- 2025年12月13日
A Beginner’s Guide to the Left, Communism, Socialism, and “Liberalism”
Learning the basics to understand how society works
A Beginner’s Guide to the Left, Communism, Socialism, and “Liberalism”
Learning the basics to understand how society works
Justice and truth
For much of the modern era, socialism and communism were treated as truth and justice. That atmosphere may have lasted for something like a century. In a broad social sense, it might even be fair to say there was a kind of consensus that “socialism equals justice.”
The essayist Natsuhiko Yamamoto, who wrote a long-running column in Bunshun, repeatedly used the phrase: “Socialism is justice.” That matches the mood of the time.
So learning what people mean by socialism, communism, and “the Left” is useful not only as general education, but as a practical tool for understanding the world.
If you don’t understand communism, you won’t really understand the world
To put it bluntly, if you don’t understand what people call communism or the Left, you can’t properly understand society.
It’s similar to how the world becomes hard to picture if you have no mental image of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or the Bible. You don’t need deep theology, but you do need a working “shape” in your mind.
The ideas in this article are difficult, and not because the facts are hard to find. They’re difficult because the landscape is messy. Unlike mathematics, it isn’t clean and consistent. It’s full of contradictions; human emotions and desires bend arguments; political convenience reshapes theory. It’s a kind of chaos.
To follow it, you often need to hold multiple competing “voices” in your head at once, as if several people are arguing inside a single mind. That’s part of the reason it’s exhausting.
You can see this tendency in Japan’s postwar New Left movements, in the way the Chinese Communist Party keeps expanding, and even in the way political correctness can proliferate.
So I’ll try to explain the basics as gently as possible.
Is equality the most important value?
The modern ideals that came out of the Enlightenment and the civic revolutions, including the French Revolution, are often summarized as “liberty, equality, fraternity, human rights (and patriotism).”
Looking back, “human equality” may have been the key point.
One direction is the abolition of status systems. Another is pushing toward economic equality by reducing material gaps.
Equality can conflict with individualism and liberty. It tends to pull thought toward collectivism.
“Communism” in English is communism, but if you translated the feeling rather than the official term, you might even say “communalism” or “collectivism” is closer to the flavor.
At minimum, the goal is set, sometimes vaguely, sometimes clearly:
the final destination is a society with no classes, where the distinction between Communist Party members and non-party proletarians disappears.
That part is non-negotiable.
So when we look at systems like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, we can say they are still “on the way,” not yet the final revolutionary goal. Historically, even the USSR and China themselves have often framed it that way.
But the moment you say it this cleanly, you also feel why this field is not like math: it never stays clean. Still, if you want to understand communism, socialism, or the Left as an organized set of ideas, it matters to remember that there is one point that doesn’t easily wobble: the final aim is “classless equality.”
Here, two problems appear.
Problem 1: The final destination has no concrete picture
The first problem is that the “end stage of history” is not concrete.
People can gesture at it, but it remains misty. Perhaps research into anarchism tried to address this, but in practice, many movements invested far more energy in the direction and the struggle than in specifying the end-state in operational detail.
There is often an assumption that the end point is “historically determined,” so it becomes less something to debate and more something to presuppose.
Marx’s famous example is so-called “primitive communism”: in prehistoric times, humans allegedly shared the means of production and lived in relative equality.
But modern society is not prehistoric society. If the destination is not “going back,” then you must build a different concrete model of shared production and classless equality suitable for a complex modern world.
Or else you are, in effect, proposing to return to the primitive world.
Problem 2: Even if the goal exists, the method is unclear
The second problem is that the method of reaching a classless, equal society is unclear.
Marx did propose a roadmap, but it remains vague in practice. Ideas alone don’t run a country. Implementation requires operations, institutions, and administrators.
In the Marxist tradition, to make revolution possible inside a mature capitalist society, you need a disciplined vanguard to lead it. Later, this was called the Communist Party.
The vanguard leads the proletariat and executes the revolution.
Revolution, in this framework, typically involves violence. It’s treated as part of the “logic of history.”
Today, many people treat any violence as absolutely unacceptable. But historically, that moral absolute is relatively recent.
There are also parliamentary, gradual approaches: gaining power through elections and reforms and then moving society toward the final goal. But from a strict vanguard-party lens, that looks like heresy or weakness.
The reasoning is: a state maintains order and defense through coercive force. If you want to destroy and replace the state, you may need an organized force capable of breaking the existing system.
If a bloodless revolution succeeds, fine. But that is the “best-case scenario.” Movements also prepare for the worst case.
