An Untold Marxist Story of Financial Crises: Japan, the United States, and the European Union

This is the story that Marxists haven't told yet. In my view, though, this story is perfectly consistent with not only most Marxists' theories of capitalism but also their traditional (usually implicit) policy preferences.

Let's evaluate policy responses in the wake of the most recent financial crises of Japan, the United States, and Europe, beginning not in 2008 but in 1991, with the ranking based on policy impacts on the overall economy and more importantly on the working class.

Central Banks

1. The Fed: Could have been better, but it's clear Bernanke knew what he needed to do and was determined to do it
2. BOJ: Confused and feckless
3. ECB: OMG, WTF

Stimulus and Output

1. Japan: The sum total of public spending for this purpose is respectable, and so is per capita GDP (as opposed to total GDP) growth
2. US: Way too small, ending too soon, leaving the US infrastructural deficit intact, though it's not as if it did nothing to sustain GDP and consumption as the Right claims
3. EU: Terrible squeeze of the periphery from Day 1, disaster capitalism par excellence

Composition of Fiscal Policy + Labor Market Policy + Budget Financing Method

Here there is no ranking. It's a story of "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is basically where the Japanese working class were done in: even as the government spent a great deal on contingent public works, structurally it made (by the standard of rich nations already small) social benefits smaller, especially for old people, while facilitating the rise of contingent labor without establishing a new social safety net for the precariat; and moreover taxes on corporations were cut while those on workers were raised. The same is now being done to American and European workers, though exactly how it's done politically varies.

Conclusion

Don't make it sound like a Great Depression is what the working class should fear facing a financial crisis; if you do, you are only defending a Maginot Line and motivating workers to turn to bastard Keynesians rather than Marxists. A modern state knows how to avoid a Great Depression, by breaking up a panicked financial crowd by a big monetary water cannon, except in cases where it wants to deliberately inflict a depression on workers for the purpose of effecting structural change, as the ECB is doing to the euro periphery.

Make sure the working class bark, and bark up the right tree. The right tree in the case where the state has its own money and controls its own monetary policy, with little to no pressure from foreign creditors, (as in the cases of Japan and the United States), is people determining the composition of fiscal policy, the labor market policy, and the budget financing method. To get the working class to bark up the right tree, Marxists must fight against right-wing populist mystification about "always uniformly bad and morally hazardous bailouts," (bailouts are not at all alike in their impacts on workers -- it all depends on how they are done and how they are financed; and, if workers are well organized, politically conscious, and militant, they can turn them into opportunities to assert social control over the bailed-out enterprises and/or sectors), without leaving that battle to Keynesians.

Not an Arab 1848

The 2010-2011 Arab revolts have been compared to many historical events. One of the analogies brought up by pundits is the 1848 wave of revolutions in Europe. But it doesn't look like an Arab 1848 in one crucial respect. Not a single monarchy has been toppled, and, with the exception of Bahrain, monarchies have so far faced far less challenges than republics, allowing the former to regroup and work with the empire for counter-revolution.

"Overpaying the Poor"

I submit what the empire likes the least about the Islamic Republic of Iran is not its nuclear program but its being prone to "overpaying [sic] . . . the poorer members of Iranian society." Cf. Najmeh Bozorgmehr, "Iran's Handouts Prove Costly" (Financial Times, 28 April 2011):

Iran's populist government is backing away from a plan to phase out subsidies on energy and other basic commodities, analysts say. Instead, it is overpaying cash compensation to the poorer members of Iranian society to maintain political support.

Official estimates admit that for decades Iran spent $100bn a year on subsidising basic commodities -- although the support was widely viewed as unsustainable and distorting supply and demand signals.

In December last year, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, embarked on a parliament-approved plan under which subsidies on energy products and foodstuffs were to be phased out gradually over a five-year period.

The plan was backed by all Iranian political groups as well as the International Monetary Fund and was viewed as a much-needed reform to the country's state-dominated economy.

However, economic analysts believe the government's populist approach has ended up inflicting a heavier burden on the economy and say that the government is moving away from the initial goal of making prices more realistic.

Under the plan, half of the government's savings from the cuts in subsidies were to be redistributed to those who registered to receive financial assistance, regardless of means. Now every man, woman and child can receive IR445,000 ($42.30) a month.

