In 1952, Katsuragawa joined the Avant-Garde Art Society (前衛美術会, Zen'ei Bijutsukai), which had been formed by Chozaburō Inoue, Iri Maruki, Tadashi Yoshii and others in 1947 and was closely aligned with the Japan Communist Party (JCP).
[1] That same year, bowing to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin's demand that they start an immediate communist revolution, the JCP ordered Katsuragawa and other young artists to go to Ogōchi, a farming village in the mountains west of Tokyo that was scheduled to be obliterated by a dam, and support the formation of "mountain village guerrilla squads" (sanson kōsakutai) by mobilizing farmers' discontent with the dam construction in order to foment a violent communist revolution.
[1] The activists who went to Ogōchi village ultimately failed to convince the farmers to start an uprising and felt betrayed when the Communist Party abruptly repudiated its commitment to immediate revolution.
For a while, Katsuragwa continued to produce socialist realist art in an activist vein, including artworks celebrating the farmers protesting the expansion of a US military air base as part of the Sunagawa Struggle of 1955–1957.
[3] Katsuragawa contributed a large-scale painting in a surrealist vein called Even So They Keep On Going (それでもかれらはゆく, Sore demo karera wa yuku) which depicted a wounded person hobbling along on crutches, whose bandages were strongly reminiscent of the National Diet Building in Tokyo which was the focus of the anti-Treaty protests.