Toulouse-Antonin Roy reviews Mark Driscoll, The Whites are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection

Mark Driscoll’s The Whites are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection offers a fresh new look at treaty port imperialism in 19th century East Asia. Moving away from conventional accounts that highlight debates over “free trade” and imperialist politics, Driscoll examines Euro-American predation in light of what he calls “Climate Caucasianism,” a term he uses to describe the carbon-spewing industries and hyper-exploitation of non-western lands introduced as a result of the British capture of Treaty Ports following the Opium Wars. Driscoll argues that this “CO2lonialism” (one of Driscoll’s many creative neologisms) was a crucial moment in accelerating the current trend towards global warming and other ecological catastrophes.

The overarching focus of The Whites are Enemies of Heaven is the “ruthless terrorism” of arms, human, and drug trafficking which treaty port officials, missionaries, and their agents inflicted on the Japanese and Chinese, along with their local responses. Using a mixture of warfare, lawfare, and “rawfare” – a term used to refer to the capitalist consumption of all living and nonliving things – Driscoll shows how racialized and gendered violence allowed Euro-Americans to weaken local populations and forcibly pry their way into East Asia’s untapped markets.

Resistance to “CO2lonialism” is the core focus of The Whites are the Enemies of Heaven. Throughout the book, Driscoll contrasts treaty port officials and their “extra-active” epistemology of instrumental reason or belief in the “mastery” of nature with the “intra-active” ways of anti-imperial radicals, whose forms of resistance were tied to local ecologies, weather systems, deities, and other non-human entities. From radical samurai and Autonomy & People’s Rights (APR) activists who led the struggles against the decaying Tokugawa state or later Meiji oligarchs, to the Gelaohui rebel brotherhood in Sichuan Province who opposed the activities of white missionaries and their Qing enablers, Driscoll brings together a diverse cast of “decolonial” movements from the region to show how an incipient “Asian undercommons” challenged regimes of capitalist extraction (xi). In the process Driscoll revisits foundational historical narratives of “anti-western” politics in China and Japan, showing us how opposition to capitalist modernization in the latter contexts should be seen more as “eco-protection” movements akin to today’s Indigenous “water protectors” rather than simple “xenophobic” backlash against foreigners.

In the introduction Driscoll examines the Sino-British Opium War, or what he calls “the first war for drugs.” Thanks to their capture of Bengal’s poppy fields, the British East India Company transformed opium into a lucrative commodity that quickly reversed the empire’s trade imbalance with the Qing. The flood of opium led to not only a massive outflow of Chinese silver from imperial coffers, but also widespread social immiseration, as company traders, smugglers, and criminal elements used opium and trafficked arms to create new markets for captive “coolie” labor, which helped fuel colonial industries after the abolition of slavery. This “clipper-coolie-captive-contraband-capital” circuit, as Driscoll calls it, provided the basis for capitalist accumulation in the treaty ports, as powerful trading firms that would go on to dominate East Asia like Jardine Matheson and Co. would launder their drug money in “clean” industries.

In reframing western penetration of the treaty ports and opium wars as “Climate Caucasianism,” Driscoll allows us to see the response by East Asian governmental officials, intellectuals, radicals and reformers in a new light. Driscoll for example takes Commissioner Lin Zexu, the staunch anti-opium Qing official, and Aizawa Seishisai, the founding intellectual of the anti-shogunal Mito school, and examines their opposition to western encroachment. Focusing on both these thinkers’ appeals to “Heaven” and its implied connections between human action and cosmic forces, the book describes how non-anthropocentric modes of relationality critiqued imperial nations for their pursuit of profit, as well as their ignorance of interconnected spiritual and ecological systems. Westerners of course responded to these critiques by racializing East Asians as child-like human beings completely ignorant of “free trade,” or as “slavish” opium addicts incapable of self-governance (or what he calls the rhetoric of Asians as “supinestupefiedyellows”).

While the introduction uses the opium war to map out the dynamics of “CO2lonialism,” the remaining chapters dive into the treaty ports themselves and the forms of resistance they engendered. In chapter one, Driscoll revisits the Euro-American enclosure of treaty ports in late Tokugawa Japan, focusing primarily on various acts of white predation. Driscoll here offers a deep dive into the process of enclosure itself, showing how the “rawfaring” of female sex workers along with systemic daily racial terror was instrumental in the consolidation of Euro-American power. In 1862, a staggering forty percent of Euro-white merchants in Yokohama had a live-in sex servant. In addition to the endemic use of female sex slaves, ordinary Japanese were subject to daily humiliations like beatings, whippings, and canings at the first hint of resistance to white demands. Euro-Americans helped foster a climate of political radicalism, as militant samurai took matters into their own hands and launched assaults against foreign oppressors and complicit Tokugawa officials. Driscoll for example examines the ideas of rogue samurai like Kiyokawa Hachirô, who saw westerners as “ignorant predators” whose destructive appetites for resources contravened the balance between humans, “heaven” and natural systems (75). Anti-western actions though always invited disproportionate responses which led to further encroachment – a fact evidenced by the British destruction of Kagoshima which took place in 1863 after an English diplomat was killed following an altercation on the Tokaido highway the year before. Driscoll’s rereading of Treaty Port imperialism as racialized violence allows him to reframe radical samurai thinkers and activists as militant eco-protectors who sought to “revere the emperor, fight the whites” (Driscoll’s spin on the classic sonnô jôi slogan). This reading adds a new dimension to the already-rich field of scholarship on Mito radicalism during the bakumatsu years, bringing it more in line with recent theoretical assemblages in eco-Marxism, critical race theory, as well as Indigenous studies.

