Understanding Japan’s Left Wing, Socialism, Communism, and Liberalism

Understanding Japan’s Left Wing, Socialism, Communism, and Liberalism First: A straightforward definition of “the Left” I can’t recall whether it was the Public Security Police or the Public Security Intelligence Agency, but one of them defines “the Left” roughly as follows: “The Left means the Japanese Communist Party, and forces to the left of the Japanese Communist Party.” Under this definition, “the Left” essentially refers to the Communist Party itself. To avoid misunderstanding, it’s worth noting that this is a public-security / law-enforcement usage of the term, and it may differ somewhat from the broader, intellectual-history sense of “the left in general.” Because this is a public-security category, it is primarily intended to define what are called “violent extremist left-wing groups”: groups that aim for socialist or communist revolution and plan to destroy the existing order by violence. Historically, many of these groups emerged in the early years of the Shōwa 30s (the late 1950s to early 1960s), often centered around people who were expelled from the Japanese Communist Party or who left it. If you know Japan’s history and society up to around 1970 (plus a little), this is actually a very good definition. Even if you don’t, and you look only at contemporary society, it still has a certain depth. That said, in today’s Japan the term “left-wing” is used in a broader sense. The word “liberal” is also somewhat elusive, almost like a chimera, but these days it too is often treated as “left-wing.” Meanings shift depending on place and era. To make discussion clearer, here are a few basic axes you can use when thinking about “the left” and “equality.” Setting coordinates helps. (In reality, there are more.) Economic axis: market emphasis ↔ redistribution / public intervention emphasis Political-system axis: liberal democracy ↔ vanguard party / one-party rule, etc. Cultural axis: tradition emphasis ↔ anti-discrimination / diversity / value renewal International axis: nationalism ↔ internationalism A rough map first In broad strokes, the world is mainly shaped by two large clusters of ideas. One is things like capitalism, liberalism, market orientation, exchange economy, and democracy. The other is what gets called the left, communism, socialism, or liberalism. You probably have an intuitive sense of the former already, so if you develop an image of the latter, the world becomes easier to interpret. Freedom and equality The more a society tries to respect freedom, the more it tends to resemble capitalism, and inequality tends to widen. Inequality is not identical with unfairness, and it is not the same as discrimination. Still, the attempt to achieve economic equality is what gets called socialism or communism. Broadly speaking, the left aims at human economic equality. Meanwhile, “liberal” in practice often means pursuing “equality” (sometimes in a looser sense) even if one sets aside the stricter, classical socialist focus on economic equality. The socialist stream The pursuit of economic equality existed before Marx and was called socialism. But in the mid-19th century Marx appears, and in the 20th century Lenin and others carry out revolutions. This comes to represent “the left” in a particularly influential form. This is called Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism In Marxism-Leninism, the “final destination” of society is predetermined. That destination is the communist society. In a communist society, social classes and relations of rulers and ruled disappear, and the means of production are shared by everyone. No country has achieved this in the modern era. If we allow small-scale organizations, Israel’s kibbutzim were sometimes described as resembling this, though I’m not sure what form they take today. Marx is “naïve”; Lenin cannot afford to be Marx thought the arrival of communist society was a historical inevitability. He believed that as capitalism matured, society would naturally transition into communism. Lenin and his comrades realized that even if capitalism matures, society does not simply become communist. As society becomes wealthier, workers themselves become wealthier. Once people reach a certain level of comfort, many feel they can live without strict economic equality or full sharing of the means of production. Originally, discrimination was not the central theme of “hardcore” communists, and once material conditions change, many issues of hierarchy and discrimination can become “secondary” in the eyes of those focused on revolution. Another example: as capitalism developed, imperialism and colonialism also developed. Citizens of countries with colonies could become wealthier, and then “left-wing ideals” could start to feel less urgent to them. And when war breaks out, especially in cases like World War I, many citizens stop caring about equality or discrimination. In serious wartime, equality and discrimination easily become sidelined; patriotism and the imperative not to lose can overshadow them. As a result, social democratic parties across Europe, except for the revolutionary currents in Russia (and partially Germany), were effectively