[lbo-talk] Japan as Heuristic

[Lajany Otum]

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This is absurd. Anyone who thinks in terms of "linear development" 
today would  have to have been asleep since the 1950's 
when Amin, Baran, Frank and others showed that capitalism
places peripheral and colonial countries on a distinct path
from countries of the core. Indeed, given the utterly banal
nature of the observation that a country of the capitalist core 
such as Japan does not show the exploited countries of the 
colonial and semi-colonial periphery their future, I have to 
wonder what the point of your flogging of stageism is --
especially as the operative division (between the core and the 
periphery) is hidden by an ideological haze of nihonjinron.
Is nihonjinron perhaps a proxy for persiajinron?

"Peoples have and will travel different paths to different ends under
capitalism."

 

The revelation that Upper Volta and Haiti were/are not on the 
same under capitalism as France will set the cat among the
pigeons here.

Lajany Otum

Yoshie Furuhashi writes:

<<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, 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
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 a way that others have. -- Yoshie>>

       
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