JAN ADALAT
[Hindi and related languages:] A people’s court created in guerrilla zones in rural areas, or
liberated or partially liberated zones, under the supervision of the Communist Party of India
(Maoist). According to the Indian central government, in the first five months of 2011 the
number of jan adalats increased to 46 from just 22 in the previous year. Jharkhand had
22 people’s courts (up from 6), Chhattisgarh had 9 (up from 6), Bihar had 8 (up from 5), and
Maharashtra had 1. [The Telegraph [Kolkata] (June 20, 2011)]
JANA ANDOLAN
A term in the Nepali language which means “People’s Movement”. In the recent history of
Nepal there have been three major events which have gone under this name:
Jana Andolan-I was the mass movement
in 1990 which ended the absolute monarchy and established a government which was nominally,
at least, a constitutional democracy. It was also supposed to eliminate the
Panchayat system of local and caste governance in
Nepal. However, the monarchy still existed, the King still controlled the army, and he
even dissolved parliament and re-established authoritarian control again. The failure of
Jana Andolan-I to really change the basic situation resulted in a 10-year People’s War led
by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) beginning in 1996, and then to:
Jana Andolan-II in 2006 which
overthrew the King again and this time abolished the monarchy completely. This mass movement
also led to the “Seven-Party Alliance” which included the CPN (Maoist) [now renamed the
Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)], and an agreement to end the People’s War, merge
the revolutionary army into the regular army, create a new constitution, and so forth.
However the bourgeois parties [including
a revisionist party called the “Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist)”] have
failed to honor those agreements. In response, the UCPN(Maoist) led what it called the
Jana Andolan-III in early 2010 in an attempt to force the reactionary parties to
fully implement that earlier agreement and possibly to further develop the revolution in
Nepal. Although this involved huge mass demonstrations and a general strike
(bandh), mere protests of this sort were not sufficient
to force the reactionary parties to fulfill their promises.
There have been many threats by the
UCPN(Maoist) to launch yet another Jana Andolan, but growing numbers of the members
of the UCPN(Maoist) now seem to agree that it will take something much more powerful than
mere mass demonstrations to truly change and revolutionize Nepal.
JANGALMAHAL
[Bengali:] The Jangalmahal, or sometimes two words: Jangal Mahal, and which means
“forested belt”, is the region consisting of the largest parts of these three districts in the
Indian state of West Bengal: Paschim Medinipur (or West Midnapore), Bankura and Purulia. The
population of the Jangalmahal consists mostly of Adivasis or
“tribals” (tribal peoples), who are very poor and generally severely exploited and oppressed.
There are about 1.3 million Adivasis in the 74 “blocks” (sub-districts) of the Jangalmahal.
There has been considerable Maoist revolutionary activity in this region in support of Adivasi
struggles against the theft of their land, etc., especially in the area around Lalgarh village
in West Midnapore.
Occasionally the term Jangalmahal
is used in a looser and broader sense to cover a much larger region of the forested, tribal
belt in parts of five states of east-central India: West Bengal, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh and Bihar.
JANTELOVEN [Pronounced (very roughly): yahn-teh-low-ven]
A set of social rules that are presumed to be characteristic of Scandinavian culture (Norway, Sweden,
Denmark). The word comes from a 1933 novel by the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose about the
rural town Jante, where the following laws applied:
1. You shall not think that you are somebody.
2. You shall not think you’re quite as good as us.
3. You shall not think you are wiser than us.
4. You shall not fool yourself into thinking you are better than us.
5. You shall not think that you know more than us.
6. You shall not think that you are more than us.
7. You shall not think that you amount to anything.
8. You shall not laugh at us.
9. You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not think that you can teach us anything.
In social and cultural discussions, the word is used exclusively
in a negative sense.
The questions of whether the “Jantelov” exists, to
what extent, whether it’s exclusive to Scandinavia and why it exists in the first place, are up for
discussion. One’s answer will largely depend on class outlook. Bourgeois ideologues might refer to
“Janteloven” in order to equate socialist and egalitarian ideals with “small-town pettyness”. However,
other interpretations exist.
“Janteloven” might illustrate how class struggle in the
ideological field leads to different interpretations of concepts that are common to the whole culture.
