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:
This article is a very concise and compact summary of the issues that were confronted, or not confronted, by the radical student movement, the driving edge of the radical movement of the late 1960s, the time when thoughtful radicals were turning to the “old left” working-class orientation where the core of the social power to change society in a progressive direction resided. Now, in hindsight, it is not at all that clear to me that there were objectively revolutionary opportunities to actually take on the government frontally and win. Not with the disarray of the left, and the mostly quiet working class. The defeat, the easy defeat, of the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. that I have written about previously as one of the key events in my own evolution to a working-class orientation, if nothing else, put paid to notion that it could be done without the social power of the working class behind it.
However, revolution, the word, the idea, the dream, was palpably in the air, or at least the smell of it and it was necessary to get, and keep, communist cadre ready for the long haul class-struggle from among those who flamed red in those days. Thus, even if we lived in a fool’s paradise about revolutionary prospects either on our own volition or through working class struggle we could have avoided squandering that cadre potential. In short, even if objective circumstances were not in our favor it was not necessary, consciously at least as with the case of Progressive Labor, to make every mistake in the revolutionary handbook. (And there were many other candidates as well, PL is just the subject here because in many ways it had the most thoughtful subjective revolutionaries and because it is a classic case study of where wrong theory leads an organization up a blind alley), . And leave a bitter, futile taste for those who come after.
And those who come after now are the youth of the early 21st century who need to read this article, and other critical articles, on the radical politics of the 1960s. As we baby-boomers retire and have more free time there are sure to be myriad memoirs and other productions by those who participated in that student radical minute in the 1960s so get ready for the onslaught. But read the stuff so this generation is better armed for the struggle than the 1960s rebels.
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From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) Newsletter: The Progressive Labor Party (PL) "Leads" Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) (headline edited by Markin)
The history of the decline of latter-day SDS is the history of Progressive Labor's criminal dissipation of revolutionary impulse and the loss of everything SDS had gained from its break from New Leftist populism in 1969. In April 1966 PL dissolved its youth front group, the May 2nd Movement, in favor of entry into the growing Students for a Democratic Society. In "A Statement on the Dissolution of M2M" PL put forward the following political thrust for SDS: "Our radicalism is based on the belief that the student movement cannot survive or grow without a socialist perspective. " (M2M's Free Student No. 7, April 1966)
Following its SDS entry, PL became the major force in SDS promoting a class analysis and a socialist goal, winning supporters on this basis.But since the SDS split in 1969 PL has systematically squandered this political capital and undercut the chance to build a strong organization of pro-working-class socialist students. While Revolutionary Communist Youth (formerly Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) led the struggle for a socialist class-struggle perspective for SDS, PL led SDS from a subjectively revolutionary working-class line to an economist working-class line, and finally, back to SDS's liberal reformist beginnings.
SDS: Social-Democratic Roots
SDS has its roots in labor reformism and social democracy, originating as the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization of liberal union bureaucrats and their kept intellectuals, politically associated with the pro-imperialist Socialist Party. Renamed SDS in 1950, the organization involved itself in the civil rights movement; in June 1962, it came out with the Port Huron statement advocating "participatory democracy" and reaffirming its anti-communism. In June 1965 SDS dropped from its constitution the ban on communist participation and on 1 January 1966 officially severed its connection with the LID, to which SDS had become something of an embarrassment. SDS had passed from establishment left-liberalism to petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Worker-Student Alliance
Following its massive entry into SDS, PL emerged as the pole of attraction in opposition to groupings which wrote off the working class as the vanguard of revolution. But when the hard New Leftists split in 1969 and PL took over leadership of SDS, the rotten and contradictory Stalinist roots of PL's brand of "Marxism" gradually began to erode the left thrust around which PL had built its Worker-Student Alliance caucus. This was apparent as early as the 1969 split convention itself.
