by the Editors

Introduction

In the United States, racist views of Asian- Americans are promiscuous and self-contradictory. On the one hand, we are told that we are model minorities, hard working citizens living out the classic American story of immigration and upward mobility. On the other hand, we are painted as perpetual foreigners, never quite American even after multiple generations of citizenship. On the one hand, we are supposed to be passive, docile, and submissive, while on the other hand they fear we are the yellow peril, a rising, ruthless, and aggressive empire that will someday destroy the white race.

The fact that these stereotypes are so contradictory show their ludicrousness. Racists project their own fears, anxieties, desires, and aspirations onto us in order to suppress our self-government and make us into who they want us to be, even if what they want us to be makes no sense. But racist fears, anxieties, desires and aspirations are not simply the product of individual ill will – they are shaped by powerful institutions. For example the U.S. military reproduces stereotypes of Asians as an aggressive, brainwashed Mongolian horde in order to raise support for their base expansion projects aimed at containing Chinese military power. Without U.S. military interests in Asia, this stereotype could have died out but instead it is growing.

That’s why liberal strategies of “anti-racism” will not liberate us. Liberals encourage white people to question their stereotypes as part of confronting their “privilege.” They do not attempt to abolish the institutions like military bases that produce and reproduce these stereotypes to keep us subordinated. This editorial will examine the historic political, economic, and social origins of anti-Asian racism. Our goal is not to enlighten anyone’s consciousness but rather to expose the institutions that oppress us so we know who our enemies are and what we need to smash.

The big picture: Facing the double-barreled shotgun of colonialism and empire

In general, we can say that our enemies are the forces of white supremacy – any institutions and practices that have the effect of elevating white people over people of color (including Asians) by subordinating and suppressing our attempts to be self-governing.

In particular, there are two interlocking systems of white supremacy that shape the terrain of Asian American life and struggle. The first consists of the social relations formed by the colonial settlement of North America and the founding of the United States out of colonial settler states. It is the result of land stolen from American Indians and Chicano/as, the enslavement of Blacks, and the extreme exploitation of “free” Black, Indigenous, European, and Asian migrant labor. As a shorthand, we will call all of this “settlerism”.[1]

Settlerism has created a legacy of terror, violence, and racial hierarchy which Asian Americans have had to navigate. From the moment we arrived as workers in the Wild Wild West we found ourselves facing down the barrels of guns originally pointed at Blacks and American Indians. Later, we found ourselves victims of a Jim-Crow-style legal system. It is only more recently that we have been championed as the “model minority”, a supposed solution to the “problem” of militant Black resistance to 500 years of settler terror. The racist rationale that created such an identification for Asian Americans is further explored below, as well as in other articles.

The second system of white supremacy is related to settlerism but is more global. It consists of the social relations formed through the expansion of U.S. imperialism in Asia through military conquest (the colonization of the Philippines, the partition of Korea, the Vietnam War, etc.) and the domination of American multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank over Asian economies. U.S. Empire built off of earlier forms of European imperialism in Asia even as it modified them. Like them, it enforced the fiction of a white Western civilization reforming Asian barbarism.

The experience of Asian Americans has been shaped by the fact that those who rule over us here in the U.S. also subjugated the countries we or our families came from. The architects of U.S. Empire in Asia created a whole string of lies about Asians being backwards, ignorant, weak, and undemocratic in order to justify this subjugation. These lies have been applied to us as well, preventing us from assimilating and becoming white like the formerly non-white immigrant groups from Europe did.

In response many Asian Americans have chosen to be consistent and principled internationalists – we have known that our situation here will not improve unless people of color abroad defeat U.S. Empire. Others have bought into U.S. empire, claiming they are the “good” Asians, unlike those “bad” Asians over there who are prone to terrorism, fanaticism, Communism, or Islam. And of course US Empire has exported aspects of North American settlerist ideology to Asia, which is why so many of our aunties and uncles over there are scared of Black Americans even though they have never met any.

In order to understand Asian American struggles we need to keep both of these systems of white supremacy in our headlights. We can’t adopt the all-too-common view that race in America is a simple binary of white over Black. Social relations in the U.S. are deeply shaped by U.S. imperialism in Asia, our peoples’ resistance to it, and our own struggles here in North America. But at the same time, we can’t pretend we’re in a national liberation struggle somewhere in Asia where we are the majority – we are in the Western Hemisphere where our lives are forged in the Black-indigenous-white crucible and we need to seek our allies and define our enemies within this context.

To do so, we will consider the origins and contemporary manifestations of four forms of anti-Asian racism: the backwards worker myth, the perpetual foreigner myth, the model minority myth, and the myth of the yellow peril.

The Docile Worker Myth: Frustrated American Dreams turned deadly

The fundamental forms of anti-Asian racism emerged because of labor competition between Asian workers and white workers who viewed Asians as backwards and submissive.

To understand why this happened we need to look at a key moment in the formation of both settlerism and imperialism: the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Asian Americans first began to arrive in large numbers as miners, farmers, workers, and rebels. At this time the U.S. was going through the industrial revolution, unleashing forces of capitalist accumulation with a voracious appetite for land, resources, and labor. To fulfill this appetite, soldiers and settlers were moving westward looting and plundering American Indian and Chicano lands at a breakneck pace. The wealth they wrenched from their genocidal drive to the Pacific was delivered, dripping in blood, as the down-payment for the new factories, plants, and shipyards that formed the bedrock of emerging U.S. imperial power in Latin America and Asia.

All of this involved mobilizing and exploiting human labor at an unprecedented scale. American settlerist mythology describes the conquest of the West as a something led by individualistic small property owners – farmers, cowboys, merchants, prospectors, etc.– who supposedly represent the soul of American democracy. But digging goldmines, boring through mountains to build transcontinental railroads, and similar enterprises required a level of organization that rugged individualists alone could not accomplish and capital that only large corporations and the federal government could provide. Soon enough big companies shunted aside the pioneers and hired mass gangs of workers at the lowest wages they could possibly impose. This was the birth day of the America we know today, where our dreams are of cowboy glory and our day jobs are full of monotonous toil under the watch of bureaucrats.

The corporations were looking for workers who could be compelled to accept slave-like wages and conditions without revolt. They turned to two sources. The first consisted of European immigrant workers from the east coast who had found themselves thrown into unemployment and poverty through economic crisis. The second consisted of former Asian farmers dislocated by the European and U.S. imperialism that was ravaging their homes (e.g. the Opium War and the genocidal Philippine-American war). But neither of these groups proved to be a well-disciplined or docile workforce, and it turned out that the only way to neutralize them was to pit the former against the latter.

The European immigrants were lured west with dreams of becoming self-made men- owning property and eventually becoming capitalists. Their dream was a mirage; they were sorely disappointed and were seething with anger. Those who had established small businesses were getting out-competed by the big corporations. And new unskilled workers who arrived from east coast slums found dangerous, low paying jobs their only option.

White supremacist politicians, craft union bureaucrats, businessmen, and many white skilled workers joined together to make Asian workers scapegoats for these frustrations; the Chinese community, which was the largest Asian ethnic group at the time, became their primary victim. They deflected the anger of small proprietors away from the big corporations and against their Chinese workers, arguing that the corporations’ reliance on cheap Chinese labor gave them an unfair advantage over smaller businesses. They also claimed that “civilized” white Americans should not have to compete in a labor market with “backwards” and “weak” “Orientals.” This allowed the skilled white workers and their craft unions to deflect the demands of unskilled European laborers for training and entry into the trades. The unskilled workers were told Chinese immigrants, not the corrupt and elitist craft unions and bosses were to blame for their plight. All of this allowed expanding US capitalism to solidify control over the workforce, neutralizing potential trouble from the unskilled white workers by co-opting them into white supremacy and neutralizing the Chinese workers by subjecting them to vigilante terror.

These anti-Chinese campaigns were a key moment in the construction of that bloody line between white and nonwhite in America. Part of the logic of settlerism was the deputization of rank and file white workers into a vigilante force that could aid the state in dispossessing and murdering American Indians and Chicanos. This logic was extended against Asians as bands of armed vigilantes attacked Chinese folks and drove them out of gold mines, orchards, and small towns across the West. Between 1850 and 1906, Chinatowns burned to the ground and thousands of Chinese were killed, forced into prostitution, or marched to railroad cars and driven out, sometimes along the very tracks they and built. It was a campaign of wholesale ethnic cleansing.

Eventually, this vigilante force was legalized in the form of a whole complex of Jim-crow-style legislation that forbade Asians from owning land, testifying against white men in court and attending public schools, etc. It all culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act which attempted to prevent any further Chinese immigration.

Early Filipino- Americans faced similar conditions. For example, there were anti-Filipino riots against Filipinos in Yakima and Wenatchee valleys in Washington, and Filipinos were driven out of Yakima in 1928. Japanese Americans also faced segregation from public schools and were attacked by racist mobs in San Francisco in 1907.

The ideologues leading these campaigns justified them by describing Asian workers as docile, dirty, backwards, and undemocratic. They were painted as conformist, traditional people unfit for a world of hearty American pioneer individualism. Many of these stereotypes remain today. (Of course, in cases where they had managed to set up their own businesses or farms, the script was flipped and Asians were portrayed as uppity, cunning devils who must have some trick up their sleeve).

In reality, the white workers were just as dirty, poor and miserable as Asian American workers, but they were bamboozled into hugging the chains of their own wretchedness rather than fighting back against their real enemies. They were the ones who succumbed to the manipulations of anti-democratic ideologues and if anyone was swept mindlessly into mob conformity it was them. They were tricked into siding with their bosses and decadent, conservative craft unions rather than joining with Asian workers who could have been their natural allies in building a more democratic America.

Of course, this is not to say that all classes of Asian Americans were automatically democratic. Emerging elites in Asian American communities also exploited our peoples ruthlessly. For example, Chinese workers were oppressed by powerful businessmen and labor brokers such as the Chinese Six Companies on the West Coast. These cartels collaborated with white supremacists to deliver coolie workers under slave-like conditions to American corporations. They worked with other Chinese elites that controlled political dissent in Chinese communities and maintained highly patriarchal and semi-feudal patronage networks backed up by thugs.

But despite these restraints, Asian American workers proved themselves to be anything but backwards and naturally slavish. They lived the classic American experience of being thrown into a rootless, violent new context and improvising strategies of survival and resistance. During the anti-Chinese pogroms, Chinese Americans organized boycotts, lawsuits, popular militias for armed self-defense, appeals to China for arms, and mass civil disobedience against attempts to get them to wear photo ID cards.

At times, Asian American workers found solidarity with Euro-American, Chicano, Black, and Native American workers in the IWW, a radical union that fought the bosses and the racist and corrupt American Federation of Labor. Japanese workers organized alongside Mexican workers in Oxnard CA, and Japanese-led labor organizing and strikes on Hawaiian sugar plantations attempted to break down the divide-and conquer management system that allocated wages based on ethnicity to create resentment between different Asian groups. Pioneering Filippino activists such as Philip Vera Cruz and Carlos Bulosan also organized alongside Arab and Latino farm workers to create the strong United Farmworkers Union in the 1960s. Enduring much physical and economic duress, the farmworkers managed to go on strike and organized a four-year long grape boycott to push for higher wages and better working conditions.

These moments of resistance are often overlooked chapters in the struggle for democracy and anti-racism in the U.S. They offer important lessons for us today where the American dream is once again dissolving into unemployment, economic crisis, dislocation, and faceless bureaucracy. Once again, right-wing populist/ white supremacist politicians and militias are emerging to blame all of this on immigrant workers. Latinos are the primary targets for now, and for reasons we explain below Asian Americans could also be targeted in the future. We can look to this early Asian American resistance for insight into how we can fight back today.

The Perpetual Foreigner Myth

Despite these heroic struggles, Asian American workers and principled multiracial labor organizations were numerically outnumbered. Eventually, Asian Americans were barred from many industries and forced to live in ghettoes (Chinatowns, Manillatowns, little Tokoyos etc). Although Asian Americans used these communities to build networks of mutual aid and protection from white supremacy, this ghettoization limited their ability to impact broader American politics through multiracial labor struggles and cultural production.

This is partly the material basis for the myth that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners. Having ethnically cleansed and concentrated Asian American populations, white supremacists turned around and argued that Asians liked to keep to themselves, that we are just visitors or squatters here who are loyal to our homelands and not to America. They see our cultures as strange and exotic, fundamentally incompatible with American democracy.

This perpetual foreigner myth was reinforced by the machinery of U.S. Empire, which was expanding into Asia. To justify its conquests, the imperialists argued that Asians had an exotic, decadent, and outdated civilization that needed to be supplanted by Western modernity. Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem the “White Man’s Burden” was about this conquest, and it described Filipinos as ungrateful heathens, “half devil, half child.” He is only one of many examples. These views of Asians as an exotic and backwards civilization were applied to Asian Americans as well, and our ongoing segregation has been justified over and over again with the excuse that we will never be able to participate fully in American civic life.

The perpetual foreigner myth reached a crescendo during World War II when the U.S. government portrayed the entire Japanese – American community as a ticking suicide bomb ready to go off in support of Japan. They rounded up thousands of Japanese families and put them in concentration camps. The perpetual foreigner myth is still alive today as neoconservative pundits portray South and Southeast Asian- American Muslims as a fifth column ready to pollute America with Jihadi terror, vampirish patriarchy, and religious fanaticism. Of course, some Asian Americans buy into this malicious propaganda by arguing that those other Asians, not us good suck ups, are the real, perpetual enemy aliens. The notorious Michelle Malkin who wrote the book, “In Defense of Internment: The case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror” is one such example.

This perpetual foreigner myth is gendered: white supremacist efforts to define Asians as strange and exotic are often fought over the bodies of Asian women. Before the Western colonists arrived, Asian societies had a wide diversity of gendered institutions from the rigid patriarchy of imperial Chinese Confucianism to the relatively matriarchal norms of Southeast Asia and southern India.Yet everywhere they went, these colonists set out to create reflections of their own patriarchal societies. In Burma, British colonialists found themselves interacting with powerful women leaders. They argued that the equality or even dominance women enjoyed there was a mark of Burmese society’s barbarism. They eagerly tried to “civilize” these “exotic” women by training Burmese men to dominate them.

Ironically, in the 20th century the imperialists flipped their script. Now they like to portray Asian societies as strange and backwards because of their supposedly more “traditional” patriarchy. We are constantly exposed to images of veiled Pakistani or Afghani women and the neoconservatives would have us believe that the war on terror is being fought to liberate these women from the grips of Islamic repression. What they never mention is that the U.S. has often supported the most patriarchal despots in Asia from Park Chung Hee in Korea to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

While the US military is busy “liberating” Asian women, its soldiers and sailors stationed at the military bases in Asia sometimes rape local women and get away with it under Status of Forces agreements reminiscent of colonial concessions. Prostitution, sex tourism, and human trafficking rings from Thailand to the Philippines have sprung up to provide “rest and relaxation” to US soldiers and tropical getaways for US businessmen. Associated advertising and pornography outfits turn this material reality into the myth of the hyper-sexual exotic Asian woman.

While some white supremacists claim they are coming to Asia to liberate its women, others appeal to the patriarchy of American capitalism and attempt to pimp out Asian women as supposedly traditional, docile, unliberated peasants who will make good sweatshop workers, mail order brides, and prostitutes. This logic has helped build an Asian underclass inside the U.S. When these women resist and sabotage their bosses’ efforts they are subjected to assault or are detained and deported.

The model minority myth

Today this underclass is rendered invisible and this history of Asian American working class resistance is suppressed. Both inside and outside our communities, Asian Americans are now portrayed as middle class, upwardly mobile, hard working techies. Our classmates assume we are naturally smart and politicians assume we are naturally conservative.

These new stereotypes also have a dark history behind them. In 1965, the US was facing pressures from the civil rights movement at home and the cold war abroad. In an attempt to improve its poor image as the world’s greatest racist, the U.S. government relaxed some of it’s explicitly race-based immigration laws and began to allow more Asian immigrants to come over.

Unlike at the turn of the century when they needed cheap workers, in the 60s the U.S. capitalists faced a crisis of overproduction and unemployment due to massive automation of U.S. factories. However they did have a large demand for trained technicians, scientists, and engineers who could help run and update this automated machinery, and they were competing with the USSR for scientific talent to promote military supremacy. Given this context, the 1965 immigration act only allowed in the educated, skilled Asians and continued to bar unskilled Asian workers. This also contributed to a brain drain in Asian countries that now lost the skilled doctors and scientists who had received state subsidized training for their capabilities.

This arrangement proved useful to the ideologues of white supremacy. They began to argue that Asians were a “model minority” because they had supposedly pulled themselves up by their bootstraps through education and hard work. The disproportionate number of Asian technicians and professionals who had arrived at the US through the state’s capitalist immigration policies, was ahistorically attributed to Asian values of hard work and family. The implication here is that other minorities are problem minorities – that Latinos and especially Blacks remain poor because of their supposedly inferior culture, laziness, or lack of intelligence, and not 500 years of settlerism, slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination. At a time when the Black Power movement was shaking up American society and galvanizing young working class Asian Americans to side with Blacks in the struggle against white supremacy, this emerging model minority myth was deployed to divide Asians from Blacks and delegitimize the Black revolt.

The model minority myth is destructive not only because it sets us against other people of color but also because it erases our own legacies of working class struggle. By presenting Asian Americans as inherently middle class it obscures the key histories outlined above, denying us democratic and anti-racist sheroes and organizational precedents from our own communities. It also renders invisible the significant and growing Asian American working class today. From undocumented Chinese and Filipino workers to Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Laotian refugees from the terror of the US war in their homelands, this myth leaves out some of the most important and dynamic Asian American communities- the very folks who are a waging key struggles today against police brutality, homeland security raids, and deportation orders.

The model minority myth could not have lasted if it were simply a white racist fantasy propagated by media portrayals of Asians. It was solidified because upwardly mobile middle class leaders in some of our own communities have bought into it. As soon as possible they moved out of the ghetto and into the suburbs and they tried to train their kids to fear and pity other people of color. Many of our parents continue to buy into this myth because in their eyes it jives with some of their own chauvinistic thinking about essential “Asian” values of hard work and family discipline (expressed through very American and very capitalist reinterpretation of Confucianism, Hinduism, etc.). For them being the model minority also means maintaining patriarchy, regulating their kids’ sexuality, and keeping them away from the more dynamic (and less white!) aspects of American culture such as hip hop. It is the task of our generation to break this middle-class stronghold that has dominated Asian Americans today.

