It Could Happen Here - The Japanese Anarchists Part 2

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

We're once again joined by Margaret Killjoy, host of the new podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, to look at the syndicalist vs pure anarchist divide that shattered the Japanese anarchist movement.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's a show. If you're listening to this episode, you probably listened to the last one. I hope so. You know what it's about. if you listen to this episode you probably listen to the last one so you know you know what it's about yeah please do uh don't start i mean i guess you could start with this one because this one is sort of wildly different from the last one but this one we're rewriting it so they all survive yeah i mean i i don't no one gets executed this episode. Yes. That is a win. And the Cosmists come, the Russian Cosmists come, and they resurrect at least Keniko Fumiko.

The rest, give or take, whatever. Maybe the children could be resurrected. That's how I would prioritize it in that order. That makes sense. Yeah. And that voice you're hearing is uh margaret killjoy host of cool host of cpw dcs cool people who did cool stuff a cool media podcast that is launching its first episode on may 2nd and episodes are every monday and wednesday i did it okay woo that's true all

the things are true except the cosmos part the cosmos i don't know maybe maybe they'll still pull it off all right as as of yet so we're gonna go back a little bit um we went to the last episode in 1923 1924 with everyone sort of dead um but the the reason that also didn't wipe out the anarchist movement was that there's there's another sort of wing of it and the other wing of it is in in 1918 1917 1918 labor movement in japan re-emerges and it re-emerges because there's the war like japan fights the world war one and uh there's just like mass inflation and deprivation and so even though striking is like unbelievably illegal people do it anyways because

the alternative is just starving to death and so there's this reformist trade union that eventually becomes japanese confederation of labor that swells in numbers to about 30 000 people and i should mention like 30 000 people is like it doesn't sound like that big for a union i think this is the biggest any union is going to get in this period i think this union might get slightly bigger than that but like yeah most of the unions don't crack 20k because the the size of the japanese industrial working class isn't that big and also the amount of repression is unbelievable but you know having 30 000 people in your union means that i your union is now the site of Japanese intra-left conflict, which is wonderful. I mean, it only took, like, three people for the political drama to fuck people up.

Yeah, it's great. There's, like, you know, there's a period where everyone kind of gets along. Like, everyone on the Japanese left knows each other. Like, they're all dating each other. Like, this is true. Like, you know, we've been talking about all the anarchists dating each other but anarchists the communists are all dating each other like the reformists are also dating each other like they're all sort of like everyone knows each other and for like a bit they're sort of able to get along uh but with with with the the uh the japanese confederation of uh labor this lasts for like one year and by 1921 the anarchists and the bolsheviks have split over the question of the

ussr after the anarchist published like emma goldman writing about how it's bad actually and suddenly these two factions are like yeah these two factions are like fighting tooth and nail for control of like the entire left because like these groups are like the anarchists and the communists are in every social movement. Like they're in labor, they're in the feminist movement, they're in this movement that like we haven't really talked about, but is going on in the background of all of this, which is the Burakuman liberation movement. The Burakuman are this like hereditary class. I'm pronouncing that extremely badly and I apologize. like hereditary class i'm pronouncing that extremely badly and i i apologize um but this hereditary class like the old fuel system which is like technically abolished in the late 1800s but like discrimination against them continues it's it's very similar to like the like the untouchable

like the untouchables in india and so they have this sort of movement and the anarchists back it and the communists like waffle on it because they're bolsheviks it takes them like a while before they're like no no 1925 we're fully backing this now and so yeah i mean that gets wrapped up in this this giant battle for the control of the left and the battle for the control of the left leads to like one of history's most common alliances which is bolsheviks allying with reformists who like also favor like centralized control to fight the anarchists who don't want centralized control yeah there are new things yep in labor movement this this plays out in this battle over like where power is supposed to be in a union confederation so you know the question basically is it supposed to be in the

federation bureaucracy like the people are like the the sort of high level of the bureaucracy itself or is it supposed to be in the unions who are like the part of this federation and and this has real consequences you know like in a lot of sort of centralized union federations like the central union bureaucracy are the people who decide if you can strike or not and you know this is extremely useful to both reformist bureaucrats who want to make sure nobody goes on strike because they have their deal with the capitalists and they don't want a revolution to happen. And it's also very useful for the Bolsheviks who want to make sure they can purge anyone who they don't like and also want to make sure the union movement is just like an extension of their politics. And so there's this huge battle and it ends with basically like both the Bolsheviks and the reformists pull out of the union. Whoa, so the anarchists win. Sort of well they they it's a pyrrhic victory there's like nothing yeah well it's not there's nothing so like 20 000 members go with the reformists like

