My critical review of Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel has been published in Philosophy in Review,Vol 46 No 1 (Feb. 2026).
The review, which is available open-access, can be found here. It is reproduced below.
Domenico Losurdo. Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet. Translated by Gregor Benton. Introduction by Harrison Fluss. Haymarket Books, 2021. 1052 pp. $65.00 USD (Paperback 9781642593402).
Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel serves as a corrective to the distortions and evasions that many leftist fans of this far-right German philosopher have peddled about him. Such irresponsibility and denialism, which Losurdo terms the “hermeneutics of innocence” (1004), sadly persist in the twenty-first century, over a century after his death.
For instance, in a 2005 essay, anti-fascist researcher Spencer Sunshine celebrates Friedrich Nietzsche’s positive reception among many now-deceased anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Murray Bookchin, and “Hakim Bey” (Fifth Estate, 2004–2005). However, this gloss—apparently written to help promote Sunshine’s co-edited 2004 volume, I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition—“make[s] difficult cuts” to reality, as Losurdo might say (827), by denying the thinker’s antisemitism and German nationalism. Moreover, it omits that the philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, subject of one of the chapters in said volume, mirrored Nietzsche in supporting the Hindu caste system, as anarchist Brian Morris points out in his critical review (Philosophy Now, 2006), and that the Nietzschean enthusiast and volume contributor Peter Lamborn Wilson (“Bey”) was a known pedophile apologist, as Robert P. Helms reminds us (The Anarchist Library, 2004).
Against proponents of an incoherent “Left Nietzscheanism,” the author highlights the “consistently reactionary character” of this philosopher’s approach (949). Although Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a middle-class German philologist, he admired the feudal landlords: hence, the author’s summary of him as an “aristocratic rebel,” and of Morris’s description of him as promoting “aristocratic individualism.” Indeed, Nietzsche was a fanatical counter-revolutionary who was as rattled by Judeo-Christian egalitarianism, the French Revolution, and the Paris Commune as he was obsessed with brutality, slavery, and rank-ordering. This ultra-reactionary announced that “[t]here is no right either to existence or […] to ‘happiness,’” declared human dignity and equality to be “conceptual hallucinations,” and held “it necessary to remain, in the Congo or wherever, master over the barbarians [sic]” (97, 336, 599).
As is detailed by Losurdo and Ronald Beiner, author of Dangerous Minds (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Nietzsche embraced slavery in ancient Greece, Zoroastrian hierarchies, the Hindu caste system, and European feudalism and colonialism for their ostensible contributions to art, “civilization,” and “culture” (358, 415, 675–7, 928–9, 973; Beiner 24, 42–50). Employing the founder of Zoroastrianism as his spokesperson in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche attempts a full-throated legitimization of despotism, majesty, “master morality,” and genocidal antagonism (Losurdo 573, 721, 940). Not coincidentally, Nietzsche has provided great inspiration to numerous fascists, including Mussolini, Hitler, Goebbels, Heidegger, Evola, Spencer, and Dugin (719, 733–4, 808–16; Beiner 2–12).
Above all, Nietzsche believed most human beings to have been “born to serve and to obey” (Beiner 2–12). As Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson explain in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Nietzsche’s follower Michel Foucault preferred Eastern pre-modern societies and anti-modern movements like Iranian Khomeinism over Western modernity, just as his German predecessor had fixated on the hierarchies of classical antiquity and the Brahminical caste system as flights of fancy from subversive, rationalistic, and optimistic Western tendencies (13–23). In this vein, Nietzsche acknowledged his “terrible ‘antidemocratism,’” self-identified as an “opponent” of “socialists,” and often targeted what he called the “anarchism of indignation.” In fact, he fantasized about crushing the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International (1864–1876), which was famously divided between Marxists and anarchists (Losurdo 22, 188, 330, 586).
In parallel, Nietzsche viewed the eighteenth-century philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who inspired the French Revolution (1789–1793), as utter anathema. In his dual rejection of the liberal and radical elements of the Revolution, Nietzsche mirrored notorious European conservatives like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Plus, far from being a critic of German nationalism, as Sunshine would have it, the young Nietzsche actually sympathized with Prussian resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte, supported Otto von Bismarck, and joined the army as a volunteer at the start of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) (38–9, 68, 188, 250–1, 336–8; Beiner 8).
Nietzsche was especially incensed by the 1871 Paris Commune, a short-lived experiment in revolutionary proletarian self-management that emerged spontaneously through the devastation wrought by this same war. He viewed the popular uprising in Paris as one of the “head[s] of the international hydra” of socialism. Like his fellow German Karl Marx, who cheered the outbreak of hostilities in a July 1870 letter to Friedrich Engels, Nietzsche celebrated the Prussian victory at war’s end as a defeat for the French revolutionary tradition. By stark contrast with Marx, though, Nietzsche consistently condemned modernity and progressive social transformation in his writings. He viewed the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution as part of a larger, “single Western revolution” with roots in Judaism and Christianity—while holding it all in contempt (26–32, 42, 62, 86–7, 252, 349, 460–6, 829–30).
In line with historically hegemonic German antisemitic attitudes, and especially those of his mentors Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, Nietzsche actually expressed strongly Judeophobic sentiments in his youth. He associated Jews with journalism and subversion, or what he called the Socratic spirit; complained about how “despicable” he found the “Jewish phrase heaven on earth”; and lamented the supposed “[a]nnihilation of Greek culture by the Jewish world” (108–10, 117–36, 173, 247). Undoubtedly, Nietzsche’s abhorrence of Christianity had much to do with its Judaic roots, considering the two faiths’ common emphasis on morality, compassion, prophecy, social leveling, and millenarianism. The German thinker evidently felt threatened by the “deadly hatred of the masters of the earth” preached by both Judaism and Christianity—in common with the socialist and anarchist traditions. Alluding to Hinduism, he feared that Christianity represented “the victory of Chandala,” or “Untouchable,” “values.” At once, he looked on Jesus the Nazarene as a “holy anarchist” and a dangerous “political criminal” who would merit exile to Siberia, if not immediate execution, were he to be resurrected (264, 283, 413, 465–6, 510, 572–4, 959).
Given this grim panorama, how should Nietzsche’s politics be read? In Anarchism and Other Essays (1969), the anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman controversially defends the philosopher’s alarming ideas about the Übermensch, or “over-man,” as anticipating “a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves” (Dover Publications, 44). Whether one reads this vision of the future as conveying apocalyptic social leveling or, more alarmingly, a Nietzschean disregard for vulnerable populations (including sick patients, people with disabilities, and enslaved workers), Beiner interprets Nietzsche’s corpus similarly to the author: that is, as a “direct call to action” to cancel the “liberal-egalitarian dispensation” of historical modernity, overturn the legacies of the Reformation and the Revolution, and restore feudal hierarchies (Beiner 40–6, 134).
In other words, Nietzsche followed counter-revolutionaries like Burke in seeking to roll back the gains of 1789, as well as “conservative revolutionaries” like Wagner, whose right-wing extremism paradoxically anticipated fascism. The Marxist philosophers György Lukács and Ernst Bloch and German artist Thomas Mann likewise saw Nietzsche’s theories as preparing the ground for Nazism. To this point, Losurdo asserts that his object of study aimed at conjuring a “party of life” that would crush modern subversiveness through a brutal reassertion of domination and hierarchy. Along these lines, Nietzsche utterly rejected compassion and humanitarianism; promoted wars and strict rank-ordering; and incited killing, elite ruthlessness, and the “will to power” and other “terrible things” (274–7, 352, 365–6, 420, 597, 683, 711, 725–32, 814–9, 838, 853, 996; Beiner 40).
Indeed, in common with contemporary social Darwinists and eugenicists, and with the Nazis he arguably inspired, Nietzsche fixated on unscientific claims about ostensible genius, human degeneration, and “natural hierarchy.” Reflecting his attack on Judeo-Christian morals, he announced that “[t]he great majority have no right to exist [sic], but are a misfortune for superior human beings [sic].” Outrageously, he encouraged disabled and chronically ill patients to die prematurely, whether through self-destruction or outright “[a]nnihilation” (100–6, 381, 410, 586–7, 596–9, 695, 715, 996). Accordingly, Morris aptly charges Nietzsche with “play[ing] around with the idea not simply of improving the human race, but of eradicating the weak – by poisoning their wells!” Such incitement undoubtedly amounts to a “morality of cruelty,” in the words of Marxist historian Franz Mehring (718).
With this in mind, Sunshine, Foucauldians, and other Nietzschean leftists might benefit from reflecting on a spin on the saying, “He’s just not that into you,” seen blazoned on T-shirts being sold at the first Inland Empire Anarchist Book Fair (2025). The shirts in question knowingly remarked on how “weird and embarrassing” it is to worship politicians—or, by extension, deceased philosophers—who don’t cherish you in return.
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 masochismand 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
Figure 1: A photograph of Maderista troops ransacking downtown Torreón, Coahuila, during an anti-Chinese pogrom on May 15, 1911 (public domain)
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. 4th 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
Figure 2: Another view of the ruins of Mohenjo Daro in present-day Pakistan. The domed structure in the distance is a Buddhist stupa that was constructed after the decline of the Indus Valley civilization. (Quratulain – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35769467)
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.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
Green, Adam S. 2020. “Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization.” Journal of Archaeological Research.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9.
Harman, Chris 2022. “From Trotsky to state capitalism.” Marxists Against Stalinism. London: Resistance Books. 27–51.
Herbert, Julián 2015. The House of the Pain of Others. Trans. Christina MacSweeney. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
Jackson, Justin F. 2021. “Labor and Chinese Exclusion in US History.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press. 17–21.
Katsiaficas, George 2012. Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century. Oakland: PM Press
— 2013. Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009. Oakland: PM Press.
