Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 13:10:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu> Subject: M-I: Vietnam Friends -- I'm a first-time contributor here, and more than a little impressed with the fervor, detail and liveliness of the list. I have a brief comment and a question: (1) The postings on Vietnam, China et. al. caught my eye. In an age of generalized and catastrophic drift to the Right, it's striking to see how thoroughly the discourse of human rights (originally a Cold War stunt cooked up by the ozone-heads at Radio Free Europe, later a joint venture between Brandt's Ostpolitik and the Scandinavian Third Way, and still later the ace card of the Green parties) has been reappropriated by the post-national Left. To paraphrase Uncle Whiskers, workers' rights are the infrastructure for all the other juridical superstructures and legal freedoms out there. One hopes that where Marx's 1843 manuscripts provided the theoretical spark for the 1968 radicalisms, Marx's Rhenish journalism will do something similar for the global Left of the next millenium. (2) My question: I teach at the University of Oregon and am trying to assemble a class on the culture and film of the East Asian region in the post-WW II period. Are there any really useful Marxist texts out there which deal with the industrialization of Japan/South Korea/Singapore and the other tigers? I know Japan has one of the deepest and richest Marxist traditions going, but I'm totally unfamiliar with the available materials and translations. I'm especially interested in any available research on the "keiretsu" groupings (in South Korea, they're called chaebol; I'm not sure what the Chinese term is), or large-scale bank-industry alliances similar to those which powered Central Europe's post-war drive to hegemony (e.g. the Deutsche Bank-Allianz-Commerzbank cluster; the Swiss banking system; the French and Italian state-managed banks). I have a lot of data on who owns what in the Singaporean economy, for example -- believe it or not, the Port of the Lions does practice a limited kind of state socialism, and has been quietly building up its industrial base and snapping up small high-tech American firms and wafer fabs with the ruthlessness of the Mitsubishi Corp. -- but I lack more general theoretical frameworks, i.e. East Asia in the overall context of the world-system. Any suggestions or references out there? -- Dennis Redmond Graduate Teaching Fellow Program in Comparative Literature University of Oregon Eugene OR 97403 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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