Stop sectarian violence in the workers movement
For an end to Chukaku attacks on the JRCL
JAPAN. On January 9 four members of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL), Japanese section of the Fourth International, were brutally attacked by commandos of the Chukaku (Core Faction), a left centrist organisation in the process of sectarian degeneration. Over the last ten years this group has specialised in violent attacks on other revolutionary groups. To this end it has even adopted a clandestine-type structure.
The January 9 attacks were carefully co-ordinated, simultaneously directed against two comrades in Tokyo and two other comrades of the JRCL in Osaka-Kobe. The next day a member of the youth organisation of the JRCL was viciously attacked by a similar group of Chukaku goons. The five Trotskyist militants — a printworker, a factory worker, a municipal employee, a JRCL fulltimer and a student - were all attacked by a group of five to six persons aiming to inflict serious physical damage. The militants who were attacked will now be hospitalised for a considerable period with broken legs and, in one case, a severe skull fracture. They could suffer serious effects from their injuries for the rest of their lives.
The Chukaku group, responsible for acts of violence worthy of the worst Stalinist and social-democratic practices, was one of the largest organisations of the Japanese revolutionary left that came out of the recomposition in the mid-1960s. A good number of the groups that appeared then were seriously damaged damaged by the 'Uchi-geva' (internecine wars) that developed during the 1970s after the collapse of the huge youth mobilisations against imperialism. The Chukaku was active in all these violent confrontations.
One of the great political merits of the Japanese section of the Fourth International, which is also a product of the same wave of youth radicalisation, is that it always refused to get caught up in these uchi-geva and has held to its course of rejecting confrontations between organisations claiming to be for workers struggle and revolution. It is to the great honour of the Japanese Trotskyists that they have kept all their efforts for the struggle against the bourgeois state and its armed reresentatives patterned on the huge mobilisations of the 1970s.
The JRCL, a number of whose leaders and activists are from the militant Zengakuren student movement - led by the Communist Party during the latter half of the 1950s - took an active part in the mobilisations in support of the struggle of the Sanrizuka farmers against the construction of the new Tokyo international airport at Narita during the 1970s. Following the role played by the JRCL in the main actions of 26 March 1978, when a control tower of the new airport was occupied by demonstrators, almost 200 members of the organisation were arrested and imprisoned. Several members of the JRCL are still in prison and likely to be there for many years to come unless the pressure of an international solidarity campaign succeeds in winning their release. (1)
This is the organisation that the Chukaku has decided to attack physically. This intent was confirmed by an official statement that appeared in the Chukaku weekly newspaper Zenshin (Forward) on January 23, 1984. They explained that it was a question for them of 'stamping out the counterrevolutionary Fourth International', the JRCL being defined as the agent of Japanese imperialism and the airport authority.
Above and beyond the revolting and unacceptable character of the terrorist methods used by the Chukaku, even beyond the counter-revolutionary actions aimed at the whole of the Fourth International through the bloody aggression aimed at the miliInternational Viewpoint 26 March 1984 elzana 41:
Occupation of the Narita airport control tower (DR)
tants of its Japanese section, the truth is that this group has plunged into an ever-increasing spiral of violence - reflected in its attacks on the JRCL - in order to try and cover up its deep political and organisational crisis.
Tokyo handed down very heavy
1.
In June 1981 the law court in sentences against 14 activists, 12 of whom were members of the JRCL who had taken part in the occupation of the airport control tower at
Narita.
3
----- photo credits and running heads -----
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The background to this crazy and violent sectarian orientation is the defeat suffered by the Chukaku in the debate on strategy for the struggle against the new airport at Narita. Traditionally, one of the fundamental rules for the solidarity of political groups within this movement has been absolute respect for the decisions of the Farmers Opposition League of Sanrizuka and Shibayama, whatever the point of view of the revolutionary organisations themselves. This principle very largely explains the combativity and the long duration of the Sanrizuka farmers struggle - which the Chukaku group is now challenging.
The central point in debate within the Farmers Opposition League was the proposal to organise a campaign to get a large number of people to become joint-owners of small plots of land in the area where the second airport runway is to be built. The Chukaku opposed this proposal in a particularly sectarian and ultimatistic fashion. Stepping up their sectarian attacks against the Sanrizuka farmers, they described this as a 'campaign to sell the land to the airport authority for the second-phase project of the airport construction', and thus as a capitulation to the
The third assembly of the Farmers Opposition League then decided to break all relations with the Chukaku, by a large majority (145 for, 25 against and 24 abstentions). A very small number of farmers from the League will follow the Chukaku in setting up a new minority league.
While the campaign for the sale of small plots is growing, some 1,000 people having undertaken to pay 10,000 yen (about 30 US dollars) for this, the Chukaku are continuing with threatening acts directed towards the farmers of Sanrizuka. They have tried to prevent certain public meetings, being particularly violently opposed to a meeting on September 15, 1983, called by the League on the site where the second airport runway is to be built. They made every effort on this occasion to intimidate people who came there voluntarily to buy a plot of land.