Kropotkin, Peter 1904. “The Desiccation of Eur-Asia.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 6. 722–34.
— 1991. Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Lahiri, Nayanjot 2015. Ashoka in Ancient India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, Arthur M. 2003. “Lewis’ First Speech.” Marx versus Tolstoy: A Debate. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. 37–67.
Lindner, Kolja 2021. “Hegemonic Orientalism and Historical Materialism: Karl Marx, Edward Said, and Mahdi Amel.” Critical Times, vol. 4, no. 3. 517–529.
Losurdo, Domenico 2020. Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet. Trans. Gregor Benton. Chicago: Haymarket Books
— 2023. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Trans. Salvatore Engel-di Mauro and Henry Hakamäki. Seattle: Iskra Books.
Marx, Karl 1976. Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books.
Mink, Gwendolyn and Bruce Baum 2009. “Meat vs. Rice (and Pasta): Samuel Gompers and the Republic of White Labor.” Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity. Eds. Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris. New York: Duke University Press. 145–63.
Nakayama, Don K 2023. “Chinese Railroad Workers, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Indispensability of Immigration to America.” The American Surgeon, vol. 90, no. 2. 323–6.
Pitt, Shaun 2021. “Anarcho-communism, New Liberalism and British Social Science Networks (1890-1921).” “Life, Freedom, & Ethics: Kropotkin Now!” International Conference, 6 February. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT5GvrzRLto. Accessed 13 February 2021.
Price, Wayne 2010. Anarchism & Socialism: Reformism or Revolution? Edmonton, Alberta: Thoughtcrime Ink.
Rapp, John A. 2012. Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China. London: Continuum.
Ramnath, Maia 2015. “No Gods, No Masters, No Brahmins: An Anarchist Inquiry on Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in India.” No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms. Oakland: AK Press. 44–79.
Richter, Sarah 2021. “Mutual Aid and the Sex Question.” “Life, Freedom, & Ethics: Kropotkin Now!” International Conference, 6 February. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT5GvrzRLto. Accessed 13 February 2021.
Robinson, Kim Stanley 2018. Red Moon. New York: Orbit.
Rosenberg, Daniel 1995. “The IWW and Organization of Asian Workers in Early 20th Century America.” Labor History, vol. 36, no. 1. 77–87.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Shlapentokh, Dmitry 2019. “Marx, the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production,’ and ‘Oriental Despotism’ as ‘True’ Socialism.” Comparative Sociology 18. 489–521.
Smith, Michael E. et al. 2014. “Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities.” Advances in Archaeological Practice, vol. 2, no. 4. 311–323.
Smith, Richard 2025. “China’s ‘No Human Rights’ Comparative Advantage vs. Western Tariffs: A Pro-Labor Alternative.” New Politics, vol. XX, no. 2.
Stites, Richard 1989. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Struthers, David 2013. “‘The Boss Has No Color Line’: Race, Solidarity, and a Culture of Affinity in Los Angeles and the Borderlands, 1907–1915.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 7, no. 2. 61–92.
Voline 1975. The Unknown Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Wetzel, Tom 2022. Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century. Chico, Calif.: AK Press.
Wittfogel, Karl 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The Great Sage Sun Wukong, imaginary simian protector of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, as painted by Yang Ruifen (2004). Credit Jim R. McClanahan.
Wu Cheng’en’s literary fantasy, Journey to the West (Xiyouji, c. 1592), is considered one of the four classic Chinese novels. Being one of the most historically popular pieces of Chinese literature, this epic has been adapted numerous times over the centuries into oral narratives, operas, and visual art. More recently, it has been made into well-received television series and video games like Dragon Ball Z (1989–1996) and Black Myth: Wukong (2024). Over the course of 100 chapters, Xiyouji provides a mythological spin on the Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s 16-year overland pilgrimage (629–645 CE) from China to India to study at Nalanda University and recover Mahāyāna scriptures. Xiyouji itself can be read as an appeal for Buddhism, defined as enlightenment.
By contrast with Theravāda, Hīnayāna, and Tantric interpretations of the dharma, or teachings, of the prophet Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (c. 540–480 BCE), Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism is more egalitarian, for it offers salvation to “all sentient beings” while allowing for the existence of numerous Buddhas.1 The very end of Xiyouji attests to this liberatory sense, with its radical declaration: “Let anyone who sees or hears / Cherish the enlightened mind.”2 Similarly, the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (c. 304–232 BCE), who converted from Hinduism to Buddhism in penance over his war crimes, only to become the greatest patron of the faith, advises his subjects in his first rock edict that the dharma is open to both “the lowly and the exalted.”3 In this vein, the radical openness of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which ironically took root in Tibet and China rather than India (its place of origin), continues the Buddha’s iconoclastic critique of hegemonic Brahminical hierarchies.4
As a fantastical embellishment of the translator Xuanzang’s travels, which are “counted among the greatest individual exploits in Chinese history,” according to scholar Hera Wagner, Xiyouji features 81 ordeals that the pilgrim and his guardians must confront and overcome to reach Thunder Monastery, where Shakyamuni-Amitābha Buddha resides in the afterlife.5 During this fictionalized epic journey, as Xuanzang and his companions confront a panoply of social ills owing to feudal domination in Asia, they exhibit anarchist practices of direct action, mutual aid, and the revolutionary defiance of hierarchy. In this sense, Xiyouji could be read to some extent as an archaeology, anthropology, and geography of equality, as well as a literary manifestation of the principle of hope.6
Even so, despite the strong anti-authoritarian and anarchist themes propagated by Xiyouji, there are evident socio-political and philosophical tensions, even contradictions, in the text. For example, the insurrectional anarchy practiced in the Celestial Court by the trickster yaoguai (demon) Sun Wukong in the “Havoc in Heaven” sequence at the story’s outset is suppressed in a joint operation that is led by the Daoist Jade Emperor, Laozi (the founder of Daoism), the Bodhisattva Guanyin (Avalokitesvara), and the spirit of Buddha himself. Wukong—an anthropomorphic macaque also known as the Monkey King, the Protector of the Horses, and the Great Sage Equalling Heaven—is thereafter punished for five centuries under Five-Element Mountain, before Guanyin converts him to the dharma and tasks him with escorting Xuanzang on his pilgrimage as atonement.
Throughout the perilous journey that Xuanzang and his bodyguards endure, Wukong repeatedly appeals to Guanyin and Buddha to save his master from doom at the hands of a host of oppressive yaoguais (monsters). Accordingly, despite its declaration of the great power of Wukong (and, by implication, nature and the working classes), Xiyouji appears to endorse the need for cross-class and corporate collaboration in the achievement of great endeavors. Hence, Cheng’en effectively affirms the place of hierarchy in socio-political life, with a nod not only to the dominant Chinese political culture of the day, but also to the “Middle Way” between anarchism and despotism proposed by the Buddha.
Historical Background on the Buddhist Dharma
To an extent, Xiyouji is a variation on the theme of the Buddha’s own life, just as Ashoka’s redemptive arc is, according to historian Nayanjot Lahiri.7 To this point, per the Dalit jurist B. R. Ambedkar’s alternative biographical explanation for Gautama’s renunciation of privilege (parivraja), the Buddha embraces asceticism not upon supposedly encountering poverty, illness, and death for the first time outside the walls of the palace of his family, the Shakyamunis—as the story usually goes. Rather, on this account, he does so after his objections to his clan’s plan to wage war on the neighboring Koliya clan are met with ostracization. Once he is rejected by the Shakyamunis for his anti-militarist dissent, the Buddha embarks on a “Great Departure” and enters the wilderness to commence his wandering ministry.8 In parallel, the historical Xuanzang launches a dangerous journey to the west after his application for a passport is denied by the Tang dynasty authorities. By persisting in his mission and pressing on westward regardless, Xuanzang effectively becomes an enemy of the Chinese State. However, Cheng’en utterly inverts this historical reality by presenting the enterprise as having been underwritten by the Tang Emperor himself! Significantly, both Gautama and Xuanzang begin their “dharma tours” at the age of twenty-nine.9
Wukong himself takes after both the Vajrapani, a muscular man who is depicted in visual art as the Buddha’s protector during the latter’s ascetic life, and the Greek hero Herakles (Hercules), who is condemned to performing difficult labors for having killed his family in a state of madness—akin to Wukong’s punishment for storming heaven. Certain parallels exist as well between Wukong and the wandering hero Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur. Like the Monkey King with Xuanzang, the Vajrapani is depicted as the Buddha’s “steady attendant” and one who “has his back, literally,” for he defends the prophet against assassination attempts by rivals, thus “champion[ing] the welfare of [hu]mankind.”10
Even more, Anthony Yu, one of Xiyouji’s English translators, suggests that Xuanzang should be read as the Buddha instead of the historical Chinese monk. Plus, we must not forget that Wukong himself becomes “Victorious Fighting Buddha” upon completion of the epic journey.11 Along these lines, it is remarkable that both Gautama and the Buddha-to-be depicted in the Jātaka folktales (c. 4th century CE) share Wukong’s epithet of “great sage.”12 The Monkey King’s imaginary body-dividing power also echoes one of Gautama’s stipulated miracles, performed at Sravasti, in the kingdom of Kosala (now Uttar Pradesh).13
Moreover, Wukong is a fighter like the Buddha, who was born into Hinduism’s Kshatriya warrior caste. However, Wukong breaks with Gautama’s example by suspending the dharmic doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence toward all living creatures, in order to defeat the myriad demons who stand in Xuanzang’s way. He apparently does so with Guanyin’s sanction, in a manner reminiscent not only of the Buddhist Shaolin monk-warriors, but also of Gautama himself, who is said to have singlehandedly subdued an army of demons sent by his antagonist Mara just before achieving enlightenment (see Figure 1 below). As well, Xuanzang, Wukong, and company practice strict vegetarianism, in keeping with ahimsa and the reforms in defense of animals dictated by the Buddhist patrons Ashoka and the Chinese Emperor Wudi (r. 502–49 CE).14
Figure 1: Siddhartha Gautama (center) resists the onslaught of Mara (right foreground), in this late-nineteenth century copy by John Griffiths of a mural from the first Ajanta cave. Gautama appears to be expressing the tripataka mudra with his right hand, as though to invoke Indra (the Hindu king of the gods) for protection. Credit Griffiths, Plate 8/Public Domain.
