>There was also the rise of Japan in the 1980s; that looked like the certain
>end of U.S. hegemony.
Japan may not end US hegemony, but on the response of the Japanese working class depends the future of capitalism. Japan's slump is behind everything from the worst financial crisis in 50 years to the continued militarization of the world's hottest spot (South Korea was two or three days from massive default in its banking system in Dec that if the US had allowed could have been interpreted as a green light by North Korea) to Russia's crash (falling commodity prices due to distress exports from Asia were the final nail in Russia's coffin) to politically and economically unmanageable trade imbalances in the world system.
Japan's exit does depend on the elimination of excess capacity--mergers, rationalisation, and massive lay offs. Every bourgeois economist worth his salt has his eyes focused on the social barriers to the massive destruction of individual capital values and unemployment that the Japanese ruling class must inflict to save itself as a species. And yet what do we Americans know about our comrades across those other shores?
Has anyone read John Dower's new social history of Japan? There is a special issue of the International Journal of Political Economy Fall 1991 vl 21, no 3 "Japanese Capitalism Today: Economic Structure and the Organization of Work".
yours, rakesh