Archive for category Ideas

Crimethinc has issued its report on its 2009 convergence, and addressed the recent controversy. An excerpt:

CrimethInc. vs. CrimethInc., APOC vs. APOC

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize about the events at the convergence is that it was not a rupture between CrimethInc. and Anarchist People of Color (APOC), but rather twin ruptures within both of them. CrimethInc. and APOC are not membership groups; it is impossible for any single action to represent either. Some of the most active participants in CrimethInc. projects are anarchist people of color, just as there are white people involved who need to do more to combat privilege and white supremacy. Also, although the disruption was calculated to create the appearance of polarization, more people of color opposed and resisted it than participated.

The false opposition of “CrimethInc. vs. APOC” serves quite a few questionable agendas. It’s useful for critics who would love to discredit CrimethInc. by any means necessary and are willing to brush off the participation of people of color in order to do so. It’s useful for white people who don’t want to have to question their own privilege and internalized racism—associating APOC and all questions about white privilege with the controversial actions of a few is all too convenient. It’s useful to all who, out of wrongheaded opposition to anarchist organizing and “identity politics,” would like to dismiss CrimethInc. and APOC alike. It’s useful to those who, like at least some of the disrupters, appear to have given up on white anarchists ever being good comrades to people of color and are casting about for corroborating evidence.

Worst of all, this false opposition is useful to fascists and nationalists, not to mention other hostile parties. The “Bay Area National Anarchists,” for example—one of several fascist organizations attempting to appropriate anarchist rhetoric and aesthetics in order to seduce new recruits—enthusiastically posted the disruptors’ statement on their website, lauding the “separatist” action as proof that there are “irreconcilable differences between tribal and racial groups.” We can be sure that some of the discussion of the incident on anarchist websites has included posts from fascists or government agents intent on exacerbating the situation. Likewise, we know from the events of the past few years that infiltrators are present at anarchist events, and we cannot rule out that they might take advantage of conflicts like this—though it is counterproductive to speculate further without evidence.

The point is that conflicts in the anarchist community frequently include hostile voices from outside it, voices which may not be easy to identify. This makes it especially important to remain level-headed in the midst of them, acting according to our best judgment and refusing to let others persuade or provoke us into behavior that does not reflect our values. It is also crucial that we not assume that the words or actions of a few represent everyone we interpret as similar to them.

For the record, we believe the APOC network is invaluable to the anarchist movement. Everyone benefits from people of color having autonomous spaces to organize and strategize. We challenge all white anarchists to respect the autonomy of people of color and to do more to combat white supremacy in all its forms. We also respect the perspective of anarchists of color who have given up on white people ever being good comrades; this is a coherent position, though it can’t usefully be our position, as people of a range of ethnicities participate in our networks and projects. Our only “irreconcilable differences” are with fascists—and all others who legitimize domination, including those who defend the disruption.

Read the full statement here.

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By Adam Hanieh

The current global economic crisis has all the earmarks of an epoch-defining event. Mainstream economists – not usually known for their exaggerated language – now openly employ phrases like ’systemic meltdown’ and ‘peering into the abyss.’ On October 29, for example, Martin Wolf, one of the top financial commentators of the Financial Times, warned that the crisis portends “mass bankruptcy,” “soaring unemployment” and a “catastrophe” that threatens “the legitimacy of the open market economy itself… the danger remains huge and time is short.”

There is little doubt that this crisis is already having a devastating impact on heavily-indebted American households. But one of the striking characteristics of analysis to date – by both the left and the mainstream media – is the almost exclusive focus on the wealthy countries of North America, Europe and East Asia. From foreclosures in California to the bankruptcy of Iceland, the impact of financial collapse is rarely examined beyond the advanced capitalist core.

The pattern of capitalist crisis over the last fifty years should alert us to the dangers of this approach. Throughout its history, capitalism has functioned through geographical displacement of crisis – attempting to offload the worst impacts onto those outside the core. This article presents a short survey of what this crisis might mean for the Global South.

World trade drops
This crisis hits a world economy that – for the first time in history – is truly global. Of course exports and the control of raw materials have always been important to capitalism. But up until the 1970s most capitalist production was organized nationally. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s both production and consumption began to be organized at the international scale. Today, all markets are dominated by a handful of large companies operating internationally through interconnected chains of production, sub-contracting and marketing. Almost every product we consume has involved the labour of thousands of people scattered across the globe – from the production of raw material inputs, research and development (R&D), assembly, transport, marketing, and financing. At one level this interconnectedness of production expresses the fact that human beings have become one social organism. At the same time, it continually runs up against a system organized for the pursuit of individual, private profit.

