Workers Vanguard No. 842	18 February 2005

Japanese Trotskyists Say:

Down With Japanese Provocations Against China, North Korea!

We print below a translation of an article published as a Spartacist supplement (4 February 2005) by the Spartacist Group Japan, section of the International Communist League. Following North Korea’s announcement last week that it has nuclear weapons, Washington revealed longstanding plans to further tighten its starvation embargo against North Korea. We demand: All U.S. troops out of Korea! Down with the sanctions!

The Japanese and U.S. imperialists are playing a dangerous game in East Asia. Using the excuse of a Chinese military threat and instability on the Korean peninsula, Tokyo and Washington are in the process of strengthening their security agreements, repositioning their military and placing a ballistic missile system in the region. A recent deadly cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas, threats of sanctions against North Korea and worse, combined with Japan’s newly released “National Defense Program Guideline for FY2005 and After” are dangerous provocations against both the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states and the workers and toilers of the entire region.

As Marxists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea—and Vietnam and Cuba—against the increasingly bellicose Japanese capitalist rulers. The social revolutions in China and North Korea were historic defeats for imperialism and victories for the working class in Asia and around the world. Though deformed from their inception by the rule of a parasitic, nationalist, Stalinist bureaucratic caste, these revolutions overthrew capitalist property relations and imperialist subjugation. This resulted in the construction of collectivized economies which meant enormous social progress for workers, women and peasants, such as the right to a job, housing, education, childcare, social insurance and medical care.

The core of the economies in China and North Korea remain collectivized. We oppose capitalist penetration into the deformed workers states because it further undermines the collectivized economies. The Stalinist bureaucrats in Beijing have increasingly opened the country to imperialism, paving the way for capitalist restoration. This simultaneously prepares the ground for a new revolutionary explosion—not a social revolution which would overturn the economic foundations of society as in 1949, but a political revolution that is premised on the defense of the collectivized economy and which would oust the ruling bureaucracy and place political power in the hands of worker, soldier and peasant soviets.

The same program holds true for North Korea where a nepotistic, cultist Stalinist regime rules. While extremely impoverished, the collectivized economy enabled the North Korean masses to receive most basic daily necessities for free. While education, childcare and medical care continue to be free, the 2002 “market reforms” have substantially raised the price of basic foodstuffs, housing and transportation. North Koreans are now expected to buy much of their food on the open market as opposed to receiving it from the state. As the UN World Food Program stated, “Life is much harder for many North Koreans.” We call for proletarian political revolution to oust the sellout Stalinist bureaucratic castes, the main internal obstacle to defending the gains of the social revolutions, and we fight to extend proletarian rule to the advanced capitalist countries, with Japan as key.

Japanese Imperialism: Deadly Threat to Workers in Asia

For ten days in mid November 2004, the Japanese military and U.S. forces stationed in Japan conducted major joint military exercises, “Exercise Keen Sword 2005,” at military installations throughout the country. The purpose of these exercises was to “increase the defensive readiness of Japanese and American forces in the air, land and at sea” and practice “suppression of enemy air defenses, surveillance and reconnaissance, safe passage” (Strategy Page, 18 January).

In reality, these provocative “defensive readiness” exercises began a month earlier. Acting as if the Pacific Ocean and adjacent seas are their own personal lakes, U.S. armed forces and the Japanese navy and coast guard monitored the entire 30-day voyage of a Chinese Han-class nuclear-powered submarine. From the time the sub left its base in Qingdao in northeast China, as it circled Guam and during its return to China, surveillance satellites, warships and patrol aircraft tracked its every move. On its return, even before the submarine had entered waters in the East China Sea that are claimed by Japan, the Self-Defense Forces had been tracking the vessel with P3C anti-submarine patrol aircraft for several days. The two-hour incursion unleashed Japan’s anti-submarine network which has the largest density in the East Asian region, equipped with over 100 high-function patrol planes and numerous anti-submarine warships. The navy was placed on high alert for the second time since the end of World War II, triggering a two-day chase with Japanese destroyers and aircraft in hot pursuit. The first instance was in 1999 at the start of the imperialist war against Serbia when the coast guard dropped 12 bombs while chasing a North Korean ship.

The new defense guidelines represent a strengthening of the Japan-U.S. military alliance, an anti-Communist alliance initially directed against the former Soviet Union and today targeting China and North Korea. In addition to its own missile defense system bought in 2003 at the cost of 700 billion yen ($6.5 billion), Japan has entered into a ballistic missile defense system agreement with the U.S. To sell technology to the U.S. imperialists, the government has selectively ended its ban on arms exports. Japan’s Aegis destroyers will be upgraded, the capabilities of its Patriot missiles will be enhanced. To supplement the guidelines, additional plans have been drawn up to “defend” the hundreds of islands between Kyushu [one of the four main islands of Japan] and Taiwan against a “Chinese invasion of Japan.” To this end, the number of Japanese soldiers on Okinawa will be increased to full brigade status, F-15 fighters will be stationed there, and a rapid deployment force will be created.

