Anarchy and Autocracy: Racism, Orientalism, and Radical Political History

Cover: Chinese Railway Workers, via https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/transcontinental-railroad and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/books/review/gordon-h-chang-ghosts-of-gold-mountain.html

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Notes Towards an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism || In Capital, volume I (1867), Karl Marx writes that the historical “power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, of Etruscan theocrats, etc. has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist […].”¹ In fact, just as these words were being printed, Anglo-American businessmen were brutally exploiting at least 10,000 Chinese immigrant laborers to build the Transcontinental Railroad.² Through their hard work, these low-waged Chinese laborers proved instrumental to the completion of the western branch of the enterprise, known as the Central Pacific Railroad.³ In reality, thousands of such immigrant workers would perish while constructing what the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose describes as “the greatest achievement of the [U.S.] American people in the nineteenth century,” next to Union victory in the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery.⁴

Such super-exploitation of labor predated the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred the immigration of all Chinese workers to the U.S. for ten years. Following its codification in 1902, this discriminatory law would only be repealed in 1943. Infamously, during World War II (WWII), the U.S. government detained 120,000 Japanese-Americans—two-thirds of them U.S. citizens—in concentration camps for three years (1942–1945).⁵ With the pretext of seeking to avoid subversion of the Allied war effort, the Communist Party of the USA infamously co-signed this atrocious deed.⁶ Grimly indeed, in August 2025, the neo-fascist Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened a new detention facility for undocumented migrants at Fort Bliss, a military base in Texas that was used to detain Japanese-Americans en masse during WWII.⁷ The very next month, during its single-largest operation to date, ICE arrested over 300 Korean workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, shackling many of them with ankle chains.⁸ During “Operation Metro Surge,” the code name for the mass-incursion of federal agents into Minnesota that began in December 2025—having murdered two U.S. citizens to date—ICE officers are reported to have gone door-to-door asking for the location of Asian families.

In parallel to the Orientalism, Sinophobia, and Nipponophobia (or prejudice toward “Eastern,” Chinese, and Japanese peoples and cultures, respectively) that have been promoted by the U.S. capitalist class and State for centuries, readers may be surprised to learn that the anti-Asian racism underpinning so-called “Yellow Peril” conspiracy theories dismally also gripped the labor movement and political radicals, including Marxists and anarchists, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁹ Kolja Lindner summarizes this paradox in the following way: “Orientalism is socially situated in an imperial project of the European ruling classes. But it also […] made its way into revolutionary thought.”¹⁰ In historical terms, while drawing on long-established Euro-American cultural Sinophobia, the phenomenon of the “Yellow Peril” began in earnest in 1869 with Henry George’s fearmongering about an overseas invasion of “Mongolian” labor that could threaten white workers in the USA, especially those residing on the West Coast. Ironically, such xenophobic anxieties escalated after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869—a Herculean task accomplished in no small part due to the great sacrifices of Chinese labor!¹¹

Following passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, white miners and vigilantes killed dozens of Chinese miners in Wyoming and Oregon in the late 1880’s, while authorities expelled Chinese immigrants from over 100 Western settlements. A mob destroyed much of Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 1871, killing 18 Cantonese. White arsonists likewise burned down Honolulu’s Chinatown following the outbreak of bubonic plague in the city in 1900. Having apparently found a muse, the chauvinist socialist author Jack London soon thereafter composed a short story celebrating the Western powers annihilating China with biological weapons, including the plague.¹² Along similar lines, Samuel Gompers, founder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), co-authored an incendiary pamphlet entitled “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?” (1902), wherein he argues for the indefinite extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act!¹³