In this sense, our struggles against the model minority myth today are not just struggles against the white supremacist media and immigration systems; they are also struggles for women’s’ liberation, workers’ self management, sexual and gender freedom, and antiracism in our own communities. As more Asian workers begin to immigrate and as our generation of young Asian Americans begin to identify more with other people of color, the model minority myth could be shaken up.

The international dimensions of the model minority myth follow the same pattern, and exacerbates its harm. U.S. Empire has propped up the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) as models for other people of color nations to follow. And yet these supposed capitalist success stories have faced restless working classes and democratic challenges to their authoritarian governments. South Korean workers and farmers militantly confronting the cops at anti-globalization demonstrations should be enough to shatter the myth of Asian docility and conservativism.

The Myth of the Yellow Peril

All of the myths discussed so far are built on the assumption that Asian countries will remain subordinated to U.S. Empire. Even the Asian tigers are junior partners. But the prospect of a growing Chinese empire emerging as a direct rival to U.S. imperialism could significantly shake up the relationship between Asian Americans and other Americans.

The rise of the Japanese Empire in the early 20th century gives us a precedent for understanding what might happen. At first the American ruling class saw the Japanese Empire as a benign, progressive force that could help modernize the rest of Asia and Japanese Americans were thus seen in a positive light. But eventually, Japan began to approach parity with the U.S. and the two empires began to compete for territory and resources. At that point, the script was flipped and the Japanese were portrayed as ruthless, cunning, diabolical aliens threatening to swarm across the world and exterminate the white race. The propaganda of both the Japanese and the U.S. armies turned the Pacific front into a race war. In the U.S., this gave rise to the stereotypes of the “yellow peril” literature and films.

Today, while most American elites are content to cash in on cooperation with China’s dynamic capitalists, some factions of the U.S. ruling class are beginning to promote a vision of China as the new yellow peril. They recognize that China holds trillions of U.S. dollars in its state bank and are startled by Chinese government efforts to wean its economy off of production for the U.S. consumer market. They describe the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony as a strange pageant of Asian conformism, as an unleashing of the collective power of docile Asian workers who will bow to a rising new Emperor, a new Oriental Despot. There is renewed talk about the threat that Chinese people supposedly pose to Western values.

What effect all of this will have on Asian Americans is yet to be seen. Many of us, regardless of ethnicity, are mistaken for Chinese by white folks who can’t tell the difference between us. If the U.S. and China begin a protracted inter-imperialist rivalry over energy, military, or financial supremacy, this could re-awaken some of the old anti-Asian elements of U.S. nationalism. The model minority myth could dissolve and more direct and vicious forms of white supremacy could re-emerge. Faced with angry American workers who have lost their jobs due to corporate looting, politicians may try to divert this anger against Chinese workers abroad and Asian American workers here, claiming we are “stealing” American jobs. This could lead to new attacks against Asian Americans reminiscent of the killing of Vincent Chin who was beaten to death in [year] by Detroit auto workers angry at Japanese competition. Although unlikely in the near future, outright war with China could lead to social chaos in both countries and the possibility of new internment camps. We shouldn’t be alarmist but it is crucial that Asian Americans begin organizing now to prevent these potential catastrophes. We are in a good position to make links between American workers and Asian workers abroad, articulating our common interests and challenging the claims of both Chinese and American elites to speak for our peoples.

Conclusion

As we have seen, anti-Asian racism is not simply the product of individual ill will. The docile worker myth, the perpetual foreigner myth, the model minority myth, and the myth of the yellow peril all have to do with deep-rooted contradictions in American society. If we want to break free of these oppressive myths then we need to confront these contradictions head on, in solidarity with other Americans and with folks struggling against U.S. empire abroad.

[1] The Asian American activist, J. Sakai, has used the concept of “settlerism” to explain the structure of white supremacy and capitalism in the U.S. Sakai argues that most white “workers” have been bought off by the privileges they received from white supremacy and therefore are not part of the working class. While we agree that the U.S. is a product of a colonial settlement process, we recognize that in history some white workers have rejected these privileges and sided with workers of color against white supremacy and capitalism. We believe that such breakthroughs are happening in lower frequencies today and can take form in larger scales.

Over the past decade, Korea has been at the forefront of conflicts over U.S. presence in Asia, the independence and integrity of Asian nations, and what types of economic systems can lead to modernization and prosperity. Many everyday Koreans are asking themselves, why is the US army still present in Korea half a century after the end of the Korean War?

Despite North Korea’s nuclear charades, many are not convinced that the North poses a serious threat to the South Korean people. In fact, the expulsion of Pyeongtaek farmers to build a new U.S. military base, the killing of young South Korean women by U.S soldiers, and the kidnapping of South Koreans in retaliation for their participation in the U.S.’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq often seem like more potent problems than Kim Jong Il’s firecrackers. Calls for US withdrawal and demilitarization have raised discussions of different visions of national reunification and the possibility of a final end to the Korean War.

This has led one wing of the South Korean ruling class to consider more friendly relations with the North in a plan called the Sunshine Policy. Among other overtures, they have financed and built the Kaesong Industrial Complex, an export processing zone along the border of North and South Korea. This project is aimed at “opening up” the North to the recipe of the South Korean miracle economy – cheap, oppressed female labor and strong state intervention. Liberals like Roh Moo Hyun, former South Korean president, call it a step toward reunification. The conservatives, like recently elected president Lee Myung Bak more honestly tout it for the investment opportunities it offers, while affirming that reunification is not on the horizon at any time soon.

The notion that capitalism could ever bring unity to Korea overlooks the fact that historically it has been rival versions of capitalism, backed by rival cold-war empires that have torn apart Korea and subjugated its people. Kaesong is the last thing that workers need in either North or South Korea. It breathes new life into the decadent, oppressive regime in the North, and undercuts decades of labor struggle in the South by shifting production from militant South Korean factories into a new industrial zone that can more easily be managed. In reality, South Korean workers have called for solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the North, giving birth to a more encompassing vision of reunification on the basis of democracy and workers’ self management. It is this vision which offers the best hopes for the national liberation of the Korean people.

Good Asian, Bad Asian

As Asian Americans we search through the news to find out what is going on in Korea and find many racist ideas that have been applied to us as well. South Korean elites imagine they are bringing progress to the backward North Korea. This resurrects the old drama of the Good Asian trying to convert the Bad Asian to respect international standards of US Empire. This is a reflection of the racial dimension which attempts to give legitimacy to U.S. foreign policy.

North Korea plays the part of the “Bad Asian”. Kim Jong Il is the “Fu Manchu” figure – a carrier of the Yellow Peril. Quiet but subversive, he cooks up unauthorized nuclear technologies that can potentially destroy the world if they don’t flop and crash into the sea. Although ample evidence of his motives and methods of rule are easily available, the US State Department and its media lackeys keep insisting Kim is an enigma. All they can do is speculate about his mistresses, his madness, and his “Dear Leader” fantasies. Although he has made clear that he wants to move toward some kind of revamped Chinese style Communism, more open to working with U.S. capitalism, the media keeps insisting that North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, and that every single North Korean hates every American with a passion. There are other examples of this Bad Asian figure more close to home, for example the Chinese scientists suspected of passing US military secrets to the People’s Republic. The Bad Asian is a perpetual foreigner to the US, linked forever to the nation of his/her ancestors. Even when his/her brains can serve to improve US technology, the Bad Asian is constantly a potential threat to US National Security and cannot be trusted with sophisticated weapons technology.

For every Bad Asian, there is a Good Asian complement. South Korea is the Charlie Chan figure, imbued with “positive” stereotypes of being intelligent, witty and diligent, much like the “model minority” Asians in the US. South Korea’s “Asian Tiger” status, its ability to rise up from Third World to First World economic standing in a matter of a few decades is testament to its success. However, its achievement shines a brighter light elsewhere, reiterating the supposed necessity and effectiveness of US imperialism in Asia. The US government emphasizes time and again, that South Korea’s success would never have been possible without the presence of the protective US military bases, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and US economic advisors.

This Good Asian-Bad Asian game obscures the fact that people on both sides of the DMZ are Koreans; they speak the same language, eat the same food, celebrate the same holidays, and have the same long and proud tradition of national unity and resistance to foreign invasions. It was the U.S. and Russian imperialists that arbitrarily decided they would be two separate countries.

Beyond the cold war: two competing forms of state capitalism

Seen from the perspective of the prisons and assembly lines on both sides of the DMZ, there are great similarities between the North and the South. Both Korean states came to power by defeating a unified and radically democratic government that the Korean people had tried to institute at the end of WW2. Before the US and Russian armies could occupy and rip up the Korean peninsula, the Korean people started to dismantle the Japanese colonial state and its system of industrial slavery, replacing it with democratic workers councils and town assemblies. They tried and punished corrupt Korean collaborators and Japanese colonizers. However, when the US Army got to the peninsula, they destroyed this burgeoning democratic government with the help of right-wing fascist gangs. They propped up the remnants of the Japanese colonial state, filling its official positions with Korean collaborators and American advisers. In the North, the emerging democracy was not crushed but rather co-opted. Its leaders were controlled by the Korean Communist party and when some of them revolted, the Russian army helped Kim Il Sung put them down. In any case, both regimes were founded at the expense of democracy and national independence in Korea.

South Korea under the rule of the chaebols

The US Cold Warriors claimed that their presence in South Korea would help create a future for Asia free from Communist tyranny. But from the end of World War II till 1987, this rhetoric masked a South Korean right wing dictatorship complete with a US-trained security apparatus unapologetically called the Korean CIA. Run by huge domestic conglomerates protected by the state, the South Korean economy was a far cry from an idealistic “free market” that in reality exists nowhere, not even in the US. Much like its North Korean counterpart, the South Korean state has imposed an economic plan of ruthless modernization from above based on the assumption that development and progress are only possible with a huge state disciplining its workers to produce at a breakneck speed. The system on both sides of the DMZ can thus be called “state capitalist.”

The South Korean state historically controlled the movement of capital and goods across its borders in order to protect and rapidly expand its domestic industries. The largest investors in the South Korean economy were either state-owned enterprises or heavily state-subsidized monopoly corporations called chaebols run by an oligarchy of several families. Hyundai, Samsung and Daewoo were all built up by the government’s economic planners. Apparently, the South Korean elites and the US Cold Warriors, despite their free market rhetoric, were not afraid of a state-controlled economy as long as it was their state-controlled economy, as long as economic planning was kept in the hands of elites allied to US imperialism, and out of the hands of everyday Koreans.

Despite the severe repression of the South Korean police state, workers and students conducted heroic campaigns from the 1970s onward for democracy and workers’ self-management. First led by women who had recently migrated from their farms to work in the Wonpoong and Dongil garment sweatshops in Seoul, this movement showed the world that migrant women workers in light industries are not just passive victims and do in fact shape history. In the 80s, this movement developed into general strikes across industry and gender lines. It was supported by liberation theology Minjung churches and worker-priests like Rev. Choo Wha-soon. Student activists dropped out of the universities to lead clandestine political study and support groups in Korea’s industrial zones. This political fermentation came to boiling point with the Kwangju uprising of 1980, a mass rebellion which was brutally suppressed by the South Korean military.

With the general strike of 1987, the dictatorship finally fell and was replaced with a form of multi-party representative democracy. However, like all representative democracies, the South Korean state continues to suppress the self-governing capacities of its population. The less radical leaders of the labor movement have been co-opted into the new government, where they repress other labor activists who have continued to push for greater workers control and safeguards against casualization and the bosses divide and conquer tactics. The recent imprisonment of Korean workers struggling in solidarity with non-Korean immigrant workers is a case in point.

During the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the IMF, World Bank, and the US treasury tried to rearrange South Korea’s state-controlled economy and turn it over to neo-liberalism, making it easier for American capitalists to invest in Korea. A wing of the South Korean middle classes today wishes to go in this direction, and South Korea has signed the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. against the wishes of hundreds of thousands of Korean demonstrators. Korean workers and farmers have taken to the streets not only in Korea but everywhere in the world at anti-globalization demonstrations from Seattle 1999 to Hong Kong 2005. This summer they held massive demonstrations, facing down police repression in order to oppose Lee Myung Bak’s decision to allow the import of U.S. beef that is potentially tainted with mad cow disease. When the cops tried to isolate the supposed “radical elements” leading this movement they failed because the demonstrations were largely self-organized through grassroots networks of citizens. This should make it clear that the Korean people are not conservative just because a conservative president was elected – there is a massive groundswell against him, just like there is massive discontent against Bush here in the U.S.

North Korea, Inc.

If state-capitalism thrived under the South Korean chaebol, it thrived in North Korea under a one-party dictatorship. The Korean Communist Party under Kim Il Sung also pursued rapid economic development, prioritizing heavy industry in this case with Soviet and Chinese rather than American investment capital. Despite all of its rhetoric about workers’ power, the North Korean government believes that its workers are not and never will capable of economic planning. Rather than private bosses, their labor is exploited and managed by Party bureaucrats and state planners who command them when to work, how to work, and how much to produce. In this sense, the North Korean state functions like one giant capitalist corporation, exploiting resources and people to make a profit that it uses to bolster the rule of the Party through the development of military hardware. Rather than South Korea’s oligarchy of several corporate families, you have the Kim family monarchy-monopoly. For a long time, this worked “well” in capitalist terms, and North Korea in the 1970s was better off economically than the South, but after the USSR fell and Soviet capital became unavailable, the Northern economy in the 90s spiraled toward famine.

It is likely that the Northern leaders will go the route China has gone, opening up to international capitalism while at the same time maintaining the iron grip of Party control of all aspects of life inside the country itself. This would not be a shift from “Communism” to “Capitalism” but simply a shift from one form of state- capitalism to another.

During the Cold War, Korea was ripped apart by different visions of global capitalism, lead by the USSR and the US. Now the Cold War is over and the question is whether China’s rising state capitalism or the U.S.’s neoliberalism will be dominant on the peninsula. North Korea desperately needs foreign investments to survive, and which international block of capital they will orient towards is still unclear. They are moving to allow limited foreign direct investment from China and South Korea, and have even indicated that they desire a more friendly relationship with the U.S. They are playing China and the U.S. off each other to make sure that they get the best deal possible from their future imperial patron.

U.S. leaders are setting up roadblocks to reunification not only because they want an excuse to keep their troops in the South but also because they fear a reunited Korea at this time may lean towards the Chinese orbit. While they have their hands tied in Iraq, the US imperialists have tried to keep up the nuclear scare to delay questions of reunification until such a time when they can ensure the new Korean ruling class will sway toward them using force if necessary.

Alternatives from below

Many everyday Koreans are getting impatient and have their own ideas. Hardly the passive duped Asians the American media paints them as, many have decided that they don’t want to live under the very modern despotisms that have developed on both sides of the DMZ.

In North Korea, many dissidents risk their lives to defect from the current government, escaping the desolation of North Korea to join their families in the South. Some escape to China, where they are subsequently caught by a harsh police force and sent back to North Korea to face labor camps and prison for supposedly betraying the nation. Defections do not necessarily indicate pro-capitalist leanings, but simply that life under the North Korean regime is so intolerable that leaving home is preferable to staying and fighting for something new. Given our limited access to North Korean society as Americans it is difficult to see what is happening on the ground today. But it is hard for us to believe that the North Koreans are all as passive and brainwashed as the US media would like to paint them.

We have more information about the South, though the depth, power, and sophistication of their developing social movements are frequently understated here in the U.S. Today there is a continuation of the democratic labor struggles discussed earlier. In the late 90s, the government tried to sneak through a program of mass layoffs to satisfy IMF austerity measures imposed by American capitalists. In response, workers, students, and churches organized a nationwide general strike despite the winter weather.

This has been followed by recurring smaller strikes and battles against layoffs and unemployment. In one case, Kim Wu-chung, founder of the Daewoo conglomerate embezzled billions of won and fled the country while one third of the Daewoo workforce was being laid off. In response, Daewoo workers and angry citizens formed the “Rob the Rich to Feed the Poor” brigade to get their money back. They chased Kim to Europe and threatened to track him down, forcing the reluctant Korean government to intervene against its protege. These labor struggles represent a serious and ongoing crisis for the South Korean regime.

At the same time, struggles against the presence of the U.S. military in South Korea have been escalated by the expansion of a U.S. military base in the Pyeongtaek region. It is built with the intention of creating an up-to-date US military hub in East Asia, ready for global deployment. This expansion, endorsed and led primarily by the Korean government has brought about forced displacements of many farmers in the Daechuri and Doduri villages.

The backlash against US troops overflows into anti-war sentiments among everyday Koreans. In the wake of the U.S. backed Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, South Korean anti-war activists declared they did not want to be the “Israel” of Asia, a client state of the U.S. used to bolster its imperialism in the region. The South Korean government provided support for the U.S. war effort in Iraq, where Koreans were kidnapped by the Iraqi resistance. This has prompted many to resist a relationship of dependence that requires Koreans to help kill other people of color and die for U.S. imperial misadventures in the Middle East.

Under these circumstances, North Korea serves as an important ideological tool for the US to justify its continual presence in South Korea. To counter these demands for US withdrawal from Korea, the US State Department and the Pentagon play up the threat posed by North Korea. Basically, they claim they need to save Koreans from other Koreans. For a while, this was facilitated by Kim Jong Il’s policy of nuclear blackmail, where he developed nuclear weapons against the will of the US and its allies. But Kim has engaged in the Six Party Talks, deescalating this conflict. North Korea has taken steps to begin dismantling its weapons program although questions still remain about its compliance. In the last months of his presidency, Roh visited Kim Jung Il in North Korea and now Kaesong is up and running. All of these developments indicate a lessening of tensions between the two governments. This begins to raise the question of why are U.S. troops still there? Why does the U.S. want military tension in Korea when most Koreans do not want it?

The need for an alternative to the Sunshine Policy

A liberal faction of the South Korean ruling class has responded to these questions by calling for the Sunshine Policy, a gradual process of reunification based on the leadership of the South Korean capitalists; Kaesong is a key piece of this. It would provide key benefits for the South Korean elites. They could bolster their nationalist credentials in the face of popular opposition to their collaboration with an increasingly discredited U.S. Empire. Once more, Korea would be a strong, united nation, but its projected liberal leadership would at best have a thin façade of independence and would still be subordinated to U.S. interests in the region (perhaps with parallel patronage from China).

South Korean businessmen could also begin to shift production into the North, allowing them to fire and replace militant workers concentrated in the industrial parks of the South. This would allow the bosses to regain the upper hand that they have lost due to the militancy and organization of the South Korean labor movement. They have already turned toward exploiting migrant workers from other Asian countries, forcefully preventing them from unionizing so as to undercut union wages in South Korea. They would most certainly welcome a highly regulated stream of destitute, displaced North Korean farmers who could come south to staff new sweatshops.

