The Theory and Practice of Marxism in Japan
From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan.
Japanese Communist Party Headquarters in 1950. (Wikimedia Commons)
For many years, Japan has been one of the leading players in global capitalism. With the world’s third-largest economy and some of its most renowned manufacturing firms, Japan is one of the few countries to have bridged the infamous gap between “the West and the rest.”
However, alongside the development of capitalism in Japan, a powerful socialist tradition has also taken shape in Japanese political and intellectual life. Marxism has exercised an extraordinary influence in Japanese academic culture, while the Japanese Communist Party remains a mass-membership party with unapologetic roots in the communist tradition.
Gavin Walker teaches history at McGill University in Canada. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan and the editor of The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68.
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