Stock market crashes imminent?

Yeah it was key to economic growth post-war and really gained speed in the '60s - all these essentially government owned companies that get state contracts with no bidding, construction being the main one. I dunno exactly what the crash was attributed to, but they've been loaning to the rest of South East Asia instead (usually to get Japanese companies construction contracts with the loaned money) so it hasn't stopped.

afaik the US dollar reserves are still pretty massive. Just starting to read up on some of this so not much in the way of answers I'm afraid.

certainly not a model COUGH*halliburton/KBR*COUGH you'd see emulated elsewhere

From what I'm reading it takes on an extra level in Japan.

Ministries create both national and local quangos, run by ex-bureaucrats, which then farm out contracts to construction companies, run by different or the same ex-bureaucrats - with similarly incestuous share ownership. As much as 90% of contract money goes to directors/shareholders with the rest unaccounted for. Since the civil service is far more powerful in Japan than in a lot of places (i.e. actual politicians are even more replaceable than the UK/US) the whole process is quasi-legal with only very, very occasional exposés etc. Ministries even run slush funds for bribing officials from different ministries, the police pretty much run the pachinko parlours etc. etc.

It's the same thing of course, just on an industrial scale and with far less attention paid to it than Halliburton etc.

Yes its quite bad. They call it something like "raised to heaven." Basically as you move up the civil service ladder, those who are passed over for promotion soon leave and join the pirate sector at massive salaries. They then use their connections to get gov contracts. The object for any civil servant is to advance as high as possible so that they may retire to the private sector for great profits.

The loan system is a bit different now though. The post office acted as Japan's national bank. Citizens used it as an all purpose savings and loan. it also holds the state pension money. The state funneled this money to the zaitbatsu for interest rates of 1 or 2 percent. Combined with American Korean war orders, the economy boomed. However under Koizumi the postal service was privatized, which might change the nature of the government's massive loan projects.

The reason for the dizzying growth of the Japanese economy is that it was bombed flat during the war, as was Germany. Their economies were tooled up to the latest, post war, innovations and sucked in imports. When these two countries, around the mid-60s, stopped being importers and became net exporters then economic crises became qualitatively worse as overproduction was exposed once again.
The idea that "it's always been like this" or "it's nothing new" is conservative at best, reactionary at worst. The situation of the Japanese economy is steadily worsening. In order to get over this - and just like the US economy - it has been giving money away on a grand scale. This has alleviated the problem for a while but is now making it worse. The condition of the working class in Japan is under attack. Wages and services have been cut, job security, a feature of Japanese capitalism, is dead and buried and it's no coincidence that Japanese imperialism is gearing up its military capacity and reach. Wars today, with all their due specificities, are simply another expression of the economic crisis. All of the capitalist states today can be accurately described as "war economies", either at war or preparing for war. It's not difficult to see that this applies to all national states today. Generalising economic crises and wars are expressions of the decay of capitalism. There's no mechanical link between the two, each feeds off the other within the framework of an economy that's lost its way. This is not "the same old thing", "going on for a long time". After the post WWII reconstruction (world war two the "same old thing"?), periods of recession and crisis from the late 60s to now have been getting longer and deeper, that's the clear tendency. WWII was much more destructive than the first. The slogan of the Third Reich "Export or Die" says it all. Wars from the late 60s, and especially from the late 80s when economic crises deepened within a deepening trajectory, have proliferated - all of them involving the major powers. The tendency to crisis and war - although with no mechanical link - as well as their inter-relation, imperialism, is clear.
This current "turmoil" on the financial markets looks like it may trip into recession. At any rate credit will be tightened and credit is what is keeping the system going on a daily basis. Whatever response the bourgeoisie make they are only going to make the situation worse, whether cheaper money or dearer money. The certainty is that attacks on the conditions of the working class will intensify.

To follow from baboon's post, it should also be pointed out that the reconstruction of Japan and Germany were both subject to twin devils of credit and imperialism.

Credit, because the reconstruction was financed by gigantic (for the time) credit instruments such as the Marshall Plan. Imperialism because it was part of the US strategy to contain the Russian bloc. Both German and Japanese militaries were integrated directly into the US C&C structures and had to tolerate big military bases on their territory.

The reconstruction was not, therefore, inevitable from a purely economic point of view. In fact, the initial Yalta plan was to completely deindustrialise Germany and turn it into a non-threatening agrarian country. It was only as both blocs realised they needed strong buffer states on their borders to contain the other that both halves of Germany were reconstructed.

The Tiger and Dragon economies of East Asia were formed in a similar effort from the US in the 60s / 70s, in response to Russian advancement in Korea, Vietnam, etc. These economies were also given massive injections of capital to compensate for the weakness of the indigenous bourgeoisie.

