ISSUE 1

Southeast Asia has been, for centuries, one of the richest parts of the world. Abundant in natural resources, one could go as far as calling it the eastern cradle of civilization. It was the harbor of one of the first oceanic trade routes, all the way back into 1500 BC, which linked Madagascar with SEA. The Austronesian people of this region were the first to build ocean-going ships, and this allowed the birth of the florid spice trade. These commerce relations were so important that the cultural exchanges with India became so intense that, around 500 BC, SEA saw the birth of the first Indianised kingdoms, as those new cultural entities based on cross-contamination of Austronesian and Indian traditions and costumes has been defined by George Coedès. 

 

These contaminations led to the affirmation of a new model of social organization, which from a rural, decentralized structure evolved into the centralized structure that characterizes the first stage of the mode of production immediately after that of primitive communism, the primitive Kingdom. The first Hindu kingdoms were in Sumatra and Java, and with them came the concept of the Devaraj, the god-king, which had not only an important political characterization but a theological and social one as well. The next major social revolution happened between the V and XII century, a period during which Buddhism came to be the dominant religion in the region. To this period date marvelous masterworks of art and architecture such as the Shwezigon golden pagoda of Bagan, in Myanmar. Between the XI and the XII century, the geopolitical landscape of the area came to be defined into two relatively distinct areas of influence. Mainland SEA was dominated by the Khmer Empire, while the insular, oceanic part of it was under the hegemony of whoever was capable of controlling Sumatra, due to the advantageous geographical position that allowed it almost complete control over the aforementioned west going trade route which linked SEA and China to the West African and Middle Eastern regions. 

 

To this period, dates the spread of Islam in the region, which came to have very particular syncretic characteristics, absorbing elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, and even ancient Austronesian Animism. This great landscape of civilizations was brought to an abrupt end by the European colonizers, who ruthlessly conquered and divided the entire region. The first colonial power to enter the area was Portugal, which was however rapidly superseded by the Dutch and the Spanish, which were then followed by the British and the French. The years of colonial rule were incredibly harsh, especially between 1850 and 1918, a period during which the lotting and looting of the rich natural resources of the SEA region reached unprecedented peaks. The colonial system, inherent to capitalism and the direct expression of its ever-expanding thirst for resources and labor, in its quest to generate capital extracting wealth from the peripheries, the colonies, directing it to the imperial core, in our case, Europe, left a much profound scar in the history and society of the region. The necessity of a justification back in the homeland of the right of the colonizers to subjugate the colonized led to the appearance of “race science” which sought to determine the natural superiority of the white colonizer over the Black, Asian or indigenous victim of his oppressing boot. The scourge of white supremacy, which to this day plagues our society, has its origin in imperialism and colonialism. The asphyxiating yoke of foreign, imperialistic capitalist rule led to the widespread growth of communist movements, the only doctrine that offered a coherent analysis and at the same time a way forward for these oppressed masses. The affirmation of anti-capitalist ideals led to a variety of conflicts between colonial powers and the oppressed people of the region. 

 

Exemplary is the case of Vietnam. From the very outset of the French invasion and colonial rule, resistance movements started to build up, in a more or less coordinated fashion. In the first years, most of the anti-French sentiment was channeled by the old feudal lord into a monarchist movement in which the masses were coopted to defend and support a return to a feudal model. 

 

From the turn of the century, however, the leadership of the movement fell out of the hands of the old nobility to assume new republican tendencies, from feudal landlords to the national bourgeoisie. The new doctrine that was naturally caused by this shift from an out-of-time hope for a return to the past to the quest for the affirmation of a national capitalist class was one deeply concerned with the modernization and the industrialization of the country. As a consequence, two movements came to emerge: Đông Du (Go East), whose plan was to form an educated vanguard of the people by sending the sons of the bourgeoisie to study in Japan so that they could become the leaders of an eventual armed struggle against the French, and Duy Tân (Modernisation), whose strategy was that of educating the masses of the country to favor a popular, more peaceful transition towards self-determination. Both movements were vastly unsuccessful in their scopes, being brutally quashed by the French dominators, but the Duy Tân left a fundamental cultural heritage: the substitution of the ancient ideograms system with a Latinised alphabet, which was preferred for its much higher schematics and, chiefly, ease of teaching. Despite those resounding defeats, the people of Vietnam did not desist from their fight. On the contrary, new, more radical movements rose to the task of leading this struggle. Phan Bội Châu, already a leader of the Đông Du, founded the Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội, which prepared for direct, armed confrontation and resistance to the occupiers. In 1927, the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (Vietnamese Nationalist Party) was created, its structure very closely resembling that of the Chinese Kuomintang. In 1930 the party was instrumental in launching the Yên Bái mutiny in Tonkin, whose outcome was disastrous for the party: its entire cadres were captured and subsequently guillotined. In those years many communist movements of different factions formed as well, but we have to wait until 1930 to see the unification of those divided, fractional entities into an organized party, the Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam (Vietnamese Communist Party), under the leadership of Nguyễn Sinh Cung, or, as he is more commonly known, Hồ Chí Minh. 

