Burkett and Hart-Landsberg on Japan and East Asia

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     [long]
     I have finished reading a very stimulating and
provocative book on the East Asian situation in
general and would like to throw its observation
into the discussions occurring on both these lists.
The book is _Development, Crisis, and Class
Struggle: Learning from Japan and East Asia_,
by Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg, 2000,
St. Martin's Press.
     They argue in contrast to most of the press at
the time that the East Asian crisis really had the long
developing problems in Japan at their root.  They
then spend a lot of time analyzing the Japanese case,
but especially in terms of its relationship with the rest
of East Asia.  They also spend a lot of time critiquing
what they call the "progressive left liberal" position that
sees/saw Japan as a possible alternative version of
capitalism, more humane and better managed than
the US/UK model.
      In particular they critique five perspectives that
they identify: neoliberal, structuralist-institutionalist,
"flying geese," "Greater China," and dependency theory.
Of course I am short shrifting here, but a quick critique of
the neoliberal position can be seen in how its advocacy
of free capital movements blew up in the East Asian crisis.
They also argue that export-led growth faces inevitable
limits.  OTOH, they see the  neoliberals as dominating the
policy discussion.
     B and H-L say that the structuralist-institutionalists, many
of whom are cheerleaders for the Japanese model, better
describe the actual functioning of the Japanese and also
South Korean, Taiwanese, and other East Asian economies.
But, they say that these people romanticize such things
as the lifetime employment and "harmonious" labor-
management relations in Japan in particular.  The former
only applied to a small elite in the largest exporting companies
and the apparently harmonious relations reflect a defeat
of labor by management, especially in the aftermath of WW II,
with the connivance of the US occupiers.
    The "flying geese" theory actually dates from the 1930s
and sees Japan as leading the other East Asian nations
in a "flying geese" formation.  Supposedly they all follow each
other up a change of industrial restructuring and transformation
of export patterns.  But they see this as leading to regional
overinvestment by Japan with scrap-and-build restructurings
that led to the crisis.  Also they see this as essentially a
neoliberal vision.  And, of course, once Japan stalled, this
engendered crisis throughout the whole formation.  Finally,
it may be that the US is and always has been the lead goose.
     The "Greater China" approach is a variation on the
last one but says that China and the diaspora of overseas
Chinese in the region will be the new center of a growing
regional economy.  They challenge this on the grounds that
Japan really is and probably will remain ahead of China in
terms of the regional hierarchy.  Not unrelated to that is the
fact that China is becoming a dependent power as it opens up.
     Finally, they seem most sympathetic to the dependency
approach, but ultimately declare that it ends up looking like
the structuralist-institutionalist approach with the same problems.
      They declare that a more clearly class-based approach
is needed.  They declare that this does not mean following
old central planning models that they deny were really socialism
and praise "worker-community movements." The final chapter
discusses such movements in South Korea in particular.  They
list five challenges for such movements: 1) to build a broad-
based movement, 2) to strengthen the working class politically
and organizationally, 3) to overcome divisions between labor
unions and NGOs, 4) to build solidarity between workers in
different countries, and 5) to rebuild internal political education.
      I think their critiques are very sharp, but it is not clear where
their proposed solutions will go.  Perhaps the various difficulties
are expressed in one of the final endnotes of the book:
     p. 240:
     "Some activists are reluctant to embrace Marxism and the
political strategy of building an anti-capitalist movement with
socialism as its goal because of their justifiably critical
appraisal of the experience of countries that have declared
themselves socialist, such as the former Soviet Union or the
Peoples' Republic of China.  We do not think that the practices
of these countries represented socialism, even though their
respective revolutions were made in the name of socialism,
and many of their citizens hoped for and worked hard to
create socialism.  That is why... we defined our goal as the
creation of socialism from below.  However, we doubt that
even this emphasis on democratic control is sufficient to
diminish popular reluctance to embrace a socialist project.
The more general problem is that most people, even those
critical of capitalism, have to come to believe that there are
no viable alternatives to capitalism."
Barkley Rosser
Professor of Economics
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807 USA
rosserjb@xxxxxxx
http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb