Japan Press Weekly

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2015 May 20 - 26 TOP3 [JCP]

Former JCP Chair Fuwa encourages young people to ‘make friends with Marx’

“Let’s make friends with Karl Marx,” Japanese Communist Party Social Sciences Institute Director Fuwa Tetsuzo said at a lecture meeting on scientific socialism, encouraging young people to learn more about the 19th-century political philosopher.

The lecture meeting was held by the Democratic Youth League of Japan on May 24 at the JCP head office in Tokyo with 610 young people attending from all 47 prefectures in the country.

Based on Marx’s works on philosophy and economics, Fuwa, who is the former JCP chair and the author of many books on Marx, discussed various problems in today’s society, including employment, nuclear power generation, and global climate change. He pointed out that the root cause of these problems is capital’s profit-oriented nature which places profit before the good of people. So, he went on to say, achieving social progress means placing production activity at the service of people.

Noting that it is the youth that will enjoy the fruit of social changes the most, Fuwa encouraged the young audience by saying, “Young people with lofty ideals, unite for a better future.”

After the meeting, one of the participants, a 22-year-old university student living in Okinawa’s Nago City, said that a protest movement against the planned construction of a U.S. base in Nago’s Henoko district is spreading across the country. He added, “I hope that we, the younger generations, will unite and become a driving force behind progressive social change.”