Sounding as if Japan was some kind of Third World country, the reformist Communist Party, the third-campist Kakumaru and the United-Secretariat affiliated Kakehashi group oppose the new defense guidelines because they claim the Self-Defense Forces will be “subservient” to and “become one with” the American military. This position alibis the appetites of the Japanese bourgeoisie which is just as committed as its American counterpart to overturning the gains of the Chinese and North Korean social revolutions and brutally exploiting the workers and toilers of Asia. Despite its “lost decade” [the 1990s when Japan’s economy suffered a decline], Japan is still the second most powerful imperialist country on the planet. In 2003, cabinet members called for a policy of pre-emptive strikes against North Korea, and several leading politicians have stated that Japan could and would go nuclear. In fact, Japan’s inventory of 55 tons of separated plutonium is enough to manufacture 10,000 nuclear warheads.

While the guidelines call for a “close cooperative relationship between Japan and the United States,” their purpose is to create a leaner, meaner military machine whose reach is now to extend to “the region spreading from the Middle East to East Asia.” For now, the ruling class has decided to strengthen its alliance with the world’s top cop in order to serve its own interests. With memories of the slaughter of tens of millions by Japan’s imperial army during the Pacific War still very much alive, it is only through its alliance with Washington that Japanese imperialism has been able to deploy its already highly advanced military overseas. Japanese military out of West Timor, the Golan Heights, the Indian Ocean and Iraq! We call to smash the counterrevolutionary alliance between Japanese and U.S. imperialism through workers revolution on both sides of the Pacific!

Reformist Left in Service of Counterrevolution

As part of the unrelenting pressure against Pyongyang, legislation that would stop money transfers to North Korea and ban port calls by North Korean ships has already been enacted. Currently, the Japanese government is considering imposing economic sanctions against North Korea, which would be an act of war. It is also drafting legislation similar to that passed in the U.S. to aid defectors. As acting Liberal Democratic Party secretary-general Shinzo Abe said, “By supporting defectors from North Korea, we will be encouraging a regime change” (Asahi Shimbun, 13 January). This position dovetails with that of the Kakehashi group. While opposing sanctions, they write that what is needed is “stronger international criticism against the Kim Jong Il dictatorial regime, and aid to the North Korean workers and masses who are starving, including the ‘defectors’ and victims of human rights violations” (Kakehashi, 20 December 2004).

The highly staged defections from North Korea are heavily funded (reportedly costing 200,000 yen [$2,000] per defector) and organized by anti-communists like the Korean American pastor Douglas Shin, whose goal is to bring about the collapse of the regime in the North by encouraging a wide-scale exodus to the South, and who has “plans to infiltrate North Korea with tiny radios tuned to [the CIA’s] Radio Free Asia” (Chosun Journal, 24 October 2004). In Japan there is the “Rescue the North Korean People! Urgent Action Network” whose prominent members include Lee Young-hwa. In Lee’s book, North Korea: The Night of Secret Meetings, he writes of his trip to the North in the early 1990s. He details his attempts to promote capitalist counterrevolution in North Korea along the lines of that which occurred in the former Soviet Union and East Europe: “I thought there would be interest in the collapse of the socialist sphere. So, I talked about the collapse and the reality.... I noted that there is no perspective for North Korea without democratization and economic opening.” The counterrevolutionary destruction of the former USSR and East Europe has meant massive pauperization of millions of working people. Such historic defeats must not happen in China, North Korea, Cuba or Vietnam. The only way forward for the Korean working masses is through revolutionary reunification of the Korean peninsula. This means workers socialist revolution in the South and proletarian political revolution in the North.

It is in the direct and immediate interests of working people in Japan to defend the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. If the working class does not understand the historic significance of the gains of the Chinese and North Korean revolutions, such as the collectivized economy, they will never understand the importance of making a revolution against their “own” bourgeoisie. The biggest obstacle for workers to achieve this understanding is the reformist left, in particular the mass bourgeois-workers parties such as the Communist Party, that serve as transmission belts for bourgeois ideology into the working class. Just as the leadership of the Communist Party-led Zenroren [trade-union federation] refuses to mobilize the unions against privatization and other attacks by the Japanese capitalists and government, these parties refuse to defend the workers states against Japanese imperialism. The social-patriotic Communist Party criticized the government for not quickly identifying the submarine which “criminally invaded Japanese territorial waters,” and demanded that “the Chinese side quickly display the attitude of responsibility” (Akahata, 13 November 2004).