—B.T. [Jan. 27, 2023]
See also:
IDEOLOGY
“JANUARY REVOLUTION” (Shanghai, January 1967)
The first major seizure of power away from the capitalist-roaders during the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
“Proletarian revolutionaries are uniting to seize power from the
handful of persons within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist
road. This is the strategic task for the new stage of the great proletarian
cultural revolution. It is the decisive battle between the proletariat and the
masses of working people on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and its agents in the
Party on the other.
“This mighty revolutionary
storm started in Shanghai. The revolutionary masses in Shanghai have called it the
great ‘January Revolution.’ Our great leader Chairman Mao immediately expressed
resolute support for it. He called on the workers, peasants, revolutionary
students, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres to study the
experience of the revolutionary rebels of Shanghai and he called on the People’s
Liberation Army actively to support and assist the proletarian revolutionaries in
their struggle to seize power.”
—“On the
Proletarian Revolutionaries’ Struggle to Seize Power”, Hongqi [“Red Flag”]
editorial, #3, 1967; Peking Review, vol. 10, #6, Feb. 3, 1967, p. 10.
JAPAN — Immigration
The demographic trends in Japan are basically for the population to rapidly shrink and for
the remaining population to get ever-older on average. Both these trends are extremely
negative from the point of view of the capitalist economy. The population is shrinking
because of the very low fertility rate, which is itself due to the need for capitalists to
work both women and men for long hours and at wage levels that make supporting a family
difficult. In addition, for racist reasons Japan has been extremely reluctant to allow large
numbers of immigrants into the country. Economic requirements have forced the country to
allow a bit more immigration recently, however, as well as much larger numbers of
temporary guest workers. Despite this, however, the falling and aging population of
Japan continues to put the country at a gradually worsening economic disadvantage as compared
with other major capitalist-imperialist countries who allow more immigration.
“Vexed by labor shortages in their rapidly aging country, lawmakers
relaxed Japan’s longstanding insularity early Saturday by authorizing a sharp increase in
the number of foreign workers.... More than a quarter-million visas of five-year duration
will be granted to unskilled guest laborers for the first time, starting in 2019....
“In the absence of immigration,
Japan’s population is projected to shrink by about 16 million people—or nearly 13
percent—over the next 25 years, while the proportion of those over the age of 65 is
expected to rise from a quarter of the population to more than a third....
“Yet the new law, which came under
considerable criticism from opposition parties, does not represent an embrace of
immigration so much as a deeply ambivalent business calculation.... ‘This isn’t about
Japan becoming a multicultural society and it’s not about Japan opening its doors to
become more globally oriented,’ said Gabriele Vogt, a professor of Japanese politics and
society at the University of Hamburg who has studied migration. ‘This is just very plain
labor market politics.’
“As of October, there were nearly
1.3 million foreign workers in Japan, according to the government. Many employers use
the trainees as cheap labor, and they often are abused. Between 2015 and 2017, the
government reported that 63 foreign trainees had died from accidents or illness in Japan,
with another six committing suicide. Critics fear the new law could simply extend the
exploitation of foreign workers.” —Motoko Rich, “Out of Necessity, an Insular Japan
Changes Its Tune on Foreign Caregivers”, New York Times, Dec. 8, 2018.
JAPANESE IMPERIALISM
[To be added...]
See also entries above about Japan, and
specific discussion of aspects of Japanese imperialism in entries below.
“In the middle of the twentieth century Japan will meet Europe on the
plains of Asia and wrest from her the mastery of the world.” —Japanese Count Okuma
Shigenobu, Prime Minister of Japan, 1915. Quoted by Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia
(NY: Random House, 1941), title page.
[Okuma (1838-1922) was part of the
Japanese aristocracy and for his services to imperial Japan was posthumously made a prince.
The Wikipedia entry on Okuma (accessed on 13 July 2018) notes that he was “an early
advocate of Western science and culture in Japan”, thus touting his supposedly progressive
views. It somehow fails to mention the imperialist and militaristic intentions of his own
and of the entire Japanese ruling class. —Ed.]
JAPAN — Imperialist War Against China (1937-1946)
[Intro to be added...]
“For most of the first four years of the Sino-Japanese War, the United
States continued to supply Japan with vital raw materials, the most important of which
was oil, so in a way Americans were collaborators in China’s humiliation and despoliation.