Crude analyses often try to find an economic rationale for every war (diamonds in Sierra Seone, oil in Iraq, etc.) but it is just as common, if not more so, to find imperialist rationales for economic actions.

Yeah. Like at the end of the WWII when we borrowed dollars to import luxury goods for the public sector middle classes rather than build on our war-time self-sufficiency. Credit is slavery, one of those special things that’s as true for groups as it is for individuals.

Good to see some discussion of the Japanese situation. I haven't yet been able to find a reliable periodical in Japan that deals with finance capital with any sort of Marxist analysis, although the Commune magazine by the Chuukaku-ha group has comprehensive monthly analyses of domestic and world events, which includes a section that keeps track of events in the economy among other things like union negotiations, strikes etc.

I would quibble with baboon and say that job security in Japan is not 'dead and buried' but instead quite intact at the technical core of the economy. It perhaps doesn't exist as a promise or incentive anymore. What has been forged over the restructuring period is a thorough two-tier wage system. Japan is perhaps one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of its dispatch working class, which suffers really harsh conditions and the population of which is on the rise. Japan's early adoption of cell phone networks facilitated the breakdown of the working class in this way, because workers needed no longer even be assembled at a day-laborer market but could be summoned by cell phone every morning for whatever job was on the plate of the dispatch company. Still, the center-piece of technological industry has necessarily remained untouched in the twenty years or so of restructuring. If anything the new dispatch workers are paying the price to maintain the wages and benefits of the engineer class, although the latter face the same creeping extension of overtime hours as the dispatch workers.

Have been away for awhile so not so sure how people are reacting to the US mortgage crisis...

I take Sphinx's point about some residual job security in the economy, but the fact is the "job for life" policy for the great mass of workers, a big feature of the Japanese economy, no longer exists (as it doesn't anymore in the public sector in Britain, where it was also a big plus). I welcome his info on attacks on the working class in Japan and would like to hear some more. The cell phone dispatch of mobile workers is also something that's been developing in Britain in mobile engineering in the last 5 years. As Sphinx says, it has the benefit to the bosses of keeping workers isolated. But there is a tendency in this post to want to divide the working class.
Sphinx, what do you think of the position of Japanese imperialism? It's flexing its muscles isn't it? I think that (just like Germany) it could get together nuclear weapons and delivery systems in a couple of weeks, at least in a very short time.
Lazy Rider's jackass theories are not even worth ridicule, but his nationalism and patriotism is evident in some of his posts. He'd be at home in New Labour.

Baboon, the "communists" make New Labour look good, like they made Tories look good in ’79, and the Nazi’s in 30’s Germany. Expressing a marginalised victim psychology so prevalent among communists, you embarrass your remaining comrades with your disturbed personal invective and discredit your already tattered ideology.

Here’s a picture of Hitler and Wittgenstein at school together, hope it cheers you up…

As neither country has a supply of uranium nor any such rockets they'd have to buy them in and a couple of weeks would be pushing it even if they imported them.

Suits you sir.

You’ve got a hard-on. A six legged sheep was born just the other day. It’s an omen. The anointed final period of decadence is upon us. Of this there can be no doubt. Collapse is imminent.

Lazy pined: "Like at the end of the WWII when we borrowed dollars to import luxury goods for the public sector middle classes rather than build on our war-time self-sufficiency. Credit is slavery, one of those special things that’s as true for groups as it is for individuals".

Who is this "we", Paleface?

Well precisely. On the one side we have upstanding patriots like myself taking responsibility for mistakes made before we were even born, and on the other the communists and other bourgeois factions who believe advance is a matter of deliberating on principles, and in so doing maintain the present order, serving only the white collar society they secretly love and admire.

What do youse make of this article?

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IH21Dj01.html

I doubt you could get much for it, I can't even get on to page 3. Reminds me of a girl I know. Ha ha.

Stop talking in tongues. You don't rate the author's analysis?

I can't read the 2nd page of it.

Not much. The value of an analysis can only be measured in the benefits accrued through it’s exploitation. I’ve spent many an hour in front of Bloomberg trying to figure out how to turn all the numbers to my advantage, all I’ve got is a few useful chat-up-lines…

LR

Were you wearing one of those stripey business shirts with the plain white collar? They love that shit for some reason.

Understanding the world markets and what that can mean for the working class in numerous countries is of tremendous importance to the building of a future international - a task which has to be the single most important task of any revolutionary. It cannot have escaped your attention that Mexico (a country with an economy heavily tied to the dollar) for example now has 11 Soviets, 32 armed left wing guerrilla groups, and faced a destabilising mass movement against the elected President last year which prompted fears of a full blown insurrection. What do you think this downturn in the economy of Mexico due to the collapse in certain parts of the US markets will mean for the class struggle in Mexico, and in turn what will that mean for the class struggle in the US (where in the South large numbers of immigrants have been kicking up shit for more than a wee while)? What will it mean for the class struggle in highly volatile but particularly important countries such as Kazakhstan? Clearly I don't give a fuck if some cokesniffing investor loses his third home. The key point is how does this current hiccough impact on popular organisation.