Furthermore, Wukong and his fellow yaoguai protectors—Pig (Zhu Bajie) and Friar Sand (Sha Wujing)—function in keeping with established Indian and Chinese myths featuring animal helpers.15 In Ārya Śūra’s Jātaka fables about the Buddha’s previous incarnations, some of which are reproduced in the Ajanta cave murals that were rediscovered in Maharashtra in the early nineteenth century (see above), there is a clear appeal for readers to cultivate sympathy for non-human animals. This is based in part on their ostensibly superior courage and virtue, relative to human beings, who are often depicted as mistreating and killing their fellow creatures for pleasure and gain.16 Such messaging accords with the love of animals and principles of ahimsa and maitri, or love for all living beings, preached by the Buddha and Mahāvīra (c. 599–527 BCE), the founder of Jainism. Like Mahāvīra, the parivrajaka (ascetic) Gautama condemned the Brahminical ritual mass-sacrifice of animals as cruel and unnecessary, recommending compassion, the recognition of interdependence, and ethical conduct as alternative bases for a true life.17
In fact, in a couple of the Jātaka stories, the Buddha is presented in previous lives as a Great Ape and Monkey King who resides in beautiful habitats full of “flowers, fruits, buds, and foliage”—quite like Wukong’s own home on the imaginary “Mountain of Flowers and Fruit,” located on an island in the South China Sea!18 Furthermore, there exist definite similarities between Wukong and the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, in terms of their heroism, defiance, and great power. Even so, Wukong’s dualistic identity—as a mighty guardian of Xuanzang and agent of Guanyin, vs. demonic menace to the Celestial Court—reflects Chinese cultural ambivalence about monkeys, specifically macaques and gibbons.19
As with the aforementioned Greek influences, which may have resonated in China especially after the fall of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the amalgam of indigenous and foreign elements underpinning Wukong’s identity reflects the importance of trade rather than conquest as a means of cultural diffusion.20 Indeed, the Indosphere that historian William Dalrymple finds to have existed throughout much of Asia for a millennium (250 BCE–1200 CE) developed as a result of India’s commercial and ideological exports along the “Golden Road of the open oceans.” Beyond Ashoka’s successes in propagating the dharma across the Mauryan Empire, the Buddha’s teachings were ironically “spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade,” following Gautama’s repudiation of pre-existing Brahminical taboos on seafaring and inter-dining with foreigners.21 To this point, the Jātaka tales contain stories of the Buddha existing as traders and a ship captain in prior lives, and the father of Ashoka’s Buddhist wife Devi was a well-to-do setthi (merchant).22
Additionally, we cannot overlook the homoerotic elements of either the dharma or Xiyouji. Ambedkar emphasizes that, prior to his parivraja, many women failed to attract Gautama, despite their great beauty, and we can only speculate about the possible relationships the Buddha may have had with the Vajrapani and other male followers like Ananda.23 Remarkably, too, legend has it that Ashoka began his conversion to the dharma after meeting the Buddhist monk Nigrodha, “a handsome young man of tranquil appearance.”24 Plus, gay scholars Randy Conner and Stephen Donaldson point out that Buddhism is unique among world religions for its official absence of homonegativity, and they note the horror of Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier upon encountering widespread same-sex relationships among Japanese Buddhist monks.25 Moreover, during the Ming dynasty when Xiyouji was written, male marriage arose in China in Fujian, near where the fictional Wukong is believed to have originated.26
There is plenty of homosexuality in Xiyouij itself, from gay banter about the size of Wukong’s magical staff, known as Jingubang, to the recurring themes of the explicit rejection of heterosexuality and marriage and—perhaps above all—the comrade-love between Xuanzang and Wukong. In fact, immediately following a stressful separation from his manly escort Liu Boqin early on in the story, the pilgrim happens upon the imprisoned Wukong, whom he frees and names his novice. Arguably, their bond follows the model of relationships between “scholar” and “warrior” monks observed among Tibetan Buddhists. Notably, Wukong has the name of his master on his lips just as he is revived after succumbing to the fearsome Red Boy. Later, he recognizes that “[o]ur hearts were […] joined,” while yearning “[t]o go on to live” with Xuanzang “for ever”! Indeed, one of the most comical scenes from Xiyouji features the Great Sage transforming into an eagle to disrupt a plant-based banquet that has been arranged to celebrate an attempted forcible marriage between Xuanzang and a demon that has taken on the guise of a woman.27
Buddhism, Anarchism, and the “Middle Way”
While the dharma may appear anarchistic in many ways, there are certain limits to its emancipatory tendencies. Whereas the Buddhist critique of traditional political authority targets despotism, proposing humane and compassionate governance in place of power politics, it is not consistently republican or anti-authoritarian, in light of the Buddhist community’s interfacing with, and blessing of, monarchs like Bimbisara of Magadha and Ashoka.28 After all, the Buddha himself accepted patronage from kings and merchants alike, and he held contradictory views about the accumulation of wealth.29
Indeed, for his generous support of the early Buddhist sangha, or society, the setthi Anathapindika was awarded the status of a deva, or divine being, upon his death. Likewise, other wealthy patrons of the sangha were promised promotion to the luxurious Heaven of Thirty-Three, dominion of Sakra (or Indra), in the afterlife. The Buddhist pantheon includes Jambhala, god of wealth. Along these lines, indeed, trade with the Roman Empire helped to finance many Buddhist monasteries.30 In a similarly problematic manner, the threat of State destabilization posed by troops deserting regimes of conscription to embrace ahimsa led the Buddha to quickly ban the recruitment of soldiers into his sangha.31 As the essayist Arundhati Roy writes in the context of her critique of Mohandas Gandhi, then, such arrangements paradoxically anticipated the phenomenon of the “corporate-sponsored” non-governmental organization of our day.32 In the words of the late Trotskyist Chris Harman, Buddhism could be said to represent a “‘universalist’ system of beliefs suited [for] a ‘universalist’ monarchy.”33
Despite such contradictions, one cannot deny the progressive content of the dharma. After all, the whole point of Buddhism is humanistic: specifically, to reduce suffering. The “Engaged Buddhist” movement of today understands this well. Buddhism’s meliorist and activist emphasis explains the leveling innovations made by the early sangha in terms of hygiene, medicine, and public health, in defiance of Brahminical orthodoxies, together with Ashoka’s unprecedented promotion of the welfare of working people and non-human animals.34 Significantly, the sangha served as a welcoming refuge for those marginalized and cast out by Hinduism, including women, Dalits (otherwise known as Chandala, avarna, or “Untouchables”), war victims, refugees, and peoples living in the peripheries, like Nagas and Yakkhas.35 It is equally remarkable that the Buddha is depicted as a Chandala in one of his previous incarnations.36 Indeed, the dialectician Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) became the “earliest theologian” of the Mahāyāna school, having emerged from the Naga community following its empowerment by the dharma.37
Furthermore, it is clear, as “Babahaseb” Ambedkar argues, that the Buddha “preferred an open and a free society,” and his sangh seems to have operated in a self-governing rather than monarchical fashion. When pressed to appoint a successor toward life’s end, Gautama refused, insisting that “[p]rinciple must live by itself, and not by the authority of man.”38 Along similar lines, the Buddha is said to have preached the following anarchist message: “By ourselves is evil done […] / By ourselves we cease from wrong […] / No one can save us but ourselves / No one can and no one may […].”39 In parallel, Xuanzang recorded anarchistic practices at Nalanda University, where “the old and the young mutually help each other.”40 More recently, the twentieth-century Japanese Zen priest Hakugen Ichikawa advocated for a reinterpretation of Buddhism as “Śūnya-anarchism-communism.”41
In this vein, as well as Ambedkar, whose approach combined the dharma with liberalism, Western Enlightenment, and Christian social action to yield Navayāna (“New Vehicle”) Buddhism as a gospel for the liberation of the Dalit community, the Indian anarchists Har Dayal and M.P.T. Acharya admired the Buddha, regardless of their more privileged Hindu origins.42 By contrast, the proto-Nazi philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was horrified by the 1871 Paris Commune, endorsed the Hindu caste system, or savarna, while decrying Judeo-Christian and Buddhist egalitarianism as ostensibly promoting “slave morality.”43 Such authoritarian views place Nietzsche in the grim pantheon of forerunners of the conservative revolutionaries who rebelled against Enlightenment precepts, including the Hindu nationalists who inspired India’s current fascist prime minister, Narendra Modi.44 Oddly enough, in this light, Max Cafard, the communitarian anarchist John P. Clark’s alter ego, actually sings Nietzsche’s praises in a 2004 essay.45
That being said, as discussed above, Gautama’s endorsement of a “Middle Way” provided a certain flexibility that served to avoid alienating wealthy and powerful patrons from supporting his cause, just as it placed certain practical constraints on the dharma’s potential for authentic liberation and social leveling. As we will see below, this tension is clearly reproduced in Xiyouji.
