Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this article:
The case of Angela Davis, after those myriad cases of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, galvanized much of the left, and garnered more than its normal fair share of liberal support as well. On such democratic/labor defense questions that liberal support is always welcomed. Moreover, the Davis case’s importance as an example of the old Wobblie (IWW, Industrial Workers of The World) labor defense slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” is obvious. Particularly since as a member, a key member, of the Stalinist American Communist Party it would have been easy to let Angela Davis’ case hang in the wind in to avoid the problems of the residual anti-communist then still present in the country. However, the combination of “red” professor, her links with the still popular Black Panthers, and her connection, in some sense, as a link back to the then somewhat fashionable Marxism pushed her case forward.
For a flavor of the liberal mindset of that period in relationship to the heated black nationalist environment, exemplified by the Black Panthers, and how it held the liberals in thrall Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mau-ing The Flack-Catchers still retains its value. The Angela Davis case was able to draw from that same “liberal guilt” well. Finally, over many years the American Communist Party had developed through fellow-travelers, former members, and left-liberals (to speak nothing of the Moscow connections) the most significant left-wing political defense organizations in America. Of course, those organizations were galvanized to defend Angela Davis and presented her case to the liberal public widely. However, in good Stalinist “popular front” form they “neglected” to highlight her co-defendant, Ruchell McGee’s case. Apparently, in order to win liberal support, a radical prison convict didn’t have the allure or cache of a “red” professor.
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From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 11, March-April 1972
BERKELEY--The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) held a rally here in late January for the defense of Angela Davis. Invitations were sent to other tendencies on the left including Progressive Labor, Workers League, Worker-Student Alliance, International Socialists (IS), Young Socialists for Jenness and Pulley, Revolutionary Women, Campus Friend of the AFT, Campus Friends of the NLF, Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), Revolutionary Union, Young Socialists, Female Liberation, Anti-Stalinism Study Group and Anti-Imperialist Coalition. Only the IS, Anti-Stalinism Study Group, Revolutionary Women, and Female Liberation responded positively; the other groups totally ignored this call to demonstrate class solidarity in the face of repression by the bourgeois state. The SMC went so far as to arrange to scab on the rally. Subsequent to being notified of the Defend Angela Davis rally, it called for another rally, to protest the presence of military recruiters on the campus—an issue which it had virtually ignored previously. The plan was to march the rally over to a "peaceful protest picket, " but when this single issue evaporated (the recruiters refused to come to the campus) the SMC was left with nothing to organize and was forced to cancel its rally.
The RCY stands for Davis' unconditional defense against persecution by the bourgeois state. Davis' arrest, the Attica massacre and the recent killings in Baton Rouge once again demonstrate the depth and ferocity of racial oppression in this country and the state's intention to crush ruthlessly all rebellion.
Fight Racial Oppression!
Black youth have shown over the past several years an increasing determination to fight racial oppression and degradation; yet even at its most radical and militant—e. g., the Panthers—this impulse has been unable to secure any permanent or basic changes for black peo¬ple or to protect them from attacks by the state. The black movement has been unable to transcend reformism and nationalist illusions. Only a united working class, politicized and conscious of its power, can successfully challenge the oppression of blacks and other minorities or repressive measures taken by the bourgeoisie against those who rebel against their oppression. Struggle against racial oppression—particularly in the trade unions--is crucial for proletarian class unity. Divisions along racial or sexual lines render the class impotent when faced with the ruling class' solidarity in its attack on the working people. The defense of Angela Davis is therefore obligatory for the left and the working-class movement. The obligation is not conditional on her "innocence" by standards of bourgeois justice, nor on support of the adventurist tactics of the Marin Court House incident, nor on agreement with the opportunist line of Davis' Communist Party (CP). Rather we must defend Angela Davis as an expression of class solidarity for mutual defense.
Who Will Be Next?
Without this class solidarity no proletarian organization is safe from bourgeois repression. No group can win exemption from persecution by disassociating itself from the or¬ganizations which first come under attack. Workers who acquiesced when reds were purged from their unions have been rewarded only by wage controls and anti-strike injunctions. SDS, which ever since Progressive Labor (PL) assumed its leadership, has been indecently eager to assure the bourgeoisie that its members "absolutely condemn and have nothing to do with terrorist bombings, " has been banned from some campuses nonetheless. Even the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), notorious for sending condolences to the widow Kennedy and dismissing political terrorists as "berserk, " has lately been the object of congressional "investigation." This stampede into the swamps of respectability is as incapable of securing safety as it is disgusting.
Lack of solidarity of the left frees the bourgeoisie to concentrate the full force of its repressive apparatus against one individual or one group at a time. Finding little support from other leftists the persecuted victims may be tempted to seek aid from anti-working class "civil libertarians. " Davis' defense, controlled by the sellout artists of the CP, has succumbed to this temptation and secured the "support" of such groups as the National Bar Association and the National Committee of Black Churchmen. These groups have no real interest in defending militant blacks from the capitalist state and if the going gets rough they will surely abandon the Davis case. Indicative of the manner in which the CP conducts her defense is the Peoples World comment on a church service honoring Davis: "Amidst choir selections and thoughtful prayer was a rever¬ence that transcended... the place of worship, a reverence for justice. " As Rosa Luxemburg said of Bernstein, the prototypical revisionist and class collaborator, we must say of the CP: In abandoning Marxism it returns "to the principle of justice, to the old war horse on which the reformers of the earth have rocked for ages, for the lack of surer means of historic transportation." This seemingly classless "justice" in fact aids the bourgeoisie, as do all class-"neutral" positions. The CP embellishes Bernstein's position only by draping his hobby horse in sacramental robes. Pandering to bourgeois ideology, the CP again eliminates itself as a revolutionary force, saving the bourgeoisie the trouble of doing so.
The CP's reconciliation with "respectability" does little to trick the bourgeoisie into being lenient on Davis but a good deal to disorient the proletariat. It might be argued that couching agitation in terms soothing to bourgeois sensibilities may not fool the ruling class, but will at least help suck the petty bourgeoisie (professionals, shopkeepers, artisans, many technicians, farmers, petty administrators, etc.) into the defense of proletarian militants. Such an argument implicitly assumes that the petty bourgeoisie is permanently wedded to its, present world.view, but actually it is the most volatile of all classes. As bourgeois democracy begins to visibly crumble, the petty bourgeoisie tends to align itself with the class that seems most capable of supplanting chaos by its class dictatorship. If the proletariat is strong, conscious and organized the petty bourgeoisie can be won over to supporting the revolutionary cause. If the dictatorship of the proletariat appears unattainable, due to the weakness or incapacity of the proletarian vanguard, then the petty bourgeoisie will leap into the camp of the only force capable of restoring "law and order" on a capitalist basis—the fascists. "Left" pandering to petty-bourgeois forces reveals a profound pessimism about the ability of the work¬ing class to achieve political consciousness, and therefore reveals a rejection of the struggle for socialism.
Only a policy of class solidarity—in defense of victimized militants as in all other matters —can demonstrate to the proletariat and its" potential allies that the left has the will and ability to lead them to revolutionary victory.
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