JAPAN: BETWEEN TWO ERAS interview with a revolutionary marxist leader The December 5 elections to the lower house of the Japanese Diet (parliament) resulted in a major setback for the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LD) The party's share of the popular vote declined to 42%, down from 47% in the elections of 1972. The LDP won 249 seats in the 511-member Diet, the first time in twenty-one years that the ruling party has fallen short of a majority. (The adherence of 8 conservative independents to the LDP after the election will give the party a bare majority of 257 seats.) In the previous Diet, which had 491 seats, the LDP had held 271. In oddition, three LDP cabinet members failed to win re-election, the first time since 1958 that any cabinet member had suffered electoral defeat. The Communist party also suffered losses, declining from 39 seats to 17 (although the CP's share of the popular vote declined only slightly, from 10.49% to 10.38%), while the Socialist party gained 11 seats and holds 123 in the new Diet. It was mainly the so-called moderate parties that made significant gains in their number of seats. The Democratic Socialist party, a right-wing split from the SP, increased its Diet membership from 19 to 29. The Komeito (Clean Government party, which is Buddhist oriented) went from 30 seats to 55. The third big winner was the New Liberal Club, formed by some young members of the LDP who split from the party last sumner. The NLC entered the elections with 5 Diet members and emerged with 17, two of whom received more votes than any of the other 897 Diet candidates. In the wake of the LD's electoral setback, Prime Minister Takeo Miki resigned and was replaced by Takeo Fukuda, another leader of the LDP. Although the LDP remains at the helm, the post-election situation in Japan is much changed, the electoral results being a distorted reflection of a deeper crisis. In the following interview, which was obtained in Tokyo on December 29, 1976, Jiro Kurosawa, a member of the Political Bureau of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, Japanese section of the Fourth International, explains the meaning of the election results and the prospects for the development of the political and economic crisis in Japan.
Q The Liberal Democratic party suffered a setback in the
December 5 elections to the lower house of the Diet.
This has been referred to as a catastrophic defeat, even though the number of seats lost was rather small and the LDP still controls the government. How serious was this setback, and how did it come about? AAt the start of the election campaign, LDP leaders said that they would consider it a victory if they could hold on to 271 seats. That was the same number of seats they had held prior to dissolution of the Diet. But considering that the total number of seats in the Diet was increased by about twenty in this election, the LDP was actually forecasting a loss of ten seats or so. But as it tumed out, they lost twenty seats more than they had anticipated. The LDP now holds a bare numerical majority in the lower house, but not a large enough majority to control all the Diet committees, as they have in the past. These results reflect the direct effect of the Lockheed bribery scandal, especially the fact that from about February through April the masses were able to go onto the offensive around the Lockheed case. Since April, though, the masses haven't risen up together against the government, so the effects of the Lockheed scandal have been expressed as an internal crisis within the ruling party, focusing on a strategy dispute over how to deal with the demands of the masses. (See INPRECOR, No. 59, October 7, 1976.) The various factions of the LDP continued to be divided under this pressure, and the party went into the elections suffering a de facto split between the "bourgeois mainstream" factions headed by Takeo Fukuda and the minority grouping led by then Prime Minister Miki. These two groups essentially ran separate election campaigns, and under these conditions the LDP as a whole suffered a big defeat. 4
Miki hoped to limit the masses' alienation from the LDP by means of policies that in a sense prefigure the line of a possible coalition government in the future. That is, he compromised with the Socialist party and at the same time tried to restrain the bourgeois mainstream. But Miki was unable to win mass support in the context of the Lockheed scandal and the divided LP compaign. Miki's policy had been successful during the 1975 Spring Labor Offensive (shunto). Up until 1974, the shunto had always been marked by numerous strikes over a ten-day period, but in 1975 Miki succeeded in preventing widespread industrial actions. In that sense, Miki's policy succeeded in restraining mass struggles - or at least in restraining political polarization - in 1975. Nevertheless, it tumed out that this line of Miki's failed completely when faced with the outbreak of the Lockheed scandal. The Socialist party remains the largest opposition party in the Diet, but its electoral gains were relatively modest. Why was this? AWe saw a stagnation of the vote total for the Socialist party. In terms of Diet seats the SP came out stronger than in the previous lower house elections in 1972, but this reflects the way election districts were redrawn when the twenty new Diet seats were created. One of the deals between the Miki government and the SP was that in return for the SP's cooperation during and after the 1975 shunto, Miki mode the big compromise of allowing some election districts to be redrawn more favorably for the SP. The SP didn't win many new seats outside of these redrawn districts. The geographical distribution of the SP's support also shifted significantly. Compared with the previous