Chapter two shifts the focus away from Japan and moves to Sichuan in the mid-19th century, then on the fringes of the treaty port system. Following the second opium war, China was further opened up to whites, especially missionaries, who increasingly sought to proselytize across the interior. Whites in Sichuan envisioned a racially segregated treaty port system in the upper Yangtze that would service capital accumulation by bringing coal-powered boats up river and exploit Sichuan province’s rich mineral stores. French Catholic missionaries, particularly the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP), were the vanguard of these extractive operations. Missionaries in Sichuan were operating well beyond the confines of their designated areas, often engaging in a range of crimes – from human trafficking and sexual assault to “repossession” of Fengshui-aligned temples. Driscoll, however, highlights how Sichuanese were already primed for resistance, as the region formed a cosmopolitan “pluriverse” of intra-action on the eve of the arrival of westerners, with multiple ethnic groups and religious traditions (90). At the center of organized resistance efforts for fighting whites was the social rebel brotherhood Gelaohui (GLH), a secretive group which drew its support from dispossessed peasants, the poor, and those employed in trades like manure collection. The GLH were at the center of a number of major uprisings against missionary property theft and abuses. Anti-Christian actions though, as was the case with attacks in bakumatsu Japan, always invited a disproportionate response, as French Catholics frequently claimed outrageous damages beyond what actually happened. In this chapter, Driscoll further develops the idea of “intra-action” practiced by anti-colonial radicals, showcasing how the GLH critiqued western missionary presence in their placards and denunciations as harmful “pollution” which disrupted the balance of local ecologies. In all, Driscoll here examines how the “eco-ontology” of the Sichuanese world provided the basis – both material and epistemological – for resistance to western missions and corrupt Qing officials. This opposition, as chapters four and six later demonstrate, crystallized into a number of large-scale uprisings spearheaded by the GLH.

Chapter three returns to treaty port Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji revolution and examines the politics of the Genyôsha – the secretive political group long reviled for its participation in ultra-nationalistic and fascist politics during the prewar era. Driscoll though takes us back to its founding years, when it was a part of an explosion of radical democratic activity targeting the incipient extractive capitalism of the Meiji oligarchs. Here Driscoll flips the script on the conventional accounts of the “Fight the Whites” movements, showing how they gained a new lease on life after the overthrow of the shogunate, rather than fade as a result of suppression by Meiji elites. The chapter demonstrates how resistance to top-down modernization, whether in the form of Genyôsha militants planning assassinations or APR activists writing their own constitutions to present to the emperor, drew their energy from the earlier social revolution to “flatten vertical Tokugawa society” (145). Driscoll draws attention here to the conceptual underpinnings of anti-colonial Genyôsha or APR activities, showing how a complex amalgam of eco-ontological appeals to the world of spirits and ancestors or Confucian notions of “Heaven” and the people’s right to overthrow rulers by force informed the anti-oligarchic politics of the 1870s and 1880s. He makes the crucial point that appeals to the emperor should not be seen as automatic support for emperorism, and we should recuperate these radical ideas traditionally written off by generations of scholars as germinations of later militarist fascism.

Moving back to Sichuan, Driscoll in chapter four discusses the further growth of the GLH in the second half of the nineteenth century and the role played by opium in that process. Here, Driscoll inverses the role of opium in East Asia from a social and moral scourge used by westerners to “rawfare” Chinese bodies into a source of “intra-action” that allowed locals to restore a sense of autonomy and dignity. During the late Qing era, political instability and dispossession marked highland areas, as powerful landlords and western capitalists drove many out of their homes or into a waged existence. This, coupled with ex-soldiers and mercenaries winding down after all the fighting from the Taiping Rebellion and other insurrections, swelled the ranks of the GLH. It was amidst these conditions that the GLH formed a vibrant culture of social banditry and anti-Qing resistance in Sichuan, forming lodges across opium dens and tea houses. These organizations were governed by elaborate rituals, behavioral codes, and were supported “intra-actively” through Daoist rituals and the worship of local deities (all of which were often accompanied by ritualized opium smoking). The chapter showcases how Sichuan’s riparian landscapes allowed GLH members to conduct robbery operations, evade Qing runners or spies, and stimulate a locally-grown opium economy. As is the case with Japan in the previous chapter, Driscoll here examines how the subversive energies of outcasts and rebels by the late 19th century were increasingly directed towards corrupt local governments, though the presence of Euro-whites was still at the center of militant activities.

