Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction) letter to the Conlutas

July 10th, 2010

Dear Mr. President of Conlutas,

We, the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction), have great respect for your fights against the war policies of the US imperialist Obama administration, and fights against sacking and wage-cut offensives on the working class in Brazil and other countries all over the world. Here in Japan, we have been advancing the antiwar, anti-military alliance struggle against the strengthening of US bases in Okinawa Island, and workers’ struggles against sackings and wage cuts, under the banner of Revolutionary Marxism. We wish to fight together with you across the ocean.
We were surprised, however, to hear that your organization not only invited leaders of the so-called Doro-Chiba (the Japanese ‘National Railway Motive Power Union of Chiba) (*) to your congress but also adopted a resolution to participate in a rally that they plan in Tokyo for this November. That is why we have decided that we must tell you about the grave crimes of the Chukaku-ha faction and Doro-Chiba (**) in their betrayals against the Japanese working class, and about their real part in the history of the Japanese labour movement. We are anxious for you to receive our warm greeting and to give attentive consideration to the questions we raise in this letter.
They insist ‘Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba is the only force which has been fighting against the offensive to divide and privatize the Japanese National Railway.’ We think that you believed in what they said when you adopted the resolution to support them. But we think it dangerous if people, who do not know much about the actualities of the labour movement and the history of the class struggle in Japan, will swallow what Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba say. The true class solidarity between workers in Brazil and Japan can be constructed on the basis of, not their falsehood, but a work to expose their crimes. We therefore want you to know: what vicious offensive the Japanese ruling class and its government made against railway workers in order to privatize the JNR; and, in the midst of this offensive, what historical role the Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders played by being manipulated by state power holders. We will tell you the historical reality. We really want you to think about it.
(1)
In 1980s, the Japanese ruling class launched the offensive to divide and privatize the JNR. They made this offensive in connection with their attacks to destroy the National Railway Motive Power Union [Doro], the main workers’ force against the offensive. The JNR division/privatization was also a major offensive of the rulers to destroy the Doro as the most militant wing of the Japanese labour movement and the National Railway Workers Union [Kokuro] as a pivot of the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan [Sohyo], and, through this, to emasculate the Japanese labour movement as a whole.
In the midst of this privatization/division offensive, murderous physical attacks on railway workers occurred in succession. In 1980, a terrible physical attack was made against a leader of Doro, who was fighting in the forefront of struggle against the rightwing reorganization of the Japanese labour movement (which later led to the end of Sohyo). This is the first attack, which was followed by other 12 cases, bringing about 8 deaths. All were aimed at leaders and activists of Doro and other militant trade unions. Mobilizing their secret squads for conspiracy, Japanese rulers engineered this series of attacks in order to eliminate those people whom they identified as the true opponents to their evil scheme to carry out the JNR division/privatization and, at the same time, to drive railway workers unions (including Doro, Shin-Kokuro and Kokuro) into either destruction or completely company-run unions. (See Assaults Records in the attached file.)
Among those attacks, we cite one that vividly showed the fact that the attacks were connected with the JNR division/privatization offensive. It is the murder of Mr. Masaru Matsushita, the then chairman of the Takasaki Regional Centre of the Tokyo Railway Workers Union. (After defeat in struggle against the division/privatization, Doro was reorganized into the Railway Workers Union, the predecessor of the JR Soren. His Tokyo Railway Workers Union was its central force.) Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba released a ‘battle report’ on this murder, saying ‘Our Revolutionary Army completely eliminated Matsushita’. (See the photocopies of Chukaku-ha’s paper on the case.) They pretended that they were responsible for this murderous attack, which, in fact, state power holders conducted by mobilizing their conspiracy squad. The journalism extensively propagandized that the murder was part of ‘conflict between far-left sects’ between the JRCL (RMF) and Chukaku-ha.
