Guest Post: Anti-Racists Should Think Twice about Allying with Socialism

Modern racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter are embracing the historically false assumption that socialism is anti-racist.

by Marian L. Tupy

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last August, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, stated that BLM would not sit at the table with President Trump because he “is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country – be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia”.

Trump’s views and actions aside, calling capitalism evil and conflating it with racism is noteworthy. The same goes for the increasing tendency among racial justice advocates to embrace the left-wing economic agenda.

So much so that Ryan Cooper, a columnist for The Week, wrote a column titled, Is Black Lives Matter turning socialist? As Cooper approvingly noted, BLM has adopted a “hugely aggressive – and firmly leftist – economic program”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Natalie Jeffers, who cofounded BLM in the United Kingdom, urged her followers to: “Fight racism with solidarity. Fight capitalism with socialism. We must organize – dedicate ourselves to revolutionary politic power.”

The Black Lives Matter Movement, a separate British organization, was founded by Gary McFarlane, a representative of the Socialist Workers Party, who writes for the Socialist Review and the Socialist Worker, and claims that, “Capitalism is racist from the top to the bottom”. His cofounders, including Kate Hurford, Harold Wilson, and Naima Omar, have also written for those two publications.

There is, in other words, a growing assumption among racial justice advocates that more socialism would result in less racism and, even, that socialism is, in itself, anti-racist. There is, in fact, no such necessary connection between socialism and anti-racism, as a closer look at early socialist writings amply shows.

Socialists Had a Lot to Say About Race

To start with, it is important to note that the meaning of the word “race” changed over time. Today, most people think of races in terms of color, as in “black” and “white.” Historically, however, race was also a synonym for a nation or, even, a family. In his 1933 book, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill noted: “Deep in the heart of the Prussian state and race lay the antagonism to France.” The English artist Mary Granville, in turn, referred to Churchill’s family as the “Marlborough race” in her 1861 book, Autobiography and Correspondence.

Race was always a part of socialist thought.

But race, whether narrowly (black and white) or broadly (skin color, nation, and family) understood, was always a part of socialist thought. In 1894, for example, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the German economist Walther Borgius. In it, Engels noted, “We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately determines historical development, but race is in itself an economic factor.”

In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Engels elaborated on the subject of race, observing “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species.” He went on, “If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”

It is noteworthy that Engels wrote those words 16 years before Francis Galton, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine, urged humanity to take control of its own evolution by means of “good breeding” or eugenics. Speaking of which, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were both socialists and eugenicists, bemoaned the falling birthrates among so-called higher races in the New Statesman in 1913. They warned that “a new social order [would be] developed by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese”.

Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, offered his views on race in his 1952 memoir The Motorcycle Diaries, writing, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide.

Socialists Are Historically Pro-Genocide

In addition to racism, early socialist writings contained explicit calls for genocide of backward peoples. The toxic mix of those two illiberal ideas would result in at least 80 million deaths during the course of the 20th century.

In the New York Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide, writing, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” His friend and collaborator, Engels, was more explicit.

In 1849, Engels published an article in Marx’s newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In it, Engels condemned the rural populations of the Austrian Empire for failing enthusiastically to partake in the revolution of 1848. This was a seminal moment, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

“From Engels' article in 1849 down to the death of Hitler,” George Watson wrote in his 1998 book The Lost Literature of Socialism, “everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist.”

So, what did Engels write?

Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality – the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

“The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians,” he continued. “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”

Here Engels clearly foreshadows the genocides of the 20th-century totalitarianism in general and the Soviet regime in particular. In fact, Joseph Stalin loved Engels’ article and commended it to his followers in The Foundations of Leninism in 1924. He then proceeded to suppress Soviet ethnic minorities, including the Jews, Crimean Tatars, and Ukrainians.

