PHOTO on opposite page. Members of a womnen's association in Osaka go into action against high prices. A price monitor carefully examines rice labeled “high quality" and checks the price tag. Inflation is an acute problem for families with limited incomes in Japan. Angered housewives are responding in a direct way.
If he does open his books and they prove to be complicated or suspicious, the housewives association furnishes accountants to probe deeper.
Shopkeepers, of course, often band together against the consumers. This can lead to militant counteraction by the housewives, such as mass entry into stores. Often the demonstrations are quite imaginative and generally rather costly to the offending merchants.
A sufficiently powerful association of housewives can engage in mass demonstrations of a very effective nature, even directing them in the streets against the government authorities, who, of course, represent the interest of the merchants, particularly the large ones who set prices through monopoly practices.
In combination with strike struggles and other forms of mass action, the housewives can play a decisive role in bringing a country into a revolutionary situation.
In view of the fact that in many parts of the world today, inflation has become chronic and often of raging proportions, such tendencies toward action as those displayed by the Japanese women at the moment will undoubtedly prove of considerable interest to revolutionists everywhere.
Housewives committees, organized on a mass scale, to check prices and the quality of commodities are much more revolutionary in nature than may appear at first sight.
Their interest in the secrets of the local shopkeeper and the distribution of commodities points directly to the secrets of capitalist society as a whole and the organization of its economy.
Such slogans as "Open the books," and "Power to the consumers to control prices" can pave the way for much more radical and sweeping slogans.
They can prove to be among the key slogans required to organize the masses in the cities throughout the "third world"; and not only there as can be seen in the case of Japan.