For all of these reasons, the liberal capitalist vision of the Sunshine Policy represents a potential defeat for South Korean working folks and a co-optation rather than a victory of the struggle for national liberation. By contrast, it is the decades-long struggles of Korean workers, students, and radical churches that offer the best hope for potential national unification on a democratic and anti-imperialist basis. Certainly, there are contradictions within these movements, as with any mass movement, and some tendencies within them are tied to the liberal wing of the state bureaucracy and support the Sunshine policy. Nevertheless, these movements have shaken up South Korea’s authoritarian state capitalism, bringing down the dictatorship and keeping the remaining oligarchy on its toes.

With increased contact between the North and the South, our hope is that these movements will spread across the peninsula, challenging the Northern regime as well by linking up with dissident voices there. This could potentially lay the groundwork for reunification from below, offering workers in the North solidarity and mutual aid rather than cheap wages and subordination to Southern profits. What can international Asians and other people in solidarity do to support these developments? We can begin by organizing in our own workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and places of worship, making links with Korean workers, students, radical Christians, etc.

American workers today are facing the fact that the jobs they used to work have been shipped overseas to Asia. The conservative trade union bureaucrats and labor aristocracy reinforce the racist notion that workers in Asian factories are all passive and obedient scabs who have undercut a stronger tradition of American labor struggle by stealing US jobs. This overlooks the fact that the auto strikes and urban uprisings of Detroit in the 60s were closely followed by strikes and uprisings in Korea in the 70s and 80s when production shifted there. Far from being passive, Korean workers, and Asian workers in general, are at the forefront of labor militancy worldwide. When we think of the “working class” today, we shouldn’t think only of middle aged white guys in Michigan with beer bellies but also young women militants in Seoul. They should be seen as allies and models for a reinvigorated American labor movement, and international links desperately need to be made if workers on both sides of the Pacific are going to successfully confront the assaults that neoliberal elites are making on our livelihoods.

American students also need to reach out to our Korean counterparts. Recently American students have raised demands for student control over university investment policies, for example with calls for divestment from Israel and from US military contractors. We should extend these calls by demanding that our universities suspend any research funded by the US armed forces, in solidarity with Korean student’s demands for US troop withdrawal from the peninsula. At the same time, we should try to make links with student activists in Korea and learn from their struggles. Through the 1980s, South Korean university students refused to see themselves as separate from the working class struggle that everyday Koreans were engaged in. They bridged the conventional divide between mental and manual labor by working alongside other Koreans in factories, applying their education in radical ways in political study groups and discussions. American students today have much to learn from the perseverance of these South Korean student militants.

As Asian Americans, we are often held up as the model minority, as obedient, upwardly mobile students living the American dream, loyal to U.S. Empire and white supremacy. South Korea is held up as the model minority internationally, as a sign of the kind of prosperity that you can get if you submit to US banks controlling your economy and 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in your country. It is time that we say as loudly as possible that malls and nightclubs in Seoul are little compensation for the fact that those troops have been stationed there to divide a proud Asian country and reinforce a client regime against the democratic aspirations of its own people. Korean workers and students have shown that they do not want to be passive, money grubbing lackeys of white supremacy; they want their country back and want to control their own lives. Inspired by their example, we should cast off the model minority myth and take control over our own lives too. We can begin this by demanding that our own workplaces, schools, and places of worship stand with rather than against the Korean struggle for democracy and national unity.

Over the past three years, a whirlwind of reports have circulated in newspapers and the hums of disgruntled conservative news pundits have filled airwaves. This latest cause of controversy, the latest so-called “threat” to American civilization is the uproar of an incipient, Latina/o-led immigrant rights movement that has organized in schools, neighborhoods and workplaces across the country. Policy analysts and rightwing forces complain that this movement represents the “Hispanic challenge” and signals the “clash of civilizations.” Some others discuss the immigrant rights movement as “awakening a sleeping giant,” bringing to the surface repressed memories of immigrant radicalism that have defined workplace struggles in this country for centuries. As participants in the 8-hour workday movement in the late 19th century, members of the early Industrial Workers of the World, rabble rousing miners, striking railroad workers, and insurgent laundry and garment workers in the 19th and 20th centuries; immigrants of all colors have organized and fought both the U.S. state and employers, long ago disproving the stereotype of immigrant workers as helpless, frightened victims of American capital.

Amidst the debates on both the left and the right about this movement, there has been a deafening silence in considering one question: where are all the Asians? Aren’t there communities of Asian workers whose labor is also being exploited within the U.S.? Isn’t Asian-Latina/o solidarity important for this burgeoning immigrant rights movement? Or are all Asians middle class, business owners, A+ students, and model minorities as they are often painted to be?

The U.S. has a rich history of Asian-Latina/o workers’ solidarity that undermines any illusions that Asian immigrants are somehow opposed to or absent from working class immigrant radicalism and rebellion. In the early 1900s , for instance, agricultural workers organized the Japanese and Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) in Oxnard, CA, and went out on strike over pay and control of working conditions. Some 1,200 farm workers, or approximately 90% of the workforce, stayed out for over a month until the Association was able to win various gains from employers. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) offered to represent the striking workers but refused to allow Japanese laborers into its federation. The JMLA in turn declined the AFL’s offer and opted for multiracial class solidarity instead, unwilling to compromise class solidarity on the behalf of white supremacy. Several decades later, Filipino and Yemeni farm workers joined with Mexican laborers to organize the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California. Philip Vera Cruz and Cesar Chavez became household names of the farm worker’s movement. More recently, the Korean Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA) gave its support to Latina/o workers who were organizing against Korean and Korean-American employers in Los Angeles.

Despite brave efforts like these, today’s movement has yet to fully explore the potential for Asian-Latina/o solidarity that it contains. The immigrant rights movement has undoubtedly declined over the past year, but it is neither dead nor defeated. How Asian workers will be integrated into this larger movement, and on what terms, will be critical to its advancement. How can Asian and Latina/o workers organize together from the bottom up? What is deterring this solidarity now? On what basis and around what politics can Asian-Latina/o solidarity be revived and advanced?

The “Immigration Crisis” and the Invisibility of Asian workers

Many sense that there is a growing crisis in American society. The downward economic spiral that working class communities have been facing – wages cut, pension plans and benefits gutted, city infrastructures, education and public health torn asunder – has created a juggling act for the U.S. political elite as it struggles to maintain high profit margins for American business while subduing an increasingly agitated working class.

Official society complains that this economic and social crisis is being caused by unchecked immigration (and immigration of the “wrong kind” of people at that) and competing tendencies have offered an array of so-called solutions. Expulsion of undocumented workers? No, that would mean fewer cheap laborers for American capital. Amnesty for undocumented immigrants? No, because that would mean alienating a growing white populist constituency that increasingly articulates its frustration against capitalism as a form of anti-immigrant racism manifested most succinctly in militias like the Minutemen. Militarize the U.S.-Mexico border? Higher application fees for citizenship? Guest worker programs? Back and forth the political elite go, attempting to reconcile and alleviate the tensions that are inherent in the current political and economic order.

The immigrant rights movement has represented a definitive “¡ya basta!” to the decades-long capitalist attack on the working class and its manipulation of immigration to cover that attack. This movement has international implications, in that it connects the attack on American workers with the ongoing neo-liberal assault against workers in third world countries. The two are, in fact, parallel and inter-dependent processes.

American capital has been expanding rapidly across the world, tearing up the countryside of scores of nations as it loots and plunders their resources. Many former farmers are unable to find work in the growing cities and migrate even further to American towns and cities. This has been accomplished through the complicity of national ruling classes in countless countries whose own tenuous class rule often couldn’t be achieved without American dollars and weapons. This is coupled today by the rise of other capitalist powers in East and South Asia, whose growth has made both landless and jobless millions of workers within their own borders. And yet the “immigration crisis” has been portrayed largely as a crisis of Latina/o immigration, ignoring its connection to these global trends.

The invisibility of Asian workers in this debate is telling on two fronts. First, under the logic of white supremacy, Asian immigrants have been identified as a model minority and thus have not been seen as a social or political threat in the way that Latina/o immigrants are portrayed. In fact, their “racial superiority” has been used as a foil to attack other people of color and has been a contributing factor deterring Asian-Latina/o solidarity. Second, the model minority myth has propped up a small, highly educated middle class of Asian businesspeople with conservative politics as the representative image of all Asian immigrants. This obscures the presence of Asian sweatshop workers, service workers, and industrial workers in small shops across the country. Because they are so-called model minorities Asian immigrants supposedly do not yield the same potential for a burgeoning working class movement, and thus are often ignored in discussions about immigrant radicalism.

You won’t need to take a fine tooth comb through history to find that both of these justifications for Asian “invisibility” hide an underlying class and racial reality. Despite being a so-called model minority, Asians have been regularly targeted by the U.S. state for attack. This is not only the case internationally, where areas like Iraq and Afghanistan are under military attack by U.S. imperialists or others like Iran and Korea face the prospects of similar campaigns. Inside the U.S., the Patriot Act has also dealt heavy blows to Asian communities – in particular plaguing people of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin and descent – where the infiltration of spies into mosques and temples, and heavy surveillance by both local police and federal law enforcement has led to many false arrests and cases of entrapment. Deportation and the detention of both documented and undocumented people has been a political tool for the American ruling class to attack the self-organization of immigrant communities inside U.S. borders; to disrupt the solidarity expressed between Arabs and Muslims here with anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East; and to create an atmosphere of fear and repression that serves to silence the rest of the U.S. population, whose aspirations and instincts for a different kind of society could otherwise coalesce into a national movement. We should not ignore that there is a class basis to the Patriot Act, which has disproportionately targeted working class communities of color.

Besides this one dynamic of state violence against Asian immigrants. grassroots violence also has its own independent and long history. Dating back to the 1800s, groups like Anti-Coolie Leagues and Anti-Chinese Associations have boycotted California ranchers who employed Chinese workers. Organized labor is not without its shameful past; the White Labor Union, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and other labor groups have all organized and/or allied with white supremacist attacks against Asian laborers during the 19th and 20th century. In the 1920s a “Swat the Jap” campaign was initiated by the Ku Klux Klan and the Native Sons of the Golden West which included violence against Japanese residents and housing and labor exclusion of Japanese workers. The 1943 Zoot Suit Riot saw attacks mostly on Mexicans, but also on Blacks and Filipinos. Today the Minutemen, and other white populist anti-immigrant groups, trace their lineage to this history of vigilantism. We should not doubt for a moment that such forces, after dealing with the “Hispanic Challenge”, would direct the same energies towards Asian folks. Many Asian immigrants have used both civil disobedience and armed means to defend themselves, and we would be wise to closely study and advance those traditions today.

From the West Coast to the Gulf Coast: Drawing Lessons from the Past and Present The model minority myth only goes so far when it comes to state and grassroots violence. Despite depicting Asian immigrants as non-threatening and as one monolithic socio-economic category, the model minority myth has not protected Asians from the violence of white supremacy in American society. Yet, the myth still exists. What is its material basis? What purpose does it serve? What does it have to do with class? And how is that affecting Asian-Latina/o solidarity within the immigrant rights movement? Rather than tackle these questions abstractly, it would be better to locate their answers within the context of two concrete examples: the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and post-Katrina New Orleans.

The 1992 L.A. uprising began after the acquittal of four police officers charged in the severe beating of Rodney King. This event acted as a lit match to ignite the dynamite of long-growing racial and class tensions in South Central L.A. Large numbers of Latinos and Blacks seized goods from stores, set entire buildings on fire, and fought cops and the National Guard when the latter attempted to suppress the rebellion. Anger over the situation was so fierce that Seattle, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and other cities also saw several days of demonstrations and riots. Attempting to preserve the wealthier areas in L.A. from violence, the police blocked off streets and directed protestors towards L.A.’s Koreatown neighborhood instead. At the end of the rebellion, some 1,500 Korean American businesses were destroyed.

Headlines proclaimed the L.A. riots a “Black-Korean” ethnic conflict. Others showed armed Korean store owners as heroes and heroines protecting the American dream (private property) from destruction. Still others depicted a Korean community victimized by brutal mobs for its hard work ethic, honesty, and successful entrepreneurship. In rushing to paint this as a race war, many failed to explore two key questions: why did Blacks and Latinos attack Korean businesses? And why weren’t Koreans also joining the rebellion in large numbers?

To understand the first question we must see the L.A. riots as a rebellion over both racial and class tensions. There were undoubtedly expressions of anti-Korean racism – which in any future rebellion would need to be opposed by anti-racist minded Blacks, Latinos, Koreans, and others – but the larger momentum among Blacks and Latinos went into an attack on property relations, which had been a prominent form of their exploitation and interwoven into their exclusion from the “American Dream.” That a large number of Black and Latina/o-owned businesses were also burned to the ground demonstrates this class relation. In fact, many Koreans had bought their South Central liquor stores from former Black owners who had acquired the stores after the Watts rebellion in 1965 but had gotten tired of getting robbed and attacked by working class and unemployed Black and Latino youth.

Further, it is important to see why Korean immigrants opened up small shops in predominantly Black and Latina/o areas. Contrary to what some might argue, this was not out of a desire by Koreans to exploit Black and Latina/o customers. Rather, structural restraints – both linguistic barriers and economic factors – largely prevented Koreans from opening up businesses in the more affluent white neighborhoods. They typically didn’t have the capital available to operate anywhere besides the poorest neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the 1970s saw an accelerated deindustrialization of L.A. and the flight of large chain stores from poor people of color neighborhoods. Affordable healthy food was virtually nonexistent and the small liquor stores and corner stores were a poor substitute for grocery stores. Many residents were angry about the lack of options and directed this rage against the small Korean shops. Belated plans by multiracial community coalitions to replace liquor stores with food markets were unsuccessful.

Not all Korean immigrants were business owners, nor were even a majority, but they tended to have a higher frequency of business ownership over Latinos or Blacks for two reasons. Historically, Black folks have had the least access to capital in American society and thus tend to have the lowest levels of business ownership, along with the highest levels of unemployment. In addition, the business ties between the U.S. and South Korea and other booming capitalist economies in Asia boosted immigrants’ access to the capital necessary to open businesses. Most reports of the riots ignored these material realities. Instead, viewers glued to TV screens across the country, watching the unfolding rebellion, saw countless images of Korean storeowners defending their shops with guns and one over-simplified, racist message emerged: Koreans were hardworking immigrants who had the wherewithal to “make it” in America, and for that they were being punished by less capable people of color.

Herein lies the purpose of the model minority myth: it is not merely a stereotyping of Asian immigrants but rather it is an appendage of white supremacy that estranges Asians from other people of color in order to keep Asians from rebelling with them and in order to further criminalize their rebellion. While upholding Asians as a model for other people of color, the constraints of white supremacy and capitalism keep Asian immigrants in constant, direct competition with other people of color for limited infrastructural and economic resources. Capitalism’s final solution for neighborhoods is to withdraw basic social infrastructure, leave various groups to fight it out over the remaining crumbs, and then seal the whole area off with a militarized cordon, a containment system of cops, cameras, and prisons. This fed the flames that erupted in Los Angeles in 1992.

Yet this still doesn’t account for the apparent lack of Koreans expressing solidarity with Blacks and Latinos in the streets during the rebellion. What was perhaps a primary contributing factor to this absence was that so few Koreans actually lived in Koreatown, despite its name. At the time of the riots, only about 10% of Koreatown was actually Korean; the majority living there, and working in the Korean restaurants and small shops, were Latinos. Many Korean shop owners questioned how their own Latina/o employees could burn and seize goods from the store. They were used to exploiting the labor of their own nieces, nephews, and distant cousins, smoothing over the tensions inherent in the employer-employee relationship with a concept of ethnic and family loyalty. But in reality much of the working class in Koreatown was Latino and hence didn’t buy into this loyalty.

The consequences of this factor become more apparent when considering those businesses which were family-run, where the employees were all related or close kin to the owners. For many Korean workers in that situation, because of their closeness to the employer, an attack on their relative’s shop often led to a defense of private property rather than collusion with the rebellion that was going on right outside their storefront. Historically, the social relation of small mom-and-pop shops has blurred the distinction between shop owner and the wage-earning employee, and the Korean owned stores in L.A. were no exception. Some young Asian shop workers might have been frustrated by the fact that they had to work long hours for exploitative uncles, aunties, and parents and some may have felt tempted to join in the rebellion. But the family bond was a lot harder to overcome for young Asian workers being exploited by their families than by young Latino workers being exploited by people they had no social connection to.

This is related to a larger problem. Mom-and-pop storeowners, while often coming from a working class background, generally have a different position in the capital-labor relation and see their interests as separate from the working class. The shopowner may face the constant threat of bankruptcy due to competition with larger chain stores and corporations, but they see that their ownership of a store (their means of production) and being “their own bosses”, although limited, are two things the working class is denied in daily life. The independent producer – be they owners of a small shop or skilled craftspeople who work for themselves – prefers her position, even though it becomes more precarious every day, to that of the working class person, who herself is constantly trying to climb up into the ranks of the middle class. As an intermediate class of sorts between the ruling class and working people, the impulse of these middle class elements is not to join a rebellion against capitalism and white supremacy but rather to choose whatever side seems to be able to secure their class position.

This is not to say that middle class folks can’t be won over to rebellions and revolutionary politics; only that it will take both mass upheaval and strong, independent working class self-organization – whose demands, strategies, and visions are defined by that class – to win them over. The middle class political orientation of the Korean community at the time of the 1992 rebellion, and its lack of independent working class organizations, meant that Korean workers for the most part stayed divided from the other communities of color. This problem was deepened by feelings of anti-Black racism amongst the Korean middle class. Such a context prevented until after the riots any exploration of what their involvement in the rebellion could’ve meant. In future rebellions this political choice will be absolutely decisive.

