East West

David Loy once said that communism is a heresy within the religion of capitalism. I’ll take that idea as a given in what follows here.

 

The great global divide between east and west that pits them vs. us, where “us” is the good capitalist west and the “them” is the evil communist east, seems to me to be nonsense. Europe gives birth to capitalism in the writings of Adam Smith. Europe also gives birth to communism in the writings of Karl Marx. Both economic systems, and the political universes that they produce, are equally European, “western.” So too is the geographical division usually defined as east vs. west. To be sure, Russia lies in the eastern part of Europe, but it is as European as Poland or Estonia or . . . pick your favorite east European country. And yes, Russia grew imperial by expanding into Asia, and the USSR maintained that empire while at the same time expanding westward via its Warsaw Pact “allies.” But to say that the Russian Empire, or the USSR, is an “eastern” power is as silly as saying that the British Empire and the French Empire were African powers because each one colonized so much of Africa.

 

What the common designation of east and west disguises is European suspicion of any part of the world not dominated by its own racial class. I’m perfectly aware that contemporary notions of racial difference derive from eighteenth and early nineteenth century theories designed to explain and justify Europe’s global empires. It begins just as those empires swing into high gear. J. F. Blumenbach’s De Generis Humani Varietati Nativa (1775), i. e. The Origin of Native Human Variety, gets the ball rolling. A century later, Ernst Haeckel’s Anthropogenie: oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menches (1874), which is to say, The Origins of Humanity, or the Developmental History of Men, makes the point is a profoundly racist image that, by emphasizing the continuity of species from orangutang to human, simultaneously reduces Africans to just one more variety of ape.

 

http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm

 

Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequalities of Human Races (1853-55) is perhaps the apex of the proposition that Europeans are superior. There are others, both before and after de Gobineau, who contribute their two cents worth of despicable argument in support of the superiority of Europeans. But de Gobineau sets the standard. His argument is explicitly that “all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.” De Gobineau makes it clear that as that noble “blood” mixes with other “bloods,” the superiority diminishes. Some of those marginal Europeans in the east and in the south of the continent are less worthy of superiority because of admixtures of Asian or African blood. In other words, the creators of racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understand European superiority to be equivalent to European whiteness. Those swarthies from Italy or Spain or Greece, or the Hunnish Hungarians or Albanians or Romanians clearly belong to a lesser race.

 

After WW II we think of Hitler as the nadir of racism, but in fact he is part of the continuum that starts with Blumenbach. As an instance of that continuity, here is Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925) making de Gobineau’s case explicit:

 

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. . . .  The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens.

 

If Hitler adds anything to the racist ideology it’s that he makes explicit the implications of Haeckel’s evolutionary tree. Hitler’s language is clear: racial differences are identical to differences in species.

 

The east/west divide, then, is about economic ideas only in the most marginal, and historically incorrect, of ways. Capitalism and communism are equally European. The political systems those economic practices engender also belong to Europe. That east/west divide, like the so-called “global south” and “global north,” simply disguises the fundamental racism that Europeans invent to justify their own imperial control of the planet. East/west focuses attention on the Asiatic; global south and global north focuses attention on the African, the Oceanic, and the American. In short, “east” vs. “west” disguises the division between whites, i. e. Europeans, and what nowadays we call “people of color.” Fear mongers’ warnings about civilizational collapse simply duplicate what racists from Blumenbach through Hitler argue. It’s not an economic nor a political system that’s the threat. It is, simply, people of color.