The attack at the beginning of January this year against the members of the JRCL is thus, for the Chukaku, in line with their conscious opposition to the independent activity of the Sanrizuka farmers. It is yet another step up of the violence that they try to justify by sectarian ultimatistic and irresponsible 'political argumentation'. In fact, according to the Chukaku, the majority of the Farmers Opposition League as well as the JRCL are 'traitors' and 'counterrevolutionary agents' of imperialism and the Japanese government, 'undermining' the struggle against the airport from within. The farmers and the JCRL have turned against the struggle, the Chukaku say, under the pressure of the 'currently polarising political situation' sharpened progressively by the 'revolutionary armed struggle' of the Chukkaku's 'Revolutionary Army'. Thus, for this gravely degenerating group, 'the immediate and main task' is to 'smash and stamp out' what it considers to be an obstacle to the struggle against the airport. In the December 12, 1983 issue of their weekly newspaper the Chukaku tried to justify this unjustifiable policy by writing:
*Having transformed themselves qualitatively and thoroughly the dropped-out farmers and the Fourth International are the foremost of the deserters who have manoeuvred to disarm the Sanrizuka struggle and who have worked to clear the way for the second phase of the airport construction by the Japanese imperialists and the airport authorities. The dropped-out farmers and the Fourth International have revealed themselves openly and have begun their destructive attacks against the Sanrizuka struggle as the genuine force of reaction. Therefore, the struggle against the planned second-phase construction by Japanese imperialism and the airport authority is to smash the dropped-out farmers and the Fourth International. out smashing and stamping out the dropped-out farmers and the Fourth International there is no stopping phase construction. To smash the dropped-out farmers and the Fourth International is the strategic link for the struggle to stop the second-phase construction.'
The terrorist spiral of the Chukaku is not only an intolerable act of violence within the workers movement but it is an attack against one of the most advanced struggles of the mass movement, that is the fight of the Sanrizuka farmers which has now lasted for almost twenty years. Far from taking on the bourgeois state, the Chukaku is saving its blows for the majority of the Farmers Opposition League, and for the JRCL which supports their struggle. By so doing, it does good service to the class enemy and its repressive forces.
From this point of view the action of the Chukaku only serves to give the police an opportunity for an offensive against the sectors in struggle and those who support them. This is the appreciation that the Central Committee of the JRCL adopted at its January meeting in a resolution outlining its attitude towards the attacks that have been made on its members.
In this resolution, published in the JRCL journal, Sekai Kakumei (World Revolution), on January 30, 1984, the Japanese Section of the Fourth International explained that 'seeing the Chukaku's attacks as a good occasion the police began provocative attacks'. In fact, 'parallel to the Chukaku's terrorist attacks, the police has intensified its intelligence and intimidation activities against the JRCL, with the aim of drawing the latter into the internecine violence. The police consider this is the best way to land a heavy blow against the JRCL
The JRCL, refusing to get involved in these uchi-geva and to fall into the trap held out by the Chukaku and used by the police, publicly addressed itself to all the activists of the Sanrizuka struggle and those who supported them, in order to strongly condemn the activities of which it had been the victim, and to build a 'broad and powerful campaign against the terrorist attacks of the Chukaku' in order to stop the attacks of this degenerate group against the JRCL. In this campaign the JRCL addressed itself to all the sectors of the mass movement, and particularly the trade-union class-struggle current organised around the journal Rohdoh Johoh (Labour Information) which supports the Sanrizuka farmers struggle. The JRCL has also acted to ensure the defence of its organisation and members against the Chukaku's attacks and against the police provocations that accompany them.
It is in the framework of this campaign against sectarian physical violence, for respect for the principles of democratic debate in the workers and peoples movement and of autonomy for the bodies that mobilise the mass movement, that the JRCL has made an appeal for international solidarity. For the present, this will consist of widespread information in the workers and democratic movements on the situation created by the terrorist attacks of the Chukaku against JRCL members. ity action could also take the form of support messages to the comrades of the JRCL at the following address: Shinjidai-sha, 5-13-17 Shiba, Minatoku, Tokyo, Japan. Also important would be statements by well-known democratic figures denouncing the terrorist attacks against the JRCL for their unconditional support to the struggle of the Sanrizuka farmers, condemning all forms of violence in the workers and popular movement in Japan, opposing all use of this situation for their own profit by the state repressive forces and demanding the release of the activists imprisoned for years for their participation in the mobilisations of March 26, 1978.
International Viewpoint International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
hoped, moreover, to establish itself as the new gendarme in the region, replacing the shah's state.
If the Iraqi regime had managed to break up the Iranian state in the war, it could have even realized the old Arab nationalist dream of annexing the oil-