As A Father Figure To The New Left
Yoshimoto, who had pursued a theory of war responsibility of the literati, supported the movement against the 1960 ANPO treaty as an expression of the contradictions of the postwar order fifteen years after the end of the war. He was said to be number 2 of the intellectuals in semi-support of the Zengakuren, and gave a lecture at the June 15, 1960 resistance assembly inside the National Diet. Yoshimoto was arrested in the incident which followed, which resulted in deaths from clashes with the police who had arrived to suppress it.
Afterward, Yoshimoto founded the magazine Shikkou with the like-minded Tanigawa Gan and Murakami Ichiro. The journal published articles by Miura Tsutomu, who had been expelled from the Communist Party after the critique of Stalin, his disciple Takimura Ryuichi, Nango Tsugumasa, and others. Edazawa Shunsuke and others made their debuts as critics in Shikkou.
Yoshimoto developed a positive theoretical discourse in the midst of the collapse of the Communist Party's heroic status and splits in the new left. Yoshimoto was widely read and supported by students and intellectuals, for his work in The Decline of a False System (1962), which developed an independent theory of the arts in the face of criticisms of the Communist Party and sectarian literary theories, emphasizing the aesthetics of language and psychological phenomena, and The Common Illusion, which emphasized a theory of the State. This became a refuge for students and intellectuals exasperated by the then-current sectarian and bureaucratic Marxism. Yoshimoto's collected works were published beginning in 1968.
As a result, Yoshimoto's anti-sectarian philosophy of independence became a major influence and theoretical resource in the 1960s and 1970s for the Zengakuren, Zenkyoto, and other 'non-sect' New Leftists, and Yoshimoto came to be seen as an ancestor for some New Left activists. Yoshimoto gave qualified support to the activities of Zenkyoto.
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“Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independence will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.”
—Women’s Liberation Workshop, Students for a Democratic Society, Radical political/social activist organization. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967)