Your article was published in France-Observateur, but with many suppressions and an introduction that compares your position with Trotskyism. The following week, the publishers did not publish a letter that indicated these suppressions, but, on the contrary, published a letter from a Japanese student who is in favor of the unity of democratic forces, a unity that is threatened by the extremist adventurers of the JRCL![2] (In fact, certain critiques in this letter didn't apply to your article, but only to the new version created by the France-Observateur.)
Edouard [Taube] has asked me to summarize for you a letter that Kuroda sent to Socialisme ou Barbarie, which by chance fell into his hands before those of Barjot [Cornelius Castoriadis].
In this letter, written at the end of July [1963], Kuroda says that he, Sigeru Mori and Atsushi Kurokawa have just been excluded from the Political Bureau by "a majority of seven bureaucrats." Kuroda reveals the manner of these divergences. First, the "bureaucrats" want to dissolve the Party in the mass movement, and he wants, above all, to reinforce the Party. Second: Kuroda wants to keep the anti-imperialist and anti-Stalinist struggles on the same plane; whereas the "so-called Political Bureau group" wants to place the anti-imperialist struggle on the highest plane and the anti-Stalinist struggle on an inferior one.
Kuroda has organized his partisans in a "revolutionary-Marxist section" [RMS] of the JRCL, which pretends to have the support of the large majority of the rank and file of the base of the JRCL's militants, all the leaders of the Zengakuren (but he hasn't mentioned Tagaki's name), and the worker-comrades of the railroads and the post offices. The RMS groups asks Socialisme ou Barbarie to write directly to Kuroda, because my letters to the Zenshinsha can be intercepted by the bureaucrats! Kuroda declares that he can reinforce the links and relations with Barjot's group (and he announces the impending publication of Japanese translations of their texts). Thus, I believe that the French critiques of Barjot's theoretical positions can also be used in Japan in the polemic against Kuroda's tendency, which accepts them more or less consciously.
I hope that you will be back in Japan when this letter arrives; and that we have news from you very soon.
Amicably[1] French text of a letter [originally] sent in "basic English."
[2] Japanese Revolutionary-Communist League.
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. All footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! April 2005.)