In 1931, after the Mukden Incident, the headline in the Hearst tabloids provided a
succinct summary of the American attitude, wherein its sentimental attachments to China
were trumped by China’s strategic unimportance. ‘WE SYMPATHIZE. BUT IT IS
NOT OUR CONCERN.’ The same headline could have been written after the Japanese
invasion of 1937, even if the sympathy was greater and the knowledge of Japanese atrocities
more immediate.” —Richard Bernstein, China 1945 (2014), pp. 54-55. [Bernstein is a
bourgeois American historian, so his acknowledgement of American complicity in the Japanese
imperialist war against China is all the more interesting. —Ed.]
JAPAN — In and Out of Recession
Around 1991 Japan entered a long period of stagnation, a period of “in-and-out-of-recession”
with only weak recoveries in between the recessions. In this it pioneered what has become a
more general phenomenon for almost the whole capitalist world (excepting China so far, though
China’s rate of GDP growth is also seriously slowing). This increased stagnation amounts to an
intensified stage in the long-developing world overproduction
crisis that first began around 1973. In the relatively near future there will undoubtedly be
further stages of intensification of this crisis, even beyond the “in-and-out-of-recession”
phase.
The graph at the right shows this weak Japanese
economy over the period of 2003 to 2018, with its frequent recessions and short and shallow
recoveries in between them.
Why did Japan “lead the way” in entering this
new period of “in-and-out-of-recession” which has now enveloped almost the whole world? Some of
the plausible explanations include: 1) Japan has fewer economic resources than the U.S. and Europe,
a smaller home market, and less imperialist penetration of the rest of the world; 2) Japan’s birth
rate is falling faster than that of most advanced capitalist countries and its population is
aging faster; and 3) Japan—for racist reasons primarily—refuses to allow more than a tiny token
amount of immigration into the country. (Immigration, by increasing the population and economic
activity, itself helps to promote the expansion of the economy.) But all these factors have only
served to speed up the process of the development of the overproduction crisis in Japan. That
process is continuing everywhere.
See also:
“IN-AND-OUT-OF-RECESSION”
JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT CAMPS — In the U.S. During World War II
The illegal, unconstitutional and totally unnecessary arrest and incarceration of more
than 120,000 Japanese-American residents on the West Coast, including both citizens and
non-citizens, at the beginning of the U.S. participation in World War II. This outrageously
racist and jingoistic act was carried out after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order
9066 on February 19, 1942, even though no American of Japanese descent had been convicted
of espionage or sabotage.
[More to be added...]
“A Jap is a Jap. There is no way to determine their loyalty.”
—Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, at the time the Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put
into concentration camps. Quoted by Glenn C. Altschuler in a review of Richard Reeves,
Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II
(2015), San Francisco Chroncicle, April 26, 2015, p. N-1.
“We can cover their legal situation ... in spite of the Constitution.
The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.” —Assistant Secretary of War John
McCloy, at the same time, quoted in the same article mentioned above. [Laws and the
U.S. Constitution are always just scraps of paper whenever the ruling class feels it
needs to dispense with them. —Ed.]
JESUITS (Society of Jesus)
1. A fanatical and ultra-disciplined
religous organization within the Roman Catholic Church which was founded by Ignatius
Loyola in 1534 and which has specialized in Catholic education and religious
indoctrination, and ideological oppression.
2. [Jesuit:] One given to intrigue or
equivocation. [Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., 1991]
See also:
INDIVIDUALISM—Within a
Revolutionary Party,
LAGRANGE, Joseph-Louis [Alexander quote]
“[F]or the Jesuits, the principle of ‘obedience’ was not just a
practical concession to the requirements of efficient action, but a religious
ideal of the highest order. ‘With all judgment of our own put aside, we ought ...
to be obedient to the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our Holy Mother
the hierarchical Church,’ wrote Ignatius [Loyola] in The Spiritual Exercises.
This obedience extends not only to actions, but also to opinions and even sense
perceptions. ‘To keep ourselves right in all things,’ Ignatius wrote, ‘we ought
to hold fast to this principle: What I see as white I will believe to be black if
the hierarchical Church thus determines it.’” —Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal
(2014), p. 40. [This is indeed dogmatism to the point of total fanaticism. —S.H.]
JIANG Qing (Old style: Chiang Ching) (1914-91)
Jiang Qing was Mao Zedong’s third wife, and the most prominent member of the so-called
“Gang of Four” who played a prominent role in leading the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and who attempted unsuccessfully
to continue the Chinese revolution after the death of Mao.
