Click on the headline to link to the Campus Spartacist archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
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Campus Spartacist
Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 through 1971. The list below reflects these local versions.
—Riazanov Library
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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 issue:
I have noted elsewhere (in the commentaries to the GI Voice archival documents, see archives May 11-18 2011) that I would have given much gold, or at least saved myself some very anxious political wilderness years, if I had run into the writer of this Campus Spartacist polemic in 1969 (or 1970) when I made a dramatic shift left-ward in my political understandings of the world.
Not that I would have adhered to, or even agreed with, what she was saying at the time. Far from it. I had only half-broken form bourgeois society and politics but I was learning, learning fast. I was, frankly, still only “toying around with” Marxist concepts at that time, but I would, as is my wont and had always been my way, made a mental note of who she was, and what political organization she represented. And it was not the CP, SWP, or even PL that even then left me cold.
Although her letter to a friend (a nice touch, a well-honored way to make political points, and a form used by all the revolutionary politicians in the old days when they wanted to ‘talk” serious without evoking their organizational affiliations) is not “high Trotskyism” by any means she has the traditional Stalinist/Maoist analysis down pretty well for someone who probably was fairly new to the world of high Trostkyism. And in the end when you think about it if there could have been fifty or one hundred more like her, not fully formed “Trots” but ardent, a lot of the inner turmoil of the 1969 SDS fight could have been directed toward the main historic (and real) fight in the international working class, Stalinism vs. Trotskyism. A flat-out, no holds barred fight for the heart and soul of those thousands, and maybe tens of thousands, of student and youth radicals who knew the CP, the SWP, and to a lesser extent PL were not the road to revolution. Or, as here, later pretenders like the RU (and the October League).
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