This is an example of the series of assaults. As to 10 out of the 13 assaults, which killed 8 railway workers, Chukaku-ha falsely stated that they carried out them. Doro-Chiba leaders ‘praised’ these attacks as they expanded their concocted story that ‘the JRCL (RMF) was helping the JNR privatization’. In this way, Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders served as assistants to the Japanese ruling class in its attacks on militant, conscientious trade union leaders and activists, or as a cover for conspiratorial attacks to kill them. Exactly this is a hard fact. Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders were the most ‘deserving people’ for the Japanese ruling class and its government in carrying out the offensive to divide and privatize the national railway with the aim of destroying the railway workers movement.
The reason why Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders today puts forward their position ‘against the JNR privatization’ is that they are desperate to cover up this secret relationship with the state power holders.
This is not all. In 1990s, after the foundation of the JR Soren, there was a series of attempts to sabotage the railway operation (including an attempt to wreck a super express train). The Japanese government instantly propagandized that ‘the perpetrator must be dangerous elements in the JR Soren, or activists of the JRCL (RMF)’. This quick response meant that the series of accidents was a state conspiracy aimed to destroy the railway workers union, and our party, the JRCL (RMF). Despite this, Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders released the shameless statement ‘to condemn the vicious crimes by the JR Soren and the JRCL-RMF’ in response to the government propaganda. They served exactly as a mouthpiece for state power holders, who conducted the frame-up to destroy the JR Soren as a trade union and our JRCL (RMF).
The Japanese working class has the painful experience of failing to fight against the offensive of frame-up that the ruling class launched to destroy the labour movement. In 1949, right after defeat in war, the US occupation authority engineered a series of incidents, known today as the Three Big Conspiracies, to destroy the National Railway Workers Union. (***)The Japanese Communist Party failed to fight back against this offensive so that the railway workers movement, which was under the leadership of this party, suffered devastating damage. We have drawn lessons from the past defeat for the present struggle. With the burning anger of the working class against state power holders, who are intent to destroy militant labour movement and organizations, we have been fighting against any frame-up or conspiracy. Many militant, conscientious activists in trade unions have also been fighting as a whole on the basis of these lessons. Only Doro-Chiba leaders, who are also leaders of Chukaku-ha, dare to say ‘Those three accidents were not conspiracies’. They mean that the state power never commits a conspiracy to destroy trade unions. This is a saying that the only ‘mouthpiece’ of the state power can make. No trade union leader with class consciousness could say such a lie.
In addition, although Doro-Chiba leaders stress the issue of ‘dismissed 1047 railway workers’ as if it were a focus of the class struggle today in Japan, they in fact exaggerate the past issue, over which the struggle already defeated. This issue was effectively ended in 1990s due to the betrayal by the leadership of Kokuro [National Railway Workers’ Union]. (The Kokuro leaders officially put an end to the issue this June by agreeing to the final settlement with the government.) We the JRCL (RMF) opposed the JNR authority and the JR companies sacking any workers including those 1047 workers. However, we also regard these 1047 sackings as the result of the mistaken guidance that the central Kokuro officials provided under the leadership of so-called left-wing social democrats and the JCP central. Faced with the offensive to divide and privatize the JNR, they did nothing but simply urged their ranks to continue rejecting the management’s orders. They are responsible for leading Kokuro workers to defeat. The truth is that those 1047 workers were politically manipulated at first and deserted at last by the central Kokuro leadership. The reason why Chukaku-ha leaders raise an empty cry today about ‘the 1047 workers’ is that they are desperate to cover up the above-mentioned crimes that they committed in the middle of the JNR division/privatization offensive. They are just trying to produce the false story that they are ‘going on fighting’.
(2)
It is not the case that railway workers were the only martyrs who killed by the conspiracy group within the ruling class. 78 comrades among the revolutionary, militant workers and students were murdered. Many a militant worker in the postal, education, municipal and private industrial fronts were murdered, or heavily injured, at their early ages. In the most cases, state power holders mobilized their secret squads by taking advantage of the peculiar situation in which Chukaku-ha and another self-styled ‘leftist’ sect had made physical attacks on revolutionary workers and students. They used Chukaku-ha for giving the appearance of ‘violence between leftist sects’ to their own attacks on our comrades. As to almost every attack, Chukaku-ha issued a statement: ‘We exterminated him’, ‘We conducted a revolutionary execution’, etc.
