Marxism in Asia

It was entirely logical that Japan should have been the first Asian country where Marxism took root. Japan was the earliest Asian land to embark on a program of capitalist development. In the 1890s, in response to the social tensions of Meiji modernization, Japanese intellectuals imported Marxism along with a variety of other proscribed Western socialist theories. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Marxism established itself as the dominant socialist theory. And the preeminent version of Marxism was the economically deterministic doctrine of Karl Kautsky (1854–1938).

The early Japanese Marxists often intermingled anarchist and utopian socialist ideas with their Marxian beliefs. It was not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 that Marxism found coherent political and intellectual expression. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), founded in 1922, became the carrier of the Leninist version of Marxism while the Japanese Socialist Party largely based itself (in its various incarnations) on the more orthodox Marxist teachings of Kautsky. But Japanese Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of severe state repression, was less influential as a political than an intellectual movement. By the late 1920s, Marxist influences were dominant in the economics departments of elite Japanese universities. The celebrated 1927–1937 debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism was a major contribution to international Marxist scholarship.

The rise of militarism and fascism in the 1930s led to the wholesale jailing of Marxists and the virtual total suppression of Marxian ideas. With the defeat of the fascist regime in 1945, Marxist intellectual and political life revived under the American occupation. Marxist theory became highly influential in economic and historical scholarship. Marxism found vigorous political expression in the small but influential Communist Party and also in the much larger Japanese Socialist Party (JSP). The JSP, which gained substantial electoral support, was hindered in its bid for power by a long-standing division between Marxist-Leninists and social democrats. A further political obstacle was the general prosperity yielded by Japan's phenomenal economic growth, which eroded Marxist influence. However, the stagnation of Japanese capitalism since 1990 perhaps augurs well for the reinvigoration of Japanese Marxism.