Markin comment on this series:
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:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
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From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)
CHICAGO—When University of Chicago president Hanna Gray and the 'U of C trustees smugly announced their intention to award former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara$25,000and the first annual "Albert Pick Jr. Award" for promoting "international understanding," they learned that the memory of U.S. imperialism's campaign of slaughter against Vietnam is not dead. Twenty-five were arrested as 1,500 angry students, teachers and workers rallied on May 22 in one of the largest demonstrations here in over a decade. Highly visible was the largest organized contingent: 50-strong, the Spartacus Youth League and friends demanded: "No Award to Imperialist Butcher McNamara! Keep McNamara Off Campus! Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims!"
The meaning of the obscene award presentation was clear: yet another fete to bury the ugly legacy of U.S. mass murder in Vietnam. CIA-liberal and Kennedy "Camelot" team member, McNamara helped to bring us the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf and the escalation of U.S. aggression in Indochina. For seven years Secretary of Defense (1961-68), this former Ford Motor Co. exec currently sits as tsar of the World Bank.
While no longer ordering troops into tie, McNamara is no less a key legist for U.S. imperialism. He presided over the World Bank when the lean economy was strangled by the imperialists in order to "destabilize" the Allende government, paving the way the Pinochet coup and the murder of 30,000 Chilean workers and peasants. The only possible contribution MacNamara could make to" international understanding" would be his trial by Vietnamese workers and peasants.
Why Mac Didn't Get the Knife...
It is outrageous that this war criminal collected his blood money basically without a hitch. Despite the fact that scores of protesters wanted to do more than stand across the street from the banquet hall and be treated to a litany of speeches droning on about the good old days, the organizers of the protest made sure that U of C "discipline guidelines" weren't broken as they provided marshals to police the crowd. They must have been overjoyed when President Gray gave kudos to the University staff, the Chicago cops and the "May 22 Committee, which organized the protest" and was "entirely forthright about its intentions and plans." Indeed, the Committee was quite "forthright" they made it clear from the very beginning that they wanted nothing more militant than a vigil.
The liberals went into a tizzy when the announcement of the award was made. But what they were fretting about was that it might "tarnish" the "image" of U of C. When 280 faculty members "dissociated" themselves from the award because it brought "politics" to the University, the May 22 Committee chirped in that the award was a "violation of the integrity of the University of Chicago."
What claptrap! Started up with the profits extorted by John D. Rockefeller, presided over by Hanna Gray, who smashed a 1977 campus workers strike at Yale, and once home to outright collaborators with the Chilean junta, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger (see "SYL Campaigns Against Chilean Junta's Collaborators," Young Spartacus No. 37, November 1975)—the U of C is already "political" and has about as much integrity as Bert Lance. Just what do the liberals expect from one of the most elite private universities whose very job is to train the next generation of imperialist ideologues, capitalist administrators and "public servants'"?
A planning meeting on May 15 drew 175 people reflecting real outrage on the campus, especially among undergraduates. The core of the May 22 Committee leadership—a clique of former antiwar activists turned grad students and professors who had met in secrecy earlier—succeeded in voting down the SYL's proposal for a united-front committee open to all organizations and individuals who agreed with the slogans "No Award to Imperialist Butcher!" and "Keep McNamara Off Campus!" To suggest that McNamara should be run off campus was totally anathema to these people. In fact, the Committee was so worried about "tarnishing" their "image" that they even voted down a vague proposal that called for "civil disobedience" at the award dinner.
Joining the liberals in rejecting the SYL's strategy were supporters of several left organizations, among them the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), the ex-Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the New American Movement (NAM) and the miniscule International Socialist Organization. NAM and the RCYB were rewarded for their services and were allowed to share the platform at a planned teach-in. The YSA, which had maintained a conspicuous absence from earlier planning meetings, arrived on the scene just in time to argue against the SYL having the right to speak. Instead, they wanted to hear... Eugene McCarthy! While the fake-lefts did their best to out-liberal the liberals, the SYL refused to endorse the bureaucratic, weak-kneed Committee and set about organizing a militant contingent for the demonstration.