Lenin’s method: a brilliant revolutionary, not necessarily a builder
Lenin may deserve the title “great revolutionary,” or more precisely, Lenin and his surrounding group.
But being good at revolution does not mean being good at building a workable post-revolution society.
Some revolutionaries succeed at seizing power while having only a vague picture of the world they want to create.
Mao Zedong is an example: he succeeded at revolution, partly by exploiting moments of national weakness and establishing one-party rule. But the attempt at building society afterward was disastrous. The Great Leap Forward failed. The Cultural Revolution is so confusing in purpose and execution that even now it remains hard to say what it was “trying” to do. If it was meant to abolish the Party and realize true proletarian ownership, it failed. If it wasn’t, then what was it?
Either way, as social construction, it was a failure.
Japan has its own examples of revolutionaries who were better at overthrow than at design. Saigō Takamori, for instance, imagined a kind of ideal moral order, the “age of Yao and Shun.” It’s interesting how both Marx and Saigō, in different ways, looked to ancient or primitive images when picturing ideals.
What was impressive about Lenin’s group was operational competence. Many were highly educated elites, and they were strong at organization. They built a disciplined vanguard party and exploited the weakness created by World War I.
But Russia, and later China (and in some ways Japan in earlier periods), did not resemble the “mature capitalist society” Marx had in mind. Leaping from semi-feudal conditions straight into a final egalitarian order is unrealistic. That’s one reason two-stage revolution theories emerged and why later conflicts multiplied.
Socialism vs communism, Socialist Party vs Communist Party
In a Marxist framing:
- Socialism is an intermediate stage in the transition out of capitalism.
- Communism is the completed final stage.
But “socialism” is also a fuzzy umbrella term in ordinary language. It can mean anything from partial public ownership to strong redistribution, without necessarily requiring total abolition of private property.
And terms shift across centuries and countries.
Before World War I, many European countries had “socialist parties.” The war fractured international socialist solidarity, and the old alignment dissolved. “Communist Party” became a distinctive label after Lenin adopted it, borrowing the prestige of the final ideal (communism) for the vanguard organization that claims to lead society toward that end.
There was also branding: replacing older socialist party identities, positioning Bolsheviks as the true inheritors.
But “Communist Party” then changed meaning through Lenin and especially Stalin. In Europe, “social democratic” parties became the more common form for parliamentary, reformist left politics, combining welfare, equality, and compromise within electoral systems.
Japan’s party landscape evolved differently. The terms “socialist,” “communist,” “social democratic,” and “liberal” don’t map neatly across Japan and Europe or across prewar and postwar usage.
The Soviet dilemma: Stalin, Trotsky, and the “socialist trap”
The Soviet Union began not as a mature capitalist society, but as something closer to a late-feudal autocracy.
Even after reforms like emancipation of serfs, Russia was not instantly compatible with a modern capitalist system. It also had deep authoritarian traditions.
So the early revolutionary project contained a contradiction: the Marxist story expects capitalism to mature before the leap, but Russia wasn’t there.
If you insist on the historical sequence, you get the logic of staged revolution: first build a modern democratic-capitalist stage, then transition to socialism, then reach communism.
But in the meantime, the vanguard party must lead, which creates a structure where the Party becomes a ruling elite and the non-Party masses become ruled.
Once war, civil conflict, and external threats accumulate, that ruling structure hardens into a default.
This is one version of what could be called “Soviet-type communism”: a system that admits it is not the final classless end-state, but treats one-party rule as necessary realism.
Here lies a trap: the party can freeze history at the “party rules the masses” stage. The organization then grows, expands, and self-perpetuates, something like Parkinson’s law.
Economic control can slide into rigid planned economies, with weak innovation, weak growth, and chronic stagnation. Political control can require suppression of factions and dissent, producing purges and internal violence.
The result is catastrophic loss of talent, sometimes wiping out an entire generation of capable people. One sees echoes of this in Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and in Japan’s left history as well.
Even stranger, when workers try to make a “true” leap toward direct control of production, the Party may treat it as a threat and suppress it. In that sense, a revolution “in the name of the proletariat” can become a machine that blocks the proletariat.
Events like Hungary 1956 are often cited as examples of this dynamic.
Trotsky’s conflict with Stalin is often summarized as “world revolution vs socialism in one country,” but it also reflects disagreement about stages, strategy, and what it means to “advance” toward the final goal.
Stalin’s logic tends to prioritize defending the existing Soviet state and Party power. Anything that threatens the Party becomes an enemy, even if it claims to be “more revolutionary.”
In that sense, the struggle becomes less class struggle than power struggle. Mao often looks similar: the system drifts away from the ideal and toward a new elite enjoying its position.
