NEW DAWN RISING History and Summation of the Japan Town Collective (5 of 7)

Many of the JTC cadres and "advanced elements" joined with the tenants to fight against the destruction of the Japanese community. As this struggle developed, some of the cadres from the JTC were pulled out of labor organizing to go into the CANE struggle and to give it leadership. At one time, the JTC had close to two dozen cadres involved in CANE.

The labor organizing at that time done by JTC centered in the garment industry. In this area, JTC and IWK were having joint meetings about strategy, direction and the development of a line in terms of organizing the workers, giving direction and focus to the struggle. I wasn't involved in that work and I don't know why it started to unravel. There was no clear sum-up of that particular period, or the errors (hat developed, but this was one of the points where the JTC shifted its focus to primarily doing its work in the Japanese community. The relationship with IWK began to come apart. At this time, IWK became engrossed in the overall U.S. revolutionary movement and its take on particular struggles in the world, and how IWK's theoretical, organizational and political line clashed with other organizations like the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party), WVO (Workers Viewpoint Organization) and most of the centrists (a term then-used to characterize groups that tended to be less critical of the then-Soviet Union, and who disagreed with the Peoples' Republic of China's international line-editor).

JTC, for the most part, withdrew from most of these line struggles going on in the rest of the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement, being waged in various coalitions. The JTC retreated into its mass organizing in Japan Town. By this time, even most of its line on international struggles was rehashed from Pacific News Service, the Guardian newspaper and some of it even from the bourgeois press.

New Dawn 6 - Why Theory Matters

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