Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Chiffons performing their classic, He's So Fine.
THE CHIFFONS
"He's So Fine"
(Do-lang, do-lang, do-lang)
(Do-lang, do-lang)
He's so fine
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
Wish he were mine
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
That handsome boy over there
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
The one with the wavy hair
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
I don't know how I'm gonna do it
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
But I'm gonna make him mine
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
He's the envy of all the girls
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
It's just a matter of time
(Do-lang-do-lang)
He's a soft [Spoken] guy
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
Also seems kinda shy
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
Makes me wonder if I
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
Should even give him a try
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
But then I know he can't shy
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
He can't shy away forever
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
And I'm gonna make him mine
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
If it takes me forever
(Do-lang-do-lang)
He's so fine
(Oh yeah)
Gotta be mine
(Oh yeah)
Sooner or later
(Oh yeah)
I hope it's not later
(Oh yeah)
We gotta get together
(Oh yeah)
The sooner the better
(Oh yeah)
I just can't wait, I just can't wait
To be held in his arms
If I were a queen
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
And he asked me to leave my throne
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
I'll do anything that he asked
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
Anything to make him my own
(Do-lang-do-lang-do-lang)
For he's so fine
(So fine) so fine
(So fine) he's so fine
(So fine) so fine
(So fine) he's so fine
[Fades]
(So fine) oh yeah
(He's so fine) he's so fine
(So fine) uh-huh
(He's so fine)
He's so fine.....
*****
That Frankie, Frankie Riley, really gets to me sometimes. Here he has the best girl around, Joanne Doyle, smart, cute, maybe more than cute but I don’t dare say it here just in case he has the joint cased (or maybe she will see it and be embarrassed), and he is catting around, catting around like crazy trying to make every twist not tied to a big bruiser of a guy. Even then, if she is a boffo, he will take a run at her and hope his track shoes are fast enough. or faster than her boyfriend anyway.
And here I am all by myself,girl-less, Johnny O’Connor, Jumping Johnny O’Connor they call me but I don’t like it, don’t like it at all. See, back in sixth grade, back before Markin, Peter Paul Markin, came on the scene and took my place, my rightful place, as Frankie’s right-hand man we were at a “petting” party, a girl’s birthday party really, but you know how kids' stuff gets going, boy and girl kids' stuff, and this stick tried to kiss me hard, some sweet-perfumed, freshly-soaped stick (I can still smell her smell now), when the lights went out and I jumped up and ran out of that birthday girl’s house. Now, and probably for eternity, I am Jumping Johnny O’Connor. But I still don’t like it. And funny that stick girl, I’ll just call her by her first name, Jenny, turned out to be lately, well she turned out to be cute, maybe more than cute but I don’t dare say it just in case she has her spies around.
Now don’t get me wrong, Peter Paul’s a good guy, a funny guy really, and he has about twelve million facts that he seems to keep tied up in a bag and has ready for any occasion, any Frankie-needs-facts-occasion. So I can see where Frankie could use him as maybe second right hand guy, and I could be first. See, where Peter Paul has those facts I’ve got the beef, the well-muscled beef, that Frankie really needs if, and when, those track shoes aren’t fast enough when that boffo girl’s big bruiser boy friend gets the word.
Some people call me a stup and a simp for hanging around with a weirdo like Frankie but that’s not right. I just don’t like to read a lot of books, and stuff like that. I like my sports, and getting some serious attention, some serious girl attention, except no dice from Joanne and ever since that party nothing but ice from that Jenny, for being good at them. But see, Frankie, and now Peter Paul, are into that new be-bop beat thing, and I have noticed that Joanne is playing right into it, even liking it when Peter Paul starts going on and on about this and that in the universe, poetry, politics, history, and not sports. But I am a sensitive guy about stuff like that jumping name, and no way would I do Peter Paul’s soap box tirade stuff or Frankie’s catting if ever I could find a true love girl.
Enter Jenny:
Oh there's John O’Connor across the street sitting in the window seat at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor alone. And there, as usual, walking over to him is Frankie Riley, the most esteemed high exalted leader of that pack of foolish beatniks who hang there after school and at night whenever he can escape the leash, the Joanne Doyle leash, and, of course, Peter Paul Markin, his slavish dribbling (oops) scribbling scribe who fancies himself a man of letters, whatever that is. Gee, I wish John would get away from that crowd. He doesn’t fit in. I know him and Frankie go way back, first grade at North Adamsville Elementary I think, but since Peter Paul and his eleven thousand useless facts made the scene a couple years ago John has been second fiddle. It’s a shame because John is so sexy and such a good athlete, football, basketball, baseball that he doesn’t need those flannel-shirt wearing, black chino-wearing, work-boot–wearing, sunglass-wearing, ah, men of some letters that I can think of.
Maybe you know the story about John and me in sixth grade already but let me just tell you my side. I’ve heard a lot of different stories about how he got the name, wrong stories, so let me set you straight. They call John Jumping John O’Connor because of me. See, I have had a crush on him since, well, since, so when Chrissie McNamara had her twelfth birthday and told me John was coming I was crazy to go too. I took a long bath, dressed up in my best dress, and wore some of my mother’s perfume (don’t tell her, alright). Okay, okay I wasn’t a beauty like Chrissie but I sure was prettier than that Joanne Doyle. And I didn’t have a shape, then. I was a stick like the boys called us among themselves (so they thought, like such terms could be kept secret, secret with sisters around) back them, shapes and sticks.