 

During the following years, the party would be subject to the same brutal repression other similar movements had experienced: its leaders hunted down and executed, it was brought to the brink of collapse. The only one of those charismatic figures that escaped the mass executions was Hồ Chí Minh since he was not in Vietnam at the time. The turning of the tide in favor of those independent movements came in 1940, with the Japanese invasion of Indochina. In 1941 Hồ Chí Minh returned to the country and formed the Việt Minh front, which cooperated with the American Office of Strategic Services to collect intel on the Japanese forces and to perform sabotage and various other guerrilla operations. In August 1945, the independentist forces launched a revolution, the Cách mạng tháng Tám (August Revolution). The emperor was forced to abdicate, and the seizure of power was almost immediate in the north, with Hanoi falling on August 19. On September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh declared independence and the birth of the Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) with capital Hanoi. In the south of the country, the rebellion wasn’t equally swift in its execution: various factions vied for power, both within the communist movement and from the outside, such as monarchist or liberal-democratic ones. Despite the difficulties, a provisional government was established and the arduous work of connecting the north and the south of the country was started. 

 

The situation seemed to precipitate when allied forces started to land on the Vietnamese shores to enforce the terms outlined in the Potsdam conference. The western powers, anxious to prevent the affirmation of a strong communist, anti-imperialist movement in the region, had tried to once again suppress the Vietnamese people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered Chian Kai Shek, leader of the Kuomintang to take over the entire region and make what could essentially be defined as a colony of it, but he initially refused since he was well aware that trying to keep the region under control would have been a quasi- impossible task, especially for a nation as weak and divided as China. On the plus side, FDR opposed the return of the French, viewing their rule as excessively despotic. Yet, Vietnam was divided along the 16th parallel in the Potsdam conference, and on August 20, the Chinese First Front Army entered North Vietnam, while on September 13 the British started the occupation of the South. However, while the Chinese forces left ample autonomy to Hồ Chí Minh’s provisional government, which was able to consolidate its apparatus, the British forces let the French reassert their dominance over the south, undoing the harshly fought for conquests of the southern Vietnamese people by establishing martial law and by freeing and rearming more than 1000 French soldiers who had been previously detained, with general Douglas Gracey, commander of the British forces in the region, refusing to meet with the Vietnamese authorities and instead of proclaiming “Civil and military control [of Vietnam] by the French is only a matter of weeks”. On January 6, 1946, north Vietnam held elections for the National Assembly, which saw the triumph of the Nationalist Front, which included the Việt Minh, winning over 300 seats on 350 in elections that were described as fair and representative of the popular will, especially in consideration of the contingencies, and despite terrorist attacks by the French, who opposed the election. 

 

Meanwhile, in the south, General Leclerc was conducting vast military campaigns with 35000 troops at his disposal to once again suppress the national liberation movement, a campaign that despite the bloodshed was completely unsuccessful in “pacification” (read suffocate rebellions in the blood) anything beyond “100 yards on either side of all major roads” In light of the inability of the southern partisans to resist the French advance, Hồ Chí Minh started to negotiate with the French in an attempt to avoid a war that would have only caused further suffering for the Vietnamese people. General de Gaulle, former leader of Free France and now President of the French Republic had the firm intention of keeping the french empire under control, with no concessions to independence whatsoever. On February 27 21000 French soldiers set sails for North Vietnam’s shores to put pressure on Hồ Chí Minh (who was embroiled in negotiations with the French authorities) to concede. The day afterward, the 28th , France struck an agreement with China which guaranteed the retreat of all Chinese forces from North Vietnam, leaving the democratic republic completely exposed to French assault. As its president, Hồ Chí Minh sent an urgent telegram to President Truman asking the US “to interfere urgently in support of our [Vietnamase] independence”, a telegram which was met with no response. Pressured from all sides and isolated, Hồ Chí Minh was forced to accept a heavily unfavorable accord, in which North Vietnam was declared a Free State within the Indochinese Federation under the French Union (the new name the Fourth Republic gave to what essentially was the old prewar Empire). The French on their part promised not to increase troop presence north of the 16th parallel over 15000 men, a provision they did not respect. The main point of the accord was however the future of South Vietnam. 

