Pan-Asianism, Anti-Imperialism, and Marxist Ambivalence

CONCLUSION: THE TROUBLE WITH PAN-ASIANISM

In an interview on a Russian state-TV channel on April 6, 2023, Viktor Bout—an international arms dealer who made headlines after he was party to a prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia for basketball star Brittney Griner—told a reporter he had sent a telegram to Trump urging him to flee to Russia for safety. “Most likely he will simply be eliminated there [the U.S.]. Therefore, I think it’s in the best interests of all of humanity and primarily all of the American people to invite Donald Trump here, to Russia, to give him security and protection here so that he leads this uprising against the globalists and, most important, does not allow the elimination of the American people.” Absurd as it may sound, the proposal for a direct alliance between today’s Russia and the Trumpian populism (alliance in their shared “uprising against the globalists”) emulates Russia’s ideological project—to create a new multipolar world in which even the people in the states that dominate the global order will be liberated. Recall Trump’s motto “America First!” which he also used in his short comment on why he didn’t put more pressure on Saudi Arabia after the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Trump’s argumentation is that Saudi Arabia offered special low prices to the U.S. for its petrol, so who cares about the peculiarities of the Saudi political order. That’s why Trump’s move to Russia is “in the best interest of all of humanity and primarily all of the American people” and the only way to prevent “the elimination of the American people” by the ruling globalists. So when Putin says, “America has nothing to offer the world except domination,” he is attacking America as a global power, which at the same time exploits the majority of the American people (for whom Trump speaks). America following the “America First!” policy would fit Putin’s vision perfectly. During his annual speech to the Discussion Club on October 27, 2022, Putin criticized the U.S. and its allies in the West and called on other countries in the non-aligned world to join Russia in building a new multipolar world: “Real democracy in a multipolar world first of all presupposes the possibility for any nation, any society, and any civilization to choose their own way, their own sociopolitical system. If the United States, the European Union countries have this right, then the Asian countries, the Islamic states, the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, the states of other continents certainly have it as well.” In an abstract sense these claims may sound convincing. Democracy is not just a form of political life within a country; it can only work if each country has the right to choose its own socio-political system freely—in this sense, each country should put its interests first. When Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow on March 21, 2023, they made the same point. Their meeting “showed the two countries’ commitment to creating a new world order, one where the U.S. is no longer the arbiter of everything that happens on the global stage.” But what about, say, the protests in Iran? We have to accept the fact that a reference to Western democracy and human rights can also serve as an index of authentic protest—protesters may use this reference even if their activity is not in any way “Eurocentric.” However, China cannot be said to advocate for the Russian version of the new world order. For over a century it has been promoting another project, so-called Pan-Asianism.

Pan-Asianism emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction against Western imperialism, domination, and exploitation. From the very beginning, it was a complex project of economic and political emancipation based on the rejection of Western liberal individualism. It came in many shades, but its main ingredient was anti(-Western)-imperialism, the idea that Asia does not have to follow the Western way of progress (i.e., that it can appropriate its premodern traditions to organize its own industrial modernization in a way that will be even more dynamic than that of the West). Viren Murthy proposes a Hegelian reading of Pan-Asianism. While Hegel saw Asia as the domain of a substantial order with no space for free subjectivity, revolutionary Asian theorists propose a new Hegelian triad: The West offers abstract individualism that negates Asian substantial order and leads to social disintegration, so that only a “sublation” (Aufhebung, or creative overcoming) of Western individualist subjectivity in a new collective agency can give rise to new freedom. A possible solution for our catastrophic situation thus resides not in Western freedoms but in the Asian radicalization of European subjectivity. However, did we not get with Japan’s militarization and colonialist expansion the first model of new radicalized collective subjectivity? Does such subjectivity not also perfectly fit Fascism? Murthy himself points out that Pan-Asianism oscillated between its Socialist and Fascist version (the two were not often clearly divided).

We should not forget that “anti-imperialism” is not as innocent a motto as it may appear: Both Japanese and German Fascists regularly used it, presenting themselves as defenders against American, British, and French imperialism. Even Sun Yat-sen, the hero of progressive Pan-Asianism, occasionally expressed sympathies for nascent European Fascism, clearly preferring it to liberalism, which he dismissed as unfit for Asian circumstances. In China, the literary and philosophical reforms of the nineteenth century gave way to the anti-Marxist developmental nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. The similarities between Italian Fascism and Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary ideology derive from their shared reactive and developmental nationalism. And this tendency is discernible even in post–Deng Xiaoping China. A. James Gregor developed the thesis that today’s People’s Republic of China is best classified as “a variant of contemporary Fascism.” It is true that parts of the Latin American radical Left define their goal as a return to the ancient Incan community, but it is the same project of going “back to the future” that Putin and his clique are trying to enact in Russia (and around it) today.

For Pan-Asians who want to remain Marxists, the main point of reference is Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich, in which he allows for the possibility that collectively owned farms in Russia could directly enter Socialism without a detour through capitalist de-collectivization. However, for Marx, such cases are exceptions: Only capitalism creates the proletarian, in the sense of “substance-less subjectivity,” i.e., a revolutionary force able to reappropriate the alienated social substance. Premodern communities of farmers can directly pass into Socialism only when the political power of proletarians opens up the possibility for socialized agriculture. Without proletarian power, farmers cannot directly enter Socialism.