The remainder of the savings were to go to the industrial, agricultural and services sectors as well as state-owned organisations to help them cope with higher costs.

But analysts say the only section of the scheme which has been implemented is the cash payment to people.

Now, about 70m out of Iran's 75m-strong population is in receipt, which is generally considered to cost more than the old subsidies.

"People now receive cash two times more than their consumption which means our goal of managing consumption of energy products is not being achieved," Jamshid Ansari, a reform-minded parliamentarian, tells the Financial Times.

The cash payments have so far been benefiting up to 30m mainly rural poor.

They and their counterparts in the cities are even net winners because the per capita consumption of their populous families is low.

"The government is buying political support through an uneconomic and illogical way of extra subsidies payments despite the budget deficit this policy has been creating," says an analyst, who asked not to be named.

Akbar, a janitor in an affluent neighbourhood in northern Tehran, says he has not yet spent his family's payments which are almost equal to half of his monthly salary. "We have saved it so far," he says.

However, the middle class who are estimated to be also about 30m in number usually live in apartments equipped with gas and electricity for heating and cooling systems. They may own at least one car and do not have many children.

Officially, the price of gas has risen fivefold, electricity and water by three times, flour by 40 times and petrol between four and seven times.

Are the Libyan Rebels for Us or against Us?

Here's a comic footnote to the Libya war: Neither side of the Libyan conflict was actually looking for any real solidarity with leftists (least of all Marxists), but somehow one side (the regime) got a lot of gratuitous, undeserved Latin American leftist support and the other side (the rebels) got a lot of gratuitous, undeserved Western leftist as well as (both secular and religious) Arab and Iranian support.

As a matter of fact, both the regime and the rebels were looking for Western imperialist support, and they didn't hide it either. The Western imperialists -- unlike the world Left, the Arabs, and the Iranians, who all jumped into the Libyan fray without examining what they were jumping into -- first took a good, hard look at both sides and then decided to back the rebels.

The rebels got what they wanted, and that's that.

In recent days, though, I have noticed that the propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic of Iran began to change tack. Maybe the IRI establishment finally realized that the Libyan rebels aren't pro-Iranian -- in fact, the rebels are as likely to be against Shia Muslims as against Africans, Marxists, and so on. Hezbollah and Trotskyists, perhaps more selflessly idealistic than IRI officials, apparently have yet to ask a crucial question of international solidarity, which unlike charity is a two-way street: Are the rebels for us or against us?

Japan

I did what I could for my family and other people in Japan.

I managed to contact my brother on the 11th and persuaded my sister-in-law and nephew to leave for Kyushu (my brother, a Japanese Red Cross worker, refused to leave because he got "work to do"). I got through to my parents on the 12th and talked them into heading south, either to stay with my favorite aunt (my mother's sister) in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, or to head further south. Those were the last phone calls, and since then I have not been able to get in touch with them. I hope by now they got where they needed to go, far away from Chiba (where they normally live, only about 150 miles from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants).

The clock is ticking, and there is little time left to do more.

Post-Vanguard

First Ben Ali, and now Mubarak. The empire has failed to stop the momentum of the Arab revolt that started in Sidi Bouzid. It is a time of great transition in West Asia and North Africa. What kind of transition will it be?

Samir Amin fears that, in the case of Egypt and perhaps elsewhere if not in Tunisia, it may result in the ascent of religious obscurantists into power, bringing about a new alliance of religious forces with the military establishment, a kind of Pakistanization so to speak. Aijaz Ahmad, on the other hand, hails the revolutionary wave as an upsurge of "secularity" as well as of democracy. Both appear to miss the most striking feature of what is going on: the absence of any vanguard ideology or vanguard party, religious or secular.

Some have named this absence "post-ideological," but that does not quite capture the fluidity of the moment. Ideologies are at work in the intifadas in the region today -- what is clear is that none is in hegemony. No single ideology is in the vanguard, nor is any political party seeking to be the vanguard party of the kind that led 20th-century revolutions. Competing political currents all appear to sense that people are not looking for a charismatic leader, a new Lenin or a new Khomeini. There is a refreshing absence of the quintessential iconography of past revolutions: larger-than-life images of the leader of the revolution.