Race, Class, and ‘Recovery’ in New Orleans

The “recovery” of post-Katrina New Orleans betrays another example of the problems undermining Asian-Latina/o solidarity. The headlines speak volumes. “An Immigrant Community Thrives.” “Vietnamese Rebound in New Orleans.” “The Vietnamese American Community Recovers After Katrina.” Rightwing correspondents remark that perhaps “other communities” of New Orleans should follow the example of their Vietnamese neighbors and stop “waiting” for government hand-outs. Story after story, readers are reminded that the Vietnamese are a strong people – as though endurance were an intrinsic characteristic they were born with – whose example should be truly enlightening for the “rest” (read = Black folks) of New Orleans. These headlines ignore the problems Vietnamese folks have faced post-Katrina, including detentions at the hands of immigration officials and the denial of recovery services due to failure to prove citizenship. Yet those details are less important to reporters and racists. What is important is a thinly veiled racist logic that justifies the destruction of the Black working class of New Orleans and the intentional prevention of their return home, on the false premise that they’re not working “hard enough” to recover.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Latina/o workers have come to the Gulf Coast to find work in the rebuilding of numerous towns and cities. They have been a preferred workforce because they have been filling labor shortages at low wages, with little to no benefits, and are by and large seen as a temporary workforce. Many are undocumented, and as employers turn a blind eye to this fact, local elites and politicians feel assured in the docility of Latina/o immigrant laborers who, they assume, can be easily disposed of if they get organized and rebellious or when rebuilding needs are met and their labor is no longer needed. ICE raids and visits from the Department of Homeland Security are already foreboding the possibility of increased harassment, detention, and deportation of these workers.

Latina/o labor has in fact been used to break the last legs of Black working class communities who were living in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast before Katrina. While some politicians have called for a massive tightening of immigration policies post-Katrina and others have applauded Latina/o workers for their “good work ethic”, both camps have pointed an accusing finger at unemployed and underemployed Black workers who are seen as the bane of New Orleans’ existence. Yet with automation, outsourcing, and declining social infrastructure, New Orleans had years ago become a de-industrialized shell of its old self, leaving thousands of Black workers without a means of livelihood. This process, along with Katrina’s physical destruction of Black communities, laid the groundwork for the dismantling of Black self-organization that was on the rise in the 1960s. It is pure propaganda to chide Black folks to “get a job” because their jobs simply are not going to come back. Official society saw Katrina as wiping away this “demographic problem” and has intentionally used Latina/o labor to prevent its return.

In reality, most Vietnamese folks face a similarly bleak future. Testimonies that attribute the high recovery rate amongst Vietnamese Americans to some sort of innate racial character ignore that New Orleans was home to a largely middle class Vietnamese community. Predominantly working class Vietnamese communities in places like Biloxi, Mississippi, have had little success in returning home or finding any sort of economic stability. Economic policies implemented by the Biloxi City Council have opened land and coastline to casinos and the tourism industry. In doing so, they are eliminating any viable recovery of the fishing industry which employed a sizable portion of the Vietnamese community before Katrina and Rita hit. Meanwhile, Vietnamese families, largely renters and not homeowners like in New Orleans, have received little to no assistance in securing new housing.

Tensions may continue to develop as the situation worsens in the region. Black folks, Latinos, and Asians are being positioned (yet again) in competing roles, roles which are abstracted from the material realities these communities currently face. Without an autonomous organizing effort – independent of the NGOs, non-profits, and political parties – this could further breakdown potential for anti-racist solidarity and a Gulf Coast recovery from below. A lack of organization on the job and a tendency among organizers to focus on “providing services” to the detriment of building working people’s power has contributed to feelings of competition for aid, resentment, and mistrust between people of color. There are some organizations that have made inroads into organizing amongst all three communities, such as the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), yet this work must be expanded.

Prospects for Solidarity

We’ve seen some of the factors that have deterred a higher level of Asian-Latina/o solidarity in recent times. We can speculate how Asian and Latina/o workers might actually organize together from the bottom up, and further, on what basis and around what politics Asian-Latina/o solidarity might be revived and advanced.

Within the immigrant rights movement, there have been important developments of local union militancy and new workplace strategies. In a number of cities across the country, Asian and Latina/o immigrant workers find themselves in similar jobs and industries, if not workplaces. Many work in labor-intensive, long hour and low wage jobs for small workplaces like grocers and restaurants, or in more isolated positions like custodians and caregivers. There are multi-shop and neighborhood orientations which strengthen the possibilities for victory among relatively isolated workplaces like small grocers and restaurants. The growth in workers’ centers across the country has encouraged solidarity across workplace and industry lines.

Such solidarity is instrumental not only on an anti-racist front. On another level, strikes, sit-ins, pickets, and other forms of direct action on the job can be difficult to sustain at small businesses without solidarity from other workplaces, and when isolated it can be even more difficult for labor campaigns to spread and be sustained in other locales. Latina/o and Asian immigrants also find themselves working together in low skilled positions in larger workplaces, such as in poultry plants in states like North Carolina and Georgia, or as staff in hospitals and hotels. There have been successful organizing campaigns among delivery workers in New York, among hotel workers and garment workers in California, and among agricultural workers in Florida, so we should have every expectation that Asian-Latina/o solidarity can be built in new and creative ways that speak to the conditions of labor today.

Ultimately, solidarity should not be mistaken for an abstraction. The political character that inevitably shapes such solidarity will be key. Some solutions have been offered by the immigrant rights movement, though the shortcomings must be sorted out from the strengths. One tendency within the movement has attempted to revive a liberal-labor coalition where the middle class helps the ruling class formulate new policy on how to overcome the current “immigration crisis.” This leadership has pushed the movement to ride the coattails of the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracies, a relationship which has only weighed down grassroots organizing in bureaucratic red tape and lobbying. Meanwhile direct action and rank & file control of the movement are discouraged or even outright opposed.

Our current historical predicament shows that both direct action and autonomous organizing from below are necessary now more than ever. The liberal-labor forces have gone so far as to make connections with big business interests to hold some sway with Congress but they have absolutely no social base for such a coalition. The old base of the “social democratic” coalitions linked to the liberal labor and state bureaucracies was dismantled during decades of neoliberal “planning” that broke down both rank and file institutions in the workplace and social infrastructure in working class communities. This breakdown was facilitated because the union bureaucracy, joined in the 1970s by the middle class, collaborated with the bosses to attack the self-organization of everyday people.

Many of these same class tensions are present within Asian immigrant political organizations and they demonstrate that these sorts of cross-class alliances are a dead-end road. The only alliances that can secure victories for Asian workers will be united fronts which are defined by and organized around working class, not middle class, demands. Asian workers are increasingly confronting a small Asian American employing class that has been exploiting them in Chinatowns, Manilatowns, and other immigrant enclaves across the country. When Asian workers protest they are chastised and reminded of the favors done for them by their “benefactors”, of the hostile racism of American society that the employers are protecting them from, of the debts they may owe for their travel into the U.S., and more. The time has come for Asian workers, alongside Latina/o workers, to refuse to be beholden to any employer, Asian or non-Asian.

The immigrant rights movement must overcome the contradictions of this tendency within it. There can be no “partnership” between labor and capital, between oppressed communities and the ruling class, because the establishment of such a partnership requires not only working people’s loyalty to imperialism but also to a closed shop in terms of immigration. It is not by separating our struggle from that of workers in other countries that we will get our “slice of the American pie.” Rather, because their impoverishment and alienation under capitalism is interdependent with our own, it is only by building with them, not against them, that we will create a strong movement.

There has been important ground covered in this respect, as seen by the diverse crowds present at anti-Minutemen protests in cities across the country. Some organizations, such as KIWA, the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), have made this a cornerstone of their organizing. Yet this work must be advanced. The examples of 1992 L.A. and 2008 New Orleans show how racial and national divisions can undermine a larger rebellion. Anti-immigrant racism by American workers (of any color) and likewise anti-Black racism by immigrants must be challenged and defeated wherever it may come up. They also demonstrate that dependence upon middle class liberalism only derails working class activity and rebellion.

As pointed out in the beginning of this article, there is a proud tradition that we can draw from today as we build stronger Asian-Latina/o solidarity within the immigrants’ rights movement. We cannot be frightened by the challenges – of state and grassroots violence, of increasing poverty and dismantling of social infrastructure – nor can we be sidelined by the contradictions present in the movement itself. It will only be through the autonomous self-organization of working people, immigrant and non-immigrant, that we will take a decisive step towards a new society and a new way of living for all.

[Author's note: This piece has been published in the Spring 2008 issue of Amerasia Journal]

I may be old and lonely, but I have resisted in wars, agitated in movements, and marched numerous times to where the crowd gathered.

Ray Jones 1968

Contrary to racist beliefs of Asian passivity and apathy, Asian Americans have historically contributed to revolutionary traditions in American politics.

However, one may argue, the political strands in progressive and radical Asian American circles have largely been dominated by state-driven conceptions of socialism. As Him Mark Lai documents in his important study of the Chinese left in America, Asian American involvement in the first half of the 20th century was mainly channeled into the Communist Party mechanism. The level of sophistication that the Comintern offered organizationally attracted many Asian radicals who subsequently endorsed the popular front tactics of Soviet Stalinism. From the 1960s onward, statist visions of Maoism also gained popularity for putting forth a vision of unity among third world peoples within the US and internationally. Nonetheless the mass-line and vanguardist approach of Maoism toward political organizing rendered it severely undemocratic, and vulnerable to unprincipled maneuvers of identity politics.

It is within this context that the literature of Pingshe, otherwise known as the Equality Society, and the writings of Ray Jones are refreshing and inspiring. Jones offers a more democratic vision of Asian-American radicalism from below. Despite the limited amount of information available about him, the collection of his works, including those compiled by Him Mark Lai at the Ethnic Studies library archives at UC Berkeley, have been immensely valuable. These archives have allowed me, a young Asian American political activist, to piece together parts of an Asian American anarchist tradition.

Internationalist and American at the same time, the work of the Equality Society rips apart the notion of Asians as perpetual foreigners, interested only in the affairs of the homeland. It reflects how involvement in politics of the homeland and immersion into US domestic politics are not inseparable, but come together as necessary and integral aspects of internationalism.

Ray Jones and the Equality Society

An explicitly left libertarian, anarchist organization, Pingshe set up shop in San Francisco Chinatown around the 1920s. It was an overseas branch of the China-based Equality Society, involving known anarchists such as Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo. Ray Jones, otherwise known as Liu Zhongshi, was a worker himself and the main organizer of the US branch. In Joseph Spivak’s account of organizing with Pingshe, as a member of the Road to Freedom, a New York-based English language anarchist publication, he compares the enthusiasm of Pingshe members, to that of “the early revolutionists in Russia. ” He describes Ray Jone’s living environment,

I went up to see Comrade Red [Ray] Jones the secretary of the group. He lives on a second floor of a very old fashioned building in the Chinese section of San Francisco. He, as well as most of the Chinese there, is very poor. He occupies a small room and according to the number of beds in this room is occupied by three. Yet when I entered the room I felt I was in an atmosphere of Ideal! The room was actually filled with literature, every inch of space is made use of for this purpose. Comrade Jones immediately began to show me one book after another in the Chinese language which were received from China and which he spreads among the Chinese population. [sic]

The San Francisco Pingshe office was part of a sophisticated network including mainland Chinese anarchists who were organizing under the threat of imminent state repression. In a letter to Ray Jones, Ba Jin writes, “Our distribution site has been discovered by the Kuomintang. We need to set up overseas branches, as most revolutionary organizations around the world do, to take over the publication of our journals. It is only a matter of time before we face state repression ” As we shall see however, the publications of San Francisco Pingshe were not simply confined to a mainland Chinese sensibility. The publication took on its own form, appealing to a Chinese American audience, set in both mainland Chinese and American political reality.

San Francisco Pingshe was an active publisher of two anarchist newsletters, the “Equality” journal and later, the “Anarcho-Communist Monthly,” both targeted at Chinese workers in San Francisco Chinatown. It also took on the organizational name, the Anarcho-Communist Alliance. Predominantly a propaganda circle, Jones and his comrades also published fliers and pamphlets. It is unclear from the literature in Ray Jone’s archives, the degree and depth of organizing he engaged in at his own workplace.

This article showcases translations of articles from the two journals, the fliers, as well as selections of personal writings by Jones. I wish to highlight certain aspects of the Pingshe’s that are valuable for young generations of Asian activists in constructing a vision of anti-statist, left libertarian politics that are both internationalist and relevant to the US.

The Internationalism of the Equality Society

The anti-statist politics of Pingshe comes up most clearly in its polemics against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT). One can only imagine the repercussions that these anarchist comrades faced for publicly denouncing the latter in the KMT-stronghold of San Francisco Chinatown. It is not surprising that their public denouncement also won them the wrath of the US government. In a report to an Anarchist Conference held in New York City in 1928, Equality Society members wrote that “[…] a few months ago, the imperialistic government of America threatened to destroy [Equality Society] by arresting comrade Jones and confiscating all our literatures. However, this only made us more militant than ever before. ”

Their militancy made its way into propaganda pieces. In an article entitled “The So-Called People’s Revolution” published in the June 1934 issue of the “Anarcho-Communist Monthly”, Jones and his comrades write,

The Kuomintang claims to be for the people’s revolution. The so-called People’s Revolution is presumably that which incites merchants, peasants, and workers to revolt. The merchants belong to the capitalist class, while the workers, the working class. Given that these two classes are fundamentally opposed to one another, is it really possible for them to unite? This kind of a revolution can only revoltingly kill the poor! […] Indeed, [KMT] is killing off the poor! Its officials and military are seizing power, depriving the masses of their livelihoods and exploiting the labor of workers and peasants. Those who seek justice have to fear for their lives.

The scathing criticism against the class-collaborationist politics of the KMT that Jones and his Chinese American anarchist comrades laid out in 1934 had its precedence set earlier. Based in Shanghai, Ba Jin had written a polemic against the presumed left-wing of the KMT party in a 1928 special issue of the Equality journal. The issue was also distributed in San Francisco. His attacks suggest tensions regarding the organizing principles of Chinese anarchists during this period. Instead of building independent anarchist parties such as the Pingshe, influential anarchist thinkers such as Wu Zhihui had chosen instead to seek shelter within the umbrella of pre-existing bourgeois parties such as the KMT. They believed they could reform these parties from within, pushing them toward more radical politics . In his polemic against a self-declared left-wing KMT bureaucrat, Ba Jin confronts the conservatism of the KMT and the inability of a bourgeois party to reform itself. He writes,

[…] I ask this again: “Where is the left wing of the KMT?” Zheng says that the party is led by the leftist faction, yet in reality, there has never been right or left factions in the Three Principles because Sun Yat Senism was never a social revolutionary program […]

To the Pingshe anarchists, the KMT program included at best Sun Yat Sen’s “Three Principles,” bourgeois conceptions of nationalism, democracy and equality, and at worst, Chiang Kai Shek-style authoritarianism. It could only come to power at the expense of workers and peasants. Nonetheless, in their opposition against the KMT, the Pingshe anarchists were also quick to dissociate themselves from the burgeoning Chinese Communist Party, learning from the experiences of their Russian comrades. They were strongly influenced by the accounts of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Nestor Makhno, all anarchists who had written about the schism between the anarchist ideals and the reality of Communist Party rule in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Jones and his Equality Society comrades distributed a flier entitled “The Difference between an Anarchist Party and a Communist Party,” where they say,

The Marxists claim to overthrow the state power of the capitalist KMT and replace them with the state power of the Communist Party. This, they term nicely as the “power of the classless state.” Anarchists adamantly oppose all forms of state power as simply manifestations of a class above society, dominating over everyday people. The majority of people cannot exercise state power, neither do they need state power. What we need, is a stateless, self-governing and liberated socialist society.

They go on further to assert that the Communist Party is simply another form of capitalism administered by the state:

What the Communists really mean by “communism” is really “collectivism.” Land, property and factories are completely confiscated by the state and nationalized. As a result, the state becomes a mega-capitalist. Today, the peasants and the proletariat of various countries have become the slaves of landlords and capitalists, through wage slavery. Under the Communist Party in Russia, peasants and the proletariat are enslaved by the state. Even though the state waves the banner of the “proletariat,” in reality, the state is the institution that exploits and dictates the proletariat.

In contrast, they highlight the self-governing aspects of their program:

What anarcho-communism means, is that all property will be run by everyday people. Land will be owned by peasants, and production will be organized by peasant councils. Factories will be run by workers and production organized by worker councils. All strategies pf distribution and production will be decided by workers and peasant organizations. There will be no dominating ruling class, and everyone will enjoy the fruits of their labor, expressing their capacities and talents to the fullest. […] This is true communism. There can never be communism under the state. Only anarchism can bring about true communism.

Like several Chinese Americans at that time, the Pingshe members did not limit their organizing to mainland Chinese politics. The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W), an anarchistic workers union that was active during 1920s, highlights the repression that Chinese workers in the I.W.W dealt with:

The Chinese workers in this country have discovered the I.W.W. And no sooner did it become known to the powers that direct the persecution against the I.W.W., than they began the usual raids on the meeting places of their locals, as for instance, in New York. We are informed that in Chicago they are trying to use the patriarchal mechanism of Chinese society to suppress and punish our Chinese fellow workers. Deportation is held out as an immediate prospect. Naturally they will first be held a long time in prison and suffer all kinds of brutalities [sic].

The I.W.W. article highlights particularly the collaboration between the Chinatown bourgeoisie and the US government in putting down workers’ organizing attempts:

The Chinese number less than 100,000 in this country, and as they are mainly in occupations that keep them together and separate from other nationalities, we cannot see any other reason for this persecution than that the Chinese employers have turned to the headquarters of the persecution for assistance, which was, of course, cheerfully rendered [sic]. Embodying the spirit of class solidarity across color lines and international boundaries, Pingshe members crafted their alternative vision of worker’s control of factories, in a manner that resonated with the sentiments and conditions of Chinese American workers in San Francisco.

The Great Depression and the San Francisco General Strike

In “Give us work!” published in Dec 1934, during the era of the Great Depression, Pingshe members undertake an analysis of the economic shakedown that had a strong class and internationalist analysis. They wrote:

The purpose of capitalist production today is not to meet the needs of people, but to increase profits for a few. Take the example of England exporting loads of textile to the Chinese market while many inside England are still walking around in tattered and torn clothes. The exports of every country are not the excess of that country. The wages that workers earn is not enough to buy the supplies that they need to live on. That is why these supplies are shipped to other countries to bring in profits for the capitalists. This is why it is not true to say that workers do not need these products. It is only that workers do not have the ability to buy these products that they need.

Targeted at the working people of San Francisco Chinatown, the article attempted to link their hardships in U.S. with the poverty that their relatives in China were also going through. Their message broke down the notion of capitalist development in countries such as the U.S. and England by focusing instead on the experiences of the working class in these nations. In doing so, the article asserted an internationalist working class struggle that was both particular to the needs of a Chinese American working class, and broad enough to project solidarity with other workers.

The article was also unique for its vision of who should run society. In addressing the workers, the article says:

Even though government officials, capitalists and philanthropists try to save the situation, the reality is that conditions are becoming worse and worse. That is because these people simply have no ability to solve the problem.

