The capitalist crisis that hit Japan in the early 1990’s has sharply increased unemployment and homelessness, forcing many workers into “Capsule Hotels.” The deepening global financial crisis has worsened this situation, leading to a staggering 25% unemployment rate, but also to an emerging fight-back by workers, teachers and students. In a country once boasting to be the stronghold of economic equality, now over one-third of Japan’s workers are hired on “flexible” and temporary contracts. Over 200,000 have been laid off since October 2008.

Immigrant workers from Southeast Asia, China and Latin America are employed in super-exploitative factory jobs originally held by unionized Japanese workers making a “liveable” wage. The fascist right-wing uses this in their sharply increasing racist attack on immigrant workers.

“Contingent” (temporary) labor is a reality for young workers. High rents and short jobless periods throw workers on the streets. An unknown number now survive for varying periods by sleeping in internet cafe cubicles, costing a fraction of what even a cramped one-room apartment would run.

Those who are poorer still, both homeless and jobless, barely exist in “cardboard cities” of major towns and often are subjected to vicious police attacks during round-ups and evictions. The rising phenomenon “Karoshi,” or death from overwork, is common at capitalist giants like Hitachi. Many workers must work up to 80 hours a week to keep their jobs.

The newly-elected liberal Yukio Hatoyama government of the Democratic Party of Japan has vowed to “solve” the crisis by “fighting corruption” and reorganizing Japan’s geo-political position, namely its relationship with China and the U.S. Hatoyama has promised to end the decade-long recession, to focus on reformist policies that benefit public need over corporate interest, and to redefine Japan’s relationship to what Hatoyama calls “U.S.-led globalization.”

Yet it’s clear that Hatoyama, who comes from one of Japan’s wealthiest families (dubbed the “Japanese Kennedys”) is using the rhetoric of change to mask ruling-class interest in disciplining the rogue capitalists, to smooth out the rough spots so that profit accumulation won’t stagger. While not a military power, Japanese finance capital is central to the inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China, both in technological advancement and capital re-investment.

Recent articles in the NY Times and Asian Times Online reveal that Japan is closely aligning with China. Hatoyama’s government is also urging the U.S. to move its massive military base in Okinawa. Hatoyama’s hope of remaining neutral within inter-imperialist competition is unsustainable and will likely lead to Japan’s realignment with either the U.S. or China, both economically and militarily, squeezing unemployed young workers in the middle of the bosses’ battle for global economic control.

Workers and students have not stood idly by while corrupt Japanese rulers have run the country into the ground. In the early 2000s, militant unions like the National Railways Union, with over 200,000 workers, have led demonstrations against railway privatization. The rank and file, some with links to the reformist Japanese Revolutionary “Communist” League (formed in the 1960’s), have also led strikes against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They especially criticized Japan’s involvement in refuelling U.S. warships anchored in the Indian Ocean for deployment in the inter-imperialist confrontation in Afghanistan.

Tokyo’s teachers have been resisting Japan’s re-militarization that began after 9/11, forcing many into a battle with the racist and openly sexist Mayor Ishihara Shintaro who controls the Education Ministry with an iron fist. These teachers have also joined demonstrations opposing Japanese involvement in Afghanistan and have played a key role in curbing the ultra-nationalism emerging in the post-9/11 period.

Students at Keio University have rebuilt some of the militant organizations of the 1960’s, which led massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1968, and have protested discriminatory university policies.

Without communist leadership, however, many young workers have turned to the Japanese “Communist” Party which has gained 14,000 members since 2008; one-fourth of these new members are under 18. This generation grew up without having experienced the relative stability existing in Japan during the post-war “boom” and has suffered hard conditions, instilling second thoughts in young workers about their relationship to the profit-driven system of exploitation and wage-slavery.

The increasing presence of worker-led street rallies has galvanized the surge in communist sympathy, benefitting the JCP in its attempt to rebuild its base in mainstream political circles. The JCP claims well over 400,000 members in 25,000 local branches, making it one of the largest “communist” parties of the industrialized countries.

While this trend indicates a seemingly leftward shift amongst Japanese youth, the resurgent JCP doesn’t offer revolutionary change, favoring instead “pragmatic” solutions to the present crisis and the “peaceful transition to socialism” without destroying capitalism. Some attempts are being made to establish a base of workers and students in Japan who ignore the false hopes of Hatoyama and JCP reformism, to turn the recent fight-back into a school for communist revolution. 

The following is an interview of a friend of PLP about the protests in Baltimore on March 4.

Q. What is the school-to-prison pipeline?

A. School-to-prison pipeline is the need for our youth, especially minorities, to not be able to go to school because the system profits more if they end up in the juvenile justice system. 

Q. You took part in the March 4th events in Baltimore.  Can you tell us a little about what happened?

A. It was a really inspirational day. We started in downtown Baltimore at Camden Yards where we waited for students to arrive and listened to speeches about the importance of why we were marching. Next we started the march past the state school board building where we met up with more students and let the people inside know we were serious. In the following events, we marched to the juvenile justice center [and] we chanted different things such as “Jobs Not Jails.”

Q. What exactly is being demanded, and what did it feel like to be part of that major protest?

A. They are demanding that 100 out of the 300 million dollars that is being allocated for more youth jails be redirected towards education. They are demanding this from the governor because he owes the city money due to a state mandate that has yet to be paid to the youth of Baltimore. I felt like I was doing something important to help students.