Our unconditional defense also includes the right of China and North Korea to possess and test their nuclear arsenals as part of maintaining a necessary deterrent against imperialist nuclear blackmail. Most left organizations oppose the right of these states to have nuclear weapons, which means they want these states to be relatively defenseless against the nuclear-armed imperialist madmen whom they claim to oppose. In the 10 February 2003 issue of Zenshin, Chukaku wrote: “From the perspective of the people we must absolutely oppose North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons.” The 18 November 2002 issue of Kakumaru’s paper Kaiho polemicized against “degenerate Trotskyists who defend the Kim Jong Il regime against unscrupulous attack by imperialism.” They go on to write that: “Kim Jong Il’s nuclear weapons and their meaning are anti-people.”

Under their infamous slogan “Down with Imperialism! Down with Stalinism!”, the third-campist Chukaku and Kakumaru attempt to give a theoretical cover to their program of capitulation to anti-communist bourgeois public opinion and the renunciation of a proletarian revolutionary perspective. Since their inception, both organizations have pushed the lie that imperialist countries—for example, Japan, which carried out the rape of Nanjing [in 1937]; America, which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Germany, which carried out the Holocaust—are equally enemies of the world’s working class as those countries that overthrew capitalism and instituted collectivized economies. This was made explicit in the document for the Chukaku’s sixth conference when they wrote:“There is no other way to stop the process of a third world war than overthrowing imperialism and the remaining Stalinist [states]” (Zenshin, 12 August 2002). In the 1 January issue of their paper, Chukaku has had to finally acknowledge that “China and the Chinese economy have not been transformed into capitalism.” But nowhere do they state that the elimination of capitalist property relations is important for the world’s proletariat, much less a gain that must be defended. As Trotsky wrote in 1940, on theeve of the second imperialist world war, against those who refused to defend the Soviet Union: “It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may be distorted by the pressures of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend the old positionswill never conquer new ones” (“Balance Sheet on the Finland Events”).

Japanese Pirates: Hands Off All Chinese Ships!

It is essential that China be able to break through the two crescent-shaped island chains controlled by Tokyo and Washington that largely obstruct its access to the Pacific. As Liu Yijian, a staff member at the Chinese Naval Command School commented, “Many exits from the nearby seas to the external oceans are shut off by the chain of islands, where China cannot avoid foreign restraint of its navy’s movement into the open seas and faces the major possibility that its exits will be shut off by the enemy” (Tokyo Foresight, 16 September-20 October 2000). The first chain Liu is referring to is composed of islands that are like stepping stones, running through the four main islands of Japan to the Ryukyus, Taiwan and the Philippines. The second chain stretches from Tokyo Bay, running through the Izu and Ogasawara [Bonin] Island chains to the Marianas and Guam, to Palau island. Defend China’s unrestricted passage to the Pacific Ocean!

It is with utter hypocrisy that the Japanese government claimed that its “territorial waters” were violated when the Chinese submarine entered waters around Ishigaki-jima in the Sakishima Island chain. In 2001, the Japanese coast guard sank a North Korean ship in Chinese waters, murdering the entire crew, and then grotesquely toured the bullet-ridden ship throughout the country. The only reason Japan can lay claim to some of the waters in the East China Sea is that Tokyo colonized and annexed the islands in this area on its way to becoming an imperialist power in the late 19th century. The once culturally and economically rich Ryukyu Kingdom—today known as Okinawa and the poorest of the 47 prefectures—and surrounding islands were formally incorporated into Japan in 1879. The first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 had two strategic goals: to acquire the Liaotung Peninsula and thereby the Korean peninsula, and to grab Formosa (Taiwan) as a base from which to control the sea-lanes of the China trade and the southern approaches to Japan. Shortly before the end of the war, a marker was erected on the rock islands that are now known as the Senkakus (Diaoyus [Chinese name]), which comprise a mere 2.4 square miles, declaring them Japanese territory. With the May 1895 Treaty of Shimonseki, Japan brutally grabbed control of Taiwan. During World War II, Japan used Taiwan as a staging area for assaults on southern China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia. During World War II, the Fourth International, founded by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, stood for the revolutionary defeat of all the imperialist nations. Simultaneously, it fought for the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and championed the self-determination of all the colonies against their subjugation by the “Axis” and “Allied” imperialists alike. The Fourth International stood for the political independence of the proletariat from its “own” ruling class in the advanced and the oppressed countries.