Lambasting “government officials, capitalists and philanthropists” broadly, asserting “these people’s” inability to solve the problems of unemployment, the Pingshe members reiterated their opposition to any states and ruling classes, regardless of nation. Instead, they pushed for workers’ control of their own workplaces, planning and deciding production quota.

It is within these efforts to push for an overthrow of the capitalist system and struggle for a worker’s control system of production, that Pingshe members attacked President Roosevelt’s attempt to resuscitate the capitalist economy in a top-down manner. Going against the current, Pingshe members condemned the New Deal and its accompaniment, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which more prominent revolutionary parties in the country had supported. In a polemic labeling Roosevelt a “number one leading capitalist dog” who answers to his “master,” the “capitalist ruling class,” Pingshe members wrote,

The capitalist project that Roosevelt so carefully nourished has become bankrupt. His master, the capitalist riling class, will soon be greeted by the raving cheers of the victorious working class. In a bid to save his masters, Roosevelt has been cracking his brain day and night. Without the ingenuity of the Monkey God, his tactics, including the most famous NRA, have failed one after another. We see the loss of American jobs, the sharpening of revolutions, and we know that Roosevelt is helpless. To the Number One capitalist dog: It is time to give up!

While the victorious claims of Pingshe members may sound like empty calls today, the verdict on the victory of the working class was not clearly out yet in the early 1930s. Therefore, it is important to understand Pingshe writings in the context of rebellion and upheavals taking place in the U.S. during that period. In the same June 1934 issue of Anarcho-Communist Monthly, Pingshe members spread news of the San Francisco General Strike that was taking place at that time. Initiated by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), San Francisco was shut down in a four-day long general strike that was as much in support of the demands of longshoremen unions to organize independently, as it was against the repression that the police employed against the striking workers. In support of these striking workers, Pingshe members entitled their piece, “Capitalist Dogs, Beware!” It said:

The agitation of dockworkers in San Francisco has been spreading from Seattle, Portland, to Los Angeles. The actions of these heroic people have burst the bubbles of the capitalist ruling class and their servants, the police. To protect the interests of their masters, the police have roughened up, by not only intimidating these revolutionary workers but also by threatening to massacre them to bring a halt to their revolutionary actions. However, the spirit of these workers will live on forever, even if their physical bodies are tortured. The calls of revolution have shaken the entire world, the blood of revolution will burst forth. When that happens, these servants, these dogs will lose their lives. We warn them now: You, the running dogs of capitalists, beware!

The third issue of the Anarcho-Communist Monthly coincided with the failure of the San Francisco General Strike. The article acknowledged the courage of the striking workers in resisting state repression, yet went forth to critique some of its organizing methods. The two main criticisms of the strike was that it relied too much on the union bureaucracy which Pingshe believed, ultimately betrayed the workers. They write:

The failure of this strike stems from a lack of revolutionary move toward the confiscation of goods at the start of the strike. That is why the strike became so vulnerable to manipulation from traitors within, who thwarted the workers attempts to institute direct workers control. In the end, the strike was controlled by the bourgeois democracy. Any movement controlled by the bourgeois bureaucracy can only be a failure.

It is not presumptuous to assume that the “bourgeois bureaucracy” that the article referred to, was the Roosevelt administration and its union collaborators who sought to co-opt the revolutionary action of the workers toward more conciliatory directions, such as the New Deal.

The article concludes by offering some future lessons for striking workers to draw from:

Despite its failure, this recent strike imparts some valuable lessons: 1)The start of a strike needs to coincide with the confiscation of goods. Workers need to seize the fruits of their labor that have been controlled by the capitalists.

2) The working class can only seek salvation in economic equality. This is why workers need to vehemently reject the battle for bureaucratic power and the negotiation of wages. Workers must not let their movement be controlled by the bureaucracy. Our fighting strategy needs to reflect the belief that “The liberation of the working class is the matter of the working class itself.”

3) The vision of anarcho-communism is to abolish capitalist nations. Every anarchist worker must not deviate from this vision. To pursue this, workers need to expand their daily struggles into a working class struggle and work to destroy the very foundations of capitalism and the state.

We, the workers need to remember these three lessons when we fight our next battle!

A Struggle in Chinatown

Women workers were at the forefront of workers struggles in Chinatown, as Pingshe would acknowledge. Calling for support of “female garment workers who suffer from severe lung diseases […] and thirty women who died from being overworked by the boss at the garment factory, ” Pingshe called for a general strike in support of the striking garment workers in Chinatown. The flier had the title,

Liberation has arrived for Chinese Workers Zhongxing Garment Workers are at the frontline All American workers unite in struggle

Even while specifically organizing Chinese workers, Pingshe’s flier projected their struggle as a nation-wide struggle alongside other American workers of “different genders, races and nationalities. ”

The support of Pingshe toward women in the community did not begin and end with labor struggles. Addressing a public letter entitled “Women’s Liberation” to a woman named “Yun,” that was printed in the newspaper, Jones urges her to use her education towards the liberation of other men and women, and not be satisfied with a job with the sole intention of making money. His critiques of patriarchy are targeted at the marriage traditions that are predominant not only in China, but also specific to the practices of Chinese American workers. He writes,

You see, people today still see marriage as a monetary exchange. Men and women alike are similarly oppressed by such traditions belonging to the old society, and so are unable to seek sexual liberation. There are many Gold Mountain workers in America who are also enslaving young women, degrading and insulting them, selling them to old men as young mistresses. There are many overseas Chinese who have lived in America for decades and suffered under capitalism, worked humiliating and degrading jobs, or committed some shameless crimes, and saved some meager amounts of money in the process. These people go back to their hometowns, pretending that they made a fortune as a big shot in the West. Actually, it is just posturing, showing off, and a way of deceiving poor young women into becoming their mistresses. These deceitful Gold Mountain workers should feel guilty for what they are doing.

Jones ties the liberation of men and women intricately, and discusses liberation beyond superficial appearances, albeit a secular one. He continues,

In the old society, it is not only women who experience oppression and pain. If women are not liberated, then men also cannot be liberated. You cannot think that simply because women have cut their hair short, or unbound their feet, and gone off to the factories to sell their labor as wage workers, that women are liberated. “Women’s liberation” is achieving true freedom for women, such that they are no longer bound by tradition, customs and all the repressions and authoritarianism of the old society.”

By reiterating that women’s liberation is not achieved merely by their departure from the household, and entrance into factories as wage labors, Jones shows himself to be consistent with an anti-capitalist vision of women’s liberation, albeit a secular one that sees traditions, customs and the authoritarianism of the old society as one and the same. Nonetheless, Jones and Pingshe show themselves to be striving a vision of human liberation of which women’s struggles against patriarchy is an integral part. Ray Jones and the Equality Society have contributed to the history of the Asian American radical tradition that goes beyond a politics of achieving state power. The members of his collective were workers, intellectuals and immigrants, who involved themselves in the political events occurring in China, as well as in their new home, the US. As active organizers, they distributed fliers and newsletters, corresponding also with workers in Cuba, trying to organize a branch among the Chinese workers there. As Spivak describes, they were avid readers with libraries of books cramped in their small sleeping quarters. Their history is one that will give strength to young anarchist Asian American youth, as we search for our own alternatives today. I will end this article with a message from Jones, to the “youth of today, ”

Library of Ray Jones

A Glow in the Dark

In this dark world,

I have my precious books.

Reading them word by word,

I seek brightness.

To the youth of today,

Come read these books!

The library of Ray Jones

With brightness we dispel this gloom

Freedom and fortune

will be savored

In the glorious future

Appendix

letter from Ba Jin to Ray Jones (2 pages)

Translations of Writings by Ray Jones (Liu Zhongshi 刘中时)

and Pingshe (The Equality Society)

A. Give Us Work!

Unemployment has become an increasingly devastating problem facing our society. As the whole world sinks into deep economical crisis, we observe the increased dumping of goods, alongside increased poverty that leave hundreds and thousands of people cold and hungry. Even though government officials, capitalists, and philanthropists try to save the situation, the reality is that conditions are becoming worse and worse. That is because these people simply have no ability to solve the problem. This moment of dilemma explodes the myths that some economists believe in. In reality, we have never had that moment of “surplus production” that these economists talk about. In all honesty, there is nothing that is produced in the world today that is too much for anyone. For example, in China, there isn’t enough rice to feed anyone, but rice is still being dumped out to maintain high prices.

The purpose of capitalist production today is not to meet the needs of people, but to increase profits for a few. Take the example of England exporting loads of textile to the Chinese market while many inside England are still walking around in tattered and torn clothes. The exports of every country are not the excess of that country. The wages that workers earn are not enough to buy the supplies that they need to live on. That is why these supplies are shipped to other countries to bring in profits for the capitalists. This is why it is not true to say that workers do not need these products. It is only that workers do not have the ability to buy these products that they need.

With regards to the complexities of this question, we will discuss further in “Anarchist Theory and Practicality.” For now, we will discuss the solutions that have been put forth before. What we produce, we should consume. Our message is: From each according to ability, to each according to need.

Naturally, this is not a message that can be realized immediately. To shift from a system of production that is based on profits, to a system that is based on need and consumption requires hard work, cooperation and new methods of production. But for now, let us courageously declare that this is the most effective way to solve the problem of unemployment. Under a capitalist system of wage slavery, the problem of unemployment cannot be solved. We need as a starting point the abolishment of production based on profit, replacing it with a need-based production. Under this system, workers are no longer wage slaves. They are producing for everybody and for themselves. Workers can have what they need, and never again be in the conundrum of overproduction. There will be no more closed factories, but rather, factories will need more workers to produce to meet the needs of everyone.

Even with everyone laboring to increase production, we will still not be able to meet needs. Our only worry will be that there aren’t enough people working, and no longer will there be people who sit around with no jobs.

Human beings are not lazy bums. Everywhere in the U.S., everywhere in San Francisco, everyone is shouting, “Give me work to do!” Yet no one hears what they are saying, and even if they do, they do nothing about it.

Unemployment! Joblessness! So much energy is wasted on people trying to find jobs, searching till they die. Many people kill themselves because they cannot find any work to do, regardless of how much is still needed in this world.

“Give us work to do!” This cry has never stopped, and has even grown louder. My friends, there is work to do if you rise up! If you use the energy spent on searching desperately for jobs, to overthrow the capitalist wage system, then you will have work to do. It is the capitalists that have brought about your unemployment. You should not let them exist while you lower your pride to beg them for work.

Hard work has always been a precious thing. It is only in a capitalist society like now, that people’s labor is seen as something excessive and useless. To avoid this pathetic fate, people have resisted by shouting,

“Give us work to do!” My friends, there is no one who can provide us with work. We should unite and seize work for ourselves. This way, we can work to overthrow the injustices in our society!

B. ”Liberation has Arrived”

Pingshe flyer in San Francisco Chinatown

#Liberation has arrived for Chinese Workers

#Zhongxing Garment Workers are at the frontline

#All American workers unite in struggle

We, the Chinese workers in America have experienced humiliation and hardship under our bosses for the past seventy to eighty years. Until now, we have not seen Chinese workers strike for better wages. This strike wave led by the male and female garment workers is an earth shattering action by Chinese workers. We, Pingshe, may not be in total agreement with the extent of their demands, but we fully respect the courage and persistence of these workers. Alongside our whole-hearted support, Pingshe would like to offer some words to all our fellow Chinese workers. This strike has given all American workers the opportunity to seek liberation. Those of us who are in unions should instantly respond in support and those without should immediately organize amongst themselves.

Our fellow workers, we have been oppressed too long, with atrocious treatment, meager wages and long hours, under conditions that no human can take. Rise, rise! All of us of different gender, nationalities and race, unite together! Stop slogging our lives away! We have some words of utmost importance: All political parties, nations and bureaucrats plunder from the working class. They are all our enemies! All workers, do not be manipulated and deceived by them and their lackey organizations! Workers, we need to trust ourselves to rise and take on the responsibilities of the working class.

Rise to fight for our freedom, struggle together!

Forward, forward!

C. Letters from Ba Jin (Li Feigan) to Ray Jones (Liu Zhongshi)

1. Letter received June 26, 1929

Zhongshi:

I believe you have received the letter I sent. The small and big pamphlets can be ready at the same time. I intended to print one thousand five hundred copies of the small pamphlets, but the printers made a mistake and only printed one thousand. I have mailed eight hundred copies, with two hundred remaining here, while will be stored at the Freedom bookstore. When you run out, please let us know and we will send more. The books at Freedom bookstore are managed by Le Fu, and details can be sorted out later.

Shu Rao’s one hundred yuan has not arrived. I am wondering if its been sent.

You mentioned before the idea of buying a [illegible]. I am considering it seriously now. . . . It is much more expensive buying it from the market.

The publishing of Pingdeng in Shanghai is again running into problems. For one, Huiling is leaving. Also, our distributing site has been discovered by the Kuomintang. We need to set up overseas branches, as most revolutionary organizations around the world do, to take over the publication of our journals. It is only a matter of time before we face state repression. I am sending you the price list now. Please consider how we should next act.

Feigan

2. Received date unknown, 1929

Zhongshi:

I have received your letter. Buying type prints [illegible], but I think rather than getting type prints, why not buy the type mold? It needs only two thousand words, and costs less than five hundred yuan. I heard that in the U.S. you can typecast for less than four or five hundred yuan, all of which would cost less than a thousand yuan. But if you buy the type prints, it would cost you more than a thousand yuan (and maybe even more), and the shipping is expensive. Type prints also don’t last as long as type molds do. What do you think? Is it convenient to find a typecast in the U.S.? I don’t know about this and will need to count on you to find that out. [illegible].

It is impossible for Pingdeng to be back on track. Huiling will not be staying in Shanghai for long, and so far has only published three issues and had a couple of meetings. Every time Huiling leaves the house, he is searched several times. There is no way to continue, and the person who is responsible for distribution is not trustworthy. All in all, there is no hope for Pingdeng to be distributed in Shanghai. My health is deteriorating, and there is much work, so I will not be able to bear total responsibility for publishing Pingdeng. I am remorseful about this, and can only hope that your publishing center will gradually flourish, so that we can return to publishing Pingdeng in the future. The books are printed already, and will reach you within half a month (because it is being packaged right now). I haven’t received [illegible]. I suppose it should arrive soon. The eight hundred small booklets and the two hundred books can be mailed together. Please mail [illegible] separately.

(back page)

I have received Pugong’s letter. Now we need to have a relentless spirit of endurance, even if now our supporters are few, and results are small, we will eventually make an impact. We must not be discouraged by our present situation, particularly when China’s movements are a disappointment to all people. But our ideal is the ideal of masses of everyday people, it is the ideal of all humanity. For everyone to achieve happiness, we need to realize this ideal. The pulse of peoples’ lives, the quest for liberation, depend on the success of this ideal. Regardless of our incapacities, it will continue to grow. The situation in China now makes it impossible to organize an A party, but we will continue to strive, and when the time is ripe, our hidden strengths will come forth, and our movement will grow in spurts. Wait and see, I [illegible].

I wonder what Pugong thinks of this.

Feigan

D. Letter from Carlos Cajan to Ray Jones

Addressed to Pingshe

1129 Stockton St,

San Francisco California, USA

April 10, 1929

From: Carlos Cajan, Partada No. 19 Palmira, Cuba

Zhongshi,

A few days ago I got a package full of articles from you through my co-worker. I have read through all of them, and know that you are very sincere. I regret that I haven’t been able to thank you properly, and can do no better than write these simple words to express my gratitude.

By not writing to you at all in the past year, I have not only let you down, but also let myself down by allowing my beliefs (anarchism) to dwindle and die. And the “apologies” you wrote in your letter for not having written, should have been said by me, not you.

My ideas and revolutionary spirit are very weak, because I am an almost uneducated farmer, having received only two years of rough education. To add to that, I am not a naturally sharp person, and it is my greatest regret that I cannot effectively do the work of saving the masses. My last letter to you was made up simply of words for me to deal with my deep pain. Yet in response, you praised me for my ideas and spirit, didn’t mind that it was too late, and instead told me about Yan [Zheng Zheng].

I believe in this ideology with a fearless and sacrificing sort of spirit. The prisons, the guns and the barbwires are not enough to dampen my

resolve. We are nothing like the opportunistic politicians of the ruling party, nothing like the ridicules that Yan Zheng Zheng pass of us. To trust him, is no different from believing in the Goddess Kwanyin. Even though I have not directly been able to contribute to anarcho-communism, I have struggled and fought, as I will share with you. But I want to make clear first, that I am not trying to claim credit for my “selfless courage,” because this is also a selfish personal struggle for me, and all of humanity, to break through our chains, to fight for our freedoms, and I can’t possibly back out of working for this. I will tell you about my experiences in this past year.

Last May when I was working as a wage slave at XX town, I started distributing anarcho-communist pamphlets during break, to inspire other workers. However, a co-worker reported me to the owner, saying that I was being counterproductive and hurting the business. His owner got all agitated and fired me. When this happened, I worked even harder to spread the word, even though my livelihood had become a problem. I scramble around in poverty and hardship, but I never gave in to the capitalist class. This is how I had been living my past year.

Recently, I have been living in a village, hoping to awaken the farmers who earn only [illegible] eight cents [illegible] for every twelve hours that they work. . . [illegible] to fight against their wage allocation. Some of the workers asked me at first, what ideology I was saying. [illegible] But after ten over days, they gradually believed in it too. It was a disaster however, that the supervisor found out, and purposely focused on supervising me and ill-treating me. Eventually, being unable to tolerate this anymore, I retaliated and yelled at him for being inhumane, for being a running dog (in all honesty though, he and his wife have never had a full meal, and his pay is barely a dollar and one cent everyday). Hearing this, he responded by calling me a communist, and called on the owner to fire me. I wanted to [illegible] him but my co-workers held me back. When they heard about what happened, my co-workers all advised me to leave the place. Having experienced so much hardship, how can I bear not working harder in the struggle! Now I am trying to join another group of workers, and will write you with some news when it happens.

Cuba’s government is getting more brutal day by day, and the people are suffering immeasurably. They have arrested many revolutionaries recently, from the conservative party, the nationalist party, and the communist party [illegible]

Notes

The author would like to thank Professor Robert Lee, Wei Chi Poon, Him Mark Lai, the Ethnic Studies librarians at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Research at Brown grant for making this project possible.

