Anti-Asian Violence: What It Is and What it Means
Workers’ kids growing up in the U.S. could not avoid hearing the anti-intellectual motto “If you’re so smart how come you ain’t rich!” By the time you were in high school you knew Henry Ford said “History is bunk” and outside of the academic setting your whole socialisation told you to believe it. Consequently there is “nativism” loose in the land again and it is embraced by even ethnic layers of the petty-bourgeoisie who do not know that its origins are in an Anglo-Saxon racist movement that began in the first half of the 19th century and was trying to exclude them! These were the “Know Nothings” and they wielded influence in U.S. politics in a big way.
Worst thing about this history is the comeback they’ve made in recent years and how this hate movement has been summoned by the last chief executive. Trump repeatedly fingered COVID as “the China virus” and this rubbish took in an alarming array of sucker varieties. Anti-Asian violence soared, and even a Democrat honcho in the Black Lives Matter movement has been charged with two anti-Chinese hate crimes! Beast type physical crimes against elderly Asian-Americans thought to be Chinese have been followed by mass murder, such as in the Atlanta massage parlors and the Sikhs killed at the Fedex in Indianapolis. The combination of the Constabulary model police organization, where a crime has to happen before they respond, plus the history of the police culture as the racist successors to the slave patrols, makes it certain that the state will offer Asian Americans the protections of verbiage, thoughts and prayers.
Until recently, when Asian-American and Pacific Islander workers have self-organized nationwide as a force in the AFL-CIO, these Sisters and Brothers have been as invisible as their U.S. history. This invisibility fostered the negative stereotype, a similar rotten caricature of sneaky moneygrubbers to the one that was foisted by the racists on Jewish refugees a century ago, Just at that time, in 1924, the racist Ku Klux Klan demonstrated en masse in Washington, D.C. and demonstrated their strategic power among the two parties with the passage of virulently racist immigration laws drafted by white power eugenicists. These internationally embarrassing laws were only repealed in 1965, yet Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised them and sought their reinstatement. Now the Biden administration has stalled opening the U.S. immigration doors, contrary to campaign promises, claiming it hasn’t got the personnel to process the refugees! There’s no question which class the bourgeois state listens to!
The White Supremacists, Know Nothings, and Ku Kluxers believe they ‘got here first’ even though the Native American population was already here, as most people and all of anthropology will tell you. Usually lost in this social acknowledgement is the fact that Native Americans came across the land bridge where the Bering Strait is today, i.e., from Mongolia. That’s Asia, and part of Mongolia is in China. DNA, some of that scientific mumbo jumbo they teach people not to believe in the schools where Nativists teach “creationism,”—DNA tests and tracing prove the first Americans’ ancestry is Mongol. Here millenia before the Jameston, Virginia cannibals or the arguably deported from England Puritans who landed in Massachusetts by mistake.
Nativists sometimes say “of course we’re not talking about THEM,” as if the subject was birds or apes, both of which they explain as here 6000 years ago when the world began. The bible tells them so. So we are told.
Reality has a different tale to tell. Some 70-75 years before Columbus, a Chinese Emperor sent great fleets of the then-world’s largest ocean-going vessels on voyages of exploration, hoping to establish trade with other civilizations. We know from the records the seafarers kept and from the Imperial official accounts that Chinese fleets voyaged to East Africa and to what is today California. These voyages and the expenses of the operations were later abandoned as an unprofitable extravagance by the successor Emperor. Whether yokels believe this or not, the Spanish were indisputably here before any Anglo-Saxons, and so were African slaves! There is also reason to believe Morroccans sailed to the Caribbean and Mexico centuries before there was a United Kingdom, as evidenced by the Thor Heyerdahl “Ra” voyage of 1969.
But none of this history means anything to most of the modern know-nothings. Some of them staked everything on the January 6th insurrection, which sought the doublethink result of asserting that the 2020 election was stolen even as they sought to toss all elections and install Trump for life. The inherent and cultivated fascist character of this would-be putsch is still lost on many of the flag wavers. This reminds us how Huey Long famously said that “when fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the American flag.” Some have been taken for a ride. But contrary to the propaganda of professional intersectionals of the media and academe, these were not white workers on January 6th, but the muddleheaded petty-bourgeoisie. Bosses. Cops. Ex-military officers, small-time politicians hoping to score in the eyes of top Trumpsters, and all of them terrified of what they imagine is to become the multi-racial society where wage labor workers unite and take power away from the 1/10th percent plutocrats they idolize.
