ABSTRACT
Central to the understanding of the process of atomisation of the working class is the formation of what may be termed the 'company world', a phenomenon which is the key to an understanding of post-war Japanese capitalism. The 'company world' is an institutional-cum-ideological device used to translate inter-enterprise competition. Inter-company competition, which was very intense during the period of resurgence of capitalism in post-war Japan, is one kind of competition and depends mainly on the commodity market situation, Inter-worker competition is, another, but in it the determinants are labour market factors. Under the traditional 'seniority wage system', the employees were divided into two major categories according to education – workers and officers. The collapse of the existing labour establishment offers an opportunity for them to make alliance among genuine unions loyal to the class struggle in order to remake the Japanese labour movement totally into a worker mass-based anti-imperialist movement.
