5 Mistakes the Left Makes about Imperialism

5 Mistakes the Left Makes About Imperialism

1. The U.S. is not the worst actor on the global stage when it comes to imperialism. That dubious award might go to France, or Belgium in the Congo. The pages of history in fact are bloodier with the actions of European nations in the name of colonizing and imperializing than are the Americans. That is not to say that America has not done hideous war crimes. But the systematic subjugation of foreign populations is a game where the most horrific awards go to his former European monarchies. The worst that was done to the People's of the continent of Africa, was done by Europeans; the worst down to South America was done by Spain; the worst done to the people of Vietnam was by the French. The most horrific imperialist crime in history may well have been the rape and plunder of the Congo by the Belgians. The United States of America plays at imperialism two, but has never mastered the feudal barbarism of European nations in making it as horrific as possible. US imperialism is genteel and suave in comparison. US imperialism is GenTeal and suave, in comparison even to the English. But the correct distinction to be made between US imperialism, which exists, in the European kind is that the US brand of imperialism is the worst corporate form of imperial capture. The genocide of the native Americans, the invasion of Cuba, and slavery, the Philippine war, and Vietnam and Iraq were all done in the name of corporate power and its expansion. The worst crimes of the East India Trading Companies pale in comparison to the corporate colonialism of the Americans. This is a worse form of colonialism, not for the victims, but for the journalists, who can't find the source to blame for it, and for anyone trying to fix it, because it is more hidden, and takes longer to root out. Blameworthiness no longer hides in castles, but in ledgers and receipts, contracts and dividends. It lasts longer because it hides better. This is the real increase in problematic difficulty about the American brand of colonialism: it simply takes longer to shut down. But it's not more bloody, it is just more tricky.
2. Imperialism did not start with modern capitalism. Left activists are always too surprised when even a latest success against the ravages of capitalism does not shut down the ravages of imperialism. Too many people generally only see and care about one dimensionality of a struggle. Imperialism maybe corporate-driven, but it's riding in the saddle of wars and peaces. As long as there are nations with contentions, they will always have the capacity to fight each other. Leaving aside, treaties, and other global governance for now, it is the corporate power that anti-capitalist struggles caution against that causes small irritations between nations in order to exploit their military power into safeguarding or expanding corporate profits. When corporations threatened to "go elsewhere" if they lose some case to activists, and yet we still win, it is to the imperialists system of profit exploitation that they then go to; it is not to stop the activist against capitalist oppression that I say, that their activism also often causes imperialism, but only to clarify why they keep running in the same circular path. The solution is to know history all the way back to the earliest civilizations, and to know that imperialism has always been an issue of national politics, no matter the nation. It has also always been opposed by some who were vindicated by history. But the pattern is to see that the most effective strategy to take imperialism down a peg to where it belongs, is to defend, and not to attack. To defend the dignity of all people, even the enemy is your state wants to create out of some of its own citizens, is the surest-fire way to restore sanity, fair dealing and anti-imperialism to your nation-State. It's not the best way to do this to critique modernity, because then modernity will assume its corporate colonial form, and flee the jurisdiction, to perpetrate modernity in a violent colonial form on another region, where it can escape from the approbation of its fellow citizens. But every imperialism has its corollary closer to the seat of national power, and activists, must at least walk as with two feet and also be anti-imperialist "at home" as it were, and oppose capitalism's corporate excesses at the same time.
3. Imperialism is not about militarism alone, but also about corporate power. In many ways, the antiwar movement is not always strictly anti-imperialist. Japan was an imperial power, and so was Nazi Germany. We too often forget that World War II was an anti-imperialist war. In the case of Japan, particularly, the rape of Nanjing, and its atrocities in east Asia - the bataan death march and on and on - are seared into my cultural memory of trauma. And China was an Allied power fighting against Japan. I am against even nuclear power, but, I can't, for instance, fully blame the US war effort for firebombing Tokyo, for instance. And now that you've got me on the subject of wars, let me state that my general sentiment about them is that they should be fought only to protect the subjects of this nation. To war against imperialist Japan was an absolute necessity. To war against Germany and its allies during their Nazi era was problematic, but also had to be done. Vietnam, though, was problematic, yet had not to be done. The US never should have there inherited the role of the French in Indochina. It was a role that we were unsuited for, and that shouldn't be a shameful thing. It should be looked at as a good thing that we, as a nation are bad at fighting colonial wars, and that shouldn't be a short coming that we tried to "rectify". It is only shameful that we tried to be good at that kind of geopolitics for a short time, no shameful that we failed. We should embrace our loss in the Vietnam war, because that shows that we can't fight when we are not in the right, and when we don't have Justice on our side. I've been to Vietnam, and the truth is that the French were the worst there, because the exploited the country. The Vietnamese had a grand old time kicking us to hell there [...] all this is to say, it gets complicated, and the analysis gets useless, when you conflate anti-imperialism with anti-militarism. [...] the true problem is the confluence of military force and corporate power, because that is when legitimate government abroad gets its power hollowed out, and the profit motive replaces legitimate policy; that is when "war becomes a racket," in the language of Smedley Butler. Imperialism is this: when foreign policy gets replaced by the corporate profit motive, cloaked in military force. Operation Iraqi "Liberation" was this: O.I.L.
4. Nor Western intellectuals, nor the "local" intellectuals of a place under colonization or imperial control are best placed to speak on imperialism. Neither are activists, no matter what street they are on in whatever nation. The reason we have "made it so" in the press is because it is the press itself that is best placed to speak on it, especially the local progressive activist press, and they simply need sources for credibility. But it's the hyper up-to-date literate culture that speaks best about imperialism. Franz Fanon, after all, is a great example of this, and he was a newspaperman. It's a bit of a joke, too, about lawyers being so late to the game that they better catch up. But besides the local progressive press, it's also very weirdly positioned people who in my experience have been best able to speak on imperialism too - people often at a critical nexus of government and corporate power. It reminds me of people ancillary, but connected to US missions in sensitive diplomatic areas abroad, and also to PFC Wintergreen from Catch-22, the telephone operator and mailroom clerk, who constantly tells people at the military base in Italy, that what everyone is really doing there is "T.S. Eliot", then hangs up the phone. Sources on imperialism often hide in the cracks.
5. Most shortly and most importantly, to critique imperialism is to do "opposition research" on other countries. The simple explanation, is that someone might say "what's so good about X country that we might invade that should stop us from invading it?" to which you as an anti-imperialist might have an answer. The sad fact is that countries and their men often go to war just to learn from their opponent. But the thing that shouldn't have to be said, yet bears repeating, is that America is uniquely situated to learn from other countries, and to avoid their perils and pitfalls, and, if you give "America" something to focus on so "they" don't have to take everything in in a war, "they" might learn from other countries as-is, instead of fighting and drilling it out with other countries in order to learn from them.

