Multiculturalism and Socialism: The Odd Couple

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Updated September 2:

In the comments section, Scott, who is a White nationalist, discusses the disconnect between multiculturalism and socialism or social democracy.

Yes, we do allow White nationalists, even anti-Black ones, on the board, but every time a cute Black woman shows up on the board, we force them to kiss her. On the lips. On penalty of banning. None have left yet. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?

Scott says:

Look at the countries that have the highest index of egalitarianism in the West: Iceland, Norway, Sweden (used to have more). The inhabitants are all pretty closely related to one another. I'll spot my sibling $100 cash.

It's basically the same thing but in a less dramatic way in such countries, but when other nationalities come in because of the aforementioned ethnostates' welfare system, as seek to take advantage of it, the whole system gets messed up. Find me an ethnically diverse country with a social democracy.

I respond:

Scott is right. Does the UK count as a multicultural country? If it does, it's growing a nasty White racist - fascist party of reaction to the diversity in the BNP.

Does Venezuela count? If Venezuela counts, I would say that Venezuela is a country riven with violence, tension and class war. There seems to be a racial angle, but in the upper class and upper middle class, it's really more about class than race. Nevertheless, it's clear that the oligarchy is much more light-skinned than the Underclass that supports Chavez.

Is multicultural Russia a social democracy? Maybe so, but it's riven from one end to the other with horrible racism.

Do Communist states like China and Cuba count? Maybe so, but those countries, probably due to the class warfare (in the case of both) and combined class/race warfare (in the case of Cuba) inherent in their societies, needed full, bloody Communist revolutions to institute any kind of socialist system.

Vietnam and Laos are multiethnic countries, but the Lao and the Vietnamese are the overwhelming majority. They also needed Communist revolutions to put in socialism.

I would say Sri Lanka. They have a pretty good social democracy there, and the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International. There's also a horribly vicious civil war going on, because that "socialist" party in power has never done much to help the Tamils.

Socialist parties in Chile, Argentina and Brazil haven't been able to get much done. In Chile and Argentina the problem is probably much more class than race. In Brazil, surely it's both race and class together. The socialists in Ecuador and Bolivia are trying to get something done, but Bolivia is riven with a horrific class/race division and it's almost civil war there.

I don't think that the socialist parties in Nicaragua and Guatemala will be able to get much done. Both nations had Leftist revolutions for decades, in the case of Nicaragua followed by a revolutionary government and more civil war, this time counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua was always more about class than race, but the oligarchy is light-skinned. In Guatemala, the situation is very much about both class and race riven together.

One thing becomes clear in this analysis.

The only way to peacefully vote in a socialist or social democratic government is to have a relatively homogeneous society. Typically a White society. As diversity and multiculturalism increases, even in White European countries, White racist/fascist groups rise up for various reasons and racial violence against minorities becomes common.

In multiethnic or deeply class-riven nations (Note how often the two are conflated!), socialism, social democracy or movements towards them is typically accompanied by either outright civil war, de facto civil war, tremendous open class war in terms of coups, attempted coups, lockout strikes, riots, imperialist interventions, class-based separatist movements, and much violence.

In other places, socialist governments are not able to get much done due to deep class and race-based conflicts and the threat of violence from dominant ethnics and/or classes.

In other places, long civil wars eventually installed Communist regimes in multiethnic countries and ethnic conflict subsided or stopped. Short of installing a Communist regime, multiethnic countries moving towards socialism are likely to experience a lot of internal violence and chaos.

If diversity is so bad for socialism, why do socialists in the West keep pushing it?

Good question.

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Problems of Leftwing Democracy

In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::

The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression.

This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples' thoughts.

I'm not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country's infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.

I respond:

huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.

This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.

The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.

This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.

Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.

These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.

The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.

What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.

The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.

The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.

In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.

Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.

Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.

The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.

Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.

Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.

Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.

What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.

If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.

One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.

The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.

If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.

What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.

So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.

The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.

All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.

On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.

When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?

Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?

In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?

