What distinguishes psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender (hence for me the fundamental impasse of Nancy Chodorow’s work) is that whereas for the latter, the internalization of norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting point of psychoanalysis is that it does not. The unconscious constantly reveals the ‘failure’ of identity. Because there is no continuity of psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. Nor does psychoanalysis see such 'failure’ as a special-case inability or an individual deviancy from the norm. 'Failure’ is not a moment to be regretted in a process of adaptation, or development into normality, which ideally takes its course (some of the earliest critics of Freud, such as Ernest Jones, did, however, give an account of development in just these terms).

Instead 'failure’ is something endlessly repeated and relived moment by moment throughout our individual histories. It appears not only in the symptom, but also in dreams, in slips of the tongue and in forms of sexual pleasure, which are pushed to the sidelines of the norm. Feminism’s affinity with psychoanalysis rests above all, I would argue, with this recognition that there is a resistance to identity which lies at the very heart of psychic life. Viewed in this way, psychoanalysis is no longer best understood as an account of how women are fitted into place (even this, note, is the charitable reading of Freud). Instead psychoanalysis becomes one of the few places in our culture where it is recognized as more than a fact of individual pathology that most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all.

What is the meaning of Okinawa within the larger frame of East Asian politics, and why has it proved such a thorn in Tokyo’s and Washington’s sides? The island is the largest of the Ryukyu chain, a broken necklace of coral reefs and rugged, volcanic islets that curves for some 700 miles across the East China Sea, from just below the tip of Kyushu in the north to Yonaguni in the far south, from which on a clear day one can see Taiwan. The Ryukyus were settled by the same mix of seafaring peoples that populated the southern islands of Japan, and the languages have a common parent-stock. Okinawa itself is about 70 miles long, and rarely more than seven miles wide; it lies in the typhoon path, some 400 miles from the coast of China’s Fujian Province, 800 miles south of Tokyo, roughly on the latitude of the Florida Keys. Granite slopes, green with sub-tropical vegetation, rise from clear seas; there are spectacular natural anchorages. The soil is poor, and what little cultivable land there is yields a hard living. Yet for centuries the island thrived as a way-station for maritime trade along the eastern Pacific. Intrepid Okinawan mariners ventured down to Indo-China and up to the Yellow Sea.

Envoys from the Ming Emperor had first reached Okinawa in 1372, and actively encouraged the island’s trade. Ryukyuan leaders thenceforth participated in the rituals of the Chinese tribute system: travelling every two years to the Imperial court to make their kowtows, and be royally fêted in return, while taking advantage of the many opportunities for informal trading along the way. Tributary gifts were supposed to be native produce, but an exception was made for the Ryukyu Kingdom, which had so few resources of its own—sulphur, copper, shells—yet could offer such dazzling luxury imports. The warehouses in the harbour town of Naha stored rare timber, spices, incense, ivory and sugar from the Indies and beyond; swords, textiles, ceramics, Buddhist texts and bronzes from Korea or Japan to be shipped to China; brocades, medicinal herbs and minted coins going the other way.

The sailors brought stringed instruments and dances from Malacca and the Indies which the islanders adapted to their own legends. Ryukyuan masonry became a high art, the heavy local stone carved into sturdy yet graceful ramparts and bridges. Above the harbour, the palace complex of Shuri Castle commanded a panoramic view over the ocean and the distant islands. Its steep stone walls and ceremonial gateways enclosed lacquered reception halls, gardens, shrines and the private apartments of the king, his wives, courtiers and concubines. The leading English-language historian of the island, George Kerr, has described the sophisticated society created by a population of perhaps 100,000:

It was a toy state, with its dignified kings, its sententious and learned prime ministers, its councils and its numerous bureaus, its organization of temples and shrines and its classical school, its grades in court rank and its codes of law, all developed in an effort to emulate great China. [26]

The Ryukyu Kingdom’s trade with Japan—the only power in the region to defy Imperial China—was supervised on the Shogun’s behalf by the Daimyo of Satsuma in southern Kyushu. This involved a second set of tributary relations. In the 1590s, the King of Ryukyu politely declined to support Hideyoshi’s planned assault on Korea and China. As a reprimand, the Daimyo launched a hundred-strong armada of war junks against the island in 1609. His forces looted Shuri Castle and took King Sho Nei prisoner. The terms of his ransom were an annual tribute, amounting to nearly a quarter of the tiny kingdom’s revenue, to be paid in perpetuity to the daimyo of Satsuma. In addition he would henceforth control all the Ryukyu Kingdom’s overseas trade—and, after 1634, exploit it freely to circumvent the Tokugawa Shogunate’s seclusion edicts, which closed off trade to the rest of Japan. The Ryukyuans turned to Peking for help, but the enfeebled and embattled late Ming court felt neither obliged nor able to inconvenience itself for a subordinate state. [27] Ryukyuan merchant shipping declined, weakened not only by Japanese rake-offs and the disruptive effects of the Manchu take-over in China, but by European penetration of the East China Sea, bringing with it missionaries, guns and demands for trade.