Bridge Man as evidence of a Politics of Desire

Shanghai's Bridge Man's slogans become even more interesting when you translate the Chinese word 要 as "desire" instead of "want", which is a perfectly valid translation.

Bridge Man's banners on either side of the highway overpass in Shanghai a few weeks ago, before his arrest by the Chinese authorities, read:

"Do not desire the PCR tests; desire to eat.
Do not desire the lockdowns; desire freedom.
Do not desire lies; desire dignity.
Do not desire the cultural revolution; desire structural reform.
Do not desire leaders; desire the ballot.
Do not desire the Cultural Revolution; desire structural reform.
Do not be a serf, be a citizen."

This translation also has the merits of expressing the true desperation behind Bridge Man's actions, while bringing the demands into a true political discourse about the ideology of the Chinese government. Especially poignant is the juxtaposition of "Do not desire the Cultural Revolution; desire structural reform," if that is referring to Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. Those led up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The use of the translation "desire" instead of "want" shows how political desire can become confused with historical facts, as it often is.

Democrats Win

November 9, 2022

Yesterday, for the first time in decades, Democrats flipped the houses of the legislature in Michigan from Republican to Democratic control. It hasn't happened in so long that most people don't have a lot to say about it: we Democrats are starting out "in the sands", due to how long they've been out of power in the Michigan legislature.

Just imagine how much drek has accumulated from decades of calcified, Republican control, and how much of the grossness associated with that is going to be swept away so suddenly, it will be surprising to see just how bad of shape we were in before, that we hardly noticed.