Chapter five closes the book’s story arc on the Genyôsha’s rise to political prominence during the 1880s. In this chapter Driscoll hones in on the factional politics of the Genyôsha, showing how the organization’s cozying up to more conservative emperorist politics led it down the path of participating in coal extraction. The chapter examines at great length the Osaka Incident of 1885, which was a failed plot by anti-oligarch revolutionaires to launch a simultaneous uprising both in mainland Japan and Korea to remove despotic governments. Contrary to typical readings of the Osaka Incident as a failed overseas imperialist venture, Driscoll here portrays the activities of Genyôsha militants and other APR supporters as an attempt to create a social “levelling” revolution across national boundaries. Genyôsha leader Toyama Mitsuru though later gave up this armed revolutionary strategy and shifted to a more “practical” capitalistic solution by getting into coal extraction in Kyushu to finance his mission to unseat the oligarchs, thereby shifting the group’s status from “last samurai” to “first extractive capitalist” (Driscoll’s playful title for the chapter). The effects of the coal boom though were devastating, as farmers were displaced by large companies, women sex trafficked on coal freighters, labor movements were quashed, and even convict labor was used. Genyôsha’s tactics for land acquisition to set up coal operations wound up looking no different from those of large conglomerates, as the organization too began hoovering up territory to cash in on growing capitalist demand. Nevertheless, the decade of revolutionary terror the Genyôsha helped foster symbolized the lingering opposition to westernization and further kowtowing to extraterritorial demands. As Driscoll points out, the Genyôsha may have played a role in the rolling back of unequal treaties in the 1890s, but it ultimately betrayed its original eco-ontological philosophy of its early days to become agents of the Japanese state abroad.

In chapter six, Driscoll examines the instrumental role both Sichuan opium and the GLH played in the railroad rights recovery movement and subsequent Xinhai revolution of 1911. While the opening of treaty ports had led to a destructive trade imbalance which ravaged the local economy, Sichuanese had reversed their fortunes towards the end of the 19th century by creating their own vibrant opium economy. In 1882, Sichuanese opium was said to “be more than all the imported opium from British India, accounting for roughly 140,000 chests.” (260). “Stoned Sichuan”’ saw large numbers of workers escape the capitalist alienation of their labor – whether as boat trackers moving the drug or small farmers cultivating it. As Driscoll highlights, opium smoking was not only a lucrative business and recreational activity that drew people to the GLH; it was also a way to amplify existing human-animal-environment-deity connections through smoking rituals. The opium boom of course soon caused a western backlash, as the drug’s links to Daoist spiritual practices made it not only a source of vice but also idolatry in the eyes of missionaries. Soon, Christian-run “opium refuges” emerged in Sichuan to treat addicts, though these organizations were largely a front for conversion, as well as an excuse to pump people full of western-made synthetic opioids. As western missionaries kicked their anti-vice efforts into full gear, Qing “new policies’” began targeting opium production and consumption. Modernization schemes sought to criminalize the rich social life revolving around opium (all in the guise of hygiene). Driscoll here compares these Qing policies to Marx’s “bloody legislation,” where the state instills waged discipline on a population through violence and the criminalization of indigence. Sichuanese opium taxes paid for a lot however, so when the Qing began outlawing it in September 1906, the state began to impose unpopular taxes on needed products. Driscoll ends the chapter by showcasing how the criminalization of opium soon intersected with the region’s other major economic issue: the recovery of railways from foreigners. Soon GLH forces linked up with Tongmenghui revolutionaries and engaged in a number of anti-Qing uprisings which weakened government troops in the lead-up to the crucial Wuchang uprising that unseated the dynasty. Driscoll manages to rebrand the Xinhai revolution as a broader regional movement inextricably tied to the dynasty’s suppression of eco-ontological worlds, and not a movement solely about an abstract idea of Chinese nationalism. Interestingly, the GLH after its participation in the overthrow of the dynasty would soon go the way of the Genyôsha, as later during the Republican era the group was taken over by middle-class and gentry elements, steering it away from its proletarian roots and making it into a “respectable” organization.

The Whites are Enemies of Heaven also contains two “Intertexts” which serve as a type of bridge between chapters. This portion of the book at first glance appears to be rich source materials that didn’t quite “make the cut” for the regular chapters, but when weaved into the book’s broader arguments about the linkages between sexual and ecological violence take on significant relevance. Both of them are organized around a representative cultural text of white supremacy in Asia. Intertext one features the novel Madame Chrysanthème, while the second intertext covers the opera Madame Butterfly. Both texts feature a white protagonist having a relationship with Japanese sex slave who then goes on to abandon and discard her after his time in the treaty ports comes to an end. Driscoll uses both these stories as representative cases of white indifference towards (as well as fetishization of) female Asian sexuality, which he highlights was built on the still-circulating supremacist formulation “they love western guys over there” (210). This assumption though quickly turned to murderous rage as the rawfaring of Asian bodies generated resistance from groups like the GLH or the Boxers (another group typically cast as “anti-foreign”). White indifference towards “rawfared” females soon morphed into the use of what the colonizers themselves referred to as “Negro methods” – extermination tactics honed in the scramble for Africa or in antebellum U.S slavery – used to put down anti-western uprisings in China. Genocidal campaigns of racial terror, mass killing, and systematic rape for example followed right on the heels of the Boxer uprising. Here Driscoll draws from the Lacanian distinction of pleasure versus enjoyment, where pleasure is governed by social restrictions, while enjoyment is linked to self-destructive behaviors (the death drive). In much the same way we shop and destroy the planet imperiling ourselves, Driscoll showcases how whites “wilding out” in treaty port China found sadistic enjoyment in racist attacks knowing full well it could potentially invite their own destruction.