Less starkly, though no less remarkably, in a debate from 1911 with Clarence Darrow about the Tolstoyan concept of non-resistance, Socialist Party of America member Arthur M. Lewis defined Christianity as an “Oriental religion.” He did so due to his reductive and racist view that Christianity and Asian philosophy alike promote “resignation, renunciation, helplessness, submission and despair,” adding: “All Orientals [sic] have absolute monarchies.”¹⁴ Along similar lines, the 1906 program of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), led by the Oaxacan anarcho-communist Ricardo Flores Magón, called for an outright ban on Chinese immigration to Mexico as a supposedly “protective measure for workers of other nationalities,” given Magón’s prejudiced view that Chinese laborers are “disposed in general to work for the lowest wage, [and] submissive.”¹⁵ Lamentably in this sense, in the early twentieth century, the PLM-supported United Laborers local in Los Angeles organized among Greek and Mexican immigrants while excluding Asian fellow workers, and even pushing the latter out of jobs.¹⁶

However, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), with which Magón and the PLM often made common cause, uniquely opposed such nativist exclusion of Asian immigrants, being “one of the first (not specifically Asian) working-class organizations to actively recruit Asian workers,” in the words of labor historian Daniel Rosenberg.¹⁷ The Wobblies’s principled support for organizing Asian immigrant workers, a commitment that reflected their practical rejection of the racist concept of the “Yellow Peril,” had been a minority position in the labor movement since the 1870’s—even prior to the IWW’s founding in 1905. Even so, the IWW’s openness to and support for Asian and Black workers earned it the esteemed status of “most racially inclusive union of the era,” writes historian David Struthers.¹⁸ As such, it avoided the nativism and racism that Mike Davis identifies as two of the most historically self-defeating aspects of the U.S. labor movement.¹⁹

In the spirit of repudiating Eurocentrism, this essay will critically examine Orientalism and the “Yellow Peril,” even among Marxists, anarchists, and trade-unionists; briefly explore the historical record of Asian revolutions; consider whether the Tsarist Empire and Soviet Union can be considered examples of bureaucratic despotism, otherwise known as the tributary State—that is, what was once referred to in Orientalist terms as “Asiatic despotism”—and conclude on a note that is critical of racism, Orientalism, capitalism, and the tributary State, while expressing sympathy with internationalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and anarcho-communism.

Orientalism, the “Yellow Peril,” and the Torreón Massacre

In his groundbreaking study Orientalism (1978), the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said (1935–2003) condemns nearly all Western artistic and political misrepresentations of Islam and the “East” as racist and infantilizing. While Said’s focus is on the Middle East, otherwise known as Southwest Asia, Orientalism also applies to historical and ongoing Euro-American engagement with Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia. In particular, Said emphasizes how the hegemonic Western imagination, as reflected in literature and visual art, has facilitated European colonialism in Asia over the course of many centuries.²⁰

Orientalism underpins the white-supremacist theory of “Asiatic despotism,” which was first proposed by Homer, on Said’s account, and then picked up by Aeschylus, Aristotle, the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, and Marx, among others. This trope has long been used to describe absolutist agromanagerial regimes located in Asia that have functioned in the interest of a governing minority through the enforcement of total State supremacy in the socio-political realm, a focus on large public works, a State monopoly on landowning, and an attendant lack of private property in the means of production. Under such conditions, the State becomes “the ultimate owner […] of the people themselves.”²¹ Karl Wittfogel, author of Oriental Despotism (1957), elucidates the Marxist concept of the “Asiatic mode of production” as describing societies in Asia wherein the “managerial bureaucracy [functions as] the ruling class” by keeping the “state supremely strong and the nonbureaucratic and private sector[s] of society supremely weak.”²² When considering such outsiders and foreign power structures—whether Egyptian, Persian, Arab, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese—Orientalists paint them as both highly menacing, but also as stagnant and headed for decline once they are confronted with Western military and technological prowess.²³ To this point, Said’s critic Sadik Jalal al-’Azm argues that Orientalism promotes an “ahistorical bourgeois bent of mind” by aiming to “eternalise [the] mutable fact” of the West’s productive, scientific, and techno-military superiority over the rest of the world.²⁴

