Euro-Amerikan violence and Asian nationalism in the United $tates

MAOIST.WS

2009 February

"It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man."(1)

Vincent Chin and "Gran Torino"

Mistaken for a Japanese persyn, the Chinese man Vincent Chin was beaten and killed in Detroit by autoworkers who had a complaint about the Japanese auto industry. The killers got away with a slap on the wrist because they were white-settler-nation labor aristocrats and Chin was yellow; the judge in the case said that the killers were good workers, not criminals.

Today, most discussion of Vincent Chin does not lead to Asian nationalism, but to imperialist-country integrationism. MIWS did not explicitly deal with Vincent Chin in its review of the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie "Gran Torino." One could, though, read into "Gran Torino" an apology on behalf of the white labor aristocracy for Vincent Chin's death. In "Gran Torino," a retired white Detroit autoworker with a complaint about Japanese imports dies on behalf of one Hmong persyn. In the context of this movie is a real-world economic downturn.

Giving rise to intense self-justification and reflecting deeply entrenched tendencies, the history of whites' manipulating and committing violence against Asians inside and outside the United $tates is not something that can be swept under the rug. Nice thoughts, good deed for individuals, and conscience-cleansing actions, won't end imperialism. In Christian talk, the Euro-Amerikan nation is going to have to repent collectively in reform school after suffering defeat in a war.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin passed about two years ago. On that occasion, one could find people saying that Chin's killers "should" have demonstrated against the U.$. government for the recession instead of taking it out on Chin. The fact is, though, that the Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy has not overthrown imperialism in decades and decades of chances and after many recessions, nor even brought about reforms ending either recessions or multiple-point unemployment rates. If the labor aristocracy were to accomplish the latter, it would be through fascism.

Anti-imperialism in the United $tates would benefit Asians nations among other Third World nations. The Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy's interaction with Asian nationalism has overwhelmingly been to promote it -- by exploiting workers in Asian Third World countries and repressing Asians.

MIWS has suggested a distinction between homeland Asian nationalism in the United $tates, and Asian-descended nationalism with a focus on Asian nations or a pan-Asian nation within U.$. borders. These two are not mutually exclusive, but it is useful to think about Euro-Amerikan violence in the context of different Asian nationalisms. The facts of the connection between Vincent Chin's murder and the pan-Asian movement in the United $tates have been discussed elsewhere. This writer would like to comment on the relationship between Euro-Amerikan anti-Asian violence within the United $tates and Chinese homeland nationalism manifested both inside and outside the United $tates. "Homeland" refers to actions seen as benefiting the nation back at home (from migrants' perspective) and its sojourners in the United $tates still a part of that nation. Asian nationalism is not confined to inside Asian country borders or Asian-descended/pan-Asian movements in non-Asian countries.

Anti-Chinese violence in the United $tates and nationalism in China

Nationalist symbol Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) has acquired an image in the West as the anti-monarchist "George Washington of China" while the broader anti-imperialist and united front aspects of his work are obscured. Today, supposed communists in the First World who have not properly absorbed the lessons of the Chinese revolution are reluctant to speak positively of Sun Zhongshan or, beyond what is necessary to discuss feudalism and maintain a facade of anti-imperialism, any positive role for the national bourgeoisie and oppressed nation nationalism. The explicit or underlying reason is that Amerikans, supposedly, are more advanced than the national bourgeoisie, or the utopian idea that differences between nations fundamentally don't matter -- an idea connected to Euro-Amerikan-worker identity politics and white pride. In an article that has been available for twenty-five years, Linda Pomerantz raises that even Chinese compradors and potential compradors, facilitating the exploitation of Chinese workers inside and outside China, played a progressive role in conflict with Euro-Amerikan workers.(2) Specifically, Pomerantz argues that the Chinese bourgeoisie sought the overthrow of the Qing government partly because the Chinese bourgeoisie was seeking a government that could effectively make demands on the United $tates to stop anti-Chinese violence in the United $tates.

"Hong Kong stood at the center of this network. Established as a British colony in 1843, Hong Kong by the 1850s began to develop a powerful Chinese merchant community. Compradors, import-export merchants, opium dealers and labor contractors flourished, partly as the number of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Americas expanded. From Singapore to Peru, an overseas commerce network developed throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. Events affecting Chinese merchants in one part of the network impinged upon the interests of their business partners and associates in other parts of the network.