I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.

Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.

People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.

The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.

Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.

There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.

We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.

The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.

One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.

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Jews Versus Overseas Chinese

Uncle Milton comments on a previous post of mine, An Apologetics For Zionism, that dealt peripherally with the overseas Chinese. I will deal with his comments at the end of the article:

Robert Lindsay: There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation - they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can't seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism.


Uncle Milton: I would say this is incorrect. Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand (and one of the richest if not the richest men in Thailand) was deposed by a military coup is ethnically Chinese.

There were also many ethnic Chinese who were very close to Suharto and received special favors and privileges from the Indonesian government.

The Chinese in Indonesia, however, have had to play a background role because the Indonesians, especially the Muslims, resented them. Basically, as recently as 1998 there were pogroms against ethnic Chinese. (One could also say the anti-communist purges of the mid 60s were heavily directed against ethnic Chinese.)

In other words ethnic Chinese in Indonesia were never tolerated previously as much as Jews have been in the US in the past five decades, so they had no basis on which to build a political or cultural movement. In recent years however, China has given aid and been an important foreign investor in Indonesia.

I suspect ethnic Chinese influence using mainland China with it's rising economic prowess (and potentially it's substantial army) will increase (outwardly) in Southeast Asia.

As for the Philippines, their national hero Jose Rizal was part Chinese as was the first president after Marcos' dictatorship ended: Razored Aquino.

I really do not know much about the Overseas Chinese. I do not think that they would go on Jewish-type jihads to wage radical change in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines no matter what. Overseas Chinese just do not care about such things. They just care about making money and keeping the pogroms away and little else.

Sure, they have gained quite a bit of political power, as one might expect due to their money. However, I believe that Indonesia and certainly Malaysia still have some very anti-Chinese laws on the books.

The Communist revolutionaries in Malaysia were mostly Chinese, but the Chinese got into this movement not due to any love of Communism so much as a way of changing a government that they saw as heavily biased against the Chinese.

In this way, they may be somewhat comparable to the many Jews who flocked to the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Communists in Poland during and after World War 2 not necessarily because they loved Communism so much, but more because the Communists were offering to crack down hard on anti-Semitism, and Polish and Russian anti-Semitism has not been a picnic for the Jews.

It's quite common for Filipinos, especially the urban university educated middle and upper classes, to be part-Chinese. The Chinese have been coming to the Philippines in large numbers for 800 years now and they bred in pretty heavily with the locals. Filipinos with some Chinese ancestry are quite common. The real Overseas Chinese are the pure Chinese who are 3% of the country and control 70% of the wealth.

Uncle Milton responds: I would say any ethnic minority group that controls 70% of a nations wealth inherently has a large amount of societal and cultural control, albeit indirectly.

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (with the exception of Thailand) are probably in a position similar to Jews in the US around 1950 with the although the ethnic Chinese control a much larger percentage of the wealth in the Southeast Asia than Jews control in the US.

The rise of political and cultural influence from Jews (US) came fairly soon after WWII and the formation of Israel and really got rolling by about the mid-60s. In my view US Jews have probably hit their peak influence or are past it. Basically it's a numbers game, Jews are declining rapidly in number both nominally and as a percentage of the population.

The average number of children born to Jewish women is 1.1; even this number is skewed towards Orthodox Jews, who tend to have larger families and generally do not get involved in politics. The ongoing Hispanicization of the US will, in my opinion, ironically (since multiple Jewish groups promote immigration to the US) mark a decline in Jewish influence.

Latino Catholics tend not to be interested (and if anything are somewhat anti-semitic) in Judaism unlike many evangelical Whites, many of which are Zionists and and tend to be very pro-Jewish.

I tend to believe the Overseas Chinese influence will strengthen in coming years, basically in conjunction with the rise of economic power in China. Effectively, over time, I believe we will see a Sinicization of all of East Asia with the exception of Japan.

