Where Are We Now? (cont’d)
Picking up where my last dispatch left off, this dispatch considers the historical and contextual work that I aim to do at the same time as I embark upon a transition to doing more practical work. This dispatch was originally written in correspondence with Colin Stragar-Rice, in response to remarkable passages that he referenced from Herman L. Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic.
Given where we find ourselves today, much more attention ought to be paid to the making of what bell hooks termed “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” from out of pre-existing “imperialist patriarchies”, because the emergence of the former from out of the latter was not a foregone conclusion but, rather, a much contested process, and the contestations of that process have left their mark on the "successful" result.
As imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has been forced to retreat somewhat by anti-colonial movements, pre-existing regional patterns of imperialist patriarchal organization are resurfacing but transfigured (or is it disfigured?) by centuries of being subordinated to and taking cues from imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. What's more, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, having retreated somewhat, now recognizes that, harkening back to its early days, it can cut deals with and outsource some of its brutalities to these resurgent regional imperialist patriarchies, in a manner very much related to how global corporations in the Imperial cores today outsource the hard work of labor discipline and control to regional corporations in the peripheries that are better able to discipline and control local labor forces.
I find Rita Segato's work incredibly astute in this regard. Segato is sensitive to how it is that imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy emerged from out of pre-existing imperialist patriarchies and how, during its rise to global hegemony, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy cut deals and made compromises with regional imperialist patriarchies, more often than not at the expense of the lower classes and castes internal to these regional imperialist patriarchies and always at the expense of their non-imperialist and non-patriarchal neighbors. In her introduction to The Critique of Coloniality, Segato writes:
Challenging the set of authors who deny the existence of pre-colonial patriarchy, I argue that it would not have been possible to capture pre-colonial positions, marked by sexual difference, within colonial-modern relations of gender—or to distort and reinterpret the former by way of the latter—if a prior patriarchy of some kind had not existed. In my writing, I describe the patriarchy that existed prior to the colonial intervention—again, prior to both overseas administration and the republican state—as a low-intensity or low-impact patriarchy, as opposed to colonial-modern patriarchy, which I perceive as high-intensity in terms of its misogyny and its lethality.
David Graeber and David Wengrow's work in The Dawn of Everything is also profound in this regard, insofar as they do the archaeological speculation upon the ways in which imperialist patriarchal organizational tendencies were kept in check and/or kept at bay in pre-modern societies, inhibiting the formation of organizations that combined what Graeber and Wengrow take to be the three most elementary forms of domination: the mastery of violence, the mastery of information, and the mastery of charisma. Through the works of Segato, Graeber, and Wengrow it becomes more apparent that imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy was so successful because it effectively worked to undermine the ways in which people had previously been able to prevent the intensification of existing imperialist patriarchal organizational tendencies. This is, of course, what Deleuze and Guattari suggest in their writings on "Civilized Men'' (i.e., the new school of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchs), "Barbarians" (i.e., the old school of imperialist patriarchs before the advent of racial capitalist techniques and technologies of power), and "Savages" (i.e., anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal peoples), but Deleuze and Guattari don't do the anthropological deep dive which, to borrow a phrase from Cedric Robinson via Fred Moten, “heightens and deepens the contradictions”, and they refuse to forcefully call out the analytics of raciality and patriarchy as being most pivotal to all of the above. Like most white male radicals, Deleuze and Guattari want to treat capitalism as the most pressing problem, and do not want to dwell upon the analytics of raciality and patriarchy. Segato actually does the anthropological deep dive and, as a result, she finds that she needs to stress the importance of the emergence of a global idea of race and its transfiguration of pre-existing forms of patriarchal sexism.
The crucial thing that we need to attend to, given where we find ourselves today, is that what many regional imperialist patriarchs have learned under the global domination and tutelage of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs is, in essence, how to deploy capitalist and racist techniques and technologies of power in conjunction with patriarchal sexism to undermine attempts to keep them at bay and in check. The rise of a upper-caste privileging Hindu-centric oriented nationalist imperialism in India and a party-bureaucrat privileging Han-centric nationalist imperialism in China are prime examples of the cruel lessons that have been learned, but the most profound of all examples in my mind was Japanese nationalist imperialism. Japanese nationalist imperialism was the most precocious student of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Indeed, to quote Mark Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945, the Japanese conceived of their take on imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy this way:
Although there’s no doubt that many Japanese elites in the mid-nineteenth century recognized the need to adopt select elements of European [racial capitalist] technoscience, they acknowledged this not out of admiration for an assumed European superiority. Rather, Japanese leaders understood that defending themselves in the inner circle and East Asian others in the outer circle against the Euro-American agents of advanced [racial capitalist] technology threatening their sovereignty—gunboat imperialists, drug runners, and rampaging free traders intent on forcefully “opening up” the region that had been the center of world trade for a millennium—meant that they had to inject themselves with certain immunities. The reform leader Fukuzawa Yukichi explicitly recommended in the 1880s that Japan needed to “catch measles” from Euro-America. Given the historical encounter produced by the First Opium War (a confrontation more properly referred to, in critical response to Samuel Huntington’s Eurocentric global mapping of the “West and the Rest,” as the “East and the Beast”), Japanese elites understood that the best means of protecting themselves from the Euro-American beasts and realizing their centuries-long dream of replacing China as the center of the East Asian tribute trade system would be through controlled exposure to its toxicity. This strategy of immunological self-exposure was popularized in the late nineteenth century as wakon yōsai, “Japanese spirituality, Western technology.”
