Nothing Is More Important than Thinking Dialectically

I would like to share some of the ideas that I have been developing from outside the academy for more than sixty years, most of that time as an Asian American woman living in the African American community.

Historically significant ideas do not come out of books but out of movement struggles. Thus the very concepts of Asian Americans and the discipline of Asian American studies were born out of the struggles of the 1960s when the civil rights and Black Power movements and the struggles of the Vietnamese people made Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Japanese Americans (the main population groups in that period) realize that the time had come for them to stop being model minorities and identify themselves as Asian Americans in order to expand and deepen the struggle against racism and imperialism.

If you forget that history, and become only academics, the chances are that you will end up on the defensive, as is already happening with African American studies programs.

We must also never forget that reality is constantly changing and that what may have been progressive at one stage is not necessarily progressive as time marches on.

For example, when the Asian American struggle got under way in the late 1960s, few of us imagined that one day:

• • There would be two Asian Americans in the cabinet of the most reactionary and dangerous president in U.S. history;

• • Asian Americans would be among the most sought after fashion models and TV news anchors;

• • China's economy would grow so fast that it would compete with the United States for access to energy sources in the Middle East and Latin America, at the same time triggering massive protests by Chinese villagers against pollution and takeovers of their farmlands;

• • Asian banks in Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India could plunge this country into the greatest of all financial crises by moving their foreign exchange out of the dollar and into Euro or other currencies;

• • Migration, which was largely eastward during the twentieth century, would be on the way to reversing itself in the twenty-first century.

These historical world developments are likely to create enormous tensions between East and West and new challenges to all Americans, especially those of Asian descent.

To prepare ourselves for these new developments, nothing is more important than thinking dialectically; that is to say, recognizing that what built the movement in the past is unlikely to build it in the present or future.

For much of the twentieth century, movement building centered on the struggles of oppressed peoples for rights and for the political power necessary to change institutions. There was little, if any, recognition of the need for two-sided transformation, not only of institutions but of the oppressed who, especially in the modern world of the mass media, absorb the values of their oppressors.

There was also little, if any, understanding that concentrating on taking state power results in the popular movement being coopted by the state; little, if any, recognition that a movement only begins when the oppressed begin seeing themselves—as the participants in the highly disciplined Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights struggles in the South did—not only as victims but as pioneers in creating new and more human relationships that advance the evolution of the human race.

In recent years, however, the degeneration of actual twentieth-century revolutions and the increasing pathology of global capitalism—its commoditization of all aspects of our lives, its destruction of communities and of natural wealth in order to create paper wealth, its pushing the life-support systems of the planet to the point of collapse, and its systematic creation of an over-consuming global north and an impoverished global south—have inspired a new kind of revolutionary movement.

The most dramatic example of this new kind of movement has been the Zapatistas who, on January 1, 1994 (the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect), occupied Mexican cities, not to take power but to create the space for everyone in the indigenous...