younger militants of the Japan Peasant Union demanded that the by-law be scrapped. The result was a compromise, that membership was open for those individuals who were approved by the party branch in question. The compromise did however not prevent splits in the party. The extreme right-wing faction inside the party (represented by section of older Japan Peasant Union leaders such as Okabe Kansuke and Hirano Rikizo) was the first dissident group to desert the party. In October 1926 they formed the Japan Farmers Party. On October 24, 1926, Sodomei and other trade unions withdrew from the party. The party leadership was now in the hands of Oyama Ikuo, Mizutani Chozaburo and Hososako Kanemitsu, and all restrictions on party membership were scrapped. Sodomei and other moderate sectors founded the Social Democratic Party in December 1926. In September 1926, the Rōdōnōmintō and Hyōgikai started a campaign to demand the introduction of five pieces of legislation; a minimum wage law, an 8-hour working day law, a health insurance law, a working women's protection law and a law for unemployment benefits. On December 12, 1926, the Rōdōnōmintō held its first convention. The convention elected Oyama Ikuo as party chairman and Hososako general secretary. The revolutionary left was also divided within own ranks. After the disbanding of the first Japanese Communist Party in 1924, leftwing cadres had joined the Labour-Farmer Party. One sector (the Fukumoto group) wanted to reconstitute the Communist Party and concentrated their work on underground organizing, whilst Sakai Toshihiko, Yamakawa Kikue, Yamakawa Hitoshi and their sympathizers focused on building the legal Labour-Farmer Party. By the end of 1926, the Fukomoto group dominated both the reconstituted Communist Party and the Labour-Farmer Party, holding key strategic positions inside the latter. In March 1927, the Communist International intervened. A meeting was held in Moscow, in which Bukharin, M. N. Roy, J. T. Murphy and Béla Kun participated, along with Fukumoto and other Japanese communist leaders. Both Yamakawa and Fukumoto were condemned in the thesis issued by the Communist International. Yamakawa was denounced as a "liquidationist", while Fukumoto was branded as "sectarian". The Communist Party of Japan was instructed to organize itself as a vanguard party, working with and within mass organizations like the Labour-Farmer Party. In December 1927, the Yamakawa group began publishing the monthly journal Rōnō, borrowing the name of the Labour-Farmer Party for their factional organ. In the midst of financial crisis