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eager to reverse nagging trade deficits with China (source of the textiles and china that European consumers coveted), Spain and Britain forcefully established peripheries in the New World where they could readily expropriate surpluses [by and through the exploitation of the racialized labor power of enslaved Africans and the Indigenous peoples whom they dispossessed of their lands]. Building on these economic martial art tactics Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital, by the 1830s Britain was finally ready to invade China’s empire from its Indian colony. In their successful campaign to terrorize East Asians into submission to unequal trade, events that James Hevia brilliantly ironizes as “English lessons,” British imperialists imposed a system of treaty ports and colonial cities on the China coast—“Every one of them,” the enraged Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1913, “[was] paid for with streams of blood, with massacre and ruin". In response, Japan’s elites rushed ahead with a program to detain and contain Beastification. Their ultimate goal was to send the white predators home and dethrone the weak Qing rulers of China as the imperial hegemon in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Immunologically, this required a commitment to injecting themselves with pathogens from the Euro-American Beasts, what the mainstream historiography on Japan has preferred to call “modernization.”
What I am trying to get at with all of the above is this: the Modern World System was the product of an untold number of compromises and strategic alliances between old-school imperialist patriarchies and the new Euro-Atlantic school of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy that heavily favored the new school, yes, but that also enabled the old schools to survive and to "modernize" by injecting themselves with racial capitalist pathogens and developing their own racial capitalist techniques and technologies of domination.
Today, the Euro-centric strain of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy born of Europe’s conquests in the New World senses that it is being challenged by the Han-centric strain of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy that has gradually emerged on the East Asian mainland as result of the rapid “modernization” of the People’s Republic of China, which has become an economic and military powerhouse over the course of the past four decades. As with the Japanese, the Han Chinese adoption of racial capitalist techniques and technologies of power was not born out of an admiration for an assumed European superiority but, rather, as a means to outmaneuver the racial capitalist techniques and technologies of power that the Euro-Atlantic powers and Imperial Japan had deployed in their conquests of the East Asian mainland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essay "Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China'', from the first issue of the journal 闯 (Chuǎng), is keen on this point.
After the “opening” of China [during the nineteenth century] demonstrated the Qing empire’s fundamental incoherence, late-imperial nationalists, often educated in the West, picked through the region’s history to construct a narrative of a coherent Chinese nation-state stretching back to ancient times. This project was soon continued by liberals, anarchists and communists alike. Since this indigenous narrative of “China” arose in the midst of a crippled empire, ruled in law by one “foreign” force (the Manchus) and in fact by another (the West), one of the key characteristics of the newly-imagined “Chinese” nation was its foundation in a suppressed Han culture and ethnic identity. Opposition to the Qing first took on the character of a restoration of Han rule, and newly-formed resistance organizations such as secret societies were perceived as partisans of this lost national essence, their slogan: Fan Qing, Fu Ming—Oppose the Qing, Restore the Ming.
But what was the “Ming” these early nationalists sought to restore? In one sense, this demand harkened back to that fundamental indeterminacy—when the die of history was still flying through the air and it seemed that the Great Ming, rather than Western Europe, could have given birth to [racial] capitalism in all its blood and glory. At the same time, “Restore the Ming” was a sort of promise. It meant development along Western lines, the creation of “China” as an entity comparable to (and on equal footing with) those Western nations that had divided the region into a mesh of trade agreements and treaty ports. It was this promise that would come to fruition in the 20th century [under the rule of the Communist Party of China].
In the wake of the non-events of emancipation, decolonization, and desegregation, the task of a radical resistance is not only to do away with the global hegemony of Euro-Atlantic imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy but, more profoundly, it is to counter the fusion of racist and capitalist techniques and technologies of power that turbo-charge imperialist patriarchies and intensify their misogyny and lethality. A radical resistance aims, above all else, to keep the misogyny and lethality of imperialist patriarchal organizational tendencies at bay and/or in check, and this means recognizing that racial capitalism effectively acts as an accelerant for imperialist patriarchal misogyny and lethality. It follows from this that a radical resistance aims to counter racial capitalism wherever it is found, no matter whether it is found in the Euro-Atlantic, or the Asia-Pacific, or the Indian Subcontinent, or the Eurasian heartland, or the African continent, or Oceania.
Any and every form of radical resistance, wherever it finds itself today, must find ways to build upon pre-existing social practices for undermining imperialist patriarchal organizational tendencies, supplementing these with new social practices that specifically undermine the use of racial capitalist techniques and technologies of domination to intensify imperialist patriarchal organizational tendencies. With that aim in mind, it is useful to attend to how it is that imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs cut deals and came to compromises with other imperialist patriarchies and how these other imperialist patriarchies have “modernized” themselves through controlled exposures to the toxicity of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
