Is Racism Just an Instrument of Capitalist Imperialism?

If we look at nineteenth century discourse on ethnicity, of the sort we stumble across in studying the writings of Richard Wagner, we find that it is quite different from what we are used to in late twentieth to early twenty first century discourse. Then as now, the subject is always highly politicised and divisive.

It is interesting that Wagner was a proponent of Jewish assimilationism. It is an ideology that emerged at the time of the emancipation of the Jews in the Age of Enlightenment:

In Prussia, where the small Jewish population had doubled... this new situation produced... the first sustained non-Jewish argument for emancipation, by Christian Dohm, a professor of history and friend of the great exponent of Enlightened Judaism, Moses Mendelssohn. ... Much of the case [Dohm] put forward in On the Civic Improvement of the Jews rested upon the Jews' capacity to become happier and more useful members of society, once there was an end to the oppression ‘so unworthy of our age’, which had corrupted them. The removal of legal discrimination, he assumed, would lead to the assimilation of Jews into Gentile society and the gradual disappearance of a specific Jewish identity. In place of their ‘clannish religious opinions’ they would be inspired by patriotism and love for the state. This would occur as part of a larger transformation of society as a whole from a hierarchy of estates into a social structure based upon merit.

Gareth Stedman-Jones: Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. My bold emphasis.

At the time of Wagner and Marx such assimilationism was still within the realms of what constituted liberal discourse, even though today it has given way to the dominance of a multicultural discourse of ethnic diversity and tolerance. I, like many of us, had come to accept multiculturalism as being a priori correct, and thus an eternal truth.

The point here is that we should not discount the whole socialist assimilationist discourse of the late nineteenth century in which intermixing would eventually result in a universally ethnically assimilated humanity, however unfashionable that may currently be. Or to quote from the Schiller line based on the French Revolution's ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité found in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. Make that Geschwister.

But perhaps, the assimilationist and multicultural discourse are not necessarily mutually exclusive either.

A question needs to be asked as to how we arrived at the discourse centred around multiculturalism, in which the concept of culture itself becomes so prominent in liberal discourse. In a former age when Marx was far more dominant, such culture-centric (superstructural) concepts were relegated to being of secondary importance to the socio-economic (infrastructural) one. Culture-centric discourse was more the realm of right-wing and reactionary thought, whereas thinkers such as Marx relegated that to one of secondary importance.

With that, I am going to re-ask the question whether ethnicity is a fiction that is the mere epiphenomenon of class conflict. With that, I am effectively asking if the Marxist analysis might have been right all along. This is not necessarily a dogmatic and utopic acceptance of Marx with respect to all things, but just with respect to the analysis of ethnicity.

Part of the reason for this is that in American politics, there is a strange emphasis on the concept of race. Particularly bizarre are the racial lines of demarcation which includes one so-called "Latino race". It is a racialisation that I have always found irrational and incomprehensible.

If you look at National Socialist discourse on ethnicity, they were quite happy to form strategic alliances with Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy. Yet both Spaniards and Italians are Latin people. In Spanish bread is pan, and in Italian pane—derivatives of the Latin panem. The languages are extremely similar, and you could argue that Italians are therefore "Latinos".  In French, the word for bread is pain, as French is also a Latin language. So are the French, who are also Latins, also Latinos?

Yet people of Italian or French origin are hardly considered Latinos in the American discourse. That has historical origins. If you look at this quote from the frightfully racist American film, The Birth of a Nation, you find this usage of the term Aryan:

The Us-Them division of alterity is between the Nordic Protestant "white" American versus the Catholic Latins of Southern-Central American. It is a division that has its origins in the hostile imperialist rivalry between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Protestant British Empire. The United States of America too was once at war with Mexico during the Mexican-American war resulting in the annexation of Texas.

Yet never during the Anglo-Spanish War (1625–1630), part of the Thirty Year War unleashed by the new political divisions between Protestant and Catholic nations after the Reformation where such political divisions cast in racial terms. The division of Us-Them was always a sectarian one between Protestant and Catholic, rather than one of Nordic versus Latin "races".

With the arrival of imperialist conflict to the Americas, suddenly the Protestant-Catholic sectarian divide came to be racialised along divisions rooted in "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden to use the original National Socialist terminology). That also took the form of the Irish Catholics being discriminated against by the so-called white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ("WASP") ethnic majority as an inferior race of Celtic Catholics in a racialised continuation of age-old imperialist conflicts between England and Ireland. To this day, only one US president has been Catholic, and that is the Irish-American president J.F. Kennedy, in an age where the Ku Klux Klan were hostile towards Catholics. That is why the election of Kennedy as president remains, even after all these years, an astonishing overcoming of ethno-political and sectarian divisions inherent to American politics.

