Japan

For a Class-Struggle Fight Against State Repression!

Abolish the Death Penalty!

Reformist Left Pushes Illusions in Bourgeois Democracy

The following article is a translation of a Spartacist supplement published by our comrades of the Spartacist Group Japan, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), on 18 November 2007.

On 23 August 2006, three death row prisoners were legally murdered by the Japanese state in Tokyo and Nagoya prisons, one of whose appeals was still pending. This brings to ten the number of people executed within less than eight months. This year, the number of death row inmates in Japan exceeded 100 for the first time since WWII—twice as many as one decade ago. Having often been locked up for decades in prisons where isolation and terror reign, without any prior warning of their impending execution until about one hour before, death row prisoners wake every morning terrorized by the thought that today could be the day of their execution. The state even robs their families of any possibility of exchanging last words with them; they are only informed after the execution. The execution is carried out by hanging; often death is not instantaneous and prisoners struggle for 15 to 20 minutes or more before being strangled to death. All this simply underscores that the death penalty is a barbaric outrage intended to terrorize and intimidate the whole population, particularly all perceived opponents of this brutal capitalist system.

The death penalty is one of the main cogs of the capitalist state—the capitalists’ machine of repression to maintain their class rule and profits. It is a barbaric legacy of the rampant torture and murder by the ruling classes of previous class societies, a system of legal murder that reinforces the brutalization of society in all respects. As communists, we fight against the death penalty as part of our struggle for proletarian revolution to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie. We stand for the abolition of the death penalty everywhere on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who lives and who dies: abolish the death penalty!

The state is not neutral. It is a weapon for class rule. At its core are the police, courts, prisons and army. Under capitalism, the very purpose of the state is to enforce the rule of the bourgeoisie through organized violence against the working class and all the oppressed. Currently, the Japanese bourgeoisie seeks to increase the rate of exploitation of workers even further in order to increase its profits, the better to compete with its imperialist rivals. In this context, the use of the death penalty is a graphic display of the power of the Japanese state, as a warning to anyone who might undertake class struggle to resist this brutal exploitation.

While Japanese imperialism is enforcing its class interests against the working class at home, it is also accelerating its military buildup. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, based on the concentration of industrial and bank capital in the hands of the most powerful capitalists—in Japan the zaibatsu. To further their plunder and exploitation internationally, the imperialists need the state and an army to protect and expand their offshore capital, just as they need the state to enforce exploitation domestically. Thus, in the middle of March 2007 the Japanese imperialist state concluded a military agreement with Australia, part of the current imperialist military encirclement of China. This comes on top of enormous expenditures by Japanese imperialism to build up a “missile defense” as part of its counterrevolutionary alliance with U.S. imperialism, directly targeting the deformed workers states of China and North Korea, which the imperialists hunger to turn into giant sweatshops. (A deformed workers state is a state in which the bourgeoisie has been expropriated and a socialized economy has been built, but the working class does not exercise political power, which has been usurped by a privileged Stalinist bureaucracy. We stand for the unconditional military defense against imperialism and internal counterrevolution of such deformed workers states. A workers political revolution is necessary to oust the bureaucracy, establish proletarian democracy and establish an internationalist policy committed to the fight for new socialist revolutions worldwide.)

The Death Penalty: Weapon of Repression Against the Proletariat and the Oppressed

In Japan, historically the death penalty has served the bourgeoisie in its repression of the workers movement and the oppressed, and to stabilize its rule at critical junctures. In the early 1870s, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, the bourgeoisie sought to lay the basis for a stable capitalist state by executing thousands of peasants for revolting against the bloodsucking landlords. Then, following Japanese imperialism’s victory in 1905 in the war against Russia, the bourgeoisie was shaken by a wave of proletarian rebellions—most significantly of the miners in Ashio in 1907—that the army was brought in to crush. Immediately following this, the Penal Code (1907) and the Prison Law (1908) were introduced—the two key regulations for the implementation of the death penalty today, used practically unchanged since they were first introduced. These laws sought to ensure the stable development of Japanese imperialism through more efficient and murderous repression of the proletariat.