For his part, Hegel held the racist view that “Asiatic despotism” first arises in humanity’s ostensible “infancy,” when the Geist (“Spirit”) remains unfree. Even so, Hegel saw this unfreedom ostensibly persisting even in his day—especially, in India, a society that he considered “stationary and fixed.”²⁵ Like classical Greek thinkers, the German philosopher perceived stagnancy and enthrallment not only in the overwhelming power of State forces in Asia, but also in the psychical masochism and acceptance of unfreedom to which he believed most subjects of these Asian despots subscribed. Anticipating Hegel’s argument, Aristotle begins his Politics by affirming the idea that Greeks should rule non-Greeks, supposedly because “non-Greek and slave are in nature the same.”²⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche would promote similar proto-fascist ideologies in the late nineteenth century, while the young Marx celebrated British colonialism in India as dialectically yielding what he erroneously held to be “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”²⁷

Undoubtedly, any Euro-American fixation on “Asiatic” forms of autocracy that would overlook analogous systems of hierarchical domination in the West is immediately suspect, given sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s insight that white people’s contempt for fellow human beings of color, especially those of African descent, has functioned to legitimize the Western slave trade, chattel slavery, and global imperialism for centuries. We must never forget that at least two million African bonded laborers perished in the Atlantic Ocean during the so-called “Middle Passage” to European colonies in the “New World,” to say nothing of those hecatombs of enslaved workers of the “sugar empire” and “cotton kingdom.”²⁸ Accordingly, as Dmitry Shlapentokh observes, “[i]n dealing with ‘Oriental despotism,’ European intellectuals would of course face their own socio-economic and political reality.”²⁹ Along these lines, radical theorist George Katsiaficas knowingly warns that anti-Asian racism has long fueled U.S. military aggression, leading to the deaths of millions of Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³⁰ As if to prove George’s point, Wittfogel presents an uncritical account of Western imperialism in Oriental Despotism, and, as Chinese scholar Chenglin Tu notes, even “defend[s] Western colonial invasion[s].”³¹

As revealed in a number of fin de siècle U.S. novels, the hegemonic Anglo-American mentality was preoccupied by threats of subversion, aggression, and even defeat by foreigners, as crystallized in conspiracy theories about “Asiatic hordes.” To this point, Last Days of the Republic (1880), The Valor of Ignorance (1909), and All for His Country (1915) feature racist and xenophobic fantasies about Chinese and Japanese attacks on, and occupation of, the United States.³² Plus, as paradoxical as it may seem, Orientalist and “Yellow Peril” discourse has even gripped many historical socialists, anarchists, and trade-unionists. As previously mentioned, Magón shared the anti-Chinese prejudices of the U.S. bourgeoisie and much of the labor movement. As Struthers explains, he “made the Mexican rebels more palatable to less radical Anglo socialists and trade unionists by placing all of them above Chinese workers in a racial hierarchy as well as uniting them in the class war.”³³

Beyond the role such Sinophobia played in legitimizing Chinese labor’s mass-exploitation in, and exclusion from, the U.S. and Mexico, this hatred soon erupted early on in the Mexican Revolution, when followers of the landowning rebel and future president Francisco I. Madero massacred over three hundred Chinese immigrants in Torreón, Coahuila (see Figure 1 below). Upon defeating the federal garrison stationed there, on May 13–15, 1911, Maderistas cruelly carried out what researcher Julián Herbert calls a pogrom and “small genocide” against the city’s Chinese residents—children, workers, and bosses alike. Madero’s forces carried out this atrocity on the false pretense that the Chinese immigrants had helped Porfirio Díaz’s troops against them, given that the federales had requisitioned Chinese-owned shops in their attempt to repel the Maderistas. In reality, as Herbert notes, the Torreón massacre was perpetrated due to “racial hatred, financial envy, sadistic cruelty,” and a perverse sense of entertainment on the part of the victorious fighters.³⁴ Moreover, its ground was arguably prepared by the anti-Chinese ideology that Magón and his followers had been inciting on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border at the time. It is even possible that some armed Magonistas participated directly in the mass-killing. This outrageous turn of events led the Chinese community in northwestern Mexico to fear a “general massacre” by the Republican Liberation Army, and detonated an international diplomatic crisis with the Chinese Empire.³⁵