Today is a celebratory day, but it's a celebration colored by the lingering thought that perhaps we've taken on a monumental task of righting a ship so long off course, and we almost can't see where, and when, it lost its bearings.

It's a celebration colored, that is, by the sensation that this is the calm before the storm; the absolute stillness of a race just before the starting gun goes off. The worry even years ago, when retaking the legislature was just a pipe dream, was that the problem might be so big that the Democrats re-taking control might not even be enough to fix it.

Well, the years have gone by, and it's clearly not a pipe dream anymore that Democrats could control both houses of the state legislature, and I think I get why that worry was stated in the years before. 

The Michigan Republican paradox of embracing racial and gender stereotypes, while denying that they were embracing them eventually destroyed their organizational structure from within. But at the same time it made discussions of race and gender issues toxic in the public sphere. The only available space for genuine progress, avoiding the toxicity provoked by this Republican collapse, is class politics, which is what the Democrats have progressively to a greater extent been campaigning on. The coup that was the CHIPS Act, though it has provoked dissent over the procedure of building that high-tech economy, has opened up the space for exactly that kind of progressive, labor-based contention of the Democratic Party thrives on.

The truth in international shipping

I.

A brief analysis of international shipping routes through global geospatial positioning maps constructed in the year 2012 shows several interesting facts in real time. The first and most obvious is that bulk cargo shipments, that would include agricultural products, rarely ship into US ports, but are more commonly shipped out. 2012 was the year of physiocracy-lite, or our first experiment into Foucauldian physiocracy, and so it has relevance to the current system; what you can see is that the export-import regime is well in line with the proposed plan from the physiocrats as conveyed through Foucault. The corollary to this is that what seems to matter as a fact of analysis is, - once you can track the positions of ships themselves, that is -, the ships, and not the ports or the port records. Some of those ships certainly have American crews and many are carrying American produce on their manifests. Certainly, also, the classic bottlenecks in the shipping patterns are still relevant: the strait of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca, and, you can see where cargo ships were still shipping grain through the Black Sea and the Bosporus from Ukrainian ports. But what's important about all this is that you can see what economic regimes are internal, and external, to each region of the world, by the process of elimination. What I mean by this, is pretty much: if you look at dry bulk, which is where grain would often be shipped in/under, and where grain is being predominantly shipped in vs. shipped out, using dry bulk as a proxy to look at grain shipments in 2012, you can see how certain regions have constructed their resource economies, either around agricultural exports or around non-agricultural exports. Agricultural exports pre-dominating over imports would suggest physiocracy, as opposed to mercantilism, per Foucault's analysis; and under predominantly free governments, would suggest freer economies for the lower classes and farmers, and a better State. However, the legacies of imperialism alter the analysis of various ways. For instance, South America's large quantity of exports to Europe would suggest the impact of the legacies of colonialism, and not necessarily strong and free political economy structures there. But there are more quirks of this map that show deep political economy trends. For instance, India imports more dry bulk cargo than it exports; despite the physiocratic element of its liberation struggle, imperialism still has its legacy in that region's political economy. This you can see in the map. Also, the Middle East imports much more dry bulk - this is common sense. Australia, as well, imports much more dry bulk, than it exports, and this points to a deep structural element of its political economy and its extractivist resource regime. The legacy of the British Crown is active there too.

In conclusion, it is impossible to speak conclusively about international shipping without addressing the legacies of imperialism and colonialism; although you can determine the state of political economy as a fact, it is as a fact agnostic to history. There is no political economy without politics. And without knowledge of imperialist histories, or rather history of imperialism told by the subaltern and oppressed, there is no geopolitics. The value of value-neutral artifacts of knowledge is explicit only in context, but the nature of the artifacts themselves, is only clear through a first level of logical discernment. Without discernment and knowledge of the meta-historical narrative, there is no such thing as intellect.

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II. 