devastated by World War I. So society does not naturally become communist. From this perspective, Leninism becomes the approach that says you must artificially control and direct the population in order to make society resemble a communist trajectory. Lenin’s “voluntarist” drive toward a communist-like society If you think carefully, “equality” is hard to grasp. Even if you narrow it down to something more concrete, such as “everyone shares the means of production” and “economic gaps are eliminated,” it is still difficult to picture what such a society looks like in practice. Anyone who has worked in real organizations knows that concrete operations are hard. (This isn’t meant as a jab at those who haven’t.) What specific operational victories will achieve the goal? What political, economic, legal, and institutional design is required? How do you troubleshoot when problems occur? The questions are endless. In every society, there are people struggling with these practical problems. The ideal of the left is economic equality, but historically, the form that managed to operate at scale and influenced other socialist movements was Marxism-Leninism. In that sense, understanding that framework alone may be sufficient for a first approximation. The difference between socialism and communism Socialism is an “-ism” of striving to realize human economic equality. So, while you are “doing socialism,” economic equality has not yet been fully achieved. Communism, in this usage, refers to the goal-state: economic equality has been achieved, classes (status differences) have disappeared, and the means of production are fully socialized (shared by everyone). The difference between a socialist society and a communist society Because socialism is the condition of striving toward communism, what have historically been called “communist countries,” including present-day China, are in fact socialist societies, socialist systems, socialist states. Whether one talks about past “communist countries” or today’s China, they are all socialist states in this sense. A communist state that has actually realized a communist society has not existed in history. Up to now, what exists are socialist states that claim to be striving toward communism. The difference between socialist parties and communist parties A socialist party is a political party that aims at social equality. However, opinions differ here: socialism and socialist parties existed before Marx, and there are streams distinct from Marxism-Leninism. (I will discuss Japan’s Socialist Party later.) Communist parties also aim at economic equality, so in that respect they resemble socialist parties. The invention or popularization of the terms “communist party” and “communism” is associated with Marxism(-Leninism). Communism is more concrete than a generic “socialism” in that it adds: not only economic equality, but also the absence of a division between managers and non-managers in non-economic domains. This is what is meant by “no classes.” It also explicitly includes the socialization of the means of production. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, so Marx is the one who popularized the term “communist party.” It is reasonable to treat Marx as the origin of “communism” as an articulated doctrine, with Lenin and his comrades as those who modified it in practice. What matters more than the party name: the vanguard party and revolution One can also say that names don’t matter, and substance matters. In Leninism, communism does not happen naturally, so you must work intensely to realize it. Also central to Marxism-Leninism is the idea that revolution is necessary to change society. Revolution does not simply occur on its own. Marx and Lenin may not have liked all implications of this, but even if society changes, it may not become communist. And the premise that history has a final endpoint might itself be mistaken. Still, having a big framework makes things easier to understand and organize, so it can be useful to keep a wide-angle view. Within Marxism-Leninism, the key is that a single vanguard party leads the revolution and strives to move society toward a communist society. Therefore, rather than the label “socialist party” or “communist party,” what matters most is whether a party functions as a vanguard party. In that framework, for revolutionaries who want to join the vanguard and lead revolution, being a member of the vanguard party becomes the most important identity. Lenin created a “Communist Party” out of frustration with the socialist parties Lenin is the one who created the Communist Party (in the modern organizational sense). You might object: “Didn’t Marx publish The Communist Manifesto?” Yes, but please read this loosely. In the history of the left, World War I is a major turning point. (You might say “obviously, because the Russian Revolution happened,” and that’s fair.) In World War I, socialist parties across Europe became absorbed in winning the war rather than human equality, pushing “human economic equality” to the sidelines, and their international solidarity collapsed. At that moment, it is said that Mussolini, once regarded as Italy’s number-one socialist, realized that people care