This interconnectedness has taken a very particular form over the last couple of decades. The world market has been structured around the consumption of the American (and, to a lesser extent, European) consumer. Goods produced in low-wage production zones such as China and India – using raw materials mostly sourced from other countries in the South – are exported to the U.S. where they ended up in the ever expanding homes of an overly-indebted consumer. Control of this global chain of production and consumption rests in the hands of large U.S., European and Japanese conglomerates.

This structure helped to fracture and roll-back national development projects across the globe. Coupled with the debt crisis of the 1980s, export-oriented models of development were imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions on most countries in the South. Many of the elites of these countries bought into this development model as they gained ownership stakes in newly privatized companies and access to markets in the North.

The ever-expanding consumption of the U.S. market was predicated on a massive rise in indebtedness. U.S. consumers were encouraged to take on vast levels of debt (through credit cards, mortgages, ‘zero-down’ financing, etc) in order to maintain the consumption levels that underpinned global demand. The dollars that enabled this growth in debt came from financial instruments that were purchased by Asian central banks and others around the world. These institutions lent dollars back to the U.S. where they were channeled to consumers through banks and other mechanisms.

The U.S. real estate market was just one of the financial bubbles that permitted this treadmill of increasing indebtedness to continue. People could continually refinance their mortgages as real estate prices went up. But with the collapse of this bubble global world demand is suddenly drying up. Because of the interconnectedness of world trade, this will have a very severe impact on every country across the globe, particularly in the South.

One measure of this is shown by a relatively obscure economic indicator, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI). The BDI measures the cost of long-distance shipping for commodities such as coal, iron ore and steel. From June – November 2008, the BDI fell by 92%, with rental rates for large cargo ships dropping from $234,000 a day to $7,340. This massive drop reflects two factors: the reduction in world demand for raw materials and other commodities, and the inability of shippers to have their payments guaranteed by banks because of the credit crisis.

Falling commodity prices also demonstrate this drop-off in world trade. Copper prices, for example, have fallen 23 per cent in the past two months. Chinese consumption of the metal, critical to much industrial production, has fallen by more than half this year. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, stated on November 5 that its global output would decline by more than 30 percent. The World Bank (which has consistently underestimated the severity of the current downturn) is now predicting global trade volumes to shrink for the first time since 1982.

Social dislocation
This drop in world trade will have a particularly devastating impact on those countries that have adopted ‘export-oriented’ models of development. This model was heavily promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and most economists over the last couple of decades. As global demand shrinks, countries reliant on exports will be faced with collapse of their core industries and potential mass unemployment. This will place further pressure on wages as new labour reserves augment already large levels of unemployment.

Standard and Chartered estimate, for example, that Chinese exports could tumble to “zero or even negative growth” in 2009. JP Morgan Chase is predicting that Chinese exports will fall 5.7 percent for every one percent drop in global economic growth. This is not just a matter of getting by on smaller levels of still positive growth. China needs to create 17 million jobs a year in order to deal with the large numbers of farmers moving from the countryside to urban areas. This means that the country must maintain high rates of growth. Even if growth drops from 11-12% annually to 8% the country faces potentially huge social dislocation. Already, workers in China are protesting in the millions as their factories close and owners abscond with unpaid wages.

A collapse in world trade is not the only potentially devastating threat this crisis presents to the global periphery. Like the 1997 Asian Crisis, the rapid withdrawal of foreign funds from stock markets and other investments in the South could cause the meltdown of currencies and the collapse of industries already reeling from slowdowns in trade. A quick survey of a few countries demonstrates the deadly mix of capital outflows, high inflation and drops in export earnings:

In Pakistan, foreign-currency reserves have dropped more than 74 percent in the past year to about $4.3-billion (U.S.). The country is teetering on the edge of total collapse and urgently requires $6-billion in order to pay for imports and service its existing debt. The dire situation of foreign outflows led the German foreign minister to state on 28 October that the “world has just six days to save Pakistan” (at the time of writing it looks like Pakistan will get this money in the form of loans from the IMF and/or countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council).

Sri Lanka has lost nearly 25% of its foreign reserves since the beginning of August as foreign investors repatriate their dollar holdings from the country. Nearly 50 percent of Sri Lanka’s textile and garments exports (accounting for some 43 percent of total foreign exchange earnings) went to the U.S. in 2007, while another 45 percent went to the EU. These exports will likely be decimated by a generalized collapse in demand. The weakening of the Sri Lankan rupee over the last few years has contributed to a 20% increase in inflation, with high food prices hitting the poorest most heavily.