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Revolutions in Asia

In confronting widespread prejudices against Asians, one is struck that such racist views overlook a myriad of progressive, humanistic, and revolutionary dimensions of Asian culture and politics. A brief and very partial review of Asian history would uncover the egalitarian dimensions of Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Daoism, and Dalitbahujan (“Dalit-majority”) culture; the Sarvodaya and Sarvodaya Shramadana movements of India and Sri Lanka, respectively; the experiences of the Dalit Panthers and the communally based eco-feminism of Chipko in the Himalayas; the Vietnamese people’s mass-resistance to French and U.S. imperial domination; the civil wars waged by peasants against the Chinese State; the utopian Daoist tale “Peach Blossom Spring” (421 C.E.) and the “China Dream” of a “just world”; Wu Cheng’en’s wise saying, shared in Journey to the West (c. 1592), that “to save a human life is better than building a seven-storeyed pagoda”; the biographies of the Chinese anarchists Liu Shifu (1884–1915), Taixu (1890–1947), and Ba Jin (1904–2005), among others; the experiences of the White Lotus Rebellion (1794–1804), the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), Xinhai Revolution (1911), and the Chinese Revolution (1927–1949); the Christian anarchist Lev Tolstoy’s comment that “the Gospels are not complete” without Laozi, author of the Daodejing (c. 4^th century B.C.E.); the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s use of the taijitu symbol juxtaposing yin and yang as inspiration for his Nobel Prize-winning work; and the numerous insurgent “People’s Power” movements that defied and overthrew dictatorships throughout much of Asia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Katsiaficas has documented, these “People’s Power” revolutions took place in South Korea, the Philippines, Burma, Occupied Tibet, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.³⁶

What is more, Aristotle, Hegel, and their disciples ignore the remarkable Indus Valley civilization (2600–1900 B.C.E.), which founded riverine cities without obvious fortifications, palaces, grand temples, or monumental tombs that would signify vast social inequalities. The so-called Harappans produced art that conspicuously lacks the fetishization of either majesty or militarism, in a striking example of “peace sociology” or “peace geography.”³⁷ Nearly a century after their discovery on the banks of the Indus River in present-day Pakistan, the ruins of the city of Mohenjo Daro at best suggest decentralization, statelessness, the lack of a ruling class, and a concurrent emphasis on cooperative labor and conviviality (see Figure 2 below).

In contrast to the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which were dominated by self-aggrandizing theocratic monarchies that enslaved workers and reduced them to precarious living conditions, if not outright sacrificing them via bonded labor or military service—notwithstanding Du Bois’s downplaying of such dynamics in ancient Egypt to align with an idealized vision of pharaonic rule—the Indus Valley’s Mohenjo Daro featured commodious, comparably-sized residences, together with a sewage system and well-built public baths. The city’s drainage system set it apart from other contemporary South Asian cities, and its egalitarian design for housing mirrored that of Teotihuacán, Mexico, where nearly everyone lived in spacious dwellings.³⁸ Archaeological discoveries in Mohenjo Daro suggest the existence of horizontal specialized craft production and flexible agricultural production free of landlordism, plus social recognition of at least three genders. Based on the relative absence of violence in Indus iconography, the Harappan social imaginary was presumably pacifistic, and many terra-cotta female figurines have been discovered at Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, suggesting devotion to a gynocentric (goddess-based) religion.³⁹ That being said, even if the ruins of Mohenjo Daro provide little evidence for priest- or warrior-kings, the city’s social system may well have been marred by caste.⁴⁰