 

Hồ Chí Minh obtained the promise of a referendum being held to determine its fate. While this may seem like a (relative) victory, the truth is that it was simply not a way to address the issue, moving the debate to a future yet to be defined. To make the situation worse, President Truman reversed the policy of opposing a French return in the region, instead of backing it, despite the protests from various officials and general, in the general climate of anti-communist policy that would lead to the solidification of the Cold War blocks. Hồ Chí Minh was starkly criticized by other leaders of the independentist movement for the agreement, but his support for it derived from his fear that the temporary occupation by Chinese forces would gradually transform into long-lasting domination, apparently commenting “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life”. On May 31 Hồ Chí Minh leaves Vietnam for Paris, to directly negotiate with president de Gaulle the independence of Vietnam. Throughout the following weeks, however, the situation in Vietnam became direr and direr. French troops repeatedly tried to attack North Vietnamese positions, while in the south larger and larger resistance movements were being secretly organized. After months of sterile talks, Hồ Chí Minh returned to Vietnam on October 20. A direct military confrontation between Vietnamese and French forces was now ineluctable. On November 8 the Việt Minh demanded the reunification of the nation under an independent republic. On the 23, French forces began the bombardment of Haiphong, which led to the death of 6000 civilians and the destruction of much of the city. The US had by this point completely abandoned any semblance of support for the self-determination of the Vietnamese people, deeming French presence as fundamental “as an antidote to Soviet influence [and] future Chinese imperialism”. The First Indochina War, as it is commonly known, had started. It would end only in May 1954, after the resounding defeat of the American-supplied french troops in Điện Biên Phủ. The following peace treaty saw France retain control of South Vietnam under the 17th parallel through the State of Vietnam, nominally ruled by the formerly deposed emperor but practically under western control. This settlement was incredibly unstable, the State of Vietnam seeing strong independentist communist movements which could not be content with it. When a popular insurrection erupted in South Vietnam to oust the emperor and reunite the country, the USA intervened immediately, starting the horrid collection of crimes against humanity that the Vietnam War was. Passing over the various atrocities of the Vietnam war, which we, unfortunately, have no time to eviscerate now, as that would require an entire book by itself, suffice it to say that on one day the US aviation dropped more tonnes of explosive on one Vietnamese formation then they had on the whole of Japan during the entire year 1945. 

 

What this long historical excursus illustrates to us with perfect clarity is the inextricable link between capitalism and imperialism. Imperialism is the natural consequence of the quest for the reduction of the price of labor and for the accretion of the inflow of resources needed to sustain the ever-growing production rates. Capitalism requires production to always expand, naturally driving down the rate of profit with every technological innovation. 

 

Therefore, to maintain or increase the level of profit, the number of goods sold must increase sharply, and at the same time, the cost of labor must be reduced further and further. This is done through two principal avenues. The first is, if we want, endogenous: the same technological innovations that increase productivity, reducing the price of commodities, reduce by doing so the value of labor, which is determined by the value of the worker’s education, plus what is needed to sustain themselves and their family, thereby reproducing its labor force and the social labor force through their children. The second one, necessary to compensate for the reduction of the value of commodities that naturally results from the previously illustrated process - if the value of the labor and the socially needed time for the production of a commodity decrease so does the value of the final product - and therefore the reduction of the rate of profit and total profits, comes through searching for geographical loci where the cost of labor is lower than what would be in the previous production location. Such a disparity may be attributed to various reasons, such as a lower level of general technological advancement, reduced access and pervasiveness of goods which may fall within the necessities of the working class in one region but be superfluous, of luxury in another; a practical example of this phenomenon would be cars. While a car is considered within the necessary “luxuries” for a working person in Europe or the USA, in Bangladesh, or similarly impoverished regions, the percentage of workers who own such an item is incredibly limited. This can be attributed to various reasons, such as a less specialized workforce - therefore a less educated one - and, chiefly a lower level of class consciousness on the part of the proletarians, which are yet to wage their struggle for their rights or they are at a lower stage of it. This demonstrates why the only real anti-imperialist movement is and can only be anti-capitalist, for, until the general, global capitalistic system and its son imperialism will be mere remembrance, there will be no freedom for the global south, for the impoverished nations, for the POC, for the colonized, for - using Fanon’s words - the ‘Wretched of the Earth.’