The Anxious Triumph by Donald Sassoon

Author:Donald Sassoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241315170
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

This system survived the interwar years and the Second World War. It developed substantially in the decades after 1945. As the long post-war Japanese boom subsided, the so-called lifetime employment began to break down. In the period we are examining there was no strong trade union movement and a Japanese socialist movement barely existed. Industrial conflicts were limited. Then, just as the Meiji elites sent missions to Europe and the United States to learn how to organize a modern society, so did those who sought to establish a modern labour movement. The Shokko Giyukai (Knights of Labor), a society aimed at promoting trade unions, sent representatives to the USA (the largest American trade union of the 1880s was called the Knights of Labor). On their return in 1896, they launched a ‘Call to the Workers’. They warned that foreign capitalists, attracted by low Japanese wages, would come to exploit workers, and ‘if you workers do not prepare to meet this challenge you will follow the same sad deplorable fate of European and American workers’.78 In the same year the government established a commission to carry out an inquiry into the conditions of the working class.79 What worried the Japanese authorities was that overworked workers might not be fit to be soldiers and meet the Meiji objective of fukoku kyōhei (‘enrich the country; strengthen the army’). Although business leaders opposed intervention, the government was unusually firm. In 1911 it introduced norms for the protection of women and children and set up a factory inspectorate. Workers’ welfare, however, was left to the discretion of employers.80

Even in Italy the state was abandoning its role as a minimalist Nacht-wächterstaat (‘Nightwatchman state’, an expression coined by the socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle in 1862) in favour of liberal interventionism.81 The great liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti, in an attempt to push the country’s economic elites into the twentieth century, accused the outgoing government of treating all workers’ associations as dangerous, even though this was no longer how such things were viewed in ‘civilized countries’ – by which he meant Great Britain and France, liberal Italy’s main models. Giolitti believed that socialism was best fought by improving the welfare of the poorer strata and encouraging small private property.82 He wanted a capitalist society where the working classes would have a stake. Giolitti accepted the existence of trade unions, their value, and their right to be represented politically and exercise influence, as long as they did not exercise power. He hoped that the bourgeoisie would rule in perpetuity, but he knew it would be able to do so only if it became an ‘enlightened’ bourgeoisie.83 The state should remain impartial in the conflict between capital and labour; each should have their own representation and be equal before the law. Trade unions reacted towards the government in a hostile way because of the hostility exhibited by successive governments. But, Giolitti went on to argue, unions were the legitimate representatives of the working classes. Political institutions should fear disorganized crowds, not organized workers.

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