The legacies of imperialism and colonialism have also had counterintuitive effects on the agricultural export regime of various formally colonized regions; for instance, Africa, with some of the richest soils in the world, barely exports any dry bulk that might include agricultural commodities, and this can be attributed to the ravages of colonialism on the region. History is an important overlay on top of the ordinary perception of such a map. Unfortunately, history in its truest facts is the most problematic subject in education to the wealthy, conservative, and bad-faith actors that exert control over our political economy. So, in conclusion, it requires a discerning mind and a knowledge of the histories of imperialism to do any good-faith, global economic analysis at all. This is why most economic analysis is a puppet tool of the wealthy elite, and yet economics when properly done is of the utmost importance to a true understanding of society, and global human history, still - even though most of it is bunk. The fieldwork of responsible economics should be history. The methodological innovation of this sort of reasoning, from data to conclusions of fact, and then to history, is to go from an effect to the necessary corollary to its cause. 

Is A causes Y, Y is present, and B is a necessary corollary to A, then is Y is present, B must be true. But the historical layer of analysis consists of a dynamic chronological analysis. If a certain failed policy causes a certain state of being such that it takes time to dig oneself out of it, then, if that time and effort has not elapsed, the state of being caused by the policy is still the best explanation of any affect seen. To continue the logical method above, if E causes a state of F, that requires X amount of time and effort to remove, then, if E has occurred, the state of F must be assumed, and if X amount has not elapsed, then, even if Y is present, then E and not A is the best explanation of it, B can't be assumed to be true, and E is the best causal explanation. 

The reasoning, that A -> Y; A -> B; Y -> B, is always true, but the historical analysis of E -> F; -F -> X; -X -> F -> E, takes primacy over the original syllogism, is always foremost when its conditions are met, and is, therefore, in those cases the best explanation. Global analysis of imperialism, that is, issues of war and peace, always supersede simple economic analysis. To put this to a concrete example, South America exports more dry bulk than it imports-dry bulk (including agricultural commodities) therefore physiocracy could be assumed its guiding philosophy; however, a state of imperialism and colonialism has occurred there, therefore, a state of current global subalternity must be assumed, until enough time and effort, toward decolonization has elapsed; since that amount hasn't elapsed, it must be assumed that imperialism and global subalternity is a better explanation for its resource flows until decolonization has been significantly achieved.

The map can be seen at shipmap.org.

The days of Bridge Man

October 25, 2022

The days of Bridge Man

Shanghai residents were confronted with a challenge leveled at the Chinese leader Xi Jingping just days before the Communist Party Congress began recently. The horrendous state of the Chinese government apparatus is regularly challenged by irate citizens. But for decades, the dominant ideology of the opposition has been Tank Man, no? All of the quasi-underground "protest" social movements have been sort of sedentary, and have gotten their legitimacy out of a sort of lethargic mood of "meh." Tank Man certainly had a giant set of balls, that should be noted, and he should be honored for his bravery. And yet, the ways that the actual state of a democratic Chinese underground has changed, deserve to be observed, and the liberation spirit deserves an updated appraisal. 

Bridge Man happened pretty recently, and consisted of a protest, where one man put up a smoke signal of sorts of black smoke, and hung a banner on a bridge overpass in Shanghai. The banner assailed several practices of Xi Jingping's Communist government, and demanded alternatives. It's again likely that he, like Tank Man, will not be seen again… But his identity is known: he is an author of several liberation, pro-democracy essays. He's not well-known exactly as a writer; but his head is at exactly where the zeitgeist is at in the pro-democracy underground - if that still even exists, that is. 

What does Bridge Man symbolize for where we are going? There's a bifurcation of purposes after a major protest, as in this in China, is identified as such by the state. The first obvious path is that people feel the liberty to demand similar liberties. Although the Chinese authorities have begun to make people register to buy paint and banner cloth now, there have still been solidarity protests, using lipstick as paint, and saying only the structure of the original Bridge Man's banner: "We don't want Y; we want Z", etc. The second obvious bifurcated path is about how the state will begin to act on the global stage as a result of this new idea. Observe that China's main tactical approach on the geopolitical stage has been to obstruct, a la Tank Man, since Tank Man. Any country is the same; observe the U.S. use of sanctions since Occupy Wall Street. And so there's going to be a sea change in the way that China is approaching geopolitical strategy if they can get away with it. The world should be prepared for a more literate, probably propaganda-based approach to Chinese strategy on the grand global stage. 

