Japan

I did what I could for my family and other people in Japan.

I managed to contact my brother on the 11th and persuaded my sister-in-law and nephew to leave for Kyushu (my brother, a Japanese Red Cross worker, refused to leave because he got "work to do"). I got through to my parents on the 12th and talked them into heading south, either to stay with my favorite aunt (my mother's sister) in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, or to head further south. Those were the last phone calls, and since then I have not been able to get in touch with them. I hope by now they got where they needed to go, far away from Chiba (where they normally live, only about 150 miles from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants).

The clock is ticking, and there is little time left to do more.

Two, Three, Many 1960s

Check out this beautiful article by an American woman: Chelsea Szendi Schieder, "Two, Three, Many 1960s" (MRZine, 15 June 2010). This is a very fair assessment, and moving commemoration, of the New Left in Japan and the global Sixties (maybe only a gaizin-san can be this fair to both the J New Left and the JCP -- the only thing missing in the article is a mention of Kanba Michiko's own writings, so I added links to those). This is 200% better than most of the articles about May 68 in France that came out in 2008. Anyhow, as you can see from the article, it's not easy establishing a republican state, is it, even -- or perhaps especially -- in the North? All sides of the Iranian nation and their leadership sometimes sound nutty, but, still and all, they are "people to be reckoned with," so very unlike the people running the show, and people who let them run it, in Japan, who are not even as interesting as the AKP!

IRIB in Japanese

A funny thing about the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) is that, of all its numerous foreign-language versions, it provides Iranian food recipes, tourist information, a detailed introduction to master musicians of Iran, elementary Persian-language lessons, etc. only on its Japanese-language site. They know my people, whose main interests generally run toward good food, sightseeing, and cultural sampling (usually in that order)!

Notes on the Japanese Elections of 2009

Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity, which created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, finally put an end to Japan's de facto one-party state on 30 August 2009. But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from 115 to 308 (the DPJ block now enjoys 322 seats, more than a two-thirds majority). The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party barely hanged onto the same numbers of seats that they had before the elections: 9 for the CP^* and 7 for the SDP. On the face of it, it is not a debacle for the Left like those suffered by Communists in India and Italy in the most recent elections. But, one of the items on the DPJ agenda is a plan to eliminate 80 proportional representation seats, and it just so happens that all the Communist representatives are elected to proportional representation seats.

Why did the Japanese Left fail to advance? Take a look at this video of the 21 August 2009 press conference of JCP Chaiman Shii Kazuo (which comes with English translation), and you'll get a clue.

JCP criticisms of the DPJ agenda are to the point more often than not (which you can see in more detail in 「国民が主人公」の新しい日本を -- 日本共産党の総選挙政策), but those criticisms don't amount to a compelling vision of a new socialist society that the party should be presenting.

The strongest point of the JCP criticisms of the DPJ is that the DPJ will pay for its promise to expand the social safety net, including the formerly excluded, by increasing the taxes on working-class incomes, leveling down the existing structures of entitlements such as pensions toward the new social minimums, decreasing public works and public-sector jobs, and so on, the trade-off that the DPJ will make inevitable given its refusal to tax big businesses and capitalists and to cut military spending.

But, in the process of making this point, the JCP ends up defending the old, such as tax exemptions for dependent spouses (usually housewives), which have discouraged many a woman from seeking full-time jobs since wives earning only part-time incomes (roughly up to 1,300,000 yen) are counted as dependents for the purpose of calculating taxes, insurance and pension contributions and benefits, etc. What's good for working-class families in material terms can be bad for working-class women looking to enhance their gender-bargaining power vis-a-vis men, and the structures of the Japanese welfare state that tacitly assume male family wages, lifetime monogamous marriages, female spousal dependency, etc. are textbook cases of the common class-gender contradiction under capitalism. This contradiction is intensifying as more and more Japanese women are clearly losing interest in marriage and childbearing, powerfully demonstrating their sharp rejection of the old gender settlement and silently erecting a strong demographic obstacle to the old methods of restoring economic growth. The JCP, or any other left-wing current in Japan, needs to offer women -- and young people in general -- a new socialist vision that addresses women as individuals in their own right and creates new networks of social solidarity other than biological families, rather than a maternalist Keynesian vision in which women are tacitly assumed to be, or become, or have been wives and mothers.

The same goes for the JCP's defense of the Peace Constitution. On one hand, any constitutional revision that the DPJ will put on the agenda will likely be one that pushes Japan onto the course that Germany took in the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, embarking on humanitarian imperialist adventures of its own, not just as a subordinate member of the US-led coalition of the willing. On the other hand, there is nothing democratic, let alone socialist, about defending the constitution that the occupier wrote for Japan, on which the Japanese people have not been allowed to vote. Socialists must present a new democratic vision for Japan. Why not a constitutional assembly in Japan, to write a new constitution as a step toward 21st century socialism?


* The proportion of the total vote for the Communists, however, registered a slight decline, from 7.25% to 7.03%.

Japanese Lesson for the Iranian Left

The wind of populism blows in Japan, in rhetoric if not in policy, raising the hope of finally putting an end to the world's longest-standing one-party state. Alas, the wind has not filled the sail of the Communist Party, but that of the social liberal party on the center left. Still and all, it ought to be an object lesson to leftists in Iran, the only leftists in the world to line up behind a loser upholding an anti-Keynesian banner in the midst of a global economic crisis.

A Bailout in Exchange for Wage and Benefit Reductions

A bailout in exchange for wage and benefit reductions, especially retirees' pensions and health care benefits -- that's the ruling-class program for auto workers . . . and all other workers, union or non-union, in the primary labor market in the United States. 

Even while the ruling class deviates from the neoliberal orthodoxy in monetary and fiscal policies, lowering interest rates, monetizing debt, and creating temporary jobs and extending temporary benefits in an attempt to stimulate the economy, it continues to push to structurally transform labor in its neoliberal image (the strongest weapon of neoliberalism is its ability to pit the workers in the primary labor market -- the public sector and oligopolistic industries -- against workers who are excluded from it to begin with, weakening the former even while extending thin new benefits to the latter to maintain the neoliberal hegemonic bloc, at which Brazil's Lula and Turkey's AKP for instance are expert).  That is what the ruling class did to workers in Japan, increasing poverty and aggravating inequality.

Needless to say, making labor more precarious is a recipe for prolonging rather than exiting deflationary stagnation, no matter how much fiscal and monetary stimuli the government applies at the same time.  The crisis doesn't automatically bring an end to neoliberalism.  It's up to the working class to end it, or else the economy won't even recover.