12 000 go with the bolsheviks about 8 000 go with the anarchists oh okay so it's not the best but they they rebuild and and into this phrase steps uh arguably japan's greatest anarchist theorists of this period harashuzo and this guy is a character like he's he's he's barely known in japan i mean there was a sort of like renaissance in in harashuzo scholarship when this one guy named john corrupt wrote this book called harashizo harashizo and pure anarchism and interwar japan which is a mouthful of a title but i'm just going to keep plugging this because like this is the book that made me an anarchist like this is like i checked this book out from a library and i read it and i was like oh my god i'm an anarchist now so yeah yeah he has he has like a shizo has a wild story um he's born in he's born in japan in december 8th 1886 and he sort of like bounces around like different manual labor jobs in tokyo and like at one point

he he he wants to be like a he tries to be like i don't know if it's a long short one he wants to be like a sailor so he gets on a boat and he's going to be a sailor and then he after like one sail ride to taiwan on a boat and he's gonna be a sailor and then he after like one sail ride to taiwan he immediately decides he doesn't want to be a sailor anymore so he just gets off the boat and leaves and doesn't come back i feel like that's what i would do if i decided oh yeah like that job especially like the 1920s that job seems awful yeah you're like oh i want adventure and then you're like oh adventure means bad things happen. Yeah. It's like,

I mean, I, I, I, I guess I understand why all these people are anarchists because like, that is a terrible job. But yeah. So she's a winds up sort of just like wandering around Taiwan. And one of the things that happens when he's wanting around Taiwan,

by the way, is a Japanese colony at this point. Okay. And while he's wandering around Taiwan, he becomes a Christian. And he goes to school as a theologian, but he drops out. But then he somehow still becomes a pastor because... I don't know. This guy's career is wild.

Shizuo is not a normal pastor. He rapidly starts pissing off everyone around him because he's... All of his sermons are just him antagonizing rich people and preaching this like very, very left wing version of the gospel. It's like read the Bible. Yeah. Yeah.

It's incredible. There's this great quote from a, a Hadeshizu and pure anarchism in interwar Japan about his time as a pastor from like someone who was there. It was a pastor. Hada sermons were superb. So much so that i thought it was a shame that more people were not there to hear them it was like the bible talking in the spirit

of pure socialism and one of my friends admired pastor hada so much that he asked him to celebrate his marriage yeah and you know this like this does not make priest is going around yeah yeah i see well it's funny because he starts like as a christian right but like he just like progressively keeps getting more and more left wing and keeps realizing that like okay so there's the kingdom of god in heaven right but like what if we did that here and and like as he's getting like as he's pissing off more of the church um and as like their their infighting gets bigger he's becoming just more and more of an anarchist and by the end he just like gets he gets booted out by his church and he's just like okay i'm an anarchist propagandist now and so 1924 he just like leaves and he's like well

i'm an anarchist now okay um and shizu becomes what's known as a pure anarchist and this is something that is like entirely unique to japan that like there's nothing there's this doesn't exist anywhere else um and this is different than like like basically every other anarchist theorist and movement in japan until this point has been like something you can find parallels with and other anarchist movements around the globe like there are nihilists in lots of countries there's egoists everywhere like there's syndicalists literally in every country that's ever existed and they mostly sort of believe the same things um you know and you get some like like osu isakai's like combination of egoism and cynicalism is like

it's cool but like just i like that idea but yeah yeah it's a good idea but it's also not like it's like he's not like he's not the first person to ever do this right and like the japanese cynicalist movement is built in the mold of like the the french syndicalist and the cgt which is this big union uh actually they're still around today they're so in like the very early 1900s they were there there were sort of narco-syndicalist union in like 1906 they have this famous charter that's like anarchist but then they go reformist and they like they vote for world war one and now they're famous for uh there's been like 12 things that probably could have been a revolution in france if the cgt had ever a single time went to the barricades and they never do let's never ever that's like their whole thing like like they sat out bay 68 like that's

impressive yeah this this is a triad union yeah yeah and they sat out bay 68 it's like yeah it's incredible but you know but you know in like 1906, right, the Japanese are looking at it, like, syndicalists are looking at this, like, oh my God, this union has like millions of people in it. Like, it's enormous. It's a syndicalist union. Yeah, which is cool at the time.

Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, they, the Japanese anarchists do sort of their standard syndicalist things. Like, they're building up democratic unions. They're like working towards a general strike that sees the season means their production they're like fighting for a society where production is run by workers themselves blah blah blah i shouldn't blah blah blah that's actually it's it's cool it's fine but uh pure anarchism is not that i'm dying to know what pure anarchism is this i'm new anarchism just dropped i'm excited a hundred years ago it's

it's kind of it's a version of anarcho-communism, but like, what if you like really, really rigorously applied anarcho-communism? And, and this, this is the thing. It doesn't exist anywhere else because everywhere,

like in the West and in Latin America, like syndicalism and anarchism, anarcho-communism just like fuse. Yeah. To the point where like, they're not really, they're like, but there's not really,

they're not really separate tendency. Like nobody's written anarcho-commun communist theory in like a hundred years. Like, like they, they, they, you know, they basically cease to be separate tendencies,

but in Japan, the syndicalists of the and comps like fighting it out to the death. And if this, this produces pure anarchism and it rules, we're going to talk about what it is because it's both wonderful and incredibly silly at the same time so okay so to understand what they're arguing about because this this this causes like a huge fracture in the anarchist movement um i think we need to sort of like go into like the vulgar marxist conception of class structure

that's kind of shared by the syndicalists okay so okay okay so you're you're okay the important thing about this is that like this doesn't work in japan like the vulgar theory of like marxist class structure right is that like okay so you're supposed to have the great industrial proletariat like if that's supposed to become a majority of the population it's supposed to be unified and organized by like the discipline of the factory system and the entire world is supposed to be reduced to two classes like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat like one class of people who have nothing to sell but their labor one class of people who exist purely to like extract wealth from people because like you entirely support this

by owning things and you know eventually these are supposed to like if you if you read your communist manifesto eventually these two classes are supposed to like meet themselves in like a final conflict where the proletariat defeats it's called ragnarok yeah yeah ragnarok yeah and you know the proletariat defeats them and then they abolish the conditions of their own existence as a class and you get stateless classless muddiness society it's like a free association of workers. And this is what communism is. And famously, this never happened. Uh-huh. What?

Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons for this. What about the immortal science? Yeah. Yeah. You know, well, the immortal science. Yeah. This is the problem with the immortal science is that one, instead of unifying the industrial

proletariat, capitalism like divides it and just sort of like like literally spatially like kicks them into suburbs and you can get this sort of like the system where instead of like unifying everyone into one class everyone is now this like completely alienated like boomer living in a suburb even if they still work in a factory and the other problem is that uh there's never just two classes and this is a problem that like yeah yeah all the other ones are our enemies yeah there's more too you. And this is a problem that like, yeah, all the other ones are our enemies. Yeah. That's weird too. You know,

but this is a real problem, right? Because like the, like the Marxists run into this in Russia where it's like, okay, so we, we did our thing. We did our urban proletariat revolution,

but like there's all these peasants and they don't like us because we keep taking their grant at gunpoint. And, but, but you know, you have, you have this one problem, but the other way to get popular

yeah it goes great right nothing bad ever happens they don't famously have to kill enormous numbers of these people but then like you know there's something weird happens which is in china uh stalin managed to get like the entire like the entire urban chinese working class like built a working class killed and so mao Mao has to make a revolution with peasants. And so peasants become this sort of like... This is what the actual revolutionary subject of communism winds up being.

From China to Colombia, it's these peasants. But like, you know, okay, so your theory of the industrial proletariat is already down the toilet. And this is what Shuzo is reacting to. He looks at Japanese society and there's like five people who do wage labor uh mostly there's this enormous like like 14 million people who are tenant farmers who are like trying to support their families on these like tiny plots of rented land but you know and like senator marx's theory is like well

okay these people will inevitably be absorbed into capitalism right by they'll be driven by competition or whatever to the market but like they're not it's not happening they're just they're sitting there and they're still just really poor and paying their landlords and you have to be more patient yeah well you just got to wait for all of japan to be like annihilated to be saved by the second war yeah uh-huh yeah yeah it's it's going great but and there's also like there's all these other classes, too. Like, there's these classes of, like, there's just, like, petty traders, for example. Or, like, low-level, like, really low-level government officials. Like, I don't know, you're, like, a clerk, for example. Who just don't fit into this sort of class schema at all.

