The first political text I wrote was a report on the situation and basic tasks, submitted to the general assembly of the JCP Kyoto University student cell in April 1959. This was the last meeting of the CP student cell, which had led the Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-governing Associations) movement at Kyoto University from 1956 to 1958, and the meeting resolved to break away from the CP and dissolve the student cell. At that time, I was a member of the cell’s leading committee and one of the two deputy caps of the committee, and I was in charge of reporting on the situation and basic tasks. The proposal on the break with the party structure and the situation-&-task report were each submitted as mimeograph documents to the general assembly in April 1959, but now these documents are not in my possession and have disappeared completely. I remember that my situation and mission report began with an economic outlook and concluded with a call for a mission to "get one Bolshevik worker per factory or workplace.

　In January 1959, I joined the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL), an organization supporting the Fourth International, but the majority of the former CPers joined the ultra-spontanist Communist League (Bund). At the end of 1959, our JRCL group had five members outside the Faculty of Medicine, but I was the only one active member out of the five. The JRCL group was active in the student movement mainly as the Left Opposition of the Socialist Students League (Left), and during 1959 we published the first issue of “Internazionale” as the paper of the Kyoto University branch of the Left. Between 1959 and 1963, about 100 issues of the “Internazionale” were produced, and I must have written about 30 articles for the paper: this mimeograph paper had disappeared completely and I have no memory of the texts I wrote.

　During the period 1960-1962, I concentrated my activities on the construction and strengthening of the Kyoto University Left and the expansion of the Left organization toward Osaka area, and did not do activities for the JRCL center, which was in Kyoto at that time, nor activities at the national scale. Therefore, my writing activities during this period were based on the Kyoto University and Kyoto-Osakai Left organizations, and I was not writing for the JRCL paper of “World Revolution”, as I was only a marginal member of the JRCL.

　One article from this period that remains in my memory that might still have some significance today is an about-40,000-word article that criticized Kan’ichi Kuroda’s “philosophical” logic as methodically pure idealism, relying on Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”. However, it was circulated in the form of a hand-writing manuscript among the Left members, and the manuscript has been lost. In any case, Marxism and Trotsky’s theories remained an object of study and learning for me at the time, and my writings were only at studying level.

　In 1963, I became a full-timer of the JRCL Central Secretariat (Kyoto), and began to work for national reconstruction of the JRCL. In 1964, I moved from Kyoto-Osaka to Tokyo, where I continued to work as a national full timer of the JRCL until the mid-1980s. Thus, since the mid-1960s, I have written various articles, mainly for the JRCL paper of “World Revolution” and the theoretical journal of "Fourth International.

　My efforts to master Marxism and Trotsky’s theories continued after the mid-1960s, but at the same time I began to recognize my own originality in my thinking and writing. This is clearly demonstrated in “Before the Thesis - Transitional Period and Marxism” (1965-1967), which was composed of three texts (https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article3025). The three texts represented my understanding of Marxism and Trotsky’s theories from 1960 to 1965 and my awareness of the specific and peculiar nature of the whole political world after World War II. The historical problematics of Marxism expressed in “Before the Thesis” have been the basic underpinning of my political thinking since then.

March 29, 2008

Yoshichi Sakai