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Caste
When considering the ideal link between “anarchism and anti-casteism,” Ambedkar’s radical critique of Gandhi’s legitimation of savarna must be front and center.46 After all, as Arundhati Roy explains, Gandhi launched a hunger strike in 1932 to protest the provisional granting by the British rulers of a separate electorate for Dalits. When, in 1935, in the village of Kavitha, Gujarat, there was an upper-caste backlash to a bid by Dalits to enroll their children in the local school, Gandhi advised the latter to stop complaining and instead move out of the community. He likewise failed to support the direct-action campaigns led by Ambedkar, by which Dalits demanded access to water facilities and Hindu temples, in defiance of Brahminical taboos.47
Western anarchists and anti-imperialists must avoid the errors of George Woodcock, who sympathized with Gandhi, overlooked Ambedkar, and thus “struggle[d] with the politics of caste,” as Matthew S. Adams and Rakesh Ankit note.48 More critically than Woodcock, anarchist historian Maia Ramnath explains how Ambedkar developed a “‘dual-systems theory’ of capitalism and Brahmanism as the greatest enemies of the working class,” and criticized the Left for recognizing the destructive role played by capitalism, but not by Brahminism.49 Ambedkar viewed Hinduism as “a form of imperialism” that officially encodes social inequality through the imposition of graded hierarchy.50 It arguably does so by privileging members of the upper caste as “gods on earth,” while prescribing “eternal servitude” for the lower castes. Consequently, in Hobbesian terms, Ambedkar declares that “Hindu society […] does not exist. It is only a collection of castes.”51 Along these lines, as anarchist writer Sarthak Tomar observes, the Hindu-nationalist movement that has taken over India holds the individual fundamentally in contempt—and Hindu nationalism is itself a “caste project,” in the words of journalist Azad Essa.52
Ultimately, it was Ambedkar, not Gandhi, who promoted the abolition of caste. Even so, Ambedkar appears to have somewhat misrepresented the anti-caste legacy of Buddhism, in an apparent attempt to find solace. Whereas Babahaseb held that the Buddha opposed Brahminical inequalities “root and branch” and sought to “discard” and “deny [the] authority” of Hindu precepts, historian Xinru Liu argues instead that Gautama “largely accepted the hierarchy of a Brahmanical universe.”53 Likewise, while Ambedkar claimed that Ashoka’s rule “completely annihilated” savarna, Dalrymple clarifies that the Buddhist emperor actually continued to patronize Brahmins. Lahiri likewise emphasizes that Ashoka’s edicts mandated tolerance for upper-caste Hindus.54
Indeed, Ambedkar’s public renunciation of Hinduism in 1935 and spearheading of a mass-conversion of five-hundred thousand Dalits to Navayāna Buddhism near life’s end followed in the footsteps of millions of other Dalits who had converted to Islam during the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), and to Sikhism or Christianity afterward. Even so, scholar Anne Blackburn suggests that the Navayāna school actually aimed at coexistence with, rather than the destruction of, Brahminism.55 This may well accord with the “Middle Way” proposed by the Buddha, between the inherited irrationalism of Hinduism and the “harsh austerities” prescribed by Jainism, or represent an inversion of Hinduism’s tendency toward hierarchical inclusivism, with the Buddhist dharma overpowering but not extirpating its Brahmin rival.56
Such issues do not appear directly in Xiyouji, for Hinduism never penetrated China, by contrast with Southeast Asia. This is despite the parallels that can be gleaned between savarna and the division of labor mandated by Confucianism—and notwithstanding the aforementioned similarities between Hanuman and Wukong. Lamentably, Cheng’en only briefly treats Xuanzang’s time in India, when the pilgrim came to the disappointing realization that Hinduism had eclipsed Buddhism there.57 Even so, the contempt clearly expressed by the author of Xiyouji toward Daoism may reflect the righteous challenge posed by Gautama’s dharma to Brahminical dogma, as though indirectly or by analogy. Plus, the chance that the literary Xuanzang’s numerous kidnappings by yaoguais are modeled off the real-life Xuanzang’s abduction by murderous pirates who sought to sacrifice him to the Hindu goddess Durga may imply a critical view toward Brahminism.58
Wukong and Anarchism
Although Xiyouji retells Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to the Buddhist Pure Land, the epic’s protagonist is undoubtedly Sun Wukong, whose name (which in Mandarin means “awakened to emptiness”) suggests that he is conscious of absurdity. Accordingly, like Don Quixote, the Great Sage is constantly on the look-out “for wrongs to right.” He “saves those in distress and […] helps widows and orphans,” thus living out the ideal of the bhikku, or Buddhist monk: that is, to be a merciful“social servant.” To this point, Wukong is praised as a kind troublemaker who hates tyranny and does not “bow to anyone.”59 Indeed, he neither “bother[s] with any court etiquette” in the presence of the Jade Emperor himself, nor is he cowed by the myriad yaoguais barring Xuanzang’s journey west, “[h]owever rough or vicious they may be.”60 During his initial insurrection, for which he is labeled the menacing “wrecker of the Heavenly Palace,” the celestial “generals […] were no match for [him]: / A hundred thousand soldiers all lost their nerve.” Despite Wukong’s unassuming appearance, standing no more than “four feet” tall, a dragon king complains to the Jade Emperor that the macaque’s immense powers make him entirely “uncontrollable.”61
Along these lines, the literature professor Shi Changyu speculates that Cheng’en was likely inspired by the “numerous peasant wars” waged in Chinese history when developing Wukong’s character.62 Arguably, the Great Sage symbolizes the great potentialities of the authentic individual and/or collective that disregards convention, defies authority, and wields direct action against oppression. Accordingly, Wukong is very anarchistic. This is reflected in his attaining immortality by blotting-out his entry, and that of his fellow monkeys, in the Register of Life and Death, in a manner that anticipates insurgent peasants’ burning of land deeds in the French and Mexican Revolutions; his insistence that the members of the westbound collective address each other as brothers, rather than master and disciples; his defeat of the hunters who had been harassing and killing his fellow monkeys on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit during his time at the Celestial Court; his restoration of the habitat following its retaliatory ecocidal devastation by heavenly agents; and his rescue of the boys of Bhiksuland who were set to be sacrificed in a delusional quest to cure the ailing local monarch, following his manipulation by a Daoist adviser. These heroic acts mirror Guanyin’s merciful orders for the evacuation of “[a]ll the baby animals” to safety during her operation to defeat Red Boy after his kidnapping of Xuanzang.63
That being said, Wukong’s behavior is not always consistent with anarchism. At the outset of Xiyouji, Wukong rules as a “monarch” over the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and later, he persistently bullies his comrade Pig during the journey west. Moreover, the Great Sage brutally kills two children of the Yellow-Robed monster to provoke him into releasing Xuanzang, and threatens to take hostage the family members of another yaoguai (Peng)toward the same end. On the one hand, he discloses that his motivation is fame, but on the other, he swears that he would “never [again] dare try to bully [his] betters,” following his conversion to the dharma. Finally, the Great Sage at times evinces sexist attitudes and engages in violence against women, thus grossly violating anarchist ideals—however prevalent misogyny has been among many self-described historical anarchists.64
Xiyouji as a Satire of Hierarchy
In keeping with Wukong’s revolutionary tendencies, Xiyouji functions above all as a satire of social hierarchy. Changyu explains that the epic’s “main theme is mockery and scorn directed at the authorities” lording over feudal China, together with “ridicule [of] the traditional reverence for sacred and exalted authority.” Cheng’en depicts the celestial bureaucrats “who cringe before their superiors and bully their inferiors” as “useless blockheads.65 The author’s depiction of the dragon king who governs rain insisting on following protocols that require prior authorization from the Jade Emperor when Xuanzang needs immediate emergency aid comically undermines the bureaucratic, imperial ethos.66 In this sense, Xiyouji can be read as a caustic critique of workplace politics, with clear parallels to our own time.
Indeed, one of the recurring gimmicks of Xiyouji is that many of the yaoguais terrorizing human communities in the text end up being revealed as the servants, pages, minions, and relatives of the most powerful figures: specifically, Laozi, the numerous Bodhisattvas, and Amitābha Buddha himself. This is the case with the Black Wind King, the Yellow Wind Sage, the Lion King, the Bovine King, Yellow Brow (a Buddha poser), the Evil Star Matcher, and Peng, among others.67 Changyu observes that these monsters’ “high-placed patrons” sanction their crimes and “cover up for them when they are found out, letting them escape scot-free.”68 Such critical social commentary illustrates timeless and universal themes of managerial incompetence, coercive control, and corporate psychopathy, proving that the issue is not just the crimes perpetrated by any given monster, manager, or boss, but rather, the larger systems and ideologies that permit them in the first place. Nowadays, the U.S. government’s facilitation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people provides a stark illustration of such atrocious hierarchical dynamics.
Likewise, as Changyu observes, most of the yaoguais who obstruct Xuanzang’s journey west constitute “representations of social evils.”69 Indeed, the companions on this dharma journey encounter corrupt Buddhist monks, abductors of women, frauds, usurpers, cannibals, evil Daoist masters, fake Buddhas, and extortioners of ordinary people, among other oppressors.70 Even the much-hyped Buddhist Pure Land, so idealized by Xuanzang and company, is far from idyllic. When the collective finally arrive to Thunder Monastery after surviving numerous ordeals and traveling thousands of miles over the course of many years, the Buddha’s arhats Ananda and Kaspaya initially extort them for access to the sutras, and then provide them with blank copies—before delivering the actual scriptures. They end up doing all of this with Amitābha’s knowledge and approval! Such a simultaneously revealing yet anti-climactic resolution is one with Cheng’en’s iconoclastic view that “evil spirit [yaoguai] and Bodhisattva are all the same in the last analysis.”71
Conclusion: The Limitations of the “Middle Way,” and of Anarchism
In conclusion, let us meditate critically both on Gautama’s dharma and anarchism. The doctrine of the “Middle Way,” lying between Brahminical despotism and egalitarian self-management, can be seen reflected in the Buddha’s own life following parivraja, as well as in the socio-political approaches of his followers, whether wealthy merchants, Emperor Ashoka, or the literary figures of Guanyin and Wukong. Nevertheless, Cheng’en makes important contributions to a necessary rethinking of the dharma by lampooning the ills that result from social hierarchy—which is, in the final analysis, blessed by the Buddha—and by underscoring the miseries of cross-class, corporatist politics that bind workers and rulers together in common cause. Through his refusal to spare even the Buddha from criticism, Cheng’en reminds us that the prevaricating “Middle Way,” by accepting support from bankers and kings alike, easily lends itself to the affirmation of bosses, masters, and yaoguais abusing the working classes.
In this sense, whereas Cheng’en and Wukong are anarchistic, the review of history, biography, and Xiyouji performed here contests Reclus’s essentializing of Buddhism as anarchist. The Mahāyāna school is egalitarian, yet not entirely anti-authoritarian—in keeping with the “Middle Way.” Indeed, as one study summarizes: “there has often been a close association between Buddhism and royal or political power in Asia.”72 Beyond this, the clearest repudiations from recent history of any thesis that equates the dharma with anarchism include the genocides committed by Theravāda Buddhist majorities in Burma and Sri Lanka against Muslim Rohingya and Hindu Tamil minorities, respectively.73 By contrast, both Ambedkar’s dual-systems theory (opposed to capitalism and savarna) and Navayāna interpretation of the dharma are more consistent with the search for Nirvana—defined by Babahaseb as “righteous life.”74
In closing, then, the question must be posed: is anarchism a false Buddha, akin to Yellow Brow, Xiyouji’slegions of masquerading Daoist demons, and the elusive Maltese Falcon (1941)? Is it, as the Deutsche Presse-Agentur suggested in its report-back on the 2023 conference held in St. Imier, Switzerland, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Anti-Authoritarian International, a “dead end”—or entirely illusionary, as the conservative German idealist Arthur Schopenhauer believed Nirvana to be?75 Given the risks that the phenomenon of the “tyranny of structurelessness” and the call to abolish law altogether may grimly midwife new hierarchies and end up perpetuating dystopian dynamics of impunity for abuse, anarchism could well be all of these things.76 That being said, as Tomar writes knowingly, “the ultimate safeguard from Brahmanism […] is Anarchism.”77 Such concerns thus provide no reason to abandon the infinitely demanding struggle to defeat the yaoguais, save humanity, and strive to create an earthly paradise!
Works Cited
Abelsen, Peter 1993. “Schopenhauer and Buddhism.” Philosophy East and West 43, no. 2. 255–78.
Acharya, M.P.T. 2019. We Are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923–1953. Ed. Ole Birk Laursen. Chico, California: AK Press.
Acid Horizon 2025. “The Anarchist Imaginary: Nicolas de Warren on Glissant, Levinas, and a New Radical Ethics.” YouTube.Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsXD5h88_xo. Accessed 29 June 2025.
Adams, Matthew S. and Rakesh Ankit 2026. “Anarchism and the ‘Fascination with Empire’: George Woodcock in India, 1964–1985.” International Review of Social History. 1–28.
Ambedkar, B. R. 2016. Annihilation of Caste. Ed. S. Anand. London: Verso.
— 2018. The Buddha and His Dhamma. Chennai, India: Maven Books.
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs 2013. “Sri Lanka: Civil War along Ethno-religious Lines.” Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 1–16.
Blackburn, Anne 1993. “Religion, Kinship and Buddhism: Ambedkar’s Vision of a Moral Community.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies vol. 16, no. 1. 1–23.
Bloch, Ernst 1986. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cafard, Max 2004. “Nietzschean Anarchy and the Post-Mortem Condition.” I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Eds. John Moore and Spencer Sunshine. Autonomedia. 85–106.
Carrier, Nicolas and Justin Piché 2015. “Blind Spots of Abolitionist Thought in Academia: On Longstanding and Emerging Challenges.” Champ pénal/Penal Field, XII. https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.9162.
Changyu, Shi 2023. “Introduction.” Journey to the West, vol. 1. Trans. W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. 1–22.
Cheng’en, Wu 2023. Journey to the West. 4 volumes. Trans. W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Conner, Randy P. and Stephen Donaldson 1990. “Buddhism.” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishing. 168–71.
Dalrymple, William 2024. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. New York: Bloomsbury.
Essa, Azad 2023. Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel.London: Pluto.
Freeman, Jo 1972. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 17. 151–64.
Galinsky, Karl 2020. “Herakles Vajrapani, the Companion of Buddha.” Eds. Arlene L. Allan et al. Herakles Inside and Outside the Church. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. 315–332.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
Griffiths, John 1896. The Paintings in the Buddhist Cave-Temples of Ajantâ, Khandesh, India. London: Secretary of State for India in Council.
Gyatso, Janet 2026. “Being with Animal Kin: Buddhist Resources for a Posthuman Ethics.” Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages (online), March 3.
Harman, Chris 2017. A People’s History of the World. London: Verso.
Hinsch, Bret 1990. “China.” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishing. 215–20.
Ives, Christopher 2009. Imperial Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Jenner, W.J.F. 2023. “Translator’s Afterword.” Journey to the West, vol. 4. Trans. W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. 2321–43.
Politopoulos, Aris et al. 2024. “An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal vol. 34, no. 4. 531–45.
Ramnath, Maia 2011. Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle. Oakland: AK Press.
— 2015. “No Gods, No Masters, No Brahmins: An Anarchist Inquiry on Caste, Race, and Indigenity in India.” No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms. Eds. Barry Maxwell and Raymond Craib. Oakland: PM Press. 44–79.
Robinson, Kim Stanley 2002. The Years of Rice and Salt. New York: Bantam Books.
Roy, Arundhati 2016. “The Doctor and the Saint.” Annihilation of Caste. Ed. S. Anand. London: Verso. 15–141.
Śūra, Ārya 1989. Once the Buddha was a Monkey. Trans. Peter Khoroche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walker, Hera S. 1998. Indigenous or Foreign? A Look at the Origins of the Monkey Hero Sun Wukong. Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
We are disappointed to learn that the renowned linguist and critic of U.S. imperialism Noam Chomsky struck up a friendship with the infamous billionaire sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2015. This came after the pedophile’s conviction for soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14 in 2008, presumably in line with the standard left-wing “reparative justice” view that ex-convicts should be reintegrated into society. In fact, when asked by The Wall Street Journal about his relationship with Epstein, Chomsky first replied that it was “none of your business. Or anyone’s,” before adding that he knew that Epstein “had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
Whatever one makes of such responses, considering that most of Epstein’s victims were working-class girls, Chomsky famously advocates anarcho-syndicalism as “the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society” in his well-known 1971 debate with Michel Foucault. In a 2010 address, he suggests that workers could take over and reconvert production to create more ecological alternatives. In reality, though, Chomsky has not participated much in the international anarcho-syndicalist movement, and legitimate questions have been raised about how accurately this term describes his politics, despite the affinity he does have for industrial democracy. Moreover, as this ongoing scandal illustrates, Chomsky lacks any real gender politics.
The unanticipated bond between this much-celebrated intellectual and the late billionaire sex-trafficker, which spanned from at least 2015 until Epstein’s death in 2019, apparently involved Chomsky traveling with Epstein on his private plane, visiting his properties, and receiving at least $20,000 from him, together with a mutual “trading [of] friendly advice” between the two. In a 2017 letter, Chomsky’s wife Valeria strikingly describes Epstein as “our best friend.” Yet, perhaps above all, it is disheartening to consider that Chomsky counseled this notorious child abuser on how to dodge accountability for his crimes against humanity.
Shockingly, in one email contained within the latest release of the so-called Epstein Files—which may end up being known as the Trump-Epstein Files, considering that the president reportedly appears a million times in the unredacted version of the available documents—Epstein cites Chomsky’s advice on how to deal with “the horrible way [sic] you are being treated in the press and public.” Supposedly, Chomsky was referring to the major exposé published in 2018 by Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown about Epstein’s extensive sex-trafficking operation.
In the wake of this bombshell reporting, Chomsky told Epstein to just ignore the bad press, likening it to the vast numbers of attacks he had received for his scholarship and activism. In the interest of reputation management, the elder academic told his hanger-on: “The best way to proceed is to ignore it.” He went so far as to mention “the hysteria [sic] that has developed about abuse of women”!
Tim Hjersted’s examination of their relationship emphasizes that Chomsky’s counsel to Epstein showed seriously poor judgment—something that Valeria readily concedes. Indeed, this conundrum reflects the fact that Chomsky is clueless about feminism and gender issues. As such, he does not adequately grasp the power dynamics between men and boys on the one hand and women and girls on the other in patriarchal societies. As Guardian journalist Marina Hyde writes, his counsel both “trivialise[d Epstein’s] crimes” and featured “a drive-by [shooting] on the notion of female victimhood.” She continues, with reference to a well-known book co-authored by Chomsky:
“Wow. Never mind Manufacturing Consent – have a read of Not Giving A Shit About Consent. I thought Chomsky cared about power and exploitative elites? Still, nice photo of him laughing it up with Steve Bannon.”
Hyde alludes here to a telling photograph of Chomsky and President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon (see above) that was released by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Assuming it is real, the photo in question was presumably recorded during a 2019 visit hosted at the Chomskys’ home in Arizona. Taken together with the corresponding emails involving Bannon, Chomsky, and Valeria, the divulged picture suggests camaraderie rather than antagonism between the white nationalist and libertarian socialist in question. Reflecting on this disturbing finding in Freedom News, Kell w Farshéa writes:
“No one expected Chomsky to appear in the files, and absolutely no one expected him to be a drinking buddy with an international fascist. What were the Chomskys doing hosting him on 10 February 2019 for lunch?”