"This international linkage is of great importance in analyzing the political situation of wealthy Chinese in the United States. Their demand for protection against the violence of the anti-Chinese movement brought them into the mainstream of the emerging nationalist movement in China in the early twentieth century. In order to adequately protect its subjects in the United States, the Qing Court had to secure reciprocity and the full restoration of its sovereignty in its international relations with the imperialist world. The inability to fulfill these demands ultimately led many propertied Chinese in the United States to join the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing in order to establish a powerful Chinese state capable of asserting equality in its foreign relations." (p. 2)

Pomerantz touches on a familiar theme of violence and its contribution to the development of nationalism. Anti-Chinese violence gave rise to Chinese unity within the United $tates and specifically nationalist sentiments. Pomerantz implicitly raises in addition to this that what happened in the United $tates as a result of anti-Chinese violence may have been less important than what happened in China. Pomerantz's article is a reminder that rhetoric against Latin American migrants in the twenty-first century is hardly different from the rhetoric against Chinese migrants in the nineteenth century, the main difference being the addition of some political correctness where migrants are slurred less blatantly in the mainstream media, but where descriptions of migrants remain the same. So, there are some interesting contrasts. In particular, unlike today's integrationist social-democrats with an ambiguous attitude toward closed borders and anti-migrant repression, the Chinese merchants did not focus on demanding integration of Chinese people with Amerikans or citizenship with all the rights and privileges of Amerikans. Nor did they fight side by side with whites to end capitalism in the United $tates (not that such would have been realistic on the part of either the Chinese compradors/merchants or white lynch mobs). Instead, the Chinese merchants demanded something seemingly less controversial. If Amerikans can be in China without being lynched, Chinese should be able to do the same thing in the United $tates. Conversely, if the lynching of overseas Chinese is permitted in the United $tates, there is less basis to expect better treatment of powerful Amerikans in China trying to control Chinese politics and industry -- something that is relevant to the Boxer Rebellion, for example.

The presence of Amerikans in China in the late nineteenth century was unlike the presence of non-settler mostly-toiling Chinese in the United $tates and was colonialist. In this context, one could expect violent resistance to Amerikans regardless of what happened to Chinese in the United $tates. On an abstract level, though, inequality in the protection of foreigners itself indicates a colonial, as opposed to a neo-colonial, stage. If Amerikans are able to run around in China protected by the Chinese government while Chinese in the United $tates are lynched, there are going to be Amerikan diplomats and businesspeople in China, but fewer Chinese diplomats and businesspeople in the United $tates, if any. Fulfilling a role that might otherwise fall to private security and private armies belonging to Amerikans, the Chinese government may be controlled by Amerikans. Linda Pomerantz addresses protection in the sense of having rights in a court room, being able to testify against whites, not just policing whites to prevent violence.

The Qing dynasty is gone, but in 2009 there are nations lacking diplomatic representation in the United $tates, nations that are overrun by Amerikan diplomats and businesspeople, Amerikan or allied spies and/or soldiers, and spies for the United $tates pretending to be businesspeople, humanitarians, internationalist revolutionaries, journalists, researchers, and tourists. At the same time, China has become a neo-colony, but has substantial diplomatic representation in the United $tates. The questions arise: what are the differences between colonialism and neo-colonialism in regard to the protection of foreigners, what are the relative merits of neo-colonialism. Exploitation and the extraction of super-profit still go on in neo-colonialism, but the bourgeoisie retains some political independence, and there is mutual protection for diplomats and businesspeople. The extraction of super-profit can take place without direct political or even economic control, via unequal exchange, under neo-colonialism. Under neo-colonialism, imperialism does not present itself as an invasive force as clearly as under colonialism; this is associated with both good and bad things, but the transition between colonialism and neo-colonialism is progress in the struggle against imperialism (though it should not be mistaken for socialist revolution).

