The Socialist Intelligentsia of the Western World Entered World War I Publicly Committed to Racial Purity, White Domination, and Violence

Havelock Ellis saw it as part of the essential socialist quest for white racial purity. Capitalism believes in mere quantity, both in terms of goods and in terms of people; socialism, by contrast, in quality: ‘the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity’ – a noble ideal in itself, and also ‘the only method by which socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path’. That is from Ellis’s Task of Social Hygiene in 1912, which unites Marx’s early vision of inevitable class conflict with eugenic theory and the coming triumph of the white races.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb echoed the point in the New Statesman. If the higher race, as they call the whites, were to lose their world predominance through a falling birth rate, there would be a cataclysm in which they would be replaced by a ‘new social order developed by one or other of the coloured races, the negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese’. That prospect made the Webbs ultra-imperialists:

It would be idle to pretend that anything like effective self-government, even as regards strictly local affairs, can be introduced for many generations to come – in some cases, conceivably never. (2 August 1913)

So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the first world war publicly committed to racial purity and white domination, and no less committed to violence.

Socialism offered a blank cheque to violence, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which, to his profound satisfaction, the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what ‘very bad stage management’ it had been to allow a party of British visitors in the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving ‘enemies of the state’ at a local station. The account is predictive, nearly ten years before the Nazis began their own mass deportations at the height of the second world war. ‘Ridiculous to let you see them’, said Beatrice Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. ‘The English are always so sentimental’, adding with assurance: ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ The story was recorded years later by her niece, Konradin Hobhouse, in a letter to the Manchester Guardian in February 1958, and it makes plain that some socialists knew of the Soviet exterminations as early as 1932 and accepted, even welcomed them as an essential part of a socialist programme. Such ideas were not limited to dictatorships. A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began an eugenic programme for compulsorily sterilising gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it till after the second world war.

--George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2010), Kindle e-book.