After the defeat of Japanese imperialism by American imperialism in WWII, a tremendous upsurge in workers’ struggles broke out, leading the powerful Japanese Communist Party (JCP)-led trade union federation Sanbetsu to call for a general strike on 1 February 1947 to oust the right-wing Yoshida cabinet and establish a “people’s government.” However, the reformist JCP was unwilling and unprepared to fight for power and called off the strike at the last minute, handing the proletariat a huge defeat. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie’s self-confidence had been considerably shaken. As part of its efforts to intimidate the working class and prevent renewed class struggle, the state stepped up its use of the death penalty, with over 90 people executed over the next three years.

In addition to the thousands of poor and working people who have died at the hands of the state through legal murder, the state and its institutions also seek to use murder to decapitate the leadership of the working class whenever the ruling class sees this as necessary and can get away with it. In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake was followed by pogroms that killed 6,000 Koreans, and the police, army and right wing hunted down and killed hundreds of Chinese, Communists, anarchists and labor leaders. In addition, the capitalist rulers have repeatedly staged exemplary executions of their perceived opponents for the sheer purpose of trying to paralyze protest through instilling terror—from the prominent anarchists Kotoku Shusui and Kanno Suga (executed in 1911) to the heroic Soviet spies Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi. These latter led a Soviet spy ring during WWII, when the urgent task for all revolutionaries was the military defense of the Soviet Union. Sorge and Ozaki were brilliant and audacious in getting crucial advance information about German imperialism’s attack on the Soviet Union, but Stalin ignored their warnings and later betrayed them. In 1944, the Japanese imperialists executed Sorge and Ozaki. The date was November 7—the anniversary of the Russian Revolution—symbolizing the capitalists’ fear and hatred of the USSR and their determination to prevent proletarian revolution in Japan.

Significantly, the current law prescribes death for 17 offenses including murder, “assistance to the enemy” in time of war, and “insurrection.” While recently the death penalty has been used against those convicted of horrific crimes involving murder, the bourgeoisie will turn murderous state repression against workers, communists and all the oppressed if it sees this as necessary.

For a Class-Struggle Fight Against State Repression!

Today’s stepped-up “anti-crime” campaign, which includes the execution of people who have been on death row for decades, is a strategy to justify the strengthening of the state apparatus. Manipulating the population’s fears about violent crimes like murder and rape, the capitalist class seeks to impose ever more draconian measures of repression. The government seeks to generate a climate of hysteria over an alleged rise in violent crime and, in particular, to identify foreigners with “crime.” While pushing this vile racism, the capitalist state carries out daily violence against the oppressed, especially immigrants.

The Japanese prisons and detention centers are notorious for systematic violence by guards against inmates, from suspicious “suicides” to torture and the denial of appropriate medical care. A case in point is Patrick Rashien from Burma: having lived and worked in Japan for 20 years, he was arrested in 2003 and held in a detention center until 2005. Having suffered the terror inside and been deprived of health care, he died two weeks after his release. (P. Rashien’s case and other examples of this horrible reality are powerfully documented in the book Wall of Tears—The Real Situation of the “Detention Centers for Foreigners” of the Interior Ministry [2007].) As communists fighting to be a tribune of the people, that champions the interests not only of the proletariat but of all the oppressed, we say: Close all detention centers! No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants and all those who live here!