Multinational Investors' Vote of Confidence in Ultra-imperialism

Check out multinational investors' major vote of confidence in ultra-imperialism today: John Willman, "Markets Cheer Bank Bail-outs" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Ralph Atkins, "European Banks Offer Unlimited Dollar Funding" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); "Full Text: US Treasury Tarp Plans" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Louise Story and Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Morgan Agrees to Revise Terms of Mitsubishi Deal" (New York Times, 13 October 2008); "Gulf Shares Surge as UAE and Qatar Act (Financial Times, 12 October 2008); and Robin Wigglesworth and Simeon Kerr, "UAE Leads Drive to Stem Crisis" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008).

It's true that, if China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the United States functioned as one politically (if not legally) coherent establishment, Americans would be back in the black:

Global Balance of Payments ($bn, 2007)

SOURCE: Martin Wolf, "Asia's Revenge," Financial Times, 9 October 2008, p. 9.

That's the level at which the ruling classes have built their post-WW2 hegemony (cf. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class; and Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace; etc.).

Therefore, a radical shift in global class relations could come only if there were a radical shift in any one of the aforementioned countries, but these are the very ones where the Left has the least chance in the world.

Is China, though, a weak or strong link in this chain of empire (to which Latin socialists, Islamists from the Hindu Kush to the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa to the Niger Delta, Maoists in Nepal and India, the national security interests of Russia, etc. have provided a partial material -- if ideologically incoherent -- counterweight)?

Update

"[T]he needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it" ("Text: Henry Paulson Remarks Tuesday," 15 October 2008).

"Investors are recognizing that the financial crisis is not the fundamental problem. It has merely amplified economic ailments that are now intensifying: vanishing paychecks, falling home prices and diminished spending. And there is no relief in sight" (Peter S. Goodman, "Markets Suffer as Investors Weigh Relentless Trouble," New York Times, 16 October 2008).

Toward the Highest Stage of Ultra-imperialism?

A local friend of mine jokes: if worst comes to worst, the US can always annex Saudi Arabia. But why stop there on the way to the highest stage of ultra-imperialism: America, China, Japan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia together legally conglomerated into a new United States, bringing Americans -- thank Allah and Confucius -- back in the black?

Global Balance of Payments ($bn, 2007)

SOURCE: Martin Wolf, "Asia's Revenge," Financial Times, 9 October 2008, p. 9.

Jokes aside, Martin Wolf's article that I used as the source for the chart above is actually very useful (except its conclusion still in favor of "liberalized finance" that is unsupportable based on the logic and evidence of the article itself). It succinctly highlights the problem of global inequity and inefficiency -- poorer nations exporting surpluses to richer nations, only to see them wasted on an enormous debt-fueled real-estate Ponzi scheme -- as the cause of the financial crisis of the century.

What lay behind the savings glut? The first development was the shift of emerging economies into a large surplus of savings over investment. Within the emerging economies, the big shifts were in Asia and in the oil exporting countries (see chart). By 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund, the aggregate savings surpluses of these two groups of countries had reached around 2 per cent of world output.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Last year, the aggregate surpluses of the world's surplus countries reached $1,680bn, according to the IMF. The top 10 (China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Kuwait, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates) generated more than 70 per cent of this total. The surpluses of the top 10 countries represented at least 8 per cent of their aggregate GDP and about one-quarter of their aggregate gross savings.

Meanwhile, the huge US deficit absorbed 44 per cent of this total. The US, UK, Spain and Australia -- four countries with housing bubbles -- absorbed 63 per cent of the world's current account surpluses.

That represented a vast shift of capital – but unlike in the 1970s and early 1980s, it went to some of the world's richest countries. (emphasis added, Wolf, p. 9)

There is no political or economic incentive on the part of the biggest deficit spenders, especially the US, to change this pattern. The change therefore has to come from surplus generators.

Memory of Fire: Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba

Memory of Fire:
Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba

炎の記憶
原爆の残り火をキューバへ

炎の記憶 − 原爆の残り火をキューバへ (Memory of Fire: Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba) was produced by 広島ホームテレビ(Hiroshima Home TV) and first broadcast in 2007.  The documentary tells the story of Ernesto Che Guevara's thoughts on Hiroshima and their relation to the Cuban Revolution's commitment to humanism, for example, its humanitarian aid and protection of the environment.  At the same time, it follows the delegates from アテナ・ジャパン (Atena Japan), a Japanese NGO, bringing the embers of Hiroshima to Cuba (which will be kept in a memorial designed by Nelson Domínguez in Cuba's John Lennon Park).

Che headed the Cuban delegation to Asia and Africa in 1959.  During the delegation's visit to Japan, Che requested that they be allowed to go to Hiroshima, the requested turned down by the Japanese government on the grounds that it wasn't listed on the delegation's itinerary.  (Omar Fernández, who was with Guevara on the delegation, wonders if the denial wasn't actually due to Tokyo's desire not to call attention to the US war crimes.¹)  Undaunted, Che, with two other delegates, jumped on a night train and visited Hiroshima on 25 July 1959 without telling the Japanese government.  What Che saw, some of which was published in his article "Recuperase Japón de la tragedia atomica" (Verde Olivo, 19 October 1959), became part of the Cuban memory of Hiroshima.

Che also strongly recommended that Fidel Castro himself visit Hiroshima, which Fidel did in 2003.  Fidel's 2003 visit, too, is part of this fascinating documentary.

In May this year, Atena Japan, together with other activist NGOs, brought Aleida Guevara to Japan, to celebrate "小さな国の大きな奇跡" (A Little Country Working Great Miracles).  The people of Japan have much to learn from Cuban environmentalism as they confront their government bent on becoming a plutonium superpower.²

Notes

1  Former Defense Minister of Japan Kyuma Fumio memorably said in 2007 that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "shoganai" (couldn't have been helped), for the bombings were "necessary" to end the war before a Soviet invasion of Japan!

久間防衛相の『原爆しょうがない』発言部分の映像

It's common for the power elites to defend their own war crimes or their predecessors', but rare are those who so openly defend a foreign power's war crimes against "their own people."   Only in Japan?

2 Gavan McCormack, "Japan as a Nuclear State" (Japan Focus, 1 August 2007); "Japan as a Plutonium Superpower" (Japan Focus, 9 December 2007); and "August Nuclear Thoughts: the New Proliferation" (Japan Focus, 4 August 2008).

Iraq: We All Work for the Casino in the Green Zone

Iraq: We All Work for the Casino in the Green Zone
An Interview with Martin Eisenstadt

As you know, there's a talk of developing the Green Zone. The Marriott Hotel chain is here, and I too am involved in hospitality. I'm representing interests that are building a hotel. . . . Five stars, a casino, gambling, and it's going to be here in the Green Zone.