There are seemingly fine distinctions among comprador interests that require consideration. For example, many compradors participated in the 1905-1906 Chinese anti-Amerikan boycott, precipitated by exclusion laws in the United $tates that were arguably more politically impactful in China than in the United $tates; boycotts are unsustainable for compradors tied to the boycotted country in the long run, and many opposed the anti-American boycott from the start. On an abstract level, though, to have a country exporting goods, but not importing goods (the situation existing in China today to degrees) implies exploitation. Neo-colonial comprador interests can both coincide and contradict. The Chinese anti-Amerikan boycott had an anti-colonial thrust, but the alternative to importation of Amerikan goods for Chinese consumption could have been greater plundering of China. On the U.$. side, Chinese gravitated toward neo-colonial bourgeois internationalism, but closed borders contribute to and perpetuate the economic foundation of neo-colonialism. Colonial and neo-colonial comprador interests can contradict. Compradors that originally arose in the context of colonialism and were affected by unequal relations between China and the United $tates in pursuing their exploiter interests in the United $tates may have come into conflict with compradors back in China more closely tied to treaty ports and the Open Door Policy of the United $tates. The Open Door Policy itself contained colonial and (in comparison with previous arrangements) incipient neo-colonial aspects. It would be wrong to think "dialectics" means looking at only those contradictions supposedly favoring alliances with Euro-Amerikans.

Among some of the oppressed and in parts of the so-called communist movement, Sun Zhongshan has a neo-colonial image. Much of this is due to how Sun is treated by compradors in Hong Kong and China, and wealthy Chinese in the First World, and because of an association with copying the West and Sun's requests to the West and Japan for diplomatic recognition and assistance. Some of the neo-colonial image is deserved. In terms of his ideas, Sun's path did not include the dictatorship of the proletariat. In his views of imperialism, Sun emphasized the political over the economic, which suggests neo-colonialism where a nation can have so-called sovereignty and control over its policies via democracy, but be exploited by other nations. Even today's left-wing bourgeois internationalists, non-Marxist and non-communist, would criticize some of Sun's ideas. Many of the Chinese merchants in the United $tates were in a comprador position, and Sun Zhongshan turned to the merchants in the United $tates to raise funds for the revolution in China. The overthrow of the Qing government was not just a bourgeois, peasant revolution, but also to some extent a comprador revolution. Unlike the few Amerikans who supported the overthrow of the Qing government, Chinese people in the United $tates, whose demands were mediated by Chinese merchants who feared the ruination of commerce, as a whole came behind some kind of revolutionary nationalism or another for China, even if in some cases just constitutional monarchism. Not focusing on Sun Zhongshan, Linda Pomerantz sums up the interests involved:

"In looking at the development of the Chinese bourgeoisie in the United States, it seems clear that the emergence of nationalist ideas flowed naturally out of specific interests. The wealthy Chinese merchants in the United States had a vested interest in the development of a large and prosperous community of Chinese workers throughout the western states. The anti-Chinese movement jeopardized this goal, first by the creation of an atmosphere of instability resulting from mob violence, then by the imposition of local and state laws harming Chinese personal and commercial interests, and finally by the passage of federal laws that reduced the size of the Chinese population in the United States and hampered the merchants in their conduct of international trade." (p. 27)

"As a rising propertied group, Chinese merchants in the United States and their allies among the merchants of Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai, and other overseas Chinese communities, held attitudes which we could normally label conservative: fears of radical change, anarchy, violence, and seizure of property. In other circumstances, the vested interest in property and the maintenance of the status quo that characterized the wealthy Chinese of America would lend itself to anti-revolutionary sentiments and acts; yet, in the context of the United States and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these same qualities led the bourgeoisie to a revolutionary nationalist critique." (p. 28)

"One reason for the wealthy merchants' militance may have been pressure from below, that is, from workers and small merchants. The inability of the Six Companies to effectively resist mob violence in the mid-1880s had contributed to a serious rise of the tong (tang) as competitors for leadership of the Chinese community. In a very real sense, the wealthy merchants' leadership was on the line and the Supreme Court's decision against them was a serious blow. Ultimately, the Six Companies were forced to incorporate the tong into the leadership structure of the San Francisco Chinese community." (p. 18)