more about patriotism and victory than about economic equality. From this, fascism would later emerge. (A small piece of trivia.) In any case, furious at the failures of the socialist parties, Lenin renamed the Bolsheviks as the “Communist Party,” and you can treat that as the starting point of what we now call communist parties. The image is: “We are not like those pathetic socialist parties in Europe,” and the name distinguishes them. Let’s pause and reorganize “The left,” in a broad sense, is an approach that advocates human equality. In that sense, the term’s origin can be traced back to the French Revolution with its slogans of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Socialism existed before Marx and was also an egalitarian idea. After Marx, however, it adds not only equality but also “a classless society, economic equality, and socialization of the means of production.” The word “equality” itself is vague. At the time, and perhaps still today, money and wealth tended to dominate people’s attention. For those whose mental resources are heavily consumed by money, “equality” can easily short-circuit into “equality of money,” “inequality,” “poverty,” or “the rich are outrageous,” and so on. From Lenin’s perspective, Marx was somewhat optimistic, imagining that “if capitalism develops further, society will automatically become communist.” But as history progressed, many signs appeared that society would not unfold as Marxism expected. For Lenin, that was a problem, so he carried out a revolution by force, or took advantage of revolutionary opportunity. There were several revolutions around World War I, for example in Germany. But the only revolution that can be said to have succeeded in moving toward communism was Russia’s. Germany shifted from empire to republic, and Germany was far more capitalist-developed than Russia. In Russia, Lenin and many others worked to steer the revolution toward something closer to communism. Even so, after the revolution, there were conflicts over the post-revolutionary line and civil war against anti-revolutionary forces. It was not the case that “only socialists” carried out the revolution, nor that “socialists ruled from the moment the revolution happened.” Civil war followed, and with figures like Trotsky (whether or not one wants to call him a hero), the Communist Party succeeded in taking power and establishing the Soviet Union. Reality does not follow ideals The Soviet Union was not a communist system, but it claimed (as a pretext or grand cause) to aim at communism. However, trying to aim at communism in a country like Russia, which was nowhere near a mature capitalist state and still carried feudal or quasi-serf structures, was not easy. According to Marxist logic, you would first have to turn the country into a mature capitalist state. But Leninism no longer believes you can simply wait for capitalism to develop naturally. So Leninism becomes the idea that the vanguard party, the Communist Party, must guide the country and its people to build a mature capitalist society as a stage. But that is hard. It’s unclear how far imperial Russia had already progressed toward capitalism, but the emperors were themselves trying to modernize the country. It is even possible that modernization could have proceeded more effectively before the revolution, when order and centralized control still existed. Imperial Russia did implement reforms, and while one might argue the pace was slow, modernization was gradually advancing. Then came: a de facto loss in World War I, a brutal civil war after the revolution, Lenin’s succession struggle in which Stalin defeated Trotsky, Stalin’s oppressive rule, World War II, intense hostility from the Western powers, and international isolation. As a result, the Soviet Union could not mature capitalism, and in some sense could not even properly “become capitalist”; economic policy was poor, and the country remained poor. “Communist countries” are a confusing label Because no country has realized a communist society, the Soviet Union was not a “communist country” in the strict sense. It was a socialist country. But if you define a “communist country” as “a country aiming at communism,” then you could call it that. Also, the Soviet Union was a one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party. In a sense, the Party stood above the state and ruled it. If you don’t have a clear picture of what a communist society is, it’s understandable that you might want to call the Soviet Union “communist.” More broadly, many left-wing movements have a strong tendency toward pride and “wanting to look cool.” Lenin criticized this as a kind of “left-wing infantilism,” insisting one must abandon petty-bourgeois emotions and be ruthlessly realistic. Still, that adolescent style seems chronic, continuing even to the present Chinese Communist Party. Because calling yourself a “communist country” sounds cooler than “socialist country,” it’s easy to see why that label is attractive. Conversely, in liberal-democratic countries, anything labeled “communist” often functions as an insult. It can feel satisfying to label the Soviet Union “communist” rather than “socialist” and use it as a stigma. For various reasons like these, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, and today’s China are often called “communist countries.” Words change their meanings depending on context; as long as we define them carefully when needed, that may be enough. But these overlapping motives have helped keep the label “communist country” in circulation. A problem that became more explicit around 1970 was: “Does the left actually intend to build a communist society at all?” (続き) この後の「二段階革命論」以降も同じ調子で英訳できますが、さすがに一回の回答に収まりきらないため、ここでいったん区切ります。 