- by CJ Atkins
- The Guardian
- Issue #2190
Photo: Brianhe – wikimedia.org (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Legally, the working week in Japan is 40 hours, but good luck finding anyone who puts in less than 46 hours on the job. For workers in some industries, like construction, the double duty adds up to as much as 38 hours a month –the equivalent of a full extra week of labour.
Most of that surplus work is unpaid – something Japanese employers call sabisu zangyo, or “service overtime.” It’s so bad that many workers are literally toiling themselves into an early grave. The Japanese have a term for that, too. It’s the phenomenon of karoshi – “death by overwork.”
Combined with decades of economic stagnation and limited opportunity at home, the lack of anything resembling a work/life balance is helping drive increasing numbers of Japanese youth to leave the country, with some observers starting to use the word “exodus” to describe what’s happening.
It’s no wonder then that the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is laser-focused on the question. Shii Kazuo – the chair of the party’s Central Committee and a 33-year veteran of the Diet, Japan’s parliament – has made it the topic of his latest book, Disposable Time and Capital: Learning from Marx, which was recently published in English translation.
Karl Marx’s 1867 volume, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, sometimes has a reputation for being full of dry calculations of fixed and variable capital ratios or hard-to-follow theorisations about the nature of commodities. Shii believes such a view of that classic work misses the big picture.
At the heart of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, he argues, among all the explanations of how surplus value is produced and appropriated, is the demand that workers should have more command of their own time – and thus, of their lives.
Shii shared his thoughts in a wide-ranging conversation with students, activists, and journalists at an event hosted by the Department of Sociology at York University in Toronto on 4 May.
Shii quoted Marx’s definition of post-capitalist society as one where “the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.” But, he asked, “how can people develop their potential fully and freely when they don’t have enough free time to use as they wish?”
That’s the central question of his book, which is built around a concept Marx called “disposable time” – the time left over after workers have completed the labour necessary to sustain themselves and their families.
