From Darwin has descended the language of error, a language that has locked up historical thinking and imposed slovenly and imprecise conclusions even upon scholarly and sensible researchers. Words like “growth,” “decline,” “development,” “evolution,” “decay,” may have started as servants but they have ended as master: they have brought us to the edge of historical inevitability.

As earlier, Greek and Roman thinkers had created the totalizing construct of the barbarians, the feudal nobilities of western Europe had inspired and authored a similar myth. Friedrich Hertz has reported that:

In the Middle Ages and later, the nobility, as a rule, considered themselves better blood than the common people, whom they utterly despised. The peasants were supposed to be descended from Ham, who, for lack of filial piety, was known to have been condemned by Noah to slavery. The knightly classes of many lands, on the other hand, believed themselves to be the descendants of the Trojan heroes, who after the fall of Troy were said to have settled in England, France and Germany. This theory was seriously maintained not only in numerous songs and tales of knightly deeds, but also in many scholarly works.

The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into “racial” ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the earl Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.

As a civilization of free and equal beings, Europe was as much a fiction in the nineteenth century (and later) as its very unity had been during the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. Both the church and the more powerful nobilities of the Holy Roman Empire and its predecessor had been the source of the illusion in those earlier periods. From the twelfth century forward, it was the bourgeoisie and the administrators of state power who initiated and nurtured myths of egalitarianism while seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the purpose of their domination.

Racialists, not satisfied with merely proclaiming the superiority of the white over the coloured race, also felt it necessary to erect a hierarchy within the white race itself. To meet this need they developed the myth of the Aryan, or Nordic, superiority. The Aryan myth in turn became the source of other secondary myths such as Teutonism (Germany), Anglo-Saxonism (England and the United States), and Celticism (France).

The emergence of nationalism was again neither accidental nor unrelated to the character that European capitalism had assumed historically. Again, the bourgeoisie of particular cultures and political structures refused to acknowledge their logical and systemic identity as a class. Instead, international capitalism persisted in competitive anarchy—each national bourgeoisie opposing the others as “natural” enemies. But as powerful as the bourgeoisie and its allies in the aristocracy and bureaucracy might be in some ways, they still required the co-optation of their “rational” proletariat in order to destroy their competitors. Nationalism mobilized the armed might they required to either destroy the productive capacities of those whom they opposed or to secure new markets, new labor, and productive resources. Ultimately, the uneven developments of national capitalisms would have horrifying consequences for both Europe and the people under European domination.

In Germany and Italy, where national bourgeoisies were relatively late in their formation, the marshaling of national social forces (peasants, farmers, workers, clerics, professional classes, the aristocracy, and the state) was accomplished by the ideological phantasmagoria of race, Herrenvolk, and nationalism. This compost of violence, in its time, became known under the name of fascism. With the creation of fascism, the bourgeoisie retained the full range of its social, political, and economic prerogatives. It had the cake of the total control of its national society, an efficient instrument for expanding its domination and expropriation to the Third World, and the ultimate means for redressing the injuries and humiliations of the past. Again, not unexpectedly, slavery as a form of labor would reappear in Europe.