This is a great question that Valeria avoids addressing in her press release following the revelations about the Chomsky-Epstein nexus. (For his part, Chomsky cannot respond on his own after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2023.) His former co-author Vijay Prashad—whose campist support for the Chinese Communist Party we reject—has publicly condemned Chomsky’s newly uncovered ties to Epstein, while his protégé Norman Finkelstein called for “both Epstein and [Alan] Dershowitz” to be “promptly throttle[d]” due to the former’s sexual abuse of girls, and the latter’s complicity with the same, back in 2015.
In light of this, Kell w Farshéa rightly asks: “how were the Chomskys so secluded in their ivory tower that they hadn’t heard these rumours when Noam attended the town house soirées in 2015?” It is clear that Epstein was trying to relate to well-known academics to rehabilitate his image, so his cultivating a relationship with Chomsky was a calculated ploy. Still, this does not explain the couple’s naïveté about Epstein’s character prior to Brown’s exposé in the Miami Herald, much less Chomsky’s questionable dismissal of the serious charges of child sexual abuse that were raised against his investor friend thereafter. While it may be little consolation, the best that can be said for Chomsky here is that there is no evidence he knew about Epstein’s child sex-trafficking operation before late 2018.
As East Bay Syndicalists, we believe that the counsel and defense Chomsky provided to Epstein over allegations of child sex-trafficking (which we know to be true) reflect the fact that his extensive corpus—being one of the most-cited authors of all time—lacks much interest in, or commitment to, feminism and women’s liberation. At the same time, for what it’s worth, we still recognize the value and relevance of much of Chomsky’s research and analysis to this day, including important pieces like “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” The Fateful Triangle, Manufacturing Consent, and Hegemony or Survival, among others.
Before closing, it should be noted that Chomsky’s lending of support to Epstein has not constituted his only lapse of judgment. After all, the man has unthinkably backed up authoritarian non-Western leaders for decades, from the late Serbian ultra-nationalist President Slobodan Milošević to former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and current Russian President Vladimir Putin. In reality, Chomsky has contributed a great deal to the toxic phenomenon of campism that plagues the left to this day.
With that being said, despite our disagreements with him and our dismay over his closeness with Epstein and Bannon, we don’t think Chomsky should necessarily be banned from consideration, or his works ignored, because of these recent disclosures from the Epstein Files. Taken less reverently, more critically and skeptically—of course, he and his works should be. For our part, we demand the full release of the Files (with proper redaction, yet only for the protection of victims—not perpetrators), plus the prosecution of all involved abusers.
No gods, no masters—and solidarity with Epstein’s victims and survivors!
Originally published in the Winter 2026 issue of New Politics (Vol. XX No. 4, Whole Number 80)
Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend By Domenico Losurdo Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Henry Hakamäki, trans., Iskra Books, 2008/2023
The late Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend exalts and even deifies the long-ruling Soviet despot Joseph Stalin (1924–1953). Indeed, the text’s cover and inside cover art strikingly depict Stalin with a halo, and the book’s contents often read like a “Greatest Hits for Tankies.” In effect, Losurdo likens Stalin to a god threatened with desecration by wayward rivals like Lev Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Nikita Khrushchev. As critic Ross Wolfe observes, the author thus promotes “nothing less than the (re)entry of Stalinism into the realm of philosophy, a new school of falsification, all in service of justifying the course history has taken.”1
In his effort to contest his subject’s demonization by the West, Losurdo suggests that this infamous general secretary of the Soviet Politburo has been unfairly tarred with a “Black Legend” of sorts. Yet, as we will see below, there is plenty of evidence for such a “Black Legend” in Stalin’s case, just as there is a plethora of evidence for the parallel historical crimes of the Spanish Empire (1492–1976). Like neo-Stalinists, present-day apologists for this empire, including members of Spain’s Popular Party and Vox, largely dismiss critical and realistic discussions of Spain’s colonial past as a distorted Leyenda negra (“Black Legend”) opportunistically promoted by contemporary competitors like the British Empire.
Along these lines, Stalin is full of questionable praise for its object of study. Losurdo describes Stalin as the “eminent theorist of the national question,” based on the Bolshevik’s authoring “an essay of undeniable theoretical value [sic] (Marxism and the National Question)” (1913). Losurdo touts the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and modernization under Stalin’s “developmentalist dictatorship.” He does so, despite acknowledging that these policies involved the imposition of highly anti-egalitarian industrial policies, an abandonment of class struggle in favor of vastly expanded production, and the further empowerment of a bureaucratic-managerial elite. Moreover, the author misleadingly claims that Stalin “was committed to helping the [Second] Spanish Republic” when it came under attack from Francisco Franco’s Nationalist rebellion in 1936. Above all, Losurdo commends Stalin’s leadership during World War II, especially Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Nazi Germany’s devastating 1941 attack on the Soviet Union—the largest invasion force in history!2
In his dubious attempt at historical salvage in Stalin, Losurdo laments the general secretary’s reduction to a “scapegoat” for the “tragedy and horror of Soviet Russia.”3 By contrast, in our review here, we will provide a more critical account, based on the historical record, plus anarchist and socialist commentaries. We will then turn to reflecting on the paradoxical convergences linking Losurdo’s anti-imperialism with anarchism and Third-Camp socialism. In closing, we will consider some of the ominous present-day echoes of Stalinism in the toxic phenomenon of campism, especially as seen in the breakdown in left-wing solidarity with Ukrainians under genocidal attack by the Russian State.
Losurdo and Stalin
Ideologically, Stalin denies, distorts, and omits key parts of Stalin’s legacy. The idea, peddled by Losurdo, that Stalin sought to aid the beleaguered Second Spanish Republic is belied by the fact that he looted its treasury through fraudulent arms sales, often sending Republican forces useless weapons without ammunition. In reality, rather than defeating Franco per se, Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was aimed at controlling the course of events and keeping the revolutionary anarchists and Trotskyists in check.4 Even such a pro-Soviet historian as E. H. Carr acknowledges that the Republic had become “the puppet of Moscow” before its fall to Nationalist forces in 1939.5
Notably, as well, Losurdo applauds Stalin for supporting the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, given that the Soviet Union was the first State to formally recognize Israel. This is despite the fact that the creation of the Jewish State involved the mass-dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, in an event known as the Nakba, which undoubtedly persists, as seen in the Gaza genocide.6 Although Losurdo opens Stalin by discussing public mourning for the Soviet leader in Israel after his death in 1953, he fails to disclose that, besides legitimizing the Jewish State diplomatically, Stalin directly armed and trained Israel’s nascent military, which was engaged then (as now) in war crimes against Palestinians.7 In parallel to this lapse, Losurdo omits that Stalin had the Jewish Soviet anti-fascist Solomon Mikhoels killed in 1948, so as to prevent the latter from bringing to light the wartime genocide of Soviet Jews by the Nazis.8
Furthermore, Losurdo downplays Stalin’s responsibility for the Holodomor famine in Ukraine (1932–1933). He cites bogus charges from the last of the rigged Moscow Trials (1936–1938) to discredit Bukharin, Stalin’s Bolshevik rival, target, and eventual victim. He misrepresents Stalin’s misrule prior to, and at the start of, Operation Barbarossa. In particular, Losurdo dismisses as fake the widespread reporting that the so-called Man of Steel suffered a nervous breakdown and fled Moscow for his dacha upon learning of the Nazi incursion, and he broadly resists squaring with the fascist and Russian-chauvinist dimensions of Stalinism itself, as identified by Trotsky, the anarchist Voline, the theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, and socialist Rohini Hensman, among others.9
Losurdo likewise ignores how Stalin’s Terror (1936–1938) undermined military readiness ahead of the long-anticipated Nazi invasion, which Hitler had outlined as early as in Mein Kampf (1925). Historians Catherine Evtuhov and colleagues explain that the Stalinist Terror involved the execution of “60 percent of the marshals,” around 90 percent of “the highest army commanders, all the admirals, about 90 percent of corps commanders,” and several “divisional and brigadier generals.” Rather than acknowledge any of the Soviet Union’s early losses during the German blitzkrieg, either—from the fall of Minsk and Kyiv to the immediate destruction of one-fourth of the Soviet air force—Losurdo cheers on Stalin’s supposed military genius.10
The author only fleetingly acknowledges the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact that was signed just prior to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, claiming at once that Moscow had no other choice, but also, that Stalin somehow atoned for this error by going on to lead the Red Army in repelling and defeating Hitler.11 In reality, he omits that this deal involved Stalin leasing the Germans a secret U-boat base in Murmansk; supplying the Nazi war-machine with wheat, oil, and war matériel; and handing over German Communists to Hitler’s forces.12 More lucidly than Losurdo, then, Hensman outright calls Stalin a “Nazi collaborator.”13
In a similar vein, while Losurdo does briefly discuss the “so-called Holodomor” in Ukraine, only to dismiss it as a Ukrainian-nationalist myth, he guards silence about the similarly devastating famine that affected Kazakhs around the same time, owing—like Holodomor—to Stalinist policies of requisition and forcible collectivization, combined with poor climate conditions.14 He accurately observes that the “policy of ‘terrorist famine’ with which Stalin is accused runs deep through the history of the West,” yet this truth can hardly be used to excuse Stalin’s crimes, as the author apparently seeks to do. While he aptly decries the “deportation of the Cherokee people ordered by Andrew Jackson,” Losurdo only indirectly mentions the mass-deportations of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and other ethno-religious minorities ordered by Stalin during World War II.15
Stalin: A Critique
A more critical account of Stalin might emphasize that, rather than build socialism, the general secretary actually vastly accelerated the construction of state capitalism in the Soviet Union. He did so by imposing economic policies of “primitive socialist accumulation,” forcible collectivization of agriculture, super-exploitation of the working class, and “Five-Year Plans” mandating State-led industrial expansion and military modernization. In reality, Soviet society even under Stalin’s predecessor Vladimir Lenin was deeply marked by class divisions between workers and a bureaucratic elite, with the working class reduced to a new serfdom due to domination by a single, all-encompassing employer (otherwise known as a monopsony): namely, the Soviet State.16 Stalin’s reign only entrenched such class divisions more deeply, while intensifying the war waged by the Kremlin against the peasantry. As such, in Nationalism and Culture (1937), the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker declares that “[m]onopoly of power must disappear, together with monopoly of property,” denouncing a “new absolutism” and “new economic feudalism” that have arisen in the Soviet Union.17
Undoubtedly, as Hensman and the late historian Martin Malia discuss, Stalin built up a “State Capitalist Empire” while rehabilitating Tsarism, Russian patriotism, heterosexism, and patriarchy. He did so, as the late Trotskyist Chris Harman notes, while exploiting millions of enslaved workers in the Gulag.18 According to Malia, Stalin’s invention and mobilization of new orthodoxies—particularly his framing of all of his rivals, from the anarchists, “the Populists[,] and the Mensheviks to the Trotskyites,” as irredeemable enemies of the people—went hand-in-hand with his persecution and mass killings of his opponents, including nearly all of the “Old Bolsheviks,” and even many of his own followers.19 George Orwell satirizes such Stalinist dynamics in his well-known dystopian science-fiction novel 1984 (1948), which Sandra Newman recently adapted as Julia (2023), hence providing a much-needed feminist take on the original cautionary tale.
