Terrorism:
means to a dead end..continued
from previous page 9
The two organizations formed at the end of the 1950s which became
the nucleus of the new left movement - the Japanese Revolutionary
Communist League (JRCL) and the Communist League (or "Bund") - believed
that the Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was at the very least a
post-capitalist
society. Trotsky famously coined the term "degenerated worker's state"
to describe the Soviet Union, and the Japanese New Left advanced
similar ideas, using different terminology, describing it for instance
as an "alienated form of a transitional society."
The socialist society they envisaged and sought to achieve would
similarly have an economic foundation of nationalized industry and a
"planned economy," but with a leadership wiser and more benevolent than
the Stalinist bureaucrats.
There were a few on the New Left who argued that the Soviet Union
was a state capitalist society, such as the theory developed by
Tadayuki Tsushima in the fifties. But the actual content of this theory
was not radically different than Trotsky's idea of a revolution
"betrayed." That is,
Tsushima believed that a socialist revolution created a post-capitalist
workers' state in Russia, but the country later reverted to capitalism
by foolishly failing to implement a proper system of labour vouchers
and a
Paris Commune-style state.
In short, the New Left activists took it for granted that the
Soviet Union provided an example of a society that was at least
post-capitalist, and they considered the Russian Revolution a model for
their own revolution in Japan. The expectation was that a Japanese
revolution would similarly
arise out of some social crisis - whether an economic collapse or war -
and in such a situation a small but determined vanguard party could
literally push the radicalised working class in the direction of
socialism at the critical moment. They had no patience for, or even
awareness of, the idea that a
socialist revolution would require most of the members of society to
desire that change.
So naturally they did not view their task as propagating
socialist ideas to convince as many people as possible of the
desirability and feasibility of a socialist society while exposing the
futility of reforming capitalism. On the whole, the working class was
viewed as an unthinking
mass that the force of events, guided or even accelerated by the hand
of the vanguard party, would propel in the direction of fundamental
social change.
The Red Army's strategy was an extension of this mistaken
understanding of
both the ultimate end and the means of getting there. They also
believed revolution would arise naturally out of a crisis, and more
specifically a revolutionary war, with their own task being to foment
the crisis and lead the workers on to victory in a global battle for
socialism. It must be said, though,that the ultimate victory interested
them far less than the heroic combat itself, which was pictured along
the lines of the cartoonish scenes of bloody class war in Jack London's
Iron Heel.
Reforms painted red
With all of their talk of socialism and revolution,
one might think that the New Left activists would have shunned
reformism. But in fact they viewed
capitalism was in fact developing as rapidly as in China today, the
revolutionaries felt they would have to manufacture a political crisis
themselves to awaken the working class by sabotaging government
policies.
Here they had a view of how a "revolutionary situation" could be
brought
about that was every bit as mechanical as the "domino theory" used to
justify the US military action in Vietnam. The activists felt that if
this or that reformist political struggle were to succeed, it would
help to create a
crisis and would thus be the first step on the revolutionary road.
This approach was evident in the movement against the 1960
revision in the US-Japan Security Treaty, which was the first major
political struggle for the New Left to engage in. The student radicals
who played a key role in that movement imagined that if they blocked
the Treaty they would create a crisis for US and Japanese imperialism.
It is interesting that
the JCP also participated in this movement, but opposed the Treaty on
the equally fictitious grounds that it would strengthen Japan's status
as a "semi-colony" of the United States.
Perhaps because they were often taking part in the same reformist
movements that the JCP was involved in, the New Left groups placed an
emphasis on the tactics employed, particularly the use of physical
force to confront the riot police or occupy buildings. They felt such
confrontational tactics were inherently revolutionary, or at least
preferable to the more legalistic approach of the JCP. This was also
connected to the idea that socialist ideas would emerge out of such
action, rather than there being a necessity to work out a political
program first. This action über alles attitude was expressed in
the founding document of the Communist
League, which said that the "programme for the emancipation of the
proletariat can only emerge in the midst the trial by fire of praxis
involving a response to the tasks of the class struggle that emerge
every day."
Ironically, in practice (or "praxis") this is a fiery rewording
of arch-revisionist Eduard Berstein's belief that, "The final goal, no
matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything."
One psychological side-effect of mechanically linking reformism to
revolution was that the activists exhibited symptoms of manic
depression.
Pinning so many hopes on reformist battles that in most cases
were doomed to failure, and at any rate would always ultimately fail to
open up
a revolutionary situation, their initial euphoria inevitably turned to
despair and bitter reflections on what should have been done. The
desperate and doomed attempt to manufacture a political or social
crisis is taken to its absurd extreme with the criminal acts of the Red
Army.
Crossing the line
Violence was a general characteristic of the
New Left in Japan. The street battles with the riot police, just
mentioned, were considered an integral part of the revolutionary
movement and raised nearly to an art form, with activists
donningconstruction helmets (featuring painted logos of their
organization), wielding long outside observers, such as French critic
Roland Barthes who described riots as a "writing of actions which
expurgates violence from its Occidental being," adding that, "there is
a colours - red-white-blue helmets colours contrary to ours, refer
historical: there is a syntax of actions (overturn, uproot, drag,
pile), performed like a prosaic sentence, not like ejaculation."
(Empire of Signs)
Setting aside the question of what Barthes was smoking, such
observers
have been less ejaculatory themselves they witnessed the violent clashes
between new left organizations. In part internecine violence was a
result overblown organizational egos, each group convinced it was the true vanguard.
But there were other issues at stake yakuza gangster could understand.
University campuses were the operational base for most groups, and each
had a vital interest in controlling student governments, which offered
access to buildings and funds. In the struggles to hold on to
strongholds or take bases of other groups, student activists did not
hesitate to rely on brute force.
In his engrossing memoir (Kotan Publishing, 2005), Manabu
Miyazaki, a student activist who returned to the criminal underworld he
grew up in, describes how he and his attacked a member of a rival group
had seized a student union room at their university: university: "We
lifted him on our shoulders and banged him against the wall of the
student union room a few times to quiet him down. We also took him to
the hut in Ome, where we beat him until he fainted. But after that, all
we did was force Suntory Red
whiskey down his throat and then, when he was good and drunk, strip him
of his clothes and set him loose." Considering that the author was a
member of the JCP's student group, which was considered less violent
than many of the new left groups, one can get a rough idea of the
atmosphere. And in relating this incident, Miyazaki emphasizes that
this was a mere prank compared to the violence a few years later
because activists had yet to even consider killing their adversaries.
The line separating beating to a pulp and murder was frequently
crossed in the early 1970s. Typically students were kidnapped, as in
the tale above, tortured to extract a "self-criticism," and killed in
the process, whether intentionally or not. Even more chilling than the
senseless murders
themselves, were the statements sometimes issued in justification of
such acts,invariably claiming that a "tool of the state" or "spy" had
been necessarily eliminated.
Here is precisely the demented mindset of the Red Army fanatics
as well.
(Just I was finishing this article a Greek outfit calling itself
"Revolutionary
Struggle" took it upon itself to shoot a rocket-propelled grenade at
the US Embassy in Athens. An article in the New York Times informed me
that this is a Marxist group, but their journalist should have heeded
Marx's own advice about how it is best to not "judge an individual by
what he thinks
of himself.")
MICHAEL SCHAUERTE
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