The sponsors are a Dubai-based company which has a lot of experience with hotels and casinos in the Middle East. And there's also a Las Vegas partner.

There's a lot of disposable wealth now in this region, as you must know -- a lot of foreign investors, foreign contractors, the troops are paid in dollars.

I'd call it a cultural center. We're excited to build hotels, to build golf courses, to bring Madonna, and to bring Elton John.

Money does talk. Democracy is the first step, but it needs to be followed by capitalism and entertainment, because that's what brings people together, and it's worked many times before. I noticed that now in the Green Zone there's even a Wendy's. Wendy's is a very famous American hamburger restaurant. . . . Do what tastes right! Yeah, Wendy's, it's an exciting process. I see the Green Zone transforming before my eyes.

And it's to the benefit of the Iraqi people, because that disposable income trickles down, as we say in America trickles down, when the people with the big money are spending that at roulettes they are also leaving tips to waiters. We have 6,000 rooms, we need many young girls to clean them. We're going to have a golf course, which needs gardeners, people with the gardening background.

The massage. We're gonna be able to bring people from all around the world, so your masseuse might actually be from the former Soviet Union or from Thailand. A boxer might come from America, mixed martial artists might come from Brazil. That's what I'm trying to convey. And there's been some lobbying, because there's a vote this week in the parliament. Democracy is vibrant, it's alive, and the Iraqis feel . . . right, the feeling is here, the feeling of democracy.

There's an issue of legalized gambling. I know in Kurdistan there is a casino that is very successful, and that's what we are trying to bring to Iraq. And I'm telling you, Iraq is already transforming, but soon it's gonna be like Berlin, it's gonna be like Okinawa, it's gonna be like Seoul, it's gonna be like Las Vegas, but within the Iraqi context, sensitive to the sensibilities of local people, of course. There'll be a mosque, a room for prayers, five times a day, there will be a call for prayers. We're gonna have a special section for Shesh Besh. Backgammon. Not just roulettes, blackjack, and poker, but a special section for Shesh Besh. So, we are going to incorporate local norms. And we are going to have off-track betting for the camel races in Dubai and countries nearby.

But yes, the pizzazz, the Vegas pizzazz, the American, can-do, let's-have-fun, we're-all-one attitude, yes, unapologetically, we're going to bring that here, but mixed with local sensibilities.

When you have a jack and a six, and you hit, everybody is in it together. That rush transcends your language, your culture, your religion. That I think is what's gonna really bring people together.

Whether you are Shia, Sunni, or Kurd, you're gonna be seen wearing the same casino uniform, with the same nameplates. which says we're all one, we all work for the casino, there are no differences between us. Our employment is going to be one third, one third, one third, so that all the peoples of Iraq are represented.

I haven't spoken as much about this in America, but I think here it's ok, it's gonna happen soon. I'm probably soon gonna be an advisor for the McCain campaign, because my candidate, Rudi Giuliani, dropped out. And I can assure you that John McCain supports this effort. John McCain will likely be the next American president. And I think the people here in Baghdad should understand that a future American president supports this endeavor.

John McCain as the head of the Indian Affairs Committee in the Senate knows hands-on, full well, the importance of development, how a casino, haw a sauna, how a golf course can transform a people, can transform a region and bring peace to groups that otherwise fight. We also had a racial conflict, between Indians, the white people, the Caucasians from Europe, and the Black people from Africa. And somehow casinos have managed to fix that divide. Only twenty years ago the Indians were drunk, and homeless, and committing crimes. Today, they're prosperous and wealthy, driving a Mercedes, with their kids with Game Boys and PlayStations, satellite dishes on their homes. And so too the Black people with sports have managed to advance themselves in this kind of entertainment sector. It's brought harmony between all the peoples. And we intend to bring the same thing here to Baghdad.

Iraq has changed. I think it's because of casinos. You find that today there's a wide consensus, across the board the American people are committed to helping Iraq see this problem through to its end. We're not gonna cut and run, we're partners, we're in this together for at least a hundred years. And I'll see you at the blackjack table. And what happens in the Green Zone stays in the Green Zone.

---

This is a partial transcript (omitting the interviewer's questions) of a program that is said to have been broadcast on Al-Iraqia in February 2008, featuring Martin Eisenstadt speaking at the "Baghdad Business 2 Business EXPO." H/T to Juan Cole, Raed Jarrar, and Rick B. The video is (most likely) a satire.

A Model Occupation

In the last couple of decades,¹ advocates for war, sanctions, boycotts, and other measures on the human rights and humanitarian grounds have become a politically significant presence on the broadly defined Left in the USA and Western Europe (inflated during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the final push for independence of East Timor, a little deflated since the Iraq War, but re-flated through Darfur, Tibet, etc.).

This current of thought is not non-existent in Japan. However, it has been a much smaller and much less politically significant current in Japan than in the USA and Western Europe.

There are various reasons for this difference.

1. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: being on the receiving side of atomic bombs has a way of encouraging pacifism and discouraging militarism, at least among leftists.

2. Japanese leftists, unlike American and European leftists, do not have a memory of being on the "right side" of a "Good War" in their "people's history." So, there is no ready-made narrative structure in which would-be pro-war leftists in Japan could easily marry militarism with humanitarianism and human rights advocacy. Besides, Japan is economically of the West but not culturally of the mythical West (whose narrative goes "from the birth of democracy in Athens to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment to liberal democracy of universal human rights," the narrative that is attractive not just to the Right but also to the Left, which may position itself as the better defender of the Enlightenment than the Right), so leftists in Japan cannot easily see themselves as protagonists in this dominant narrative of humanitarian imperialism.

3. Till very recently, the Liberal Democratic Party had had a de facto one party state in Japan. The Left in Japan being a minor force that has not had a chance of becoming a governing party or a member of a governing coalition, there has also been much less temptation to opportunism for them than those parties and intellectuals in Europe and the USA who could become, and sometimes did become, part of the establishment by joining center-left parties. (This may change sometime in the near future, with the ascendancy of the Democratic Party in Japan.)

4. The Communist Party, albeit no longer Marxist, has remained a mass party in Japan, more or less hegemonic over left-wing political culture in the country, not only directly but also through its numerous affiliate institutions and publications, in a way that Communists in the USA and Western Europe have not been especially since the long Sixties.

5. After WW2, both the Left and the Right of Japan renounced any ambition to develop their own foreign policies: the Left by embracing the "Peace Constitution"; the Right by always deferring to Washington. They embraced the defeat, as John W. Dower says.

This last fact has both positive and negative aspects for leftists in Japan. There is no big constituency for assertive liberal imperialism in Japan, which is good for the Left. However, by accepting what the occupier imposed on the Japanese, the Left in Japan has failed to develop a political culture of republicanism and democracy, which is not only bad for itself but also bad for the rest of the country.

