Capitalist life destroys identity. Under capitalism, work is not a celebration of our abilities: it's the destruction of our bodies and minds. There's no choice: we have to sell our labour-power to survive. With this entrapment comes the destruction of everything that makes us human: sexuality, intimate emotional relations, even their very bodies. Yoshihiro Tatsumi understands this, and his book The Pushman and Other Stories shows it over and over again. Robot-like men tramp through his comics: sewage-workers, trash shovellers, machine operators. They’re so dehumanized that most of the time they can’t even speak. They feel closer to animals than each other – graphically expressed in the last story, where a man leaves his girlfriend for a rat.

Women have a troubled – and troubling – status in Tatsumi's comics. They’re at the heart of nearly every story, but most often they’re usurers, draining the men of money and feeling no less than a boss. The characters wreak violent revenge for their maltreatment and are always caught and punished. In one story, a sperm donor spies the woman who’s receiving his sperm, falls in love and then feels spurned when she uses another donor for treatment. He attacks her, is jailed for attempted rape and asks himself “How did this happen?” This is typical: the men have no insight into their relationships. They are simply passive victims, used and abused, and when they finally assert their humanity, it’s in bursts of violent rage that destroys themselves and their partners.

Here’s where the line between normative and descriptive blurs. Read literally, Tatsumi is a brutal misogynist. It gets hard to take in panel after panel of conniving, uncaring women, where the man is always a victim. But is Tatsumi saying this is the truth, as it's always been? In the attached interview he says he based his comments on observations of working class life around him. Capitalism destroys relations between people, as surely as it destroys people themselves (captured literally by Tatsumi, when he portrays a man deliberately mangling his arm in a stamping machine so he can give his girlfriend insurance money.)

Describing capitalist social relations, or advocating them? - Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I think Tatsumi's showing the inexorable logic of relationships under capitalism, where natural links of empathy and solidarity between genders are drowned in the cold, cash nexus. People need money to survive, they use each other to get that money, and their psyches and identities are obliterated in the process. Relationships aren’t just a symptom of this: they’re one of the prime sites of this dehumanization. On second reading, Tatsumi has a lot of sympathy for his female characters as well. They're also trapped by powerful men: the same girlfriends of the workers are the mistresses of the bosses. Tatsumi expresses this alienation through the repeated, disturbing imagery of the fetus, either aborted and tossed into the trash or sewer, or in one case, brought to term while its mother is murdered. Queasy, anti-choice emotional associations aside, Tatsumi's point is clear: even the sacrosanct realm of motherhood isn’t safe from capitalism. There’s no ‘state of innocence’: children are born into this world (or not) already tainted with the degradation of capitalist life.

Sociological studies of working class life bear this out. Lillian Rubin’s Worlds of Pain shows clearly the weight of expectations brought to bear on relationships by working people, as recompense for the daily brutalities of capitalist life. Michael Lerner, in his excellent psychological analysis of alienation Surplus Powerlessness, details the frustration and violence that result. So, while there's no denying the sexism of Tatsumi's work, I prefer to read it as showing the material roots of that sexism, not simply as ‘bad ideas’ in people’s heads but in the very life conditions of working people. As such, his comics become a powerful critique of sexism. He’s saying, “Look what capitalism reduces us to.”

One of the many walking dead men in Tatsumi's stories

I don’t think this is a ‘charitable reading’, and here’s why. One story in the middle of the book stands out starkly from the others. In “Make-Up”, an office worker spurns the advances of a female colleague. He has an empty relationship with a cocktail waitress, but when she goes to work at night, he dresses up in her clothes and goes out. While passing as a woman, he meets his colleague, who is smitten, takes him to a hotel to have sex, and then tells him: “… so you’re actually a man. But I love you as a woman. So I want you to be a woman with me. I want to love you as a woman… I have to believe in that…” They share a tender embrace.

At the end of the comic, we learn she’s married to an old man, while he continues his charade with the waitress. Both are trapped in their lives, yet they’ve discovered their mutual humanity. That humanity is free of money worries, bourgeois family constraints, or even gender. Love conquers all. That message, normally a naïve, utopian sentiment, is in The Pushman and Other Stories a shout of rebellion.