> "...The Ikeda plan produced a kind of madness - the madness of material
> growth at any human or environmental cost, of a ruling party whose sole task
> was good relations with America; the madness of a mutant democracy in which
> elections function to deprive voters of their democratic rights.
> Thereafter, production and consumption were everything.
Wait a second here -- this needs some historical context. In 1960, Japan had barely recovered from the war; per capita income was maybe one eighth that of the USA (in relative terms, sort of where southern China is today vis-a-vis the First World). In 1960, having an electric fan was still a big deal in Japan. Sure, GDP doesn't equal happiness, but a rising GDP doesn't have to mean unhappiness, either, if powerful unions and socialist movements share the wealth. Politically, these sorts of arguments generally terminate in a joyless paranoia, a kind of fetishization of austerity, when the point should be to liberate the use-values frozen in the Ice Age of market society.
-- Dennis