I just established a new webpage for Digital Library VI. The first set of .pdfs pertain to the Preface and Section One of Kita Ikki’s Kokutairon and Pure Socialism. The Preface outlines the body of the text, including brief summarizations. Section One, “Economic Justice of Socialism,” consists of three Chapters describing what kind of “Pure Socialism” was being proposed by Kita.
The Japanese translator specifically noted that “Socialism” in the context of this tome is referring to “Social-Democracy.” Marxism-Leninism has yet to be exist; written in the opening years of the 20th century, the First World War has not occurred either, and the Soviet Union would not be established until after that conflict. Pan-Germanic Socialism was still an obscure little movement operating on the peripheries of the German-speaking world. Thus, at time of when Kokutairon and Pure Socialism was written, the world’s Socialists, Communists, and others aligned with them were then involved in Social-Democratic parties.
In fact, much of what Kita Ikki described can be found in the writings of various people adhered to Communist, Socialist and Social-Democratic movements. The book is an introduction to what Japan was at the turn of the 20th century, when the old Tokugawa Shogunate of the Edo Period had already given rise to the new Meiji Restoration of that particular period. Kita criticized the then-prevailing perspectives of Japanese Social-Democrats for trying to appease the emerging business interests within the country, describing it as the creation of an “Economic Aristocracy.”
This “Economic Aristocracy” is the Zaibatsu and various Capitalist interests that profited immensely from the Meiji Restoration, which contributed to the industrialization of Japan and the Japanese pursuit of being up to par with the major European colonial powers of the time. Kita drew a convenient throughline from which pre-Meiji samurai and their feudal lords were swept aside by the merchants who became powerful and wealthy after the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The realization of “Pure Socialism” in Japan will lead to the creation of a sort of “Economic Democracy.” In essence, what Kita was describing is not so much as something outlined by, say, Rudolf Jung in the pages of Der nationale Sozialismus. That is one critique which I have with the translation: Kita Ikki was not describing a “Pan-Japanese Socialism” as such a concept sounds ridiculous in a Japan already united for centuries by the Tokugawa Shogunate after the Sengoku Period. His “Pure Socialism” resembles, instead, a Social-Democratic Japan whose Nationalism was driven out of an understandable desire to protect the country from European colonial interests in Asia and any Japanese Liberal Capitalists who may have something to gain from allowing those same interests to dominate the continent.
Kita Ikki also mentioned two men that were of importance among Japanese Socialists and Social-Democrats around the turn of the 20th century. I would like to research those two men at some point. If I have time, I might be willing to share the information that I have here.
Categories: Philosophy
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