Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> But if the rise of a fascist state presupposes a powerful
> working-class movement, we'd have to come to a conclusion that Japan
> at the height of its imperialism (from the February 26 Incident to the
> end of WW2) wasn't fascist. Do we want to go this far?
I had just been speculating on this point myself. And I don't really
know enough about Japan to speculate very usefully.
While Japan, unlike Germany, had suffered no military defeat; and while,
unlike either Germany or Italy, there was no powerful working-class
movement; Japan, _like_ Germany and Italy, was marginal to the
imperialist core (U.S., UK, France). And the following is more a query
than a statement: Like Germany and Italy, it seems that Japanese culture
(and social relations?) exhibited a great concern to maintain certain
'hierarchical' traditions which were/are incompatible with untrammeled
capitalist relations. Consider the following from Pound's Cantos:
Story told by the mezzo-yit:
That they were to have a consortium
and one of the potbellies says:
will come in for 12 million"
*And another: three illyum for my cut;
And another: we will take eight;
And the Boss said: but what will you
DO with that money?"
"But! but! signore, you do not ask a man
what he will _do_ with his money.
That is a personal matter.
And the Boss said: but what will you do?
You won't really need all that money
because you are all for the _confine_."
Canto XLI)
Pound was pretty confused about many of the actualities of Mussolini's
Italy, but one can see here (whether or not the actuality conformed to
Pound's fancy) one of the attributes of "actually existing fascism" in
Europe: the effort to maintain the direct link between act and motive
which characterized (to varying extent) 'feudal' regimes but which
developed capitalism entirely liquidates. The concept of the "Just
Price," for example, is a feudal leftover that, even in fancy, can be
maintained in a capitalist order only by some sort of direct personal
rule as under the chaos of fascism.
Whether this has any relation to what was going on in Japan 70 years ago
I do not know.
Carrol
