As a Tokyo resident, I had a first-hand view of the anti-nuclear movement taking shape after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. I work in the district where most of government ministries are located, not far from the Diet building and the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), so I’ve encountered all sorts of protests, large and small. The protests were a welcome sight to me not just because they expressed the anger felt toward that rotten outfit, TEPCO, and the elite bureaucrats who have done its bidding; but also because Japan has been sunk in a...
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In 2008 we commented on the Nepali Maoist Party, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, rise to state power and their simultaneous capitulation to any sort of pretense of being socialists. Like the “comrade” in this cartoon, it turns out they would much rather break-unions and shake down their members for money in order for their leader, Prachanda, to live in a home in Kathmandu’s exclusive Lazimpat befitting a “man of Prachanda’s stature” than carry the manure for the revolution. Yeah, not surprising at all for us. Maoism, as a form of Leninism, derives from the theories of Social-Democracy not marxism. In social-democracy,...
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American global hegemony continues its steady decline. The most striking recent case in point is the overt shift of Pakistan, long a U.S. client state, into China’s sphere of influence. The U.S., no longer able to supply its forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan, has no choice but to withdraw rapidly from that country. (The old Soviet supply route through Uzbekistan is inadequate on its own, and we know from Wikileaks that the U.S. asked China to allow a new route through Chinese territory but was refused.) Afghanistan will revert to its traditional status as a dependency of Pakistan, whose...
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In the Second World War Russia (or the U.S.S.R. as it was then), which had been fighting Germany since the Nazi invasion of 1941, only got round to declaring war on Japan on 8 August 1945. That was three days after the first atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima and one day before the second landed on Nagasaki. The Japanese empire was now squeezed between the vast armed forces of Russia and America, and it disintegrated. Japan had forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, but the Japanese were now driven out. The U.S.S.R occupied the northern half of Korea with its...
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Frank Dikötter, a historian who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known”. Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962- The Great Leap Forward – explains that at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years. His book, Mao’s Great Famine;...
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The heroic and inspiring struggles of China’s working class will only lay the ground for new and improved exploitation methods – unless, that is, the struggle turns political – and socialist. “I do the same thing every day,” said one employee at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where more than ten workers have committed suicide. “I have no future.” Many, perhaps most, workers will know exactly how he feels. But to the bourgeois mind, it’s all an impenetrable puzzle. There was something criminally stupid and sickeningly idiotic about the reaction to the suicides of Terry Gou, the billionaire...
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According to the International Trade Union Confederation, Bangladesh’s 3.5 million garment workers, most of them women, are the ‘world’s most poorly paid workers’. Many work 12 to 14 hour shifts, six days a week, often in hazardous conditions. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations stated ‘Bangladesh’s garment workers are among the hardest working women in the world, and the most exploited.’ Sheikh Hasina Wajed, Bangladesh’s prime minister, recently told the parliament: ‘It is not possible for the workers to live on the wages they get now.’ Compensation in the garment industry was ‘not only insufficient...
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China’s manufacturing contracted by the most on record last month as the global financial crisis cut demand for exports, a second survey showed. A government-backed survey released on Nov. 1 also showed a record contraction, adding to concern that the world’s fastest- growing economy may slump. With export orders falling because of the global slowdown and rising raw material and labor costs, more than 68,000 small companies nationwide collapsed in the first half of 2008 and about 2.5 million jobs in the Pearl River Delta region may be lost by the end of the year, according to government and...
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“Oblivious of rumours that famine is gathering again and that the state’s food-distribution system is breaking down, the country’s pampered elite went on a shopping spree at the Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair, held on May 12th-15th. Originally designed to promote business-to-business contacts, the trade fair, along with a companion event in the autumn, has become one of the few opportunities for North Koreans—or, more accurately, a few thousand residents of the capital—to buy, or gawk at, foreign merchandise. More than 100 Chinese companies, together with some from Taiwan, Indonesia, Britain and North Korea itself, offered up everything from...
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North Korea: Is the Crisis Real?
It is hard to tell what is real in the ongoing Korean ‘crisis’ and what is contrived. Up to a point – after all, it is in no one’s interest to frighten the markets too badly – it suits both sides to foster a sense of crisis. For Kim Jong-un and his generals a crisis atmosphere is a way to exert pressure for full admission to the nuclear club. For the American rulers and their allies it is also a way to exert pressure – and push North Korea firmly out of the club. Of course, a good external...
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