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.
******
Markin comment on this article:
As far as I know the youth group of this organization, the Workers League, no longer exits (I will stand corrected if the case is otherwise) but that is not as important as the question posed in the article about youth vanguardism. In America that question, the question of who would lead the revolution, has been resolved by time and history. Not the youth, at least not youth as an undifferentiated mass, and certainly not youth as Ipod/facebook/myspace/sidekick/whatever nation. Nevertheless, as the student upsurges in Europe, especially France and Great Britain, portent this question could come up again. Moreover, this article is a nice exposition on the relationship between the revolutionary party and its youth auxiliary, and what it should not be.
********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbears of the Young Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 10-January/February 1972
Workers League Youth Vanguardism: Fake Youth Conference
NEW YORK--The Workers League "Conference for Youth to Fight Back" held December 18 re¬presented yet another in the WL's long series of attempts to set up a youth front group in the U.S. ("Revolt,” "YoungWorkers League, “etc.) Tim Wohlforth followed the precedent set by his mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, right down the line in setting up his youth conference just like the British Young Socialists, the street-demonstration, rock-band low-level youth group Healy personally runs.
Wohlforth himself set the tone of the conference, which was youth vanguardist through and through. "Youth will bring consciousness to the working class, " "Youth will force the trade unions to take up the struggle, " he drummed into his audience, which consisted mostly of high school students, most of whom have probably never attended a radical political meeting before. The other speeches given, one by a member of the Young Socialists, who in her opening remarks attacked the Spartacist League, and one by a Peruvian attacking the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, went over the heads of most of the audience, whose questions were naive ones such as "Will we lose our freedom under socialism?, " "What is Stalinism?, " etc. When the question of unity of the left was raised, Lucy St. John said, “We are the only revolutionary tendency in the world!" The young audience was thus whipped into shape, warned to avoid other groups on the left—all of which, according to the WL, embody betrayal itself-revisionism, Stalinism or reformism.
What was omitted is as important as what was said. During the hour or so of audience questions about "unity,” Wohlforth and Co. never used, much less explained, the term "united front.” Such vital questions as racial and sex¬ual oppression and imperialism were not even marginally mentioned.
In order to appeal to youth militancy, Wohlforth exaggerated fascistic elements in the U. S. today. He warned, “We'll all be in concentration camps in a few years if something isn't done—that's how far they'll go!"
The entire conference was run in extreme bureaucratic fashion, with questions left inadequately answered or unanswered altogether. Political opponents were excluded on sight. One speaker, suspected of being a supporter of the Labor Committee, was ordered to sit down in the middle of asking a question.
Youth Manipulation
At the end of the speeches, voting took place. On what, one may well ask--on the "program" (the leaflet handed out for the conference), on having a steering committee (for what?), and to have an "action" sometime in March. There was no discussion, there was no explanation of what this voting meant, of whether it is the founding of a youth organization, of the relation of youth to the party, no explanation of anything.
This "democratic" gesture—the vote—was a cynical and disgusting manipulation of potentially serious young militants. To ram through this "program,” to manipulate young militants who lack the experience to see through this trickery--or if they do, who will walk out disgusted by what they believe to be "socialism"--is a crime against the revolutionary movement.
Of course, we realize the WL could not afford discussion on its "program,” could not afford comparison to other radical groups, particularly to the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), the youth section of the Spartacist League. The RCY is not a front group, but a Trotskyist youth group affiliated to the SL along Leninist lines of organization. The RCY sees the working class, not the undifferentiated "youth" as the vanguard of the revolution. The SL-RCY passed out a leaflet criticizing the "program" and had available the RCY program, organizational rules and youth-party relations document in pamphlet form. (Our founding conference spent two full days going over these documents, following two months of pre-conference discussion, and only after this thorough and democratic discussion, voted and approved them!)