The Third Camp
Potentially, against the author’s best intentions, some of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist points Losurdo raises in Stalin could jibe with anarchism and Third-Camp socialism, which both oppose the hegemony of Washington and Moscow. Despite all the aforementioned disgraces, Losurdo actually concedes that Lenin and Stalin’s regimes were “ruthless […] dictatorship[s],” that Stalin fashioned himself after the infamous Tsar Peter the Great, and that Stalin’s rule led to the “advent of autocracy.” To his credit, if only in passing, Losurdo expresses sympathy for political prisoners incarcerated in the Gulag, and he acknowledges the criminality of the 1940 Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers and prisoners of war, which was carried out on Stalin’s orders by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB).
In an attempt to avoid contemplating Stalin in a vacuum, however, Losurdo makes important criticisms of the wide-ranging contemporary “concentrationary universe” created by Western imperialism. He points to a plethora of murderous and genocidal violence on the part of Euro-Americans, as seen during British imperial rule over India, Ireland, and Iraq; the British military repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the antebellum and Jim Crow U.S. South; the settler-colonial genocides of Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America; the counter-insurgent war waged by the United States in the Philippines; the U.S. mass-internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war on Cambodia—among other crimes perpetrated by the nominally liberal United States and United Kingdom.21 Losurdo rightly stresses that the Soviet Gulag echoed many similar Western concentrationary spaces, yet, to reiterate, two wrongs do not make a right.
In this sense, to contemplate Losurdo’s emphasis on the racial slavery and imperialism practiced by Western liberal societies, while engaging in a critical reading of the same author’s apologia for Stalin, may lead one to a proper political and philosophical balance—that is, one in favor of the Third Camp.22 Along these lines, we should consider the horrors of Stalinism, along with Losurdo’s view—shared with Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and others—that liberalism effectively underwrote Nazi Germany, without overlooking the arguments made by Rocker and Critical Theorists (including Marcuse) that liberalism dialectically alsounderpins the libertarianism of anarchism and Marxism.23
Conclusion: Stalinism, Campism, and the Russo-Ukrainian War
The Stalinist concept of “socialism in one country”—or, rather, one empire—is intimately connected with the toxic phenomenon of pseudo-anti-imperialism in our time. Otherwise known as campists—in an allusion to one’s siding with either the “First” (Western) or “Second” (Soviet/Eastern) World, or Camp—pseudo-anti-imperialists usually promote the cause of the Second Camp against the First, as is reflected in their apologia for Russia, China, Iran, and Syria’s former Assad regime, among other bureaucratic-authoritarian rivals of the West.24 In subscribing to campism, pseudo-anti-imperialists clearly contradict the anarchist and socialist imperatives of internationalism, egalitarianism, and working-class self-emancipation.
Once disconnected from such fundamental principles, campists readily proceed with the promotion of deadly disinformation that serves their cause, such as denialism over Assad’s use of chemical weapons during the Syrian Civil War or China’s present-day genocide of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other ethno-religious minorities. They typically do so, while de-emphasizing and distracting from undeniable everyday atrocities—especially Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine. Such practices echo the past denial of Stalinist crimes, as evinced in Losurdo’s book, along with the “continuous and often hefty leftist support” the Soviet regime enjoyed, in the words of Eric Heinze—not to mention Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing blatant rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy.25
At a basic level, it is undeniable that the plight of Ukrainians at the hands of the Russian military has much in common with that of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. Still, while present-day leftist critics of the First Camp do well to center the horrors and injustices of the Gaza genocide, many overlook the parallel genocide in Ukraine—perhaps due to a mistaken sense that this atrocious war is either unremarkable or “constructive,” its victims “unworthy.” While this formulation is taken from Edward S. Herman, an unrepentant second-campist who used it to criticize Western media and politicians, it can help to illustrate the extent of the problem of leftist denialism, when the shoe is proverbially on the other foot. Other factors inhibiting an unequivocal left-wing embrace of the Ukrainian cause likely include a combination of indifference or hostility to national self-determination in Eastern Europe, and deference to the Kremlin, perpetrator of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which ranks highly within the Second Camp.26
By contrast, as remedy, we must resist the dehumanization, militarism, and imperialism of both camps, while supporting the cause of the anti-authoritarian, internationalist Third Camp as best we can.
Notes
1. Ross Wolfe, “Against Losurdo,” New International, Sept. 1, 2025.
2. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Henry Hakamäki (Seattle: Iskra Books, 2023), 6, 14–15, 28, 34, 54–55, 101, 124, 136, 157.
3.Ibid., 117.
4. Ronald Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xvii, xxiv, xxx.
5. Losurdo 2023, 6; E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (London: Pantheon, 1984), 31.
6. Losurdo 2023, 216–21.
7. Ross Wolfe, “Losurdo’s Lies,” New International, Sept. 4, 2025.
8. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 63.
9. Losurdo 2023, 15–16, 43, 68, 78–84, 117, 190–96, 282–84; Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975), 350–51; Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 147; Catherine Evtuhov et al., A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 703; Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), 110–11; Hensman, 15, 35–36, 47.
12. Laurence Rees, WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis and The West (London: BBC Books, 2008); Evtuhov et al., 701–2; Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Verso, 2017), 524.
13. Hensman, 36.
14. Losurdo 2023, 191 (emphasis in original); Evtuhov et al., 669.
17. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998), 535, 545–46.
18. Hensman, 32–36, 62; Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 235–36; Chris Harman, “From Trotsky to state capitalism,” Marxists Against Stalinism (London: Resistance Books, 2022), 37.
23. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1968); Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 21; Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 3–42, and Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia: Collected Papers Volume 6, eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London: Routledge, 2014), 340–41.
24. Hensman.
25. Eric Heinze, “Critical Theory and Memory Politics: Leftist Autocritique after the Ukraine War,” International Journal of Law in Context vol. 20, no. 2 (2024), 184–203.
26. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010),103 (emphasis in original); Heinze.
Publishedon East Bay Syndicalists, 22 December 2025
David Camfield’s Future on Fire is a clarion call for the application of an “emergency brake” to the uncontrolled global warming produced by the capitalist system (15). While the greenhouse effect was identified at least as early as 1824 by the mathematician Joseph Fourier, and the physicist Svante Arrhenius predicted in 1896 that carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions would greatly worsen this effect, the ineffectual Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been farcically meeting on an annual basis now for three decades. The COP began convening in the wake of the mainstream scientific acceptance of the risks posed by global heating, following climatologist James Hansen’s public testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988.
Yet, in reality, little to no progress has been made to date, given that CO2 emissions are at record highs. As Dharna Noor notes in the foreword to Future on Fire, despite incontestable evidence of the risks that climate breakdown poses to humanity and many other species, “state actors have largely avoided imposing even moderate regulations” on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG’s) (xiii).
In this slim volume, Camfield traces the fatal dance between fossil-fuel interests and governments, whereby mega-capitalists from the hydrocarbon industry either capture the State directly or make it bend to their will by threatening disinvestment and capital strike. The bosses act this way, so that they can preempt national legislation aimed at curbing GHG’s and lobby against binding international climate treaties—even if such profit-maximizing strategies jeopardize the very future of humanity (8–13, 28–9). Environmental sociologist Allan Schnaiberg outlined this fatal dynamic back in 1980 through his proposed model of the “treadmill of production.”
Such sober and critically realistic analysis leads Camfield to conclude that only mass-movements can deliver a just transition away from fossil-fuel-driven climate chaos in the short timeframe that we appear to have left before runaway global warming takes effect (31–3). In this sense, the author acknowledges that “climate justice politics should be fundamentally extraparliamentary,” not directed toward electoral politics. At best, this reconstructive alternative would be based on egalitarianism, internationalism, and the self-emancipation of the working classes (44–59). Camfield discusses the survival of Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians, as providing possible inspiration for future human survival under scenarios in which GHG emissions are not mitigated (62–6).
The author concludes his book with a short chapter extolling eco-socialism, which he defines as “a self-governing society with a nondestructive relationship to the rest of nature” (67). He proposes a shift toward democratic workplaces as part of a devolution of power from the capitalists to the workers on the path to the “ecologically rational cooperative commonwealth” (72–4). Short of this, the author controversially affirms the relevance of eco-socialist politics even as harm reduction and palliative care (56, 74–5), assuming the bourgeoisie does “ruin the world” irreparably, in the knowing words of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Buenaventura Durruti.
Conclusion
In closing, we highly recommend Future on Fire. Like the cause of green syndicalism, Camfield confronts the urgency of the climate crisis head-on, proposing radical mass-movements as the proper remedy. While brief, this book will hopefully serve as an important catalyst for conversations and organizing campaigns aimed at fighting global warming, resisting capitalist authoritarianism, and bringing about the much-needed cooperative commonwealth.