So, the very skeptical will point out that this is also likely to be a pivot the state apparatus has already made, in response to more large-scale events. But this is not truly an either-or decision about the cause. At the very least, the two problematics are mutually imbricated, for example, that people's protests have the concrete effect of giving a stamp of approval to certain government-level strategies…

So, the days of Bridge Man are upon us, and we should prepare accordingly.

“Spin”

 October 24, 2022

Spin

When I found the book Spin in an airport bookshop, I had no idea at first it would be one of the top 10 books that changed my life. It looked like a relatively mundane sci-fi award winner, so much like another and another I had seen before, that I almost didn't get it. But I did, and I read it over and over again, and my life and my thinking has never been the same.

Some books make ordinary life pale in comparison to them. This book made ordinary ideas pale in comparison to it, such that this book could qualify as a scientific man's Bible to come to grips with the era of science at the end of the space exploration, moon landing, age, and the beginning of the climate science age.

The book contains within it all the tension between science and religion that came along with this age of scientific being. It contains also the whirlwind of intellectual frenzy that accompanies those on the cusp of two ages of human progressive endeavor. And it includes a very enlightening commentary on the nature of our treatment of those that are solutions to our problems, and an intriguing idea about the nature of some of the knowledge about humankind that could emerge from this era of human scientific striving. In short this book is more in content than just another sci-fi novel.

The opening premise of Spin is the one that fascinated theoretical physicists for years: time travel; but time travel, that follows the rules of physics. One day as the protagonists are teenagers, the night sky of stars suddenly disappears. The Earth has been wrapped in a sort of envelope blocking out the night sky. The classic example of the time travel that follows the rules of actual physics is as follows: consider a bubble floating on the surface of your coffee as you stir it; if the bubble is in the middle of your drink, it will not move as fast as the coffee around the edges. And so it could be with time itself in certain cases. And the hypothetical posed at the start of this novel is: what if this happened, to the whole Earth; if time on Earth passed more slowly than outside it in space? This is a type of hypothetical that could please a hard-boiled type of scientific mind: not time travel exactly, but a time discontinuity.

One of the three protagonists, Jason, spends his adult life from that moment on grappling with the scientific implications of no longer being able to use space and space exploration in the same geopolitical and scientific way that it once was able to be used before the time anomaly known as the Spin was erected around Earth. We get to see the tender appraisal of a scientific genius tortured into greatness by the interesting times that he lives in and the harsh idolizing relationship between him and his father. It is an unsparing portrait of a man driven wild by the captive need of the state and the endless possibilities of a new era in science. 

But the hard emotional, psychological, and biological core of the story is the relation between Jason's sister, and their childhood friend Tyler, who idolizes and loves Jason's twin sister Diane. It brings to the foreground several of the book's core themes, which linger on in the mind even longer than Jason's eventual heroic sacrifice. Although never requiting Tyler's love as children, there is a strong emotional pull of history that nothing "the times" can do will keep Tyler and Dianne apart for a long period. Like that feeling that keeps calling you back to some events and people in your past, Tyler and Diane exercise a certain gravitational pull on each other, such that they constantly return into each other's company. Diane, unlike Jason, is drawn to the Millenarian aspect of the new scientific age that has suddenly been forced on people through the Spin, and joins a cult. Those who are paying close attention to the dire needs of the climate right now know that it is still often hard to discern, for example, Native American and indigenous rhetorics from actual avenues of political or ecological action through indigenous knowledge. Millenarianism is part of the fashion cycle lately. But it's the combination of the back-to-the-land millenarianism in the tired old Biblical millenarianism that infects Diane, and she becomes involved in a problem on one of these communes related to mad cow disease. The book properly treats this like it is no joke, because mad cow disease could be like a zero-day attack on the entire American agricultural system, should it actually happen here. But it troublingly notes that an attitude of Millenarianism, whether that is from climate change or another existential threat, could make us lose sight of the importance of forestalling dangers like these. It is not only the actions of another of Tyler's girlfriends, who suicides by pills on the day of a launch of a mission to escape Earth and the Spin by rocket ship, that reasoned policy should prevent, but also the slow surrender away from the rational scientific approaches that govern our daily lives. Millenarianism can take many forms. But its most damaging aspect is this erosion of rational norms.