Well then, I suspect a new thread is in order. "What is revolution and what, then, are the immediate tasks of the revolutionary?". One thing's for sure, the answer does not lie in "struggle", but in the positive organisation of production and power.

We've dealt with this one. I agree with you. But power is won through fighting for it. That fight is often termed a 'struggle', but not all struggles have any hope of enhancing the power of the working class.

Not at all. Power isn't won, it’s exercised. “Meaningful” conflict occurs as the working class clears the obstacles confronting it in putting programmes into action. All “struggle”, including so called direct action, protest and other reactions are merely choreographed annexes of bureaucratic society. By the way, building a future international is far from the single most important task confronting us, once again it is a matter of (leftist) values, not a fact.

I'm sorry that's a puffed up logomachy. What I said was basically the same thing you just said.

That is another thread, but a question, what the fuck do you do when you establish socialism in one region if you don't have an international with the capacity to generalise that victory across the planet. Surely the lessons of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and fucking countless other examples I could be typing for half an hour about can't have passed you by. We desperately need a powerful new political international composed of serious parties in every corner of the world.

Saw this in the Guardian today.

Apparently a quarter of the UK working population will be unable to get credit by 2011, due to the huge rise in personal brankruptcies.

But look back 30 years and it's a similar proportion, maybe higher, except for the pawn shop. Which incidentally has been making a fairly string return over the last few years.

Ha ha ha. I don't even know what that is, so fair play. So, is it like a Fabianist thing?

What’s in it for me?

If I had been asked about Japanese imperialism a year ago, or two years ago, I would have given a much more affirmative 'yes' to the question of whether it's flexing its might. Things however have quite distinctly changed. The six-party talks managed to disarm the DPRK of its nuclear weapon capability (at least as far as the IAEA knows). What this was done in exchange for I'm not so sure. Obviously China felt that curbing the NK dictatorship was the best short-term option. I would add this to the Russian endorsement of the Fayyad regime in the West Bank as evidence that there is still a strong commitment by the main bourgeois factions to the stability of world capitalism with America in a central role. The nuclear disarmament of the DPRK along with the absolutely scandal-drenched Abe cabinet (really reaping all the whirlwind from earlier administrations) had big effects on the recent election where domestic issues were the focus and the LDP lost convincingly in the upper house. What is key here is that the LDP was NOT able to motivate people on the basis of patriotism/militarism to vote for them. This is at least a small sign of hope, even though the DPJ (Koumeitou) has also indicated its desire to amend the 'occupation' constitution and hardly represents a real change. For instance, the pension crisis was, as far as I know, born out of the crisis of the early 1990s where pension money was thrown onto the private market (AFAIK) and therefore it isn't a matter of bad management but a contiguity of crisis. So no matter how much they claim they can plug this hole in the economy, they have serious problems. That the pension crisis is creating a world where the young are set against the old mirrors the base line logic of capitalism, of course.

The DPJ will also at least also be subject to the same bureaucracy that really forms the backbone of the Japanese state, as aptly analyzed here:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/yakuza.php

Anyways, getting back to imperialism, I think Japan will at least have to keep its head low for a little while. firming up alliances with Taiwan and moving away from the American axis (the left wants to lead this move), extensions of Japanese imperialist reach (for example a proposed dispatch to Afghanistan) have most recently been shelved, and don't forget the SDF came back from Samawwah humiliated. Japan will most likely stick to its strategy of accruing weight and credibility in the UN which will allow it to participate in 'international peace keeping' in the same theaters that Australia is now involved. This will fit exactly with the ideals of both the left and right in Japan who are for 'peace' (so was Tojo!). I've read speculation in socialist journals that a first target for Japanese intervention could be East Timor, but this may take a few years.

All that said, the ground has been laid, the machines and weapons are there, the social field is largely being transformed into one that permits war abroad. Hopefully there will be some measure of contestation against this state of affairs but starting in the workplaces, which is where these tendencies have their origins.

Ha ha ha ha. Imperialism. Comedy gold.

If car ownership dropped to the level of the 50s, would you say this isn't indicative of anything considering how relatively cheaper cars are now? Similarly with credit, you're talking about a far more developed industry which is totally enmeshed with mainstream society. And this has serious implications for capitalism because it means an exhaustion of the strategy of using credit to artificially expand the market. It has serious implications for the working class because it means the effective exclusion of large swathes of it from "normal" life.

As for the pawn shop, yes, you're right and the reason, once again, is the growing impoverishment of the working class.