That failure also has had unforeseen consequences for people in the global South. The Japanese Left's acceptance of the occupation -- seeking "to turn the conqueror's democratic revolution peaceably into a socialist one" under the leadership of a "lovable Communist Party" in the early post-war years (John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, pp. 255-256) -- has encouraged those on the broadly defined Left in the USA to look back nostalgically upon the occupation of Japan as a model occupation, good for the conscience of the occupier and good for the welfare of the occupied, a model which makes them think, "If we had done it the way it was done in Japan, we could have succeeded in Iraq" (blaming the Bush White House for its "tactical errors"), or "If Iraq had been like Japan, the occupation could have worked" (blaming the Iraqis for their "underdevelopment"). Therefore, no matter how disastrous the occupation of Iraq becomes, it doesn't curb the enthusiasm for other interventions, for the myth of the model occupation tells them seductively: select the right target and employ the right tactics, and you will be a liberator again.

Here's a dialectical irony: humanitarian imperialism has failed to grow on the Left in Japan; but its growth on the Left in the USA and Europe may very well have been copiously fertilized by the post-war choices made by the Japanese Left.

1 To be sure, there had always existed both imperialist and anti-imperialist political currents on the broadly defined Left. Liberalism, social democracy, and socialism all had politico-economic theories that could lend themselves to either current. For imperialist liberals and social democrats, imperialism brings capitalist development, which in turn, especially if it is tempered by reforms, fosters social and cultural development; for imperialist socialists, imperialism, by dissolving feudal barriers and dispossessing peasants, can hasten the day when the gravediggers of capitalism, the proletariat, are born on the world scale. A relatively broad anti-imperialist consensus at the height of anti-colonial struggles in the twentieth century may have been a historical anomaly.

US Declares War on Iran

Washington is now making the most ruthless use of its dollar hegemony against Iran. It just declared war on the entirety of Iran's banking system and will blackmail China, Europe, Japan, et al. to cut off Iran financially.

(1) the March 20 advisory [of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit within the US Treasury Department] represents a US declaration of war by sanctions on Iran and a sanctions threat to the international banking community, (2) the US has various unilateral financial sanctions measures at its command in the form of executive orders and Patriot Act Section 311 and (3) the BDA-North Korea sanctions were, at least in retrospect, a test run for Iran.

If the US succeeds, an international quarantine on Iran's banks would disrupt Iran's financial linkages with the world by blocking its ability to process cross-border payments for goods and services exported and imported. Without those linkages Iran is unlikely to be able to engage in global trade and commerce. As 30% of Iran's GDP in 2005 was imports of goods and services and 20% was non-oil exports (World Bank and other data), a large chunk of Iran's economy would shrivel up. The repercussions will be painful and extend well beyond lost business and profits. For example, treating curable illnesses will become difficult. According to an Iranian health ministry official, Iran produces 95% of its own medicines but most pharmaceutical-related raw materials are imported. (John McGlynn, "The March 20, 2008 US Declaration of War on Iran," MRZine, 24 March 2008)

Make no mistake: this economic war is a strategy pursued by both Democrats and Republicans, realists and adventurists alike: Daniel Dombey, "Senators Urge Formal Sanctions," Financial Times, 6 March 2008.

The dollar hegemony is declining (cf. Jeffrey Frankel, "The Euro Could Surpass the Dollar within Ten Years," Vox, 18 March 2008; Wolfgang Münchau, "This Crisis Could Bring the Euro Centre-stage," Financial Times, 23 March 2008), but will it decline fast enough for the Iranians?

The ruling clerics of Iran are able leaders who have run their country with a surer hand than leftists would have, but this presents them with the greatest challenge since Saddam Hussein, backed by the West, invaded Iran -- perhaps even a greater challenge, since at least the richest third of Iranians are not made of the same stuff as those who made the revolution and defended Iran's sovereignty in the eight-year-long war.

Divorce Japanese Style

I have always thought that the Japanese are not made for heterosexuality, let alone monogamy.

• "Almost 40 percent of Japanese married couples speak to each other less than 30 minutes a day, with more wives than husbands contemplating divorce, a recent survey [of 1,200 married people by Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co.] revealed. . . . [C]ouples in their 40s spend the least time chatting -- almost 54 percent of husbands and wives in that age group spent less than half an hour per day talking with each other" (Yoko Kubota, "Married Japanese Quietly Contemplate Divorce: Survey," Reuters, 26 November 2007).


• "A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict" (Blaine Harden, "Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price: Japan's Salarymen, with Pensions at Stake, Work on Their Marriages," Washington Post, 26 November 2007, A1).

My parents, after more than four decades of marriage, are still together. Not only that, they are decidedly heterosocial, in that they have always spent more of their free time with each other than with their respective same-gender friends. Very unlike many Japanese wives and husbands their age.

Japan, a Blogging Nation

The Japanese apparently blog more than anyone else.

Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English, according to Technorati, the Internet search engine that monitors the blogosphere.

By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Japanese blogging is done on mobile phones, often by commuters staring cross-eyed at tiny screens for hours as they ride the world's most extensive network of subways and commuter trains.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Technorati found that of all recorded blog postings in the fourth quarter of last year, 37 percent were written in Japanese, 36 percent in English and 8 percent in Chinese.

This was not an aberration. In the past three years, Japanese has been running ahead of or about even with English as the dominant language of blogging, according to Technorati. About 130 million people understand Japanese, while about 1.1 billion understand English. (Blaine Harden, "Japan's Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web," Washington Post, 6 December 2007, A01)

What are they blogging about? Mainly about "cats, kids and lunch." Blogs in Japanese are largely media of phatic communication meant to be read only by friends of bloggers, or so suggests research on comparative blogging behavior cited in this article. No doubt because nothing -- n o t h i n g -- politically interesting, let alone world-historical, happens in Japan.

There are some Japanese blogs worthy of your attention, however. My favorite is イランという国で [In a Country Called Iran], kept by a Japanese woman who has been living in Iran since 1996, teaching the Japanese language at the University of Tehran. She's been blogging about her life in Iran, her observations on Iranian culture and society, and her conversations with Iranians since 2004, her topics ranging from her grocery shopping to her argument with campus security guards who check on whether her outfit is up to the codes. In a good old expat fashion, she complains a lot -- especially about Iranian students, who like to avoid homework and come to class late -- but she also demystifies how things are, giving her audience verbal and visual images of everyday life of Iranians that are missing from the Western media.

When Sex Is Not Subversive. . . .

One of the enduring myths of modernity is that the social order depends upon repression of sex and therefore sex is a subversive act. Both states that censor sex and dissidents who defy them share this myth. The myth has inspired countless artists into sexual dissidence.

Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses (1976), set in 1936, is perhaps the best of the genre that depicts sex as a symbolic statement against the repressive state. The pivotal scene of the film has its protagonist Kichi walk in the opposite direction to a military parade, and the end of the film has him willingly submit to his lover Sada's wish to strangle him as she has sex with him. After his death, Sada castrates Kichi, completing the reversal of the power relation in which he was initially her master. The state obliged the artist, and In the Realm of the Senses, upon its release, was censored in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries where either the film was banned altogether or controversial scenes were cut or altered.

Araki Nobuyoshi, a photographer best known for bondage photos, takes a different tack than Oshima. In his photos, female bodies meticulously conjugated according to the exacting grammar of fetishism are part of everyday life, often surrounded by commonplace objects, a zabuton on tatami, a tea cup and saucer, things like them, shot in the same tender spirit with which he captures shitamachi [old downtown Tokyo], very unlike those of Hans Bellmer or Robert Mapplethorpe. Were Araki a woman, his work would be more fascinating than it is. Even limited by his social identity, though, his work may prove more enduring than those of artists who have played the expected role of antagonist in the aforementioned sexual myth of modernity. On the occasion of the release of the uncut version of In the Realm of the Senses, Freda Freiberg wrote:

In the mid '70s, when this film was produced, it created a storm of controversy, and encountered censorship problems in several countries, not just Japan. Its explicit treatment of sexual intercourse and its bloody castration scene outraged and disturbed viewers brought up on Hays Code morality. It was an international sensation, provoking packed houses and lively debate at the 1976 Melbourne Film Festival.

Now, 25 years later, its re-release in the original uncut version has passed almost unnoticed by viewers in Melbourne, despite the plaudits of film critics. It has become a classic, but not a cult classic apparently. That is the unkindest cut of all. The public's lack of interest serves to remind us of all those clichés about yesterday's sensation and the ephemerality of fame. ("The Unkindest Cut of All?" Senses of Cinema 12, February-March 2001)

Freiberg laments the passing of the time of sexual dissidence, but that is perhaps a welcome sign that sex has become unremarkable -- just a part of everyday life, as Araki has always insisted.

A Time between Ashes and Roses

Observing that a majority of capitalists have abandoned the Republican Party for the Democratic Party (58% of campaign contributions have gone to Democrats and 42% to Republicans so far), Doug Henwood, the editor of the Left Business Observer, notes in his interview with Il Manifesto (Marco d'Eramo, "Primarie Usa: Pioggia d'oro sui candidati democratici," Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi, 4 November 2007, p. 3):

«L'unica soluzione -- conclude Henwood -- sarebbe per i democratici un grande piano di opere pubbliche, visto che le nostre infrastrutture -- ponti, strade, ferrovie, reti elettriche, aeroporti - stanno letteralmente andando in rovina. Questo piano consentirebbe aumento dell'occupazione, la ripresa economica e anche succosi profitti per il capitale. Ma nessun democratico si sogna di proporlo perché per finanziare queste opere pubbliche bisognerebbe reintrodurre una parziale progressività fiscale e questo, nei tempi che corrono, è una tabù, un'eresia che ti può mandare al rogo (politicamente parlando)».

"The only solution," concludes Henwood, "for the Democrats would be a grand plan of public works, inasmuch as our infrastructures -- bridges, roads, railroads, electrical grids, airports -- are literally falling apart. This plan would allow job growth, economic recovery, and also plenty of profits for capital. But no Democrat dreams of proposing it because, in order to finance these public works, it would have to introduce a little fiscal progressivity, and this, for the time being, is a taboo, a heresy that can condemn you to be burned at the stake (politically speaking)."

Moreover, a question may be asked: even if the Democrats were to propose "a grand plan of public works," would it be possible given the political economy of the United States?

In Japan, the worst impacts of deflation during the 1990s were mitigated by public works as well as government loans to the private sector. The net capital outlay of the Japanese government in 1995 was 7.9 percent of GDP, more than double the OECD average (Paul Atkinson and Paul van den Noord, "Managing Public Expenditure: Some Emerging Policy Issues and a Framework for Analysis," Economics Department Working Papers No. 285, OECD, 8 February 2001).

SOURCE: Atkinson and Van den Noord, P. 6

SOURCE: Atkinson and Van den Noord, p. 49

It was the option to which the Japanese government, which some call the "construction state" based on the alliance of "construction ministries and agencies (MLIT, MAFF), the construction 'tribe' of (largely LDP) politicians, and the construction and real estate businesses" (Jeffrey Broadbent, "The Institutional Roots of the Japanese Construction State," ASIEN 84, July 2002, p. 43), was naturally predisposed.

More to the point, the Japanese government could take this option because it had at its disposal gigantic postal savings, whose size in 2006 was "roughly 65% of Japan's GDP" (Thomas F. Cargill and Hal S. Scott, "Postal Savings in Japan and Mortgage Markets in the U.S.," FRBSF Economic Letter, 3 March 2006).

Not so with the US government. The massive US current account deficit puts downward pressures on the dollar: "The United States borrows a whopping $2.5 billion daily from abroad to service its burgeoning debt," a result of "a manufacturing base that has declined 60 percent since World War II" (Hamid Varzi, "A Debt Culture Gone Awry," International Herald Tribune, 17 August 2007). At the same time, higher energy prices and rising inflation in China make for more inflationary pressures. Combined, they cannot but narrow the options of the US government in fiscal and monetary policies even as US economy, which has barely begun to experience the deflation of debt-financed asset bubbles, heads into recession.

In short, there is no organized sector of the US population capable of pushing and willing to push for a solution to the problem of US economy that would favor US workers; and, in any case, options available to US workers have already been narrowed considerably and will be narrowed further in the near future.

The US economy facing serious trouble does have a silver lining: for the first time since the end of World War 2, there is an objective potential to put an end to the dollar hegemony, the economic pillar of US imperialism. For everyone else besides hapless Americans, now may very well be a time between ashes and roses.