After completing elementary school she enrolled
in an acting school in Tai’an and at the age of 15 or 16 became part of an avant-garde theatrical
group in 1929. In Qingdao in 1930 she began to associate with the Communist Party, and became a
member in 1931. She was arrested for political activities and briefly imprisoned in 1933. In 1934
she married the film critic Ma Jiliang, and was divorced in 1937 after a scandalous affair. Not
long after the Sino-Japanese War broke out Jiang went to Yanan which was the central base of the
revolution. She worked at the Lu Xun Art Institute there, and met Mao. Within a year they were
married.
For many years Jiang Qing did not play much of a
public role (required, it is said, by the Party leadership which had not approved of her marriage
to Mao). In the early 1960s, however, she began to work on reforming the traditional Beijing
Opera, by instilling more up-to-date themes and revolutionary content into it. She played an
especially prominent role in promoting revolutionary art, literature, music, drama and films
during the GPCR. Many of the model revolutionary Chinese operas of that period were produced
with her guidance and direction. See: BEIJING
(PEKING) OPERA
It seems that she and the other top Party
leaders who tried to remain loyal to Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought [as our revolutionary
science was then called] failed to use the mass line that Mao
always strongly advocated, and failed to unite the great majority of the masses and the Party
members against the relatively small number revisionists and capitalist-roaders within the Party.
This is why Mao himself gave the friendly advice to this core of revolutionary leaders not to
form themselves into a “Gang of Four” (which is the origin of the phrase).
The revisionists within the CCP bided their time
until Mao died on September 9, 1976. Less than a month later, on October 6, 1976, Jiang Qing and
the other members of the “Gang of Four” were arrested and imprisoned. A show trial for them began
in 1980, and according to the revisionists only Jiang Qing bothered to mount any sort of defense.
She stated that she had obeyed the orders of Chairman Mao at all times and always tried to defend
Mao and his political line. She also made the famous statement that “I was Chairman Mao’s dog.
I bit whomever he asked me to bite.” At the conclusion of the trial in 1981, Jiang Qing was
sentenced to death. In 1983 her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. While in prison she
developed throat cancer and in 1991 was released temporarily to a hospital. She reportedly
committed suicide before she could be returned to prison. It is claimed that she left a suicide
note which read:
“Today the revolution has been stolen by the revisionist clique of Deng,
Peng Zhen, and Yang Shangkun. Chairman Mao exterminated Liu Shaoqi, but not Deng, and the
result of this omission is that unending evils have been unleashed on the Chinese people
and nation. Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you!” —Jiang Qing,
as reported in the book by Ross Terrill, The White-Boned Demon (2000).
However, there are also suspicions that she was murdered by her revisionist jailers, to
prevent her from becoming a rallying point for Maoists. In that case her “suicide note” may have
merely been from something else she wrote, such as perhaps a journal.
For a long, well-researched article about Jiang
Qing and her struggles against revisionism, which is written from a Maoist perspective, see
“Chiang Ching: The Revolutionary Ambitions of a Communist Leader”, by Zafia Ryan, at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1993-19/Chiang_Ching.htm
“You have been wronged. Today we are separating into two worlds. I am
old and will soon die. May each keep his peace. These few words may be my last message
to you. Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds. In the struggle of the
past ten years I have tried to reach the peak of revolution, but I was not successful.
But you could reach the top. If you fail, you will plunge into a fathomless abyss. Your
body will shatter. Your bones will break.” —Said to be a prose poem, summation and
warning written by Mao shortly before his death and sent to Jiang Qing. [As posted by
Mike Ely on the Kasama-Threads website on Oct. 15, 2008.]
JOBLESS RECOVERY
A recovery from an economic recession in terms of renewed GDP growth
which is not matched (or only feebly so) in terms of job growth, and the hiring back of workers
who were laid off during the recession.
The first recession in the U.S. to be given this
description was that of 1990-91, though a recovery in jobs did eventually occur (as the so-called
“Dot.com” or “New Economy” bubble developed). This same phenomenon was even more pronounced in
the 2001 recession and its aftermath. Indeed, a considerable part of the very slow job recovery
after that recession was actually due to phony statistics rather than to actual job growth. But
the most extreme example so far of a jobless recovery has been in the aftermath of the
“Great Recession” of 2007-2009. A year and a half after
this recession is said to be over by bourgeois economists even the official
unemployment rate is still around 10%, and the actual
unemployment rate, including long-term discouraged workers who have given up looking for work,
is over 20%.