Today, it is well known that these murderous attacks in 1970s to 1990s were committed by part of the state power holders. Find the attached photocopies of the book, Crimes of the Security Police Seen in So-Called Violent Infighting between Leftist Sects. The author, Nobuaki Tamagawa, is a conscientious literary critic, who was no connection with the JRCL (RMF). He reveals, on factual evidence, that what was called sectarian violence was an evil state conspiracy. Everyone can read this book at public or university libraries in Japan (including the National Diet Library).
We quote, for an instance, an attack on Zengakuren students in 1974, when one of the attackers was found to be a police officer. Three apartments of revolutionary students in Tokyo were simultaneously attacked late at night. Attackers broke into the rooms as raising battle-axes but the students bravely drove them back. Chukaku-ha issued a statement that they carried out the attacks. Among the attackers, however, there was one who was knocked down by the students and sent to a hospital by an ambulance. Although this heavily injured attacker wore the symbolic helmet of Chukaku-ha, we identified him as a policeman. As soon as we revealed this fact at a press conference, he was picked out of the hospital to somewhere by a police car. This was an attempt by the police to cover up the fact. (See the book, p.148 on.)
We take another example. In the February of 1978, a revolutionary worker was assassinated in Osaka. Awkwardly, two statements that claimed the responsibility for this attack were issued at the same time from Chukaku-ha and another leftist sect. As to the single attack, two different sects issued ‘battle reports’. This reminded us of the assassinations in the so-called Red Brigade cases in Italy. This dual statements proved that the true perpetrator was neither Chukaku-ha nor the other but a secret squad of the state. (See the book, p.120 on.)
Why have Chukaku-ha become a tool of the imperialist state power? This dropped-out element (in 1963) from the anti-Stalinist revolutionary communist movement in Japan played at an ‘armed uprising’ around 1970. They were possessed by an infantilistic dream of ‘revolution’ and inevitably went bankrupt. Exactly for glossing over this bankruptcy, they started violent attacks on the JRCL (RMF), or revolutionary, militant workers and students, who had developed the revolutionary forces in the class struggle. Their attacks against the working class were smashed by our fights. Driven into a predicament, they asked the state power for help and degraded themselves to be a tool of the state.
Now Chukaku-ha leaders are desperate to erase their blood-stained past, to conceal their nature as a tool of the state power. Being aware that it is difficult to conceal their true nature, they even admitted that ‘there was a spy in the politburo’ (in the March 5th 2007 issue of their weekly) to pretend that they expelled the suspicious elements. In an attempt to show that today’s Chukaku-ha has departed from its past, its leaders are playing with syndicalistic slogans, e.g. ‘Let’s make trade unions the subject of revolution to overthrow capitalism’, which are the complete rejection of the Leninist position of the vanguard party. Their syndicalism, however, is just a fake one, a copycat of the European original. This is because they are using these slogans only to conceal their nature as a tool of the state power.
Even if they try to display their small and declining local trade union, Doro-Chiba, as a selling point, or even if they raise a fake banner of syndicalism, they can never conceal the true nature of themselves, who in the past claimed the false responsibilities for those bloody conspiracies and served to help the frame-ups by the state power. The Japanese working class will never allow them to do it.
Comrades in the Conlutas, we sincerely ask you to listen closely to us. We will answer any question from you.
Comrades in the Conlutas, Chukaku-ha and Doro-Chiba leaders are travelling around several countries only to conceal their true history and nature. They are deceiving workers and people in Americas. We call on you to direct your attention to the historical truth. Let us strengthen the genuine international solidarity of the working class.

JRCL-RMF