The question is if the leaderless revolts, without any vanguard party or ideology, can fully dismantle the ancien regimes, which are decapitated but are otherwise more or less intact, establish new ones, and defend and develop them.

The Tunisian Revolution: Views from Iran

The biggest front page story of Kayhan on Monday, 17 January 2011 is headlined thus: "80% of People in the Middle East: Repeat of Tunisia Phenomenon in Store for Arab Governments."

By way of not-so-subtle contrast, Kayhan features a story of happy Iranian children right next to the Tunisian story: "Joyful Winter Day across Iran: Yesterday, Kids, Instead of Studying, Played with Snow."

Raja News,¹ for its part, notes five similarities between the deposed Shah of Iran and the deposed Tunisian president: promoting secularism with an iron hand; supporting and being supported by the West; looting national wealth during escape; attempting to impose lifelong rule; and getting driven out from home and getting discarded by the West.

A note of general satisfaction, in short, is unmistakable among the oficialistas in Iran.  The revolution in Tunisia, in their eyes, confirms their strategic assessment that "a major shift in the regional balance of power" underway favors the axis of resistance:

In Tehran, there is a strong belief that the region is changing dramatically in favor of Hezbollah, the Palestinians, and the Resistance.  The rise of an independent Turkey, whose government has a worldview very different from that of the U.S., German, British, and French governments, along with the relative decline of Saudi and Egyptian regional influence, signals a major shift in the regional balance of power.  Saudi military incompetence during the fighting with Yemeni tribes along the border between the two countries, the general decline of the Egyptian regime in all respects, and the almost universal contempt among Arabs as a whole for the leaders of these two countries and other pro-western Arab regimes and their corrupt elites, are seen as signs that the center cannot hold.  The fact that the Iranian president and the Turkish prime minister are so popular in Arab countries, while most Arab leaders are deeply unpopular, is a sign that the region is changing.

Meanwhile, the Web site of the embattled Green Path Movement features Nader Marzban's opinion reflecting on "Iran and Tunisia: Superficial Similarities and Substantial Differences between the Two Movements."  What is the main difference?  Marzban highlights the difference between the Iranian movement's reform strategy and the Tunisian movement's revolutionary strategy.  What is more important, however, is that in Tunisia the movement first began with, and has organically grown from, a protest against unemployment,² a class battle, an aspect notable for its absence at the height of the Green Path Movement.³  As the tenth government of the Islamic Republic implements controversial subsidy reform⁴ in Iran, both defenders and opponents of the nezam of Iran today will have opportunities to revisit similarities and differences between Iran and Tunisia.

1  Raja News, by the way, is giving big play to the news of exiled Renaissance Party leader Rashid Ghannoushi's return to Tunisia.  Its editor has apparently failed to canvass informed Arab sources such as this: "Aljazeera has [to] stop promoting Rashid Ghannushi and stop announcing his travel to Tunisia as if his impending arrival is analogous to that of Khumayni's return to Iran.  No one cares about Ghannushi, from what I have seen, although I won't rule out the likelihood of the emergence of an Islamist current later on."

2  Rising youth unemployment, plus relative deprivation felt by educated youth, resulting from a combination of a youth bulge due to demographic transition, economic liberalization making decent jobs in the public sector scarcer, and slower growth of the world capitalist economy after the end of the post-WW2 boom, is a common story in the Middle East.  What is peculiar to the Iranian case is both the rise and the fall of the youth bulge are sharper than in any other country: "As noted above, the current group of Iranian youth is the largest in the country's history.  In 2005, the age group 20-24 was 62 percent larger than it was 10 years earlier, 9.1 million compared to 5.6 million, pushing the ratio of youth, which we define as ages 15-29, to total  population to 35 percent, the highest recorded ratio in any country.  Figure 1 shows that Syria has the second highest youth ratio (32 percent) while Turkey's is considerably lower, about 27 percent, having passed its peak of near 30 percent in the 1990s.  By 2020, youth ratio will decline considerably, to less than 25 percent, the level observed in advanced countries.  This is because the youth population is predicted to fall in absolute terms; for example, the 20-24 age group is expected to shrink by 75 percent in 2015, to 5.2 million.  The reason for Iran's high youth ratio and its fluctuations is a baby boom in the early 1980s, when the revolutionary government was pro-natal, followed by a sharp decline in fertility in the 1990s, when it reversed this policy" (footnotes omitted, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, "Iranian Youth in Times of Economic Crisis," September 2010).