India has seen its foreign exchange reserves drop by 17% since March 2008. Over $51-billion (U.S.) left India during the third week of October, the largest fall in eight years. The Indian textile industry, which makes up the second largest component of the country’s labour force after agriculture, exports 70% of its product to U.S. and European markets. It is expected that textile and garment orders will decline by at least 25% over winter and mass lay-offs have already begun. On October 29, the Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industries predicted that companies in seven key industries (steel, cement, finance, construction, real estate, aviation, and information technology) would need to cut 25% of their workforce. This at a time when the country struggles with an immense gap between rich and poor. The wealth of the richest 53 people in India is equivalent to 31 percent of the country’s GDP, yet according to the World Bank 42 percent of the population lives below the official poverty line of $1.25 a day.

These patterns are repeated across the globe. Countries including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea as well as the poorer countries of Eastern and Southern Europe are faced with collapsing growth rates, capital flight, and declines in the value of their currency. In many cases, these problems have been exacerbated due to a proliferation of low-interest loans taken by individuals and companies that were denominated in foreign currency (such as Swiss Francs, Euros, and Dollars). These loans initially offered a better rate of interest than the domestic currency, but, as local currencies have dropped in value, the amount of money required to be repaid has increased dramatically. Business Week estimates that borrowers in so-called ‘emerging markets’ owe some $4.7-trillion (U.S.) in foreign-denominated debt, up 38% over the past two years. This is the reassertion of a debt crisis from the 1980s that never really went away, but only partially subsided.

The IMF returns
This unfolding social crisis has returned the IMF to center stage. Typically, the IMF lends to those countries facing potential collapse and, in return, demands the fulfillment of stringent economic conditions. The scale of borrowing is already immense: Iceland ($2.4-billion), Ukraine ($16.5-billion), and Hungary ($15.7-billion) have been extended loans with Pakistan, Serbia, Belarus, and Turkey likely candidates in the near future.

The conditions that come with this latest round of IMF lending have been particularly opaque. The policies that Ukraine is expected to pass, for example, are not yet known despite the fact the country has essentially agreed to take a $16.5-billion loan from the IMF. Hungary has agreed to cuts in welfare spending, a freeze in salaries and canceling bonuses for public sector workers yet the final details have not been made public. Iceland was required to raise interest rates to 18% with the economy predicted to contract by 10% and inflation reaching 20%.

We can certainly expect that the conditions attached to loans in the poorer countries in the Global South will be much more stringent than those imposed on these European countries. There is little doubt that these countries will face massive job losses, intense pressure to privatize public resources, and slashing of state spending on welfare, education and health in the name of ‘balanced budgets.’ Whether these attacks on the social fabric are successful, however, will ultimately depend on the level of resistance they face.

Authoritarian state
On 11 October, a meeting of progressive economists in Caracas, Venezuela, issued a statement warning that the dynamic of this crisis “encourages new rounds of capital concentration and, if the people do not firmly oppose this, it is becoming perilously likely that restructuring will occur simply to save privileged sectors.” This is an important point to understand. Capitalist crisis doesn’t automatically lead to the end of capitalism. Without effective resistance and struggle, the crisis will eventually be resolved at the expense of working people – particularly those in the South.

This could be one of the most serious crises that capitalism has faced in living memory. But we should not be fooled into thinking that the system will somehow be reformed or its contradictions solved through peaceful and orderly means. The most likely immediate outcome is a hardened, more authoritarian state that seeks to restore profitability through ratcheting up repression and forcing people to accept the loss of jobs, housing and any kind of social support. In the South, this will inevitably mean more war and military repression.

If this is not prevented then the system will utilize this crisis to restructure and continue business as usual. This is why resistance – both at home and abroad – will be the single most important determinant to how this eventually plays out. In Latin America, for example, attempts to restrict capital flight, place key economic sectors under popular control, and establish alternative currency and trade arrangements are important initiatives that point to the necessity of solutions beyond capitalism. In the Middle East, popular resistance to the political and economic control of the region has undoubtedly checked the extension of U.S. power.

Any displacement of crisis onto the South means playing different groups of people against one another. For this reason, the ideological corollary of war and military repression abroad is likely an increasingly virulent racism in the North – directed at immigrants, people of color and indigenous populations. This means that for activists in North America the question of global solidarity and resistance to racism must be placed as a central priority of any effective fightback. Any attempt to turn inwards, or dismiss international solidarity as less important in this phase will be disastrous for all working people – across the globe. •

Adam Hanieh can be contacted at Autonomy & Solidarity

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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.

Via jalanjournal

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