5 Feb 2024 7:20 am
(PART IV OF V)
Under capitalism, racism is necessary for the reproduction and amplification of capitalism since it protects divisions within the working class while insulating the capitalist class and lending ideological justification for inequality. Under socialism, with the capitalist class and inequality removed from society, the need for racism is also removed. That's why Paul Robeson said, "In Russia, I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being." And that's one of the reasons that virtually no Americans know who Paul Robeson was. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Soviet Union was its ethnic diversity. Some ninety-three ethnic groups were indigenous to the USSR. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union actively recruited black industrial and agricultural specialists from the US to work in the USSR. And never was there racial or ethnic strife in the Soviet Union because there was no material basis for it to take hold.
So, no, Marx never claimed that multiculturalism and racial harmony were necessary in a socialist society because he knew he didn't have to make such a claim. There isn't anything in a socialist society that incubates racism. And yes, of course, socialism could work and did work in a racially homogenous nation-state. We know this because it worked in Mongolia for nearly seventy years. (Yes, Mongolia was the Mongolian People's Republic from 1924 until 1990, when the lives of Mongolians improved immensely.) But it's erroneous to state that "Socialism will almost certainly work in a racially homogeneous nation-state better than in a state with multiple competing cultures." When human beings have their needs met and are treated as human beings, their already-meaningless pigmentation becomes even more meaningless. As Paul Robeson's comment demonstrates, it just doesn't matter.
On the other hand, if and when the needs of human beings aren't met, then typically meaningless pigmentation can and often does become meaningful, at least in an artificial fashion. I have a feeling that Cannonpointer resides somewhere in the southeastern United States, where many people, including many white people, lead lives of impoverishment and precarity. In such a situation, people tend to be at one another's throats like starving rats in a sociology project while blaming each other for their plights. And, of course, racism, particularly anti-black racism, becomes ascendant.
Cannonpointer: "You still haven't explained how a RELIGION can be affected by genetic disorders. Is this Jewish source just lying about itself?"
Firstly, this is the first time I've been asked to explain that. Secondly, the members of a religion cannot be exclusively afflicted by any ailment. The notion that Jewishness constitutes "a race of people" because "Only Jews get certain diseases" falls on its face when one understands that there are no disorders that inflict Jews and Jews alone. Contrary to widespread conditioned belief, afflictions such as cystic fibrosis, bloom syndrome, dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase deficiency, Tay-Sachs, etc., also afflict non-Jews. Beyond that, there aren't any human races, for no group of human beings has ever been cloistered long enough from other human populations to preclude "crossbreeding." The history of Jews supports this argument because Jews have always had babies with non-Jews. (Continued in PART V.)
http://www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf
(END OF PART IV)