Chosen Soren [the pro-North Korean organization] is being targeted for wholesale destruction by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois courts ordered it to pay the horrendous sum of 62.7 billion yen, and the government has already impounded its headquarters, all under the pretext that Chosen Soren failed to repay debts and taxes that were imposed on it at outrageous rates in order to bankrupt it. This follows a series of raids on its premises around the country over the past year, under cover of investigating alleged “kidnappings” and even “illegal exports” of medicine to North Korea! The bourgeoisie’s campaign against Chosen Soren is twofold. It is vile, anti-Korean racism, used to split and weaken the working class in the face of all-sided attacks on living standards. However, it is also an anti-Communist campaign to demonize the North Korean deformed workers state. Japanese imperialism is enraged that its former colony not only got independence, but then went on to overthrow the rule of capitalism in the northern part of the country. While politically ruled by an anti-revolutionary Stalinist caste, the smashing of capitalism in North Korea is a gain for the international proletariat that must be defended against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution (see Spartacist Japan leaflet “Defend North Korea!” 15 July 2006). Down with the economic sanctions against North Korea! Defend Chosen Soren!

Oppressed minorities are frequently the first targets of state repression. The Burakumin [descendants of Japan’s low-caste “untouchables” still facing discrimination] Kazuo Ishikawa, framed by the capitalist state for a murder he did not commit, sentenced to death in 1964 and sent to death row, is a case in point. Having arrested Ishikawa in 1963, the cops employed their standard practice and terrorized Ishikawa into signing the cops’ lying deposition. However, this and all the manufactured evidence presented in the so-called “Sayama [city in which the murder took place] trial” could not cover the monstrosity of the frame-up. Among other things, a threatening letter written by the murderer had clearly been written by a highly educated person with the ability to compose correct text. However, because of poverty and discrimination, Ishikawa was able to attend virtually no classes in elementary school and was not able to read and write. In 1974, the Tokyo High Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in order to cover up the frame-up and entomb Ishikawa for life in prison.

Large numbers of Burakumin and non-Burakumin workers took part in the movement to free Ishikawa because they recognized in his frame-up the brutal discrimination and exploitation they encounter daily in the capitalist system. After more than 30 years in prison hell, petitioning by a large number of Burakumin organizations, as well as by Jichirou [public workers union] and other unions, won Ishikawa’s provisional release in 1994 to a life he describes as having to wear “invisible handcuffs.” Ishikawa and his supporters are campaigning for a new trial to lay bare all facts, demonstrate the frame-up and clear his name. We say: immediately overturn the conviction of Kazuo Ishikawa! This case shows in clear relief the nature of the capitalist state: the conscious collaboration between the police, prosecution, judges and courts with the single aim of legally murdering him or locking him up for life. It shows that the whole purpose of the state machinery is to repress first the most vulnerable layers of the oppressed, then ultimately the proletariat. This is because it is the proletariat’s potential power to smash capitalism through workers revolution that the bourgeoisie fears more than anything.

In Japan the bourgeoisie is represented in politics by both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party (DP). The LDP government is particularly vile, chauvinist and justly hated by many workers and youth. A taste of this was given recently, when LDP justice minister Hatoyama demanded that all executions proceed automatically by eliminating the need for a minister’s signature. But we must be clear that the Democratic Party, which won a majority in the July [2007] elections to the Upper House, is no less a committed enemy of working people and the oppressed. The DP is a capitalist party aiming to pursue Japanese imperialism’s interests abroad and domestically, simply with different tactics than the LDP. The DP already promises massive attacks on public workers as well as further splitting the proletariat by decreasing minimum wages for the very young and very old workers. And, of course, the DP also agrees to escalate state repression, e.g., demanding more police on the streets.

The reformist left either from time to time openly collaborates with the DP (like [the United Secretariat affiliate] Kakehashi in the 2007 Tokyo governor elections) or occasionally grumbles that the DP “capitulates” or has “sold out tremendously” to the LDP ([“third campist” group] Chukaku, Zenshin No. 2103). In contrast, as Marxists, we draw a class line against the DP, explaining to workers that it also represents the class enemy. Instead of looking for some nonexistent “lesser evil” wing of the capitalist exploiters, it is necessary to mobilize the social power of the proletariat in class struggle against the bosses’ attacks on working people and the oppressed.

