File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 516


Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 21:28:58 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Tokyo's casual laborers swell Communist's ranks



Recent Communist electoral successes in Tokyo --mirroring similar triumphs
throughout most of the rest of the country -- have re-focused attention on
the political potential of the city's casual workers.  As the "bubble
economy"  has put paid to the notions of "life-time employment" and
corporate paternalism prevalent among Western academics, the structural
demand for *yoseba* -- the syndicate-controlled meat-market of day laborers
-- has intensified.  The casual worker is needed, in the words of one candid
government official, "to generate a supply of temporary labor, to keep it
centralized and under strict control, and to cut off sustenance to workers
who've become expendable".  

This blithe admission, with its echoes of Marx's reserve army of surplus
labor, belies a new phenomenon in neighborhoods like San-ya (where labor
union organizers were murdered as recently as 1989); the presence of a
strong local Communist party organization, flexing its new muscle and
focusing deliberately on the city's heretofore hidden "underclass".  This
direct organizing, deliberately undertaken among an unstable and socially
volatile population of alcoholics, loners, and semi-literates, has produced
surprising results; the growth of an orderly, disciplined cadre of temporary
workers eager to promote the struggle for socialism not only among their own
ranks, but throughout the entire neighborhoods where they are obliged to
call home, for the time being.  

In fact, this new strata are among the most militant in the Communist party,
which recently has sought to soften its public persona to that of an
ordinary political party , respectful of "market principles" and hankering
after a social-democratic persona.  The new recruits, like those running the
office in San-ya, speak frankly of the demise of the capitalist system, and
the expropriation of those wealthy employers who so recently took their
services for granted.

An interesting, and encouraging, turn of events, culled from the Asian press
over the past few weeks. 

Louis Godena








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