I he activities on May 22 began with an "honor the dead" picnic on the quadrangles, complete with protest songs. Dave Dellinger (remember him?) extended his "turn the other cheek" philosophy to include McNamara, saying that he shouldn't be punished for his crimes! He then denounced the SYL's slogan of shipping him to Vietnam to be tried by his victims. Marshall Sahlins—a former antiwar activist—suggested that "next time" the protest movement should drape itself in the "stars and stripes" instead of burning it, as if the American flag could be something other than the symbol of the most brutal imperialist power.
After several hours of nostalgic left-liberal dribble which drove most of the students away in sheer boredom, an SYL speaker finally got to the floor to cut through the "movement is not dead" rhetoric;
"Unlike what many of the liberals have been saying, McNamara's crime is not that he helped deceive the public about a 'mistake' of the U .S. government. The war in Vietnam was no mistake, but part of U.S. imperialism's drive world wide. McNamara's crimes are those of a mass murderer.
"During the Vietnam war the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League recognized that there was a class war going on in Indochina and we took a firm stand for the military victory of the NLF/DRV. We called for labor strikes against the war and we said 'All Indochina Must Go Communist'....
Our program was in direct counterposition to the reformists of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party who sought to limit the movement to peace crawls and tie it to the Democratic Party—the party of McNamara and the war. The liberals and reformists have continued this policy today in their plans for tonight's demonstration
"The Maoists of the RSB and RCYB who today protest McNamara felt fine when Nixon sipped tea with Mao Tsetung in Peking while U.S. bombers rained death and destruction over Hanoi and Haiphong. Now the Chinese deformed workers state plays the role of cat's paw for U.S. imperialism with its invasion of Vietnam in a not-so-veiled attack against the Soviet Union—the main military/industrial powerhouse of the deformed and degenerated workers states.
"While the Maoists grovel in their alliance with U.S. imperialism and the RCYB lines up with imperialism's propaganda offensive against the Soviet Union, the SL/SYL defends all the deformed workers states against imperialism and struggles for a workers political revolution from Moscow to Peking to Hanoi to overthrow the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies.”The SYL is organizing the only contingent in the demonstration which will raise revolutionary politics. This award is an atrocity and McNamara should be kept off campus!"
Just one month after the SYL spokesman asserted that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was "no mistake," the Carter administration called for military intervention to suppress a popular revolution against a hated rightist dictatorship. At the U.S. colonial bureau, the Organization of American States, Cyrus Vance proposed a "peace-keeping" force to prevent the Nicaragua rebels from overthrowing the Somoza dynasty.
If the day of speeches was frustrating for militant students, the evening's events must have been more so. While McNamara was being whisked into a side entrance by the cops, the protesters were being kept across the street by the May 22 Committee marshals.
The only interesting speech that came booming from the Committee's sound truck was given by Revolutionary Communist Party honcho Clark Kissinger— interesting because it was nuts: "This is the night of the living dead," he raved, "you know that you can't deal with a vampire with just a cross, you deal with him with a stake through the heart!"
Despite the predominant liberal politics, the crowd was in a militant mood. When the Chicago cops stepped in to put out a burning effigy of McNamara, the SYL's chant of "Cops Off Campus" was enthusiastically taken up. The chants of the militant SYL contingent also provided the only alternative to the insipid "McNamara, We Will Not Forget" moral witness politics of the rally organizers. "International Understanding the U of C Way— Butcher 'Honored' by Strike-Breaker Gray!"; "World Bank, CIA: Backers of Videla and Pinochet!" and "No to the Draft and Imperialist Slaughter! Capitalism Wants Us for Cannon Fodder!" echoed off the walls of Hutchinson Commons as McNamara was wined and dined.