Spartacist League members of SDS critically supported the WSA wing, introducing to the WSA's main motion proposing a working-class orientation an amendment calling upon SDS to declare itself a noh-exclusionist socialist youth group. Despite its stated intentions for dissolving M2M, PL opposed this amendment, insisting on defining SDS's program only negatively--!, e. , anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-male-chauvinist, etc. Still riding on the sharp polarization of the factional struggle, however, PL included the following slogan at the end of the WSA statement: "ALL POWER TO THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS!" When a Spartacist spokesman pointed out that the slogan had a certain communist flavor, PL did not reply, but when a final edition of the WSA statement was presented to the body for approval, the slogan had disappeared. This was a foretaste of things to come.
The degeneration of PL's line in SDS from a crude but real working-class orientation to an alliance with academic liberalism stems from an opportunist "two-stage theory" of revolutionary organization and the rejection of the transitional program. PL puts forward a minimum program for "mass organizations" (SDS), reserving for "cadre organizations" (PL) a "maximum program" of socialism. By this logic, PL must fight for reformism in organizations like SDS in order not to deprive itself of its very reason for existence.
At the root of the reformist content PL gives to the slogan of a worker-student alliance is an inability to grasp the Leninist insistence on the leading role of the industrial working class in the socialist revolution. The working class—by virtue of its role in production, the collective and cohesive social organization of its work, its existence as wage slaves rather than proprietors (small or large) of lander capital—is the only inherently revolutionary class in capitalist society. The petty bourgeoisie stands tangential to capitalist production, and its social position is highly unstable. In times of crisis, the petty bourgeoisie in its main motion supports whichever major class—bourgeoisie or proletariat-offers the greater social stability. The critical factor in gaining the support of sections of the petty bourgeoisie for socialist revolution is therefore the strength of the working class and its leadership, the Leninist party. In the absence of a politically conscious and organizationally cohesive working class contending for power, no section of the petty bourgeoisie as a group will transcend the varieties of capitalist ideology: liberalism or, in periods of crisis, fascism. But many individual students can and must be won to the side of the proletariat on the basis of a communist world view, as declassed revolutionary intelligentsia who will constitute an important part of the future Leninist vanguard party.
In a book called SDS—A Profile (New York, Scribner's, 1972), endorsed by PL with only the slightest qualifications (PL Magazine. March, 1972), Alan Adelson writes:
"A revolution is very much a possibility in this country, PL reasons, if the tremendous industrial work-force can be united in struggle with the legions of students. That powerful worker-student alliance would be enough to run out the entrenched 'rulers' here just as the fusion of workers and peasants established 'a dictatorship of the proletariat' in China. " (page 9)
Later, in discussing the failure of the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy at Berkeley, Adelson writes: "No one wanted to scrap the idea of trying to ally Berkeley's 'two oppressed groups'—the workers and the students.,.. " (page 91) PL's conception refuses to recognize the class difference between the petty bourgeoisie (to which both peasants and students belong) and the working class, and thus projects an equal
revolutionary role for each group. The "theoretical" codification of this obscuring of class lines is found in PL Magazine, November 1971 (see RCY Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972, "PL's Right Turn").
The Short but Dull Life of the CWSA
Rejection of the 1969 Spartacist proposal that SDS declare itself socialist was only the beginning of its retreat from the sharp leftist posture taken by PL in preparing for the SDS split. In the fall of 1969, just months after the split, PL pro¬posed the Campus Worker-Student Alliance stra¬tegy for SDS—a reformist working-class orientation economist in thrust and parochially confined to the campus. At the December 1969 SDS conference in New Haven, Spartacist members and supporters in SDS formed the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus. RMC pointed out that campus workers, having little social power, were being used by PL/SDS as a substitute for the decisive struggles in industry and within the union movement, and that the question of program was being shunted aside in favor of "show the workers SDS wants to help them. " PL vehemently opposed RMC demands to broaden working-class struggles beyond pure and narrow economism and to inject revolutionary political issues into SDS's mere atrocity-mongering propaganda. The oft-repeated "Students can't tell workers what to do" conflicted with the line that students and workers are natural allies with shared class interests, but it also represented a patronizing view of workers, a negation of the role of revolutionary theory and a dishonest cover for the desire to keep SDS a low-level front group so that revolutionary-minded-students could be drawn into an organization that could, presumably, "tell workers what to do": PL.