By the early 1800s, Western interests—American, Russian, British, French—were converging on Japan, hoping to prise open its ports by diplomacy or force. The Ryukyu Kingdom was an obvious—and defenceless—launch pad for such an attack. In 1853 Commodore Perry dropped anchor in Naha, hoping to establish a military base. The White House thought it would be ‘inconvenient and expensive’ to maintain such an outpost, however, and the Commodore sailed on to Edo and a larger prize, having granted the little state recognition with the 1854 Ryukyu Kingom–United States Friendship Treaty. From Japan’s vantage point, too, securing Okinawa was the rational first step in a modernizing imperialist expansion that would soon encompass Formosa and Korea. Within five years of the Meiji Restoration, Tokyo had asserted its sovereignty over the Ryukyus and—through a show of arms on Formosa—extorted recognition of this from China. When Shuri demurred, a garrison force was dispatched to the island and a powerful Home Ministry bureau opened there. In 1879 the now-powerless Ryukyuan throne was abolished and an Okinawan Prefecture established, under the command of a Tokyo-appointed Governor. The deposed king was held under restraint in Tokyo until his death in 1902. [28]

Imperial rule brought a levelling down for Okinawans as the local aristocracy was displaced by arrogant officials from the north. Land reform in the early 1900s abolished the communal village-allocation system in favour of private ownership, creating tens of thousands of landless labourers. Sugar-cane plantations, run by a monopoly corporation whose principal shareholders were the Imperial Household and the Mitsui and Mitsubishi Companies, came to dominate the local economy. Japanese modes of dress and speech were made compulsory; state Shinto and the Emperor cult were imposed; portraits of the Emperor and Empress hung in every public building. Eventually, in 1920, Ryukyuan representation in the Diet was put on the same footing as that of the rest of the country. Okinawans suffered severely during the inter-war period and Great Depression, which has passed into memory as the time of sotetsu jigoku or cycad hell, when people were reduced to eating the fruit or bark of the cycad, a palm-like but toxic tree. They played little role, however, in the militarization drive of the 1930s or invasion of China in 1937. The minimum height and weight requirements for the Imperial forces were above the average for Ryukyuan males, and during the Second World War they were largely confined to the labour corps. [29]

Facing defeat, Hirohito ‘sacrificed’ Okinawa in a bid to preserve the Emperor System and the home islands, while treating for surrender terms. The Allied land assault was launched in April 1945: the ancient walls of Shuri Castle were subjected to continuous bombardment from air and sea for sixty days, while half a million US troops poured onto the island, five times the size of the defending force. To the Imperial Japanese Army, distraught Okinawans were either a nuisance—competing for scarce resources, hindering troop movements—or a threat, suspected of spying because of the incomprehensible dialect they spoke. In the most extreme cases, grenades were distributed and the people were called upon to sacrifice themselves in ‘collective suicides’. At the same time, many trying to hide in the island’s caves were incinerated by American flame-throwers. More than 200,000 people, half of them civilians, died in the rain of fire and steel. After the cynical nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had secured an already prostrate Japan’s unconditional surrender, Okinawa became ‘an immense, neglected military dump’:

Towns and villages were rubble heaps; tens of thousands lived in caves, tombs, lean-to shacks, or relief camps … Farmers became air-base labourers; fishermen became truck-drivers; the old aristocracy disappeared. Cast-off GI clothing, American soft drinks, cigarettes and canned goods supplied a new luxury trade for a totally impoverished people. [30]

The memory of 1945 is seared into Okinawan identity and has shaped responses to the security agenda foisted upon the island ever since. Their outrage is especially stirred by attempts to sanitize history, as happened under Koizumi, by deleting from school textbooks their memories of the compulsory mass suicides under the bayonets of the Imperial Army, and the final orders from Tokyo to abandon all thought of survival. They learned, and refuse to forget, that neither the Japanese nor the American armed forces were there for their defence.

Rosa Luxemburg, dependency theorist.