We of the CWG know that as well as history and the present there is also a future and it will either be socialism or barbarism. Anti-Asian violence, like all other racist violence is a foretaste of that barbarism. The capitalist class in more and more countries ponders the possibilities of expropriating more profits from the laboring masses via fascist dictatorships. They do so because their capitalist system guarantees them nothing and delivers ever-more-frequent crises and ever-shallower rebound recoveries. This is due to the operation of a law of capitalism discovered by Karl Marx known as the law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. When you hear us talk about the “TRPF,” stop us and remind us everybody hasn’t heard of it.
The CWG knows fascism cannot be allowed to become a mass movement, because the principle aim of fascism is the destruction of the workers’ movement. Each variety of racist violence serves the fascists’ “strategy of tension,” where participants may not understand their role in the big lie but the leaderships; objectives of rendering the bourgeois-democratic state compromised as to intentions and more and more toothless as the police majority are won over completely to the fascist ranks. Already the rightist pole in Congress tried to assemble an “America First Caucus” dedicated to defense of Anglo-Saxon traditions. This was only scuttled after Republican House leadership criticized the idea as a “nativist dog whistle,” meaning perhaps too extreme for general electoral use. But the signal was sent to the rightist lumpen groups as well as the Chamber of Commerce forces backing the many racist vote suppression measures in the states. They are represented. The workers and the most oppressed are not. The open organizing of fascism may slow down a bit as Biden tries a ‘bipartisan’ approach to keep illusions in Congress alive, and Trump’s influence on the GOP remains. It also reflects the success of Trump in selling the message that antifa are terrorists and the labor movement is yet to unite beyond fragmented struggles. But don’t be fooled by the bosses’ maneuvers! We need to build the independent workers party and a union-based anti-fascist movement.
Against the haters today we see BLM/Asian united solidarity actions of youth, workers and oppressed people remembering George Floyd and committing to stand together against anti-Asian anti-Black police and racist violence. Such actions need the active support of the entire labor movement. Asians have united and rallied with the multi-racial Black Lives Matter protests, recognizing shared interests in opposing all forms of racism.
On Sunday, April 18th, there was an Asian-Black Solidarity rally held at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, This comes near the end of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the racist cop who killed George Floyd and in the wake of the outrage over the killing of Daunte Wright by the cops. The Twin Cities have been turned into a militarized zone with mass deployment of cops and the National Guard trying to contain the current BLM protests as well as the expected outrage over the coming Chauvin verdict. The ruling class and their politicians know that the oppressed Black and Brown communities, Asian-Americans, immigrants and workers have been pushed to the wall and that they may not be able to easily contain us. All the political maneuverings of last summer that helped derail the George Floyd protests and channel the anger into the elections, promising defunding police departments and community policing and civilian review boards have evaporated with the Biden administration promising to hire more police. The Democratic Party-controlled cities like Minneapolis, whose City Councils said they would abolish the police last summer have predictably gone back on their word. This will continue until a fighting workers’ labor party controls these cities.
We call for Workers’ Defense Guard militias, based in Union halls and the organizations of the oppressed, an armed and disciplined formation trained by worker veterans of the armed forces. It is puerile now and suicidal going forward to expect to be defended from fascism by “law enforcement.” But this is what the Business Unionism leadership we have today is selling! Likewise, liberalism has made disarmament of the masses its be-all, making a saint of their ‘guns are the problem’ church out of Marjorie Davis High survivor Hogg, the son not at all incidentally of an FBI Agent. Workers with guns are a theoretically possible limitation on the Capitalist class’ freedom of action. Liberals want to scare you with the crazed gunmen in our social midst without a thought to what alienation and insecurities set their murders in motion. We cut through all this false consciousness that benefits only the exploiter class. Our neighborhoods and those of our neighbors need worker patrols to guard our social class and prevent violence visited on any of us by revenge seekers, by the fascists or the bosses’ gunmen of any kind.
Unlike the Trump era, the ostensibly more sophisticated Biden Democrats are pumping up and reinforcing U.S. Alliances in preparation for proxy wars and even all-out wars with the China/Russia alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Apart from historical materialist dialecticians like the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency, of which we of the CWG Communist Workers Group U.S. are a section, few on the left even grant that such conflicts are possible today because of the profundity of the trade links involved. But nation-states frequently see conquest as the best model of trade, i.e., “all for us” and subjugation for others, especially when economic crisis returns with vigor and how to both control and employ the working class requires a special, exactly nationalist and racist policy. That would be nothing new for our ruling class. They are long overdue for retirement!
Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