In individualist talk, during the War of Resistance Against Japan Mao Zedong was willing to unite with people whom he knew represented comprador and landlord interests connected to different imperialist countries, if they were prepared to fight the main enemy, Japanese imperialism. So, it should not be too disturbing to contemplate Sun Zhongshan as an agent of neo-colonial comprador interests who needed to be supported against forces who were holding China back at an even earlier stage. Even if Sun had been to some degree comprador, the chance for would-be neo-colonial compradors to have U.$. masters didn't really come about until after Sun died, though various forces in China had individual Amerikan sponsors betting on the outcome of conflicts. The United $tates' attitude toward Sun went from viewing Sun as a joke to confronting Sun's cause with gunboats and diplomatic isolation. When Sun died, colonialism was still the main form of imperialism in China, not neo-colonialism. Though compradors in the bourgeois camp opposed to Sun's may had neo-colonial aspirations, they were linked to monarchical restorationists, warlords, and opportunists, or were themselves flabby types, and objectively supported the old colonialism.

MIWS is not here to sing the praises of Third World comprador-merchants. There were import/export merchants in China who played a counterrevolutionary role after the Qing government overthrow, not to mention the early role of compradors in the colonization and foreign oppression of China; Sun Zhongshan famously suppressed the Merchants' Volunteer Corps after uniting with the Communists. And, the lynching of Chinese-born Vincent Chin did not precipitate a revolution anywhere, though it supposedly causes Asians today to rethink doing business in Detroit. However, it is important to think about the true history of how progress happens in connection to violence and contradictions in the United $tates, the parasitic country of the Euro-Amerikan settler nation. While white labor unions led the lynching of Chinese in the United $tates, the violence, part of a larger anti-Chinese movement in the United $tates, gave rise to nationalism among Chinese in the United $tates and through the Chinese in the United $tates contributed to the development of nationalism in China. Linda Pomerantz relates:

"These feelings of frustration [with problems involving Chinese unemployed as a result of the anti-Chinese movement] may have helped to feed a growing nationalistic sense among Chinese in America. In their statements and activities of the middle and late 1870s, the San Francisco Chinese merchants seem to have developed a nationalist consciousness well in advance of the vast majority of their countrymen. Implicit in the demand for government protection was the modern idea that a nation-state should provide its nationals abroad protection from abuse and seek redress of grievances in cases of injury or property damage. This was an aspect of national sovereignty, or guoquan, the exercise of which was vital to the survival of any nation. Reciprocity was also linked to the issue of sovereignty. Imperialist nations, including the United States, demanded protection for their nationals in China and had wrested enormous concessions and indemnities for damages sustained by missionaries, businessmen and diplomats. If China was to be an equal member of the family of nations, reciprocity was essential." (pp. 12-13)

The Chinese response was nationalist. The positive long-run aftermath in the United $tates of the anti-Chinese violence was at best quasi integration with political correctness. Because of a situation produced by imperialism resulting in migration and retarded industrialization in China, compradors came into conflict with the white working class and mediated a revolutionary struggle. The white working class was counterrevolutionary, and Chinese in the United $tates including compradors became nationalist and helped precipitate revolution in China. The Chinese had appealed to the U.$. federal government to stop the white working class lynch mob violence. When that failed, and then the Chinese turned to the Qing government to have pressure put on the federal government and that didn't work, the Chinese looked to reforming and then to overthrowing the Qing government. The white working class opposed Chinese merchants in the United $tates and set themselves against the merchants' counterparts and compradors in China not because the white working class was anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist, but because it was racist and white-nationalist opposed to bourgeois internationalism. Both Chinese businesspeople, big and small, and Chinese workers offended the white workers. Exploitation of Chinese workers was fine so long as it was out of sight and did not appear to affect the employment and wages of white workers. The white working class did have complaints about monopoly, but the nature of these was petty-bourgeois.

Neither is the point to sing the praises of the imperialists to whom the Chinese merchants appealed. The Chinese merchants and Chinese workers sought to make use of contradictions and differences within the Euro-Amerikan nation. In international relations, i.e., where struggles between nations are concerned, there has not been any reason to necessarily favor the working class of the white settler nation versus its imperialists. The Euro-Amerikan nation, as distinct from early Irish, Polish, etc., white migrants who had recently migrated, has been a nation of oppressors.

Even first-generation non-English white migrants craving the privileges of the settler nation workers were involved in anti-Chinese violence in the Western United States, but there is a class basis to U.$. white workers' actions toward oppressed nation people, not just racial ideology.