Driscoll’s The Whites are the Enemies of Heaven rewrites the book on the “opening” of China and Japan by shifting the lens to the ecological struggles and “eco-ontological” approaches they engendered. Both classical narratives of “modernization,” whether the Meiji “success story” or the late Qing “self-strengthening” failure, are insignificant here. What matters is “CO2lonialism,” inspired and imposed by Euro-whites and then enforced by local elites, which suppressed insurgent political movements and alternative socialities. In rebranding opposition to treaty port imperialism as an assertion of universal humanity in the face of racialized occupation and plunder, The Whites are Enemies of Heaven allows us to link the late nineteenth century moment with liberation movements in the decolonizing era, or more recent Indigenous protests against capitalist extraction. Even though the featured movements of his book would slide into irrelevance or betray their radical eco-ontological programs, Driscoll’s powerful new book serves as an invitation to “redeem those earlier commitments of the Gelaohui and Genyôsha in our present as we search for examples to counter intensifying Climate Caucasianism and ongoing Superpredation” (308). Driscoll’s The Whites are Enemies of Heaven is a timely intervention that injects new life into the study of imperialism with its richly detailed source materials and broad conceptual frames. The book is sure to inspire future work which will engage colonial histories through the lens of local eco-ontological approaches.

Toulouse-Antonin Roy holds a PhD in history from the University of California Los Angeles and currently teaches middle and high school world history in Taiwan. His work examines the pacification and disposession of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples and the making of Japan’s camphor industries during the colonial era. He is the author of the recent articles “War in the Camphor Zone: Resistance to colonial capitalism in upland Taiwan, 1895-1915” (Japan Forum, 2020), as well as “‘The Camphor Question is in Reality the Savage Question’: Indigenous Pacification and the Transition to Capitalism in the Taiwan borderlands (1895-1915)” (Critical Historical Studies, 2019). He can be reached at toulroy AT ucla.edu

Editorial Collective, Statement on Anti-Asian Violence

We are outraged at the racist violence against Asians and Asian Americans, especially elders and women, which has resurfaced since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. As “Asianists,” we are painfully aware that prejudice and hatred against Asians and Asian Americans have been an integral part of the US history of racism since the 19th century. Recent assaults in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York follow a familiar but disturbing pattern of racial violence against those who are regarded as Asians or those of Asian descent in the United States. In the current moment, the practice of blaming the pandemic on the Chinese nationals who first suffered its horrifying effects also fits a common but intolerable culture of castigating original victims of a pandemic for its devastation. The Editorial Collective of positions politics joins with others around the country and elsewhere in standing against this violence. We hope all people of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander ancestry remain safe in these perilous times, not only from the effects of COVID-19 but also from the pandemic of racist violence.  

In solidarity,
Editorial Collective of positions politics

Jing Wang, Letter from MIT

In mid-January of this year, MIT professor Chen Gang, a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist, was arrested by the FBI and charged with wire fraud for “failing to file a foreign bank account report (FBAR) and making a false statement in a tax return.” In fact, since the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched its China Initiative in 2018 to counter national security and technology threats from China, 1000 Chinese scientists have been investigated, among them, 50 were arrested. An FBI officer declared that they are opening up a new federal case every 10 hours against scientists who have developed deep ties with Chinese universities. Of the 5,000 active counterintelligence cases the FBI has launched, “nearly half of them are related to China.”

Chen was charged with building collaboration with Shenzhen-based Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) for which he received 29 million grant from the university, which led to the FBI’s assumption that Chen committed espionage by assisting China in developing its science and technology programs. Chen’s arrest sent a shock wave to the science community in the US.  MIT president Rafael Reif quickly stepped forward to refute the charge by clarifying the nature of the SUSTech engagement in an open letter to the MIT community. “It is not an individual collaboration; it is a departmental one, supported by the Institute.”  Meanwhile, approximately 200 MIT faculty drafted and signed an open letter to support Professor Chen in defense of academic freedom and international scientific collaboration. The rallying cry “We are all Chen Gang” sent a powerful protesting message to American law-enforcing authorities.

Professor Chen was fortunate because he has MIT’s backing, which includes provision of legal counsel and financial assistance. But other arrested scientists, Tao Qian at the University of Kansas and Charles M. Lieber at Harvard among them, were ditched by their home institutions and are fighting their legal battles alone. In the wake of Chen’s arrest, science communities in the US are mobilized to fight back. The main target is DOJ’s China Initiative and racial profiling. Editorials of science journals, webinars, and opinion pieces sent the new Biden administration the message: the defense of those wrongfully arrested professors is the defense of the scientific enterprise. 

To show support for the initiative of anti-racial profiling of Chinese scientists, please read this petition. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors are calling for the establishment of a federation of ACPs (Association of Chinese Professors), a horizontal connection between ACPs of various universities, to promote academic freedom and protect the vital interests of Chinese professors. The first cross-campus joint meeting was held on January 30. Forty-five representatives from twenty-seven universities attended.

We are witnessing the return of McCarthyism for sure. We have to fight against the governmental interference with academic research and stop the societal prejudice against scientists of Chinese birth.

Ken Kawashima reviews The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetic in Japan’s ’68

It is Time to Return to the Future of The Red Years for Our Time.

The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics of the Japanese ’68, edited by Gavin Walker, is a book that reconstructs three fundamental aspects of the Japanese ’68 revolution for us today:

    1. Marxist and revolutionary theory, which was caught in a certain mode of crisis, but also in a mode of new possibilities for revolution and rebellion in the present;

    2. Revolutionary politics of the Japanese ’68, i.e., the intersectional diversity of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutionary practice in Japan led by student proletarians;

    3. Radical aesthetics of, and for, revolutionary and emancipatory politics, which changed human perception in the fields of writing, painting, music, dance and theatre.