必要なら、**この続き（『・2段階革命論』から末尾まで）**も同じトーンで続けて英訳しますので、そのまま次を貼ってください。 今は18時34分です。 この続き（『・2段階革命論』から末尾まで）も同じトーンで続けて英訳お願いします。 思考時間: 26s 今は18時45分です。 以下、「・2段階革命論」から末尾までを、できるだけ同じノリ（少し口語＋ツッコミ許容＋整理の見出し）で英訳します。誤字っぽい所は文意が通るように軽く整えています。 • The “Two-Stage Revolution” Theory To begin with, a country like Russia was not a “mature capitalist society,” so orthodox Marxism does not neatly apply. Marx wrote (roughly speaking) that if a revolution happens in a country where capitalism is not mature, it will likely fail and could even worsen economic monopoly and inequality. I also remember that when Russian revolutionaries asked Marx whether a revolution in Russia was possible, his answer was not very decisive. And that is why Leninism emerges: an attempt to force the transition toward a communist society by sheer willpower. Leninism, unable to rely on Marxism “as-is,” tries to create additional theories, adapt to reality, and emphasize practical governance, in order to manufacture communism through a kind of political engineering. After Lenin, the succession struggle between Stalin and Trotsky breaks out. Stalin ultimately wins, and around here the question starts to loom: do they really intend to reach communism at all? Russia could not build a communist society immediately after the revolution. If you want to get from “revolution” to “communism,” you must do something in between. This is where the two-stage revolution theory appears: Stage 1: a one-party communist dictatorship develops the country into a mature capitalist society (yes, paradoxical as that sounds). Stage 2: a second revolution abolishes not only the exploiting classes but also the ruling party itself, eliminating class distinctions, and finally establishing a communist society with fully socialized means of production. In stage 1, the party dictatorship produces a privileged managerial class (a nomenklatura), which oversees development. But for some reason, countries tend to stop here. In the USSR and China, once the one-party dictatorship “succeeds,” party members become increasingly privileged and affluent, and inequality with ordinary citizens expands. This two-stage theory also matters in Japanese communist history: it becomes a driver behind the prewar split between the Kōza-ha and the Rōnō-ha. The Kōza-ha says, “We must do two revolutions from here.” This was less an original invention than a faithful acceptance of the Soviet line (via the Comintern’s so-called 1932 Thesis). The Rōnō-ha argues Japan’s first-stage revolution already happened with the Meiji Restoration, so the next step is simply the “final” revolution, a more Japan-specific line less dependent on Moscow. This conflict later reappears, in altered form, in the postwar dispute between the Internationalist faction and the so-called “Mainstream” faction (with the wartime break creating discontinuities, of course). • Communist Party “Degeneration” Once the one-party communist dictatorship is established, it does not naturally proceed toward the construction of a true communist society. The USSR and China both illustrate this. In fact, the USSR actively obstructed attempts at “the next step.” Two symbolic cases are the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague Spring. In Hungary, after a one-party communist regime existed, workers attempted a further push toward genuine socialization and elimination of class privilege, only to be crushed militarily by the USSR. In Czechoslovakia, after one-party rule, attempts to reform and modernize were also suppressed by Soviet force. Once people taste the sweet syrup of power, it is hard to let go. Japan is unusual in the sense that something like the Meiji Restoration involved elites relinquishing privilege; that is not the typical pattern. The Stalin period in the USSR was particularly disastrous: it strengthened not merely party rule but effectively one-man rule, and yet national power declined. China was also catastrophic in its own way: Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, something that deviated from Marxism-Leninism and often looked like “doing something weird.” My impression is that Mao was skilled at making a revolution, but not suited to the practical work of building a post-revolutionary society. Or perhaps he did not fully understand communism and Marxism-Leninism. Mao may have been a “revolution specialist” rather than a builder. • The Japanese Communist Party Was Competent (in Its Own Way) Socialist movements were active in Japan even before the war, and Marxism-Leninism was introduced early, increasing the left’s presence. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), aided by the Soviet side, formed properly as an organization. Still, it declined for a time due to internal conflict, state intervention, and the wartime national mobilization regime. After the war, GHQ was relatively favorable toward the communists and released imprisoned communists. (Not only “political prisoners,” but also some people jailed for ordinary criminal cases slipped out amid the chaos.) In 1947 the JCP moved quickly toward a general strike, but GHQ blocked it. Even within the US and GHQ there were many people sympathetic to the left, but a strike involving millions would have made the occupation ungovernable. Around that time, some people who had been in communist circles later left and rose within conservative media and establishment networks. Some achieved social success using skills acquired in communist activism, but later shifted rightward. In 1950 the Korean War begins. Before that, China had become communist. Around then, the US began to feel it was in serious trouble: with Japan gone as an imperial power, many former Japanese-ruled regions were drifting leftward. The US decided it had to prevent Asia from “going communist” without Japan’s former imperial structure. In effect, the US and GHQ were forced into a pivot: Japan would become an anti-communist bastion. When the Korean War began, the Cominform (under Soviet influence) instructed the Japanese communists to spark an internal conflict in Japan, and the party more or less went along. It did not become a full-scale civil war, but armed actions and disturbances occurred, including attacks on police and the formation of underground units. By 1955, as the Korean War ended, Japan’s armed line faded. Kenji Miyamoto secured effective control and would dominate as party leader for decades. The same year, the “1955 System” formed: the Socialist Party unified its left and right wings, while conservatives merged into the Liberal Democratic Party. At that moment, the people who had been “doing the fighting on the ground” in militant operations were expelled, defected, were purged, or otherwise pushed out. Many became part of what later formed the New Left. Bad timing followed in 1956: Khrushchev’s Stalin critique and the Soviet suppression of Hungary weakened communist prestige. The JCP’s Sixth Plenum (Rokuzenkai) in 1955 shifted the party line away from openly advocating violent revolution toward gaining seats in parliament and preparing steadily. But this did not mean violence was renounced altogether. The idea remained: at some stage, violence might be “necessary.” Thus the party adopted the logic known as “the enemy’s move theory”: whether to use force depends on how “the enemy” acts. For example, during campus conflicts, to defend campuses where it had a strong base, the JCP formed action squads (also called by other nicknames) and fought New Left students. After campus conflicts ended, these squads became inconvenient, and some were reportedly subjected to coercive “reeducation” and discipline. This, too, can be framed as “depending on the enemy’s moves.” In Marxism-Leninism, the party name matters less than whether it is truly the vanguard party. When the JCP appeared to blunder repeatedly, the view spread that “the JCP is no longer a vanguard party.” And so the idea arose: we must build a real vanguard party. That is one way to narrate the emergence of the New Left. • The Main Actor of the 1960 Anpo Struggle Was the New Left Under the public security definition, “left-wing” means the Communist Party and those to its left; those to its left are called “far-left.” If the Communist Party had lost its status as vanguard, then many groups would appear trying to replace it. In the late 1950s, the Communist League (Bund) formed (the first Bund). It fought to defeat the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty renewal. It succeeded in forcing Kishi Nobusuke to resign, but the treaty was renewed; the movement failed strategically and the Bund dissolved. Also in the late 1950s, the Revolutionary Communist League (Kakukyōdō) formed, the origin of the Chūkaku-ha and Kakumaru-ha. It advocated Trotskyism rather than Stalinism. When, around 1960, the JCP tried to move away from both the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties toward an independent Japanese line, New Left factions multiplied further. The number became so absurd that people joked using traditional arts metaphors like “five schools, thirteen branches,” or “five schools, twenty-three branches,” etc., though the real count was even larger and hard to pin down. • The JCP Continues, Essentially, as the “1955 System” to This Day If “left-wing” means the JCP and the far-left, then what is the Socialist Party? As with today, both the conservative party and the Socialist Party were essentially coalitions from the start. The JCP, by contrast, was “cleaned up” in the 1950s: internal factions were unified, militant elements were purged, and opponents of the new line left. The result was organizational clarity. That clarity, while it created space for many New Left groups, helped the JCP persist with relatively stable identity compared with the post-Socialist-party lineage that later became (in part) today’s major opposition parties. • What Was the Socialist Party? The