election, the strength of the SP declined in urban areas, both in terms of Diet seats and in the percentage of the vote. At the same time there was a slight increase in the SP vote in rural areas. So we can say that what the SP lost in the cities was compensated for in the countryside, and most of the SP's new Diet seats were gifts From Miki. The total percentage of the vote that went to the SP was less this time than four years ago. This increase in the SP'S vote in rural areas reflects something we began to see in the previous election, namely that the votes of people who are becoming alienated from the LDP are tending to go to the SP. In a sense, this is the initial political expression of alienation from the LDP in the countryside. In Tokyo and the other urban centers we've already passed through that phase, and the process of political difFerentiation is proceeding with the SP picking up votes that went to the Communist party in the previous elections while losing votes to other parties. The net result is that the SP's strength in urban centers has declined significantly since the previous elections.
Communist party candidate MATSUMOTO 1 should mention a couple of other things about the SP's results. One is that nearly all the most prominent SP leaders, except for the party chairman and vicechairman, were defeated in this election. Among the losen, for example, were the two ranking members of the Party Policy Council and leoders of major intraparty factions, such as Saburo Eda. The second thing is related to this. These defeated Social Democratic big shots were the ones who tradifionally hod depended most heavily on the major labor unions to gather votes for them. One of the striking Features of the SP's campaign this time was that the unions under Social Democratic leadership didn't budge on behalf of SP candidates. Up to now, the big shots had always figured that they could rely on the stable vote-gathering capabilities of the big unions and just call on them in order to get elected. This is how it had been for a long time in traditional SP strongholds such as the city of Sendai. But that strategy completely collapsed this time, as the most important unions wouldn't lift a finger. In a sense, this is a result of the defeats of the shunto in 1975 and 1976. It shows very clearly what has been happening to the relationship between the SP and the working class, especially the workers in Sohyo-affiliated unions. (Sohyo, the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan, is the largest Japanese trode-union federation - INPRECOR.) QWhy did the Communist party suffer such a major defeat? A The percentage of the total vote that went to the
Communist party this time was only 0.1% lower than in the previous elections, but in terms of Diet representation the CP suffered a historic setback, losing twenty-two seats. This reflech the geographical shift of the CP's vote, which was more dispersed this time, rather than concentrated in a few urban strongholds. We can say that in those strongholds the CP lost from both the right and the left of its troditional base of support. In the past, the CP's support came largely from city dwellers, especially workers in education and local government employees. The CP attracted these layers, responding to their economic demands and organizing them on the neighborhood level, and on this basis establishing "renovationist" municipal goverments in various cities. This has been more or less the structure of the movement on which the CP's growing strength was based. But in the last couple of years the Stalinists' support among teachers and local government employees has been declining as a result of the party's new theories that "a teacher's profession is a sacred one" and that "local government employees are not workers, but public
JAPAN servants. " These "theoretical" innovations were intended to justify the CP's abandonment of the struggle of these workers for the right to strike. This has resulted in a loss of CP influence - and membership - among these layers of workers, which have been the CP's only major base within the union movement. In the recent election campaign, the CP of course carried out leafleting and other activities, but it was unable to turn out large numbers of its usual labor union supporters for this sort of activity. The Stalinists were unable to organize such big street demonstrations as in the past. The only layers of the CP's base among whom the party did not lose support seemed to be the elderly. They also lost their ability to mobilize students. Support for the CP within the student movement had been a big factor in previous election campaigns. But this year, for example, the Stalinist youth group organized campus demonstrations around the Lockheed scandal which in some cases involved only a few hundred students - no larger than the ones we organized. So we can say that the CP ran in this election campaign without the support of the activist layers of trade unionists and students who had been crucially important to its earlier campaigns. Trying to run an election campaign without those activists was like trying to run a car without the engine. At the same time that it was losing the support of these layers on the "left" of its electoral base, the CP also ran up against the contradictions of the reformist municipal governments in which it participates. There are very many people who have supported CP candidates in local elections not because they are aftracted to the Communist party ideologically, but simply because they see the CP as a symbol of "clean politics. " Some of these supporters have become alienated from the CP because they now stand politically to the left of it, or at least because the CP is offering no positive alternative CP's propaganda in this election wound up being opposition to anticommunist attacks, rather than any concrete perspective of governmental power. We began to see these trends when Minobe, the reformist governor of Tokyo, ran for re-election in 1975. There has been a continuing rightward evolution of the CP's line, which was symbolized in 1976 by the decision to delete the term "proletarian dictatorship" from the party program. But more than just the renunciation of one well-known slogan, it is this whole evolution that has acted to demoralize many party members and alienate CP supporters. To the average activist, the most blatant betrayal is the new "theory" that workers in education and in municipal government services are not really workers and therefore should not have the right to strike. After splitting from the LDP. last summer, the New
Liberal Club (NLC) made big gains in the elections.