Like, if Marxism thinks about, like, small, like, I don't know, people know people who like cut wood and then go into a town and sell it like they're like well these people are pretty bourgeois like their reactionary is blah blah and there's this whole history of like anarchists organizing people like this who marches just sort of like steer at like bolivia has this where like anarchists organize these like uh these indigenous like they're not really positive these indigenous artisans whose things like they go to market and they sell their craft and the Marxists were just like why do we care about these people

like why yeah not workers and it always seems like the better I don't know whenever I was like presented with the basic analysis of like okay we've got the proletariat who have

terrible lives in factories and then you have the lumpen proletariat who refuse that kind of work and are like beggars and thieves and people doing work outside of the traditional system or whatever and then you have the petty bourgeoisie and are like beggars and thieves and uh people doing work outside of

the traditional system or whatever and then you have the petty bourgeoisie who are like you know own stores or artisans or whatever and then you have the bourgeoisie over it and it's just always funny to me because i look at i'm like well clearly the only ones that would be worth being would be lump and proletariat or petty bourgeoisie like they're the only ones who get to have any fun like yeah you know and i think like like this is a problem that that shuzo sees and i'm gonna read part of um uh krupp's book about his solution to this because i think it's really interesting um given the failure of the available methods of class analysis to capture the subtleties of japan's social structure hana developed the notion of the propertyless masses as an alternative concept to the subtleties of Japan's social structure. Hara developed the notion of the propertyless masses

as an alternative concept to the proletariat. The propertyless masses was a wide-ranging term which encompassed tenant farmers, small traders, petty officials, artisans, and even wage laborers when they are prepared to forsake their preoccupation with narrowly defending advantages that accompanied their urban lifestyle and were ready to throw in their lot

with the other oppressed strata. Yeah, that makes sense. That's just the 99%. You know, it's the like, or it's just the haves and the have-nots. It's like, okay. Well, it's kind of, but there's a crucial difference here,

which is that like, okay, so the other, like the really big thing about the pure anarchists is that they don't believe in class struggle. Okay. And the reason why they don't believe in class struggle okay and the reason why they don't believe in class struggle is that they think that okay so they look at the history of the union movement right and it's like okay so has the union movement ended capitalism it's like no so like okay what what does it actually do and

the answer is it gets people slightly more money under capitalism which is nice too yeah which which is nice but it's also like shuzo like adopts this tube there's no other japanese anarchist who who has this metaphor it's like he he compares it to like people fighting inside of like a bandit gang where it's like okay so if you have you have like fight like the bosses of the bandit gang are obviously exploiting like the the lower level people in the bandit gang but you know if even if even if the the low level people in this bandit gang like take over they're not actually going to stop being a bandit gang right it's just that the the distribution of where the bandit gang wealth is going changes and this is a big thing for for for the the pure anarchists because the pure anarchists are you know they're

looking at the the industrial working classes like this is tiny and they're they're all exploding the countryside and so because of that like they they they look at this they look at the the union movement and they they look at it at like class struggle like classical tm like class struggle and they're like well this doesn't cause a revolution all this does is just like sort of reorient like who's in power inside of uh that's what the bolsheviks did right yeah but but it's not just what the both so they apply this to the bolsheviks but like it's also like there's analysis of what a union is is that you're like class struggle is just defending your position under capitalism but you're also fighting very specifically narrowly for your class right so if you're like a factory worker right you're fighting for you and the other factory workers you're not

fighting for like i don't know like a tenant You're not, you're not even fighting from like, for like the guy down the street who bakes bread. It's like, you're, you know, these, these things that are like, that are what they call like instruments of class struggles, like your workers council, your unions, your Soviets, like they don't actually get rid of class. It's just now another class has power. And it doesn't matter if it's sort of like – and this is what they're arguing. It doesn't matter if it's democratic.

It doesn't matter if it's like – there's no difference in how the actual – eventually the class dynamics will play out. It doesn't matter if it's like Lenin making – like Stalin making himself dictator or you have a bunch of democratic Soviets because they're both so interested in class power. They're both sort of just going to reproduce this this whole system and yeah and so they they have this thing that they they counterpose which is like class struggle is just about like stuff that's happening inside the system but that's different for revolution which is like destroying this the system entirely and this is where you get into his stuff about the division of labor which is i think is really interesting because it i i think this this sphere of pure anarchism got to a bunch of critiques of stuff that people have gotten to now but they got to it in like 1920 where okay so shuzo's like one of his big things

is that like the division of labor is inherently exploitative because it like it destroys sort of rural communal living and it replaces it with the centralization of expertise and centralization of power. And he also thinks that like science is like a capitalist engine that's used to like create the, the division of labor. And then it's used to create like mechanization and it's used to create like labor exploitation.

