#title Collection of Texts from Japan Anarchist Alliance #author Japan Anarchist Alliance #LISTtitle Collection of Texts from Japan Anarchist Alliance #date March 2026 #source [[https://www.anarchism.jp/][www.anarchism.jp]] #lang en #pubdate 2026-05-07T02:42:22 #authors Japan Anarchist Alliance #topics Japanese anarchism, Revolutionary organization, Autonomy, Zengakuren, Anarchist dictatorship *** Basic Principles Anarchism is a revolutionary doctrine that takes the freedom of Dasein as its point of departure, rejects every form of transcendent authority, and aims at “total destruction.” Revolution is the project through which we respond existentially to the reality of oppression that confronts us in the world into which we have been thrown. It shatters, one after another, every idea that presents itself as “sacred”: the state, capitalism, patriarchy, religion, and even the Communist Party. “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” We have inherited, and are charged with further developing, this classical Bakuninist spirit. Our task is to bury the diminished current of “anarchism of everyday life” that became fashionable during the recent COVID period through figures such as Yasushi Kurihara, Motoi Mori, and Keiichirō Matsumura, in which mutual aid was turned into an end in itself. Against the postmodern condition of thought, we will once again fire Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” and seek to overcome modernity. The struggle to win freedom must itself be practiced freely. As autonomous anarchists, we unite in our alliance as an association of a minority of revolutionaries. In order to prevent the reproduction of bureaucratism typical of existing sects, indiscriminately accommodating organizational expansion must be avoided. Membership is limited to those who fully understand this basic program and are capable of developing their own thought and practice on its basis. “I have based my cause on nothing.” The spontaneous and loose solidarity of horizontal organizations and non-sect activists is nothing more than a petty-bourgeois movement that remains satisfied, under the existing order, with bourgeois rights: non-interference and private property. Anarchist freedom means that, upon the groundlessness of existence, the Unique One takes possession of the world through their own will. It is through struggle that we, united as a firm and indivisible force, create freedom. *** On Ontological Alienation In order to confront Marxism’s materialist dialectic, anarchism requires a philosophical foundation capable of being used for social analysis. As our method, we critically “appropriate” elements from various theories, incorporate them, and then re-establish and systematically integrate them upon our own Heideggerian standpoint of Dasein: the gaze of the “I” here and now, that is, the Unique One. Below, we construct this theory of “ontological alienation.” We do so by reading Kyōji Chisaka’s theory of the state in Revelation from History—while overcoming its weakness, namely that from the standpoint of communal being it overlooks the mechanism through which bureaucracy is reproduced; the Situationist critique of consumer society—while overcoming the fact that Debord’s Society of the Spectacle remains a description of objective analysis and lacks phenomenological reduction; and Wataru Hiromatsu’s theory of reification—while overcoming the fact that its intersubjective structure of being leans too heavily toward objective relationality and leaves Dasein absent. What is usually called physical coercion by the apparatus of violence—tax-office seizures, the police, and so on—is merely the exceptional state of sovereign power. The essence of domination lies rather in the Gestell, the enframing that daily boxes Dasein into the obedient subject called “the citizen,” reducing it to standing-reserve and driving it forward. What allows this mode of disclosure to be understood within the concern of the people is the intersubjectivity of “meaning” projected by the spectacle. For example, Gestell appears in the staff announcements broadcast in large stores: workers are summoned into designated tasks as homogeneous and interchangeable standing-reserve. There, two forms of oppression arise. The first is “alienation”: while working, the worker is managed by employment rules and quotas, and the fruits of their labor are appropriated by the company. The second is “reification”: when assigned to the cash register, the worker’s relation with customers no longer appears as being-with-others, but merely as an exchange of commodities and money stripped of all ownmost character. Concrete examples of the spectacle include, in its concentrated form, nationalist mobilizations that generate a large-scale sense of unity, such as military parades, world expos, and the Olympic Games. In its diffuse form, they include not only media advertising that praises the system while inciting useless consumption, but also the discourse of online right-wingers in the information society and