The Democratic Socialist party (DSP) and the Komei party also got much larger votes than in the past. The 6 bourgeois press has pointed to these victories as evidence that "the people rejected both the right and the left, and instead showed their preference for the moderates, for a middle-of-the-road political line. " Is this assessment accurate? AKomei, the DSP, and the NLC all appealed to the masses - including layers of the working class - on the theme: "we have to get rid of the LDP and restore clean politics." In a way, their election strategies were the ones most closely in tune with the prevailing mood. What characterized the campaigns of these parties was that they completely avoided any propaganda along the lines of what kind of government they wanted to form. Rather than elaborate policies, they merely stressed over and over that "we have to get rid of the LDP. " They definitely had this character of "mood campaigns. " This was true of all three parties, above all the New Liberal Club. In a situation in which the SP and CP also refused to speak clearly about their policies, about what kind of government they wanted to form, the masses voted for Komei, the DSP, or the NEC simply as an expression of anti-LDP sentiment. It's true that the SP and CP also got these kinds of votes, but the "Floating votes" were really the key to the Komei, DSP, and NC's success. Support for these parties increased most conspicuously in the major cities. These gains of Komei, the DSP, and the NLC -particularly in urban areas — reflect not so much support for the political programs of these parties, but rather the combined processes of alienation from the LDP and disillusionment with the Social Democrats and Stalinists. Many people who in the past had voted for the SP or CP turned to these parties for lack of an alternative. For this reason it is incorrect to speak of the election results as "the people's choice of a moderate line. " On the contrary, the results were an expression of the disappointment of voters who were not presented with a clear choice of political line and in many cases wound up casting votes for candidates of the "middle of the road" parties, whose lines have yet to be tested in practice. The NLC in particular was appealing precisely because it was new. But its political character will be put to the test in the very near future, even sooner than the line of the SP and CP. The success of the Komei party also reflected its organizational growth. It has been expanding its influence among thelower layers of the petty bourgeoisie and unorganized workers and building a neighborhood-level organization linked to the Soka Gakkai Buddhist sect. Many of the people being attracted to the Komei party were CP supporters in the past. During the economic boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the CP drew around it those urban layers who were "left out" of the economic prosperity. The CP promised increased social welfare spending under "renovationist" municipal governments. But with the end of the economic boom and with the cutbacks by local governments, these layers have
become disillusioned with the CP. The somewhat increased social welfare spending by reformist local governments always depended on funds provided by the national government controlled by the LDP. Now the LDP is demanding cuts in such spending, and the CP has refused to leod a mass struggle against the cutbacks. As a result, those unorganized workers and layers of the urban petty bourgeoisie who used to support the CP are now being attracted to the Komei party and its local organizations, which promise better funding for municipal services. So how would you sum up the significance of the election results as a whole? AThis election marked the first time since the carly
1950s that the radicalization of the masses has begun to pose the possibility of an alternative to the LDP government. At this point the working masses are not at all clearly conscious of what kind of government they want, but they know they've had enough of the LDP. In that sense, this election marks a turning point in Japanese history. The LDP lost its numerical majority in the lower house in this election. Only because a few Diet members who were elected as independents have joined the LP since the elections, the LDP now has a bare majority. The class polarization reflected in the election results is still at an early stage of development and was expressed in a very confused and incomplete way. That is, it has not come to the point of a clear polarization over what kind of government should be formed. Nevertheless, it is an important political trend objectively. The role of the SP and CP Further exacerbated this confusion. They represent the only currents that could have offered a realistic alternative to the LDP, but they refused to do so. Instead, they also tried to water down their programs, formulate their slogans more vaguely, and present themselves as "moderates. especially so in the final weeks of the election campaign, as SP Chairman Narita publicly announced that the SP would be willing to join in a coalition government with elements of the DP, even if it meant dropping the SP's longstanding demand for abrogating the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. Chairman Miyamoto of the CP hesitated barely twenty-four hours before announcing that the CP was willing to do the same. In this context, with all parties but the LDP refusing to speak about what policies they propose to carry out, the process of political differentiation among the masses was suspended at a very early stage. And as a result, the masses' alienation from the LDP was often expressed in votes for "moderate" parties. This was the basic character of the election results. Another factor was that the struggles of the working class over the post two years have been dispersed under the line of the SP and CP. Not only has the voting strength of the working-class parties declined in urban the shunto has gone down to defeat two years in a row. The working class has been left without any organized nationwide tendency willing to confront the LDP as an organized movement. This was an election in which the working class was objectively left without any nationwide pole of attraction around which to unite and struggle against the LDP. What are the factors that have brought on this crisis of the LDP's rule in Japan? A There are basically two main factors that have led to the present crisis of the LDP goverment. The first of these is the bankruptcy of the economic boom that continued throughout the decade of the 1960s. (See INPRECOR, No. 61/62, November 11, 1976.) This bankruptcy was already apparent, in a way, at the time of the explosive outbreak of the youth radicalization in 1968, for the movement of radical youth was clearly a reaction to the contradictions of rapid economic growth. But the generalized economic recession that began after 1972 transformed this youth radicalization into a generalized rodicalization of Japanese society as a whole. Or to put it another way, alienation from Japanese capitalism was transferred from a purely intellectual level to the level of the daily life of the masses, from the disenchantment of youth with capitalist society to a more generalized mass disenchantment increasingly directed against the capitalist LDP governSimultaneous with this has come the second factor: the advance of the East Asian sector of the world revolution. But the tremendous impulse from the advance of the Asian revolution, which spurred on mass alienation from the LDP and swung the masses' energy to the left, toward support for the SP and CP, has come to an end in the past two years. This, of course, is due largely to the détente between the United States and China. This is reflected in one important difference between the 1972 and 1976 general election campaigns: the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty ceased to be a key issue. In all the elections prior to 1976, the Security Treaty emerged as a central issue. Masses of people who were not necessarily opposed to the Security Treaty as such nevertheless supported the SP or the CP as the political currents which would prevent Japan from being drawn into a war. These votes represented not so much a desire to put the SP and CP into power in place of the LDP as the hope that if the anti-Security-Treaty parties were strengthened, Japan would be less likely to go to war. This time, however, the Security Treaty was not a focal point of the election campaign, clearly because of the détente between Ching and the United States -in other words, becouse China now accepts the JapanU.S. military alliance. Mass opposition to the Security Treaty had been increasIng ever since the start of the Vietnamese revolution. But that opposition was defused and the Security Treaty issue was completely pushed into the background, when China gave its approval to the treaty. In this way, the present advance of the Asian revolution has guaranteed the expansion of the influence of the "moderate"
7
JAPAN political currents internationally. That is, the political moderates in Japan have become the "pro-China" current. The Komei party, for example, began octively raising the call for peaceful coexistence with China just when the U.S.-Chinese détente was initiated. Today, the figures in Japanese politics who are most popular with Peking are first of all former Prime Minister Tanaka of the LDP; second, Chairman Takeiri of Komei, and third, Saburo Eda, a leader of the right wing of the SP. These three were the first major Japanese political figures invited to visit China; since then, they have all been depicted in China as very important people. They have acted as advocates of the Chinese position in policy debates in Japan. They obtain mass support in Japan because they have become identified as supporters of China. They benefit from the Japanese masses" traditional sympathy for China, or at least from the masses' fear of a war with China. By virtue of the Fact that they are the ones who can act as go-betweens on questions of Sino-Japanese relations, it has been these moderate politicians whose political influence has been bolstered by China, at least since the downfall of Tanaka, when his crooked financial dealings were exposed. In keeping with its hostility toward the Soviet Union, Peking has assumed a hostile attitude toward the CP and the left wing of the SP, which favors joint action with the CP. In this way too, it is the moderates who are bolstered by China's position. In this political context, the advance of the Asian revolution has had a contradictory effect on Japanese politics. It has strengthened the moderate currents, even though it had spurred on the rise of the New Left during the late 1960s. The relationship of forces between Japanese "moderates" and "radicals" has objectively shifted in favor of the moderates as a result of the détente. Could you explain this point a little more concretely?
For example, you have often referred to the LDP govemmental crisis as a consequence of the victory of the Vietnamese revolution. Concretely, how did that victory contribute to the governmental crisis in Japan? Alt used to be said that in the elections one-third of the voters opposed the Security Treaty, and two-thirds supported it. But nowadays, as a result of the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, one-third support the Security Treaty, one-third don't favor revising the treaty but don't support it either, and one-third oppose it. Consequently, the LDP, whose entire policy is predicated on the alliance with U.S. imperialism, has become unable to win a majority in support of its line. The present sentiment is that Japan should no longer determine its policies fundamentally in relation to Washington, but rather in relation to China. This is a direct effect the Vietnamese revolution has had on the structure of Japanese politics. 8
Q How is the political situation in Japan likely to develop in the near future? What can we expect from the new cabinet under Prime Minister Fukuda?
AWell, in the area of foreign policy, Fukuda's biggest problem is Korea. In a sense we can say that we are now entering a third period in the relationship between the Asian revolution and the govemmental crisis in Japan. The first period was from about 1968 to 1972, when China and Vietnam acted as a single element offecting Japanese imperialism and the Japan-U.S. alliance. It was then that the LDP began to lose many
Diet seats, began to collapse.
From 1972 to about 1975, we had a period during which the advance of the governmental crisis was partially blocked. That is, the rise of the moderate currents and the maintenance of the LP government expressed a widespread attitude not of opposition to the Security
Treaty, but of accepting the treaty so long as Peking approves, accepting the alliance with the United States so long as it does not lead to war with China. This period is now coming to an end.
In that sense, the recent election results reflected the mood of this past period. The effect of the new situation which has arisen in Korea this year was hardly reflected
INTERNATIONAL
Theoretical Journal of the International
Marxist Group, British Section of the
Fourth International
Contents: Volume 3 Number 2. Winter 1976
Editoriali Revolt in Southern Africa
Mike Holbrook-Jones: Lessons of the General
Strike
Denise Avenast Trotsky's Marxism-Port |
Richard Carver: The National Movements in
Euzkadi and Catalonia
Document: 'The Programme We Need'-From
IMG Conference
F. Wang: Corrections to "Memoins of a Chinese
Trotskyist"
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at all in this election. But the situation in Korea is evolving rapidly right now. You see, the détente between Peking and Washington has had a moderating effect on the situation in Japan. But the effect of the détente in Korea has been felt only for about half a year. The joint North-South Korean Declaration was issued in 1972. That was clearly done in an attempt to establish a system of peaceful coexistence on the Korean peninsula patterned after the U.S. -China and Japan-China détentes. But just at the moment when the Park regime had put forward a Joint Declaration and North Korea had agreed to it, the relationship between Park and the South Korean masses changed abruptly. In other words, the U.S. -China détente played a certain moderating role in Japanese politics, but in Korea ife onset of the détente was linked to an upsurge of the masses which immediately exacerbated the crisis of the Park regime: Consequently, Park was forced to quickly change his line. Even though a détente had been established between the United States and China, it proved impossible to do the same on the Korean peninsula. As a result, the Yushin Constitution, the State of Emergency, and the whole augmented repressive system in South Korea was established within the framework of the détente. Today, the crisis in Korea once again calls into question the moderating effect of the U.S. -China détente on Japanese politics. That is, the Security Treaty may be acceptable in relation to China, but for the Japanese masses it once again appears as a dangerous factor in view of the crisis in Korea. The Japan-U.S. alliance has now become a system for reacting to events on the Korean peninsula, and the Japan Self-Defense Forces have also become part of this joint U.S. -JapaneseSouth Korean military system. The fact that U.S. imperialism can no longer act single-handedly in Korea, that any moves in Korea will involve this whole military system, means that the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty will once again become a key issue in Japan. With South Korea Fitting into this sort of structure; we've begun to see a new movement around the problem of Korea. In June 1976, the New Current was formed by the moderates in Japan, mainly leaders of the right wing of the SP. Their aim is to establish a mass movement, further to the right than the SP's old Voice for Peace, whose support has been declining. These elements have begun to take up the problem of Korea actively. The Korean problem is clearly the Achilles Heel of the moderates" line. If the Park regime continues to exist and events in Korea take a sudden violenf tum, the whole moderate line would be wrecked. Therefore, it is urgently necessary for them to integrate Korea into the structure of the détente. We can see this in the attempts to organize a mass movement in Japan - and in America as well - to pressure the Park regime to make the necessary changes to bring Korea into the framework of the détente. This implies, in fact, replacing Park by another regime in South Korea.
In this sense, the struggle here in Japan in solidarity with the Korean people has grown in importance, spreoding rapidly beyond the narrow milieu of groups like ours based on the youth radicalization, who have carried out this activity in the past. The formation by the New Current of the Korean Problems Research Council shows that concern over Korea is reaching into the mass trade unions and political parties. The success of the recent campaign by the Korean Youth League in Japan, who gathered more than one million signatures on petitions demanding the release of political prisoners in South Korea, is also evidence of this spreoding concern. In the final analysis, Vietnam had only half the effect on Japan that it might have had, thanks to the Chinese leadership. Vietnamdid not strike a direct blow at Japanese politics. The Vietnamese revolution was just beginning to have an effect when China interfered. Hence, the victory of the Indochinese peoples was not able to play an active role in promoting apposition to the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. Vietnam is also geographically farther from Japan than Korea is. But the present problem of Koree is one which Chine cannot intervene to solve, and one which is tightly, inseparably linked with the political and economic situation in Japan. In this sense, Korea is the axis of the new situation. We now see the Japanese government carrying out a very active diplomatic policy in regard to Korea. Prime Minister Fukuda is so far postponing action on other major foreign policy questions such as Sino-Japanese relations, treating Korea as the top priority. We saw that three Japanese who had been held as political prisoners in South Korea were recently freed. That was President Park's gift to Fukuda. So the Korean question is intimately linked with the whole political situation in Japan. One of the perennial themes of certain LP politicians has been the "Red Flag over Pusan" theory. Pusan is a South Korean seaport across the straits from Japan. They say that "if the day ever comes when the red flag flies over Pusan, it won't be more than a week or two before Japan will go red, too. " We're hearing that more often these days. What about the economic policies of the new cabinet? ADuring 1976 the Japanese economy recovered a bit from the 1974-75 recession. But much of that recovery was due to a rapid expansion of export trade, which means it was at the expense of Japan's imperialist competitors. This kind of situation cannot last for long -even now the Fukuda cabinet is working hard to persuade West European governments not to enact retallatory import restrictions. In the long run, the LDP will be forced to carry out much more severe antiworking-class measures at home, to make Japanese workers pay for the long-term crisis of the capitalist economy. And Fukuda will have a much harder time putting over new affacks on the Japanese workers than he will reaching agreements with his European colleagues.
9
JAPAN The bourgeoisie and the LDP tried to enforce a massive program of speed-up and rationalization against publicsector worker in 1973 — that was the marusei "productivity program. " That aftack was defeated by the resistance of the unions. The experience of that successful struggle and the effects of the recession have deepened the rodicalization of public-sector workers. Today not only the youngest layers, but even middle-aged workers are more and more coming into motion, in spite of attempts by the leadership of Sohyo to tighten up bureaucratic control. Fukuda and the government have no choice but to launch a new round of attacks against these workers. The precarious state of the economy leaves the LDP very little room for compromise, or even for postponing the confrontation. The first main target of the Fukuda regime's economic policies will be the workers of Japan National Railways (JNR). This is partly because the JNR workers have the strongest union organization in the country. The fiscal crisis of the JNR is also a concentrated expression of problems that affect all sectors of the economy. The LDP will try to politically isolate the JNR workers from mass support by linking the workers demands to the question of raising railway fares. We saw this happen in 1976. The government demanded a 50% increase in JNR fares as a precondition for paying the 7% wage raise won by JNR workers in the 1976 shunto. The union took a position against any fare increase, and the SP carried out parliamentary maneuvers to stall passage of the legislation to raise fares. The union threatened to go on strike again to get the pay raise, but the SP reversed its position just before the strike deadline and allowed the fares to be raised. But even with that 50% fare increase, the crisis of JNR finances has not been solved, and a major confrontation with the union of JR workers was only postponed. One of the first acts of the new cabinet was to announce plans to eliminate over 100, 000 jobs in a massive ratjonalization of the freight division of JNR. So os I said, at this stage the JN workers are Fukuda's main target. If the government can defeat these workers, it will succeed in forcing the burden of inflation onto the mosses through further fare increases, it will be able to break up a powerful workers' organization, and it can resolve the most acute contradictions in the transportation industry. For us too, this struggle is a key test of how well the workers movement can stand up to the attacks that are being prepared. Q Can you tell us about the intervention of the Japanese
Trotskyists during the Lockheed scandal and the elections? AOkay, but first i should make a point about the difference between the class struggle in Japan and in
Western Europe, because it has a lot to do with our fosks. There are important historical reasons why the 10 radicalization of the Japanese working class, this process of class polarization, is not expressed af this stage in a growth of support for the mass reformist parties. The distinction between the European and Japanese workers movements results partly from the effects of the defeat of the potentially revolutionary upsurge following the surrender in 1945. The Japanese workers movement had been completely smashed prior to the war. In addition, there was no large-scale resistance movement during the war. The tremendous upsurge of 1945-47, which saw the formation of industrial unions and the explosive growth of the Communist party, was completely smashed. Industrial unions were replaced by company unions and the CP suffered heavy repression by the American occupation forces. This is in contrast to what happened in most of Europe, where real trade unions continued to exist, providing a mass base for the Social Democratic and Stalinist parties. The Japanese working class had no tradition. And lacking trodition it was unable to build lasting mass organizations during the post-surrender upsurge. The present union movement, in which some of the Sohyo unions come closest to being real trode unions, took shape during the struggles against economic rationalization in the 1950s. As a result of the defeat of workers in private industry during those struggles in the 1950s, even today only the public-sector workers have effective union organizations. This is why working-class militancy has developed for the most part in the public sector and not in the key sectors of heavy industry. In the private sector we have "enterprise unions" which collaborate with management on the shop floor and are politically pro-imperíalist. Since the early 1950s the Communist party has had no organized base whatever in the union movement. Beginning in the 1960s the CP acquired important influence within some Sohyo unions - especially teachers and local government employees - but that's all. This means that the working class has been unable to confront the capitalists and the government as a class, even on the trade-union level. There has been no experience of any sort of SP-CP united front on that level. Half of the working class is left with nothing but these pro-imperialist company unions. Therefore, when the process of radicalization begins again, there is a lack of class-struggle trodition, and the radicalization is expressed in an extremely dispersed and confused form rather than a rapid polarization reflected in votes for the SP and CP. The recent working-class struggles in Japan are not part of a continuity of accumulated experience. This is a big difference between the West European and Japanese workers movements. This also means that the Communist parties are different in some important ways. In the late 1960s the Japanese CP began to formulate a line very similar to that of its West European counterparts. But unlike what happened in Europe, this rightward evolution of