In what follows, I will focus on the first two points, but if there is an overarching and basic lesson of the book, it is this: “There is no guilt in revolution—to rebel is correct”. (235) Comrade Walker’s timely declaration repeats—and psychoanalytically grounds— Mao’s declaration to The Shanghai Workers’ Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters in 1967. As the Chairman declared then: “In the last analysis, all the truths of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: To rebel is justified.”

2.

Marxist theory occupied a central place in the Japanese ’68, and The Red Years discusses how it combined the inheritances of three, inter-related discourses of Marxist theory:

    1. Japan’s interwar discourses of Marxist theory, epitomized by the Debate on Capitalism (“the Debate”), which spanned from 1927 to 1937;

    2. The political economic theories, method and research of Uno Kōzō (1897-1977);

    3. Marxist theory in the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1956, the latter year representing the critique of Stalin and the Hungarian rebellion.

Again, for the sake of brevity, I will focus on the first two points.

To recapitulate a familiar but still repressed story of the splitting of the Marxist Left in the interwar period in Japan: the split was expressed in the form of a Debate that distinguished two Marxists factions, which took opposing sides in relation to the Comintern Thesis of 1932 on the situation in Japan. The 1932 thesis called for overthrowing the feudal Emperor system in Japan as a precondition for a subsequent proletariat revolution, and also concluded that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was not a bourgeois revolution, only an incomplete one. (Walker, 2016, Chapter 2).

Supporting the Comintern line was the Japanese Communist Party (JCP, founded in 1922), itself supported by the “Lectures faction” or Kōza faction (講座派) of Marxist scholars and researchers. Opposing the Comintern line, the JCP and the Kōza faction was the Rōnō faction (労農派). The Rōnō faction argued that the Meiji Restoration was effectively a bourgeois revolution and that the capitalist mode of production—especially in terms of the development of the commodity (and market) economy, or 商品経済— had been fully developed in Japan by the 1930s. They thus argued for a direct communist revolution and an immediate dictatorship of the proletariat, but also tended to ignore the idea of overthrowing the Japanese Emperor system.

As The Red Years clarifies, many of the theoretical and political positions from the interwar Debate were transplanted and transferred to the ’68 revolutionaries, and to their new historical conjuncture in the shadows of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaties, which placed Japan in the position of a ‘client state’ under U.S. imperialism. In the ’68 conjuncture, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and its youth league (Minsei) adopted the Kōza faction position; the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) adopted the Rōnō faction position and was deeply influenced by the theories and research of the Japanese Marxist, Uno Kōzō. Finally, many of the New Left sects of the Zenkyōtō movement, who commonly opposed both the JCP and the JSP, were also influenced by Uno. But instead of taking Uno’s theories to parliament like the JSP, the New Left took Uno’s theories to the streets.

In The Red Years, Suga Hidemi gives a concise description of the discursive constellation of the Rōnō faction, Uno Kozo’s economic theories, and the New Left:

In the postwar years, the Rōnō faction’s argument became the position of the left wing of the Socialist Party (now known as the Social Democractic Party), which was to the Communist Party’s right. Insofar as it did not advocate the abolition of the emperor system, the Socialist Party could be considered a moderate social democratic party. Broadly speaking, Uno Kōzō’s economic theories…could be placed within the Rōnō faction ideology. Starting with the Bund, the question of how to interpret Uno’s economics was an important topic for the Japanese New Left. (102)

Further corroborating the impact of Uno Kōzō’s thought on the New Left, Hiroshi Nagasaki, author of the Theory of Rebellion, writes:

The influence of Uno’s political economy on the thought of the New Left was immense. On the one hand, as a method of political economy for disclosing the objective crises of capitalism anew, it provided powerful and independent thematics of economic analysis. It emphasized the need to write a new theory of imperialism. On the other hand, Uno’s theory of principle, by locating the motor-force of revolution outside the text of Capital, provided a conception of ‘freedom’ to practice. It was the opportunity in thought that allowed for the liberation of ‘rebellion’ from the Marxist theory of revolution. (Nagasaki, The Red Years, 37)

In this quotation, Nagasaki emphasizes three points of Uno’s method for political economy that were so meaningful for the New Left’s radical vision and practice in ‘68:

(1) Uno’s theory of the fundamental principles of political economy (i.e., Marx’s Capital)

(2) Uno’s theory of (the inevitability of) crisis

(3) Uno’s theory of imperialism (i.e., Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism)

Regarding the world of principles and its relation to practice, in Theory of Crisis (1953), Uno wrote:

What is clarified as a social principle is something that is expressed as if it can make society move and develop eternally. This means that what becomes a principle is something that is repeated, inevitably and necessarily. The historicity of a society’s birth, growth, and decline becomes hidden in the background, so to speak. Thus, when we provide the exposition of the principles of political economy, as a system that begins with the ‘commodity’ and ends with ‘all classes’, questions such as the birth of ‘commodities’ or the end of ‘classes’ cannot be answered by the systematic principles itself. Now, in Capital, when Marx on occasion explains the necessity of capitalism to transform into another kind of society, I do not believe that this problem can be solved by the systematic principles themselves. This, at least, is how I understand it. There is no reason and no way that the principles, in and of themselves, can provide an exposition of a society’s birth and death. (Uno, 1953, my translation)

For Uno, the question of theory and practice has three aspects. First, the question of theory is never assumed to be automatically unified with practice (politics), as in the phrase “the unity of theory and practice.” Uno instead separated theory from politics, and vice versa (and in a way that resonates with Althusser’s theoretical struggles within the French Communist Party in the 1960s-70s. See Althusser, 1990a and 1990b).