Then and now, Taiwan is of vital strategic value to the Japanese and U.S. imperialists. As an Autumn 2001 article in the U.S. Naval War College Review stated, “Japanese geography and sea power, therefore, collectively pose an inherent obstacle to Chinese expansion into the Pacific as long as Taiwan remains free of mainland control.” Ominously, the Taiwanese parliament is set to purchase a massive arms package from the U.S. which would include submarines, an anti-missile system and anti-submarine aircraft. This should make the [fake-Trotskyist] United Secretariat very happy. At a November 2001 Kakehashi meeting in Tokyo, a representative from the Hong Kong Pioneer group [supporters of the United Secretariat] stated that they would defend capitalist Taiwan in a war with China. As for the Kakehashi group, which had been debating for six years whether or not China is a workers state: after “discussions with our Pioneer comrades,” they decided that “sometime in the 1990s” China became capitalist. By labeling China capitalist, the social-democratic Kakehashi group can justify supporting imperialist-backed, anti-Communist forces in China in the name of promoting “democracy,” just as it sided with capitalist restorationist forces in the former Soviet Union and East Europe.

Taiwan is ethnically, linguistically and historically Chinese. We are opposed to the Chinese plan of reunification embodied in “one country, two systems.” We call for the revolutionary reunification of China: That means a workers socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow and expropriate the bourgeoisie and a proletarian political revolution on the mainland.

In an attempt to prevent China’s ability to search for new sources of oil, the Japanese imperialists are trying to bully China by claiming that large swaths of the Pacific Ocean lie within its exclusive economic zone. A case in point are the Okinotori Islands, which stand no more than six and a half inches above water and have been capped with titanium alloy to prevent further erosion. Around these rocks, Japan claims an exclusive economic zone over a vast area of the Pacific Ocean. Shintaro Ishihara, the racist, anti-woman and anti-communist governor of Tokyo, has called for Japan to take military action to repel Chinese scientific ships in the seas around the Okinotori Islands. Another example is the Chunxiao natural gas field in the East China Sea, which even the Japanese bourgeoisie admits lies within China’s exclusive economic zone. China’s attempts to develop this field for much needed gas and oil have been continually threatened by the Japanese navy and coast guard. Defend China’s right to access natural resources!

For Proletarian Internationalism

To some it may appear that there is inconsistency within the ruling class on how best to achieve capitalist counterrevolution in China and North Korea. While the navy chases down Chinese submarines and [Prime Minister Junichiro] Koizumi prays to the spirits of war criminals at Yasukuni shrine, the zaibatsu [family controlled banking and industrial combines] are furious. Following the visit to China by German chancellor Schröder and large economic delegations in November, the head of Keizai Doyukai (Association of Corporate Executives) called on Koizumi to refrain from visiting Yasukuni shrine. The growing two-way trade with China, set at ¥8 trillion ($79 billion) for the first six months of 2004, is fueling the Japanese jobless “economic recovery,” and the bourgeoisie does not want anything to get in the way of its increased profits.

While there may be tactical differences within the bourgeoisie, in the lead-up to the 60th anniversary of the end of WW II, the Japanese ruling class is united in throwing off the constraints of the “defeated nation” syndrome. To accomplish this, domestically the ruling class needs to impose a policy of economic austerity, whip up nationalist poison and reinforce the oppressive apparatus needed for the maintenance of capitalist law and order. While targeting the workers states overseas, the new defense guidelines strengthen the state’s arsenal of repression against the workers movement at home. To augment the emergency war legislation which targets unions in the transport industry, these new guidelines call for the establishment of special anti-guerrilla units, intelligence gathering operations are to be strengthened, and cooperation among the military, the police and coast guard is to be heightened.

“Peace in Northeast Asia” will never be realized as long as Japanese imperialism exists. There is much anger among the working people of this country and a real desire to fight against economic recession, discrimination, increased state repression and war. An important example is the refusal of the Sasebo longshoremen to load war matériel onto a Self-Defense Force warship bound for the Indian Ocean in 2001. As we wrote at the time, “This type of class-struggle action by members of Zenkowan (All Japan Dockworkers Union) has more potential to thwart Japanese imperialism’s military ambitions and plans for increased domestic repression than all of the dozens of ‘antiwar’ demonstrations held recently across the country” (“Japanese Longshoremen Refuse to Load Warships,” 7 December 2001).

This anger and militancy must be directed toward building a real workers party which will coordinate the struggles against war, against racism and chauvinism, against sexism and against unemployment. A Trotskyist party would link the fight for workers revolution in Japan with the Chinese and North Korean workers struggle against their corrupt Stalinist bureaucracies and with the class struggles of the militant Philippine and South Korean workers against their capitalist rulers. Only through a socialist revolution in imperialist Japan will the basis be laid for the development of a socialist Asia.