3  E.g., "Iran has witnessed several spirited labor actions in recent years, well-known examples being the wildcat strikes of Tehran bus drivers and schoolteachers.  But these actions have not crystallized into what can be called a coordinated, militant labor movement.  Furthermore, militancy has not yet appeared in the most sensitive sectors of the economy, oil and transportation of freight. . . .  These trends of diffusion of protest and relatively small-bore economic demands have held during the Ahmadinejad presidency. . . .  [T]he core of the Green Movement leadership is devoted to an Iranian version of trickle-down economics, according to which the masses will eventually enjoy the good life but only if the elites prosper first and furiously.  The Green Movement has offered little in terms of a redistributive vision that could motivate the working class to flex its muscles" (Mohammad Maljoo, "The Green Movement Awaits an Invisible Hand," Middle East Report, 26 June 2010).

4  Two contrasting views of the subsidy reform: Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, "Iran: Goodbye to Energy Subsidies, Hello to Price Controls?" (Tyranny of Numbers, 19 December 2010); Kevan Harris, "Iran's Subsidy Reductions: Upon Whom Will the Costs Fall?" (MRZine, 27 December 2010).  It would be instructive to comparatively study Iran's subsidy reform juxtaposed with the aborted energy price reform in Bolivia and the ongoing economic reform in Cuba.

Dawn of the Dead Again in America

It's dawn of the dead again in America.  It's not, however, because hard-pressed Americans en masse rejected "socialism," voting for austerity, against bread and peace, as the Right would have us believe.  As is usually the case with mid-term elections, the turnout was low: just "42 percent of registered voters" voted.  Which means this re-run of the dawn of the dead is brought to you by a minority, upper-class America mobilized by corporate America, voting against the working-class American majority, just as capitalist democracy American-style is designed to work.

Which Democrats ended up becoming zombie meals?  Not the bread and peace wing of the Democratic Party: progressives in progressive districts by and large survived.  Take Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio: they even voted against the 2008 bank bailout and lived to tell about it.  Who got eaten up by zombies, then?  "23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down."   In other words, the very people who fed working-class meat to living dead capitalists to reanimate them in the aftermath of the financial crisis.  The lesson is clear: Don't feed the zombies -- they'll come back for more and bite your ass.

This, however, is not a moment for Marxists to indulge in schadenfreude.  The rest of America has not even noticed the existence of American socialists, who have been saying: "Obama Ain't No Socialist -- We Are!"  Hard as it may be to admit, we have failed to build an organized Left, under Bush or Obama, despite two shooting wars and now a nearly 10% unemployment rate.

And hard luck for the Left in hard times isn't a story of "Only in America."  Whether we look at a country whose working class is powerful (France) or a country whose ruling class is weak (Greece), 20th-century socialism (Cuba) or 21st-century socialism (Venezuela), the crisis has made left-wing lives more difficult, not less.

How can American socialists help build an organized Left here, in the decades of slow growth and high unemployment ahead of us?  Can we at least help squash the most voracious zombies who would like nothing better than making Americans work till death while killing Iranians to boost the economy?

Monopoly Capital Blocks Rational Policy of Wage-led Growth

What lesson might the working classes of the global North take from what's happening in China? Canadian journalist Paul Jay spells it out in plain English.

Paul Jay: So we've been talking about macroeconomic policy, the G-20, austerity. And there was one little line in the G-20 document I thought was interesting, and it's sort of buried in amongst everything. It said countries could facilitate wages going up proportional to productivity, which is rather interesting, 'cause it's the only time I've ever heard it even mentioned by these guys. There's quite a big section about how wages need to go up in China. There they understand the need for increasing demand. And we've heard President Obama say, we can't be the consumer engine of the world anymore, you guys have to do it, looking at China. And they talk about increasing the social safety net in China. They even talk about allowing strike struggles in China so wages can go up, but they sure don't talk about it when it comes to their own places. . . . So the problem is -- and this is where it becomes a political problem. I mean, it's not that difficult to sit down and kind of envision a rational solution to all of this -- you just can't pass it anywhere. The way that the politics is controlled and the small gang of people that actually own the commanding heights of the economy, starting with the banks, they don't allow any of this to actually get passed, so you get to an impasse. You can talk rational visions, but you can't execute on it.