The fact that jobs are returning ever slower
after recessions, or even not at all, is due to two major factors:
1) The underlying contradictions of the capitalist
economy are becoming ever worse, and it is getting harder and harder to resolve them even
temporarily.
2) There is a long term trend under capitalism
to drastically improve productivity and to require ever fewer workers to produce all the goods
and services for which there is effective market demand. (This is sometimes called the problem
of automation.)
JOBS — Disappearing
[Intro to be added.]
See also:
COMPUTERS—and Unemployment,
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,
AUTOMATION—The Claim that Automation Creates More Jobs than It Displaces
“The emerging automation wave that [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt called
attention to at Davos [in 2014] is going to replace millions of jobs and alter the nature
of many of those jobs that remain. Some technology experts like Ben Way expect a loss of
70 percent of existing jobs in the next three decades, with little hope that very many new
jobs will emerge to replace what is lost. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Randall
Collins expects an unemployment rate in the neighborhood of 50 percent. One need not
accept these predictions—they strike us as speculative if not extreme—to see that at the
very least what is about to transpire is going to put severe downward pressure on
wages and working conditions, which already are deplorable. ‘What does the “end of work”
mean, exactly?’ journalist Derek Thompson asked in a penetrating examination of
automation in a 2015 issue of the Atlantic. ‘It does not mean the imminence of
total unemployment, nor is the United States likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent
unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual
downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the
share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs.’”
—Robert W. McChesney & John
Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless
Democracy (2016), p. 20. [It is interesting to see here that even many people who are
alarmed about disappearing jobs find it hard to understand just how many existing
jobs are going to disappear, and just how soon that will occur! —Ed.]
“We have developed a fairly definite idea that an employer’s business
is to eliminate work.” —Rexford G. Tugwell, Industry’s Coming of Age (NY: 1927),
p. 37; quoted in Eugen Varga, The Decline of Capitalism (1928), p. 16.
[Tugwell was a liberal bourgeois
economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original “Brain Trust” which
developed policy recommendations resulting in Roosevelt’s “New Deal” program. It is true,
of course, that since the beginnings of capitalism it has been the goal of every capitalist
to produce goods with ever smaller amounts of work and ever fewer workers. These efforts
took one qualitative leap with the Industrial Revolution, and are now taking a much greater
and more profound qualitative leap with modern automation
and artificial intelligence. —Ed.]
“Robots could eliminate 75 million jobs globally by 2022 and create 133
million others, according to a World Economic Forum report released last year. Global
manufacturers could also face a potential shortage of 7.9 million workers by 2030, warns
a study released last year by the consulting firm Korn Ferry.” —Nick Leiber, “Early
Lessons in Robotics”, New York Times, June 7, 2019.
[Even while many bourgeois
economists now recognize that jobs are disappearing rapidly, and new jobs are coming
into existence at an ever slower pace, some bourgeois ideologists refuse to believe
that any of this could possibly be true! However where are the supposed “133 million”
new jobs going to be? In what industries? And the claim that there will be a shortage of
workers in manufacturing specifically is utter
nonsense given the decades-long decline in world manufacturing jobs that is overall only
speeding up. —Ed.]
JUNG, Carl Gustav (1875-1961)
Swiss psychiatrist, at one time a colleague of Sigmund Freud,
who went on to construct his own psychoanalytic theory rather
different from that of Freud—though just as unscientific. “Jung was alive to the potential of the
supernatural. He believed in demons and angels.” [David Talbot, Devil’s
Chessboard (2015), p. 120.] Jung’s theory, unlike Freud’s, put little emphasis on the
role of sexual impulses in people, though more emphasis on the role of the pursuit of personal
power. His theory centered on the hypothesized deep, “collective unconscious” which individuals
supposedly have. Jung’s approach focused on the imagined hidden significance of symbols and
concentrated on the supposed symbolic significance of dreams.
A graph showing the percentage of jobs lost during a recession beginning at the start of that
recession. The graph at the right (from the Calculated Risk website) shows the job loss curves
for all the U.S. recessions since World War II. Note that the current