Hexbear’s latest struggle session is in: should Latin America be considered western or not? I decided to write up some thoughts about it.
The discussion on comrade’s @autismdragon 's post centered around a comrade from Palestine living in Honduras (or born in Honduras with Palestinian ascent) and others from neighboring countries claiming that Honduras (and other neighboring countries) is a western country, as it is populated by christian protestants, speaks a romance language, and has been subject to continuous economical, cultural, and imperialist influence by the United States. Others have pointed out that western should be understood in its most exclusive sense as pertaining only to western europe & the USA, and that racist white people in such countries would never consider a latin american person to be western and therefore it must be true they are not western.
I think this argument fails to capture the way the concept of “western” has been utilized in Latin American countries to further the position of certain groups. So while I do agree that there are fundamental differences between Latin America and Europe or the US (the basis on which I believe they should be understood to be described below), adopting the most radical exclusionary concept of westerness does not allow us to understand the totality of social relations in Latin America, which are very much infused with notions of westerness and white supremacy.
To make an analogy with phenomena within “western in the strict sense” places, it is known that US WASPs did not consider italians or poles or sometimes even germans to be white. Or we can imagine an italian who moves to Sweden and is not reeeealy considered white, over there. Does that mean only the most exclusionary concept of whiteness is true?
Or, rather, should one look into it as a fundamentally relational concept with changing significates? That same italian from the example above can move into Africa or South America and be very much considered white: Brazil for example welcomed several italian migrants during the 19th/20th century as part of a state policy of whitening society. A polish descendant in the US, some generations removed, might very well be considered a white westerner. And our european comrades such as @egon would not BELIEVE what passes for white on, say, northeastern Brazil.
The fact is that such concepts of western institutions and thought, and whiteness, are woven into societies born out of colonization and used even by the mestizo descendants of the colonizers of yesterday. I’m perfectly aware that several argentinian people who consider themselves very white would not be considered white by a racist northern european (or even a mildly progressive one). That does not change the fact that their white and european heritage has a material effect on their social relations within argentinian society.
The fact is also that whiteness and westerness exist insofar as certain parts of latin american society hold the power of defining non-whiteness within their own societies (by e.g. murdering a black or indigenous person). This might be the alchemy of racism in Latin America: nobody is white yet it is clear and defined who is black.
I think disregarding such mechanisms as delusions of a comprador elite, as has been proposed by one of our comrades in the thread, does not allow us to capture the issue in its totality. It also leaves out that although latin american countries generally do not have a nationalistic bourgeoisie as combative as, say, Osama Bin Laden or some russian capitalists, it is also not completely devoid of a certain degree of autonomy and interests that clash with those of imperial/external capital. An internal bourgeoisie, if we go by Poulantzian concepts.
I also think that telling our latin american comrades to shed the concept of westerness because a northern european would not consider a latin american western, while having interesting rethorical effect and shock value, is not as necessary as some comrades in the thread made it out to be. Rather, an european who reminds our latin american comrades that they are very much not western and “to be honest we don’t even consider the czechians western” is merely exercising once again the power to define who is or isn’t [ingroup] that is characteristic of whiteness and westerness. Again, possible rethorical effect but to me it does not seem to further our comprehension of material reality, merely recreating its mechanisms with inverted signifiers.
What would then be a more interesting way of looking into it?
I’m by no means an expert but I also wanted to end this effort post with a more propositional tone. So here is what I think to be more useful to us in a marxist forum.
It is true that Latin America has several cultural ties to the west-in-its-strictest-meaning (e.g. romance languages, christianism); that it has institutional ties to the west-in-its-strictest-meaning (e.g. a lot of state building in Brazil happened when the Portuguese king was in exile following defeat to Napoleon, to the point where some liberal scholars will consider ours a Portuguese-state-in-exile); and that it might as well share some customs (e.g. santa claus dresses in heavy red clothes while christmas is in summer goddamnit) or ideologies (with a seemingly unending propensity to import the latest fads in european economic science). On the other hand, a proper marxist understanding should stress that material conditions are central to the social phenomena observed. A shared cultural heritage (which exists and accounts for comrade’s @CatrachoPalestino considering Honduras western) does not supersede the class relations of indigenous displacement and genocide, black slavery, superexploitation, and having part of our surplus value directed to the central capitalist countries. It is those relations that should be seen as the defining features of our material reality rather that a cultural heritage - which does not exclude looking into how such cultural heritage might be utilized to very material effects.
Final notes: musical notes
I will not translate two song’s lyrics as of right now but I feel two songs are thematically relevant to our discussion which I will leave linked below because I like them. Mapping them out within western or non western musical traditions will be left as an exercise to the reader.
The only west that actually matters, politically
The white bourgeois insistence on ‘cultural westernism’ or whatever in these countries is just aspiration to the Imperial core that they ain’t in
Yet such insistence has material effects within their own countries, such material effects explain the insistence of our comrades from Latam that their countries are, in a certain way, western, and claiming that the US and EU are more western does not take that into account.