The lesson given by Jay is a Kaleckian one, one of the most important lessons, especially today, as we struggle against the drive to austerity in the North. First of all, make clear what obstacle needs to be removed if the rational alternative is to be implemented.

To that Kaleckian lesson, however, we want to add a Gorzian one, especially in the United States: take productivity gains more in the form of gains in disposable time than in the form of more consumption. That's our socialist ticket out of crisis, economic and environmental.

Minimum transitional demands: retirement at 50 with full benefits; free education and social wages for students (all the way up to doctoral degrees for those who want them); paid parental leaves (six years for each new child); two months of paid vacations per year at minimum; indefinite unemployment benefits (to last till the ruling classes come up with worthy jobs at worthy wages for the unemployed).

Fiscal Crisis of States

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, what next?  In the United States,¹ a "fiscal crisis" of states and municipalities, both real (masses of public-sector workers are getting laid off even now²) and imagined (bogus public pension liabilities stats used in right-wing propaganda to attack unions³).

Money is out there, though, if only we had a powerful coalition to tax the rich!

There's a very good pro-labor, anti-racist, Green rationale to prioritize this fight above all, since one of the sectors under attack is urban mass transportation, whose workers are often unionized and, as in many other sectors of civil service, are often non-white.  Needless to say, state and municipal public service is the most feminist thing in the United States, in terms of profiles of both workers and beneficiaries.

Leftists can't win everywhere pursuing this battle to tax the rich, but we can win here and there,⁴ which would help build more durable bases for future actions than anything else.  There's nothing like victories to build a Left!

Taxing the rich is also better financial reform than any "oversight" of finance that the Democrats come up with at the federal level.  The less money the rich have, the less money for their gambles.  The financial reform PR message here is to tax the rich and spend their money here, so they won't spend it to bid up, say, real estate prices in China or something like that.


1  In the eurozone, the fiscal crisis expresses itself as the euro core of Germany versus the euro periphery of PIIGS.  See Jayati Ghosh, Heiner Flassbeck, Joseph Halevi, Costas Lapavitsas, and Mark Weisbrot.

2  Dean Baker, "State and Local Governments Have Shed 72,000 Jobs since December," MRZine, 2 April 2010).

3  Nathan Newman, "No Crisis in Public Retirement Systems: Debunking the Hype and the Attacks on Employee Benefits" (MRZine, 17 April 2010).

4  Rick Wolff, "Oregon Counters Massachusetts" (MRZine, 27 January 2010).

Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics

The best way to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran is to see it not as "theocracy" but as "Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics."

The power elite of Iran don't care about Islam as such (Islam, after all, is diverse, and some varieties of it, as conceived by Nader Hashemi, Mohsen Kadivar, Ahmad Sadri, and the like, are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy). What they care about is their revolution and their republic and their ideology (in which Islam does play a part but an increasingly smaller one). As IRGC General Mohammad Ali Jafari reportedly said:

حفظ نظام جمهوری اسلامی ایران از ادای نماز واجب‌تر است

They love their politico-economic order much more than prayers.

Unlike the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, whose legitimating ideology came from outside (Western Europe) and was instilled from above (the Marxist-Leninist Party), though, their ideology is one that has organically grown out of Iranian history, which is what is going for them.

My back-of-the-napkin calculation, however, says that about 20% of the Iranian population, largely of economically upper strata, are liberals who are tired of this politico-economic order and its legitimating ideology. Give Iran a couple of decades in which its social dialectic can unfold without foreign intervention, and liberals are likely to grow more numerous in the country as it undergoes its capitalist development; and liberals inside Iran might eventually transform the country in a way that liberals outside it would like, through passive revolution (much as the AKP has done in Turkey, which too was once ruled by men of the Jacobin mentalité).

Meanwhile, the duty of Iranian patriots, even liberals in exile, is not to let imperialists bomb Iran.

Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism

How does the ruling class destroy liberty, often in the name of liberalism, today? By exploiting fear, especially specters of Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism. The ruling class defines each of these categories in such a way that each becomes a mixed bag of defensible and indefensible. To take just one example, in the category of terrorism, class justice and propaganda of the Western powers insidiously merges together national liberation movements such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (defensible) and Al Qaeda (indefensible).

