City of despair (1999)

From the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Japanese city of Osaka looks like a scene from a grainy black and white film about the Great Depression,” writes Leeroy Betti in the Western Australian (6 January). “Scores of cardboard and plastic shanties line the footpaths for block after block.” Thousands of men stand around open fires, many offering all kinds of rubbish for sale; others arrive as early at 5am outside the Imamiya Labour Centre, hoping to find jobs for building projects.

Officially, unemployment in Japan is 4.4 percent, or just on three million, but, says Betti, “the real jobless rate could be closer to 12 percent, according to some US economists”. And, he continues, “as the worst recession in Japan’s postwar history bites deeper, construction jobs, like those in other sectors, have dried up”. Moreover, many company executives are concerned at losing their jobs.

Betti concludes:

“As Japanese authorities search optimistically for signs that the economy will bottom out in 1999, its ninth year of stagnation, they could be caught unprepared for a burgeoning social crisis among those for whom time, hope and money already has run out.”

They may be whistling in the wind. Production in Japan, as elsewhere, is not geared for the satisfaction of people’s needs (Japanese workers need new homes while construction workers stand idle in Osaka), but with a view to profit for those who own the means of production. And without the likelihood of a profit, production will be curtailed or, ultimately, cease altogether, resulting in a surplus of the means of production and commodities on the one hand, and a surplus of unused labour-power, and mass unemployment, on the other. Indeed, in Japan, again as elsewhere in much of the world, too many commodities have been produced, not as compared with the actual needs of the overwhelming majority of the people but compared with their purchasing power. And workers in Japan, as well as Korea, Malaysia, Russia, and now Brazil, are discovering the hard way.

Is it not more than time that they organised to replace the chaotic, planless, society of capitalism with one in which rational planning, and the satisfaction of needs, social and individual, are paramount?

Peter E. Newell