In regards to repression of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia: those laws have been reversed. As for Malaysia, basically the laws are similar in scope to our affirmative action laws. It's up to each individual, I suppose, to determine how oppressive affirmative action is. In addition, Malaysia has some quirky laws about Islam; the Constitution states that all Malays are Islamic and anyone marrying a Muslim has to convert to Islam.

I am convinced that any further pogroms against Overseas Chinese will be met with some sort of response by the PRC. Likely first an economic threat and if severe enough, a military threat.

I respond to Uncle Milton: I am not going to go round and round about this. My perception is that the whole Overseas Chinese (OC) thing has been to keep their heads down, focus on making money and getting along, and stay out of cultural stuff. They are the complete opposite of the Jews.

Now, why so many OC got involved in the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965, I have no idea. First of all, I am not even sure it is true. I am sure that there must also have been huge numbers of Indonesians involved. After all, that party was one of the largest political parties in the nation. It's been outlawed since 1965 because the ruling Indonesian elites are so terrified of it coming back bigtime.

Communist parties (CP's) are still a pretty big force in that region.

Vietnam and Laos are ruled by CP's, Cambodia had a ruling CP until just recently (not the Khmer Rogue, but instead a pro-Vietnamese CP whose leader was named Hun Sen), the Philippines has a vast CP that is outlawed and has taken up arms in a huge insurgency, Nepalese Maoists are about to seize power, Indian Maoists are tearing up India, there is a Maoist insurgency in Bangladesh, there is an active armed CP in Burma, and China, the largest nation on Earth, is ruled by a CP.

Communism goes right along with the cultural and economic realities of the region very well, particularly with Confucianism and Buddhism.

Indonesia still has one of the most horrible and inequitable semi-feudal economies in the region. It's not that different from the Philippines. A ruling elite who are little more than criminals has teamed up with the military to steal about every spare dime in the land. Hunger and malnutrition are widespread, and wages are ridiculously low.

The state for all intents and purposes as a guarantor of the rights of the poor, who are the overwhelming majority, simply does not exist. The ruling system under Suharto (pangasila) - an alliance (LOL!) between capital and labor along with very close ties between capital, the military and state, along with all sorts of para-state organizations - bears quite close resemblance to classical fascism.

The state even has bands of street thugs (usually Islamists) who conveniently assault striking workers. Leftists, dissidents and labor activists are also just out and out murdered by the state.

I am not sure about the Sinoization of the whole region, because so many nationalists in those countries are hostile to the OC. Even in Vietnam there is a lot of hostility towards the OC and to Chinese in general. Fact is, no one in Asia likes the Chinese. This is what I have been told by Asians. They are an 800-lb gorilla romping through the backyard and everyone is scared of them.

There is a Chinese nationalist who comes here every once in a while and he is furious at the way that these countries have treated their ethnic Chinese. He is urging the OC's to just pack up, sell off their assets, and go back to China or Taiwan.

You may be correct that China may intervene in the next anti-Chinese pogroms, assuming that they occur.

The Jews are total morons for letting all of these anti-Semitic Mesoamerican Catholics in here. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking? I talk to these Hispanics now and again, and they are, as a group, way more anti-Semitic than the average US White Protestant. Jews are so stupid sometimes. You know that probably 80-90% of US Jews are 100% open borders too.

Jews play dangerous games a lot, and this is one more case of it. They don't want to oppose immigration because that will set off White racism. They like immigration because it weakens the dominant ethnic-religious group in the nation - in this case, White Christians. Thing is, the Jews have done their work and the job is done.

White Christians are already sufficiently diluted that there is not going to be any racist backlash that is going to turn anti-Semitic and go after the Jews. Whites are like 64% of the US population and that was in 2000. You know we are probably like 57% now. That's what this sudden burst of White nationalism is - the last cry of a dying majority. Historically, such backlashes can get nasty, but I think in this case, it's too little, too late.

Amy Chua's World On Fire is an excellent example of a modern-day Overseas Chinese polemic. Her OC aunt living in the Philippines was murdered by her Filipina maid, possibly in a fit of ethnic pique.

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