Capitalist society is divided into classes with irreconcilable interests—centrally the capitalists and the workers. Capitalism is based on the capitalists’ exploitation of the working class. The capitalists own the means of production
—the factories, machines and transportation—and their objective, rather than to produce for people’s needs, is to maximize their profits. Exploitation, poverty, racism and war are inherent in this system. What’s more, the nation-state, on which capitalism is based, is an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces of humanity. It is impossible to reform capitalism to make it function in the interests of the workers and the oppressed.

However, workers are not simply victims. In the words of Karl Marx, the working class is the “gravedigger of capitalism.” It uniquely has the social power, because of its position in production, its numbers and organization, to overthrow the rule of the capitalists, establish workers states and build an international planned economy run in the interests of the workers and oppressed. This planned economy will abolish the anarchy of the capitalist profit system, which leads to periodic economic crises and large-scale misery. The consequent development of humanity’s productive forces—directed not in the interest of mutually competing capitalists, but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan in the interests of workers and the oppressed—will lift all of humanity to a living standard above even the most advanced capitalist countries.

However, the key obstacles to mobilizing the workers in their class interest are the bourgeois workers parties of the JCP and Social Democratic Party (SDP) as well as the bureaucratic trade-union leaderships who follow these parties, or are even linked to the capitalist DP directly, like the Rengo federation, which organizes those workers with the most social power. Both the JCP and SDP are organically linked to the working class but have a thoroughly pro-capitalist leadership and program—and thus are programmatically based on the defense of the capitalist order. While occasionally using slightly more militant rhetoric, reformist groups like Kakehashi or Chukaku and [the “third campist”] Kakumaru push fundamentally the same reformist lie that capitalism can be made to work in the interest of the oppressed. In contrast, we in the Spartacist Group Japan struggle to forge a revolutionary, internationalist, proletarian party that fights for workers revolution to overthrow the rule of the Japanese imperialists, as part of the struggle to uproot capitalism by workers revolutions worldwide.

Mobilize Labor to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Our organization, the International Communist League, has been campaigning internationally to free American death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the U.S.’s foremost political prisoner. Targeted by the FBI at least as early as 1969 when he was a 15-year-old spokesman of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, Mumia is an award-winning journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization. Based solely on his political history and beliefs, he was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing a police officer. The state seeks to silence this powerful “voice of the voiceless.” In the U.S., the racist death penalty is rooted in the slave system—it is the slaveholders’ lynch rope made legal. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! (See Spartacist Japan supplement, 13 June 2006.)

Mumia’s case is at a critical juncture. Following a hearing earlier this year in May [2007], the U.S. federal appeals court will pronounce on Mumia’s fate, and a decision could come at any time. Now more than ever it is urgent to mobilize protest based on the power of the international working class. Now more than ever there must be no illusions in the proceedings of the “justice system” (the capitalist injustice system). Abu-Jamal was railroaded to death row in a trial that was a concerted travesty of justice—from the notorious “hanging judge” to the racist jury selection, from the fabricated “confession” to the invented ballistics evidence, from the prosecution’s buying or naked coercion of witnesses to the multiple violations of Mumia’s constitutional rights. For the past 25 years, the U.S. courts have rejected or even refused to consider the overwhelming evidence of his innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, killed the police officer. The American bourgeoisie sees in Mumia the spectre of black revolt. Thus, they are determined to legally lynch him or bury him in the living hell that is prison. That must not happen!

When Mumia was facing an execution warrant in 1995, it was worldwide protests initiated by efforts undertaken by the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the SL/U.S., section of the ICL—and supported by labor unions representing millions of workers that won a stay of execution for Mumia. However, this movement was demobilized by the reformist left, who pushed illusions in the capitalist state with their calls for a “new and fair trial.” As if the bourgeoisie would ever give him a “fair” trial! While standing for pursuing every possible legal avenue on Mumia’s behalf, we must not put any faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. It will take an international mobilization of the masses, centrally the workers movement, to win Mumia’s freedom. Now is the time; mass protest to demand Mumia’s immediate freedom has to be rekindled!