‘If the economic relations between the different “national economies” amount to no more than the fact that, as the professor teaches us, these “national economies,” just as at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, cast off certain “surpluses,” i.e. if simple commodity exchange is the only bridge over the void dividing one of these “microcosms” from another, it is clear that a country can import exactly as much in goods from abroad as it exports of its own. But in simple commodity exchange money is only an intermediary, and the foreign products are paid at the end of the day in one’s own commodities. How then can a “national economy” manage the artifice of permanently importing more from abroad than it exports from its own “surplus”? Perhaps the professor will jest with us that the solution is the simplest thing in the world, the importing country only needs to settle the excess of its imports over its exports in cash. “Only,” indeed! The luxury, year in year out, of filling the bottomless pit of its foreign trade with a considerable sum of money that will never be seen again is something that at most a country with rich gold and silver mines of its own could afford, which is not the case with either Germany or France, Belgium or the Netherlands. Besides, there is a further amazing surprise: not only does Germany steadily import more goods that it imports, it also imports more money! In 1913, German imports of gold and silver came to 441.3 million marks, its exports to 102.8 million, a relationship that has been approximately the same for years. What does Professor Bücher with his “surpluses” and “gaps” have to say about this puzzle? The magic lamp is flickering gloomily. Indeed, we begin to suspect that behind the puzzling character of world trade there must in fact be quite other kinds of economic relations between individual “national economies” than simple commodity exchange; to regularly obtain from other countries more than you give them is evidently only possible for a country that has some kind of economic claim over others that is completely different from exchange between equals. And such claims and relations of dependence between countries exist in fact at every turn, although these professorial theories know nothing of them. One such dependence relationship, in the simplest form, is that between a so-called mother country and its colony. Great Britain draws from its largest colony, India, an annual tribute of more than 1,000 million marks. And we accordingly see that India’s exports of goods are some 1,200 million marks greater than its imports. This “surplus” is nothing more than the economic expression of the colonial exploitation of India by British capitalism—whether these goods are directly bound for Great Britain, or whether India has to sell to other states each year goods to a value of 1,200 million marks specifically for the purpose of paying this tribute to its British exploiters.XI

But there are also other relationships of economic dependence that are not based on political rule. Russia annually exports around 1,000 million marks’ worth more of goods than it imports. Is it the great “surplus” of agricultural products over the needs of its own “national economy” that drains this immense flow of goods each year out of the Russian Empire? But the Russian peasant, whose corn is taken out of the country in this way, is well known to suffer from scurvy due to undernourishment, and often has to eat bread mixed with tree bark! The massive export of his grain, through the mechanism of a financial and taxation system designed for this purpose, is a matter of life or death for the Russian state, in order to meet its obligations to foreign creditors. Since its notorious defeat in the Crimean war,19 and its modernization by the reforms of Alexander II,20 the Russian state apparatus has been financed to a high degree by capital borrowed from Western Europe, principally from France. In order to pay interest on the French loans, Russia has to sell each year large quantities of wheat, timber, flax, hemp, cattle and poultry to Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. The immense surplus of Russian exports thus represents the tribute of a debtor to his creditors, a relationship matched on the French side by a large surplus of imports, which represents nothing other than the interest on its loan capital. But in Russia itself, the chain of economic connections runs further. The borrowed French capital has served principally in the last few decades for two purposes: railway building with state guarantees, and armaments. To this end, Russia has developed since the 1870s a strong heavy industry—under the protection of a system of high customs tariffs. The borrowed capital from the old capitalist country France has fueled a young capitalism in Russia, but this in turn requires for its support and expansion a considerable import of machinery and other means of production from Britain and Germany as the most technologically advanced industrial countries. A tie of economic connections is thus woven between Russia, France, Germany and Britain, in which commodity exchange is only a small part.

Yet this does not exhaust the manifold nature of these connections. A country like Turkey or China presents a new puzzle for our professor. It has, contrary to Russia but similarly to Germany or France, a large surplus of imports, amounting in many years to almost double the quantity of exports. How can Turkey or China afford the luxury of such a copious filling of the “gaps” in their “national economies,” given that these economies are not nearly in a position to export corresponding “surpluses”? Do the Western powers offer the crescent and the realm of the pigtail each year a present of several hundred million marks, in the form of all kinds of useful goods, out of Christian charity? Every child know that both Turkey and China are actually up to their necks in the jaws of European usurers, and have to pay the British, German and French banks an enormous tribute in interest. Following the Russian example, both Turkey and China should on the contrary show a surplus of exports of their own agricultural products in order to be able to pay this interest to their West European well wishers. But in both these two countries the so-called “national economy” is fundamentally different from the Russian. Certainly, the foreign loans are likewise used principally for railway building, port construction and armaments. But Turkey has virtually no industry of its own, and cannot conjure this out of the ground of its medieval peasant subsistence agriculture with its primitive cultivation and tithes. The same is true in a slightly different way for China. And so not only the whole of the population’s need for industrial goods, but also everything necessary for transport construction and the equipment of army and navy, has to be imported ready-made from Western Europe and constructed on site by European entrepreneurs, technicians and engineers. The loans are indeed frequently tied in advance to supplies of this kind. China, for example, obtains a loan from German and Austrian banking capital only on condition that it immediately orders a certain quantity of armaments from the Skoda works21 and Krupp;22 other loans are tied in advance to concessions for the construction of railways. In this way, most European capital migrates to Turkey and China already in the form of goods (armaments) or industrial capital in kind, in the form of machinery, iron, etc. These latter goods are not sent for exchange, but for the production of profit. Interest on this capital, along with further profit, is squeezed from the Turkish or Chinese peasants by the European capitalists with the help of a corresponding taxation system under European financial control. The bare figures of a preponderance of imports for Turkey or China, and corresponding European exports, thus conceal the particular relationship that obtains between the rich big-capitalist West and the poor and backward East that it bleeds dry with the help of the most modern and developed communications facilities and military installations—and with it the galloping ruin of the old peasant “national economy.”

