Precarious Japan by Anne Allison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Pressures of Precarity In a Land Of Lost Hope

Before reading this book I had never encountered the word ‘precarity’. Precarious, yes; precariousness, of course; but precarity hit me not only as a linguistic novelty but an entirely new social condition, a ‘thing’ as popular culture has it, that I have known about sub-consciously but never bothered to articulate. Once identified this condition is obvious and disturbing. I take it from Allison’s text that the term is commonplace among sociologists and therefore will creep, or seep, into popular and political consciousness. So it seems to me likely precarity could well become a central political issue common to all democracies.

According to Allison, “Japan is becoming a place where hope has become a privilege of the socioeconomically secure. For the rest of them— the widening pool of “losers”—even the wherewithal to imagine a different there and then beyond the precarious here and now stretches thin.” This is the existential condition of the “precariat” who have replaced the 19th century proletariat. This precarious proletariat has lost even the hope of improvement in their condition: “This social and human garbage pit is precarity. And, as the sensory nature of precarious living, it is pain and unease. Life that doesn’t measure up: a future, and everydayness, as secure as a black box.”

The fact that precarity is an issue in Japan reflects something important about Japanese culture for consideration by the rest of the world. The intensity and rapidity with which the phenomenon of precarity has swept through the country make it a sort of canary in the mineshaft of 21st century global capitalism. The effects of precarity are also more visible in Japan because the country’s post-war economic policies, corporate structure, and social cohesion had more or less eliminated it before the 1990’s and the bursting of the country’s property bubble. Japan started the process of increasing precarity from an apparently solid and stable familial and civil society. The lesser social cohesion in countries like the USA therefore seem even more vulnerable to its effects.

Precarity brings together a number of social and economic conditions: the increasingly disproportionate distribution of income and wealth around the world, the growth in under employment among the educated and unemployment among those with minimal education, the sharp rise in zero-hours contracts for relatively unskilled work in the internet economy, the increasing pressure on national welfare provision brought about by an aging population and international tax competition, and the dominance of self-employment in some high-tech sectors (the “cognitariat” as a sort of intelligentsia among the precarious proletariat). These issues are a far more concrete focus for the vaguely defined populism so obvious in Europe and North America. And they affect not just the certifiably impoverished but also those of what used to be called the middle class - enough of the population in most countries to form a substantial electoral coalition.

I look forward to what the currently shapeless rhetoric of the British Labour Party and the American Democrats might become if either group can find the courage, as well as the language, to form a coalition of the precarious. Allison quotes the sociologist Lee Edelman on what he calls the demise of “reproductive futurism... the notion that hard work today yields a better tomorrow: the modernist in progress staked on the child as the obligatory token of futurity.” This is the global version of the American Dream, which if it can’t be recovered, doesn’t augur well for the future of democracy, perhaps even of responsible government.

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