Iran: The Islamic Revolution Defeats Western Hopes for Regime Change

. . . and Hashemi's hopes for a palace coup.

Iran Celebrates the 31st Anniversary of
the Islamic Revolution

Green Wave^* Ebbs

Isfahan	Tehran

Having defeated the Western hopes for regime change and the endogenous upper-class hopes for a palace coup, Salomes of Iran will have a better chance to fight for freedom.

سبز شدیم در این خاک از سالومه

*   For the social and political character of the Green Wave, consult Iran's Last Marxist Nasser Zarafshan: Setareh Derakhshesh, "Interview with Dr. Nasser Zarafshan and Farrokh Negahdar" (VOA Persian, 6 January 2010).

It's about Time

Despite all the activism and writing about Copenhagen, few are putting shorter work hours (i.e., consuming productivity gains in the form of more leisure than commodified goods and services) on the environmental agenda. Why?

A New John Brown?

"If a new John Brown arose today -- fundamentalist, patriarchal, and yet devoted to the cause of racial equality, or anti-imperialism, environmentalism, or some other good cause -- and moreover employed "direct action" (which would be naturally called "terrorism") to advance the cause, how many leftists would hail him as a hero? Would he not be scorned on account of his less than enlightened views about women, homosexuals, and so on?" -- Suleman Sheikh

Looking for the Boss

Ever since I began working for Monthly Review, I've had a number of opportunities to see leftists display an attitude that one wouldn't expect from those who profess to stand for freedom, democracy, and the socialist way. The attitude in question basically is one of "I'm gonna complain to the boss if I don't see an employee jump when I tell her to." Today I had it spelled out by one such self-identified leftist, who wrote me: "Please also provide me with the contact details of your supervisor / line manager."

What It Takes to Make Keynes Work

John Ross wrote in the Guardian ("No Secrets to China's Success," 18 August 2009):

Keynes noted in the final chapter of his General Theory, in a point highly relevant to a situation where mass unemployment is again soaring, that "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment".

That "somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment" is impossible in a private sector-dominated economy. The decisive advantage China has in the present crisis is that it does not have to rely only on indirect means (reduction of interest rates, budget deficits etc) to attempt to reverse the plunging investment that is the driving force of this as with every major recession. China can use its large state-owned company sector to increase investment and instruct its state-owned banks to lend. That is why its economy is growing, while Alistair Darling is still pleading ineffectually for UK banks to increase their lending and while UK investment in housing and transport is plunging by 30% and more.

A good point.

The thing about Keynes is that you can make Keynes work but not under a normal capitalist state in a normal capitalist market economy. It takes something like (1) China's one-party state or (2) war economy (of not capital-intensive wars like today's Afghanistan and Iraq wars but labor-intensive wars of total mobilization subordinating capital and labor alike to the state, like WW2) or (3) the working class so awesomely powerful that it might as well go ahead and do socialism instead of Keynes.

That's what typical Keynesians and typical anti-Keynesians (either of the Marxist or of the capitalist liquidationist kind) don't understand.

Notes on the Japanese Elections of 2009

Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity, which created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, finally put an end to Japan's de facto one-party state on 30 August 2009. But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from 115 to 308 (the DPJ block now enjoys 322 seats, more than a two-thirds majority). The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party barely hanged onto the same numbers of seats that they had before the elections: 9 for the CP^* and 7 for the SDP. On the face of it, it is not a debacle for the Left like those suffered by Communists in India and Italy in the most recent elections. But, one of the items on the DPJ agenda is a plan to eliminate 80 proportional representation seats, and it just so happens that all the Communist representatives are elected to proportional representation seats.

Why did the Japanese Left fail to advance? Take a look at this video of the 21 August 2009 press conference of JCP Chaiman Shii Kazuo (which comes with English translation), and you'll get a clue.

JCP criticisms of the DPJ agenda are to the point more often than not (which you can see in more detail in 「国民が主人公」の新しい日本を -- 日本共産党の総選挙政策), but those criticisms don't amount to a compelling vision of a new socialist society that the party should be presenting.