forms of fan activity that consume “moe” elements as signs. Money likewise has two aspects: the legal force of compulsory currency that gives it value, and the intersubjective trust through which people recognize and circulate it. In this way, by using the theory of ontological alienation, we can radically and uniformly criticize every kind of social problem, from the macroscopic structures of oppression analyzed by world-systems theory to the harmfulness embedded in microscopic everyday customs. In short, the problem is the inversion whereby beings that once lay close to hand are distanced into representation, and we ourselves come to be ruled by representation. The path toward transforming the world is therefore the practice of first severing the instrumental nexus imposed by society—the connections between things expressed as “in order to…”—and then freely reconstructing what is ready-to-hand through Dasein. In other words, it concludes in the purposeful “construction of situations” through which the Unique One takes possession. Thus, in the context of being-in-the-world, world revolution is grasped anew. *** For the Victory of the Revolution We anarchists have a duty to confront power. If, after Foucault, “power” is omnipresent in every relation, then we too must assume our own power and embody its anarchist form. That means organizing an anarchist dictatorship—a dictatorship that destroys all authority—on the principle of purposeful self-abolition. There can be no doubt that this counter-power is itself a form of free life and a constructed situation. In contemporary Japan, both the student movement, which has been almost entirely destroyed—apart from the hollow shell of Zengakuren barely maintained by New Left sects—and the aging labor movement, which has declined into reformism through demands such as wage increases, can be fundamentally surpassed only through the possibility of counter-power. The only remaining hope lies in the councilist vision of restoring what Vaneigem called “the totality of life,” a vision capable of reintegrating a world fragmented under absolute freedom. Toward the abolition of the state, we must form councils as bases of counter-power, encompassing existing student self-governing associations and labor unions. This will not be achieved simply by waiting for the spontaneous movement of the people, nor by seeking a Bolshevik theory of external injection. Rather, it will be achieved when revolutionaries enter among the people as strategists, act upon them, and orient them toward revolution: an “invisible dictatorship,” that is, the construction of situations that organizes spontaneity. The councils confront the state. On the basis of such a situation of dual power—which is essentially unstable, and whose instability is precisely what makes it revolutionary—we overthrow the government and replace social organization with an association of free individuals. Through councils that autonomously govern the whole of everyday life, politics and alienation are sublated. Directly lived experience is recovered, and free life can be authentically enjoyed. “The proletarian revolution will be a festival, or it will not be.” Let the bourgeois ruling classes of the West and the Stalinist party bureaucrats of the East tremble before the artillery fire exploding from the ranks of a pure anarchist world revolutionary war. In this unique revolution, which shoots time and recaptures space, we have nothing to lose but our chains. What we must take into our hands is the whole world. Dasein of all countries, unite! *** Where We Came From, and What We Did March 28, 2026 — Yukito Akii Since childhood, I hated school, refused to attend, shut myself indoors, and studied on my own. It was around my third year of middle school that, through my rebellion against authority, I discovered anarchism as an idea and began studying it. Toward the end of that year, after Noriyuki Maekawa organized me, I joined a left-wing organization called the [[https://institute-for-libertarian.org/the-libertarian/1787/][Libertarian Alliance]]. During my first year of high school, I was actively involved: I went to Hiroshima for antiwar demonstrations and gave street speeches with tax-cut groups. Yet as time passed, I grew disgusted and disappointed by their bureaucratism, which did nothing but turn “movement” into an end in itself, and by the poverty of philosophy that prevented them from sublating their own contradictions. The final breaking point came during the general election, when conflict erupted over the summation of my “street-speech assault,” a struggle I had carried out with the aim of overthrowing democracy. I was one-sidedly condemned as reckless and lacking caution. Unable to tolerate this, I blocked them from February 2026 onward and completely broke with them. Together with comrades who left alongside me, I began building this Anarchist Alliance. At that moment, while searching for a form of practice, I turned my attention to the Autonomia movement in Italy during the “Years of Lead” in