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Tsarism and Stalinism as Bureaucratic Despotism

In his reflections on history, the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) laments the thirteenth-century subjugation of the federal city-states of Kyivan Rus’ in present-day Ukraine to the Qipchak khanate, otherwise known as the “Golden Horde”—the successor state of the Mongol Empire corresponding to Eastern Europe and the Western Steppe.⁴¹ Over the course of more than two centuries, the Qipchak khanate imposed a centralized State through census-taking, taxation, and corvée labor; the use of debt slavery, looting, extortion, and alliances with local landlords and clergy; and suppression of communal resistance in cities like Novgorod and Tver.⁴²

In climatological terms, Kropotkin proposed that Mongol expansionism resulted from the progressive dessication of Eurasia owing to planetary heating, although more recent research has suggested the opposite: namely, that the coolness and precipitation seen during the medieval “Little Ice Age” stimulated said migrations.⁴³ In parallel to his compatriot, in Statism and Anarchy (1873), Mikhail Bakunin worries about a perceived “danger […] from the East” ostensibly represented by China. He thus anticipates Wittfogel’s view that the Mongol rulers had picked up the bureaucratic methods with which they would maintain their vast Empire—what Shlapentokh identifies as the “tradition of total enslavement and perpetual terror”—from their conquest of China in 1240.⁴⁴

This is but a sample: it was not just Bakunin and Kropotkin—or the aforementioned George, London, Gompers, Lewis, or Magón—whose Orientalist views interpreted Russia and/or Asia with trepidation. Many other radicals have controversially viewed Russia as a “semi-Asiatic” society, starting with Marx, who contrasted Russia with “completely Eastern” China.⁴⁵ According to Marx, Tsarism represented a potent “semi-Asiatic” despotism underpinned by its employment of Western military technologies.⁴⁶ His disciples Friedrich Engels, Georgii Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin likewise considered Russian society to be “semi-Asiatic.” Engels hypothesized a link between the existence of rural peasant communes and “Oriental despotism,” and Lenin characterized the “Aziatchina” (Азиатчина), or the “Asiatic system” of bonded labor, as governing Imperial Russian society. Plekhanov would argue against Lenin’s proposal for the nationalization of the land by announcing, “We want no Kitaishchina” (Китайщина), or “Chinese system.”⁴⁷

In parallel, Bakunin’s fellow anarcho-Populist Alexander Herzen, the ‘father’ of Russian socialism, likened the Imperial Russian State to “Genghis Khan with telegraphs” in an 1857 letter to Tsar Alexander II. Herzen thus found common ground with the historians Nikolai Karamzin, who blamed Russia’s reactionary nature on the legacy of the Mongol Empire, and V. O. Kliuchevsky, who regarded the Tsarist State to be an “Asiatic structure […] decorated by a European facade.”⁴⁸ In literary terms, the Symbolist Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913–1914) similarly depicts Tsarist Russia as a “fragile Western civilization” grafted onto the “savage [sic] ‘Eastern’ culture of the peasantry” and threatened by “Asiatic hordes.”⁴⁹

Anarchists and Marxists from later generations would make similar comments about the Soviet Union. In her memoirs about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman questionably calls the Bolshevik leader Lenin, whose maternal grandfather was Kalmyk, a “shrewd Asiatic.” In parallel, Walter Benjamin remarks in his Moscow Diary, based on a 1927 visit, on how “astounding” he finds “the exotic surg[ing] forth from the city,” where he recalls having discerned “many Mongol faces.”⁵⁰ Historian Richard Stites notes that the Bolsheviks’ Red Guard uniforms included “Mongol-type cap[s]” and coats that were “vaguely [Asian].”⁵¹ Suspecting that his rival and ultimate killer Joseph Stalin had hastened Lenin’s own death in 1924, Lev Trotsky accused Stalin of “Mongolian ferocity.”⁵² Furthermore, Nikolai Berdyaev describes Stalin, the Georgian General Secretary who dominated the Soviet Union for three decades, as a “ruler of the Eastern Asiatic type” and a “peculiar sort of Russian fascis[t].”⁵³