The strongest point of the JCP criticisms of the DPJ is that the DPJ will pay for its promise to expand the social safety net, including the formerly excluded, by increasing the taxes on working-class incomes, leveling down the existing structures of entitlements such as pensions toward the new social minimums, decreasing public works and public-sector jobs, and so on, the trade-off that the DPJ will make inevitable given its refusal to tax big businesses and capitalists and to cut military spending.

But, in the process of making this point, the JCP ends up defending the old, such as tax exemptions for dependent spouses (usually housewives), which have discouraged many a woman from seeking full-time jobs since wives earning only part-time incomes (roughly up to 1,300,000 yen) are counted as dependents for the purpose of calculating taxes, insurance and pension contributions and benefits, etc. What's good for working-class families in material terms can be bad for working-class women looking to enhance their gender-bargaining power vis-a-vis men, and the structures of the Japanese welfare state that tacitly assume male family wages, lifetime monogamous marriages, female spousal dependency, etc. are textbook cases of the common class-gender contradiction under capitalism. This contradiction is intensifying as more and more Japanese women are clearly losing interest in marriage and childbearing, powerfully demonstrating their sharp rejection of the old gender settlement and silently erecting a strong demographic obstacle to the old methods of restoring economic growth. The JCP, or any other left-wing current in Japan, needs to offer women -- and young people in general -- a new socialist vision that addresses women as individuals in their own right and creates new networks of social solidarity other than biological families, rather than a maternalist Keynesian vision in which women are tacitly assumed to be, or become, or have been wives and mothers.

The same goes for the JCP's defense of the Peace Constitution. On one hand, any constitutional revision that the DPJ will put on the agenda will likely be one that pushes Japan onto the course that Germany took in the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, embarking on humanitarian imperialist adventures of its own, not just as a subordinate member of the US-led coalition of the willing. On the other hand, there is nothing democratic, let alone socialist, about defending the constitution that the occupier wrote for Japan, on which the Japanese people have not been allowed to vote. Socialists must present a new democratic vision for Japan. Why not a constitutional assembly in Japan, to write a new constitution as a step toward 21st century socialism?


* The proportion of the total vote for the Communists, however, registered a slight decline, from 7.25% to 7.03%.

The Scandal of Privatization in Iran

Probably the worst thing that the Islamic Republic of Iran has done for its working people is to educate its young economists at "the most prestigious Western economics departments." The horror, the horror! It's not the Western fashion in clothing but economics that the IRI should have kept out, but, as Sohrab Behdad has argued, the idea of Islamic economics met its demise soon after its rise -- much like the idea of socialist economics, I may add.

Despite the resurgence of gharbzadegi in its economics, though, hardly any privatization worth its name has been going on in Iran: "a main buyer of government assets over the last decade has been the para-governmental sector, which includes state banks, government-linked investment and holding companies, religious foundations, and pension funds" (Mohammad Khiabani, "The Great Tehran Expo Privatization Scandal You've Never Heard Of").

That is largely thanks to the Western sanctions, I suspect. It is probably also thanks to the political culture of Iran. Get ten Iranians to speak up, and you'll probably get twenty contradictory opinions about how thing are and why they are as they are in Iran, at least about fifteen of which are conspiracy theories. Nothing changes very fast in a country like that.

Ahmadinejad to Propose "at Least Three Female Ministers in His New Cabinet"

Reuters reports: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday he would propose at least three female ministers in his new cabinet following Iran's disputed election, an unprecedented move in the conservative Islamic state. . . . It would be the first time a woman would hold a ministerial position in Iran since its 1979 Islamic revolution" (Zahra Hosseinian, "Ahmadinejad Plans Female Ministers in Iran Cabinet," 16 August 2009).

Three female cabinet ministers would be more than Iran has ever gotten in its entire modern history, not just in the history of the Islamic Republic. Khatami had only Masoumeh Ebtekar (head of the Environment Protection Organization of Iran) and Zahra Shojaei (head of the Center for Women's Participation) in his cabinet, who were replaced by Fatemeh Javadi and Nasrin Soltankhah respectively in Ahmadinejad's first cabinet. It looks like it's easier to improve Ahmadi's cultural program than reform Khatami-Mousavi-Rafsanjani's economic and foreign policy programs.