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.
Damn, good post. Changed my perspetive a bit. (Also thanks for calling me comrade, made me feel warm)
That said, i think the material conditions part of your summation is kind of the core point of why I and others were perplexed by the idea of Hondurus being “western”, in spite of the other stuff.
For me, “the west”, “the imperial core”, and “the global north” are very close to being synonymous in how i understand them. But maybe they shouldnt be. This is why i usually use imperial core though, since it seems the most specific.
“western” and “the west” aren’t even the same thing. latam is westish in those regards but these countries certainly aren’t the hegemonic “the west”
No worries about the pronoun!
I agree with you that my summation seems close to your point. I just don’t think it allows us to discount @CatrachoPalestino’s concept of Honduras as western. It might not be in the imperial core but the experience Catratcho and others describes is real. As Odo put it over there:
PS: how do we tag people I’m bad at formatting pls help
All of these also hold true for Angola, Congo, Kenya, Philippines, and several other countries in Africa and Asia. If everyone’s “Western” then it’s a meaningless term.
We already know what the answer to this, “Western” is based on race, which is the only reason Latin America is even in the running on being considered Western. But when you look at how ACTUAL Europeans behave and put their value, they don’t actually consider Latin America western in any sense at all–and this is because of the other half of their ancestry.
@CatratchoPalestino@hexbear.net
You dropped a letter comrade