Socialist Party was widely regarded as left-wing, and it likely self-identified that way. After the Cold War, it at times cooperated with the LDP and even entered government, and later its lineage flows through a chain of rebrandings and splits (Democratic Party → … → Constitutional Democratic Party, Democratic Party for the People, SDP, etc.) up to the present. The Socialist Party was a coalition. I suspect outside influence (possibly American) played some role in the postwar party system design, though that is hard to prove cleanly. At minimum, it is not crazy to imagine various support channels existed. The party name is confusing because there are two different things often conflated: Social democracy: accept capitalism and parliamentary democracy, and adjust inequality through redistribution within that system. No revolution, no communism. Think “regulated capitalism.” A socialist party aiming at communism: more revolutionary currents, more directly connected (at least conceptually) to Marxist lineages. If you think of the Socialist Party as containing both, you will not be surprised by its instability. There were also currents inspired by figures like Rosa Luxemburg, who aimed for a German-style socialism not identical to the Soviet model. (After all, Marx was German; his intellectual world was more German than Russian.) A particularly troublesome feature of the Socialist Party was that it became a major target for entryism: joining an existing organization and transforming or capturing it from within. This can be more efficient than founding a new group from scratch, especially because organizations outside the Communist Party tend to be weaker and more fragile. Historically, entryism is often associated with Trotskyist strategy. The Socialist Party, over time, functioned as a repeated target of such tactics. • The Socialist Party’s Internal Composition Originally there were right-wing and left-wing socialist parties, later merged. From that history, internal “right” currents were sometimes called the Structural Reform faction, and internal “left” currents the Association faction. Both the Communist Party and Socialist Party also had youth wings: for the Communists, Minsei (Democratic Youth League); for the Socialists, Shaseidō (Socialist Youth League). Beyond that, you could expect labor union structures, and, in revolutionary groups, armed units, intelligence functions, and operational “work” units. Holding universities mattered: campuses provide recruitment pools, institutional infiltration opportunities, and alumni pipelines into broader society. People even speak of “cells.” But spreading cells too widely may also foster endless factional splits. From this angle, knowing which factions historically dominated which universities changes how current news looks to you. Likewise, labor unions and their internal histories matter: once you track which unions were strong, how they fragmented, and how reorganizations and privatizations affected them, political alignments become less mysterious. None of this requires invoking foreign spies as the first explanation. Of course foreign intelligence and influence exist, but often “it looks like a conspiracy” simply because people do not know domestic history. Today, with AI and searchable sources, it is easier to learn these backgrounds. Even so, you cannot say “the Socialist Party wasn’t left-wing because it wasn’t left of the Communist Party” if you don’t understand entryism and cross-infiltration. • Structural Reform, Association Faction, and “Liberation” Faction It is said that the post-merger “right” advocated a kind of Eurocommunist “war of position” strategy (think Gramsci): slowly secure positions and advance step by step. Some might say this resembles social democracy. Or, if the final step is still imagined as revolutionary violence, it may not be so different from communism after all. The left-wing Association faction, being theory-heavy, was not unrelated to socialism and Marxist traditions. There are stories that some leaders expected the USSR to “liberate” Japan, consistent with a Leninist tactic sometimes described as exploiting defeat or near-defeat conditions to enable revolution. A third pole, later associated with what became Shaseidō Liberation faction (also called by another organizational name), allied with the Association faction to defeat the Structural Reform faction. After that, the Association faction split again into a more “theory” wing and a more “practice/field” wing, and alliances shifted (sorry, I may have the direction reversed here). In short: like the LDP, it was not unified. This pattern continues: after the Cold War, the party’s choices undermined support; many flowed into newer parties. Over time, branding changes and realignments followed, and today’s opposition landscape reflects that messy lineage, plus the complexity of labor-union bases that do not split cleanly along old lines. From this perspective, the “vibe” of the Constitutional Democrats, and why parts of the opposition support certain progressive institutional reforms, can be narrated as the outcome of layered histories rather than a single simple ideology. • The Meaning of “Left” Expands If you look at it