It is unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler, who admired Stalin for his ruthlessness and called him a “genius,” was also heavily influenced by Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism,” Hitler said, “as I do not hesitate to admit.” Throughout his youth, Hitler “never shunned the company of Marxists” and believed that while the “petit bourgeois Social Democrat … will never make a National Socialist … the Communist always will.”

Hitler’s “differences with the communists”, argued Watson, “were less ideological than tactical”. Hitler embraced German nationalism so as not to “compete with Marxism on its own ground,” but explicitly acknowledged that “‘the whole of national socialism’ was based on Marx.” It is, therefore, unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

How much did the Nazis learn from the Soviets?

In his 1947 memoir Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, Hoess recalled that the Germans knew of the Soviet program of extermination of the enemies of the state through forced labor as early as 1939. “If, for example, in building a canal, the inmates of a [Soviet] camp were used up, thousands of fresh kulaks or other unreliable elements were called in who, in their turn, would be used up.” The Nazis would use the same tactic on the Jewish slave laborers in, for example, munition factories.

Following their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, wrote Watson, the Germans collected information on the immense scale of the Soviet camp system and were impressed by the “Soviet readiness to destroy whole categories of people through forced labor.”

Communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog.

After the war ended, Stalin was deeply worried about what the Germans knew with regard to the Soviet camp system and the crimes that the Soviets committed in the territories they conquered following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He sent Andrey Vyshinsky, the mastermind of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-1938), to Nuremberg to steer the war crimes tribunal away from inconvenient lines of inquiry.

Today we are familiar with the aggregate numbers of people who died as a result of the socialist experiment, but communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog. As such, the Nazi extermination of the Jews is generally condemned as an example of race hatred. The Soviet extermination of specific groups of people, in contrast, is generally seen as part of a much less toxic “class struggle.”

The Strange Separation of "Race Hate" and "Class Struggle"

The Marxist theory of history focused on class struggle and posited that feudalism was destined to be superseded by capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, was destined to give way to communism. Marx saw himself chiefly as a scientist and thought that he had discovered an immutable law of evolution of human institutions, from barbarism at the one end to communism at the other end. (Hence the idea of “scientific socialism” that Engels promoted after Marx’s death.)

Peoples stuck in feudalism, like the Slavs, “as well as Basques, Bretons and Scottish Highlanders”, could not progress straight from feudalism to communism. They would have to be exterminated – so as not to keep everyone else back! Watson noted, “They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.”

How, then, are we to think of socialism and race, and does the answer to that question have any bearing on the distinction that has been drawn between the Nazi and communist atrocities?

The best that can be said of the socialists is that their victims were more varied than those of Hitler. 

In his 1902 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought, H.G. Wells wrote, “There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the abandon of rabbits or negroes.”

“I must confess,” he continued, that “I do not see the Negro and the poor Irishman and all the emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party.”

Note the ease with which the socialist author of such best-sellers as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds(1898), conflates backward whites and backward blacks.

To Wells, both were primitive and, consequently, unsuited to be the torchbearers of socialism. That’s perfectly consonant with Marx’s theory of history, which was, by definition, universal in applicability. Creation of a socialist utopia, therefore, depended on the extermination of all races, broadly understood, who stood in the way of socialist revolution. As such, it included black “Bushmen” and white Bretons.

In contrast to Marx, Hitler’s utopia was not universal. Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), wanted to create socialism in only one country, Germany. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, for example, was partly rooted in his belief that capitalism and international Jewry were two sides of the same coin. As he once famously asked, “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?”

The old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism and socialism proper seems to be untenable.

To achieve their socialist goals, wrote Götz Aly in his 2008 book Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, the Germans confiscated gold, food, clothing, and machinery throughout the territories they conquered. They also put the conquered peoples to work in German slave labor and extermination camps, and factories.

