The fundamental problem we are dealing with is not “white, hetero-normative patriarchy.” The system we are up against is not just some arrangement where “straight white males” lord it over everybody else.

This system has all this oppression built into it—including oppression based on nationality and race, sex and gender—but all this rests on a certain foundation, a definite mode of production: the way the economy is organized and functions. As I have emphasized before: If you don’t understand this, you don’t really understand the actual problem, or the actual solution.

Capitalist exploitation is not a white European invention. Oppression is not just a “white,” or a “male” (or a “straight white male”) thing. And imperialism is not just European countries dominating and robbing countries and peoples they have colonized. As I pointed out in message number Twenty-One:

Things like racism and misogyny (hatred of women) are not “built in” characteristics of white people and men—and the attitude of looking out for yourself, and to hell with everybody else, is not “hard wired” into human beings. All these things are products of the system that people are forced to live under—the oppressive economic, political, and social relations of the system, and the ideas and culture that reflect and reinforce those relations.

And:

In general throughout human history, in any part of the world where people have been divided into masters and slaves,“upper and lower classes,” this has been accompanied by the idea that those in the superior position are somehow, by their very “nature,” superior as human beings, and those in the lower position are “inferior” human beings. This has been true in ancient, as well as more modern, empires and countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as Europe.

For example, the Asian country of Japan is a capitalist-imperialist country. Its development as a country based on the exploitation and oppression of masses of people goes back far beyond any significant involvement with Europeans. And there are crucial lessons to be learned from the role of Japan in the period leading into and during the second world war (the period of the 1930s and early 1940s). During that time, the Japanese capitalist-imperialists were determined to replace European countries as the dominant imperialist power in the rest of Asia. Their goal was not to bring about liberation for the people in those Asian countries, but to bring about Japanese imperialist plunder of those countries and exploitation of their peoples.

But the Japanese imperialists did this in the name of “Asian identity” and opposition to European domination. They invaded and occupied many other Asian countries, including China, and the invading and occupying Japanese troops carried out the most horrific atrocities against the masses of people in those countries, including mass rape of women.

Why did the Japanese imperialists do this? Not just because they were depraved hypocrites, but most fundamentally because of the nature and needs of the system of capitalism-imperialism, which is based on ruthless exploitation of masses of people, and is driven by bitter competition between capitalist exploiters and intense rivalry between capitalist-imperialist countries, whether those capitalist-imperialists are European, or Asian, or any other “identity.”

Any system that is based on exploitation will also have, as one of its main features, brutal male supremacy, along with other oppressive relations—and the motivation of the soldiers of such a system will involve the prospect and the “right” to the sexual conquest and plunder of women—something which has certainly been true of the American military throughout its history.

To finally put an end to all this terrible oppression, everywhere, it is necessary to move beyond all systems founded on exploitation—it is necessary to overthrow the system of capitalism-imperialism and abolish and uproot relations of exploitation and oppression, everywhere. That is the real solution to the real, fundamental problem with which human beings everywhere are now confronted.