this way, the Communist Party is the “king” of the left, and the New Left ultimately leaves only a few surviving militant organizations. Meanwhile, the old Socialist-party lineage survives in mainstream opposition parties. Some of that stream may still aim, at least rhetorically, at revolution or communism, so one could label it “left” in a broad sense. But the old Socialist Party was like a Shibuya scramble crossing of domestic and international actors. You can almost ignore it if you want a cleaner model. Depending on how you view it, Japan had longstanding self-denigrating or anti-national currents even before the war; then you can add Soviet strategic lines (e.g., Comintern theses), GHQ’s war guilt framing, the post-1970 crisis and fragmentation after student movements, and so on. Meanwhile, some activists shifted from “revolution and communism” toward issues like discrimination, minority rights, environmentalism, vegetarianism/veganism, spirituality, and new religious movements. Originally, the left was about pursuing economic equality, and Marxism-Leninism combined that with revolutionary practice, plus anti-imperial and anti-colonial frames that were not as central in Marx’s time. In the Leninist story, revolution creates a vanguard-party dictatorship that modernizes the country, then a second revolution completes communism. Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with discrimination issues or environmentalism. Lenin even argued that bourgeois moralism and “small justice” could distract from revolution (what he called “infantile” leftism). Marx likely treated such issues as secondary too, assuming they would resolve after the main transformation, or could be handled later. But Japan, after the war, moved from extreme postwar deprivation and devastation to (by the 1970s) astonishing wealth and “middle-class society.” Japan was even sometimes called “the most successful socialist country,” meaning: it achieved unusually strong economic equality without being communist. This was not only Japan; many countries saw inequality shrink after WWII, roughly until around the 1970s. Some would say “it still wasn’t enough,” but the general trend in the West was that capitalist democracies became richer and in some ways more equal than the Soviet bloc. • Liberalism, Political Correctness, Discrimination, and the Environment Get Folded into “the Left” If Marx’s theory were to be tested in the purest form, you’d expect a revolution in a highly advanced capitalist society like the present-day United States. If that happened and produced a classless society with socialized means of production, Marxism would look vindicated. Otherwise, you might conclude Marxism was fundamentally wrong. Whether such a transformation will occur remains an open question. For Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao, discrimination and environmental issues were basically side matters, not core to the doctrine. So in that strict sense, those topics are not part of Marxism-Leninism. However, if “modern ideals” are framed as equality, then it becomes tempting to expand “equality” beyond economics: not only humans, not only money, but any form of inequality becomes suspicious. As Soviet credibility collapsed through Stalinism, Hungary, Prague, Afghanistan, and finally the Cold War’s end, Marxism-Leninism declined as a fashionable doctrine in Western advanced countries around the late 1960s to 1970s. In that vacuum, non-Marxist “equality” movements rose, with anti-discrimination activism becoming prominent. Equality, discrimination, and freedom are distinct concepts. Freedom can produce inequality, so one might focus on inequality rather than “freedom.” Equality, discrimination, and inequality are separate phenomena and separate concepts: Inequality does not automatically imply discrimination. Discrimination does not automatically imply inequality. Inequality does not automatically imply discrimination. A common confusion is: equality = good = non-discrimination, but reality is more like: economic equality ≠ human-rights non-discrimination ≠ political freedom. The USSR claimed “equality,” but lacked freedom, and included brutal discrimination in the form of purges. Whether people understood that or not, discrimination issues became connected to “equality” and then to “socialism.” Some people awakened to discrimination issues without any Marxist background; others pivoted from Marxism-Leninism to discrimination activism. Perhaps because discrimination issues had been suppressed inside Marxist-Leninist movements as “petty bourgeois moralism,” they later returned like a rebound. Even if this shift had nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism directly, it could still be a multi-factor phenomenon. In medical terms: a multi-causal condition. • Mixing, Like an Entropy Increase Within Marxism-Leninism, discrimination issues were often treated as peripheral or even alien. But from a broader left/socialist viewpoint, equality and anti-discrimination tend to connect. Even if they are logically independent, empirically they correlate. If you remove “economic” from “economic equality,” and remove even “human,” then “equality” becomes a general moral magnet. “Where