So why did Hitler and his German Third Empire (Dritte Reich) not emphasise such Nordic-Latin divisive racialisations in this American manner? The reason can be partly found in the fact that Hitler was Austrian by birth. The Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Habsburgs remained aligned with Rome during the Thirty Year War unleashed by the Reformation. Hitler remained a tax paying member of the Catholic Church until his death. His political allegiance to fascist Italy and Spain also precluded emphasising the old Nordic-Protestant versus Latin-Catholic lines of division in the American manner.  To stand as Leader (Führer) over a united German Empire, Hitler had to try to overcome the Protestant-Catholic sectarian divide between North and South Germany.

That is to say, the racialised divisions (or lack thereof) strategically emphasised by National Socialism were dictated primarily by imperialist political divides in Hitler's Central Europe. The same can be said of the ethno-political divisions in North America with its origins in imperialist conflicts between Protestant North America vs Catholic Latin America, leading to the polemical exaggeration of the Nordic-Latin ethno-racial divisions of conflict between Nordic Protestant versus Latin Catholic. The political divisions created by imperialist conflict is entirely primary, and the ethno-racial divide is secondary and derivative. Ethnicity can thus be interpreted as being almost entirely a fiction created by imperialist political propaganda. The "racial" divisions of modern America are thus largely a fictional propagandist derivative of the political divisions engendered by the Thirty Year War.

That means that Marx is right. Political rivalry for dominance is primary, and ethno-cultural divides are secondary and derivative.

Can this analysis be extended to the black-white tensions in America? The answer is that, yes it can. There is no such thing as a black or white person. Here is the Revlon skin colour tone chart to prove it:

Notice that there is no white or black in there. All human beings have skin tones in shades of melanin, and even Revlon "ivory" is just another shade of beige. Nobody is plain black or white. To call someone "as white as a sheet" is hardly a compliment. The starkness of the black-white duality is entirely a social fiction creating a false dichotomy where none exists.

As for the term "African-American" that too is a social fiction. The human species evolved in Africa, meaning that each and every one of us comes from Africa. We are all an African species of more than slightly mad monkey. Mythical narratives that run contrary to this are all entirely fictional, however much mythos may be the quintessential species characteristic of this strange African beast.

At this point let us return to Wagner and his idea of the exceptional racial purity of the Jewish people. Wagner thought that Germans were mongrels, but that only the Jews retained their exceptional racial purity. Yet that too turns out to be a myth:

Modern historians have questioned the idea of a pure Jewish people from Biblical Palestine. Instead, they descend from scattered Middle Eastern and Eastern European converts to the religion.

The notion of the "Jewish race", a racially pure breed of God's Chosen People, is just another social fiction that does nothing to change the fact that we are all part of the same species of African hominid. If you don't believe this, just watch Donald Trump "go ape" and my point is proven beyond doubt.

Returning to the principal theme of this discussion, this can only mean that the multicultural ideal of "tolerance between races" is entirely a nonsense concept. The concept of "race" is entirely a fiction created by imperialist political conflict trying to give propagandist foundations in "blood" to socio-political rivalries.

That means that the dualistic black-white racial divide is just a by-product of class conflict. "Race" is largely a social fiction created by capitalist-imperialism to artificially divide between the Master Class and the chandala Slave Class. Multi-culturalism preaching a "tolerance" between black and white "races" only entrenches the fictional notion that such a black-and-white "racial division" exists at all in the first place, thus helping to perpetuate the very racism that it claims to seek to eliminate.

A further consequence is the fact that the only way to bridge so-called "racial divides" is to eliminate the socio-economic divide between Master Class and Slave Class. Unfortunately, the economic gap in America (and other English speaking nations that have adopted neoliberalism) between rich and poor is only increasing exponentially. Ethno-culturally based talk of "racial tolerance" does nothing to improve that, especially given the fact that there has always been the argument that "race" in and of itself is a racist concept.

It is now time to bring up an unpopular theme oft raised by historians that Hitler was not the product of everyday level racism at all. That he was a mountebank, an opportunist who brandished a politicised racism as a cudgel to beat his enemies. As an artist, he gladly sold his artworks almost exclusively to Jewish art dealers. As a soldier, he gladly took orders from Hugo Gutmann, his Jewish commanding officer in his list regiment, and by whom he was awarded his Iron Cross. As a music lover, he was mesmerised by the conducting of Gustav Mahler and delighted in listening to the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn, a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn. Never prior to his political career had he exhibited any serious animus towards Jews in his everyday personal life. In Mein Kampf, he even admits that:

In my father's house, I do not recall hearing the word [Jew] at all during my father's lifetime. I believe the old gentleman would have seen, in the particular emphasis placed upon this term, a cultural backwardness.