Q. Why do you think the cops didn’t arrest the people who sat-in and picketed, right inside the Baby Bookings [juvenile jail] complex?

A. I think they didn’t arrest anyone who sat-in or picketed because it wouldn’t be in their best interest to arrest any of the students or adults. If they did that would cause more media coverage for our cause and it could have caused an uproar from the students.

Q. What is Progressive Labor Party’s analysis about why U.S. capitalism, year after year, incarcerates such tremendous numbers of working-class people?

A. The capitalists of America need prison labor to produce products cheap to make a huge profit. Private prison contractors make a lot more money using prisoners to labor for cheap. The capitalist state needs the school-to-prison pipeline. To end it we have to
destroy the capitalist state and establish working-class power, which means a dictatorship of the working class.

Q. There was a very good Town Hall meeting last month to help organize for March 4. Can you tell us about Progressive Labor Party’s contribution to that event?

A. During the open discussion period of the meeting a comrade took a firm position that the school-to-prison pipeline was wrong and that the only solution is a communist revolution. Then the people on the panel at the Town Hall meeting were asked what they thought of revolution. It caused the audience to begin to cheer for our comrade and showed that we aren’t the only ones here to believe in revolution.

Q. On March 4 itself, how many people helped distribute PLP’s communist newspaper, CHALLENGE, and about how many participants took copies of the paper?

A. On March 4 there were three people passing out CHALLENGE and we got out close to a hundred papers and made a couple of new friends of the Party.

Q. Last year, only 4,285 students graduated from public high schools in Baltimore City, but a larger number — about 6,000 young people — were arrested by the police.  How do you think we can solve this problem?

A. As I discussed above the only solution would be a communist revolution. We should start with a class-consciousness that would help these students learn that the bosses need these numbers to keep their families and minorities as a whole oppressed. 

ATHENS, March 29 — The class struggle is raging in Greece, and the working class is beginning to advance against the bosses’ cutbacks. The working class shut Greece down on Thursday, March 11, for the second time in less than a month (see CHALLENGE 3/17). Planes didn’t fly, factories and schools were closed and the Corinth Canal was shut down. TV, Radio, electronic news websites, and the press — the whole country was brought to a standstill. Over 100,000 workers marched, possibly the largest demonstration in 15 years. Some factories that did try to stay open were forcibly shut down by protesters and striking workers, with many scabs being stopped from entering.

Earlier in the week, the striking workers attempted to storm parliament. When one of the major union leaders tried to stop them, they beat the snot out of him. It’s inspiring to see the bosses’ dogs get stomped. A few days later, the union put up wanted posters of the workers who beat him up, echoing one of the Nazi’s favorite tactics. 

During an event organized by the Ministry of Education, teachers invaded the conference room while the Minister of Education was speaking. The teachers unfolded a big banner against the measures and chanted slogans against the regime. When a plain-clothes policeman tried to stop them, the teachers surrounded the man, disarmed him, and beat him, culminating with the man crawling on the floor towards the exit. The teachers then continued to chant slogans against the Minister. 

Greece is suffering from massive budget cuts being inflicted upon it by the international capitalist class — the bosses. The Socialist government is crying that they must inflict these cuts on the working class and that it’s out of their hands. These bootlickers are not saying that capitalism cannot meet the needs of the working class. They can’t, because they are not against capitalism. They want to control it so that they can continue to sell out the working class for their capitalist masters. Socialists will always betray the working class because they don’t fight directly for communism, even if they pay lip service to wanting to fight for it at all. 

The communist movement in Greece has been diverted down two dead-ends: anarchism and socialism.  The socialist parties, many of whom call themselves “communist,” are saturated with false ideas that capitalism can be reformed.  The anarchists are saturated with the false idea that communism can be achieved without a centralized party apparatus to organize the revolution and society. The anarchists led attacks on police stations, luxury shops, representations of wealth, banks, and the police themselves, and leftists did lead the one-day strike, but it will not be enough to stop the socialist PASOK government from instituting the cuts that the capitalist bosses need.

It is amazing to see the photos of brave workers fighting against the cops. A favorite chant is “Cops are not children of the working class, they are dogs of the capitalists.” It is exciting to see class consciousness inspire the strikes. It should inspire us all to step up our attacks on the capitalist state as they continue to attack us.

Examples of Greek students being attacked by cops on motorcycles trying to encircle them, and then encircling the cops, smashing their motorcycles and sending over 15 of them to the hospital after they beat them up, should inspire us to not fear the state and its armed apparatus. When the working class faces increasing repression, they begin to resist the new social order that the rulers try to impose. But, without communist leadership, that resistance will be co-opted into narrow reform movements and one-day strikes.

It will take a lot more than a one-day strike to stop the capitalists from trying to preserve their profit rate on the backs of the working class, both in Greece and internationally. The same enemy is attacking workers in Haiti with hundreds of thousands dead, and soldiers walking around with weapons instead of food. The same enemy is attacking the workers in Afghanistan with radioactive weaponry and paying for the war by cutting services and education of students from New York City to Los Angeles.

If workers around the world shared the Greek workers’ anger and class consciousness the rulers would be shaking in their shoes. However, we know that anger, militant action and reform demands are not enough to change the system to meet the needs of the working class. We need communist leadership from the PLP to make a revolution to wrest state power from the capitalists.