The first revolutionary party to form in California during the twentieth century was called the Social Revolutionary Party, and the society it sought to overthrow was Japan’s. Its founder was Kōtoku Shūsui, a Japanese left-wing writer and organizer who came to the States in 1905 after being released from jail amid a nationalist crackdown in his home country. His 1901 pamphlet Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century, written in conversation with both Western and Eastern thinkers and history, is one of the world’s earliest and most coherent analyses of the phenomenon; Kōtoku had it pegged.xi A translator of The Communist Manifesto and cofounder of the Social Democratic Party in Japan—based on the German party of the same name and banned immediately—Kōtoku was relieved to find that Japanese leftists had more breathing room in the Bay Area than they did at home. It was a crucial time in the development of the world’s revolutionary political tendencies, and Kōtoku quickly came to reject ineffective parliamentarianism and embrace bomb-throwing anarchist insurrectionism as the only solution to the problem of empire. The Social Revolutionary Party wasn’t based on the Germans, it was based on the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, whose members, called SRs, sought the overthrow of the czar and the redistribution of royal land.

Kōtoku didn’t become an anarchist in California—he thanked the emperor’s jail for that—but his politics were further shaped there, and as the acknowledged leader of the Japanese ultra-left in the United States, he had his own serious impact on the development of the racially integrated West Coast labor movement. The California trade unions continued to exclude nonwhite workers, limiting their potential impact in the state. As a result, Kōtoku found his friends in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, a revolutionary coalition of unions open to all laborers, which was founded the same year he arrived, 1905. Like the ultra-left factions in Germany and Russia, their idealized tactics were the general strike and the bomb, but the IWW was more like a militant labor union with big dreams than a revolutionary conspiracy. They scrapped with hired thugs at mines and sawmills throughout the West in particular. Compared to the craft workers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), IWWers were rough-and-tumble, noted for getting in fights, moving around, and changing their names to escape bad reputations. The West, where they were strongest, was considered the country’s backwater at the time, but the West was also closest to the Eastern Hemisphere, and the internationalist dissidents who made their way to the coast even temporarily, like Kōtoku—who was only in the country for eight months total—pulled still-emerging California into the global class struggle.