Contrasts between nationalist Chinese sojourners and contemporary Third World traitors

According to Linda Pomerantz, Chinese merchants in the United $tates who became responsible for the Chinese community as a whole there were concerned with unemployment. They had to take care of unemployed Chinese who gathered in the cities because of anti-Chinese violence in the country. This added to the merchants' problems, and they sought to discourage migration to the United $tates on the Chinese side, while pursuing protection of Chinese already in the United $tates and opposing the movement to drive out the Chinese. The merchants' willingness to accept immigration limits suggests a parallel with Latinos in the United $tates today supporting immigration limits, but the U.$. Chinese leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not primarily seeking integration of assimilated Chinese people, and their response to anti-Chinese violence was nationalist and increasingly militant, even though the Chinese Big Companies (which Pomerantz focuses on) helped organize the exploitation of Chinese. Latinos' support for immigration limits has more to do with assimilation and imperialist-country-privilege integration than Aztlán, Mexican or other Latin American nationalism.

Merchant leaders of Chinese in the United $tates were also concerned with prostitution. In this context, it is necessary to draw a contrast with contemporary oppressed nation traitors seeking to stir up Amerikans as some kind of feminist vehicle. The Chinese merchants did not go to the white public and say, "You know, the Chinese really are depraved and perverted, and lazy and decadent. So, please put the heat on the Qing government with your warships, but let us rid ourselves of footbinding. Nobody will call our bluff. Otherwise, we will forever be stuck in the past."(3) Sun Zhongshan would have called such nonsense treasonous, and he would have been correct because it would have been divisive on multiple levels, objectively anti-nationalist, and capitulationist, even though the Qing government was feudal and conciliatory toward colonial imperialism. The context of the anti-Chinese movement in the United $tates was that the United $tates was trying to dominate China, already had interests in China that it was attempting to defend and expand, and was prepared to carry out war to secure those interests. Nationalist consciousness in China was struggling to develop in relation to this.

Today, organizations calling themselves communist are spreading capitulationist and collaborationist ideas with regard to the United $tates, brazenly in the name of proletarian-led people's war, while consciously revising Marxism. They seek to rile up Amerikans over the veil in Muslim Asian oppressed nations, with similar sexualizing undertones as with footbinding. There is a difference here between what happened in China and with Chinese in the United $tates, and what is happening with oppressed nation middle-class people coming into contact with the United $tates through travel or media and then spreading counterrevolutionary ideas globally. With the Chinese, it was a situation where nationalist resistance to the United $tates (among other imperialist countries) in China was contributing to the anti-Chinese movement in the United $tates, and anti-Chinese violence in the United $tates and unequal relations were in turn contributing to Chinese nationalism in the United $tates, which then spread to China and resonated with nationalism already there. By contrast, the central thrust of what some traitors purporting to represent oppressed nations, and their Amerikan sponsors utilizing identity politics, are doing is to raise contrasts between the ideals of some culturally conservative people in Muslim nations and the ideals of liberal Democrats. This is in harmony with State Department and Voice of America efforts singling out certain Third World countries. The idealist excuse given is that both the U.$. rulers and the oppressed nation rulers are oppressors, by which the traitors and their sponsors mean that it is okay to unite with Amerikan oppressors called "workers" and "the middle class," and Democratic millionaires, but never fine to really unite with Third World bourgeoisie unless those bourgeoisie support liberal Democrats and/or are opposed to prudish taboos and sexual repression.

In China, the opponents of the Qing dynasty and foreigners had various religious and superstitious ideas that would be ridiculed in the West and which figured into the work of Christian missionaries in China. Today, New Age culture, the pseudo-atheism of people with petty and stylistic complaints about the religious, and lifestyle Liberalism, fulfill a function similar to Christianity's in contrasts with the East. In China, the anti-Christian movement overlapped with the anti-imperialist movement. That's how things turned out, because Christian missionaries came with Western imperialism. Today, U.$. imperialism projects a partly-atheist image. The atheism appears as superficial and consequently (and because of accompanying consumerism and individualism) hedonistic. Consequently, much Third World nationalism is reactively religious, and it is religious also because of international differences in religiosity connected to social and economic differences caused by imperialism and which the Third World nationalism seeks to even out.