I also don’t think Japan is western. Maybe global north would be a more correct concept to describe the green countries in your emoji.
yeah japan is sometimes part of “the west” but it’s not western. i mentioned in another comment that this is perhaps an opposite to the latam situation.
being “western” and 3 bucks will buy you a cup of coffee
it just doesn’t matter and I think it’s sus to worry about it. the only reason anybody cares about how “western” they are is to position themselves as better than someone else for the purposes of exploiting them. or, maybe to try to assuage bad feelings from being in a low hierarchical rung themselves and excluded from the imperial core. still not a good look.
I’d also argue Japan is more “western” than, say, Colombia in most cultural ways too. Full internalization of Western art, music, and most importantly political and governance structures, which are sort of a superficial veneer in most of Latam.
I don’t think there is a single dogmatic definition for western, nor should we seek one out. It depends on context and has shifted over time, just like whiteness as you rightly mentioned. But while I agree with the overlap with whiteness, I don’t think western necessarily implies race every time it is used.
Western means something slightly different when speaking of philosophy compared to art. It means something entirely different in leftist (esp. Marxist) discussions because it is usually referring to the imperial core which is coincidentally in the West (as originally, arbitrarily defined relative to Rome).
Hell, one could argue that we quit using the word western altogether, first and foremost because of its imprecision, secondly because it maybe has some latent Orientalism baked in; the term western only has meaning relative to Eastern which has historically connoted inferior, backward, foreign, etc.
Edit: sorry for all the adverbs, I usually edit them out but I’m about to fall asleep
I don’t think there is a single dogmatic definition for western,
Yes there is. It’s just “collective European racial interest”
The anglos in USA, Aus, NZ, Canada are all 98-100% genetically pure and look Northern European. It’s not at all like Latin America where they’re both 1) only from the (visibly darker pigmented) European periphery of Spain and 2) only partially descended from said periphery, which results in something like 80% of Latinos looking out of place in Northern Europe.
Why does this matter? Because the west is racist, and this racism is applied primarily based on appearance. Illegal Polish immigrants don’t exactly get questioned for their papers out of the blue, but legal US citizens can be deported if they look Mexican enough (Joe Arpaio)
- White Americans (and Australian etc) are pure so they’re western
- Japan and Korea are not remotely European so they’re not. Will gladly fill with 100s of European-controlled military bases tho
- Russia seeks more power at the expense of other whites. (bolded very important). Thus, not western. They’re betraying the collective racial interest!
- Poland used to be non-western. But now it is.
https://i.postimg.cc/MWGZ93zF/image.png
If Latin America is western, then they’re doing a piss-poor job at it lol. If almost every country in Europe would rather help any other European country than help Colombia, what does that make Colombia? Even Spain would rather help much richer Northern European countries than they would Colombia. Hell even INDIA receives an overall warmer reception, though not by much, but it should tell you that Latin America is as forgettable and unimportant to the Western world as INDIA is. And the best part is that Colombia isn’t even an especially offensive Latin country in terms of geopolitics, unlike Venezuela or Cuba or Bolivia etc.
“Western” is just another extraneous word for “white”. Whites love making more words mean “white”. They did it with the word “Caucasian”, the word “Aryan”, the word “continent” which was redefined to give white-people-land its own special snowflake status, the word “Indian”, which was applied to the actual inhabitants of America in order to tacitly emphasize that they don’t belong here so that white settlers could LARP as natives, etc. “Western” is just another variant of these words. Anyone who thinks otherwise is playing checkers while we’re playing chess.
If you wanna complain about the concept of a direction being used as an ethnocultural bloc, then I’m all for that. Europe is a central place on the world map (which is completely arbitrary anyway). But when white westerners say “western”, I promise you nobody is thinking of Chile or Ecuador when they say that.
I largely agree with you that Western means white in many contexts. Just not all. The usage of so many terms for white, far from proving a uniform history of white supremacy over different eras and continents, actually demonstrates the ambivalent and volatile nature of whiteness as a concept, that it is not something absolute but rather disputed and impermanent.
I don’t agree with identifying peoples as Western based on appearance. It is valid to consider Japan as Western in certain discussions because it forms an integral part of US imperialism today. Same for Israel, Guam, and other places. India right now is at a turning point and seems to be trying to join the west. Yet I acknowledge that in other contexts these countries are not really part of the club and could then be considered non-Western. It’s a matter of geopolitics not biology.
So I take the Parenti view on this one. It doesn’t matter to me what we call Western as long as communication is clear. At best, it is a waste of energy like it is a waste to argue whether certain nations are/were Actually Existing Socialism. At worst, it validates the existing class structure by accepting the division as natural. Like I’m not interested in fine-tuning exactly which ethnicities I would consider Aryan because the very premise is racist and unnecessary. We have terms like imperial core and global south, which shift the focus properly to social relations rather than racial ideology.
