Fight to Replace Capitalism with Communism
Soviet Poster: DEATH TO THE FASCIST BEAST! (1941)
SEATTLE (USA) — After the New Zealand Islamophobic massacre, a friend bemoaned widespread hate and division.
“I think it’s more than hate and division,” replied a comrade. “It’s racism, sexism and xenophobia, which capitalism always nurtures. But as fascism becomes more necessity for the capitalists, they raise the level.”
“Exactly!” she said. “It’s a textbook case.”
The next day we discussed the New Zealand terrorist’s racist rant. He entitled it “The Great Replacement” after a 2012 book by the French demagogue Renaud Camus. Camus argues that white European women must have more babies. Otherwise, Europe will be overrun by Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa. This “replacement theory” holds sway in European anti-immigrant, right-wing parties.
Fascist demonstrators in Charlottesville (USA) echoed this line. Neo-Nazis chanted, “The Jews will not replace us! The blacks will not replace us! Immigrants will not replace us!” Then one ran over a counter-demonstrator, killing her.
“It’s a perfect storm!” our friend declared. “Racism, sexism and xenophobia rolled into one!”
Racist Eugenics: From the US to Nazi Germany
We then talked about the German Nazi state-sponsored Lebensborn (fountain of life) program that produced 20,000 “racially pure” children.
Lebensborn recruited some “pure Aryan” Nazi women to produce babies with SS officers, sometimes in one-night stands, and give them up for adoption. Some may have been raped by the SS. It also offered some “pure Aryan” single pregnant women an alternative to abortion. Eventually Lebensborn turned to kidnapping children. All 20,000 were sent to “proper Aryan” families.
Is Renaud Camus trying to bring this back?
By the third day, our friend had talked to more workers. Her closest friend was surprised she hadn’t heard about the Nazi program before. Actually, few people know about this.
Even more revealing, many workers who are usually savvy about racism, sexism and xenophobia, hadn’t heard about the role the U.S. “eugenics” movement played in this history. Big capitalists like Rockefeller and Carnegie funded it. Key leaders, like Harvard professor Charles B. Davenport, used elite universities as their platform.
Eugenics helped to justify the 1924 Immigration Act. This implemented quotas favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe. It drastically reduced arrivals from Africa and southern and eastern Europe, including Jews and Italians. It stopped immigration from Asia.
These policies were developed to counter what President Theodore Roosevelt had called “race suicide” and the dwindling of the Anglo-American “stock.” They complemented attacks on immigrant workers, many of them socialists or communists, who were leading class struggle.
The US eugenics movement faded during World War II, when its Nazi connections became a liability. However, racist capitalism soon regenerated a new eugenics movement. Again, its leading mouthpieces came from elite universities. This time, there was more push-back from students and teachers inspired by mass anti-racist rebellions of black workers.
The Battle in the Working Class
Replacement theory reflects a time like that of the Nazis. Capitalism is again in crisis. Many rulers in Europe, the US and elsewhere want masses of white and/or citizen workers to blame immigrants (particularly of different “races”) for sharpening attacks on the working class.
Replacement ideology serves to turn people’s fears into this fascist movement. As the manifesto shows, it contributed to the New Zealand massacre. But it also provoked a global mass anti-racist response.
This time the struggle will be centered in the working class. The battle must be to mobilize for communism.
Before last week, political conversations with this Boeing friend were limited to general criticisms of Trump and the bosses’ oppression of us. The New Zealand massacre and the ideology behind it are more serious to her.
She’s has already begun to fight against this fascist ideology with many of her co-workers. She took an extra copy of the new ICWP migration pamphlet for her friend. This booklet was the first piece of party literature she’s read. It will help link this anti-fascist struggle more clearly to mobilizing for communism. With her and more like her, we can build a communist movement.
Racist, sexist, xenophobic ideologies are nurtured under this system and bloom into fascism as capitalism goes into crisis. Communism is the only way to end the emergence and re-emergence of these fascist ideas.
Students in Christchurch, New Zealand, perform a Haka, a traditional Maori war dance, in honor of the people murdered in the attack on the mosques on March 15, 2019.
The Flip Side of Replacement Theory
The repercussions of eugenic movements around the world go beyond breeding of the white race. They have resulted in millions of deaths.
The U.S. eugenics movement resulted in the sterilization of 64,000 people (for disabilities) in the twentieth century. Their disability was that they were poor, often black or latino/a.
California’s sterilization program was so robust that the Nazis turned to California for advice. Hitler proudly admitted following the laws of several U.S. states. Each allowed for the prevention of the reproduction of the “unfit.”
Then there was the murder of 8 million in the concentration camps.
But it didn’t end there. The Nazis used the ideology of lebensraum (living room) along with lebensborn. Lebensraum justified German imperialism in World War II. It said the Aryan race needed room to expand. Any other “lesser” races or nationalities had to be subjugated or eliminated throughout Europe.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the working class is truly a life and death struggle.
Students at Middlebury College, USA, turn their backs on racist professor Charles Murray, March 2017