JAPANESE WORKERS FIGHT REACTION TO A STANDSTILL
Since August 1957 Japanese capitalism has been marking
The rate of increase in production in 1958 is estimated at only 1 %, lowest since the 0.3 % rate of the depression year of 1931. If optimistic estimates hope for an increase of 5% for 1959, it is doubtful whether this will be achieved Increases in production and productivity are particularly essential for Japanese capitalism, with a capital accumulation between 1952 and 1958 of some $ 25,000 million, and an ever more competitive world market.
As might be expected, from these economic conditions the Japanese bourgeoisie, like those of various European countries, drew the political conclusion that the labor movement must be hamstrung. It prepared various anti-labor measures against different sectors of the workers' movement, most universal and far-reaching was that presented to the Diet on October 8th in the new so-called Police Duties Revision Bill. Specifically this bill was aimed at limiting labor's right to engage in demonstrations and to form picketlines; more generally, uncontrolled discretionary powers it gave to the police, it was a first and important step toward the reimposition of an open police state.
The threat was undisguised, and not only provoked violent reactions among the rank-and-file workers, but could not be blinked by even the most hardened reformists: resistance immediate and unanimous from all workers' organiboth political and trade-union. Nation-wide strikes and other protest actions were prepared in a series of five
The early waves, though universal throughout all unions, were limited to work-stoppages or shop-rallies ranging usually from one to three hours. But as succeeded one another, the stoppages grew graver. The government attempted to get tough: after the October 28th "third wave," it victimized about 1000 railwaymen and 375 postal workers, and arrested the leaders of the teachers' union.
The workers' response was to elect substitute leaderships in case of further arrests and to redouble their militancy: on November 5th, 180,000 workers went on 24-hour strikes and some 4,500,000 members of both the leftist Sohyo and the rightist Zenro unions held stoppages and rallies of three or more hours. What was particularly significant of the workers' attitude was that in many regions and trades, unions went far beyond the instructions received from the cautious national centres, and innumerable rank-and-file militants called for a general strike of unlimited duration. The reformist trade-union leaders found themselves between fires : to save their bureaucratic skins they had to fight the bill, but they were soon in danger of being unable to keep the militancy of the rank and file within reformist bounds. The potentially revolutionary nature of the crisis beginning in Japanese capitalism began to show through.
After 45 days of these mounting waves, the last 19 of them heightened in tension by a continuous crisis within the Diet, the government had to admit defeat by withdrawing the Police Duties Revision Bill. This major and unquestionable victory of the Japanese working class not only is heartening in itself but considerably changed the political climate in Japan. The leaders of Sohyo, after the victory, tried to cancel plans for the fifth "wave," scheduled for November 26th, and though the wave was therefore mostly quieter than previous ones, many workers wanted not to stop at the stage of having blocked the government's plans but to ahead. The National Coal Miners' Union staged a 24-hour nation-wide strike, the telecommunication workers, agricultural ministry workers, and non-nationalized railway workers held militant rallies, and the teachers boycotted classes and transformed the goal of the struggle into a drive for year-end bonuses and against the teachers' efficiencyrating system, a device for weeding out militants.
On October 16th, as part of the tactic of fighting the police powers bill, the reformists formed a "People's Congress," representing 5,000,000 workers and over 1,000,000 students, intellectuals, and other pro-labor elements. The reformists tried to keep this congress within a framework of a pressure tactic, but it soon rendered them very uneasy by tending to consider itself a rival to the bourgeois parliament, and they had nightmares that it might prove an embryo of dual power. It did not, of course, and has been officially "put on the shelf," but it is conceivable that we have not heard the last of this curious and interesting body.
Thus the Japanese bourgeoisie - trying, in the present conjuncture, like those in other capitalist powers, to take back what gains the workers had forced out of it — has been, in its first major anti-labor offensive, set back on its heels, hard, by an aroused and dynamic working class. The result for the moment is an uneasy and unstable truce. The government is concentrating its efforts on trying to isolate the more militant and politically conscious workers from the masses as a whole. On their side, the workers are planning struggles for a minimum-wage system and against the US -Japanese Security Treaty.
The general tendency to political polarization and the increasing strain between the revolutionary instincts of the workers and the reformist practices of the traditional workers'
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL leaderships is at the moment particularly reflected in rising disputes within the Socialist Party. Its leftist theoretical leader, Professor Sakisaka, recently published an article in which he criticized the rightist leaders of the party as a urely parliamentar fraction. To their denial of the class haracter of the S P, he opposed the affirmation that it i and must be a class party of the workers, even if it is not a majority in the population. rejecting the armed insurrection as a means of revolution, he proposed the general strike as necesary for the seizure of power. His declaration was supported by the chairman and general secretary of the Sohyo, Ota and Iwai, and, on the basis of it, a left fraction
15 in the SP is being formally organized. It is visible here that the left tendency in the SP is reflecting mass pressure from the ranks, while the right remains as ever a tool of the bourgeoisie in a quite unmixed way.
It is evident that the fight over the Police Duties Revision Bill was only the first round in a continuing battle. The magnificent way in which the courageous Japanese workers, despite timorous reformist leadership, sent the bourgeois enemy reeling back from its first offensive augurs well for its capacity to contain and by counter-attacking to roll back its tireless class antagonist.