1. Jones, (n.d), Personal note. Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder 3. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
2. Him Mark Lai, “To Bring Forth a New China, To Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s,” in Chinese America: History and Perspective (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco State University, 1992): 3–82.
3. The Equality Society is the English translation of the Chinese name of the organization, Pingshe (平社). I use both names interchangeably throughout the piece.
4. Ba Jin (巴金) is the pen name of the well-known Chinese anarchist and writer, Li Feigan (李芾甘). His pen name is derived from the names of two leading Russian anarchist thinkers, Bakunin and Kropotkin.
5. Jones, in his writings, does not explain how he got his name. If I, as the translator, could wax lyrical on Ray Jones’s name, I would say it might 150 have been a combination of the imageries that he refers to in his poem: “Glow in the Dark, the Library of Ray Jones.” Ray as in glow, and Jones, a phonetic translation of his Chinese name, Zhong. I would imagine too that part of it was an attempt to “Americanize” his name, and in some sense, even make his ethnicity somewhat ambiguous.
6. Mitch, “Chinese Anarchists in the 1920s USA—The Equality Society,” Anarkisimo, article posted October 31, 2005, http://www.anarkismo.net/ newswire.php?story_id=1610 (accessed December 1, 2007).
7. Ibid.
8. Ba Jin, Letter to Ray Jones, June 26, 1929. Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder
9. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
10. The Equality journal is the English translation of the Chinese title, Pingdeng (平等). I use the two names interchangeably.
11. Mitch, “Chinese Anarchists in the 1920s USA—The Equality Society.”
12. Pingshe, “The So-Called People’s Revolution,” Anarcho-Communist Monthly, June 1934. Him Mark Lai Collection, Carton 1: 35. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
13. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution: The Revolution that Never Was (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
14. Ba Jin, “Where is the Left?,” Equality Society Special Issue (July 1928): 2. Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder 15. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
15. Pingshe (n.d.), “The Difference between an Anarchist Party and a Communist Party.” Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder 7. University of California Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. One Big Union Monthly, Industrial Workers of the World, March 1919.
19. See Appendix 1.
20. Ibid.
21. Anarcho Communist Alliance, “Capitalist Dog, Beware!” Anarcho Communist Monthly (July 1928). Him Mark Lai Collections, Carton 1: 35. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
22. Ibid.
23. Anarcho Communist Alliance, “An Analysis of the San Francisco General Strike,” Anarcho Communist Monthly (August 1, 1934): 1. Him Mark Lai Collection, Ctn 1: 35. University of California Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
24. Ibid.
25. Pingshe, “An Alert to Fellow Chinese Workers.” March 4, 1938. Ray Jones Archives, Box 1: Folder 19. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
26. See Appendix B. Amerasia Journal 2008 Pingshe 151
27. Ibid.
28. Jones, (n.d.), “Women’s Liberation,” unnamed newspaper, page[?]. Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder 13. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
29. Jones, (n.d.), Manuscripts of essays. Ray Jones archives, Box 1: Folder 2. University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California
30. Ru, “Give Us Work!” Anarcho-Communist Monthly December 1, 1934: 1. Anarchism collection, Ctn 1: 35. Him Mark Lai Collections, University of California, Berkeley Asian American Studies, California.
31. San Francisco Pingshe, “Liberation has Arrived,” July 1938. Anarchism collection, Ctn 1: 34 / Him Mark Lai Collection, University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
32. Letters from Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin) in Ray Jones archives had been transcribed by Yamayuchi Mamory (山口守), Nihon University Chair of Chinese Literature Department on October 30, 1995.
33. Correspondence with Li Pei Kan. June 26, 1929. Ray Jones archives, University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Studies, California.
34. Carlos Cajan letter to Ray Jones. April 10, 1929. Ray Jones archives, University of California,

This is a sketch. All the foundations have not been laid. The contours are beginning to take shape. Many of the details are still missing. Tasks lie ahead.

What will happen in the future is bound by what has happened in the past. What will happen in the future is also free of what has happened in the past. This is not a play of words or a typo, but a profound duality that is integrated into one total movement of the future. It is the interplay of human agency, historical facts and forces. None of these can be determined precisely. Even history at times turns into speculation and possibilities. Human agency is complicated and at times, speculative. That is its beauty and terror, all at the same time.

This essay however is not a metaphysical exploration of these questions, but a concrete analysis of a group of people who have found themselves in America. I speak of my own people—South Asian Americans. It is within this context that I explore further questions, seeking for some guideposts to arrive at a few conclusions. I do not have all the answers. This essay is the beginning of a dialectical perspective that calmly and explosively looks at the South Asian experience not historically, but philosophically and theoretically. This is not about sociology or anthropology, but about how the perceived truth of reality can be destroyed by the “spontaneous” movement of millions in a matter of days. It is a spontaneity that is neither mystical nor fetishized, but one borne from daily facets of everyday life in a capitalist society.

I hope to take up contemporary issues, historical events, and cast light on future possibilities of South Asian Americans in the United States. My own understanding of these questions have been influenced by left-libertarian perspectives which challenge contemporary takes on immigration, nationalism, and democracy. Contrary to popular belief, South Asians today are not free in the United States. We are bound, not only by an imperialist, racist, and capitalist government, but also by patriarchy, racism, and class tensions in our own community. It is only through the self-activity of working-class South Asians that our community can be free.

We are unevenly integrated into the American tradition, history, landscape, culture and politics. What is our future as South Asian Americans? How do we relate to our Latino, Asian, and Black brothers and sisters in this country as peers and not perpetual foreigners? No book, no professor, or otherwise, can clearly answer this question for us. The interactions of daily life, cooked in American-style class tensions, racism, and patriarchy will unleash movement politics that will resolve this question. We only need to look back to the 1960s to see how profound questions around race, immigration and sexuality were addressed through mass movement.

It is a hot stew that we have found ourselves in. We came with hopes of a new and clean start. Some, in the middle class, believe they have achieved this. Their playhouse will not stand for long. And if it does, it will bear the blood and tears of their own kin, blood and family. The options are starker than ever before: barbarism or freedom.

Americanization of South Asians

South Asians—in varying degrees—carry the political, cultural, and historical traditions of their respective nations when they arrive in the United States. Some might hope to leave as much as possible behind for a variety of reasons. Others come here to replicate their homes, except with fuller stomachs. Most know that they will give up something to gain another and are willing to take that risk. Few can imagine what lies ahead.

Immigrants are influenced by their experiences of race, class, gender, and sexual dynamics in the U.S. On certain issues, we use political tools forged back at home to grapple with this country’s realities. In other situations, immigrants pick up liberal racism through the media, day-to-day experiences and stories from the more established immigrants. More often than not however, sexual dynamics are understood as they were in the home land. The need to preserve them is key because control of private space through women and the household is often regarded as grounds for cultural autonomy Pre-existing class relations within the community also help maintain hierarchical authorities in the family. This readjustment process is one that all immigrants, including Europeans go through. There is nothing degenerate or unique about South Asians.

This process is one of Americanization. Unfortunately, it has been muddied by the rulers of this country for too long; it has been monopolized, tarred with imperialist notions of patriotism, racist anti-immigrant sentiments and politics; it has been plagued with a white supremacist politics for millions of Black folks that will haunt future generations to come. This nation state’s vision of America is doomed. It will have nowhere to go when the US population becomes majority people of color and U.S. empire abroad continues to be ruthlessly resisted from Iraq to Korea. The alternative version of “Americanization” I refer to has nothing to do with getting immigrants to speak English, acquiring citizenship, or assimilating them into WASP culture.

When I refer to America and to the process of Americanization, I hope to convince the reader that a different concept of Americanization can exist. When I speak of “America”, I speak of the working people of this country. They are Black folks standing proud, Chicano folks protesting in the streets, the LGBTQ community with no fear, Muslims and Arabs protesting the war in Iraq and the occupation in Palestine, Southeast Asian youth resisting police brutality in their neighborhoods, and Korean Americans protesting the Free Trade Agreement between Korea and the US. I see these people carving out a new definition of America that is multi-racial, anti-racist, egalitarian, and more democratic than anything the rulers of this country could imagine. I base this on our histories, which stress moments of solidarity, compassion, hope, care, and struggle against forces of racism, colonialism, heterosexism and patriarchy. It might appear that these moments are few, but in reality they are happening all the time in small doses. Once in a while, when things come together they explode into beautiful protests, like the immigrant rallies led by the Chicano community in 2006. This America has a place for people from all walks of life, and it is about being in solidarity and finding solutions to American social problems.

When I speak of Americanization, it is also critical for us South Asians to broaden our political perspectives, to break down artificial divisions that make South Asian political reality distant and foreign to a US political reality. What happens in South Asia is not just an issue about American foreign policy; it is also an American domestic issue. Who it is in the U.S that has the power to dictate white supremacist and capitalist foreign policies in South Asia, cannot be separated from American racial, class, and gender politics as well. This means that our community needs to articulate South Asian politics on a local and national level in the US, in a way that intersects with concerns of Black, Chicano and Asian American communities. We cannot come up with demands that make issues appear as if they are relevant only to South Asians. As I will elaborate more later in this piece, the Hindutva issue, and current events in Pakistan are challenges that South Asian Americans must generalize and integrate into American society. With that, the community might even begin to speak on behalf of American-domestic issues to represent trends in the broader society, the way the Black Power movement started to do in the 1960s.

Americanization can only happen when South Asians are living and working side by side with other American communities. This molecular process is already happening on a daily basis but is extremely difficult to see, let alone understand. Usually, this process is discussed in terms of culture, which is critical, but has its limitations. The issues of dating and different lifestyles also carry political germs, but are usually discussed in terms of defending our cultural heritage alone. This cultural nationalist argument attempts to close deeper political discussions about more radical ideas of sexuality and lifestyle choices. At times, dissent around individual cultural and lifestyle choices also become substitutes for other forms of broader, more socialized political battles which are also integral parts of Americanization. The completion of the Americanization of South Asians can only happen in political and social struggle which demand freedoms, outreach to other oppressed sectors of the community, and begin to connect South Asian issues to American issues.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 were a horrible, but nonetheless powerful igniter for the debate of what America means for many Muslim South Asians. So far, the broader community has handled it in quiet ways, hoping to be good people of color and assimilate into American society. This strategy is running into problems as South Asians are being harassed by the FBI and Homeland Security, often with the help and collaboration of middle-class Muslim leaders. This is hardly a program that will convince youth that they are equals of this country. It is only a matter of time before the dam breaks and sections of the community are fed up with this accommodationist stance. Will this result in new mass movements? How will this mass movement relate to other social problems facing the nation? In the cultural front we see the slow incorporation of South Asians and hip hop with artists such as DJ Rekha and Malabar to name only a few in this growing genre. These artistes rap about the ways in which Brown people in the US are collectively oppressed, and highlight the solidarity that is necessary between Black and Brown people in the US. How these artists will affect broader American society is unclear. In the South Asian community, they represent a force that will not cower before the US state, finding strength and solidarity instead with other people of color here.

My argument boils down to the following: the South Asians might be Americans in the way we dress, talk, eat, and behave, but we are not Americans in our politics, traditions, and beliefs. I am referring to how we conceptualize ourselves; how we concretely see our interests in relationship to other everyday Americans; how we interact with anti-Black racism, class conflict in this country. Oftentimes, we think ourselves to be outside the racial problems of this country. We think we can exist above them or outside them. We claim not to be Black or White, but too often we also end up siding with white supremacy in our political and cultural behavior. We have failed to come up with a South Asian American racial and class identity that is at the same time independent and confident of its own origins, and related to the racial and class conflicts of this country. Instead, we feel we are a social class destined to be doctors and engineers, and ignore the class differentiated societies we left back home. I am not looking for programmatic answers to these questions but searching for what they look like when people are on the move in the workplace, neighborhood, and their schools. What people do is often more important then what they say. On both counts, the verdict is not good at the present moment; however the future is not doomed either.

Class Dynamics in the South Asian Community

Myths are sometimes distorted reflections of truth. There is no exception to the one pertaining to South Asians in the U.S.: the model minority myth. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) which encouraged skilled professionals to enter the United States. This meant a substantial number of doctors, scientists, and engineers entered the country for more than a decade. In 1976, a new set of laws made it difficult for skilled professionals to enter the country. The new laws still allowed family reunification for immigrants. This meant that the influx of immigrants from South Asia would not stop, but the class character of the immigrants would change. The 1980s and the 90s saw an increase in South Asians coming under the Family Reunification clause. These have tended not only to be of more working class origins but also from less developed countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. These new class forces in the United States have been cause for tension. The very social relations and material realities for working class South Asians become a brutal school of authentic Americana: the hard knock life of racial conflict, class warfare, family problems, patriarchy, sex, drugs, and more. At the level of work, school, and neighborhoods, South Asians are forced to interact with an American experience.
The future of the South Asian working class is different from its middle-class counterpart. While the middle class has settled into its own sensibilities, ambitions, and a way of life, this door for the working class is closed except for the occasional individual here and there. For many youth, unemployment, poor education, and ghettoization are either already realities, or will soon be. Our generation will have to resolve a distinct set of American questions that have plagued the Black, Native American, and Latino communities. How they will be resolved, and what kind of leadership is needed, are challenges we have to take up.
Because of the influence and familial closeness of the South Asian middle class to the working class, the question of leadership becomes critical.

The classes in immigrant communities are literally related and tied to one another in much sharper ways then many white ethnic communities. Tribal family relations, arranged marriages, hierarchical gender roles, class antagonisms, not to mention caste from South Asia are brought to the U.S. This does not mean that they did not already exist in American society but under different political, social and cultural circumstances and frameworks. The problem is compounded since capitalist countries like the United States have no qualms with tribal family relations. In fact, there is no evidence that there is a fundamental contradiction between the two. Comparisons of whether the USA or South Asia is progressive or backward on this are much more complicated than theorized by thinkers of modernity, colonialism, or empire.

The carrying over of such family relations cause the South Asian American working class to trail their more visible and dominant middle class counterparts. Much of this can be attributed to a reliance on the latter as immigrants negotiate the economic and cultural aspects of American society. A simple example should shed light on what I am discussing. There is a tension between settled middle class first generation of immigrants versus the working class immigrants who have come in the last twenty years. The working class immigrants might be cousins, nephews, or nieces of the middle class immigrants. They cannot prop themselves up without some help from the now settled first wave of immigrants. These latter immigrants are well-established doctors or engineers. Many of them are the biggest financiers of temples and mosques. Newer immigrants might have access to small amounts of capital from savings back home, or via loans from family members They might start small businesses or rent a taxi, but many more end up in unskilled working class jobs. This is a reflection of class, caste, and gender dynamics in South Asia.

As South Asian American youth grow older, they have two sets of authorities they must deal with. It is not only their parents, but also the community’s authority that is a constant check on the activity of young people. In no uncertain terms, the middle class eye is always hovering over poorer families as well as youth. These middle class gate-keepers are the vigilant authority that often seeks idealistic notions of a pure religious or cultural order rooted in South Asia. They cannot see that their future is tied to a South Asian American reality. They see culture, religion, and identity as static, a-historic, and one-dimensional. I would argue that all these are extremely fluid, multi-dimensional, and constantly developing. We should welcome this process of Americanization. Middle class patriarchs worry about how everything in the United States will poison their perfect images of the South Asia household and community, and in doing so only serve to compress our political activity. Instead, we should recognize that South Asian identity has nothing to fear in the face of American culture. The question is rather, what will we contribute to this society?

As I have discussed above, the material success and social prestige of the middle class largely explains why the working class takes its cue from them. I hope I have successfully demonstrated that material and ideological pressures on the working class are immense. We can ask then, how will working class South Asian immigrants break from their middle class leadership? This is one of the lynchpins of the South Asian question. This question is tied to many other factors: young people need to be free of family control, women need to be free of patriarchal social relations, and racial politics need to be reconfigured on new axis. We will look at some other key contours and then come back to the question I have asked.

Model Minority#####

Two social processes are happening together. Americanization is a process which is determined by its class content. Middle class Americanization is more complex than simply assimilation on the one hand or romanticization of the homeland on the other. More fundamentally, it is the belief in the model minority myth. The model minority myth doesn’t say that the South Asian middle classes are “making it” because they have become “white,” but rather because “their own culture” is one of hard work and maintaining right family ties, both of which are recipes to success in American society. What this really means, as we know, is capitalist obedience bolstered by feudal tribalism and reinforced by the US state’s engineering projects of the 1965 immigration act. All this served to put the dentist class of South Asians in charge of the community. In any case, this middle class vision is not simply one of assimilating into whiteness but rather allying with the white middle classes against people of color and workers. Its ingenuity lies also in its ability to do the above and still maintain a sense of cultural authenticity, especially within the four walls of middle-class suburban houses where gender and age dynamics are strictly determined by tradition.

South Asian culture is seen as one which appreciates and promotes a hard work ethic, honesty, timeliness, and a host of other employer-friendly attributes. Often times, this perceived image of South Asian culture is contrasted to Black civilization or culture which racists will argue is mired in the violence of street life, the patriarchy of hip hop, or the lack of family values. Racists can claim that they are not for white-supremacy by pointing out that they are for values instead of racial superiority. Instead of racial slurs, they can point to the good cultures and bad cultures. From these racist points of view, it is nothing to do with white supremacy that so-called Black culture does not appreciate these values and skills. Nonetheless the racist rhetoric that vilifies anything indifferent to white middle class capitalist discipline is thinly veiled.

In this way, South Asians are posed as the solution to the Black and Latino problem. These latter communities supposedly need to learn from South Asians. We, South Asians are supposed to teach Black and Latino community how to be good people of color. This is not only about racism against other people of color, but also about which class perspectives monopolize and determine our lives. We live in a capitalist society and nothing drives the engines of capitalism like the consumer appetites of good middle class people, regardless of their color.

This Cultural Olympics way of “solving” the “Black and Latino Problem” also ignores the structural, historical racism and oppression these communities have endured and continue to face. It ignores state violence towards these communities. It ignores the class dynamics and history of how each of these communities arrived in the U.S. model minority myth assumes that it is not racism or empire that are the roots of the problem, but laziness, lack of values, and other cultural deficiencies. It attempts to place blame on Black and Latino folks instead of the state, the police, and a failed education system.

The model minority myth is also used to police “Bad South Asians” inside the community who do not exhibit the same values that the “Good South Asian” a.k.a. model minority folks. These are South Asian youth who want to be anti-racist activists and hip hop artists; they want to date people of different races, have pre-marital sex, and more, like many youth; they want to experiment with their career choices, and push the limits of what success means. In all these ways, a standard of “Good South Asians” a.k.a. the model minority is a noose around the possibilities of any of these things happening. “Good South Asians” become doctors, get married, are good consumers, obey the law, and die peacefully Any deviation from this is a threat to this safe identity and way of life. We only need to look at South Asia to find plenty of South Asians who never made it to the U.S. and are hardly the definition of the model minority. How do their existences fit into the model minority picture?