there is discrimination, there is inequality” feels intuitively plausible to many people; its contrapositive (“if there is equality, there is no discrimination”) also feels plausible. But it is easy to see cases where economic inequality does not necessarily imply discrimination. There are surely many people wealthier than the Emperor of Japan, but very few would say the Emperor is “discriminated against.” (Well, perhaps someone extremely twisted might.) Adding “human” can produce human-centered thinking. Some might go further: “all living things are equal, therefore we must not eat animals.” One prominent revolutionary figure (a key introducer of Trotskyism in Japan, a founder figure in early revolutionary organizations, nicknamed in various flamboyant ways) seems to have gradually lost interest in revolution/communism from the late 1960s, shifting toward things like bomb struggles in the 1970s, Ainu independence ideas, vegetarianism framed as anti-discrimination against livestock, “natural living,” and eventually conspiracy-like narratives (Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews, anti-international-finance-capital), and then even “reptilians rule humanity.” Conspiracies and reptilians aside, you can see here the drift toward today’s liberalism, political correctness, anti-discrimination, environmentalism, and veganism. Among people involved in student movements (both traditional student federations and broader non-sect radical coalitions), not only this figure but others also gathered toward “naturalist” directions like organic farming. In terms of influence, if you list famous names with partial redactions (Ik〇 Akira, the moderator of certain political TV shows, Miya〇 Hayao, Terii〇 Itō, Oshi〇 Mamoru, Ueno〇 Chizuko, Kan〇 Naoto, Eda〇 Yukio, Kaie〇 Banri, Sen〇 Yoshihito, Sa〇 Masaru, Sakamoto〇 Ryūichi, Mura〇 Ryū, Katō〇 Noriko, etc.), you could go on forever. Organizationally, these influences spread into universities, labor unions, NPOs/NGOs, religious groups, government offices, local governments, public schools, media, academic societies, political parties, ministries, and more. Some cult vocabulary overlaps with activist slang; likewise, on the right, certain religious organizations gained political ties through anti-communist networks. Japan is not unique; in Italy’s “Years of Lead,” the Vatican and the mafia were also entangled. Both right and left have historically intersected with organized crime. If you trace big media networks, you can sometimes see continuity across postwar strike struggles, the Anpo generation, the Zenkyōtō generation, and later liberal generations. Conservative elites sometimes even preferred hiring people who had “done something” in their youth, as long as they did not cross an irreversible line. Italy was similar, and then you can add the US, China, the USSR, North Korea, South Korea (whose full democratization is relatively recent), and other countries, until everything becomes a tangled knot. But again: even without immediately shouting “foreign spies,” domestic history alone can explain a surprising amount. • Not Being Left Means Lacking “Sincerity” Socialism presents itself as justice, even as truth. Many people (in Japan, and perhaps in many parts of the world) have felt that “not being socialist” means lacking sincerity. People who deny equality may be treated with suspicion. Defining “equality” properly is hard. Marxism, Leninism, and communism are not fashionable today, and “sharing the means of production” (the “communism” part) is difficult to imagine concretely in a modern realistic world. Still, technology and social theory evolve, so more concrete pathways might appear someday. Communism may not be popular, but the broader theme of socialism, “pursuing equality,” remains relevant. Recent fashion has been anti-discrimination liberalism and political correctness. That is not identical to socialist economic egalitarianism, but in today’s context it is often lumped into “the left.” Historically, being left/socialist was a badge of justice and sincerity, so people did not hide it; they often proudly displayed it. Today, “left” may carry a faint image of “someone a bit dangerous.” Yet in an era where neoliberalism and globalism have arguably gone too far, maybe we need the left and socialism to work harder again. Everything is balance. Until humanity becomes calmer and more mature, the left and socialism may need updates to function as a balancing mechanism against individualism and liberalism. In truth, moderation is best, but humans tend to swing to extremes. Reconciling freedom and equality, individualism and collectivism, and settling things more smoothly might be what “maturity” looks like. Once, GHQ and the US also dreamed of “left-wing idealism” and used Japan as an experimental ground. But faced with the Cold War as “reality,” they pivoted. Now we are dreaming a “new left-wing dream” in the form of political correctness and environmentalism. Will this too fade someday in the face of “reality”? Or will it, like some trajectories, end up going as far as “reptilians”? Either way, perhaps what stops the runaway of “sincere justice” is, in every era, only “cold reality (boring everyday life).”