Im väterlichen Hause erinnere ich mich überhaupt nicht, zu Lebzeiten des Vaters das Wort auch nur gehört zu haben. Ich glaube, der alte Herr würde schon in der besonderen Betonung dieser Bezeichnung eine kulturelle Rückständigkeit erblickt haben.

Mein Kampf: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Munich. 1943 edition; p.54. My translation 

The idea that political racism is nothing more than a direct outgrowth of petty everyday racism, existing on a direct continuity with it, seems to be so obvious to many that when historians even remotely question this, it comes across to lay people as heresy. That the political is a result of the everyday socio-cultural sphere seems to be an unquestionable absolute for many. The underlying assumption is that psychology and culture is the driving force of history.

When examined more critically, the form that politicised racism took in German fascism was as an attack on "Judeo-Bolshevism". That is to say that the opponents of the right, the Social Democrats and the Communists, were not authentically German. They were everything that was allegedly alien and antagonistic to national patriotic identity. The true German character was right-wing, and left-wing Germans had been lead astray by a foreign thinking seducing Germans away from their authentic national character written in the blood. Hence Saul Friedländer is right in describing National Socialist ideology as a "redemptive anti-Semitism", one that constitutes a polemical attack that aims to confer absolute alterity to anything that was left wing: socialism, Marxism, democracy, feminism, and tolerance toward the LGBT community. If McCarthyism attacked "pinko commies" for being "un-American" so too did Hitler attack the left for being unGerman—hence "Jewish".

In other words, the political dimension of class conflict has primacy, and the ethno-cultural aspect is but a derivative of that.

Hitler could hardly have incriminated German Jews like his former commander Hugo Gutmann on the charge of being unpatriotic, but that was hardly the point since racism was but a propagandist weapon of reaction. Indeed while Gutmann was being wounded in action during the apocalyptic Battle of the Somme, Hitler was off in the cosy safety of a psychiatric hospital being treated for psychogenic blindness. His later propagandist attack on the entire spectrum of the left of politics came first and foremost, the racism being but a subordinate instrument of belligerence wielded in that struggle. It is questionable as to whether the ills of National Socialism can be reduced down to the single dimension of "racism" without ending up inadvertently falling afoul of the wholesale acceptance of the very same racist obsession of placing "race" at the epicentre of all discourse.

"To the German Mother!
12 000 Jewish soldiers fell in the battlefield for the Fatherland
Christian and Jewish heroes have fought together and rest together on foreign soil.
12 000 Jews fell in combat!
The blind wrath of party hatreds does not stop before the graves of the dead.
German women, tolerate it not when the sufferings of the Jewish mother are derided"
A 1920 leaflet published by the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (German Jewish Veterans Organisation)

History seemingly repeats as the father of a Muslim father whose son died in active service in the US military speaks before the Democratic Party Congress. The Muslim mother on the left looks almost like the mourning mother in the 1920 German pamphlet

In the absence of credible evidence, to rationalise their politicised racism, fascists had to resort to cooking up fake news with a whacky conspiracy theory concocting an international Jewish plot to take over the world under the cloak of a Marxism which had stabbed Germany in the back causing it to lose the war:

The German army is alleged to have been "stabbed in the back" during WWI by a conspiracy of "Jew-commies"

The goal of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution. They want to bring chaos to the Reich and Europe, using the resulting hopelessness and desperation to establish their international, Bolshevist-concealed capitalist tyranny.

Goebbels in speech delivered in the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, two weeks after the catastrophic defeat of the German 6th Army

Fake news and right-wing pseudo-socialism is nothing new, and if a cautionary tale were to be extracted it could just as much be one of the dangers of conspiracy theories based on gross misinformation. Richard J. Evans draws precisely that conclusion:

The biggest threat to democracy is the use of conspiracy theories by governments, who then try to delegitimise opposition or any independent thought by ascribing them to conspiracies.

Evans in an interview with the Financial Times.

David Cesarani, in his landmark 2016 book Final Solution, further displaces ideology from its place of centrality in driving genocide, by recontextualising events in the context of a vast imperialist war of expansion, in saying that:

[B]y ignoring the war, Holocaust historians have missed the single most important thing that determined the fate of the Jews—more important even than Hitler's anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jews was essential to his self-identity, but Hitler also saw himself as a warrior. ... [I]n his messianic quest to restore German power he was fanatically committed to avoiding any repeat of the conditions that engendered the country's collapse [in WWI]. These fixations guided his personal direction of the war...

