Re: American eugenics and Nazism

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Weren't there a lot of people on the left in to
> eugenics back in the early parts of the 20th Century?
>
Yes, for example Trotsky moots the possibility - his argument was that we
would want to prevent malformed and badly formed children as much as
possible in the future using scientific knowledge. But he does not specify
the ethical conditions which would need to govern such a practice, i.e.
under what conditions eugenics practices would be morally sound and
defensible.

> Didn't the Socialist Party have segregated locals?

Which SP are you talking about ?
>
> Wasn't eugenics part and parcel of certain strands of
> reasoning in the birth control debate?

Yes. Because conservative religious people consider any scientific
experimentation in the area of procreation is immoral. But that is because
they abstract from the historically formed social relations within which
that procreation occurs, and replace that with eternal values.
>
> Please do correct me, if I'm wrong, but I seem to
> recall that Sanger was saying things like birth
> control could contribute to eliminating unsavoury
> elements from contaminating the gene pool.

The eugenics argument can easily become a racist argument, that is true. But
it need not be. But to find a correct socialist answer to this, you need to
understand genetics, medical ethics, and the nature of class society.

Marx never said that capitalism was all bad. He said it is a system which
gives rise to many different conflicting tendencies, which he conceptualises
in terms of contradictions which are in motion, and these contradictions
impel the development of the system. Thus, as I mentioned in a post on
prostitution, while plunging many people into hell, it simultaneously shows
them what heaven could look like. This means among other things that
capitalism unleashes productive powers of labour which go beyond that which
the system can contain - morally, socially, economically, culturally, and
politically. The capacity for sophisticated eugenics programmes is one of
those powers. In reality, eugenics programmes are already being tried on a
small scale, but no eternal and universal ethics about it exist, because
those ethics have to deal with the given social relations, and you can never
see eugenics programmes separate from those social relations, you have to
see them in context.

There are many women today who voluntarily seek a male sperm donor
specifically in order to produce a healthy, intelligent, goodlooking baby,
and I see nothing wrong with that, provided the wishes of those directly
involved are duly respected, and provided they assume full responsibility
for their actions, and can do so. This practice is already a primitive form
of eugenics,
which shows there is in principle nothing wrong with it, it just depends on
how it is done and what the motive is. But you could well imagine that the
bourgeois would like to impose private property relations on this activity,
such that beautiful, intelligent, healthy babies are only for the propertied
classes, and the proles can spurt uglies.

Jurriaan