Eugenics and Capital
by Mark S. Lennon

Problem: Why did the Soviets end up equating genetics and fascism?
Definitions:
Capitalism–form of social organization in which the economy is the sovereign principle, the economy being that dimension of human activity concerned not only with securing sustenance for living bodies but with the production of profit through exchange of commodities
Biologism–social mythology which functions to avert discussion of social matters in terms of historical/social categories (i.e. class) by claiming to analyze human beings according to ‘natural’ categories which are always already historical but not acknowledged as such.
Geneticism–With the elaboration of biology in the 20th century according to the Mendelian-Darwinian synthesis a new subcategory of biologist ideology was born. According to this ideology, if there is no inheritance of acquired characteristics, the distribution of characteristics and resultant inequalities within human populations can be explained by reference to differences within the gene pool without reference to any outside factors.
Demographic Politics–the conception of politics beginning in the bourgeois epoch where the object of the interventions of power is the statistically analyzed population as a biological thing.
Eugeni-conomy–The capitalist principle combined with demographic politics and geneticism gives rise to a tendency toward an economically oriented “rationalization of the species.” This is the capitalist form of utopia which it is destined to repeat as a demand so long as it maintains itself in existence.
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Under the capitalist form of social organization everything in on the market. This includes bodies and the molecules that compose them insofar as industrial techno-science can render them accessible to marketization-economization-commodification. This gives rise to two potentially disastrous tendencies:
1. Human Monoculture
2. Molecular Market
We have by no means reached either of these limits. However, in our own day we are seeing a re-normalization of eugenic or para-eugenic discourse both in an increasingly meanspirited ‘let-em-starve’ libertarianism, and under the rubric of various forms of genetic screening and biotechnology. The possibility of therapeutic interventions today is used to cushion the potential shock of the reintroduction of a way of thinking that was thoroughly discredited by the Nazis as a representative of the global eugenics movement of the 20th century.