For reformists, the evidence of Mumia’s innocence is uncomfortable, because it proves that his case is not an aberration, that it is not about one racist judge or one bad cop. In fact, the case is about the whole racist capitalist system that will do anything it can to silence its most militant opponents. Reformists seek to hide the nature of the state and preach reliance on the very same courts that framed Mumia to begin with. Thus our fight to rekindle the mass movement centered on the labor movement centrally involves fighting the illusions in the capitalist state pushed by the reformist organizations. No illusions in the capitalist courts! Mumia is innocent! Labor must mobilize to free him now! In the context of the increased state repression here in Japan, it is clear: the fight for Mumia’s freedom is the fight against capitalist tyranny and injustice not only in the U.S. but here in Japan and everywhere. It is an integral part of the fight to finish off capitalism once and for all through international workers revolution.

Reformist Left Pushes Illusions in Bourgeois Democracy

The bourgeoisie and its political representatives have their differences on the death penalty, but these differences are entirely tactical: what works best to maintain an efficient apparatus of repression against the oppressed. The DP in 2003 supported a motion in the Diet [parliament] for a “moratorium on executions until the conclusion of the death-penalty investigation committee comes out,” while “conducting a full discussion” and establishing a “lifelong prison term” without any possibility for provisional release (which currently does not exist in Japanese law). The DP underlined, “As the Democratic Party, we decided to support this law, since its aim is not abolishing the death penalty itself, and it is important to establish a parliamentary investigation committee and hold wide-ranging discussions including on the pros and cons of the death penalty.” Recently Yoshihiro Yasuda, one of the country’s most outspoken anti-death penalty lawyers, who has braved intimidation and death threats for his position, has started supporting the idea of establishing a “lifelong prison term” replacing the death penalty. This is also the position of the “League of Parliamentarians for Abolishing the Death Penalty,” which is headed by former cop Shizuka Kamei. However, in contrast to the DP, the significance of this latter group’s position is that it has members from the LDP, DP and from the SDP and JCP! While we can expect that parts of the bourgeoisie will seek to “discuss the pros and cons” of the death penalty (like the DP) or abolish it (like Kamei) in the interests of what method of state repression works best, for members of the JCP and SDP to join in proposing to the bourgeoisie the alternative of entombing people for life in prison hell is a fundamental betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. As communists, the SGJ would welcome any spanner thrown into the state machinery of legal murder, but we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on alternatives!

Such betrayals are part and parcel of the reformist program of the JCP, which outrageously intones that “in case there are not enough police officers, we are for the minimum necessary increase of the number of police officers” and that “the increase of the number of judges cannot be postponed” (JCP 2007 election brochure). Police are not “public workers” as the JCP declares. They, as well as judges, are an integral part of the bourgeois machine of repression. Increasing their numbers can only mean increased repression against the working class and all the oppressed. Consistent with this disgusting capitulation, the JCP is conspicuously silent in not protesting the recent executions, even though on paper the JCP stands for abolishing the death penalty. Characteristically, a key document by the JCP stating its opposition to the death penalty is...its 1946 proposal for a capitalist constitution for Japan based on the rule of the blood-soaked bourgeoisie! With this perspective of class collaboration, it is no wonder that the leadership of the JCP has refused to mobilize their working-class base against attacks by the bourgeoisie and in particular against the death penalty.