Anti-Asian activity in the contemporary United $tates, and Asian nationalism

Amerikan labor unions are not organizing mass lynchings of Asian nationals in the United $tates in 2009, at least not the massacres that took place in the late nineteenth century. The anti-Asian violence is against Asians outside the United $tates and in the form of deportations and imprisonment of poor and migrant Asians. Despite media stories about Muslim migrants' experiences in the United $tates being a source of "extremism," the response to racist incidents against Asians is more likely to be integrationist, or political correctness befitting neo-colonial commerce and diplomacy, not Asian nationalism.

In the absence of a dire issue affecting a whole Asian national group in the United $tates, other things come to define the response of Asian nation sojourners to their experiences in the United $tates. One of these is the obscured origin of Amerikan living standards and wealth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white living standards were more clearly, visibly, based on oppressed nation labor. When Chinese, First Nation and Mexican people had built the infrastructure of the economy on the West Coast, for example, either for a fraction of white wages (or barter income) or as slaves in the case of First Nation people, the origin of the living standards of whites who moved onto the West Coast and killed or drove the oppressed nation people out could more easily be called into question. Today, the basis of Amerikan living standards -- the exploitation of oppressed nations workers located mainly in the Third World -- is hidden beneath various mechanisms of transfer. Consequently, Third World sojourners coming upon the high degree of prosperity in the United $tates seek to explain it in terms of the culture and political system of that country. The result is neo-colonialism when the sojourners return home. The extent of their "revolutionary" nationalism is to overthrow their governments with the help of the U.$. military and replace them with governments serving U.$. imperialism.

Even so-called atheism becomes associated with so-called development. Those attributing economic backwardness to religion perpetuate the myth of high First World productivity and contribute to the situation where Third World sojourners end up going back home with State Department and White House revolutionary nationalism instead of anti-imperialist revolutionary nationalism. Existing racial integration in the United $tates also has the potential to impact the political development of Third World sojourners.

Labor aristocracy apologists looking at anti-Chinese violence, among other white worker violence against oppressed nations, attribute the violence to racism dividing workers in the United $tates and getting in the way of what would have been working class solidarity -- that is, to false consciousness. Emphasizing the ideological and an abstract worker identity as if international economic relations and international contradictions didn't exist, anything becomes possible to explain as false consciousness. The same apologists for the labor aristocracy attack Chinese merchants for holding back Chinese workers and therefore the anti-capitalist movement of the entire working class in the United $tates. The notion that Chinese and white workers should have got along strangely recapitulates the politics prevailing in the anti-Chinese movement, that the right of settler white workers to occupy an economy built by oppressed nation workers and slaves is sacrosanct. Chinese-white unity would have meant driving out Mexicans (as Mexican-white unity took the form of driving out Chinese and participating in lynch mob violence). To support the idea that today's white workers in the United $tates are willing to get behind integration, it is necessary to mythologize and whitewash the white working class of the past. As in the past, the cooperation of various national working classes with the Euro-Amerikan working class is based on oppression, but the absence of immediate large-scale violent conflict in the United $tates masks the ongoing violent basis of Amerikan living standards and gives sojourners the impression than racial integration in the economic sphere in the United $tates reflects multicultural harmony in the production of Amerikan living standards, rather than oppression of nations inside and outside the United $tates.

In connection to ideas about the origin of U.$. living standards, radically minded Third World sojourners are prone to mistaken about politics in the United $tates, including of course that the Euro-Amerikan is a revolutionary working class, but also that the Euro-Amerikan working class is not reflected in the government. To reuse the historical Chinese example, the big Chinese merchants in the United $tates in charge of the Chinese migrant workers were themselves ruthless exploiters, but the Chinese workers put pressure of the merchants to advance their particular interests. It would be wrong to say that the merchants only acted for themselves in the context of the international struggle. Likewise and more so, Euro-Amerikan workers put pressure on their leaders, for example, to punish migrants, or exclude Asian-descended workers as with the Japanese internment. Once one understands the limits of parliamentarianism for the seizure of power and the proletariat's exercising dictatorship, it is necessary to go beyond that critique and look at how the exploiter labor aristocracy does exercise power through democracy in the First World and opposes the interests of the oppressed in other countries. There is a difference between the First World and the Third World in their class structures, and though bourgeois democracy in the Third World also has limitations there is a corresponding difference between First World leadership and Third World leadership.