the 1970s. Rather than seeing it merely as a historical movement, could it not be re-evaluated as a still highly effective tactic for overthrowing the spectacular commodity society, which continues to deepen in twenty-first-century Japan even more than it did under the conditions of that time? What follows is my report and summation of the practice I carried out. *** Japanese Autonomia One of Autonomia’s main tactics was “self-reduction”: voluntarily reducing the price paid for a commodity by subtracting the surplus exploited by capital and paying what corresponds to its real labor value. This is a revolutionary struggle that contests the reification of the commodity spectacle, in which companies monopolize price-setting and relations between people appear only as commodity exchange. Store clerks and part-time workers are also members of the working class, and therefore there is room to share class consciousness, such as resentment toward capitalists. If they accept self-reduction, a sabotaging complicity is formed and solidarity can be expected. In fact, I carried out a self-reduction struggle at a local convenience store and won a brilliant success, presenting the system with a radical negation at its root. I entered the store and casually, naturally said, “I would like to use self-reduction, please.” A dialogue with the clerk then began, in which I argued the logic of Autonomia in a coherent way: it is fundamentally wrong to sell a mere half-dozen pieces of chocolate at the inflated price of 165 yen including consumption tax; therefore, buying it at 50 yen as a fair price is a legitimate demand. In addition, as an act of counter-revolutionary enforcement, I tore down an anti-smoking advertising poster as a spectacular representation. The struggle continued through March, becoming increasingly refined. However, the clerk stubbornly refused to accept self-reduction. Finally, on the 22nd of that month, I was met with class betrayal: the clerk reported me, ignoring their own class interest as a proletarian. Faced with the Gestell-like violence of the police, this struggle was repressed, and so it entered the stage of summation. *** Summation and Future Prospects The practice of Japanese Autonomia may seem like a small matter, but it directly and intensely shook the deceptive structure of the capitalist economy. Insofar as it confronted and tried to break through the familiar facticity of everyday life, primordially alienated here and now, it was far more radical and revolutionary than the New Left’s endless cycle of demonstrations and rallies. Autonomia proper has strong practical force because the people struggle collectively. The reason my individual practice failed was the absence of hegemony. That is why the clerk, without ulterior motive, reported me, and the system was reproduced. In other words, because practice is always given meaning by revolutionary theory, it was confirmed once again that ideological struggle must come first. Nevertheless, we must overcome the problem that the system can “recuperate” struggle by processing it, unintentionally, as mere crime or mental disturbance. We must be able to move from destructive acts toward the construction of situations. That is, at the site of struggle against Gestell, how can we establish free council power and link it to a continuing expansion of the front? This becomes the condition for new tactics. Given the current situation, in which society as a whole is shifting rightward—as seen in the spread of trivial conspiracy theories and the growth of Sanseitō—while the left has intellectually degenerated into harmless humanitarian discourse such as anti-discrimination and antiwar positions on Palestine, we must now, as one form of ideological struggle, use our theory of ontological alienation to carry out an “entryist tactic” into the many existing movements and win hegemony within those milieus. To take back the revolutionary movement! *** Proposal for an Organized Zenkyōtō April 14, 2026 — Aryumīnin I imagine the readers of this short text to be radicals. I am not addressing decent citizens who feel repelled by revolutionary movements. In contemporary Japan, I am addressing the smoldering, anachronistic young “revolutionaries” who, for example, gather around figures such as Kōichi Toyama. They may be far right or far left. In 2026, in order to revive the radical revolutionary movement represented by the student movements of roughly sixty years ago, I propose what might be called an “organized Zenkyōtō” or “organized All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee”: a structure that would encompass multiple sects within one large sect. To break through this rotten society, an effective revolutionary movement is necessary. In contrast to the historical All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees, which emerged by relying on spontaneity, the revolutionary form I propose is characterized by artificial and bureaucratic organization. In other words, we would artificially create what once took spontaneous