>But my general perception should be correct: Japan has the least
>room to maneuver of the G7. Japan is the weak link of the G7 now.
>True, paralysis and impasse could continue for some time, as it did
>in Britain for some 15 years, albeit against a sharply contrasting
>social-political foreground: Britain: open class battles; Japan:
>relative class peace; Britain: relatively low G7 living standard;
>Japan: relatively high G7 living standard; Britain: really bad
>cuisine; Japan: really good cuisine. :-D
There is no nation in the world today for which socialism is more suitable than Japan. Her workers are productive & well educated; her civil servants are efficient; her middle strata are not as individualist as other nations'; her capitalists lack self-confidence unlike other rich nations'. The problems are working-class fecklessness & absence of political leadership comparable to Lenin's, plus the pesky questions of the U.S. military on the archipelago & possibilities of capital flight & economic sanctions (which alone can wreak havoc for Japan is dependent on import of food & industrial inputs) should her workers rise up.
At 1:42 PM -0800 3/13/01, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
>Japan these days sort of reminds me of Shinji Ikari at the
>conclusion of "Evangelion"; all the angels have been defeated, but he's
>still terribly unhappy, and has to wrestle with the toughest opponent of
>all -- himself. Director Hideaki Anno's own conclusion is... well, I won't
>reveal any secrets here.
***** The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move - these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by, capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means - unconditional development of the productive forces of society - comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production. (Marx, _Capital_ Vol. 3, at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm>) *****
Yoshie