          A time between ashes and roses is coming
          When everything shall be extinguished
          When everything shall begin.
            -- Adonis, "An Introduction to
                the History of the Petty Kings"

The Labor Wing of the Empire

The history of the labor wing of the US-led multinational empire -- such as the International Trade Union Confederation (the result of the 2006 merger of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour) with which the International Transport Workers' Federation is allied -- claiming to promote free, independent trade unions, i.e., trade unions that are independent of Communist parties and governments, and to act in solidarity with workers of the global South has not been a pretty one: see, for instance, Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor's Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (South End Press, 1992). The end of state socialism and the Cold War did not change its fundamental role. A more recent history of it has been documented by such labor writers as Harry Kelber and Kim Scipes among others. Here is an example from Haiti: Jeb Sprague, "Failed Solidarity: The ICFTU, AFL-CIO, ILO, and ORIT in Haiti" (Labor Notes, June 2006). Leftists inside and outside Iran ought to be aware of what the labor wing of the empire does.¹

The labor wing of the empire, like other vehicles of "democracy assistance," seizes upon a real problem of most post-revolutionary governments, whether they are Communist, nationalist, or Islamic: the fact that space for autonomy for organizations of workers and others is restricted to various degrees for reasons of national security (lack of autonomy is nearly complete under a one-party state-socialist state). The absence of autonomy eventually undermines the social gains of revolution when either the rulers abandon their commitment to the ideology that made revolution possible or the ruled become depoliticized and self-centered or both (the history of state socialism in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe is a cautionary tale for the Iranians, just as the history of the overthrows of Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende, and others is). However, workers who turn to the labor wing of the empire to solve this undeniable problem usually come to grief.

Workers of the North, especially in the USA, are normally unaware of the dilemma faced by workers under post-revolutionary government in the South, who must fight for their class interests without undermining their national interests (especially defending their nation from the empire). In many cases, trade union members in the USA aren't even aware of what their unions are doing at home, let alone abroad. Naturally, they do not realize that intensified global competition, workers of formerly socialist or nationalist countries now competing with them for jobs, has come about in part because of the exertion of top labor bureaucrats of the North who were supposed to protect their interests.

In the meantime, workers of the North are also finding out how good their free, independent unions are, some of which are going far beyond business as usual of concession bargaining and giving up the right to strike altogether. See, for instance, Sam Gindin, "The CAW and Magna: Disorganizing the Working Class" (MRZine, 22 October 2007).

It is possible that, in the near future in the North, only French workers will remember how to strike, if not to win new gains, at least to defend their way of life. Even the still impressive national solidarity of French workers, however, may eventually be undermined by the gap between the public and private sectors: "nearly 20 points separates the rate of sympathy [for the 18 October 2007 strike] in the public sector (69%) from that in the private sector (49%)" (Christelle Chabaud, "The Majority Strike in Public Opinion," MRZine, 18 October 2007).

1 For instance, "On 15 February 2006, the ICFTU and its International Transport Workers' Federation coordinated rallies and protests outside Iranian legations world-wide" (Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, Pluto Press, 2007, p. 120), officials of the AFL-CIO and James P. Hoffa of the US Teamsters Union taking the lead. Malm and Esmailian celebrate this as "an unequalled manifestation of global solidarity with a labour movement in the Middle East" and "the most awe-inspiring show of global opposition to the labour politics of the Islamic Republic ever recorded" (Malm and Esmailian, pp. 120-121). Note, however, that nothing of the sort was done for any other Iranian workers, let alone workers of other countries in the Middle East, especially those of the empire's client states like Egypt.

Other Iranian labor activists took note of this contrast. Malm and Esmailian report that "The activists of Mohsen Hakimi and the other council communists of Komiteye Hamahangi, on the other hand, limited themselves to issuing a few statements, one of which was a condemnation of the global day of action" mentioned above (Malm and Esmailian, p. 121). The condemnation in question stated: "It means that the ICFTU . . . in the realm of the current conflict among the bourgeois government of Iran and other bourgeois governments [sic] has wanted the false defense of the demands of workers in Iran [to] be made a pretext in order to support one sector of the bourgeoisie in contrary to another sector" (qtd. in Malm and Esmailian, p. 121). While the translation is awkward, you get the drift. Malm and Esmailian cite it only to dismiss it as "[u]ltra-leftist gibberish," but that says more about their own lack of understanding of the labor wing of the empire, of which some Iranian workers are aware.

So do some workers of the North. Take Zenroren, an ally of the Japanese Communist Party, for instance. This year, there was an "ITF/ITUC International Action Day on Thursday 9 August in solidarity with union leaders Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi," the day of action in part organized by the State Department-funded Solidarity Center. Rengo joined them, but Zenroren did not. Communists of Japan, no longer Marxists, still know better than getting involved in labor imperialism.

Far from it, JCP leaders actually attend the celebrations of the Iranian Revolution held at the Iranian Embassy in Japan and take other actions for the purpose of what they call Yato Gaikou, "opposition party diplomacy": see, for instance, "イラン革命記念レセプションに 志位委員長が出席," Akahata, 11 February 2003; "イラン革命記念レセプション: 不破議長が出席," Akahata, 11 February 2004; "イラン革命記念レセプション: 志位委員長が出席、ハラジ外相とあいさつ," Akahata, 11 February 2005; "イラン大使と志位委員長が懇談," Akahata, 21 December 2005; and "イラン革命記念レセプション: 市田書記局長が出席", Akahata, 10 February 2007.

Not that they agree on everything. The JCP, like most political parties in the world, is committed to a two-state idea on Israel/Palestine, whereas Iran is just about the only country in the world whose government is officially committed to a one-state solution based on the referendum of all people who live in historic Palestine and Palestinian refugees (though Iran's government adds that, whatever the Palestinians accept, it will also accept it), and the party candidly discusses its concerns with Iran's ambassadors (see "イラン大使と志位委員長が懇談," Akahata, 21 December 2005).

Chiísmo, científico y utópico

Chiísmo, científico y utópico

Por Yoshie Furuhashi
Traducción Julio Fernández Baraibar

¿Cuál es hoy el principal peligro para los intelectuales de la diáspora iraní?   Su deseo de "mirar hacia Occidente"¹.  Su tentación de llamar a "la potencia americana", en nombre de "un supuestamente agradecido público iraní, dirigido por la clase media occidentalizada" a través de una guerra ideológica que hace que Irán sea vista como la República del Miedo.

. . . (Kanan) Makiya argumentaba que, una vez liberado, ellos (los iraquíes) se quitarían de encima las gastadas ortodoxias de la política árabe y, para su desesperación, mirarían hacia Occidente.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Estaba condenado", me dijo (Ali) Allawi.  "Lo que estaba condenado era el intento de modernizar Iraq en una especie de renovación civilizatoria, usando el poder americano en alianza con un supuestamente agradecido público iraquí, dirigido por una clase media occidentalizada.  Se hizo evidente que este presupuesto era falso.  Y que está compuesto por una serie de decisiones desastrosas" (Dexter Filkins, "Regrets Only?" New York Times Magazine, 7 October 2007).

