Arrow Books, £4.99 MICHAEL Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, and true to form his latest book is now also a movie with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. It's a detective story. It's also an outburst of rampant anti-Japanese hysteria, apparently toned down in the movie.
Central police characters John Connor and Peter Smith (Connery and Snipes in the movie) investigate a murder on the 45th floor on the Nakamoto building in LA.
But an unending campaign of obstruction and non-cooperation from the Japanese corporate types frustrates them.
It's not just that the Japanese have something to hide. They are protected by US politicians, judges and other officials who are in their pockets. That's how powerful Japanese business has become. They're buying 'our' industry, 'our' real estate, even 'our' movie industry.
Heavy-handed
aren't directly in Japan's America! And if the heavy-handed message isn't quite clear, Crichton adds his own Afterword calling for a national crusade against There's a deeper argubought-up by Japan, it's beweak, flabby and lazy. The because they are industriAnd they have a right to buy our industries - weren't they the ones who financed the budget deficit in the Reagan years?
American anti-Japanese outrage isn't new. What gives Chrichton's version its clout is that he puts his finger on real aspects of Japanese business culture -ruthlessness, chronic obedience and respect for authority, fierce company loyalty, overweening sexism and rigid hierarchies. Things you couldn't say about Microsoft or Exxon, Crichton's book is part and parcel of the campaign for trade war and import controls againsi Japan. This ideology is a danger to American workers who can be made to think that the solution to their problems is to attack the JapaDespite its own protestations that it is not racist, deep down the book really is. They're industrious and clever these Japs, but don't you just hate their cunning and secrecy? And you know why they're like Well they went straight without paying their dues: it's really feudalism they've got out there!
Japan is in the worst recession since world war 2. Clinton's government has already declared economic war. Unemployment is rising and living standards are under attack. The last thing Japanese or American workers need to fight their respective bosses is an upsurge of national chauvinism and racism. Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis -an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the full powers of the state.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class - the over. whelming majority of society -to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity. working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. Too often this degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people.