Secondly, practice/politics is ultimately a question of overturning the world of capital’s principles from a position that represents the outside of capital, i.e., the position and movement of labor-power (Marx, 1990, Chapter 6; Kawashima, 2009; Walker, 2016, Chapter 4; Kawashima-Walker, 2019). This is Uno’s famous question of the commodification of labor power, its ‘im/possibility’, as well as its ‘negation’ or ‘sublation’, or 労働力商品化の「無理」•「止揚」. (Uno, 1953, 1958)

Thirdly, the autonomous place of politics is something that can be reached only by passing through three, distinct levels of political economic research and their attendant forms of knowledge (abstract-theoretical; historical; and concrete-empirical):

    1. the theory of the purely abstract, fundamental economic principles of the capitalist mode of production, as theorized by Marx in Capital, also known as Uno’s 経済原理論;

    2. the theory of the historical stages of capitalist development, or 段階論 and 経済政策論, which are based on the differences between the state economic policies of mercantilism (重商主義), liberalism (自由主義), and imperialism (帝国主義);

    3. the concrete, historical analysis of capitalism after 1917, or the analysis of contemporary capitalism in its historical conjuncturesor 現状分析.

These are the three levels of Uno’s method for political economy. As such, they are the ‘precursors’, so to speak, of the emergence of the autonomy of politics. In the context of the Japanese ’68, Uno’s theoretical exposition of the world of capital’s principles had the dialectical effect of liberating thought and politics away from the purely economic principles of capital, and towards the invention of alternative modes of subjectivation, community, and political practice that were totally antithetical to the world of capital and its commodifying and oedipalizing principles of capitalist and imperialist sociality. In short, the political praxis of the Japanese ’68 began where Uno’s theoreticism ended. As Hiroshi Nagasaki writes in his On Rebellion:

We departed from the point where Uno consciously [i.e., logically] stopped. In other words, the radical theoreticism of Uno, which absolutely lacks actual relations with practice, in turn influenced our [political] practices [their autonomy]. (The Red Years, 209)

Echoing this line of thought, Yutaka Nagahara writes:

It is exactly the distinct, autonomous field of politics that must be questioned for its possibility, as Badiou did. This paradoxically resonates with Boltanski and Chiapello, who argue that ‘the history of the years after 1968 offers further evidence that the relations between the economic and the social…are not reducible to the domination of the second by the first.’ It is this ‘inversion’, so to speak, that ’68 made happen on the structured streets.” (The Red Years, 209)

 

3.

What happened to the Japanese ’68 after the event of ’68?  The problem, as Nagahara quotes Badiou, is that, “We are commemorating May ’68 because the real outcome and the real hero of ’68 is unfettered neo-liberal capitalism.” (The Red Years, 207) Moreover, compounding the problem of neoliberalism, the defeats of the ’68 revolution have created a Left with a strong tendency to “overvalue the negative capability of remaining in doubt, skepticism and uncertainties”, which, according to Mark Fisher, has become a “political vice” of the Left that the New Right is more than happy to take neoliberal advantage of. (The Red years, 231)

How can the Left today overcome this insecure doubt, skepticism, uncertainty, as well as its sad passions? The Red Years, it seems to me, alerts us of two important tasks that can, and must, be done to begin resolving these problems on the Left.

First Task: to develop further the open secret of the Japanese ’68 rebellions: that capitalism ‘works’ and ‘operates’ in the way that it does only because there is something intrinsic about capitalism that is fundamentally inoperable and broken. Any appearance of rationality in capitalism is only an illusory appearance (Schein) of capital’s exchange process based on the commodity-form, which itself is nothing but a salto mortale, or an irrational and speculative “leap of faith” from the relative form of value (‘20 yards of linen’) to the equivalent form of value (‘1 coat’). (Marx, 1990; Karatani, 2020) It is thus a mistake to think that the essence of capital can be explained as if it is a purely rational substance.

Therefore, it is never the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rebels who are the mad ones. The anti-capitalist rebels are the normal and sane ones; it is capital, its representatives, agents, sycophants, saboteurs and spies—especially in the stage of imperialism—who are the stark and raving mad lunatics, hell-bent on deploying whatever irrational means of violence to realize absolute and relative surplus value for the dictatorship of capital. (Deleuze-Guattari, 1968)

Therefore, to believe that one can describe capital as if it is rationally structured will fail to realize the many ir/rational reasons why everyday people—who think—will repeatedly revolt against the dictatorship of capital, even in vain, if only to taste a little bit of real freedom. As Yutaka Nagahara writes:

Rational Marxian economics could demonstrate the structure of our reiterated defeats scientifically only because of the way in which it describes capital itself as rationally structured; but for that very reason, it can never imagine and therefore realize the (ir)rational reasons people revolt repeatedly in vain. (The Red Years, 182)

Second Task: To develop the revolutionary inheritances of the Japanese ‘68 in today’s depoliticized dead-end of neoliberal thought, it is necessary to re-articulate the critique of contemporary forms of eclecticism. This critique is necessary (once again, as it was for Lenin in the 1890s in Russia) because eclecticism prevents all of us from coming together as a unified combination of forces to overthrow capitalism.