The model minority myth not only has devastating effects in terms of broader race relations, but internally within the South Asian community as well. It attempts to buttress white supremacy and empire by controlling the norms and behavior of a group of people of color. The fact that the South Asian middle class is so comfortable in playing this role should shed light on any “progressive” role it might play. It also demonstrates the importance of working class communities being independent of their middle class leaders.

The consequences of the model minority are three-fold: First, it prevents the development of international anti-imperialist solidarity. Are the Pakistani youth who burn U.S. flags and chant “anti-American slogans” the model minority? Of course not: they are talked about as the uneducated and emotional third world brothers and sisters who need to be educated and civilized. While this might sound like Orientalist propaganda, it is also an often repeated sentiment by many progressive and liberal South Asians, quiet as it is kept. As discussed earlier, South Asian Americans, both liberal and progressive, too eager to play the part of the “good,” “reasonable” Muslim in contrast to their rowdy Muslim counterparts in the Middle East, highlight this point. Second, it ignores the discrimination that South Asian Americans have faced after 9-11, such as the countless name callings of “Habib,” “Sand-nigger,” “Camel-jockey,” to name a few of the “treats” that racists have in reserve for us. In the post 9-11 world we have also been treated to a new round of deportations and interrogations by the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security, not to mention the subordination of Pakistan and Afghanistan by U.S. Empire. Third, the model minority also limits the possible and new identities that South Asian can explore. It defines a narrow racial, cultural, and class vision. The realities of America and the energy and courage of South Asian youth are already showing that the model minority myth will become obsolete.

Problems We Must Solve

The middle classes are pursuing their own vision of Americanization. This has left a landmine of problems that must be dealt with by the growing South Asian youth population in the U.S. Three key points come to mind: the race question, gender and politics, and strategies in the post 9-11 world.

Racial Politics

Questions of race are can rarely be taken up on their own. In the United States, race is an inseparable part of class dynamics and vice versa. Subordination of one to the other leads to disaster. What I hope to show in the following section is an integrated analysis of class, race, and immigration in terms of the South Asian community.

South Asian chauvinism has been re-conceptualized in the racial matrix of this country. This chauvinism takes a variety of forms: religious, sexual, civilizational, class, and of course racial. As discussed earlier, the feudal family conceptions and class background all pull the middle class to be soft on white-supremacy but ruthless and racist against Black Americans. That reflects the power of white supremacy against Black folks in this country. The conflict is most visibly seen in the large suburban density of many South Asians. The logic goes that, as soon as a family living in the ghetto has enough money, it leaves for white suburbs. It should be no surprise to those familiar with the community, how comfortable the South Asian middle class can be in white suburban communities seeking to create their enclaves away from the third world invasion and black islands left in the inner city.

The question of where South Asians fall on the racial spectrum is a ticking time bomb. This conflict has not taken explosive dimensions as of yet, but the battles are happening in smaller ways. The key pivot in this question is our relationship to Black people in this country. Working class and unemployed Black folks are at the bottom of American capitalism and the labor market. They are attacked as a community on almost every imaginable front. It is off of their backs that many immigrants have made their stand in American society when they collaborate with the form of anti-black, white supremacy. An important piece of breaking down the destructive model minority myth is to forge a new relationship of solidarity and commonality between South Asian and Black folks. We see this happening organically among South Asian youth who are influenced by Black culture and history. Young South Asians are debating with their parents if they can hang out with, date, or marry Black folks. Arguments occur on other issues as well, such as whether Black folks are prone to crime, their work standards, sexual behavior, family values, and lifestyles. Some young folks have accepted the racist perceptions of their parents and the media about Black folks. However, many others see a different reality.

Hamtramck, Michigan provides a good case study of this problem. I have lived in this “new American city”. It is packed with Bengali, Yemeni, Somali, Polish, and Serbian immigrants, along with native Blacks and Whites. In the elementary schools, many South Asian kids are friends with Black kids, but by high school these same kids are getting in fights with one another. What happens between those years is critical. How do friends end up becoming such bitter enemies? There is immense ideological persuasion going on at home from the parents and the community not to mention the media that demonizes and scapegoats Black folks.

Racial identities are not chosen by simply sitting in the living room and pondering over them, or by going to meetings and discussing them. Parents might shape the early years of racial perspectives but reality is also a powerful teacher. Racial identities can be shaped by two forces: the first is the day to day experiences of South Asian folks with other people of color, and the second is when millions of people challenge white supremacy. In the late 1960s, Black rebellions shook the country and the Black Panther Party came to existence. At this time Chicano, Native American, Asian American and white youth were forced to take sides with either the Black rebellions or white supremacy. Many chose the former because they were inspired by the energy of the Black Power movement and saw their own liberation tied up with it. The same will be required of South Asian youth when future Black rebellions and organizations are born. Yet, this does not mean South Asian youth need to depend on Black organizations to become involved in anti-racist organizing. In Hamtramck alone, issues of community control of schools, police brutality, gang violence, drug use, FBI and Homeland Security raids are all problems that South Asian youth can play an important role in. But the reality is, we cannot confront these issues without figuring out how to relate to our Black neighbors on the basis of solidarity.

Black folks will have to give up chauvinisms as well. Common perceptions amongst the community are that Asians—broadly speaking—are not oppressed, that they have gotten free money from the government, and have little to be angry about. Just as South Asian Americans have to reach across racial barriers which structure this country, Black folks will have to do the same. History can be an important teacher, reminding both communities of a time when South Asians were the inspiration of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. The importance of Indian national liberation movement was pivotal in demonstrating that white-supremacy could be challenged, and it was pivotal in developing a method of struggle in the U.S.—I am referring to the non-violent strategies of Mahatma Gandhi. Not to mention the important role India played in the Non-Aligned Movement, a coalition of African and Asian states attempting to forge a third path between American capitalism and Russian communism, despite the movement’s extremely serious flaws and failings.

What this means is that South Asian Americans do not have to become “Black” to be in solidarity with the community and have anti-racist politics. Although I think it is great and healthy if South Asians Americans identify as Black in this country, the question I am more interested in, is whether a South Asian American identity that is both independent from and related to the Black community, can be developed. This is critical. I believe this can only happen when a break with the South Asian American middle class is made, a break which will open new possibilities for young and old people alike. Here, new dimensions of South Asian American and Black identity, culture, and politics can be explored when both communities are free to experiment, play, and struggle together without worries about purity and racial hierarchy. Each nation offers new configurations of identity and political formations. The U.S. is no exception. This country offers its own dynamic possibilities and we must go into the future with open minds and large ambitions. To pass this opportunity by would be a failure of our imagination and actions.

Women in the South Asian Community

Women in the South Asian community are at the center of many important questions. They have been at the forefront of social movements such as Palestine solidarity, anti-war, anti-globalization, and third world solidarity. The broader community’s failure to recognize this has been pitiful. This is based on my own experiences as an organizer for all the above issues in the last six years of my political life. Throw in Arab and Muslim women in this mix and the problem is even deeper. Contrast it to the absence of men and it is shocking. What to do? What is the problem? This question falls in the matrix of class, feudalism, and patriarchy. How can this happen? Women have been the backbone, often the most militant activists I have seen throughout my political experience. Let’s take a concrete example: Wayne State University during the buildup to the Iraq war. Arab, African, and South Asian Women formed the bulk of the anti-war organization, demonstrations and events that were held on campus. Yet, further involvement in political life was always in tension with, if not checked by family pressures to be the good daughter, future professional and wife.

The forces of middle class ambitions, feudal family relations, combined with patriarchy, held women back from further pursuing political work. Breaking this deadlock in this context has explosive potentials. In one single stroke all three can fall. What is holding it back? None of these forces are ideas alone. Overthrowing authoritarian ideas goes hand-in-hand with overthrowing authoritarian relations and material realities. This is easier said than done. Much is at stake while possibilities of a better future are on uncertain grounds. Concretely, financial black mail, emotional threats, respectability, and ostracism from the community are at stake. Probably the most difficult is financial blackmail and the absence of a strong radical women’s movement to defend against it. The most courageous and politically daring women in the community are financially dependent on the family—a reality of most youth life. The absence of a women’s movement is devastating for women who do try to break from their families and are looking for solidarity amongst women who are going through or have gone through similar experiences. When larger movements do not develop, extra attention and support have to be given to the brave women involved in political activity. This is the only way they can gain a sense of independence from their family. There is a tragedy in this story as far as I am concerned. Women face three independent and at the same time interlocked sets of objective factors that oppress them. Overthrowing them is a massive feat and many brave women attempt this. In non-movement times however, I can only imagine how difficult it is with the many retreats and disappointments. We must support and emphasize the importance of this struggle and hope that the few women that cross this chasm will lay the groundwork for many more women in movement times.

Welcome to the Post 9-11 World

Two strategies so far have been developed in dealing with the new realities created by 9-11. One has been vigorously pursued by the South Asian middle classes. Leading up to the Afghanistan war, Bush held community sessions in Masjids. The “good,” middle class South Asian American leadership tried to make sure there was no resistance to U.S. Empire by offering no dissent against the Afghanistan and later, the Iraq war. This type of prostration to U.S. Empire continues to this day. When Masjids are attacked, the first people called are the FBI. The contradiction in this behavior cannot be sharper considering it is this same FBI that infiltrates Masjids, rounds up South Asian-Muslims, and deport or interrogate them.

These have been immensely difficult times for young and working class South Asian Americans. It is in many of these communities that agents of state surveillance are operating. And yet the middle class is demanding cooperation. So far this pressure has held. However, the dam will eventually break. This has been the history of this dynamic in among Black, Japanese, Chicano and women’s groups in this country. The middle class seeks cooperation with the very people who constantly harass, terrorize, and oppress their broader community. The working class and youth are generally the victims. How long the U.S. can hold off the powerful Arab, South Asian, and Muslim movements in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia from having effects which challenge this class cooperation is not clear. The riots in France over the last two years, the famous anti-fascist struggles in England, the developing movements in Germany and Turkey, not to mention the series of movements in the Middle East, cannot be treated as aberrations of the model minority forever. The shakeup of this weak class coalition will result in new organizations, with much more militant politics, and provide resolutions to many of the questions we have been asking in this essay—this is exactly what U.S. Empire and the South Asian middle classes are attempting to block for their own reasons, in their own ways.

What Next####

When the Black struggle led to splits in middle class and working class people it led to the latter creating working class based organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Action Movement, League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Congress of African People. Each of these organizations would later find it immensely difficult to remain free of middle class domination whether internally or in coalition work. These organizations give us a tradition and clues of what future groups might look like, what problems they might face, and how they are to be built. What can South-Asian American history tell us?

However, using historical examples as the only way to build a tradition of political activity in the United States has its limitations. How the Ghadar Party is often presented in South Asian progressive circles is an example that highlights the limitations of this method. The Ghadar Party was a group of ex-patriot Indians who built an anti-colonial organization in the United States. They hoped to send military aid and trained personnel from the United States to India This is a valid and highly important objective for anyone. However, it failed to sink roots in the American radical-left tradition of political and organizational activity. With the exception of the individual Hayar Dal, it had few other organizational and political ties with American groups. The Ghadar Party took little interest in the happenings of the U.S. working class, its race problems, etc. It was not able to make an impact in the trajectory and traditions of the variety of political trends that existed in the country. Today, its actual historical legacy is extremely faint. It is remembered by a few South Asian progressives. It is a historical example that is largely tied to the liberation of our own distant homeland, with little to say on matters of American politics.

The problem becomes greater when looking at South Asian activity in other major movements that have occurred in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, United Negro Improvement Association, Communist Party, Socialist Worker’s Party, or Workers Party just to mention some of the major organizations before the 1960s. The absence of South Asians in these movements has been a serious obstacle for young South Asians today to see themselves as part of an American radical tradition.

The last political upheaval of the 1960s and 70s where numerous ethnic, racial, and religious groups articulated their demands and struggle for some measure of control and justice in their lives found South Asians missing again. This is an interesting historical point of fact for today, as that era has become a reference point for many young people today. It is often a starting point of icons, traditions, and a sense of belonging in the American radical tradition.

Again, this is not about cheap historical examples and a few slogans. More importantly this is about missed chances for South Asian Americans. Our political and cultural interests do not lie just in South Asia but also intersect with the problems occurring in this country. The 1960s exposed the questions of Black community control, women’s rights, Chicanismo, Third world solidarity, queer liberation, and labor rights for the working class. At this time, South Asians were not able to develop organic American-based traditions which determined where they would side, how they would expect support from other groups, and how they would explain themselves in the flow of movements. This phenomena can be partly explained by a relatively simple reason. South Asians were a minuscule population until after these movements were destroyed. We were not in this country in large numbers to take up the nationalist, ethnic, and class politics that flowered in the 1960s and 70s. It is not our fault, but the consequences will have to be dealt with.

My comments above should not be taken to mean that South Asians do not have a radical history to draw upon. The Ghadar Party is one living example, our involvement in the Black Power movement in Trinidad, in the nationalist movement in Kenya, in the anti-colonial struggle in India, the massive social movement in Pakistan in 1968 which brought down General Ayub Khan and a host of other examples. The question is, how will these struggles be used in the United States? Will there be recognition of this past and an integration of this into third world solidarity movements in the U.S.? Will there be sheroes rescued from this past? Only the future can tell.

Where do we go from here? Can the absence of a tradition in the US by itself define our community and its future political work? I believe they can be powerful factors but nonetheless not the only factor. . To make it so would be to reduce political activity to digging for a political tradition. Two aspects should be considered while looking at the development of South Asian American politics in the United States: how movements dealing with issues back in South Asia take shape and how movements dealing with domestic problems in the U.S. take shape. As I have discussed earlier in this piece, the relationship and connections made between these two aspects are crucial for the formation of a vibrant South Asian American politics.

The successful organizing of the New York Taxi Cab Alliance (NWTCA) shows that the struggles of working class South Asians have an important role to play in shaping US domestic politics. South Asian drivers constitute over half of the cabs in the city. Contrary to myth, taxi cab drivers do not make pockets full of cash. Instead they lease cars on a daily basis, pay for their own gas, and are hounded by New York City police who obviously enjoy handing them tickets on all sorts of frivolous charges . The breaking point came when Mayor Giuliani imposed policies to increase cab safety. These policies were in reality, thinly disguised attempts to push through anti-labor legislation, designed to create an increasingly obedient workforce The ensuing struggle in the form of a strike helped build multi-racial solidarity across religious and national lines among the cab drivers. Many drivers also talked to their passengers, explaining what was going on. In efforts to build working class solidarity in the 1998 strike, the taxi cab drivers had to deal with their linguistic and national differences if the action was to be successful. The drivers put their issues and needs on the agenda of New York City. It was from this angle that matters of race, religion, and language hato be dealt with.

Other issues have yet to find their mark in American politics, such as problems in South Asia: the rise of Hindutva, the partition of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh, the caste system, the Naxalite insurgency, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist movement in Nepal, and the question of dictatorship or democracy in Pakistan. How each of these issues will be translated into South Asian-American issues is yet to be seen.

There have been attempts made, but the most prominent examples have led to in-group only discussions with little ability to reach other Americans. One example is the “Campaign to Stop Funding Hate”. Relating Hindutva to social issues in this country has been a challenge. One of the targets has been the Hindu Student Council national leadership and the organization in general. The campaign has failed to create a movement. It has been relegated to small skirmishes inside an already small community. I do not believe this is because of the questions that the campaign is trying to address per se, but more to do with the political framework and organizing strategies undertaken. In general, the campaigns have not “Americanized” this question. This does not mean liquidating the acutely Indian problem into the needs of an American constituency, but instead coming up with a framework that can make international politics more relevant here in the US. Organizationally there has been little development of building towards grassroots campaign where there are organizers who push for concrete demands, recruit folks to a specific political perspective, and build coalitions with other American organizations.

Pakistan is another example. Although of national concern amongst rulers and planners of this country, Pakistan has also become a new side kick in the fight against terror. Yet, Pakistan’s neo-colonial dependency, poverty, and issues of democratic freedoms have not become the basis for an international solidarity movement in this country. There could be a variety of reasons for this. Perhaps the movements in Pakistan do not cause the imaginative and movement leaps in this country that other struggles have (for example, Palestine or Venezuela). Perhaps it is rooted in the class dimensions of the Pakistani community in the U.S. It could also be that the anti-Muslim and Arab laws and hysteria pushed by the U.S. State has stifled the political variety of Muslim activism in ? of this country. All three factors could be inhibiting the development of solidarity movements in this country.

Lastly, my own organizing experiences have shown contradictory results. I cannot claim to have done successful organizing around South Asian identity. Am I less South Asian because I have done multi-racial organizing around issues instead of around identity? Is the organizing less pure or worthy?

What I can take credit for, as a South Asian American, is a contribution to the deepening of South Asian activists in American political struggles. Most decisively this has been as a Palestine solidarity and anti-war (against Afghanistan and Iraq) activist. In this context, I have organized with Muslims, Black folks, Whites, LGBTQ folks, and more. I have seen Muslim and South Asian sectarianism towards more radical ideas. Ironically many such liberal formations ignore the militant traditions of South Asia and the Middle East. I have seen among them, contempt for the LGBTQ community as well. This ignores Muslim and South Asian LGBTQ communities long before any contact with the “West,” which is often accused of importing this ideas. But I have also seen that it is in the act of struggle that people learn the limitations of their prejudices and what “beliefs” they must choose if they wish to be free. I have also experienced chauvinism and racism from other people of color inside the movement towards South Asians. Islam and Islamic politics has yet to be treated with the same care and nuance that Christianity and Christian liberation theology finds in many progressive circles.

I believe what my experiences demonstrate is that basing our political organizing on the basis of our ethnic identity is not the only place to begin for activists. It does not mean we lose sight of South Asians in the United States. Rather, we can choose to think about this in a different framework, some of which I have outlined in this essay. “My community” cannot be based just on the origins of my birth or my resemblance to what other people look like. Luckily, community and identity are not determined by these factors alone. South Asians—myself included—are slowly being recast into something different as we continue to live in this society. What this will mean when the next great rebellions break out is yet to be seen. Just as new identities emerge based on our political environment, so do alternative organizational forms emerge, that reflect the needs of our society today. The politics of reformist organizations, such as those we are saturated with in the non-profit industrial complex, are fundamentally co-opted by capitalism and the structures of liberal racism. The monopoly that such reformist organizations have among many politicized folks is due to a general lack of historical knowledge and a failure of political imagination.

