Marxism and Racism

I have said before in this space that Marxism’s notion of class and class warfare segues naturally and almost inevitably, as it did in Germany and Italy in the twenties, into racism and race warfare. Once you start the hunt for scapegoats, a foreign scapegoat is the best. And the very term “bourgeois” is telling: it means the people of the town. The people who, unlike peasants and landowners, were not tied down to the land. The people, mostly traders, most likely to have come from elsewhere, and to have contacts elsewhere.

I was aware already that in Vietnam, the hostility to “bourgeois” almost automatically became a hostility to the Chinese minority who tended to run the businesses in the South. Hence the sufferings and exodus of the “boat people.” I was unaware, until pointed out by Neale in his People’s History of the Vietnam War, that the same was true of the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia. Wiping out the “bourgeoisie” there actually began with wiping out the Muslim Cham and the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia.