WARNS AGAINST RISE OF FASCISM IN JAPAN
The Japan Times Weekly reported June 17 that Ryokichi Minobe, the first Socialist governor of Tokyo, warned recently that "Japan is gradually becoming fascist in its thinking."
Minobe said the economic situation
in Japan today is similar to that between
1925 and 1930, just before the world de-
pression leading to the militarists' rise
to power.
TENG HSIAO-PING
TENG HSIAO-PING
ITALIAN CP LEADER ATTACKS CUBAN POSITIONS
By Livio Maitan
{The following article has been translated from the June 1 issue of Bandiera Rossa the newspaper of the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari, the Italian section of the Fourth International. ]
*x* * *
The mid-May meeting of the Central Committee of the PCI [Partito Comunista d'Italia ~- Communist party of Italy] has shed rather more light than previous sessions on the current preoccupations, orientation, and contradictions of the party's leading group.
For at least two reasons it was inevitable that the Vietnam war would become the focal point of discussion: first of all, because objectively, it is the key question with which all others are bound up; and, secondly, because the party's policy as regards questions closer to home like trade-union struggles or the attitude to be taken toward programming* is presently too vague to be likely to stir much activity or even any new discussion (except a discussion arising from a radical criticism of this policy).
Even on the question of the fight for Vietnam, the PCI's position presents some difficulties. On the one hand, the leading group is trying to bring pressure to bear on the government through the socialists, or a part of them, and through some Christian Democratic groups} and thus tends to adapt its organizational methods and even its slogans to this end. On the other hand, however, it is forced to undertake more thoroughgoing actions, particularly as the escalation mounts and creates a more and more tense situation, and also to avoid getting into difficulties with the masses which might be set in motion in this phase.
With Amendola's speech, the final motion, and a series of comments voiced at this session, the Central Committee has indicated quite clearly along what lines the party's activity will develop in the immediate future.
First of all, the PCI, reaffirming its total rejection of the Chinese, is beginning to polemicize against some of the basic ideas of Fidel Castro and the Cuban CP. This polemic had already been underway for sometime in the form of a
*Programmazione -- The bourgeois substitute for socialist planning. [Translator.] conspiracy of silence or a rigorous censorship -- it is sufficient to recall how little space the party publications devoted to Fidel's speech of March 13 and the summary reports of Che Guevara's message, to which 1'Unita gave not a tenth the space it gave a message shortly preceding it -- Pope Paul VI's Populorum progressio.
With Amendola's speech, this polemic became overt, despite the fact that it was launched formally against "some groups" (but can anyone be unaware of the fact that the strategy of three or four Vietnams was not invented by "our armchair strategists," but by the leader of the Cuban Revolution?)