Yeah. That sounds like modern. A lot of like stuff that I read more modern. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. that sounds like modern. A lot of stuff that I read more modern, yeah. Yeah, except they're doing this in like 1927. Yeah. But you know what else is a capitalist engine of exploitation?

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Well, no, revolution, theoretically. Theoretically not exploitative. Well, yes, yes, but we have to get through the last exploitative thing, which is the thing, I talked a bit about this earlier but like the pure anarchists argue that like cities inherently are this concentration of wealth and resources and power and so like farmers and workers need to work together to destroy all forms of power including cities

and this sounds a lot like primitivism yeah it does although you know they wouldn't necessarily be like repping the farmers i think i think primitivism might be the wrong term but it's definitely a lot of like the anti-tech stuff yeah well it's it's interesting okay so they have they have like they they thread this needle where so like there are people in this period who want to just go back to pure rural agrarianism and don't want their technology and the pure anarchists are like no we still want technology but we don't want the division of labor so they're like we like our reaping machines so we don't have to work as much when we're farming we just don't want everyone to live in apartments yeah i mean

even the reaping machine i don't know like i it's kind of unclear to me how this is exactly supposed to work because like we'll get into this i guess we can just get into this now which is like okay so they really don't like the division of labor because they think the division of labor like well okay they have they have like there's like three critiques of it one is that like when you have the division of labor labor becomes like mechanized industrialized and when that happens um labor because like it gets reduced to just like a cog you put in a machine and they see this is like this is like an inherent like thing that happens with labor specialization is you just end up like being a person who makes one repetitive move in a factory

over and over again like you're not free because of this um and they also argue that like specialization means that people only care about like labor that they do and so this gives you like an identity that that divides workers from one sector like say if you're if you're you know you're like a coal miner right your daily experience is so utterly different than a baker. And it's not just like your experience. It's like your knowledge is different. The other person is not going to, like the baker is not going to understand what you're doing.

And I keep wanting to argue against this political position that is a hundred years old. I keep trying to be like, no, that misunderstands the nature of specialization at all. But then i'm like all right i i can't go back and convince these people they're all dead yeah yeah i think like i think okay this is i'm gonna i'm gonna go i'm gonna uh put on my my my marks my like weird left comm marks noise and go it's a critique not a platform okay which is not they they actually

want as a platform but like i think right it would have been a great a critique not a platform okay which is not they they actually want as a platform but like i think right it would have been a great critique and not a very good platform yeah their platform yeah i mean i think there's there's interesting elements of it like they have this argument that like okay so if you have your like your your syndicalist like society right where okay so you you have a bunch of like you have a bunch of like coal miners you have a bunch of people who like make pots and pans but you you need to coordinate your labor okay because because you you have like specialization you have branches of labor and their argument is that okay so well the syndicalist way you do this you have coordinating

committees right you you like elect a person, you send them to a coordinating council, and the coordinating council coordinates stuff. Okay. And Chizuo's like, well, that's just going to turn into a state. You're just going to create a permanent class. Even if you rotate people, you're creating an administrative body that's going to rebuild the state again. And, yeah, like, okay. I'm making this shrugging gesture that the audience gets i'm like i got you know yeah i i don't okay so like i don't think he's right about like most of this like i think he's sort of wrong about a like almost all of it the the thing

the thing that stuck with me though when i read this is like his specific critique of syndicalism which is that it maintains like the structure of the old world because if you're a syndicalist and your your society is based on unions running their workplaces then you you've maintained the division of labor but you've also maintained like the basic like geographic physical technological and organizational structure of capitalism sure like all all of the like all of that stuff is still in the same place and you're still sort of like going there to do your job and i think there is an interesting sort of like like i think there was a genuinely interesting critique there of yeah like how how do you make sure that you aren't just sort of reproducing that stuff? And like, like, I mean, I don't know, like the critique of why would you want to build

a society like structured along the lines of production? Like why, like why do you want to structure your society around work? Like that's awful. I like that about the pure anarchists where they were kind of like, let's's let's throw away the marxist shit for a minute and like just actually like figure out what we want and like i i like that about it i but i i dislike the idea of like well it's it's it would be my problem with syndicalism and most of the syndicalists i met believe in syndicalism as a a method and not a end result right um it's a way of building workers power not a way to create a society but but if syndicalists were like everyone must wake up and go to their work job and then make eight widgets but it's