Kanan Makiya debería ser una lección para los izquierdistas de la diáspora intelectual.  Ellos no pueden amar a Irán del modo como yo lo hago porque ellos están cargados con el peso de las pérdidas personales y las derrotas históricas, pero si el imperio multinacional dirigido por los EE.UU. tiene éxito en la destrucción de Irán², ya sea por medio de una guerra económica, "una asistencia democrática", una fuerza militar, o (como es lo más probable) la última posibilidad, después de una década de ejercicio de las dos primeras, ellos van a perder más de lo que yo perderé, de la misma manera que Kanan Makiya debió perder en Iraq más de los que yo perdí.

1 Las siguientes palabras de Jalal Al-e Ahmad suenan como una verdad cuando uno mira la cultura de, más o menos, el primer 20 por ciento de las naciones del Sur, dependiendo esta proporción del nivel de su desarrollo capitalista:

Seguir a Occidente -- los estados occidentales y sus empresas petroleras- es la suprema manifestación de "occidentosis" en nuestra época.  Así es cómo la industria occidental nos saquea, cómo nos dirige, cómo maneja nuestro destino.  Una vez que tú has dado el control político y económico de tu país a las empresas extranjeras, ellos saben qué venderte o, por lo menos, qué no venderte.  Porque como ellos buscan obviamente venderte sus productos en perpetuidad, es mejor que tú permanezcas para siempre en necesidad de ellos y Dios salve tus reservas petroleras.  Ellos se llevarán el petróleo y te darán cualquier cosa que quieras a cambio -- desde sopas a nueces, o incluso granos.  Este comercio forzoso se extiende incluso a cuestiones culturales, a letras, a discursos.  Hojea nuestra media docena de las llamadas publicaciones literarias pesadas.  ¿Qué noticias ves de nuestra parte del mundo?  ¿De Oriente, en términos más lejanos?  ¿De India, Japón, China?  Todo lo que ves son noticias del premio Nobel, del nuevo Papa, de Francoise Sagan, del Festival de Cannes, de la última obra de Broadway, de la última película de Hollywood.  Y esto sin mencionar los semanarios ilustrados, que son mucho más evidentes.  ¿Si a esto no se lo llama "occidentosis", cómo podemos llamarlo? (Occidentosis: Una plaga que viene del Oeste, Mizan Press, 1984, p. 62-3)

El hábito "espontáneamente" cultivado por muchos intelectuales de los países que miran hacia Occidente, o más bien el mítico Occidente, sirve a las clases dominantes del imperio multinacional dirigido por EE.UU., incorporando la clase alta y los estratos medios al liberalismo, al americanismo, a la ideología de "Libertad, Igualdad, Propiedad y Bentham".  Ver el artículo de Shirin S. Deylami, "In the Face of the Machine: Westoxification, Cultural Collision, and the Making of Perso-Islamic Ideology" (Frente a la Máquina de Occidentosis, Choque Cultural y la Producción de una Ideología Perso-Islámica) (Octubre, 2006) para una crítica a dos erróneas interpretaciones de la ideología de Ahmad (y otras parecidas) como "una invocación al pasado" y " un desdén por la moderna globalización" en todas sus formas actuales y potenciales.  Esta mala interpretación, sostiene Deylami, pierde el punto principal de la crítica de la Occidentosis: "el apuntar a una específica forma de hegemonía económica, política y cultural" (página 1).

2 Irán, de no haber sido por la maldición del petróleo y la fe en el Duodécimo Imán, debería haber sido un Japón del Asia Occidental; por el contrario, si Japón no hubiera llegado a ser una potencia imperial por derecho propio, Kita Ikki debería haber sido un Jalal Al-e Ahmad del Japón.  Como las cosas han sucedido de la manera en que sucedieron, nuestros senderos fueron en direcciones completamente opuestas.  Los intelectuales de la diáspora iraní no se dan cuenta que los hombres y mujeres de la clase trabajadora de su país, tercamente religiosos, que los rechazan y en su lugar siguen a Khomeini, están haciendo una elección más fina que mis compatriotas.  Pero si ellos no miran hacia Occidente y, en su lugar, miran hacia Oriente, apreciarán lo que tienen.  Los iraníes tienen una república propia, aunque sea religiosa; los japoneses tienen un "estado cliente", aunque sea secular, conducido por burócratas japoneses y gangsters al servicio del emperador americano.  Además, la república que ha expulsado a sus intelectuales cosmopolitas, podría, si es permitido vivir, eventualmente recibirlos de vuelta, quizás bajo las banderas de un chiísmo que es a la vez científico y utópico.

Notas del Traductor:
Kita Ikki (1883-1937) fue un intelectual, escritor y filósofo político japonés, en actividad durante el principio del Japón del período Showa (Período de la Paz Ilustrada, correspondiente al reino del emperador Showa [Hirohito]).  Durante sus años de estudiante de la Universidad Waseda en Tokio, fue atraído por las ideas socialistas, reuniéndose con muchas de las figuras influyentes del primer movimiento socialista en Japón.  También fue atraído por la Revolución China de 1911 y se hizo miembro de la Togmeng Hui (Liga Unida) dirigida por Song Jiaoren.  Estuvo en China y presenció la caída de la dinastía Qing.

A su retorne a Japón en 11919, se desilusionó de la Revolución China y del socialismo.  Se unió al Okawa Shumei y otras formas de Yuzonsha, una organización ultranacionalista, y dedicó su tiempo a escribir y al activismo político.  Gradualmente se convirtió en el principal teórico y filósofo del movimiento derechista previo a la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Participó en el golpe de estado del 26 de febrero de 1937 y, fracasado éste, fue fusilado.

Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923-1969) fue un prominente escritor y crítico social y político iraní. Nació en una familia religiosa en Teherán y su padre era un clérigo islámico. Realizó estudios universitarios y se especializó en literatura persa, en la universidad de Teherán.  En 1950 se casó con Simin Daneshvar, una muy conocida novelista iraní.  Jalal y Simin no tuvieron hijos, tema que ha sido reflejado en las obras de Jalal.  Murió en Asalem, una zona rural del norte de Irán, en una cabaña construida con sus propias manos. Fue enterrado en la mezquita de Firouzabadi, en Ray, Irán.

Shi'ism, Scientific and Utopian

What is the greatest danger to intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora today? Their desire to "look to the West."¹ Their temptation to appeal to "American power," in the name of "a supposedly grateful Iranian public, led by a Westernized middle class," through ideological warfare that makes Iran out to be a Republic of Fear.

. . . [Kanan] Makiya argued, that, once freed, they [Iraqis] would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and, in their despair, look to the West.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"It was doomed," [Ali] Allawi told me. "What was doomed was the attempt to refashion Iraq in a sort of civilizational makeover, using American power in an alliance with a supposedly grateful Iraqi public, led by a Westernized middle class. The assumption turned out to be false. And it was compounded by a series of disastrous decisions." (Dexter Filkins, "Regrets Only?" New York Times Magazine, 7 October 2007)

Kanan Makiya ought to be an object lesson for leftists among the diaspora intellectuals. They cannot love Iran in a way that I can, for they are saddled with the burden of personal losses and historical defeats, but if the US-led multinational empire succeeds in destroying Iran,² whether through economic warfare, "democracy assistance," military force, or (as is most likely) the last after a decade of the first two, they will miss it more than I will, just as Kanan Makiya must miss Iraq more than I do.