... But the Protesters Did
As the evening wore on the crowd began to dwindle away until only one third of the demonstrators were left. In an unsuccessful attempt to intercept McNamara's departure, several hundred protesters broke away and sat down on University Avenue for a "teach-in." As the cops moved in the one in charge got a pie thrown into his face and twenty-five protesters were hauled off to a waiting paddy wagon including a Vietnam veteran dragged off in his wheelchair.
Quickly 200 angry demonstrators marched to Hanna Gray's house where an SYL spokesman demanded that the charges against those arrested be immediately dropped, that there be no administration reprisals and that the cops get off campus. True to form, though, most of the May 22 steering committee members boycotted this rally.
While the 25 were being booked and fingerprinted it turned out that the Committee was busily debating the wording of a statement dissociating it from the sit-in! Some Committee members spoke against bailing out Kissinger and another RCYBer, baiting them for "violence-mongering." It was only after an angry SYLer intervened to condemn this crass anti-communism, to point out that it was the cops who were responsible for any "violence" and to demand that all those arrested be defended that the Committee relented and voted to bail out all the arrestees.
The day after the arrests, however, the wretched Committee made it clear that accolades from Hanna Gray meant more to them than defense of the arrested protesters. After refusing to endorse a rally hastily called by the RCYB, the Committee sent its water- j boy, a YSAer, to read an "official" statement. Applauding the participants who had "rigorously observed the policy of the peaceful and legal discussion and demonstration decided upon -by the Committee and its marshals," the YSAer then shamelessly called upon all those present to disperse! The YSAer could only look on in dismay as 150 demonstrators remained and the continued.
Both at the rally and at a heavily attended meeting that night the SYL exposed the Committee's despicable attempt to distance itself from those arrested, and proposed that a united-front defense demonstration be held. Despite the desire of many of those present to protest the arrests, the motion failed—largely due to the arguments of a number of defendants that the arrests themselves had made the "point" and to the fact that the RCYB preferred to stick with the liberals and thus sabotage its own defense!
In the absence of effective, militant protests, the Chicago courts were able to place 24 of those arrested under one-year "court supervision," which means that it any are arrested again within a year they will face the charges of disorderly conduct. The alleged pie thrower still faces a count of battery on a policeman. These attacks must not go unchallenged! Ten years ago, as soon as widespread student protest died down, the U of C administration expelled 42 students and suspended 120 others. The threat of reprisals still remains.
For a meeting called on May 29 the SYL distributed a leaflet entitled "Drop the Charges! For Militant Protest!" "The question is on everyone's lips. Were the events of May 22nd a victory or a defeat, and for whom? .The SYL says that it was significant and important that 1500 people were drawn from the apolitical mire of the 'me-decade' to protest the award to imperialist butcher McNamara. However, it is no victory that McNamara did receive the award and that 25 people were arrested."
This analysis was clearly shared by many of the frustrated demonstrators. The meeting, called to form a new "progressive" organization voted to hear SL Central Committee member Tweet Carter. As a former regional organizer for SDS she noted that even at its worst, SDS was far to the left of the May 22 Committee and its "left" pals. As the SYL leaflet explained: "There has been a lot of talk about bringing back the student movement of the New Left and creating a new student coalition to deal with the various 'issues.' Don't repeat the mistakes of the sixties! The reason that SDS and the New Left fell apart was because it did not have a leadership with a revolutionary working-class program which could guide the movement beyond student-power illusions and sectoralist politics. As a result, many students got channeled into the Democratic Party reformist politics of McGovern or became disillusioned with politics entirely. The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, the precursor of the SYL, fought for a working-class perspective within SDS, winning over militants to Trotskyism. What is needed now is not another grab-bag liberal coalition like the May 22 Committee under another name, but a party of professional revolutionaries committed to a socialist future.
"The Spartacist League and its youth group, the SYL, are fighting to build a Trotskyist vanguard party. Such a party would mobilize the labor movement to fight for the establishment of a workers government which would expropriate the capitalists and run society for the working people. Join the SYL!"
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