its hesitation to bring in a total-war economy. Primacy of politics Besides his studies on the working class of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Mason was noted for his break with previous Marxist interpretations of fascism that saw fascist regimes as the servant of capitalist interests. Mason argued instead for the "primacy of politics" by which he meant that although he thought that fascist regimes were still capitalist regimes, they retained "autonomy" in the political sphere and were not dictated to by capitalist interests. In a 1966 essay, Mason wrote "that both the domestic and foreign policy of the National Socialist government became, from 1936 onward, increasingly independent of the influence of the economic ruling classes, and even in some essential aspects ran contrary to their collective interests" and that "it became possible for the National Socialist state to assume a fully independent role, for the 'primacy of politics' to assert itself". Mason used the following to support his thesis: After the 1936 economic crisis, German industrialists were increasingly excluded from the decision-making process. After 1936, with the coming of the first Four Year Plan, the state came to play a dominant role in the German economy through state-owned companies and by placing larger orders. The expansion of the production of armaments, supported by a very interventionist state, led capitalist enterprises that were unrelated to armaments to decline. The decline in effectiveness of economic lobbies in the Third Reich. Although every major German industrialist called for a reduction of working-class living standards from 1933 onwards, the Nazi regime always ignored such calls until 1942 and sought instead to raise working-class living standards. Mason's "primacy of politics" approach differed from the traditional Marxist "primacy of economics" approach and involved him in the 1960s in a vigorous debate with the East German historians Eberhard Czichon, Dietrich Eichholtz and Kurt Gossweiler. The last two historians wrote if Mason was correct, it would amount to "a complete refutation of Marxist social analysis". By approaching the subject from a different angle from conservative historians such Henry Ashby Turner and Karl Dietrich Bracher, Mason's "primacy of politics" thesis reached the same conclusion about Nazi Germany: big business served the state, rather than vice versa. "Flight into war" theory Mason's most notable arguments were the following: The German working class was always opposed to the Nazi dictatorship. In the overheated German economy in the late 1930s, German