Paradoxically, such Orientalist interpretations of Russian and Soviet society were also shared by conservatives. Contrasting his dismal view of the Golden Horde’s imprint on Russian history with the supposedly progressive legacy of the occupation of Iberia by various Muslim rulers from the eighth to fifteenth centuries, the Russian-chauvinist poet Alexander Pushkin quipped that the Mongols had brought Russia “neither algebra nor Aristotle,” but rather, a new Dark Age.⁵⁴ From a distinct perspective, Prince Esper Ukhtomskii, tutor of Tsar Nicholas II, held that the Empire’s conquests in the Caucasus and Central Asia served to unite Russians with the “alien races” that are ostensibly “related to us in blood, in traditions, in thought […].”⁵⁵ Later, Winston Churchill would compare Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union to an “aggressive semi-Asiatic totalitarianism.”⁵⁶

Shlapentokh agrees with Wittfogel’s claim that “Oriental despotism was actually the template” for the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. This is so, the argument goes, given their common domination by bureaucratic-despotic ruling classes that have perpetuated the Imperial legacy to impose State capitalism and pursue superpower and nuclear status. Along these lines, echoing those cited above, Shlapentokh compares Stalin to “an Egyptian pharaoh or […] the First Emperor of Qin,” while Domenico Losurdo compares the Mao Zedong, the longstanding Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to an Asiatic “despot.”⁵⁷ Beyond the reigns of these two totalitarian bureaucrats, the CCP’s massacre of students and workers in and around Tiananmen Square in early June 1989; its genocide of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other ethno-religious minorities; and its imposition of an ideology of “no human rights” at work, plus Russia’s ongoing genocidal war on Ukraine, all echo the unpleasant dimensions of the past.⁵⁸

Nevertheless, according to the insights of anthropologist Kate Currie, Hegel, Marx, Engels, and company were factually mistaken in presenting their hypotheses about the origins of Asiatic despotism as either emanating from an exclusive State monopoly in the land, or communal ownership at the village level. By contrast, Currie finds that, in the South Asian Mughal Empire that predated British colonial rule, “there certainly existed a hierarchy of land rights,” and individual peasant cultivation existed. Undoubtedly, as she writes, it is misleading, ahistorical, and racist to equate the the proposed features of agromanagerial or “Oriental” despotism with “the descriptive category ‘Asia.’”⁵⁹ Currie proposes the adjective “tributary” as a more appropriate alternative to describe this “non-capitalist interventionist state,” which

appropriates the surplus product from the direct producer and which stands in the same objectively antagonistic relationship to that producer as does the slave-owner to the slave, the feudal lord to the serf, and the capitalist to the wage labourer.⁶⁰

Currie’s framework of the tributary State—which explains important aspects of Imperial China, the People’s Republic of China, the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia—can be fruitfully compared with theories of State capitalism shared by council communists, dissident Trotskyists, and anarchists, as well as with Tom Wetzel’s concept of the bureaucratic control class of capitalism.⁶¹

Conclusion: Against Orientalism, Capitalism, and the Tributary State

In conclusion, we aim to close on a note that is critical of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, capitalism, and the tributary State, and sympathetic to internationalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and anarcho-communism. In this sense, the present-day labor and anarchist movements, and the left overall, would do well to come to terms with the Orientalism, Sinophobia, and Nipponophobia that these ostensibly historically progressive forces have promoted. It is both inconsistent with human equality and completely self-defeating for radicals or revolutionaries to advance racism, misogyny, and/or heterosexism either in practice or in the imagination. Doing so wrecks the emancipatory cause of the working classes.

