Modernity and "Whiteness"

Bolívar Echeverría was one of the leading philosophers and critical theorists in Latin America and his work on capitalism and modernity offers a distinctive account, informed by the experiences of Latin American societies, of the social and historical forces shaping the modern world.   For Echeverría, capitalism and modernity do not coincide:  modernity is a long-term historical phenomenon that involved a new set of relations between human beings and nature and between the individual and the collective, while capitalism is a particular form in which modernity has been realized.  As Marx showed, capitalism is a mode of reproduction that involves the growing commodification of social life – everything, even human labor power itself, is turned into a commodity. Echeverría introduces the notion of blanquitud or “whiteness” to capture the new form of identity that is brought into being by the totalizing and homogenizing character of capitalism.  While blanquitud includes certain ethnic