*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1970

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter 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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Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus

The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—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 the Racial Oppression-Irvine and RMC Positions article in this issue:

As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 3, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.

Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their  problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.       

It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.     

Additional Note:

The key historical argument in this issue centers on the role of revolutionaries in the fight against special oppression, as addressed here of blacks as a race-color caste in America. And a good exposition (the Tishman polemic) of our general attitude that while we see the working class as central leadership of the class struggle that class has to fight these special oppressions, even for those who we someday will see on the other side of the barricades. That is the reasoning behind our support for all types of basically democratic, non-revolutionary, demands. That is the importance of the Dreyfus example in the Tishman polemic. Those are our wedge into class-struggle perspectives as “tribunes of the people.”