War, Language, and the Working Class: Toward a Trans-Pacific Genealogy of the New Left

• In Event: Other Trans-Pacific Alliances: 1960s Protest Movements Crossing Borders in the US and Japan

Abstract

On December 28, 1965, Marxist-humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya lectured in Tokyo at the invitation of the student members of the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League. In Detroit, Dunayevskaya had been renewing Marxism as a revolutionary theory of working-class self-activity against orthodox Marxist-Leninist vanguardism and state capitalist exploitation -- a significant intellectual source for the American New Left. This paper explores Dunayevskaya and other American radicals’ transpacific encounters with their Japanese counterparts which challenge the national historical narrative of the New Left. Defining the New Left in national or sectarian terms fails to grasp the global reach of its personal, intellectual affiliations, its multiethnic, multigenerational composition and roots in working-class experience, dissident Marxist, anarchist voices, and polymorphous engagement with cultural, linguistic, political issues of the previous decades. In 1966, Ralph Featherstone and Howard Zinn came to Japan to work with Beheiren. Zinn was especially impressed by Tsurumi, who, like Zinn, asserted the importance of "anarchism as a method" of political practice. Tsurumi was instrumental in bringing together Noam Chomsky and Tanigawa Gan. Chomsky's theory of universal grammar informs, even if tenuously, his libertarian socialist politics, which shares its ideological roots with Dunayevskaya's council communist strand of Marxism, while Tanigawa sought to fuse poetry, activism, and education through the self-activity of regional subaltern communities, especially Kyushu miners, against the centralized authority of the Japanese Communist Party and metropolitan Tokyo. These connections illustrate the transnational genealogy of New Left thought.

Author

• Manuel Yang, Waseda University