Eclecticism today is a neoliberal way of thinking and living that makes everyone too timid to even dare to revolt against the existing conditions of capitalism. Eclecticism today is a sophisticated and pompous discourse of allowing the existing conditions of capitalism to be analyzed interminably, and thus to remain in place indefinitely and unchallenged. Today, eclecticism also commonly combines with Essentialism and Esotericism to produce a generalized depoliticization. For example, in today’s University discourse, “Latourian Object Analysis + Identity Politics + Neo-Heideggerian fundamental ontology = Eclecticism + Essentialism + Esotericism = Radical Depoliticization”.

Marxism and the Left today must smash such senseless, neoliberal eclecticism in order to begin to actualize the possibilities of socialist revolution that the Japanese ’68, for a brief moment, forced into existence.

As Lenin wrote in the 1890s: “The eclectic is too timid to dare to revolt… Let anyone name even one eclectic in the republic of thought who has proved worthy of the name rebel!” (quoted in The Red Years, 233)

Finally, to stamp out eclecticism amidst the crisis of neoliberal capitalism today requires, more than ever, nothing short of a renewed theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Marx, 1875; Lenin, 1917; W.E.B. Dubois, 1935; Balibar, 1977).

Walker’s The Red Years identifies these important tasks (and more) as critical elements for the revolution to be accomplished for our time, daring us to renew a revolutionary and rebellious movement on the Left against the dictatorship of capital.

To rebel is correct and justified!
Smash Capitalism and its Neoliberal Eclecticism!
Labor-Power for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

 

Ken Kawashima
University of Toronto

 

References:

Althusser, Louis (1990a). Reading Capital, Verso.

____ (1990b). For Marx, Verso.

Balibar, Etienne (1977). On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Verso.

Deleuze-Guattari (1968/). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, University of Minnesota.

W.E.B. Dubois (1935/1992), Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, the Free Press.

Karatani, Kojin (1973/2020). Marx: Towards the Center of Possibility, translated by Gavin Walker, Verso.

Kawashima, Ken (2009). The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, Duke UP.

Kawashima, Ken and Gavin Walker (2019). “Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kōzō, Imperialism, and the Theory of Crisis, Viewpoint Magazine, https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/surplus-alongside-excess-uno-kozo-imperialism-theory-crisis/.

Marx, Karl (1990). Capital, Volumes 1, Penguin.

_____ (1875). Critique of the Gotha Program.

Lenin, V.I., (1917), State and Revolution.

_____ (1916). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

Uno, Kōzō (1953), Theory of Crisis, translated by Ken Kawashima, forthcoming from Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism series, with an essay by Kawashima and Walker, “Uno’s Theory of Crisis Today”.

____ (1958). Capital and Socialism (資本論と社会主義), in 宇野弘蔵著作集、Vol. 10.

Walker, Gavin (2016). The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Duke UP.

Editorial Collective, Critical Reflections on “Comfort Women”

Powerful statements have been issued in the last week regarding the inaccuracies and academic misconduct in the publication of “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” With permission, we duplicate here the statement by Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, who had been contacted by the editor of the journal in question for a critical response. After reviewing the article, they have opted to issue a brief statement, urging a retraction pending a thorough review. 

Editor’s Note: Powerful statements have been issued in the last week regarding the inaccuracies and academic misconduct in the publication of “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” With permission, we duplicate here the statement by Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, who had been contacted by the editor of the journal in question for a critical response. After reviewing the article, they have opted to issue a brief statement, urging a retraction pending a thorough review. 

For additional statements and resources, Michael Chwe has created a helpful page with an updating link to statements, petitions, letters, articles, and events. Please also see our special issue Critical Reflections on “Comfort Women” on the 75-year anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War in August 2020.

February 17, 2021

Statement by
Andrew Gordon, Professor, Department of History
Carter Eckert, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations,
Harvard University

Earlier this month at the request of the editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, we began to write a critical response to the article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” by Professor J. Mark Ramseyer, at that point released online by the journal with plans for formal publication in March.

As historians of Japan and Korea, what initially appalled us was Ramseyer’s elision of the larger political and economic contexts of colonialism and gender in which the comfort women system was conceived and implemented, and the multiple and brutal ways in which it affected and afflicted the women on a human scale. But as we began to look into the article, its evidence, and its logic, we encountered a different and prior problem of the article’s scholarly integrity. We write to explain that problem.

Ramseyer’s article rests on a comparison of contracts concluded with the so-called “comfort women”, mainly Korean women, between 1938 and 1945, with contracts for what we might call ordinary legalized prostitution in prewar Japan and in colonial Korea. The article states that he bases his comparison on examination of all these categories of contract (p. 2, final paragraph of section 1). Yet, so far as we and other scholars can determine from tracking Ramseyer’s citations, he has not consulted a single actual contract concluded between a Korean comfort woman, or her family, and a recruiter or a comfort station, or even a sample contract that might have been provided for guidance by the Japanese government or military. One of his sources (Naimusho 1938) provides sample contracts for Japanese women recruited to comfort stations in Shanghai. It describes the women as shakufu (barmaid) not ianfu (comfort woman). It is written in Japanese.

Absent evidence of contracts concluded in Korea with Korean women, readers are being asked, with no justification given, to assume that such contracts were the same as these contracts with these Japanese women. We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read.