In conclusion, the old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism (as purely racist) and socialism proper (as lacking a racial component) seems to be untenable. Both the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities (ie, the Germans) and their victims, including the Jews and the Slavs, were white. As such, Nazi atrocities make little sense on the narrow definition of racism (i.e., black versus white). They do make sense in the broader context – the perceived necessity to exterminate all peoples who stood in the way of achieving Hitler’s utopian ideal.

But, the same can be said of communist atrocities. The early socialists certainly toyed with the idea of racial inferiority of the darker races (i.e., narrow definition of racism), but ultimately embraced a program of genocide that was more encompassing. The best that can be said of the socialists, therefore, is that their victims were, in accordance with the universal aspirations of Marxism, more varied than those of Hitler. Let us hope that’s not the sort of inclusivity that Black Lives Matter on both sides of the Atlantic strives for.

Reprinted from CapX

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post - Which Fosters the Spirit of Giving: Free Markets or Socialism?

by Robert Higgs

Christmas will soon be here, and preparations for this holiday are proceeding apace. People are buying gifts for family members and friends and making preparations for great feasts at which family, friends, and other loved ones will gather to share the joy and love of the occasion. Notice how much effort and expense are going into giving to and bringing joy to others. Notice, too, how much of the spending people do during this season would be impossible except for the affluence made possible by the remaining elements of the market society that the government, to date, has failed to destroy completely.

Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

The free-market society is often criticized or condemned root and branch for its alleged dependence on the unsavory human trait of greed. Socialists have always claimed that their system would replace one dependent on greed with one based on compassion and caring for the unfortunate. Both theory and history have shown, however, that socialism cannot produce the wealth that makes possible the highly effective expression of compassion and caring. Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

In any event, the idea that the free-market system rests on greed has always been mistaken, if not an outright lie. The system rests on allowing people to pursue their self-interest, to be sure, but self-interest is quite different from greed and indeed often consists of the very opposite. People in general have an interest in, for example, earning more income, and a major reason for this desire is that they wish to have the wherewithal to give to or take care of others more effectively—their own families first of all in most cases, but hardly their own families exclusively.

The amounts of money, time, and effort that people devote to making others happier or better off—amounts vividly on display during the holiday season—belie the slander of a free market’s dependence on greed. But such transfers also occur throughout the year and amount to an enormous proportion of all the uses to which people in free-market societies put their wealth.

In contrast, the alleged compassion and caring for the unfortunate that many have supposed support socialism are scarcely to be seen. For one thing, the incentives inherent in socialism entail that the socialist society will become or remain lodged in poverty, thereby crippling its capacity for effective compassion and caring in the material realm. For another thing, socialism does not so much eliminate the greed that exists in a population as it alters the forms in which the greed can be directed and expressed.

The opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is a great blessing.
Leaders of socialist societies have a habit of living lavishly amid the squalor of the system they control and despoil—Mao, Castro, and Chavez provide ready examples. Ordinary people in socialist societies, being deprived of free-market outlets for the pursuit of their self-interest must instead strive to better themselves and those for whom they care by struggling for political power and, often, by diverting resources intended for the general public to their own enjoyment. Socialism does not build the generous character that socialist dreamers have touted; on the contrary.

So, at this time of the year, let us remind ourselves not only of the love and compassion that Christmas calls forth, but also of the systemic economic underpinnings that permit people to express their love and compassion so effectively. The love of family, friends, and others is the greatest blessing, but the opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is also a great blessing.

Republished from the Independent Institute.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review.  He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Pledge of Allegiance, Revisited

Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the use of the prepositional phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional.

According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor by Michael B. Farrell,

In two separate cases, Michael Newdow, who previously challenged the Pledge in a case that reached the US Supreme Court in 2004, attempted to further his long-running campaign to strip references to God from the public domain.

In Mr. Newdow’s latest case against “under God” in the Pledge, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled, in a 2-to-1 decision, that the schoolroom routine for millions of children is not a violation of the Constitution, but a historical reflection of the Founding Fathers’ beliefs that “serves to unite our vast nation.”