Since he blamed the Jews for Germany's downfall, once the Fatherland was again at war Hitler... removed Jews from any function in society or the economy in which they could sabotage the war effort or poison morale, ... expelled them from German living space, and, when that was not possible, liquidated them.  

David Cesarani: Final Solution—The Fate of the Jews 1933-49

Jews were considered not as civilians, but as dangerous Judeo-Bolshevik enemy combatants and partisans who had to be preemptively taken out at all cost lest they stabbed Germany in the back once again as they had allegedly done in WWI. This preemptive tactical strike against the Jews was regarded integral to German imperialist military strategy, and the more the tide of the war turned against Hitler, the more it kindled his paranoia that a vast and nebulous Jewish conspiracy was undermining him. To him it meant that the Final Solution seemed the last desperate military trump card that needed to be played to strategically prevent another defeat at the hands of "backstabbing Jews".

"Behind the enemy forces: the Jew"
German imperialist propaganda shows the Allied forces as puppets of the Jews

Again racial ideology alone did not suffice to catapult such pernicious thinking to centre stage of politics, but for the radicalising effect of imperialist class conflict. Before the Great Depression, the NSDAP polled at only 3%, but afterwards at 33-37%. It was the socially destabilising impact of the Great Depression that propelled such monstrosities to the forefront of politics, something that has repeated itself with the Great Recession.

One of the first things Hitler did after consolidating power was to persecute his political enemies on the left in makeshift concentration camps: the German Communist Party, the Social Democrats, then the trade unions. The Jews came only later, and only because they were supposed to be a nest of Judeo-Bolshevik partisan activity:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;  

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist;  

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;  

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;  

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me. 

Variant of a poem by Martin Niemöller: a politically conservative pastor, and ardent supporter of the National Socialist regime until falling out of favour by arguing that baptised Jews should be afforded protection. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp.

In the past, it was thought that the National Socialists were so obsessed with racism that they sacrificed valuable wartime resource for the sake of an irrational genocide. Today we now know that plundering Jews for their assets and then working them to near death in concentration camps as a massive pool of slave labour prior to euthanasia was a vastly financially valuable resource that helped keep the cogs of the German imperialist war machine turning. Or as Cesarani says "military exigencies drove anti-Jewish policies, not the other way around" for it provided another front in the capitalist-imperialist class war between Master Class and Slave Class, however much as this was dressed up in the phoney language of "race".

Once again, in our age neo-fascism is functioning the same way within the structures of twentieth-first century capital, albeit in a different historical context, and in a cosmetically different outer garb. Walter Benjamin described it perfectly:

The growing proletarianisation of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the ... proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations. Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. 

Walter Benjamin:  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In other words, fascism is a pseudo-socialism that gives vent to just proletarian rage but redirects this onto minorities and immigrants, so as to preserve the inequitable structures of capital intact. That is why Trump—the billionaire people's choice of the National Socialist Working American's Party (NSWAmP)—comes from a real estate background. His is a redemptive populism preaching a path to a salvation through a renewal of the nationalistic authenticity of the Volk. It is, in other words, a völkisch pseudo-socialism—a national socialism. With that, we have at last a translation of the word völkisch, long considered untranslatable into English. Volk just means people, being related to the English word folk, and pronounced exactly the same way. The Latin word is populus, so völkisch just means populist.

"We the workers have awoken!
Vote for the National Socialists on list 2"
In the meanwhile, the NSDAP was being bankrolled by big business as it was the only viable right-wing party large enough to stand up to the Social Democrats and Communists on the left.

With pseudo-socialism comes pseudo-revolution, which is just a violently reactionary putschism rebranded as a fake "revolution":

The new empire (Reich) has arisen. It will be consecrated in blood. The work of fourteen years has been crowned in victory. We have reached our goal. The German Revolution has begun!

Goebbels calls the destruction of Weimar democracy, a “revolution” in Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei p.254, 33rd Edition, Verlag Franz Eher, Munich 1933

Steve Bannon even describes his "anti-elitist mission" as being "Leninist"—a mission of a revolutionary who wants to "bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment". Bannon may have been the source of the Stalinist phrase "the enemy of the people" used by Trump to describe the press, although it originated during the French revolution when it came to be associated with the Reign of Terror that followed.

Michael Anton, a key intellectual figure within the Trump deep state, and follower of the right-wing political philosopher, Leo Strauss, tells us:

...my journey toward Trumpism was in many ways a journey leftward, toward the center. I have jettisoned a lot of conservative orthodoxy precisely because I think it was not working for the bottom half, or even the bottom two thirds. It’s ironic or odd or something that in moving to the left, I get called a fascist and such. 