collectively determined which widgets that you make right like fuck that but also if it was like everyone goes and wakes up and goes to their collective farm and maybe we use reaping machines and maybe we don't. And it's just like I get so unexcited by it's like one of the reasons that like a lot of the like nitpicky branches of anarchism don't. They interest me, but I don't like subscribe to any of them is because I'm like, well, what if some people like this shit and some people like this shit? Like, you know, maybe there could be fucking different. Imagine that we could have a plurality of, uh, economic models systems,

but you know, whatever. Um, I'm now arguing with dead people who I probably would have gotten along with in real life. This is interesting. Like, well, I don't know.

Cause these guys like, they, they have like the Maoist thing going on where like, they will like attack other leftist groups who like don't like follow their line. And so this is where this whole thing is wild. So one of the other things is like the. The pure anarchists are like completely convinced that syndicalism is like a sort of like, well, they think it's just like it's not an anarchist thing. It's just like a tendency to labor movements.

Well, they think it's just like, it's not an anarchist thing, it's just like a tendency to labor movements. And they also think that, like, it's basically like a bastardized form of Marxism. Because... They're not, like, entirely wrong about either of those things, but it's just different at different places and times. Yeah, but it's like, the thing that they have about it, like,

because they're completely convinced that syndicalism will inevitably just, like, turn into, like, Soviet communism. It's like yeah it's it's incredibly silly um but like like this you know like on the one hand like they are kind of inventing a lot of the sort of like like they're inventing a lot of the sort of like some okay some bad arguments about uh uh like specialization and stuff like and like some anti-work stuff too that like is going to be around later yeah they're also inventing a lot

of stuff that's like and you know initially this kind of like new theory doesn't have this doesn't have an enormous effect. In 1926, the Federation of Black Youth, or COCRAN, has its first public meeting, and they have a bunch of cool slogans. Their slogans roll. They have,

the emancipation of workers must be carried out by the workers themselves. We insist on libertarian federation. Destroy the political movement. Reject the proletarian party get rid of professional activists down with all oppressive laws and ordinances that is an entirely based platform yeah it's sweet all right it's it's good yeah and you know the other thing is despite the fact that it's called the federation of black youth this is like not a youth i mean i mean there's like youth in it but like it's it's this thing's backed by like remember those those

printers unions that i was talking about last episode that osagie sakai had like set up so they're all heavily involved in this um and they do a bunch of cool labor stuff like they they get involved in like uh there's a bunch of tram worker strikes they get involved in they're in this uh the the japanese musical instrument company strike which is like there's like over a thousand people on strike for like over a hundred days and there's there's this great split where like so the leadership of the union is bolshevik but like a bunch of the like a bunch of the the ordinary people in the union are anarchists and so you have that there's there's like this is fun tension going around you know they're they're doing the stuff um and then the anarchist form um zengoku jiran which is the the all japanese

libertarian federation of labor unions which is a it's a federation of 25 unions wait these are the pure anarchists that you're talking about that are doing all this oh so i sorry at this point they they haven't split yet oh okay because i was like this sounds like all the stuff that they said that they don't want to do yeah well this well, the other wild thing about this is that, okay, so the entirety of pure anarchist theory is about how unions don't do revolutions and that class struggle, but they still do strikes. They still do all the normal stuff. It's kind of wild.

Okay, I kind of like that. Yeah, and that's sort of how they're able to get along in this early period and these unions like okay so there's like a lot of printers unions in this because the printers unions are just really anarchist but there's there's like just a tenant farmers union there's a bunch of like rubber unions and it grows to like 15 000 workers almost immediately and yeah they're doing a lot of cool stuff like they they have they have these huge demonstrations in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, who the US is killing for being anarchists

and also Italians. Just like... Yeah. The one time anti-Italian racism was real. And a hundred years ago, shit was real different than it is now, and it doesn't... Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for, for, for one year, this, like this works great. Uh, you know, like the, the, yeah, the, the unions up to like, I think they get up to like 20,000, 30,000 members. Like it gets pretty big, but then 1927, uh, intense conflict between the syndicalists and the anarcho, theists, the pure anarchists break out. And this gets so bad so fast that like the International Working Man's Association, which is the like the giant international like federation of syndicalist movements, like sends them a letter that are like, hey, syndicalists, anarcho-communists get along literally everywhere else on earth.