“Not every mention of God or religion by our government or at the government’s direction is a violation of the Establishment Clause,” wrote Judge Carlos Bea for the majority in the opinion that was issued Thursday.

By sheer coincidence, the ruling came on the 67th anniversary of the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In that case, the Court eventually ruled that state authorities could not compel students (or anyone else) to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

In his majority opinion in that case, Justice Robert Jackson noted

that the compulsory flag salute and pledge requires affirmation of a belief and an attitude of mind. It is not clear whether the regulation contemplates that pupils forego any contrary convictions of their own and become unwilling converts to the prescribed ceremony, or whether it will be acceptable if they simulate assent by words without belief, and by a gesture barren of meaning. It is now a commonplace that censorship or suppression of expression of opinion is tolerated by our Constitution only when the expression presents a clear and present danger of action of a kind the State is empowered to prevent and punish. It would seem that involuntary affirmation could be commanded only on even more immediate and urgent grounds than silence. But here, the power of compulsion [p634] is invoked without any allegation that remaining passive during a flag salute ritual creates a clear and present danger that would justify an effort even to muffle expression. To sustain the compulsory flag salute, we are required to say that a Bill of Rights which guards the individual's right to speak his own mind left it open to public authorities to compel him to utter what is not in his mind.

Whether the First Amendment to the Constitution will permit officials to order observance of ritual of this nature does not depend upon whether as a voluntary exercise we would think it to be good, bad or merely innocuous. Any credo of nationalism is likely to include what some disapprove or to omit what others think essential, and to give off different overtones as it takes on different accents or interpretations. [n14] If official power exists to coerce acceptance of any patriotic creed, what it shall contain cannot be decided by courts, but must be largely discretionary with the ordaining authority, whose power to prescribe would no doubt include power to amend. Hence, validity of the asserted power to force an American citizen publicly to profess any statement of belief, or to engage in any ceremony of assent to one, presents questions of power that must be considered independently of any idea we may have as to the utility of the ceremony in question.

Nor does the issue, as we see it, turn on one's possession of particular religious views or the sincerity with which they are held. While religion supplies appellees' motive for enduring the discomforts of making the issue in this case, many citizens who do not share these religious views [p635] hold such a compulsory rite to infringe constitutional liberty of the individual. [n15] It is not necessary to inquire whether nonconformist beliefs will exempt from the duty to salute unless we first find power to make the salute a legal duty.

In a now-famous passage, Justice Jackson wrote at the conclusion of his opinion:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

(Thanks to Professor John Q. Barrett of the St. John's University law school for the reminder that the oral arguments in the Barnette case took place on March 11, 1943. Barrett is the originator and editor of the Jackson List, an archive of material about Justice Robert H. Jackson.)

In addition to the coincidental anniversary, the 9th Circuit ruling comes on the heels of a minor controversy in Maryland, in which a schoolgirl was reprimanded by her teacher for refusing to stand during the Pledge, in clear violation of the child's constitutional rights.

The Washington Post reported on February 25 that the Montgomery County school system has apologized to the girl and her family, and that the teacher has been reprimanded, in turn:

In addition to an apology, the mother of the girl was told that the teacher, who has not been identified by either side, and school administrators plan to lead the girl's class in a discussion about the incident and their constitutional rights, [attorney Ajmel] Quereshi said.

"It's not an issue of just the pledge. It's a larger issue about their First Amendment rights," Quereshi said. "It's an important lesson that should stay with them."

The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that students cannot be forced to salute the flag. Maryland law explicitly allows any student or teacher to be excused from participating in the pledge, according to the ACLU.

The Montgomery school system's student handbook contains a section about "Patriotic Exercises" that reads: "You cannot be required to say a pledge, sing an anthem, or take part in patriotic exercises. No one will be permitted to intentionally embarrass you if you choose not to participate."