In addition to dissatisfaction with politicians and executives of corporations in which Amerikans of diverse classes are invested, to the observer there seems to be a disconnect between rhetoric and reality in regard to liberal democracy and civic culture. Many Amerikans' abstention from voting and civic participation, or from going to church to sleep in before watching the football game, should not be taken as a sign of deep political protest. The Amerikan exploiters have various whiny and pathetic complaints, but they allow themselves to be "ruled" by choice; in the long run, their government works for them.

From any scientific communist standpoint, it is clear that Third World sojourners should not be returning home with the notion that Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton are some kind of revolutionary internationalist feminist ally. However, it is a struggle to arrive at genuine revolutionary nationalism and anti-Amerikanism. Unfortunately, war and the threat thereof remain the biggest inspirations for Asian revolutionary nationalism, particularly among Asian-descended people in the First World, for whom it is challenge just to get to the "nationalism" part. To reuse the Chinese example once again, the Chinese bourgeoisie became more receptive to Marxism after Western intransigence and interference in China continued after 1911. The May Fourth Movement renewed a nationalism that had been waning. With the United $tates' military threats against China into the 1920s, it appeared that Western science and Liberalism weren't all they were cracked up to be, Western science being particular relevant to ideas about economic development. In the present day, it may take an invasion of one's nation by the United $tates to realize that Amerikan living standards are based on more than productive forces in the United $tates built by hard work and ingenuity of Amerikans.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were wars with the United $tates in multiple East Asia and Southeast Asia countries constituting a basis for homeland nationalism and pan-Asian nationalism in the United $tates. Then, near the end of the Asian-nationalist upsurge in the United $tates, Euro-Amerikan workers reflecting widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in the white labor aristocracy carried out an anti-Japanese lynching of a Chinese man. This is somewhat ironic, because while lynching of a yellow persyn gave a boost to pan-Asianism in the United $tates, this writer believes that Vincent Chin's murder marks a turning point of sorts toward integrationism, rather than Asian nationalism. Looking before the 1960s, obviously there is the World War II internment of Japanese and Japanese-descended people in the United $tates, the civil-rights-oriented mythologizing of which has contributed to the Asians-as-model-minority idea (paradoxically) and to integrationism.

What would give rise to a major pan-Asian movement in the United $tates in the 21st century is almost too terrible to contemplate. If the collectively condoned anti-Japanese lynching of a Chinese persyn didn't do it (and it could have in other circumstances), what will? Aggression against Middle East countries is instructive. It is notable that some Euro-Amerikan-dominated so-called-revolutionary organizations' response to this has basically been to dull the nationalism of the oppressed with manipulative collaborationist psychological warfare and rhetoric that would have made the "socialist" backers of the anti-Chinese movement proud. Instead of the clarity needed on the principal contradiction and the international united front against U.$. imperialism,(4) there is confusion supporting capitulation to imperialism in general and collaboration with U.$. imperialism in particular.

Germany, which had the Holocaust, ended up being occupied. White people in the United $tates were punished for slavery in the Civil War, or at least that is how the war is mythologized. Euro-Amerika apparently was not punished enough for Japanese internment, though, with Amerikans' continuing to defend it. In addition, Euro-Amerika was not sufficiently punished for its war against the Third World in East Asia and Southeast Asia, and in fact the war is ongoing. Thus, anti-Asian racism remains deep in the psyche of Amerikans. Nothing has happened to make Amerikans think in regard to anti-Asianism, "That right there, that's just wrong." Consequently, subterranean shifts take place beneath a facade of political correctness, manifesting in anti-Asian outbursts and a stream of ancient rhetoric about "cheap labor" from the authoritarian Asian culture. Euro-Amerika hasn't really dealt with its anti-Asian racism; it has just been hidden as Asians have been incorporated into Liberalism, integration, and (though to a less extent than Blacks and Latinos) political correctness.

Informal racism against yellow people in the United $tates is rampant. Regretfully, the response of Asian and Asian-descended intellectuals has overwhelmingly been integrationist or postmodern-apathetic, not nationalist. Renewed hysteria about China's monetary policy as a source of trouble for Amerikans in the present economic downturn, and intensified competitive attitudes toward Asian products and yellow workers inside and outside the United $tates, have the potential to change this quantitatively. Impeding the development of Third World Asian and Asian-descended nationalism will be a hoard of motley labor aristocracy and petty-bourgeois apologists emphasizing contradictions with governments and corporations, pointing to mortgage and credit card difficulties and the unemployment of professionals as proof of class polarization in Amerika, and encouraging cooperation with the so-called working and middle classes of the United $tates.

