>This is from "THE USE AND ABUSE OF JAPAN AS A PROGRESSIVE MODEL"
>by Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg
>http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/burkett-landsberg96.txt
>
>The Japanese Investment Regime
>
>"The left-liberal consensus also considers Japanese capitalism more
>progressive than U.S. capitalism insofar as Japanese capital is or has
>been relatively patient and planned, and relatively less speculative and
>anarchic than U.S. capital. Here, the assumption is that Japanese
>capital's greater patience and more `efficient' planning has little to
>with the fact that both the goals and the process of accumulation and
>industrial policy formulation (including the planning operations of
>government agencies like the Ministry of International Trade and
>Industry) are undemocratically determined. It assumes, in other words,
>that even if the basic priorities to be served by accumulation and the
>planning process were democratically determined, capital would (or
>could, presumably given the right constellation of political forces) be
>just as patient. By contrast, it seems more likely to us that the
>relative patience of Japanese capital was based firmly on the relative
>weakness of the Japanese working-class, i.e., on the strictly
>subordinate status of workers' priorities in the Japanese political
>economy. Indeed, Steven (1990: pp.12-3) suggests that the nationalist-
>industrialist form and ideology of the post-World War II Japanese state
>were based on Japanese capital's complete domination of the Japanese
>working class, which allowed the state to focus on external
>competitiveness and the management of inter-imperialist rivalry more so
>than in any other developed capitalist country.5"
I have one question concerning the last sentence here. It seems to me that had "the nationalist-industrialist form and ideology of the post-World War II Japanese state" been "based on Japanese capital's complete domination of the Japanese working class," _by now_ the state & capital would have embarked upon a far more drastic restructuring of social relations along the neoliberal line than has been the case. Japan's economic problems for the last decade point to the weakness & absence of coherence on the part of the ruling class (well matched by the weakness & absence of coherence on the part of the working class). In countries where civil services are well developed, bureaucrats have interests & ideologies of their own, which are not identical to the ruling class's, much less neoliberal ideologues'.
Unlike Dennis, I don't recommend Japan as "a progressive model," first of all because the rise of Japan had historically specific causes that cannot be replicated in today's world; however, it appears to me that the relation among capital, labor, & the state in Japan is a good deal more complex than what is suggested in the paragraph above.
Yoshie