They're chill. Can you guys like chill? everywhere else on earth they're chill you guys like chill and uh the anarcho-communists in kokodran uh their response is uh we are fighting quote the betrayers opportunists and union imperialists in zengoku jiren's ranks it's amazing um this is why we can't have nice things yo it's great it gets better it gets It gets better. Better than we always lose. Yeah. Look, in the 1928 conference, Sengoku Jiren,

which is the Union Federation, they have the yearly conference in 1928, and there's just a giant battle over what the organization's platform is going to be, a thing that doesn't matter at all, except it's a proxy ideological fight. uh both sides just start screaming at each other and i'm gonna read this description from harashizo and pure anarchism in tour japan coconut members barricaded the uh barrack to the anarchist syndicalists jeering and catcalling them

and the proceedings degenerated to the level where it was almost impossible to hear the speeches eventually the anarcho-syndicalists decided they had had enough unfurling their black flags they walked out of the hall to a chorus of taunts such as believers blind believers and central authority bolsheviks and betrayers oh my god get over yourself oh my god no okay to to be fair to the pure anarchist oh one so okay a bunch of the the syndicalist unions start leaving and uh one of them does actually join the bolsheviks but like all the other ones don't because they're not and you get this period there's like they have like the syndicalists and the the pure anarchists of dueling magazines uh there's one called black flag there's one called black battle and like so cochran which is like the youth movement thing

like the syndicalists and the anarchists are still in it together and they like they start just like fighting each other in the street when they run into each other because the uh the this is more depressing than everyone getting murdered after the earthquake not the genocide part of the anarchist killing part yeah well i mean yeah yeah it's it's it's like it's incredible you know and like yeah they what's interesting about this though is that like the anarcho-communists like when the union splits like almost all of the people stay with the anarcho-communists even though the anarcho-communists are like explicitly saying we're not fighting for like wage increases uh we're just fighting for revolution which is fine i'm all right with that yeah well but there's interesting stuff too where it's like like they're

also so because they have this thing that's like okay so the urban workers are like exploiting the well okay the line about it's complicated because it's like they they think the urban workers are exploiting the countryside but they also don't think that the solution to it is to just like turn it the other way around they think that like the workers and the tenant farmers just work together to like all right make the oppression go away that seems like a reasonable stance on it yeah but it means that you know they're interested in like they're interested in the rural movement in a way that like the other japanese left movements aren't but uh unfortunately you know okay there's a big debate as to whether this split like actually like like how big a role this split had in the collapse of anarchism because like by by by like by like 1931 like

the fascists have just straight up taken over Manchuria. Things have gotten so fascist that it's unclear whether the split mattered at all. Yeah. Yeah, but they run into this problem where Kokurin... The state really hates them.

And a bunch of them get arrested and they respond to being arrested by getting more militant, but then that just all a bunch of them get arrested and they you know they respond to being arrested by like getting more militant but then that just you know that fuels a cycle of them getting arrested for and people just leave because they're like well okay if i'm in this organization like we're all just gonna like get shot i mean that's the clandestinity spiral you know yeah yeah and you know it's just a problem and like harishizu himself becomes just like incredibly depressed by the suppression of the movement and by 1932 he just leaves like he's just out he like renounces anarchism he uh abuses his wife because this is the story of a bunch of guys who sucked

and then he drinks himself to death yeah yeah well i guess okay he he did it to him so he yeah he drinks he got it done on his own yeah and you know so he he dies and he like kills himself well i i don't think he was doing it on purpose but he just yeah he dies from drinking too much in 1934 and that year actually the anarcho-communists anarcho-syndicalists like get back together but it doesn't matter because by this point the fascists are just sort of in power. And yeah, the anarchists, they,

they do, they do one last rural uprising and they fight a lot of cops and then all of them get arrested and anarchism just sort of dies until the end of World War II. Okay. And yeah, it's, you know,

okay. Anarchism does reemerge after the war, but that's like, that that's a whole nother story entirely. What, what I will say about it is uh if you see those those construction hats from like 1968 protests and you see one that's just all black it doesn't have like a name written on it like those are the anarchists cool it's still around um and you know anarchism in japan like survives to this day uh there's there's a book called the manual for a worldwide for a worldwide manuke revolt that like