How then do we develop alternative organizations and politics that have been missing in the broader American population and consequently in the South Asian community? The last great wave of these alternatives was the late 1960s and early 70s. Today we are at a similar historical juncture, where easy solutions are no longer possible. Sacrifice and discipline are an inevitable part of liberatory politics and organizations. To be missing any of the components: creativity, sacrifice, discipline, joy, or spontaneity is to narrow the complexity and success of political projects.

Politically South Asian American youth have to take bold initiatives in anti-racist struggles that not only affect their own communities but that of Black, Chicano, and other Asians. Hip hop, inter-racial dating, sexual freedoms, or the struggle for new identities should be related political struggles. Not only new identities, new cultures, and new political organizations, but a new way of life is at stake. Pure identities, struggles, or organizations are a thing of the past. Instead we should look forward to a future where our struggle for freedom begins to open up new possibilities that we could not have imagined before. Whether these opportunities will forever remain a dream or become a reality is dependent on the defeat of forces which oppose us: white-supremacy, our own middle classes, and U.S. Empire.

Arif Dirlik. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 326p.

Introduction

The place of anarchism in the foundation and development of the many revolutions in 20th century China is largely unknown or forgotten in China and the world over. Philosophers and organizers of numerous groups under the umbrella of anarchism helped lay the cornerstones for political, social, economic, and cultural struggles in China. Their work culminated in the capture of state power in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From the first decade of the 20th century to the early 1930s, anarchist ideas had much currency among those individuals seeking to construct a modern Chinese nation free from the influence of the flags of the rising sun, Union Jack, Stars and Stripes, and the modern Chinese state.

It also sought freedom from the grip of Confucian ideologies justifying monarchy, patriarchy and rule of the family over the individual. The ideologies and organizational forms building a new society under the banner of anarchism varied greatly. This proved very important in its relationship to the bourgeoisie parliamentary nationalism of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. To understand the philosophical and organizational strengths and weaknesses of the many flavors of anarchism in China during this time takes much research and study. Scholar and author Arif Dirlik has contributed to this important task with his thoroughly researched book Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution.This proved very important in its relationship to the bourgeoisie parliamentary nationalism of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. To understand the philosophical and organizational strengths and weaknesses of the many flavors of anarchism in China during this time takes much research and study. Scholar and author Arif Dirlik has contributed to this important task with his thoroughly researched book Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution.

The important research and writing that Dirlik presents help us understand the direction that revolutionary struggles in 20th century China took. Dirlik, a scholar who has written extensively on Marxism and anarchism in China, approaches the subject matter of the influence and place of anarchism in the Chinese revolution with an attitude of critical support. Dirlik believes Chinese revolutionaries espousing anarchist and Marxist-Leninist ideas had much to learn from each other, suggesting that the split between the two by 1923 was a missed opportunity to bring the best of each ideology together to create a new Chinese society. However, there were barriers to such a convergence. These included divergent views on the place of the state, the role of the vanguard organization, and tactics towards enacting social, economic, cultural, and political change between the anarchists and the communists. These differences created gulfs too wide to bridge. Dirlik also mentions that a major theme of his book (and this article for that matter) is not reclaiming statist versions of Mao, the Communist Party, or the Chinese Revolution for anarchism—to which, making an informed guess, anarchists would be the first to object. Dirlik’s work successfully allows one to better understand the course the revolution took in China through Communism when viewed as part of a broader revolutionary movement, where anarchist ideas were central historically. Anarchism in China introduced dissonant elements into the Bolshevik conception of revolution. Anarchism was not the only heroic or legitimate expression of democratic, revolutionary philosophy and action in early 20th century China. However it was one of the first, introducing a whole generation of future CCP leaders, including Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai among others to its ideas of remaking society through revolutionary means. These ideas, from popular committees, communes, popular education, the idea of a “new culture” remaking individuals through self sacrifice, a breaking down of mental and manual labor, and a return to and celebration of rural life and agriculture as “going to the people” were all ideas first discussed and practiced by Chinese anarchists. It was only later that these ideas were incorporated into the Chinese Communist state after 1949 as Mao Zedong Thought. Coming to terms with this history helps explain the particularities of Chinese Communism both in the past and the present. It helps explain the “power from below” aspects of Chinese Communism, particularly its ability to co-opt energetic mass movements from the working classes and peasantry. Everyday Chinese folks struggling for democratic change from below can benefit today from examining how anarchist ideas were manipulated to shore up the authoritarian rule of the Communist state.

Anarchism Develops in China

The origins and growth of anarchism in China were part of broader trends in the development of anarchism worldwide during the first two decades of the 20th century. Anarchism in this time was making strides internationally, and these developments influenced Chinese social movements through literature and reports by Chinese in the diaspora, most importantly from individuals in Japan and France. China was also receptive to anarchist ideas from prominent Russian and American anarchists including Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Varlaam Cherkezov among others. The influence of Marx was much weaker, only gaining strength after the founding of the CCP in 1921. This meant for many young Chinese radicals their initial point of reference towards revolutionary social change was not through Marx, but through anarchists like Kropotkin. However this did not mean that all young Chinese radicals were staunchly against the state. As it still functions today, anarchism can be viewed as a clearinghouse of broadly leftist anti-authoritarian philosophies and circles. Anarchism has many flavors from radical individualism, to cultural and literary pursuits challenging the “mainstream,” to syndicalist trade unionism, to revolutionary class struggle advocating popular committees and councils in opposition to the state. But anarchism has also always had its share of individuals and groups with social democratic philosophies, more eager to be progressive agents reforming the state from below than to be builders of self-governing societies. It is this clearinghouse notion and diversity of philosophy, tactics and organization (or lack thereof) that greeted young radicals in early 20th century China.

Chinese anarchists in Paris, grouped around the journal New Century, were pioneers of social democratic tendencies in the movement. In comparison to Chinese anarchists in Japan, who published journals with a bent towards primitivist naturalism (a call to return to pre-industrial society), anarchists in Paris proved more influential. The Paris group was started by Zhang Ji and Wu Zhihui. It later included future CCP party leaders Deng Xiaopeng and Zhou Enlai. This group approached anarchism as a driving cultural and educational force towards cosmopolitan modernization. This modernization mission would subsequently be expressed in the Kuomintang (KMT) and CCP state missions. The Paris group famously developed the educational initiative of “diligent work-study,” bringing young Chinese to France to learn the virtues of hard work, self-sacrifice in attempting to break the divide between mental and manual labor. Their ideas and programs sought to make the modern Chinese individual through what was, by 1919, coined the “new culture movement.” However this movement was very much tied to the KMT as Zhang Ji and Wu Zhihui worked with these bourgeoisie nationalists as early as 1912. They were the cultural leftwing of Chinese nationalism, a Kautskyist interpretation of socialist ideas believing the path towards liberation entailed a slow evolution of the state and society, primarily through educational means. As Dirlik mentions, the diligent work-study program was actually supported and encouraged by the Kuomintang for it provided a safe outlet for aspiring anarchists in China to learn their ideas (away from China) and also supplied France with cheap foreign labor during the World War I. This was hardly anti-authoritarian. It is perhaps the legacy of these social democratic “anarchists” that had the most lasting effect on the CCP. Ideas of diligent work and making the “new man” through education and self-sacrifice were used by the CCP to justify its social and economic programs. For the Paris group, anarchism was a modernization project supporting the remaking of the Chinese nation in the mold of the cosmopolitan West. For them, democracy equated relative individual freedoms and civil society in support of the modern, progressive state.

Not all early anarchists can be viewed as the leftwing of the KMT. A handful of anarchists took the words of Kropotkin and Bakunin to heart, advocating class struggle and mutual aid societies in opposition to the state. Dirlik most notably mentions the circle around the philosopher Shifu. His group built federated communes in Guangzhou and later Shanghai. Shifu died prematurely in 1915, but his influence helped animate many democratic struggles from below that blossomed throughout in 1920s. Shifu, who tended towards a literal interpretation of anarchists like Kropotkin, was one of China’s first serious revolutionary anarchist philosophers and organizers. His circle conveyed their views and published translations of Western anarchists’ writings in the journal Voice of the People (Min Sheng). He also used the journal to polemicize against the social democracy of Sun Yat-Sen and Socialist Party leader Jiang Kanghu as statist social policies influenced by Marxist collectivism. In contrast, Shifu believed a true socialism was anarchist-communist, as theorized and practiced by Bakunin and Kropotkin. Shifu’s circle also had connections with anarchists aboard, receiving visits in Shanghai from Alexander Berkman and a number of Japanese anarchists. A thorough account of Shifu’s life and ideas can be found in Edward S. Krebs’ Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism.

After Shifu’s death in 1915, individuals from his communes continued to publish Voice of the People and influence other serious Chinese anarchist thinkers. Most prominent among them was Ou Shengbai who, in the 1920s, upheld class struggle anarchism in polemics against founders of the CCP. It was Shifu’s circle that produced the most developed and historically grounded thoughts on socialism in early Republican China. They clearly staked positions as anarchists rooted in a stateless communism in opposition to state socialism that groups such as the KMT, Socialist Party, and the Paris circle practiced and supported. Shifu’s views were expanded and modified by his circle to help its members organize among workers, something he supported but never did during his lifetime. Shifu’s legacy would influence many young Chinese radicals, including Mao Zedong.

In discussing the varying organizing methods of the Paris group versus Shifu’s circle, Dirlik locates their conceptions of organization and power. He points out how “anarchist modernizers” were largely unable to conceptualize politics beyond that of culture and education. Dirlik suggests these anarchists tended towards a modern individualism, seeking to enact change through cultural and education initiatives from below that avoided “doing politics.” This phrase as used by Dirlik is framed somewhat problematically, for those seeking change through educational and cultural realms were indeed doing politics in the sense that they were contending for ideological influence in a growing rebellious milieu. What Dirlik seems to suggest is anarchists were seeking not to directly work with the state or engage in party politics. The Paris group claimed to be “above politics.” Yet the founders of this circle supported KMT activities as early as 1912. What Dirlik suggests is the lack of “doing politics” meant a rejection of serious organizing and philosophical reflection on the ideas of power and coercion in making the new society. This was the case not only with the Paris group, but also among some individuals influenced by Shifu during and after his lifetime. The question of political power and organization became very evident in the 1920s during the philosophical and organizational struggles between anarchism and the Marxist-Leninist philosophies of the CCP.

Anarchists, Communists & Nationalists: Questions of Democracy, Organization & Power

The most crucial chapters of Dirlik’s book for our understanding of anarchist influence in revolutionary China and its eventually defeat at the hands of the nationalists and later the CCP are chapter six, “The Anarchist Alternative in Chinese Socialism, 1921-1927,” and chapter seven, “The Revolution That Never Was.” Dirlik lays out the struggle for power in 1920s China between the KMT, the emerging Communist Party, and assorted groups and philosophers advocating various forms of anarchism. All three forces would work with each other at times, publicly debate one another, and eventually wage violent struggle against each other. By the end of the decade, the nationalists purged the CCP and subordinated anarchists to consolidate their hold on state power. Dirlik portrays this initial defeat of revolutionary socialism as tragic in that anarchists and communists were unable to work together after their split in the early 1920s. However the real reason a revolutionary democratic China was not realized then was that after their split, the CCP and some anarchist forces opted for a popular front strategy seeking cooperation with the nationalists. It was a losing proposition from the start. Communists and anarchists were at best junior partners, easily played against one another and discarded when the nationalists saw them as too disruptive. The Chinese people would tragically learn this again during the Cultural Revolution some forty years later. They were taught the limits of democracy when granted from above by a seemingly progressive ruling class.

In portraying the public debates between anarchists and early CCP members in the early 1920s, most famously between CCP founder Chen Duxiu and class struggle anarchist Ou Shengbai, Dirlik focuses on questions of organization, coercion, and democracy. Polemics between Marxists and anarchists are still with us today throughout the world. Discussions among anarchists around ideas of organization and its relation to state power in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia were not unique to China. Anarchists with first-hand knowledge of events in Russia including Kropotkin, and especially Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Varlaam Cherkezov were translated and published in China. Many radicals in China initially believed the Russian revolution was anarchist-led by the Bolsheviks. This was to change after reading on-the-ground reports. From these reports a number of anarchists, influenced heavily by Shifu, were able to deduct the state capitalist or collectivist nature of the Bolsheviks through their understanding of Marx and his influence on Lenin. This shaded public debates between anarchists and communists who, initially in both China and the West, sought friendly working relations.

The public debate between Chen Duxiu and Ou Shengbai helped make obvious to young Chinese revolutionary socialists clear distinctions between Marxist-Leninist and anarchist ideologies. Chen, an official at Beijing University and major advocate of cultural anarchism during the “New Culture Movement,” believed anarchists in China too disorganized and unprepared to lead a revolution. Instead, he started to advocate Marxist-Leninist philosophies suggesting a vanguard of professional revolutionaries were needed to lead the country towards socialism through the means of proletarian dictatorship. While Chen generally agreed with some anarchist philosophies, he felt more discipline and centralized organized and a seizure of state power were needed towards an eventually goal of stateless socialism. He critiqued, correctly, the nature of some Chinese anarchists tending towards individualism and culture at the expense of collective class struggle and serious organization. While Shengbai agreed that class struggle was important and that ideas of organization should be addressed, he dismissed the notion that socialism must be obtained through stages including dictatorship of any sort. Even more strongly, anarchist Huang Lingshuang, who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, aptly noted that the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was a veil for rule of intellectuals and bureaucrats in the Communist Party. As Dirlik points out, the rise of Marxist-Leninist ideas in China was to suppress discussion of democracy from below, a crucial element in socialist ideology. This would haunt everyday Chinese folks, as both communists and anarchists would set up new methods of organization and opportunistic partnerships with bourgeoisie nationalists.

A contested space for influence among anarchists and Communists in the 1920s was the burgeoning labor movement. A number of syndicalist unions in major cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou grew in part because of anarchist influence. Many members of Shifu’s circle moved towards labor organizing after his death in 1915. Their success was uneven, organizing among transport workers and other laborers crucial to keeping port cities like Shanghai running. This helped produce a force in society demanding impendence from imperialists and also from the national capitalist classes. But like the Paris group, initially many anarchist-influenced labor unions claimed to be “above politics.” This spelled trouble because the CCP heavily competed for influence among these unions. They were very successful in organizing workers in Shanghai and helped form a commune there. CCP-backed unions followed the party into a popular front with the KMT that lasted from 1925 until April 1927 when many workers and party members were murdered and purged by the nationalists. In their bid for state power, the CCP and their followers were eliminated. Having learned little from this episode, a number of anarcho-syndicalist unions and original members of the Paris circle, including Wu Zhihui, backed a move to join the KMT. They saw an opportunity for patronage, with many mistakenly feeling the purge of Communists meant the KMT was more open to embracing anarchists. At best, the nationalists were friendly to the cultural aspects of popular education and individual freedoms that anarchists advocated. In reality, they were no more generous to anarchists than they were to the CCP, gutting the anarchists’ popular educational initiatives, like the Labor University in Beijing, to shells of themselves. They also shut down many anarchist journals. Whereas the nationalists rightly viewed the CCP as a threat to their hold on state power, the decentralized nature of the anarchist movement made them easy to subordinate and co-opt when necessary. The same can be said of the CCP and Mao Zedong Thought’s relationship to anarchism, where the roots of its distinct ideologies lie.

The most obvious influence of the anarchist legacy in Maoist China, and perhaps its greatest co-optation, was during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao encouraged youth to question elders, authority figures, and even party leaders. This led to much upheaval, acting as a cue for everyday folks to seize control of their lives from the stifling bureaucracy of the CCP. Dirlik notes the development of the Shengwulian federation in Hunan province. Taking their cue from Mao, they declared a people’s commune of China, recalling the best of Chinese anarchism during the days of Shifu’s circle in Shanghai. There were similar stories of groups and individuals striving towards direct democracy, taking the words of Mao to heart and pushing them toward an authentic anarchist re-organization of society through popular councils and committees. However this was not to be, for Mao’s real intention was not to empower everyday folks at the local and national level, but rather to consolidate his power within the CCP against a new generation of Party bureaucrats challenging his leadership. He used populist rhetoric and ordinary people as shock troops to help purge elements in the party disagreeable to him. The Cultural Revolution as cover for an intra-Party battle was seen outside of China among anti-authoritarian leftists as early as 1967 as Cajo Brendel’s “Theses on the Chinese Revolution” attests. This meant trouble for individuals and groups like the Shengwulian federation for when Mao and other party leaders saw their grip on society slipping away, they reigned in “the people” and ended the Cultural Revolution with brutal force. The CCP saw people’s power from below as a real threat to their control of state power through a means of collectivist state capitalism. Like the anarchists and early CCP members who chose the strategy of a popular front with the KMT, everyday folks during the Cultural Revolution who took Mao’s populist rhetoric at face value were dealt a harsh lesson in the limits of democracy when it is offered by progressive rulers from above.

Conclusion

Dirlik penned Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution during the uprising of students and other individuals in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He suggested this revolt showed that people in China and the world over were looking outside of socialism for democracy, hence showing that the “socialist revolution” in China was not living up to its promise. Yet it was long before 1989 that many people in China knew the so-called leaders of revolution in China were not up to the task of democracy, be they workers in Shanghai in 1927 repressed by the Kuomintang, peasants in the 1950s starved to death under the state capitalist policies of the Mao Zedong and the CCP during the “Great Leap Forward”, or the people’s commune of the Shengwulian federation in Hunan province who took Mao’s ideas of a Cultural Revolution to heart, only to be crushed by his army. The histories of anarchism and revolutionary democratic movements from below have a proud history in 20th century China. Yet they continue to be crushed today by a government that, during the time of Mao Zedong, cloaked ruthless state capitalist economic development and political centralization in language, culture, and social forms introduced to China through anarchism and other popular democratic philosophies.

Today that revolutionary veneer is largely lifted as the CCP pursues capitalist policies more akin to the United States and Western Europe. This is not to say revolutionary democratic struggles from below are not on the horizon. Everyday Chinese workers, farmers, and unemployed migrant folks are resisting in their own forms, as individuals or more importantly as groups or communities against economic and social repression. When these various, disparate struggles will connect into a nation-wide movement only time will tell. As Asian, Asian American, and other activists and concerned citizens living here in the United States, it is important we tell the history of anarchist influence in the Chinese revolution. We must be willing to share its victories and defeats and its strengths and weaknesses in philosophy and organization. This will inform our own struggles for democratic and anti-racist communities be they in China, the United States, or elsewhere in the Asian world. Arif Dirlik’s thorough study of Chinese anarchism makes an important contribution to these tasks.