "raffendes Kapital" (speculative, mobile, finance capital) from "schaffendes Kapital" (productive, industrial capital); condemned interest ("interest slavery") as the root evil, demanding state-issued labor currency and the breaking of "interest bondage."
- His 25-point program economics: nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing in large enterprises, land reform against speculation — the "socialist" planks of National Socialism, largely abandoned by 1933.
- Served as undersecretary in the Economics Ministry until his marginalization by Schacht's orthodox financing of rearmament; dismissed 1934.
Analytical significance
Feder is the classic case study of anti-usury politics without class analysis: correctly identifying finance parasitism, then misattributing it to "Jewish capital," so that the critique of usury became the vehicle of genocide rather than expropriation of the expropriators. The Nazi state preserved private property and served heavy industry while murdering the scapegoats. Every patriotic-socialist current must answer Feder's question — how to attack finance capital — without repeating his answer (see Strasserism, Vampire economy, Left-Conservatism).