File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 383


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



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