1 The following words of Jalal Al-e Ahmad still ring true when one looks at the culture of the top 20 percent or so of just about all nations in the South, actual proportions depending on levels of their capitalist development:

To follow the West -- the Western states and the oil companies -- is the supreme manifestation of occidentosis [westoxification] in our time. This is how Western industry plunders us, how it rules us, how it holds our destiny. Once you have given economic and political control of your country to foreign concerns, they know what to sell you, or at least what not to sell you. Because they naturally seek to sell you their manufactures in perpetuity, it is best that you remain forever in need of them, and God save the oil reserves. They take away the oil and give you whatever you want in return -- from soup to nuts, even grain. This enforced trade even extends to cultural matters, to letters, to discourse. Go flip through our half-dozen so-called heavy literary publications. What news do you see of our part of the world? Of the east in the broadest terms? Of India, Japan, China? All you see is news of the Nobel Prize, of the new pope, of Françoise Sagan, the Cannes Film Festival, the latest Broadway play, the latest Hollywood film. This is not to mention the illustrated weeklies, which are quite notorious. If we aren't to call this occidentosis, what are we to call it? (Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, Mizan Press, 1984, p. 62-3)

The habit "spontaneously" cultivated by many intellectuals of all nations who look to the West, or rather the mythical West, serves the ruling classes of the US-led multinational empire, incorporating the upper classes and strata of their nations into liberalism, Americanism, the ideology of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham." See Shirin S. Deylami, "In the Face of the Machine: Westoxification, Cultural Collision, and the Making of Perso-Islamic Ideology" (October 2006) for a criticism of two common misinterpretations of Ahmad's ideology (and others like it) as "a call to the Past" and "a disdain for modern globalization" in all its actual and potential forms. These misinterpretations, Deylami argues, miss the point of the criticism of "Westoxification": "a particular targeting of one form of economic, political, and cultural hegemony" (p. 1).

2 Iran, but for the curse of oil and the faith in the Twelfth Imam, might have been a Japan of West Asia; conversely, if Japan had not become an imperial power in its own right, Kita Ikki might have been a Jalal Al-e Ahmad of Japan. As things happened, our paths went into completely opposite directions. Intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora do not realize that stubbornly religious working-class men and women of their nation, who rejected them and followed Khomeini instead, still made a finer choice than my compatriots. But if they don't look West and look East instead, they will appreciate what they have. The Iranians have a republic, albeit religious, of their own; the Japanese have a client state, albeit secular, run by Japanese bureaucrats and gangsters for the American emperor. Moreover, the republic that had expelled its cosmopolitan intellectuals may, if it is permitted to live, eventually welcome them back, perhaps under the banner of a Shi'ism that is at once scientific and utopian.

Update

Julio Fernández Baraibar, my friend in Buenos Aires, translated this article into Spanish: "Chiísmo, científico y utópico," Critical Montages, 7 October 2007.

Japan as Heuristic

I do not claim that the Monthly Review school of Marxism was or is right about all things Marxian, but one of the things that it does better than many others is criticism of the nineteenth-century notion that "all nations would inevitably pass" the same "linear set of stages" of development,¹ which happens to be the most important thing to get right.

If that is true of development of relations of production and productive forces, moreover, it is even truer of political and cultural development. This point is easy to grasp if you always keep Japan -- which today is secular without having ever struggled for secularism and yet very superstitious all the same, sexually kinky in hilariously mundane ways without being politically progressive or culturally liberal in the least, etc. -- in mind as a point of reference, a useful heuristic. (You might enjoy living there if you are not a leftist.)

"The country that is more developed industrially" does not show, "to the less developed, the image of its own future." Peoples have and will travel different paths to different ends under capitalism. Socialism won't change that either. If the people of Japan ever do socialism, which, alas, is highly unlikely, they won't do it in the same ways that others have.

1 See, for instance, João Aguiar, "Capital and Empire: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster," MRZine, 23 March 2007:

Q. In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (1867), Marx says: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." Can we infer from it that Marx thought the capitalist world-system would become more or less uniform and homogenous, without the major polarization between core and periphery that exists today? Was Marx thinking that what happened in the transition to capitalism in England would happen all over the world, following the exact same steps of economic development?

It is worth remembering the context of this statement in Marx's preface. He was telling his German readers that although the analysis was based directly on Britain, the most advanced capitalist country, it applied to Germany as well. Here he quoted from the Roman poet Horace's Satires (Book I, Satire 1), where Horace, in his critique of the pursuit of riches, says to those who think this critique does not apply to them: "Change the name, and the tale is told of you." Germany, Marx insisted, would follow the same basic developmental course as Britain, reflecting an "iron necessity" of capitalist development.

This passage has frequently been quoted to indicate that Marx thought of capitalism as following one linear set of stages, through which all nations would inevitably pass. Marx, however, did not himself adhere to such a rigid interpretation and pointed in his later writings to uneven and distorted development and alternative paths. The best known of these alternative paths was the Asian mode of production, which, whatever its demerits as a conception, pointed to Marx's departure from any simple linear pattern. From the late 1860s on, he increasingly took into account relations of dependency in the cases of Ireland and India, in particular, learning from resistance movements in those countries. At the end of his life he argued that the next revolution would first take place in Russia, which was still a semi-peripheral power.

Still, the notion "the tale is told of you" clearly dominated most Marxist thinking until the 1950s. By that time it was clear (since the underdeveloped world's share of total industrial output had declined steadily from more than 60 percent in 1830 to something like 7 percent in 1950) that the notion that all countries would develop along the line of the original capitalist powers was false. Fifty years ago in 1957, Paul Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth which introduced a new Marxist approach to imperialism and development, inspiring the radical dependency and world system traditions. Baran observed that while Marx's notion that the less developed countries would follow the path of the more developed countries had been right for Western Europe and the European settler colonies in North America and Australia, the manner of the imperialist penetration of Latin America, Asia, and Africa had created a different reality: an imperialist system in which the peoples and territories of the periphery were in a seemingly perpetual condition of dependency. Indeed, these conditions could be expected to persist, Baran argued, apart from some break with the imperialist status quo, either on the lines of the Japanese state-led, authoritarian Meiji restoration/revolution (an option now closed to most of the periphery), or socialist revolution (of varying types).