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Our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Proposition on the Contemporary World Proletarian Revolution
1：无论资产阶级和帝国主义如何发展，革命的成败主要还是取决于内因，即无产阶级革命党的组织建设程度，在全球普遍缺乏成熟革命政党的当下，各国的无产阶级革命家都必须要首先通过列宁的政治报路线打造出一个工业化的革命党，也只有具有了这样一个严密的革命党，才能在不断的路线斗争中进一步得出正确的革命策略并推广执行下去。
译文：No matter how bourgeoisie and imperialism develop, the success or failure of a revolution still depends primarily on internal factors—namely, the degree of organizational building within the proletarian revolutionary party. In the current global context where mature revolutionary parties are generally lacking, proletarian revolutionaries in all countries must first forge an industrialized revolutionary party through Lenin’s political-newspaper line. Only with such a tightly disciplined revolutionary party can correct revolutionary strategies be further derived through continuous line struggles and subsequently promoted and implemented.2：帝国主义的发展路线归根结底就是剥削无产阶级的路线。其在国内用民族叙事和通过剥削全世界带来的剩余价值来麻痹无产阶级，让他们去仇恨他国无产阶级，并企图利用帝国主义国家之间的争霸来实现”阳光下的土地“，无产阶级必须明白自己与他国无产阶级是同一战线的阶级兄弟，而本国政府的小恩小惠不能掩盖他们的剥削本质，只有团结在一起建立一个自觉的无产阶级政党，不断通过路线斗争净化自身，才能推翻整个世界帝国主义体系，实现真正的世界人民互帮互助。
译文：The development path of imperialism is, at its core, a path of exploiting the proletariat. Domestically, it uses nationalist narratives and the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the entire world to pacify the working class, encouraging them to hate proletarians in other countries. At the same time, it seeks to exploit rivalry among imperialist powers in order to secure its own “place in the sun.” The proletariat must recognize that workers in other countries are their class brothers and sisters on the same front line of struggle. The minor concessions granted by their own governments cannot conceal the fundamentally exploitative nature of those governments. Only by uniting to build a conscious proletarian party, and by continuously purifying it through struggles over political line and direction, can the working class overthrow the entire global imperialist system and achieve a world in which peoples genuinely support and assist one another.
Mark Metzler’s book Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (2006) catalogs useful empirical information about the rise of Japan from a peripheral to imperial power, looked at through the lens of its monetary policy. I have sought to synthesize its most useful details and display them, with the hopes that this would shine some light on the processes of imperialism in hopeful imperialist powers (e.g. Brazil) and already rising imperialist powers (e.g. China).
Metzler’s Lever of Empire describes three key external conditions for Japan’s rise as an imperialist power. First, was its plundering of weaker neighbors. Second, was its continued borrowing from foreign capital markets. Third, was the opening created by the imperialist Great War. However, it should be emphasized these are external and not internal causes. Metzler touches on, but does not describe in detail, the history of class struggle within Japanese society that coincides with these international trends. So, as tools to understand Japanese (or generalized to other country’s) society, we should understand these are the conditions of change rather than the basis of change. Still, the secondary causes must be understood in order to understand the principal internal cause, so it remains of value for study.
In the spring of 1898 a Japanese banker, Takahashi Korekiyo, arrived in London amidst the global scramble to carve up the empire of the Qing. He had come to manage the fortune Japan had extorted from China after the war of 1894 to 1895 (about 230 million taels, or about a quarter of Japan’s national income)—which was subsequently stashed in the vaults of the Bank of England (pp. 3-4). This loot became the Bank of Japan’s gold reserve, and in 1897 the yen was placed on gold. The gold standard was the ticket of admission to the imperialist capital markets, and meant that Japan’s empire, the gold standard, and foreign borrowing would remain linked almost from beginning to end.
The same fund also helped build Japan’s first modern steel mill, the Yawata Steelworks, financed in part by the indemnity and in part by an 1899 sterling loan (p. 31). Its most important consequence, however, was the ability to establish lines of credit in the capital markets of the other imperialist countries. As Sakatani Yoshio of the Ministry of Finance saw it, the indemnity bound Japan’s financial destiny to China’s; looking back twenty years later, he held that it “in every way still continues to circulate in the history of the Far East” (p. 32). The plunder carried its own twisted irony: as Metzler observes, the 1894–95 war against China was, after the fact, “entirely funded by the European capital markets” (p. 31)—in small part through Japan’s own borrowing, but in great part because China borrowed abroad to pay the indemnity to Japan. Atop this initial plunder, Japan built its empire on further borrowing from the French, British, and American capital markets, which allowed it to challenge Russia and bring Korea under its control.
However, due to its reliance on foreign capital, Japan was only able to achieve full autonomy as an imperialist state with the advent of World War I. When the old imperialist powers fell into World War I, Japan muscled into the space that they tore open. As Inoue Junnosuke, a governor of the Bank of Japan and Minister of Finance, declared in 1929:
“If we speak of Japan’s national polity or of its race, I think we can be proud of that in the whole world. But in terms of wealth, Japan [before the European war] was a country so poor that it almost lacked the qualifications for independence. However, the European War began in 1914 and Japan rose to quite an enviable position . . . With that, from the standpoint of the economy, Japan was able to become an independent country for the first time . . . I was happy that for the first time we had created the qualifications to leap out into the world.” (p. 206)
This fragment was a part of a larger speech, where Inoue was exhorting housewives to spend less, as Japan’s balance of payments increasingly became negative due to the consumption of foreign goods. Though, this was nothing less than Inoue trying to handle the contradictions of monetary policy in a nation transitioning into an autonomous imperialist form. As the liberal international order (signified by the gold standard) continued to disintegrate, and the class struggle in Japan intensified, Inoue, a liberal, would later be assassinated (in 1932) by brewing fascist elements.
