Yoshie:
> 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 ... wasn't fascist. Do we want to go this far?
Carrol Cox wrote:
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.
Barrington Moore's SOCIAL ORIGINS OF DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY has some analysis of this question. One summary (which fits with what I remember) says:
Moore argues that in countries where landowners were able to secure
political power independent of the crown, and become bourgeois managers of commercial agriculture in a way that created minimal political grievance among those who worked the land, then the result was capitalist democracy. However, in countries like Russia, China, Germany and Japan where this process was halted, forced, abortive, or out of sequence, then the result was dictatorship. In the communist cases, this dictatorship came about through a revolution from below, spurred on by disgruntled peasants against a non-commercial, non-bourgeois landowning class; while in the fascist cases the modern revolution came down from "above" as landowning elites used the tools of the state (preindustrial bureaucracy) to impose modernity on a politically powerless peasantry.< (from: http://www.amazon.com/Social-Origins-Dictatorship-Democracy-Peasant/dp/0807050733) -- Jim Devine / "War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, / The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade, / And, to those royal murderers, whose mean thrones / Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore, / The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean." -- Percy B. Shelley