A very brief history of socialism in Japan (as background)
Japan imported socialism as part of importing modern Western ideas after the Meiji Restoration.
There were famous incidents such as the High Treason Incident. Japan’s early communist movement formed, faced heavy repression, and fragmented internally.
Even when organized parties were crushed, socialist and Marxist ideas continued to circulate widely. In some periods, socialist sympathies were common even among elites.
Postwar, the sudden release of many political prisoners and the intense labor and political conflicts created conditions where socialist and communist ideas were unusually prominent.
There were moments when mass action might have changed Japanese history had it unfolded differently.
In the 1950s, international communist politics and the Korean War context drove internal conflicts within Japan’s communist movement and prompted strategic changes. This fed the rise of New Left movements, and the 1960s saw intense waves of protest and factional proliferation.
Some groups disappeared through repression, internal collapse, or escalation into violence that provoked state crackdowns. Others survived by building durable organizational bases (labor, campuses, unions, etc.) and by adopting strategies that allowed long-term persistence.
The 1970s turning point: when “revolution” lost plausibility
By the 1970s, the prospect of violent revolution transforming Japan became less plausible to most people.
Some groups continued, but many movements lost a clear “grand narrative.”
When a movement loses its organizing end-goal, its energy can disperse into other channels.
“Liberalism,” political correctness, and the shift to smaller narratives
When the big story of “overthrow capitalism, establish communism, reach the classless end of history” weakens, a different style of politics can take its place.
Instead of one enormous narrative, politics fragments into many smaller narratives: anti-discrimination, feminism, environmental protection, anti-war, anti-nuclear power, anti-government, anti-nationalism, and so on.
In my reading, this can become a shift from a “grand narrative” toward a politics of grievance, victimhood, and constant policing of language and norms, where the main activity becomes finding violations, exposing them, and punishing them socially.
This tendency doesn’t come only from former activists. If the older cultural atmosphere treated equality as moral truth, that moral grammar can spread far beyond organized movements and continue in new forms.
If you want a psychological vocabulary, you can invoke Nietzsche: resentment, moralization, and the inversion of power.
There is also a sociological angle: elite educational systems often produce people who seek recognition and status, sometimes compensating for inner insecurity. Under certain conditions this can slide into suspicion, paranoia, and a taste for control. Under criticism, it can become neurotic and defensive.
All of this also sits on top of a century marked by trauma: poverty, war, harsh childhood conditions, and social instability.
Generational differences matter. In Japan, cohorts that formed their personality before the defeat in 1945 differ from cohorts who were still young children at defeat. These differences shape how people relate to authority, guilt, ideology, and conflict.
Equality and freedom: the central difficulty
Equality is difficult because the question “equality of what?” never ends.
If equality means absolute sameness, it becomes absurd. People occupy different positions in space and time, and those differences produce diverging futures.
It’s easy to proclaim equality in the abstract. The moment you demand operational detail, you can split into multiple sects.
Even the relationship between liberty and equality is complicated. They can coexist in idealized settings, but in ordinary life they often trade off.
Why it started being called “liberal”
In this messy landscape, many trends came to be labeled “liberal” for historical reasons.
But older people can still remember the moral aura: pursuing “human equality” felt like truth and justice.
That aura helped enable the modern language of political correctness.
At the same time, political correctness is vulnerable in interesting ways. It can be weakened by empirical, practical thinking. It can also be weakened by people who simply refuse to play the game, saying things like “So what?” or “What’s wrong with that?” If the moral code isn’t accepted, the policing mechanism can collapse.
In the past, societies often tried to “educate” or discipline such people. Today, that may be less common.
The focus of equality can also expand beyond humans. In many countries, pets outnumber children. People bond with animals deeply. Debates about whales and dolphins, intelligence, and hunting norms rise and fall.
In some areas, left-coded politics has also produced unintended harm, such as environmental policies that backfire.
Collectivism and individualism
The word communism carries the flavor of “the common,” the shared. Equality often leans toward collectivism.
The opposing pole is individualism, which often aligns with liberty.
One possible future path is this: if individuals become genuinely strong, confident, and independent, then diversity becomes natural, and the machinery of “discrimination codes” becomes harder to sustain. A society of confident individuals might produce a kind of equality not by sameness, but by resilience.
This is easier to imagine in prosperous, advanced societies than in poorer, harsher eras. But historically, perhaps certain aristocrats, samurai, or clergy achieved something like it within their own circles.
In that sense, a freedom-centered path to equality might be both realistic and compatible with contemporary philosophy.