What is interesting to note is that, prior to WWI, Japan remained in a semi-subordinate position, essentially in the state which Lenin called the “transitional forms of dependence”, where the nation remained formally independent but was caught in a net of finance (such as Argentina and Portugal at that time). Indeed, both Argentina and Portugal were subordinate to UK capital, similar to Japan, which remained in close alliance with the UK due to these financial bonds. It was only when the financial center of the world was shifting from London to New York, that the United States was able to break this alliance between Japan and the UK. Metzler noted that the British alliance historically enabled Japanese expansion, and it was for this reason that the United States insisted on the breakup (p. 92).
Prior to this break, one could trace a clear flow of capital from London, through Japan, into the rest of East Asia. In Manchuria, British capital “provided vital support for Japan’s continental advance” (p. 55). Once the American group around Kuhn, Loeb walked away from the South Manchurian Railway deal, the railway’s first foreign bonds, roughly £6 million in 1907 and 1908, had to be raised entirely in London. As of 1914, thirty-two of Japan’s forty overseas bond issues were raised wholly or partly in London, and even the New York war loans were sterling loans floated jointly there (pp. 96-97). Japan’s trade was settled in London, in sterling, and Metzler noted that London profited from clearing trade in which Britain itself was not even a party: the circuits of capital ran through London and enriched it.
Korea is perhaps the best case to demonstrate this chain of dependency (p. 54). Japan sought to base the Korean currency on a specie reserve held in Tokyo, creating Korean monetary dependency on Japan. This was attempted firstly through non-military means; then, with the conquest of Korea, it was more forcefully implemented in top-down fashion. Nevertheless, Japan’s own reserve was based on the reserve of gold held in London. No matter where Japan established colonies (Taiwan, Manchuria, and so on), their colonies would ultimately remain monetarily leveraged on reserves held in London. Japan was thus similar to Russia in this sense. It was a debtor to the big imperialist countries, but a creditor to its own colonies and those countries it sought to colonise.
Despite its participation in the colonial partition of the world, Japan would not yet, to use Inoue’s words, “leap out into the world” until the end of WWI. Europe’s war was Japan’s “divine providence” (p. 92) , to use the phrase of elder statesman Inoue Kaoru, and Japan was at last able to establish itself as a true financial power—and immediately set itself to the task of financial and military imperialism in China (e.g. the 1915 Twenty-one Demands to the government of Yuan Shikai). Outside of East Asia, Japanese exports filled the vacuum left by the European powers who withdrew from the markets of Asia, Africa, and South America. War orders lifted a prior depression, volumes of manufactured goods began to flow to Europe, and domestic manufacturers now supplied many of the high-technology goods formerly imported from Europe (p. 95).
The results were overall astounding. Across 1916 to 1918 Japan ran payments surpluses of some 2.4 billion yen, gold poured in, and for the first time in its history Japan became a creditor nation and sought to send its own surplus capital abroad to both European and East Asian (principally China) markets (pp. 95, 98-99). Though, it should be added, that Japan entered a period of extended depression throughout the 1920s. This depression coincided with the broader collapse of the liberal world order. As this global structure disintegrated, the militarist wing of Japanese politics grew increasingly aggressive and eventually took command of the state apparatus. The imperialist structure that the liberals built thus came under the total command of the militarists.
Lenin described the stage of imperialism as a division of the world between a handful of “usurer States” and a mass of “debtor States”: Japan sought to leap, via force and via loan, from the second category into the first. The three external conditions (plunder, borrowing, imperialist war creating an opening) I have described are not sufficient to explain such a qualitative leap; however, I believe they are necessary secondary conditions in Japan’s case, and if combined with a description of the internal class composition of Japan during this time period, would make for a complete understanding of Japan’s imperialist development.
I think these processes have general characteristics that can be fruitfully applied to other rising imperialist powers. Take the second condition, continued borrowing from foreign capital markets. For China, Hong Kong was, and to a fair extent remains, the headquarters where the Chinese bourgeoise engages with foreign capital. Hong Kong was instrumental for the revisionists to overturn socialism and establish capitalism in China. This means that Chinese and Hong Kong communists should recognise the peculiar characteristics of this city, and its importance for rising imperialist China, in any sort of strategic intervention. And as for the third condition, the opportunity created by imperialist great wars—all communists must recognise the inevitability of inter-imperialist conflict.
Ultimately, such developments in imperialism are the autonomous logic of capitalism articulating itself through subjects who are unable to act in any other way. The end result for Japan was to embark on a brutal imperialist war. We should not be blinded by any claims by rising-imperialists that they represent independence, sovereignty, or national strength: there is only war on its horizon and the immiseration of the proletariat. The inexorable logic compels these states no matter what they say. There is only one real route to freedom for the masses, and that is revolution, led by the conscious leadership of the proletariat, embodied in a Communist Party. The proletariat party, independent and autonomous, developed through exercising the political-newspaper line and engaged in two-line struggle, will lead the masses and smash the states that oppress them; and out of the conflagration the dictatorship of the proletariat shall be erected as a tower on a hill.