The obvious stages of class development are primitive communalism, feudalism and capitalism. A class is a group of people sharing common relations to labor and the means of production. Class is the basis of the vast majority of societies today with very few exceptions.
Class hasn't, however, been around forever. Japan is certainly no exception. Primitive Japan …show more content…
In this period the productive forces(technological advancement and organization of society and humans available to labor) began advancing at an incredible rate. The main cause of this rapid increase of the ability of the productive forces was the Chinese influence at the time. The
Chinese were exploring a trail of recently created islands when they stumbled upon Japan. This created something very interesting in Japan. Japan saw little use of slavery as the second historical stage because feudal China's influence affected their mode of production in such a way that allowed the slavery stage to be skipped. The landlord and peasant classes were blatant and rigid. Another one of China's contributions besides the customary feudal relations was agriculture. The Chinese taught the Japanese to farm rice and utilize metals for tools and weapons. Something to note here is that slavery existed during the late times of primitive Japan and basically all of feudal Japan, however, it was not the main mode of production. Similarly to how communes and cooperatives found in capitalist society today without making the entire
country …show more content…
The classical view of how capitalism develops is that within feudal society a series of classes emerge made up of merchants, bankers, early industrialists, i.e. the bourgeoisie, and that for this class to be able to develop its full potential a bourgeois revolution is required to break the limits imposed by the landed feudal aristocracy. That is how things developed, more or less, in countries like France and England, but not in Japan. General MacArthur had occupied Japan in the name of the US under the guise of destroying their ability to wage war. What he did, however was force liberal democracy on Japan through imperialist policies. In his own words he needed to “Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize the political power. Separate church from state…” Perhaps in the end this was beneficial for the people of Japan but it does seem