The Red Years

Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68

Gavin Walker author Gavin Walker editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Verso Books

Published:24th Nov '20

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The Red Years cover

Japan: The "other", lesser-known 1968

The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan. It is also the pivotal year for a new anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics to erupt across the Third World - Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Japan's position - neither in "the West" nor in the "Third World" -provoked a complex and intense round of mass mobilizations through the 1960s and early 70s.

The Japanese situation remains remarkably under-examined globally. Beginning in the late 1950s, a New Left, independent of the prewar Japanese communist moment (itself of major historical importance in the 1920s and 30s), came to produce one of the most vibrant decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century. In the present volume, major thinkers of the Left in Japan alongside scholars of the 1968 movements reexamine the theoretical sources, historical background, cultural productions, and major organizational problems of the 1968 revolutions in Japan.

Praise for The Sublime Perversion of Capital:"What is capital? What is its relation with the 'world' and with the nation? What is its origin, its limit, and its 'other'? Reading the 'debate on Japanese capitalism' in the 1920s and 1930s against the grain of contemporary concerns, Gavin Walker invites us to a breathtaking intellectual journey. He provides a masterful interpretation of a crucial historical debate and makes a landmark contribution to our understanding of global capitalism and to the forging of a new project of liberation." -- Sandro Mezzadra, coauthor of, Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor
Praise for The Sublime Perversion of Capital: "Gavin Walker's superb The Sublime Perversion of Capital is a brilliantly imaginative recovery of Marx's worldly vocation and the original premises of historical materialism dedicated to combining the immediacy of local contemporary circumstances with the global reach of capital. He realizes this singularly vital program by reflecting on the writings of the economist Uno Kozo, especially his thinking on logic and history, as they intervened and culminated in the famous Marxian debate on capitalism in Japan's 1920s and 1930s in a context sparked by a rapidly uneven passage into capitalist modernity and its spillover into imperialism." -- Harry Harootunian, author of, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism

ISBN: 9781786637222

Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 18mm

Weight: 317g

272 pages