In addition to the absence of contracts, he offers virtually no documented third-party statements, oral or written, about contracts with Korean women. The final sentence of section 3.2 (p.6) claims that “some Korean comfort women in Burma worked on contracts as short as six months to a year.” The citation brings one to a sample contract written in Japanese in 1937 (years before the Japanese military was fighting in Burma). It is a sample for contracting with Japanese prostitutes to work in “comfort stations” which specifies a two-year term.

There is only one verifiable reference in the entire article to a third-party claim about contracts with women from Korea (section 3.4, final paragraph). Ramseyer refers to a diary kept by a “Korean receptionist for comfort stations in Burma and Singapore,” said to make clear that “regularly, comfort women from his brothel completed their terms and returned to their homes.” He cites a book about that diary, not the diary itself (the diary was translated into Japanese in 2013).1 In the diary one finds seven entries noting cases where one or two women completed their terms. Most of them applied for permits to return home, but whether all succeeded is not clear. One also finds an entry noting that two women who had left the station by marrying (one assumes, to Japanese officers) were forced to return to their “comfort stations” by a military official.

The same paragraph that mentions the diary, purportedly a paragraph about contracts with Korean women, ends by quoting a Japanese veteran who recruited women from Japan and claimed many of them paid off their advance and went free.

Any reasonable standard of academic integrity would require that Ramseyer state in his article that he does not have access to actual contracts or sample contracts concluded with Korean women in Korea, acknowledge how few third-party statements he has seen about contracts, and note the limits to what one can learn from those references.

For us, as we believe for the journal and for Ramseyer, the heart of his narrowcast argument about contracts rests on the comparison between two types: those concluded with Korean “comfort women” recruited to wartime “comfort stations,” and those concluded with Japanese or Korean women working as prostitutes in prewar licensed brothels in the home islands or the colony. Just as he is unable to make the comparison in the first place, we are unable to critique that comparison with full confidence without having contracts to examine.

Let us explain why seeing the Korean contracts in full text matters so much, beyond the obvious fact that responsible scholarship requires one to be clear on what one’s sources are or are not (we have little doubt such contracts were concluded; the issues are whether samples or concluded contracts survive in any form, and if so, whether Ramseyer’s article points us to any of them).

The word used from 1938 for “comfort stations” (the places the women were put to work) was wianso in Korean, ianjo in Japanese (the same Chinese characters are used in both cases: 慰安所). The term for “comfort woman,” in use from that year, has two of the same syllables/characters, translated as “comfort”: wianbu in Korean, ianfu in Japanese; 慰安婦 in Chinese characters.

So far as we can determine, “comfort woman” (wianbu/ianfu) is a wartime neologism, and “comfort station” is a repurposing of a term that until the late 1930s carried very different meanings. The Asahi, one of Japan’s leading papers, used the term in 9 articles between 1917 and 1935, most with the meaning of “recreation area,” such as a 1930 story celebrating 15 new “comfort stations” (ianjo) in Tokyo parks for the enjoyment of all residents.2 The headline of an article in praise of a Japanese hotelier in Seoul who has replaced his shabbier inn with a fine new hotel, published in a Japanese newspaper based in Korea in 1937, calls it “a great advance for ianjo in the [Korean] peninsula.”3 A review of Korean-language newspapers between the 1920s and 1945 shows that the term wianso also held different meanings (e.g., shelters for children, inns and hotels, hot springs spas) in colonial Korea as well, and the term wianbu (慰安婦) begins to appear only in the late 1930s.4 A Korean doctoral dissertation from Sŏnggyungwan University in Seoul on the comfort women system (2010) states that “most Koreans did not know what the term wianbu meant.”5 And, even a former Japanese military policeman assigned to guard duty at a “comfort station” in 1943 has said that until he got there, he thought he was assigned to an officer’s club, not a brothel.6

It matters greatly that the terms now in widespread use in Korean and Japanese to refer to brothels and the women put to work there did not necessarily carry the meanings of brothel or prostitute at the time the Japanese government authorized and arranged for the creation of “comfort stations” and issued instructions to recruit “comfort women.” It means that in oral communication to the women and their families, it was an easy matter to obscure the nature of the work being asked for. Indeed, one finds much oral testimony from the women that they were deceived as to the nature of their expected work. It would be all the more significant if, as we suspect, the contracts themselves used these opaque terms. Of course, we cannot be sure if they did, if neither sample nor actual contracts survive.

The obfuscation of this issue created by the lack of any discussion of whether he has seen actual or sample contracts, and the lack of any citation to such contracts, is for us the most egregious violation of academic integrity in the article. But there are numerous other serious problems: citations that are wholly unrelated to claims made in the text (just one is noted above); claims in the text of the article entirely at odds with the documents cited to support those claims; selective use of documents and other materials to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary. Some of our historian colleagues, including those far more knowledgeable than we on these issues, are compiling an extensive list of such problems. They will be shared with the journal in due course, or may have been shared by the time of this statement, and we believe our colleagues will make that list public.

It is not our responsibility to conduct a full examination of the integrity of a paper published by a journal with which we have no connection. That is the job of the journal and its publisher, ordinarily through the peer review process but in extraordinary cases after the fact. This is such a case. We have written to the journal requesting they suspend publication of this piece, conduct its own inquiry drawing on expert opinion, and pending the result, retract the article.