This is a video recording of my comments today at the 11th Biennial Herbert Marcuse International Society (HMIS) Conference about ongoing genocidal wars on Ukraine and Gaza.
Originally posted on the Industrial Workers of the World Environmental Union Caucus, 11 November 2025
As delegations of numerous State representatives gather in Belém, Brazil, for the Thirtieth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), known as COP30, the Industrial Workers of the World Environmental Union Caucus (IWW EUC) would like to pause and reflect on this critical moment. After three decades of annual meetings, the COP and UNFCCC have utterly failed in their objective of reducing the grave risks posed by global warming to humanity and the rest of nature. Such failures are clear: carbon-dioxide emissions are now at an all-time high, and 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the hottest on record… so far.
Ahead of the COP30 meeting, UN Secretary General António Guterres conceded that the world has officially missed the +1.5°C target in increased average global temperatures (relative to pre-industrial levels) that the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement had identified as the goal for controlling global warming.
The Trump regime—in line with its atrocious authorization of oil and gas extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, mandating the violation of the Endangered Species Act via the clear-cutting of vast old-growth forests, withdrawing yet again from the Paris Agreement, resurrecting coal energy, and wrecking numerous renewable-energy projects—isn’t even bothering to send a delegation to COP30, although it still remains a COP member.
In parallel to the climate-denialist U.S. government and armies of fossil-fuel lobbyists that have stymied action to curb global warming for three decades, petro-despotic States like Russia and such OPEC members as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will presumably continue to block any and all international agreements that might mandate meaningful reductions in worldwide carbon emissions at COP30, even without the U.S. officially present.
The IWW EUC emphasizes that the entire COP process is a farce, and that capitalism—together with all other authoritarian economic and governmental systems—must be dismantled to protect humanity and planet Earth against the climate and environmental crises. This is so, given that capitalism mandates the subordination of the working classes to the whims of the managers and owners, who are committed above all to maximizing profit and increasing market share, even and especially when their directives degrade and destroy the environment and the possibility of a livable future. (Consider the classic example of the oil executive who imperils the health and safety of his offspring by ordering the expansion of fossil-fuel production.) As a caucus, we assert that only a post-capitalist future based on ecologically sustainable worker- and community-controlled alternatives will allow for real mitigation of global warming and restoration of ecological balance.
We applaud the front-line community-led non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), Indigenous groups, unions, and nation-States that demand accountability from COP member states, especially those of the Global North. That being said, we certainly do challenge the mistreatment of workers, front-line communities, and Indigenous peoples at the hands of all States, whether they be more or less powerful.
Published on East Bay Syndicalists, 8 September 2025
Red Flag Warning is a new collection of essays and interviews dedicated to exploring mutual aid in the face of the wildfires that have devastated Northern California over the past decade. Supercharged by the greater heat and disrupted precipitation patterns caused by global warming—which is itself driven by the greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and gas) to fuel industrial capitalism—these recent Californian megafires have consumed well over a million acres. Accordingly, they have left behind scenes reminiscent of “war zone[s]” and “Armageddon” (121, 127). This anthology, whose title refers to a term used in California to signify a high risk of imminent fires, provides voice to rural, female, and Indigenous writers seeking a “better world” amidst infernal conditions (166). In many ways, the work follows the example of Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), a stirring book that covers numerous cases of mutual aid and systematic rescue being practiced during and after historical disasters.
From an anti-colonial perspective, Red Flag Warning begins with Manjula Martin’s acknowledgment of the Spanish and U.S. suppression of periodic burns practiced freely by Indigenous people in California before colonization. Manjula argues that the centuries-long settler-colonial focus on fire prevention and suppression has needlessly contributed to the mass-destruction wrought by megafires in our own time (1–6). Fellow contributor Jane Braxton Little agrees, directing readers’ attention to how the commercial logging of old-growth forests left an environment “primed for a runaway inferno” (69). In her chapter on the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California’s recorded history, Hiya Swanhuyser educates readers that the word disaster means “no stars,” in the sense of ‘being in the dark,’ disoriented for the purposes of navigation, or, as if by analogy, rudderless. Yet, even as the “climate crisis and systemic disasters” accelerate, there is hope that communities will respond in stellar, pro-social ways (8, 18).
Along these lines, in one of her chapters, co-editor Margaret Elysia Garcia highlights the importance of community as a coping and survival mechanism for working-class families who were affected by the gigantic 2021 Dixie Fire (35–9). Fellow co-editor Dani Burlison likewise underscores the “amazing amount of goodwill and care” that was shown after the Tubbs Fire burned down part of Santa Rosa in 2017 (44). In her chapter, which creatively integrates Daoist, Buddhist, and Japanese motifs, the previously mentioned Little recognizes that “[c]limate change is the disaster lurking for all of us,” yet she stresses the therapeutic potential of self-organized communities of solace (56, 71). In her interview with Burlison, “Parenting in Fire Country,” Kailea Loften insightfully emphasizes the communal aspects of resilience (110–12). The book ends with Redbird Willie’s moving retelling of a community burn performed among Indigenous people that serves the aim of social reproduction by transmitting ancestral knowledge to younger generations (151–61).
Disaster Anarchism?
For all of its strengths, Red Flag Warning sadly does not elaborate a theory of either “disaster anarchism” or its conceptual cousin, “disaster communism.” The editors and contributors certainly do highlight surges of mutual aid in the wake of the various megafires that have ravaged Northern California in recent years, but these episodes are not necessarily connected to a unifying theoretical framework that might help readers understand and resist the established trends toward local or regional ecocide and planetary annihilation—whether that be green anarchism, eco-socialism, or degrowth communism. (The latter concept is part of the subtitle of a 2022 book by Kohei Saito that Paul Messersmith-Glavin recently reviewed in New Politics.) There isn’t much of a sense in Red Flag Warning that the various megafires might be opposed, and in the future potentially mitigated, by a “disaster anarchist” movement like the one that emerged in New Orleans after the destruction and mass-death wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We find no call for a green-syndicalist organizing campaign to contest these grave threats through collectivizing the economy from below, as Tom Wetzel proposes. There is little discussion about the chance for disaster communism, or, as the Out of the Woods collective puts it, “the possibility of communism in the Anthropocene,” a proposed name for the current geological epoch (the Holocene)—otherwise aptly described, by Jason W. Moore, as the “Capitalocene.”
Instead, Red Flag Warning’s political demands include anemic calls for greater “accountability from elected officials,” and the volume betrays a certain defeatism converging with capitalist realism, as revealed through such comments as, “we’ll lose millions more acres of forest [to fire] before the [supposed] reset is complete” (116, 126). Plus, several of Red Flag Warning’s authors and interview subjects openly identify themselves as managers rather than workers, thus contradicting the anarcho- and green-syndicalist causes. Indeed, particular chapters praise the opening of an apparently non-unionized, privately owned sawmill in Indian Valley, together with the Pasadena Job Center, which is described as “connect[ing] small businesses and homeowners with skilled day laborers” (145–9, 165)! Furthermore, the author of one of the pieces discloses that she is a “boss,” seemingly without pause, shortly after complaining about human overpopulation (128–30). Brandon Smith, co-founder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), points out that many of the firefighters who respond to wildfire emergencies in California are incarcerated workers of color, yet he aims to recruit more people of color to work in wildland firefighting statewide (73–84).
The 2025 Los Angeles Fires
In Ecology of Fear (1998), the late Marxist Mike Davis draws a stark contrast between the vast public and private resources dedicated to wildfire defense for the wealthy capitalists in Malibu, vs. the paucity of efforts and attention dedicated to fire prevention among the working-class and immigrant residents of Westlake and Downtown Los Angeles, who survive in “slum conditions of Dickensian dimensions,” often succumbing to blazes therein (Ecology of Fear, p. 137). Hugh McCagney expands on Davis’s argument in his account for New Politics of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, as he ties the Palisades Fire to the “madness” of developing real estate in Malibu, which is a fire-prone ecosystem by nature. Recent estimates suggest that insured losses for the dual wildfires that burned nearly 40,000 acres in southern California early this year—not only Palisades, but also the Eaton Fire that affected Altadena—range from $20 to $45 billion. This liability would threaten bankruptcy for the California State fund that was established to compensate precisely for losses owing to wildfires. Were he alive today, Davis would surely be interested in the ways that the fires have illuminated racial and class inequalities in LA, in terms of insurance reimbursement rates and pay-outs, community reconstruction status, and health risks in Pacific Palisades vs. Altadena.
Beyond the vast residential, economic, psychological, floral, and faunal losses for which the Palisades and Eaton fires were directly responsible—not to mention the more than 400 people they killed—it is clear that the immense amounts of ash and debris emitted by these conflagrations into the Pacific Ocean in turn provoked harmful algal blooms (HABs) that have tragically poisoned and proven fatal to many marine mammals on the California coast. Such HABs have also affected coastal fish populations, though apparently to a less extreme degree.
Conclusion
In closing, Red Flag Warning provides readers with timely reflections on the direly important phenomena of wildfires and megafires, which are only getting worse due to accelerating global overheating. Such deadly processes are in turn being driven above all by the mass-emissions of fossil fuels that underpin the capitalist system. In this light, the editors and contributors’ communal, anti-colonial, and ecological insights are most welcome. Still, the book’s argument could arguably be strengthened by integrating anti-capitalism and green syndicalism, rather than featuring bosses and waffling on, and at times even boosting, the exploitation of labor, private property, managerialism, and capitalist realism—the key elements of the very system that is wrecking the planet. That being said, we very much agree that a Red Flag Warning is proverbially in effect for the time being, until and unless capitalism and colonialism are overturned!
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 
