>Well, the amount that capitalists spend on propaganda can vastly change the
>length of time a country can remain at full employment. Gramsci never said
>this, but it comes to close to some of his points. Japan had full employment
>for 30 years, from the early 60s to the early 90s. How? I got a clue about
>how that was accomplished from an article I read a few years ago in The
>Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. The article focused on the coal strike
>(in Japan) in 1958, and its breakup in 1959. After that strike, the Japanese
>business class adopted a new tact, they began to spend lavishly on corporate
>promotion, team building, loyalty building, ie, all the forms of propaganda
>that might help keep workers docile. I read in Business Week a few years ago
>something about "And Japanese corporations still spend too much on their
>workers. They spend 6 times more than American companies on team building
>exercises and events." Of course, Business Week did not understand the
>politics involved, it simply felt Japanese companies were failing to cut
>useless costs. And perhaps Japan will need to follow a different course now.
>But they had a system that worked for a long time, full employment and no
>militancy (except for a brief stretch in the 70s).
Japan had full employment by certain rather generous definitions. A core of the workforce, maybe a third, enjoyed "lifetime" employment - but these were mainly in big firms, and most were expected to find other employment in a small or mid-sized business, at around age 55. The rest of the workforce was hardly so lucky - especially women. (Almost all the "permanent" workers were men.) Many female office workers, who were valued more for their appearance than their productive contribution, were expected to leave the labor force by the time they were 25. Others were employed and disemployed as the business cycle warranted. Lots of workers in small or family-owned businesses were barely employed at all in bad times, and they didn't show up in the stats.
Doug