Eight years ago, when Michael Newdow's first lawsuit was decided by the Ninth Circuit (in his favor), I wrote an article about the Pledge of Allegiance that made other arguments about why Americans should be wary about reciting it so lackadaisically. It was twinned with an article by Richard J. Santos of the American Legion under the headline, "Court's Decision on Pledge Must Not Stand." The two articles appeared in The Metro Herald (Alexandria, Virginia) on July 5, 2002.  Here is my article as it appeared that day:

PLEDGE RULING:
RIGHT, FOR THE WRONG REASONS

Richard Sincere

Metro Herald Charlottesville Bureau Chief

(Charlottesville, VA, June 27, 2002)—The American Heritage Dictionary defines “allegiance” as “the obligations of a vassal to a lord.” Similarly, Black’s Law Dictionary defines it “obligation of fidelity and obedience to government in consideration for protection that government gives.”

In a widely-noted ruling on June 26, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in government schools is unconstitutional because the Pledge contains the words “under God.” The court said this violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion …”)

Writing for a three-judge panel of the court, Judge Alfred T. Goodwin argued: “A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”

Goodwin added: “Although students cannot be forced to participate in recitation of the pledge, the school district is nonetheless conveying a message of state endorsement of a religious belief when it requires public school teachers to recite, and lead the recitation of, the current orm of the pledge.”

Needless to say, conservative groups and their spokesmen pounced on the appeals court ruling with speed and fervor.

Steve Schmidt, communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), sent out a “talking points” memorandum that suggested to Republican activists that they should “call on every school board to ignore this decision.” David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU), “called for the impeachment of the two judges who came up with such a ridiculous opinion regarding the separation of church and state,” according to an ACU news release issued within hours of the court’s decision.

These conservatives might not be so eager to complain if they knew the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and its intended purpose. While most of us today view it as benign or sentimentally patriotic, a look at its origins illustrates the sinister -- one could say “un-American” -- features underlying the Pledge.

Writing in the May 2001 issue of the journal Ideas on Liberty, published by the Foundation for Economic Education -- one of the oldest pro-freedom think tanks in the United States -- author and activist Jim Peron reports that the author of the Pledge of Allegiance was Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and socialist agitator who was the cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of the socialist utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888).

Francis Bellamy composed the Pledge for a magazine called The Youth’s Companion, which first published it on September 8, 1892, and promoted it vigorously. As Peron relates the story, “Bellamy, like his cousin, wanted to use government schools to help promote a socialist agenda. He felt that one way of encouraging this agenda would be the teaching of state loyalty. To this end he wrote a pledge, which students across the country were asked to take. With a few minor changes this pledge is what is now called the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Peron goes on to note that “Bellamy attempted to accomplish several goals with his Pledge of Allegiance. He saw it as a means of inculcating support for a centralized national government over the federalist system of the Founding Fathers.” Moreover, Peron writes, Bellamy “originally toyed with the idea of making the Pledge more openly socialistic, but decided that if he did so it would never be accepted.”

Why not? Because the American republic was founded on constitutional principles that are antithetical to socialism and its parallel, feudalism, in which the citizen is a mere vassal to a superior lord. The Pledge of Allegiance stands on its head the American commitment to universal but individual rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence). In its place it puts fealty to the will of the state and the subjugation of the individual to an amorphous “society.”

Whether reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in government schools is unconstitutional or not will be left to another court -- perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court. But Republicans and other conservatives should not be too quick to condemn the ruling without first thinking about the implications of the history and the text of the Pledge itself. If they do, they might realize that they are supporting something that undermines all they hold dear about America.

As a matter of fact, it may do well for all of us to reflect on the true meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance this Independence Day weekend. The unsettling conclusions we draw should lead to deeper wisdom and a better appreciation of individual liberty as promised by the Constitution.

Richard Sincere is president of the Arlington Research Group and author of two books on foreign policy, The Politics of Sentiment and Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise.

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