WL Youth "Program"
The WL "program" is notable for its lack of Trotskyist politics—the word "socialist" ap¬pears only once, and then as the unspecified program for the future "labor party,” which is called for without a single reference to the strug¬gle against the reactionary trade union bureaucracy. The "program" is largely economist in content; for example, the section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against imperialism! Its primary purpose is stated as building "the widest campaign among the youth"—which youth, Wohlforth made clear at the conference, is "all youth who want to fight back, " recruited at the dances, at the sporting events, off the streets, anywhere and everywhere! This assumes the undifferentiated "youth" to be inherently revolutionary, a capitulation to petty-bourgeois misconceptions. (In typical flip-flop fashion, Wohlforth took the opposite position a few nights earlier at Stony Brook, where driven to a rage by opposition questions from the floor, he screamed, "The WL is entirely hostile to the middle class!", also a thoroughly un-Marxist position, since the middle class is an intermediate social class and in periods of social crisis elements drawn from the middle class can be won to the proletarian revolutionary cause.)
The WL youth conference represented a profound capitulation to the petty-bourgeois mood of youth vanguardism~-the idea that "the youth,” who are in fact drawn from all social classes, are. inherently revolutionary. Given strong working-class leadership, other oppressed groups (youth, ethnic minorities, women, etc.) can be a valuable component of the revolutionary movement. But without deep political and organizational ties to the Trotskyist proletarian van¬guard organization, the militant radicalism of other social groupings only reinforces New Left, poly-vanguardist illusions.
The WL's approach to building a youth group is not just an aberration, but flows directly and consistently from the real "method" of the WL which sacrifices Marxist principle to the opportunities of the moment. We have assembled a few of the more glaring examples of the opportunism of the WL which have led us to characterize this group as counterfeit Trotskyists and what Lenin called "political bandits. "
Some Questions for the WL
The WL supported the reactionary and racist strike of NYC police in Jan. 1971, claiming that cops are workers too, and in fact-were leading the struggle of all NYC labor. How can they simultaneously defend the Panthers or the Attica prisoners, most of whom were put there by the same cops? If there hadn't been a riot, would they have supported the demands of the Attica Correction Officers—all AFSCME members—for better riot equipment?
The WL characterized the Panthers as a black version of the Weathermen and "proto-fascist" in Oct. 1969, and thereby on the other side of the class line. Yet a year later the WL hailed Huey Newton for embracing "dialectics"(shortly before he embraced the church).
While now attacking the Mao Tse Tung government of China for its criminal support of the West Pakistan government for cheap diplomatic advantage, they fail to mention that the WL called for support to Mao during the Cultural Revolution because "Mao's line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism.”
Instead of a policy of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the WL urges support for India, thereby subordinating the just Bengali struggle to the ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie, and abandoning Trot¬sky's theory of Permanent Revolution which states that only through proletarian revolution can even bourgeois-democratic demands be real¬ized in the colonial countries.
The WL denounces the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionaro for its popular frontist maneuvers. Yet the WL itself called for support to the Allende Popular Front in Chile, claiming "as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises.” (21 Sept '70). This formulation "to support insofar as... “was the same rationale used by Stalin to support Kerensky in 1917, and was fought by Lenin.
The WL condemned any participation in the NPAC April 24 demonstration as class collaboration, then turned around and defended the right of imperialist U. S. Senator Hartke to speak "against the war" at the July 4 NPAC conference, joining with goon squads of the reformist SWP to beat up and expel Spartacists, RCYers and others who oppose class collaboration in the anti-war movement.
Does the WL still defend excluding any reference to either racial oppression or the Vietnam war from their "labor party" program as they did in 1968 when they formed "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party"?
For years the WL touted its cynical toadying to Gerry Healy's SLL in England as "internationalism" and passed off the "International Committee"—a rotten bloc between the SLL and the French OCI, along with their respective satellites—as a disciplined international organization. The IC split has now ripped away this "internationalist" facade from what was all along a non-aggression pact papering over basic and long-standing differences.
Don't Be Fooled!
These are only a selection of the twists and turns and 180 degree shifts in line of the WL in the recent past. They are typical of the entire history of this group since its inception. The Spartacist League wrote in 1970: "Faced with such a history, the much vaunted 'Marxist method' that Wohlforth teaches his members is of necessity a profound cynicism which cannot but erode and destroy the backbone of those who start out by seeking revolution and end up following Wohlforth ever deeper into the mire, " We say to young militants seeking the path of revolutionary communism: do not take the "fools gold" of the Workers League for good coin. There is a lot more than loud speeches and big banners involved in becoming a professional revolutionist.
No comments:
Post a Comment