one day i swear to god i'm actually going to read but he is uh really big in china well okay i say really big in china it's very influential in a very small subcultural anarchist scene in china but i'm talking about them because it heavily influenced uh like the the people who wrote the lying flat manifesto um we're like we're very heavily influenced by this stuff what's the line manifesto oh okay okay so we did the episode about this a while back but lying flat was this thing in china i guess still going on but like people were just like it's kind of it was kind of the version of anti-work or a bunch of people like discovered diogenes and were like what if i just didn't work

like what if i just like lived on like i worked like one day a month and then lived on like nothing so i didn't have to work or if i just quit what if i just like stop doing all of this capitalist stuff and what if i like stop having to deal with this patriarchy what if i just like you know it yeah and it takes kind of like yeah yeah they're great they lots of fondiogenes quotes lots of like the manifesto they released is like very it's like very anarchist and yeah like that whole thing that was like like this is a big enough social movement that like like xi jinping like mentioned it in a speech okay and so yeah like japanese anarchism still has influence to this day.

It was a big problem for them. They were kind of concerned about it. Yeah. The same way a whole bunch of oligarchs got concerned about the anti-work stuff. You saw anti-work hit pieces in the past six months. It was similar things, being like,

well, this better not catch on more because that could really suck for us. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. That's as optimistic of a note as you could possibly get out of the story, which is that they're still around and they still influence things that matter. And hopefully they don't fight each other more than the state yeah don't don't do that like i like yes i i guess i will make my controversial sometimes it's okay to stab an abuser under the throat stance but also don't purge all your syndicalists

because on the accusation of Bolshevism... Hot take. Don't purge all your syndicalists. Yeah. Don't systematize violence like that. You know, you're like, this individual guy just did this thing, and I'm real upset that he just did it to me, and there's like a throat.

I'm not actually making an actual advocacy. I'm talking about how sometimes when that has happened in history that seemed kind of cool but yeah not the not the systemic kick out all the people who have this minor i mean it's really funny to me because i'm like i'm like huge anti-infighting then people are like don't you spend all your time fighting tankies on the internet i'm like they want to make a state that's different yeah they believe that they everyone should be thrown in jail that is a different thing um also i don't like you gotta manage the polycule drama like you gotta manage it's gotta be kept under control you cannot allow your entire scene to be factionalized over rival polycules and anarchists

control your polycule drama quotations and uh parenthesis impossible see that's why you just need more no maybe it's not true it's like you need more multi-generational anarchists because i think people in their 40s give less of a shit about a lot of the drama but then i'm like maybe that's not true maybe people in their 40s give just as much of a shit about all the drama oh anarchism wonderful idea yep yeah that's it's good and speaking of wonderful ideas it is time for us to do the plugs

first I just want to plug Jamie Loftus's new cool zone media podcast ghost church by Jamie Loftus by the time this drops episode one will be out and episode one will be out and episode two will be dropping

on... The next Monday, I believe. Yes, exactly. And we also have another podcast on Koolza Media with one Margaret Kiljoy called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Margaret, you want to tell us about that?

Oh, should I start working on that? I'll get it done by Monday. Oh, okay, cool. I have a new podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is about cool people who did cool stuff. And you might like it if you like stories about people who, I can't say cool stuff again. I'll have to come up with more synonyms.

Really, it's just all a competition to see how many synonyms for cool I can come up cool stuff again. I'll have to come up with more synonyms. Really, it's just all a competition to see how many synonyms for cool I can come up with without using the word based because I feel like I'm too old to use the word based. Really, this is what you are here for. So I'm much more eloquent on my podcast, which you can catch every Monday and Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Probably wherever you got this podcast is where you can find it. And the trailer is out now so you can go and you can listen to the trailer where I talk about some anarchist bank robbers who broke out of prison because why would you be in prison when you could be outside of prison

which is generally the preferable position to be in with the exception of like every now and then like people break out of jail by like someone goes to jail on purpose but they have like hacksaw blades in their shoes and shit that would be cool too um so more breaking your friends out of jail and less chasing them out of the room jeering at them is my general rule i hate to make rules but if i were to make one, it would be that. And you can hear me talk

about those kinds of stories on the podcast. Yay! Thank you so much for joining us today for Chris to talk about the wonderful history of Japanese anarchism

and the many deaths that are associated in... Those poor people. wonderful history of Japanese anarchism and the many deaths that are associated in... Those poor people. Yeah. Like a mini Korean genocide. Yeah.

Intense. Well, that does it for us today. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenYourPod Pod and Cool Zone Media. See you next week. And go listen to podcasts. We have many of them. Wow.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.