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From New International, Vol. VIII No. 2, March 1942, p. 63.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Japan, belatedly rising to the stature of an imperialist power toward the end of the nineteenth century, was confronted by a world already substantially divided among its imperialist rivals. The Japanese imperialists, moreover, were obliged to proceed from an exceedingly weak economic base in their plans of empire. Lacking such vital raw materials as coal and iron, copper, oil and cotton, they were driven from the outset to seek these supplies beyond the natural frontiers of Japan. Acquisition of sources of these raw materials was a condition, not only of expansion, but even of survival in the competitive world of imperialist rivalry. The career of Japanese imperialism opened with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, when Japan defeated China and seized Korea and Formosa. Then years later, Japan vanquished czarist Russia and took over the sphere of influence held by the latter in South Manchuria, during the World War of 1914–18, Japan seized the Chinese province of Shantung and presented China with the notorious Twenty-One Demands, which were designed to bring all China under Japanese control.
The growth of Japan’s productive forces and the development of capitalist economic relations did not result, as in the capitalist countries of the West, in the emergence of a corresponding social and political superstructure. The transition from feudal to capitalist society was accomplished without revolution and the bourgeoisie was therefore not faced with the necessity of razing the old institutions of social rule and replacing them by new. Emerging from the ranks of the feudal nobility and the warrior caste of Samurai, the bourgeoisie adapted the old institutions, with some modifications, to the requirements of the new systems of capitalist exploitation. Thus ancient feudal institutions, including a “divine” monarchy, a semi-independent military caste, and semi-feudal types of exploitation exist side by side with a “democratic” Parliament and powerful industrial and financial trusts. From the presence of the “feudal survivals,” powerful as they appear to be, it would, however, be false to deduce that the next stage in the social progress of Japan must be a “democratic” revolution.
The strivings of the military caste to keep intact its privileges and powers tend to complicate the main problem of the Japanese ruling class as a whole, which is to maintain over both the proletariat and the peasantry the present crushing system of exploitation with all the oppression which accompanies it. Periodically, this case comes into conflict with industry and finance capital, which seek to stem the drain on economy caused by the parasitic needs of the military caste. Army revolts and the assassination of leading political representatives of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie are the sharpest expressions of this conflict. These revolts also express, insofar as they are led by the younger officers of lower rank, the rebellion of the peasantry against finance capital. But since all sections of the ruling class realize the perils of class disunity, conflicts are finally settled on the basis of mutual concessions, by loading additional burdens onto the backs of the Japanese masses and by common agreement to embark on predatory military campaigns to enslave neighboring peoples, thereby cementing the cracks in the structure of ruling class domination as a whole.
– The War in the Far East, thesis of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, 1938
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