Japan: Heimin

Anti-war propaganda "Heimin" was not free from shortcomings. Criticism of chauvinism and militarism was conducted primarily with Tolstoyan-pachyfist positions and did not differ in consistency. Typical is a letter to Russian socialists published in the pages of the newspaper Heimin in the summer of 1904. This letter expressed "regret" that Russian socialists have to resort to means of violence in the struggle for their ideals.

Despite the shortcomings and mistakes, the movement of Haymin was of progressive significance. It fought against the instigators of the imperialist war, acquainted the Japanese workers with revolutionary ideas, woke up sympathy for the revolution in Russia.

In 1905, in No. 11 of the theoretical organ of the Japanese socialists, "Socialism" Katayama wrote: "The main point of the social revolution is the question of the seizure of political power by the workers." In these words, for the first time in Japan, a call was made for a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In 1906, the legal socialist party Nihon shayayto was created.

The new party held mass rallies aimed at rallying the working people. So, Nihon shakayto organized a protest rally and a demonstration. The workers passed through the streets with red flags. After that, a meeting was held on the issue of universal suffrage. Japan: Heimin ...

In May 1906, Kotoku returned from Japan to exile. While in America, he joined the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World. Not being a Marxist before, Kotoku perceived a number of erroneous anarcho-syndicalist views and began to disseminate them in the Japanese labor movement.

Soon the Japanese Socialist Party became the arena of the struggle between various ideological currents. At the second congress of this party in 1907, there was a clash between Kotok, who put forward a program of "direct actions" that rejected the use of parliamentary forms of struggle, and representatives of outspoken reformists represented by Tadzoe. Most of the participants in the congress were inclined to reconcile Kotoku's views with the platform for the struggle for parliamentary reforms.

The ideological confusion among the Japanese socialists very soon led to the organizational disintegration of Nihon shayayto. In the conditions of the most brutal police terror, Katayama led the work in the masses under the slogan of the struggle to win universal suffrage. He sharply criticized the anarchist errors Kotoku, who put forward the slogan of a general strike in conditions when there was no real ground for this.

Japan: Heimin