A still different case is presented by the United States. Here we again see, as in Russia, an export figure well above that of imports—the former came to 10,200 million marks in 1913, the latter to 7,400 million—but the reasons for this are fundamentally different from the Russian case. Right from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the London stock exchange has absorbed vast quantities of American loans and shares; speculation in American company formation and stocks, until the 1860s, regularly announced like a fever patient’s thermometer an impending major crisis for British industry and trade. Since then, the outflow of English capital to the United States has not ceased. This capital partly took the form of loan capital to cities and private companies, but mostly that of industrial capital, whether American railway and industrial stocks were sold on the London stock exchange, or English industrial cartels founded branches in the US in order to circumvent the high tariff barrier, or else to take over companies there by purchasing their shares, in order to get rid of their competition on the world market. The United States possesses today a highly developed heavy industry that is advancing every more swiftly, and that, while it continues to attract money capital from Europe, itself exports industrial capital on an increasing scale—machinery, coal—to Canada, Mexico and other Central and South American countries. In this way the United States combines an enormous export of raw materials—cotton, copper, wheat, timber and petroleum—to the old capitalist countries with a growing industrial export to the young countries embarking on industrialization. The United States’ great surplus of exports thus reflects the particular transitional stage from a capital-receiving agricultural country to a capital-exporting industrial one, the role of an intermediate link between the old capitalist Europe and the new and backward American continent.

An overview of this great migration of capital from the old industrial countries to the young ones, and the corresponding reverse migration of the incomes drawn from this capital and paid as annual tribute by the young countries to the old, shows three powerful streams. England, according to estimates from 1906, had already invested 54,000 million marks by this time in its colonies and elsewhere, from which it drew an annual income of 2,800 million marks. France’s foreign capital at this time amounted to 32,000 million marks, with an annual income of at least 1,300 million. Germany, finally, had invested 26,000 million, which yielded 1,240 million annually. These great main streams, however, ultimately break down into smaller tributaries. Just as the United States is spreading capitalism further on the American continent, so even Russia—itself still fueled completely by French capital, and English and German industry—is already transferring loan capital and industrial products to its Asian hinterland, to China, Persia and Central Asia; it is involved in railway construction in China, etc.

We thus discover behind the dry hieroglyphs of international trade a whole network of economic entanglements, which have nothing to do with simple commodity exchange, which is all that the professorial wisdom can notice.

We discover that the distinction Herr Bücher makes between countries of industrial production and countries of raw-material production, the flimsy scaffolding on which he hangs the whole of international exchange, is itself only a crude product of professorial schematism. Perfume, cotton goods and machines are all manufactured goods. But the export of perfume from France only shows that France is the country of luxury production for the thin stratum of the rich bourgeoisie across the world; the export of cotton goods from Japan shows that Japan, competing with Western Europe, is undermining the traditional peasant and handicraft production throughout East Asia, driving it out by commodity trade; while the export of machinery from England, Germany and the United States shows that these three countries are themselves propagating heavy industry to all regions of the world.

We thus discover that one “commodity” is exported and imported today that was unknown in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar as well as in the whole of the antique and medieval periods: capital. And this commodity does not serve to fill “certain gaps” in other countries’ “national economies,” but quite the reverse—opening up gaps, rifts and splits in the edifice of traditional “national economies,” and acting like gunpowder to transform these “national economies” sooner or later into heaps of rubble. In this way, the “commodity” capital spreads still more remarkable “commodities” on an ever more massive scale from various old countries to the whole world: modern means of transport and the destruction of whole indigenous populations, money economy and an indebted peasantry, riches and poverty, proletariat and exploitation, insecurity of existence and crises, anarchy and revolutions. The European “national economies” extend their polyp-like tentacles to all countries and people of the earth, strangling them in a great net of capitalist exploitation