Recent News

The most important power transfer in 50 years has just occurred in Japan with the election of Yukio Hatoyama from the Democratic Party of Japan.  While this election was certainly a seismic shift one thing certainly didn’t shift at all and that was the representation achieved by the Japanese Communist Party and the corresponding number of seats they achieved in the Japanese House of Representatives (link to data on Japanese election results here).

Book Cover of the 1929 version of 'The Crab Cannery Ship'

This against the backdrop of over a decade of economic stagnation and a global economic crash – if the Japanese Communist Party had an opening this was certainly it.  There had been an increasing interest in the ideas surrounding the Japanese Communist Party – exemplified by the unexpected publishing success of 2008, Kanikōsen 蟹工船, (The Crab Cannery Ship).  Written in 1929 by Kobayashi Takiji, the book tells the story of a cannery ship and its workers in northern Japan: their desperation, their wretched prospects, their exploitation at the hands of the ruling class and eventually what they do about it.  Kobayashi later joined the Communist Party and was tortured to death by the police in 1933.  The book had combined total sales of 1.5 million until 2008, when it was re-printed and it sold out across Japan equaling sales of the book for its entire lifetime in one year.  This looked like a pre-cursor to a political re-alignment.  However, this has not translated either to revolutionary action or even a greater number of votes for the Communist Party of Japan.  Therefore, something else must be going on.

Manga Version of 'The Crab Cannery Ship'

This ties into the start of 2009 when there were a number of predictions (mainly by European police and intelligence agencies) that the world was likely to see a ‘summer of rage’ and a concurrent potential revival of left-wing terrorism.  This clearly has not happened and the risk (if it ever existed) is receding as the financial system stabilizes.  The failure of communist parties and other left-leaning movements to exploit the financial crisis politically or on the street could have the opposite effect than that predicted at the start of 2008, that is a re-thinking of revolutionary action and politics away from traditional models.  There is some revolutionary theory developing in this space through the publication of the ‘Coming Insurrection’ jumping out of France and the Tarnac9 case.  This manifesto pulls together the hopelessness of the consumer age, impending environmental destruction and packages it with the flavor of an Internet manifesto.  Similarly, from a tactical standpoint the riots in Greece, should have shown the way to other western street protest movements, but these tactics involving rapidly networked information flow have not been picked up or used effectively elsewhere.  Therefore, while traditional left-wing revolution may have lost its appeal it is too early to say whether an Internet enabled revolutionary doctrine could take hold of activists’ imagination.  So far, the traditional left-wing sources of resistance have been shown to be as bankrupt as the banks, which precipitated the crisis.  It will be interesting to see what, if anything takes their place.