Serious Marxist question for you, do you think the current definitions/parameters for genocide are sufficient? Or would you broaden/limit its scope?
Like many things that evolve out of the liberal order, the full potential of the critique is limited by the practical needs of the ruling class.
WEB Du Bois helped lead the charge of attempting to get the UN to recognize lynchings as an organized genocide against Black Americans. The institution due to its attachments to the American hegemon, of course could not satisfy what accepting that analysis of lynchings as genocidal would imply - tribunals, prosecutions, truth and reconciliation committees, reorganizing the political and economic institutions of the state. In a sense, finishing the job Reconstruction was prevented from completing.
We see too in Palestine the limitations of these international laws which yes recognize openly these acts as genocide - and were punished by the American hegemon for doing so.
The problem is, to truly address the harms of ethnic cleansings and genocides committed globally and maintained by the perpetrators through continuous violence, discrimination and apartheid/ghettoization would strike against the heart of the major world empires and their allies. What United States could exist if forced to provide restitution to its victims? How would such a thing be enforced? As it has been in the past, by force.
As for a general Marxist analysis of genocide:
Much like war is a continuation of politics by other means, when the conditions of peace can no longer resolve the conflicts between different interests, genocide is a continuation of politics by other means. Genocide is a physical extermination of a social problem.
Fascism produces death at an industrial scale and death is big business. Business benefits from fascist genocide via the weapons, munitions and chemical industries as well as the slave labor employed in concentration camps. We can’t also forget the business leaders who collaborated with the Nazi regime outside of these industries. Even indirectly business profited from the atrocities of fascism. It’s one way capitalism normalizes fascism and genocide: it does business with it.
The mass production of death in genocide is related to the mass production of commodities for genocide: iron for planes, tanks and guns and clothes for soldiers for example. In some cases such as the Nazi example slaves are used for this production. During colonization genocide was used to gain lands for settlers to develop. The United States committed genocide on lands they would then use slaves to labor on producing a variety of commodities. Genocide is a profitable endeavor, it produces commodities, disciplines labor and develops productive forces. Genocide is a form of primitive accumulation and dispossession. Possessions and properties are seized and lands developed. The logics of capitalism are present in the genocidal process. This is not to say that genocide is synonymous with fascism. Genocide is an ancient practice whereas fascism is a modern ideology and political movement. However, the history of fascism is inseparable from massacres, genocide and ethnic cleansing so must be analyzed with those conditions in mind. In the era of capitalist-imperialism genocide is an economy of death with fascism as its religion.
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