form as Zenkyōtō. But because the artificial always carries the risk of becoming authoritarian, I deliberately call it “bureaucratic” as a warning. Without looking away from that reality, we must build mechanisms from the beginning to monitor the bureaucracy and preserve the left-right “joint struggle” character of Zenkyōtō—that is, its freedom. I explain the concrete mechanisms below. The image I have in mind is the “counterintelligence” organization created by the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine to defend itself against Cheka espionage. In order to prevent dictatorship by ensuring that the bureaucracy does not expand, it would adopt an elite-minority principle and thoroughly exclude anything resembling the “Lenin Enrollment” that Stalin used to swell Bolshevik Party membership. Unlike the coexistence-ism of Akinori Tomosaka, I propose a federation of sects that is not “loose.” The first and most important source of the idea is the doctrine of “anarchist dictatorship” energetically developed by Professor Yukito Akii. This idea has existed since Bakunin’s time in the First International, and in the present day Akiiism is its main driving force. If I had to name another source of inspiration, it would be an expansive interpretation of the Rōsōkai, a prewar organization in which the right and the left interacted across party lines. I have combined Zenkyōtō with the Rōsōkai. In other words, just as the far left has historically undergone repeated splits and recombinations, the goal is not for each sect to unite voluntarily through agreements among sects. Instead, every far-right and far-left organization would be “registered” under the umbrella of Zenkyōtō, and unity would be organizationally enforced. Sects that do not enter the unified sect would be excluded from the movement. Every movement body inside the university—or elsewhere—would be “registered.” Tribute would be extracted like protection money collected by the yakuza. It is not a very good analogy, but the organization would behave somewhat like Tito’s Yugoslavia, which tolerated criticism of the regime while repressing nationalism. Externally, it would carry out unified action for the defense of student autonomy, and the Zenkyōtō Executive Committee would be responsible for organizing this unified defense force. Internally, the various sects would be free to debate and criticize one another. However, criticism of the existence of Zenkyōtō itself would not, as a rule, be permitted. It would be permissible to denounce corruption and misconduct, which could certainly arise within the Zenkyōtō leadership. But opposition to the existence of Zenkyōtō as such would not be allowed. Since this is probably a new concept, let me search for other formulations. Under the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party there were the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; under the banner of the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō, students belonging to a wide variety of sects, such as Chūkaku, Front, and the Fourth International, struggled together. But unlike the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which fell into endless disorder, the executive would use coercive authority to maintain the organization’s external unity so that the sects do not become independent powers. A small elite “Zengakuren Special Action Squad” would be formed to launch attacks against unregistered sects or sects that seemed likely to become independent from Zenkyōtō. Soldiers would be trained using tribute money. Normally, the organization would not interfere in the political thought of individual sects; however, counter-revolutionary sects would be expelled. Why is the “bureaucratic” organization of Zenkyōtō necessary—“bureaucratic” being a term I use with caution against formalization and hollowing-out? It is necessary in order to bring internal violence between sects under organizational control. Having reflected seriously on the history of revolution in Japan, I have reached the conclusion that unless the revolutionary movement suppresses internal factional violence, it benefits the counter-revolution: the Communist Party, the police, and similar forces. In confronting counter-revolution, each sect absolutely requires external unified action, and therefore organizes Zenkyōtō above itself. For the defense of all sects! Organized Zenkyōtō is not a “political organization,” but an organization for preserving both the far right and the far left. It would adopt a quota system requiring both the far right and the far left to be represented on the Executive Committee, and it would prohibit the exclusion of the far right from the student movement. Moreover, this would not only be true in principle: to prevent a reign of terror that crushes each sect, the organization would adopt an elite-minority principle, establish an independent tribunate, and ensure that the small elite force attacks “only the enemies of Zenkyōtō.” There must never be enough personnel to monitor all