Michael Anton: a neo-Straussian ideologue within the Trump deep state

What Anton fails to see is that this fake "journey leftward" is precisely what has engendered a pseudo-socialist neo-Straussian ideology that represents the repristination of a modernised fascism that eloquently intellectualises an American Realpolitik promising to "drain the swamp". Even a former friend, Bill Kristol, has come to liken Anton to Carl Schmitt:

Well, on the one hand I’m flattered [by the comparison] because Schmitt was a brilliant man who had the respect of Leo Strauss. But, of course, that’s not what Bill meant. He meant to insinuate that I am a Nazi. I’ve known Bill for more than 20 years and always liked and respected him. That was about the lowest blow I’ve ever taken from a “friend,” however, and I don’t know what to make of it.

Michael Anton: quoted in Decius Out of Darkness  

Anton has been compared to Carl Schmitt, German philosopher, jurist, political theorist, professor of law and crown jurist of the Dritte Reich, who also gave an intellectual outer buffing of respectability to German fascism.

It is as Michael Rosen has put it:

I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you...

It doesn't walk in saying,
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."

Well-meaning cultural leftists who think that the best way to counter such Alt-Right neo-Straussian ideology is to continue preaching ethnocultural tolerance towards one's neighbours irrespective of "race or creed", thinking this alone will suffice to oppose the Alt-Right. They are setting themselves up for yet another crushing defeat by severely underestimating their opponents. This is not to say that the culture-centric approach of identity politics is bad, but rather that its excessively naive simplicity blinds us from seeing what is primary to inflaming brutal social conflict. In fact, the rise of a new racist far right is precisely due to the catastrophic failings of cultural liberalism that brought culture-centric ideologies like postmodernism and identity politics to the forefront of liberal discourse, in contrast to a previous age which saw culture-centrisms as being reactionary.

With the postmodernist "linguistic turn" it meant that if you learned to speak politically correct language, linguistically inculcated Good-Speak and Good-Think would lead history down the path to Utopia, since culture and language create the world: for nothing exists outside of language. While post-modernist pseudo-liberalism busied itself with its culture-centric agenda, the right pressed forward unrelentingly with its neoliberal economic agenda culminating in income disparities reaching levels ever more reminiscent of the age of Charles Dickens. The left has lost its way, and this has encouraged the explosive eruption of neo-fascism.

That is why for all of the imposition of the language of politically correct Good-Speak, the cultural left has done nothing to prevent the explosive rise of a neo-fascist far-right in America. It is not a reflection on the specific moral character of Americans, but rather a reflection on the social impact of the Great Recession, with its gross acceleration of the development of further inequity. Thomas Piketty has just shown that the disparity between rich and poor has never been greater:

This is what is driving brutal social conflict in America (and around the world). You can preach political correctness to thy neighbour till the cows come home and it will be to no avail, and if this trend continues, the social conflict will soon reach a severity reminiscent of Weimar Germany. That is why the culture-centric agenda of post-modernism—with its "linguistic turn" spinning around itself like a dog chasing its own tail in a linguistic solipsism where "all is but mere words"—must now be declared a minor post hoc addendum and failed byproduct of modern capital.

Foucault and Neoliberalism
Postmodernism not only failed to confront neoliberalism but was complicit with it

Washington has not been so politically divided since the 1860s, a period of social conflict that culminated in the American Civil War. It is the same extreme political polarisation, leading to extreme stress on the democratic systems of checks and balances, that caused the collapse of Weimar democracy. Or to once again quote Sir Richard J. Evans:

“You can put quotes by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, about what he called the Jewish lying press and how it would be closed down when the Nazis came to power, side by side with quotes by team Trump and they look almost exactly the same,” he says. Like Trump, Hitler chose to rule with a team of close allies. The democratic roots of the Weimar Republic were also much deeper than is often assumed, which means a secure democracy such as America could be similarly vulnerable. The most worrying question in America, says Evans, is: “Are the institutions going to stand up to the assault they are being subjected to?”

Though we truly live in terrifying times, none of what seemed to suddenly loom before us formed overnight. It is just the emergence of a vast iceberg that has taken decades to form, of whose which only a tip could previously be gleaned. It is the culmination of an entire epoch, and it is difficult not to feel like we heading on the Titanic straight towards that iceberg. While nobody has a crystal ball to foretell the future, assuming such a predetermined future even exists, if we are to avert the worst we must anticipate the worst. If we fail to expect the worst, then we will all be the foolish victims of having been too naively optimistic. For it was the hubris of invulnerability in the face of the looming iceberg that sunk the Titanic.