It is through Jason that Tyler manages to rescue Diane from this dangerous Eco-La-La of a Millenarianist cult, that has many resemblances to contemporary Eco-millenarianism; but Jason, whose health was already fragile, has become worn out above his years trying to solve the problem of the Spin, and he invites Tyler to be his personal physician. While working for Jason, Tyler meets a wonderful man from Mars that may have the key to saving the human race. But these "Martians" are descended from humans themselves, due to another trick of the Spin's time discontinuity: if time passed faster outside the Spin, then in one human lifetime we humans could terraform Mars. And so on. Over time, what returns from Mars is one man with a medicine to extend human life. It unlocks in "adulthood it beyond adulthood", a "Fourth Age" so to speak, and has the potential, only, to produce humans who have the wisdom to see a way out of the predicament they are in. Because the sun, in this Soin paradigm, will eventually expand to destroy the Earth as it dies the death of all other stars. This man descended from human settlers of Mars comes as a diplomat, walking the very fine line between educating people, and not pausing alarm, because in time, Mars, populated by humans, has gotten its own Spin around it. The central aphoristic notion to the story is the one about boiling a frog in water: if you turn the heat up ever so slowly, it will not notice in time to hop out of the pot. And the slow-motion crisis of the Spin has very slowly started to boil this water. The human from Mars knows this, knows the danger, but goes public anyway, and he is yet eventually killed by a person with a random grievance. The deeper human message of this episode in the books narrative is that human beings still would rather kill a presumed Messiah figure for not being a Messiah, even if he explicitly says he is not one. Like the frog escaping away from a wooden spoon put in to rescue it from the slowly boiling pot, you might also say… 

For Jason, human populated Mars now having its own Spin is just more evidence of a larger mystery, because at this point, it has become for Jason almost a one-on-one war between him and the Spin. Hardly acknowledging the death of the man from Mars, he embarks on a further scientific quest that represents what may be the zenith of human space exploration in this contemporary age: populating the known universe with self sufficient, replicating, von Neumann machines in an attempt to find the origin of the Spin "out there". But to do so, he madly betrays all his contractual obligations with the US government and makes his own brain the receptacle for all the information beamed back by this network of colonizing machines, using Martian biotechnology brought over from the humans settled there. In this "glorious betrayal" for the sake of scientific knowledge, he also gives the Martian drug to induce the Fourth Age to Tyler and Diane, and this induces the grace by which they escape, as does humanity its eventual dire fate. He also gives them his record, of the secret he has found: that the von Neumann machines are of the same type as what has caused the Spin, which means, that there must have been an extraterrestrial intelligence out there, either long past or still extant; that the Spin itself was proof of; and thus perhaps it is the fate of any intelligent species in the universe to eventually create such a Network, that could even one day create its own spin. As Tyler rests in the state of misery, pain and graphomania, ruminating on this and reminiscences of his life with Jason and Diane, who is now with him and administering to him the Martian drug, this thought creates quite an impression: a memory of Jason flying downhill on a runaway broken bicycle as a teenager, too large in frame even then for the broken machine…

What are we to make of this novel? Perhaps that our intellect and our ideas are more important in the end than our biological personhood. But also, perhaps that new scientific paradigms scatter the threads of our previous being throughout the known universe before turning us to our new reality. Perhaps more.

What is the sacrosanct?

What is the sacrosanct?

What is sanctity? In a certain sense I have done civil disobedience when the sanctity of my political integrity was at stake. But what is sanctity? In a sense sanctity is that which does not have to be proved, and which, therefore, invites disproof. But the value of the disproof of the sacrosanct is in what else the disproof can accomplish. Voltaire, for example, was known as a critic of the Church, but remembered for his contribution to human freedom and enlightenment. The value of sanctity is that the sacrosanct does not have to inspire offense when attacked; it can defend itself when attacked. And this, is why civil disobedience has to be done, because every man and woman of you is responsible for defending what is sacrosanct to you. No one can defend for you what is sacrosanct to you. And, honest-to-God, this is where the American and Tocquevillian value of "self-interest properly understood", comes to the foreground.