Anti-War Upsurge Bypasses SDS
RMC argued that SDS must address itself to the critically important issue of the Vietnam war, with a revolutionary class program demanding labor strikes against the war. But SDS continued to push the CWSA line, and the national student strike in the wake of the Cambodia invasion and the murders of students at Kent and Jackson State caught SDS totally unprepared. When the student strike wave erupted over its head, SDS chased frantically around campuses trying to seize , buildings and get campus workers to join the de¬monstrations. Only the RMC, pointing out that student strikes are impotent unless they are extended to the working class, which has the power to stop capitalist production, distributed propaganda at union meetings and worked with workers who were agitating in their unions for labor strikes against the war.
PL let the CWSA die quietly, admitting to each other that it had been a failure (as Adelson openly states in his book) and switching SDS's attention to assorted on-campus issues like day care, ROTC, right-wing professors, and resisting any serious orientation to major labor struggles--all this against the background of an increasingly -militant wave of strikes all across the country.
During the summer of 1971, PL held numerous "Fight Unemployment" marches in its own name (around essentially economist demands) but in SDS confined itself to demanding an end to campus unemployment! In August, when Nixon declared the wage freeze, PL responded with the call for a general strike and "30 for 40" (demands lifted directly from the Spartacist program) but opposed RMC's attempt to get SDS to join in agitation for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze.
We Both Get Thrown Out of NPAC
Belatedly, PL/SDS turned its attention to the anti-war movement and began attending the meetings of the National Peace Action Coalition, the Socialist Workers Party's single-issue popular-front alliance with the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie. At the Cleveland December 1970 NPAC meeting, PL/SDS blocked with Spartacist/RMC to militantly oppose the participation of bourgeois representatives in the anti-war movement.
At the July 1971 NPAC conference in New York, PL/SDS and Spartacist/RMC were violently ejected for shouting down Senator Vance Hartke. Like it or not (and they didn't) PL/SDS found itself in an anti-class-collaboration bloc with Trotskyists. It managed to differentiate itself by organizing a token kamikaze attack on the conference the following day and by its position that trade union bureaucrats are the same as capitalist politicians and should equally be excluded from the anti-war movement.
By the time the November NPAC peace marches came around, PL/SDS declared its support for them. At the December NPAC conference in Cleveland, PL/SDS humbled itself many times over to the leadership of this alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, pledging its support to the next march and generally adopting the posture of NPAC loyalists. The SL/RCY alone at the con¬ference stood in militant and unconditional opposition to class collaboration. What PL learned from the NPAC experience was apparently that capitulation works, and began developing its own reformist single-issue campaign, SDS's "Fight Racist Textbooks" line, complete with endorser lists signed by liberal professors.
PL opposed the welding of a political alliance between radical students and class-conscious workers (the formation of a fighting youth auxiliary to communist opposition in the unions), pre¬ferring to establish such an alliance on an appeal to moral do-goodism and the obscuring of a class line. PL's own inability as a would-be revolutionary party to develop a program to bridge the gap between trade union and socialist conscious¬ness, its adherence to the sterile minimum/ maximum program, fed its tendency to progressively lower the political level of SDS.
Throughout our existence as. the left opposition to PL in SDS, Revolutionary Communist Youth has raised the need for a socialist orientation based on transitional demands--demands which raise the issue of class power, connecting the felt needs of workers to their larger political interests—e. g., strikes against the war and wage freeze, "30 for 40", construction of a labor party, etc. Marked by a rejection of a communist approach, the history of PL's "leadership" of SDS is a sad story of the squandering of precious political capital. Now the sellout-to-liberalism "Fight Racist Textbooks" campaign marks a qualitative shift in the political character of SDS. It is a betrayal and has transformed SDS into an organization whose thrust is dangerous to the working class. The RCY must struggle politically to defeat SDS, counterposing itself as the genuine communist youth organization.
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