the CP, culminating in explicit rejection of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, quickly eroded the base of support that the party had begun to build up among certain sectors of the working class. I guess we'd have to say that in France or Italy, when the CPs made their "right turn" they took big sections of the working class with them -all the way to renouncing the proletarian dictatorship. But the Japanese CP Found itself without a proletarian base long before it renounced the proletarian dictatorship. This is a key aspect of the political situation, and the essential nature of our task flows from this, The working class in Western Europe has the experience and the tradition of joint action by the SP and CP at both the trade-union and parliamentary levels - although it has always been class-collaborationist, not a genuine united front. There hasn't been that experience in Japan, not on any level. As a result, when you talk about a worken government, it's more difficult for a Japanese worker to visualize what you mean. Even the term "workers government" doesn't have the same meaning - or the same connotation - that it would to a European worker. In spite of this problem, we concluded at the time of our eighth national congress in January 1976 that the political situation was entering a period during which the question of a workers government would be posed objectively. This was a theme that ran through all our discussions at the congress. This discussion, however, remained somewhat abstract; we did not see any way to respond in practice to the new situation we saw developing. Less than two months after the congress, the Lockheed scandal broke and we were suddenly up against a very concrete question. We tried - and we were the only current that did so — to link the scandal to the question of power for the working class, emphasizing the need for a workers government and for workers control of Industry. The axis of our propaganda was this: bring down the corrupt LDP government, for the formation of an SP-CP government, for the nationalization under workers control of all the corporations involved in the scandal. Throughout this campaign we stressed the need for a workers united front. We also took the initiative in trying to organize united actions involving those left groups that were willing to participate. In Sendai and Osaka during the shunto we projected the Lockheed scandal os a key theme for the Sohyo's struggle. Building on that momentum, we in¡tiated a united demonstration in Tokyo on June 20, which drew about 3,000 people. Our second major arena of activity has been mobilizing the working class to support the Buraku liberation struggle and the struggles in solidarity with the Korean people. (The Buraku, or "outcasts, "are an oppressed minority in Japan - INPRECOR.) Objectively these struggles are linked to the interests of the labor movement, but they have always been isolated from the unions. We try to take these questions into the unions, to link the movements in action. For example, we propose that local unions carry out strikes in solidarity with the Buraku Liberation League. Also, as I mentioned before, the whole problem of Korea is being discussed increasingly by sections of the SP and the Sohyo leadership. We want to pose solidarity with the South Korean people's struggle as a key task of the unions. This is another issue around which we can take new polifical initiatives within the unions which cut across the existing relationship of forces between ourselves and the reformists. This will be a prime vehicle for bringing together the younger layers of unionists whose activity has generally been suppressed by the bureaucrats since To the extent that we can accomplish this second task of drawing radical young unionists back into action around the Buraku or Korean issues, we'll be in a better position to carry out the first task, advancing the process of political differentiation, forming a militant wing of the union movement which will be able to force the SP and CP leaderships into a united front. The events of the next year or so will provide several tests of our ability to do this. We have to campaign around the issue of the proposed rationalizations of the JNR. This should be the central focus of the 1977 shunto. As I mentioned before, the JR issue poses some of the central demands of our transitional program as immediate, pressing questions. In particular the demand for nationalization, workers control, our governmental slogan -these are all tied in. Why is nationalization necessary? Why do we need worken control? Unlike the past, when we've explained these things in an abstract way, the 1977 shunto will be a time when we can propagandize and agitate among working people directly around these questions. We'll find out how capable we are of intervening that way. And following soon after that struggle, there will be elections next summer for the upper house of the Diet. These two events, the shunto and the elections, will clearly measure our ability to bring together a united front of militant activists on these key questions. CORRECTION Two errors of fact crept into the article on Mauritius published in the last issue of INPRECOR (No.65, January 13, 1977). First, the Mauritian Social Democratic party left the governing coalition in December 1973 and not in 1969 as printed (page 27). Second, contrary to what is stated in the first footnote (page 29), it is not the case that the present coalition was made possible only because of the eight "corrective" seats in the Assembly added to reestablish "communal equilibrium. " The coalition parties and the MMM each took four of the "corrective" seats, but the coalition parties also won 32 of the 62 elective seats in the Assembly, against 30 for the MMM.
DEFEND THE WORKERS
FIGHTS ON IN