The basic reality involved in cooperating with a Euro-Amerikan class has not changed over a century. Uniting with the Euro-Amerikan working class as a class (not just some individuals who started thinking more seriously about Marx or world politics in their retirement years), outside an inter-imperialist context such as World War II, means cutting colonial or neo-colonial deals. Whether it is Mexican-white unity, Black-white unity, Filipino-white unity, Chinese-white unity, or even First Nation-white unity, one group or another is excluded to advance oppressor interests. At the same time, despite the exhortations of academics and poets, and while there are nationalist and proto-nationalist organizations of the oppressed in the United $tates, there is nothing structurally fusing together "people of color" in the United $tates in a movement (except the need for joint action against military recruiting and the settler anti-migrant police in some cases), and so struggle within the exploiter-majority United $tates is at a low level right now where in the party-building context communists have to send out a steady scientific anti-Amerikan message while the development of the nationalism of the internal semi-colonies and Asian-descended people lurches forward and backward -- a point that MIWS will return to in the future. The revolutionary consequences of anti-Asianism in the United $tates occur mostly outside U.$. borders at the present time; within those borders, nothing much politically is going on in general.

Notes

1. Austin E. Anson, quoted in Saturday Evening Post, 1942 May 9.

"We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over."

2. Linda Pomerantz, "The Chinese Bourgeoisie and the Anti-Chinese Movement in the United States, 1850-1905," Amerasia, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1-34.

3. In Sakai's book on the white so-called proletariat in the United $tates, J. Sakai touches on the sexual aspect of the anti-Chinese movement.

"The settler propaganda kept emphasizing how pure, honest Europeans had no choice but "defend" themselves against the dark plots of the Chinese. Wanting to seize ("annex") Chinese jobs and small businesses, European immigrants kept shouting that they were only "defending" themselves against the vicious Chinese who were trying to steal the white man's jobs! And in case any European worker had second thoughts about the coming lynch mob, a constant ideological bombardment surrounded him by trade union and "socialist" leaders, bourgeois journalists, university professors and religious figures, politicians of all parties, and so on. Having decided to "annex" the fruits of the Chinese development of the Northwest, the usual settler propaganda about "defending" themselves was put forth.

"Nor was Euro-Amerikan racial-sexual hate propaganda neglected, just as bizarre and perverted as it is about Afrikans. In 1876, for example, the New York Times published an alleged true interview with the Chinese operator of a local opium den. The story has the reporter asking the "Chinaman" about the "handsome but squalidly dressed young white girl" he sees in the opium den. The "Chinaman" allegedly answers: "Oh, hard time in New York. Young girl hungry. Plenty come here. Chinaman always have something to eat, and he like young white girl. He! He!" A woman's magazine warned their readers to never leave little white girls alone with the Chinese servants. The settler public was solemnly alerted that the Chinese plot was to steal white workers' jobs and thus force the starving wives to become their concubines. The most telling sign of the decision to destroy the Chinese community was the settler realization that these Chinese looked just like Afrikans in "women's garments"!

"The ten years after the passage of the Exclusion Act saw the successful annexation of the Chinese economy on the West Coast. Tacoma and Seattle forced out their entire Chinese populations at gunpoint. In 1885 the infamous Rock Springs, Wyoming massacre took place, where over 20 Chinese miners were killed by a storm of rifle-fire as European miners enforced their take-over of all mining. Similar events happened all over the West. In 1886 some 35 California towns reported that they had totally eliminated their Chinese populations." (pp. 35-36)

J. Sakai, Settlers : The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 3rd edition (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).

4. Ellen Barry, "Kyrgyz Parliament votes to close U.S. base," 2009 February 19, http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/19/asia/20kstan.php

"The Parliament of Kyrgyzstan voted on Thursday to terminate the American military's eight-year lease on an air base outside the capital, Bishkek, complicating President Barack Obama's plans to deploy as many as 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan over the next two years."