Both the SDP and the Kakehashi group have openly denounced recent executions, participated in protests, and Kakehashi openly calls to abolish the death penalty. But the hallmark of reformist groups like Kakehashi is that they cannot manage to correctly oppose concrete measures of bourgeois repression without at the same time building up illusions that capitalist imperialism can be made to operate in a truly democratic manner on behalf of the oppressed. Perhaps most grotesque in this regard is a recent comment by Chukaku about the proposed “citizen judge” system, where they write (Zenshin No. 2271) that its introduction would be “an attack transforming the legal system under the current constitution—which has as its pillar fundamental human rights.” But Kakehashi pushes the same kind of line more subtly, in its recent articles (Kakehashi No. 1992, No. 1980) saying not one word on how the death penalty is connected to maintaining the class rule of the bourgeoisie. While the SDP grotesquely praises the “anti-death penalty” rhetoric of the UN, Kakehashi follows along by printing the report of the UN “anti-torture” body in its pages (Kakehashi No. 1980), without a word of criticism or characterization of what the UN is. In reality the UN is a den of imperialist thieves and their victims and—among other crimes—responsible (with the full support of the Japanese government) for starving over 1.5 million Iraqis to death through its economic sanctions.

In fact, sowing illusions that the UN could act in the interests of the oppressed is totally in line with both SDP and Kakehashi pushing the lie that if only the death penalty were abolished and maybe some other “corrections” made, the capitalist system could function in the interests of the oppressed. But most advanced capitalist states, such as Germany and Britain, have abolished the death penalty and are no less committed to maintaining exploitation and oppression through brutal state repression. Of course, neither group mentions that under Socialist Party prime minister Murayama in the ’90s two executions were carried out. This underlines how the violence of the bourgeoisie and its state against the working class and oppressed cannot be eradicated short of workers revolution.

As for its ultimate perspective, Kakehashi states: “Since our 19th conference in 2002, our position, in order to promote the anti-capitalist alternative...has been to stand for the realization of ‘global peace, justice, human rights, democracy’” (Kakehashi No. 1958-59, 1 January 2007). Even occasionally calling this program “socialist” cannot cover the fact that it is fundamentally a liberal conception that one can achieve “human rights” or “democracy” within the framework of the capitalist state. Consistent with its deeply social-democratic program, Kakehashi presents the death penalty as largely a moral question, divorced from the class struggle. The book What Is the Death Penalty? (1992) by Murano, uncritically publicized by Kakehashi, says: “Of course, outstanding personalities in the fields of both religion [!] and education...will be able to lead the people in a good/sane direction, by explaining how the death penalty itself is demeaning to the human heart. People who face the death penalty in reality like prosecutors, judges, people working in the prison system, and the Minister of Justice will be even more capable of doing this.” Instead of seeking to mobilize the proletariat in opposition to the capitalist state and its representatives, this directly appeals to the state apparatus to be more humane, and “lead the people in a good direction”!!

By pushing the reformist lie that violence by the capitalist state is not an inherent part of this exploitation system but simply a bad policy, Kakehashi sows illusions in reforming the capitalist state, and it is such illusions that politically paralyze the proletariat. Kakehashi is thus a political obstacle to mobilizing the proletariat in class struggle against state repression, and thus also for the overall struggle for workers revolution. The current situation cries out for a generalized counteroffensive by the working class at the head of all the oppressed. If mobilized independently of the bourgeoisie in class struggle, the many-millioned proletariat would be a powerful force in defense of its own interests.

The SGJ seeks to intervene in class and other social struggles to win workers and youth to the fight to forge a revolutionary workers party. This party will be forged in political struggle against the reformism of the JCP, SDP and their tails like Kakehashi. We fight for a revolutionary transformation of this country, a proletarian social revolution that will end the savage exploitation and brutal racial oppression of capitalist class rule and the barbarism through which it is enforced. The revolutionary party we struggle to build will be internationalist, joining together the struggles of the proletariat and oppressed in the imperialist centers like Japan with the struggles of those of the oppressed nations. Our objective is the working class taking power, smashing the capitalist state and establishing its own state—the dictatorship of the proletariat. This will be the first step toward a world free of war, racism, poverty and exploitation. Join us in this struggle!