sects; the organization must not have the numbers to do so in the first place. Both right-wing and left-wing groups would register with Zenkyōtō. But Zenkyōtō would not merely register and tax them like a municipal office; it would organize united action for external unity and the defense of student autonomy. The Executive Committee would consist of half right-wingers and half left-wingers—or, at minimum, at least one third right-wingers and one third left-wingers—in order to maintain the Rōsōkai-like character of the organization. The purpose of organized Zenkyōtō is to defend a situation in which sects can freely proliferate. Concrete activities would be carried out spontaneously by each sect, thereby realizing student autonomy. Of course, this does not need to be limited to universities or students. Zenkyōtō has no ideology, or rather it has both far-right and far-left ideology. It is not to be made into an ideological movement body, that is, one sect among others, but into a small, coercive organization whose only purpose is to defend ideological movements from external enemies. It must remain a small elite force, not a large elite force like the KGB. Since political activity is conducted autonomously by each sect under the Zenkyōtō umbrella, there would be no direct democracy at the level of a general assembly. Historical experience suggests that this would likely lead to splits and internal violence. It is not spontaneous Zenkyōtō, but organized, bureaucratic Zenkyōtō. Yet this is not a bureaucracy that imposes one ideology. It is an administrative body necessary to unite the far left and the far right, prevent internal violence, defeat the real counter-revolution such as the Communist Party and the police, and carry out unified action together. Normally, it would not intervene in individual sects. But when an external enemy appears, it would impose conscription on each sect in equal proportion and organize a Zenkyōtō army to repel riot police. Of course, this would be a military force with a chain of command. However, it would not be a professionalized standing army, but a temporary army. Once the enemy is repelled, it would be dissolved, except for the executive bodies necessary to maintain public order in defense of student autonomy, that is, to suppress counter-revolution. The goal is to combine externally unified organizational defense by the far right and far left with internal debate and the proliferation of sects. Or, to put it in a less than ideal way, the far right and far left would jointly maintain and manage the same “platform” called the student movement. Each sect would be compelled to register under that umbrella, while carrying out its own movement and actions according to its own ideology. Still, what happens if a Stalin-like figure takes control of the Zenkyōtō executive? That is precisely why the elite-minority principle is necessary. If the number of personnel is small, despotism becomes physically difficult. Even if someone like Stalin or Beria were to seize control of the Zenkyōtō executive, a small number of subordinates could not rule all sects through terror. The Zenkyōtō Special Action Squad that represses and attacks anti-Zenkyōtō factions must remain a small elite force. If the total number of activists across the sects is five thousand, it should be around fifty people; if the total is one thousand, around twenty. There must be no standing army, so that the executive cannot become dictatorial. In peacetime, the Zenkyōtō army is not to be organized. Furthermore, the authority to remove such executive members would be granted to an institution called the “tribunate,” whose members would be chosen by lot. Executive members themselves could also be chosen by lot rather than election. The tribunes and executive members would be elected, or selected by lottery, through separate systems. An independent auditing body, the “tribunate,” would be established with strong powers of investigation in order to monitor and investigate whether the Zenkyōtō executive properly distinguishes between “criticism of the existence of Zenkyōtō itself” and “criticism of Zenkyōtō policy or personnel,” and whether it correctly defines the targets of repression. The Zenkyōtō executive would have no veto power over investigations by the tribunes. Only when the deployment of riot police is highly likely, or when attacks by Minsei or the Communist Party counter-revolution are anticipated, would a system of conscription be imposed on each sect in equal proportion and a temporary army organized to repel external enemies. Once the riot police are repelled, it would be dissolved. The units directly subordinate to Zenkyōtō must remain small in ordinary times, and a strict upper limit on their numbers must be fixed in rules or a program. Against the counter-revolution—the Communist Party, the riot police, and similar forces—the Zenkyōtō army would jointly repel them. Maintaining the conditions in which the student movement can exist: this is the entire purpose of organized Zenkyōtō.