Haven't given it much thought - didn't care for the movie much. I'll take Porco Rosso any day.

I'd guess it's a possibility, but not likely. In the movie, if I remember right we want to root for the Ryu/Kei contingent, yeah? Come down to it, the Red Army did some bad shit, and that cost them any popular/ist support they may have had as a viable leftist alternative to the government.

*shrug* More likely than not, I would guess they were a romantic ideal of how the non-conformists in Japanese society (yeah, even though the bosuzoku are moajor conformists within their own world) represent the freedom and responsibilities that the mainstream shrugs off in return for the security provided by an obivously corrupt government.