Without getting into the weeds of what “Western” precisely means: racists in the imperial core might not think of them as Western, but that’s on them.
but that’s on them.
this is just cope
It’s not on them, they lose nothing from it, because they own all the wealth and all the capital
It’s like me walking into a KKK meeting with your mindset and what happens? I’d just get lynched, but hey, their loss that’s on them (not really)
The better question is why are so many Latin Americans, as well as a certain class of obfuscating-or-completely-ignorant actual Westerners (On this forum it’s mostly the latter, on reddit and other areas it’ll be the former) obsessed with the idea of Latin America being considered Western? It’s because 1) honestly speaking, a ton of Latinos are self-hating/love the “ego boost” from being considered part of a powerful class and 2) actual white westerners love virtue signalling their support to Latinos because the fake camaraderie costs them nothing, and they would love to have Latin America turn into an antipodal version of Korea/Japan/Saudi Arabia covered with US/French/British military bases and funneling even more resources into the ACTUAL West.
but that’s on them.
this is just cope
My point is that just because someone in the imperial core doesn’t think someone from Latin America is Western doesn’t change the fact that many of them are (excluding people who have kept to indigenous traditions, and say for instance some non-European immigrants). My point is simply that they’re wrong. It’s their error.
And by your logic Angola, Kenya, the Philippines, huge swathes of India etc are also Western. Pretty much the whole world uses Western technology, speaks some degree of English, wears Blue Jeans, and listens to the Backstreet Boys or whomever.
The only reason people bring up Latinos being western, is because the definition of Western is inherently racial, everyone knows this intuitively including every single person debating it–that’s why they even brought it up in the first place.
And Latinos are obviously only partially European racially, and they don’t look similar enough to pass in Northern Europe which is where the imperial core is. So when people say “the western world” they are almost never thinking about Latin America, unless they themselves are Latin American and want to feel included under this exclusive label.
So since Western is just a racial dogwhistle, AKA a polite way of saying “White” that doesn’t sound as racist to the POCs ears, and since Latinos are basically only half white (from a darker than average white country like Spain), that means that Latinos are not Western in any way that matters. Are they west–ish? Sure.
Or we can imagine an italian who moves to Sweden and is not reeeealy considered white, over there. Does that mean only the most exclusionary concept of whiteness is true?
Forget Sweden, I know Italians who couldn’t move into certain neighborhoods here in the northern US as late as the 1990s
Italian was considered a different racial category from northern European as late as the 1980s, I’ve seen it on official job applications
Italians also just look different in a way which doesn’t exist for Irish Polish or even Russian people. They’re darker, and they look more proximal to Arabs or Mexicans depending on who you ask.
Rather, an european who reminds our latin american comrades that they are very much not western and “to be honest we don’t even consider the czechians western” is merely exercising once again the power to define who is or isn’t [ingroup] that is characteristic of whiteness and westerness.
well yea, because that’s what whiteness is. It’s exclusionary. It’s not exclusionary to say “the whitest whites don’t consider you white”. That’s not racism, that’s just observing reality.
This whole debate is pointless because “Western” is just another weasel word, a euphemism, a dogwhistle, for “White”. The point was to make it sound softer and tamer, and the fact that this debate even exists, means they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “The White World” sounds awkward and racist to the POC across the globe, but “The Western World” sounds soft and tame and inclusive–mission accomplished!
They can basically say “White interests” by saying the word “Western”, and the White supremacists know the sound of the dogwhistle, they can claim plausible deniability (“it’s not based on race, I swear!”) and even half a continent full of Latin Americans will have millions of people clamoring about how they’re “totally Western actually” even though most of them would be facing deportation as a LEGAL US CITIZEN in many towns and states.
My definition of whiteness is simple: it’s whether you can pass as an Anglo. That’s pretty much it. What counts as “passing as an Anglo” heavily depends on time and place, but that’s what it really boils down to in the end. Anglos are definitionally white, and every other European ethnic group, even the French, the Danish, and the Dutch, are only white insofar as Anglos consider them close enough to be Anglo.
How else do you explain WWI when Anglos called Hitler’s ubermensch a bunch of yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed, buck-teeth, dog-eating Asiatic marauders? Or this infamous poster, which boils down to Anglos, in this case an Anglo American, calling Germans the n-word. It’s because there are levels of whiteness, and some ham sandwich gammon fuck is at the very top of the pyramid. And in the case of WWI, the ham sandwich gammon fuck decided that blue eyes blonde hair Germans are no longer white, so blue eyes blonde hair Germans stopped being white. And after WWI is over, the ham sandwich gammon fuck decided that blue eyes blonde hair Germans can be white again, so blue eyes blonde hair Germans became white again.
All that nonsense about blood quantum or religion or cultural affinity or language is bullshit. The real question is: does the ham sandwich consider you a fellow ham sandwich?
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Yes? Then you’re a fellow Anglo and the world belongs to you and me.
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Close enough? Then you’re white and the world is yours as well but us Anglos get first dibs.
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No? Then you’re a filthy nonwhite who can make T-shirts and shoes for us.
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Maybe? Then you’re conditionally white/white-with-an-asterisk who us Anglos will strategically employ for our gain before throwing you under the bus when you’ve outlived your usefulness.
