NEW DAWN RISING History and Summation of the Japan Town Collective (6 of 7)

This theoretical weakness and avoidance crippled its ties to many of the "advanced elements." The JTC wasn't able to lead these people in day-to-day mass organizing who were in the study groups that the JTC led. The JTC lost its ability to give overall revolutionary direction, getting bogged down in day-to-day things, in little victories and responding to the concessions given by the redevelopment agency. The redevelopment agency had a lot of room to give concessions. Although at the time, the JTC saw these concessions as little victories, they really turned out to be little sell-outs, token gestures given to the community.

A lot of these results revealed the JTC's theoretical weakness in being able to give overall revolutionary direction to both the struggles internal to the Japanese American community and also to the line struggle around various struggles going on in the rest of the world. Some of these questions centered on China's foreign policy, particularly at that time, around the struggle in Angola. Irwin Silber, a prominent New Left intellectual and writer, and longtime editor of the Guardian newspaper, would criticize and eventually condemn China's international line. There was much controversy and debate in the new M-L movement. The JTC had a difficult time being able to study and develop a position on all these debates. Some JTC cadres united with Silber and what I called these "centrist" lines (soft on condemning the Soviet Union as social-imperialist-"socialism in words, imperialism in deeds-and increasingly opposed to China, particularly its international positions).

This weakness came to a head about 1974 when a lot of the "advanced elements" began to work with IWK, which really isolated the JTC. People were leaving the JTC either for other groups, or burned and turned off by the intensity and stridency of the M-L polemics. The JTC had become so isolated that one night, the few remaining people who still comprised the JTC drove up in the middle of the night, took all of their things from the building in which everybody shared offices, and left. From that day on, they weren't a force to reckon with in the Japanese American community. Nobody hardly ever saw them anymore. I believe that the JTC just faded out around late 1974 or sometime in 1975. Through the years, I hear about different people, about what they're doing, their alignment with various other groups like MLOC (Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee) which joined the Communist Party USA. Those who did this seemed to just disappear from view.

New Dawn 7- JTC's Legacy

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