As discussed in this chapter, the AFL and Magonista PLM discriminated against Asian immigrants in the USA and Mexico, disastrously bolstering the Chinese Exclusion Act and laying the groundwork for pogroms like the Torreón massacre of May 1911. By contrast, by welcoming Asian fellow workers, the IWW served as a shining exception to the Sinophobic “rule” of the contemporary North-American labor movement.⁶² This principled stance bears important implications for today: namely, that the workers should come together for self-emancipation through the One Big Union, and that the abolition of racism is indispensable to the cause of freedom.⁶³

Undoubtedly, spaces reminiscent of Mohenjo Daro and the “Peach Blossom Spring” cannot co-exist today with capitalism or the echoes of the tributary State. After all, whether practiced in Asia, the Americas, or anywhere else, the bourgeois subordination of labor is antithetical to human freedom and ecological sustainability.⁶⁴ Indeed, as Journey to the West demonstrates, the lyrical Pure Land can only be reached through dedicated radical struggle. Solely through union, self-organization, and the diffusion of an internationalist, feminist, and anti-racist imagination can the workers clear away the various obstacles to emancipation.

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Footnotes

1 Marx 452.

2 Losurdo 2020: 396.

3 Ambrose 149–66.

4 Nakayama; Ambrose 17.

5 Jackson 13.

6 Davis 2018: 93.

7 Yam.

8 Bekiempis.

9 Clark 2.

10 Lindner.

11 Jackson 5–6, 15.

12 Ibid 9; Herbert 74; Davis 2020a: 252.

13 Mink and Baum.

14 Lewis 49, 55, 61.

15 Herbert 91–2.

16 Struthers 76.

17 Rosenberg 77.

18 Ibid 77–9; Struthers 61.

19 Davis 2018: 22–9.

20 Said.

21 Shlapentokh 490–5.

22 Wittfogel 4–9.

23 Capra 102; Shlapentokh 490–501.

24 Al-’Azm.

25 Anderson 14.

26 Aristotle 1252b:7–9.

27 Losurdo 2020: 949; Anderson 15.

28 Du Bois vii, 16–43; Gerth and Mills 209–13; Pilkington.

29 Shlapentokh 491.

30 Katsiaficas 2012.

31 Wittfogel 8–9; Shlapentokh 504.

32 Davis 2020a: 285–300.

33 Struthers 74–5.

34 Herbert 167–84.

35 Najár; Cumberland 193, 199, 208; Herbert 21, 110, 201–6.

36 Clark; Richter; Rapp; Ramnath; Robinson K 261, 267 (emphasis in original); Cheng’en 1080; Denner 15; Capra; Katsiaficas 2012, 2013.

37 Robinson A; Pitt.

38 Du Bois 98–114; Lahiri 75–7; Smith et al.

39 Green; Eisler 9.

40 Graeber and Wengrow 313–21.

41 Kropotkin 1991: 15–16, 89–90.

42 Evtuhov et al. 72–3; Wittfogel 1–8, 201–224.

43 Kropotkin 1904: 723; Davis 2020b: 198–9.

44 Bakunin 100; Wittfogel 220–5; Shlapentokh 505.

45 Wittfogel 375.

46 Shlapentokh 495–6.

47 Wittfogel 375–94.

48 Герцен (my translation); Figes 369.

49 Figes 262, 421.

50 Goldman 47; Benjamin 104.

51 Stites 133.

52 Losurdo 2023: 14.

53 Berdyaev 147.

54 Figes 367.

55 Morrison.

56 Losurdo 2023: 207–8 (emphasis in original).

57 Shlapentokh 498–501; Losurdo 2023: 298.

58 Smith.

59 Currie 256–63.

60 Ibid 259–64 (emphasis added).

61 Harman; Voline; Price 172–95; Wetzel 11–12.

62 Jackson 11.

63 Du Bois 257–60.

64 Deyo; Davis 2018.