The author was recently invited to Japan to represent the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) in anti-imperialist protests and events around the recent Group of Eight meeting.
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The choice of venue conforms to the usual pattern of holding G-8 meetings in the most remote areas possible in an attempt to circumvent protests. Hokkaido, a land of beautiful lakes and volcanoes, is the most rural and least populated of the four major islands that make up Japan. The Japanese government, in its rush to ingratiate itself to the bigger imperialist powers, spent $250 million in security measures and deployed 22,000 national police to Hokkaido, with another 20,000 on reserve in Tokyo. Had the meetings been held in Tokyo, the demonstrations would have been massive and militant.
The G-8 includes the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and Russia; the EU has limited participation. These countries make up less then 35 percent of the world’s population but control the great majority of the world’s wealth. The fact that the emerging economies of Brazil, China and India were not included exposes the exclusiveness of the imperialist club Those countries—along with Mexico and South Africa—held parallel meetings.
The leaders in attendance at the G-8 meeting do not speak in the interest of their country’s people; only the rich corporate and banking elite of their respective capitalist classes. Still, there was no real unity of the imperialists achieved at the meeting as to how to carve up the world for themselves.
The one agreement that was reached—without accountability mechanisms—was that G-8 countries would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by the year 2050—42 years from now. As Fidel Castro commented in his reflections of July 15, “In other words: when hell freezes over.”
In a rational world, the fact that a recent scientific study predicts that the ice at the North Pole may completely melt this summer, one would imagine that such powerful world leaders would declare an international emergency. But these are the leaders of world capitalism—an unplanned, reckless system that tramples all as the capitalists seek ever-greater profits.
The ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) was invited to send a delegate to the protests organized by Asian Wide Campaign against Japanese and U.S. Imperialism (AWC), the leading anti-imperialist group in Japan. The AWC is a mass organization that originated out of the Japanese Communist League in 1992 when Japan sent soldiers to Cambodia.
The AWC has an active and visible youth group called the Anti-Invasion Asian Students Joint Action. Other foreign delegates to the G-8 protests included International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) and Bayan Philippines; Hyung Heun Kim, president of Korean StreetNet International; Kuei Wen, head of the Taiwan Labor Rights Association; Rey Asis, Asian Students Association of Hong Kong; and Rosana Tapiru, Migrante Japan. Participants attended four protests and an anti-imperialist forum.