The party was going pretty good and John, for some reason, asked me to dance, we danced and that was that, for him anyway. But as will happen at twelfth birthday parties, and on other occasions as well, the party was really a cover for “petting.” You know what petting is right, and if you don’t look it up. I was thrilled, heart-beating thrilled, pulse-pulsating thrilled that John danced with me, and misread the meaning of it big time. So when the lights went out I drew a bee-line to John and gave him a big kiss right on the mouth as hard as I could. He pushed me away like I was one of his football opponents, jumped off the sofa he was on, and ran out the door. That’s the real story. Except for me, for my midnight alone sorrows. Since then he hasn’t spoken to me, or acknowledged my existence. Funny though, I have seen him in class lately looking over in my direction for a few seconds and then turning his head back when I have spotted him, at least I hope he is looking my way.
I admit it. I am miserable ever since that party a few years back. Sure I have gone out with other boys to parties, the movies, and for pizza. I even went out with Peter Paul once but he was so full of air, and of himself, that I put the geek (no go) sign on him. And, yes, Frankie, pure as the driven snow Frankie, just so you know, has made more passes at me than you can shake a stick at. And Joanne, Plain Jane Joanne Doyle, is clueless. But John is the only one who has my eyes since, well, since. Maybe one day, one day when I am just miserable enough, just miserable enough to say enough, I will walk into Salducci’s and just sit on his lap and dare, not double dare, John O’Connor to jump up. It’ll be harder to get me off of him than the whole opposing team on the football field on Saturday afternoon.
Reenter John:
Hey, there's Jenny at the bus stop. I wonder where she is going all by herself. I noticed that she noticed that I was looking at her, looking at her kind of long and easy, a couple of times in study class. I wonder if she is still sore at me for pushing her aside when she kissed me hard like that and I jumped out the door at Chrissie’s birthday party that time. I didn’t mean to do to it but I had never been kissed by a girl like that before. I wonder too if she knew when I asked her to dance then that I had had a crush on her since, well, since. Maybe some day, maybe some day when all the guys, all the guys with their be-bop wisdom wise-guy stuff, are not around, I’ll go over and apologize to her.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxist Bulletin No. 7-The Leninist Position on Youth-Party Relations-Documents from the YSA & SWP, 1957-61 (Preface)
Go to the International Communist League Website to purchase the full document or to the International Bolshevik Tendency Marxist Archives section of their website to download it.
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.
*******
Preface
The present collection of documents deals with the vital issue of the relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth organization. These documents, from the years 1957-61, set forth two aspects of contemporary party-youth relations: they reaffirm the earlier position of the Leninist and Trotskyist movement; and they present the history of those few years of Socialist Workers Party-youth relations during which the SWP re-established a nationwide revolutionary Marxist youth organization in this country after a lapse of nearly two decades. These documents, as a collection, but especially the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, have a long history of suppression in the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. Some of them have never before been circulated in any way.
Documents and Definitions
Document one was written in 1957 by Murry Weiss, the architect of the initial attempt to rebuild the SWP's youth organization under the conditions of the break-up of the CP. Because he was one of the very few continuing leaders of the SWP with any significant experience in its earlier youth group he was particularly interested and involved in the new attempt in 1957. What he did initially was to set forth the Leninist principles upon which the earlier Trotskyist youth organization had been founded, principles which documents two through seven also restated, a few years later when the SWP leadership began to turn its back on its own history.
These documents two through seven present the position on youth party relations of the YSA leadership both before and during the time the dispute over the Cuban Revolution forced many youth leaders to form the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, the forebears of the Spartacist League. This position, in brief, is that a youth organization should be autonomously related to the party, being organizationally independent, but ultimately politically subordinate.
Document eight, a letter by James P. Cannon, presents the antithetical position arrived at by the SWP majority leadership, namely that the youth organization, although not openly related to the party should be, through the fractional intervention of party members, in effect organizationally dependent and thus politically servile. Cannon's letter might appropriately have been titled "Epitaph", for it served that function in the discussion.
Stands Not Alone
Because of its peculiar nature, the youth question does not stand by itself. When it comes up, it is almost never raised as an abstract issue; instead it usually reflects disagreements within the party and the youth on other political issues. For example, in 1961, a majority of the central leadership, progenitors of the Spartacist League, viewing Castro as then petty-bourgeois, condemned the SWP's uncritical treatment of him as a great "proletarian revolutionary". (See Marxist Bulletin No.8, Cuba and Marxist Theory, for the discussion on Cuba.)
The youth leadership of 1961 started by criticizing the SWP's Pabloist adaptation to Castro; but when these criticisms brought forth the SWP's perversion of the YSA, the youth leadership was faced with the need to reaffirm the Leninist youth party relations which the SWP majority had found necessary to suppress. In order to do this, the YSA leadership based itself on the development and functioning of the Young Communist International in Lenin's time and on the YSA's own Educational Bulletin, "History of the International Socialist Youth Movement (to 1929)".
The RT's attempt to reaffirm the Leninist position made it very clear to the SWP majority that it would henceforth need to conduct discussions of youth-party relationships by concealing or prohibiting the early documents of the YSA and the earlier history of the communist youth movement. The importance of keeping today's YSAers in a state of virginal ignorance had been clearly demonstrated by the RT itself, which through its development in the YSA had understood the need for political opposition to the opportunism of the entrenched SWP leadership. Accordingly, the SWP has suppressed historically tested practices and has worked out a means for neutralizing any opposition in the YSA. It has a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if you-don't policy for those SWPers in the youth with some difference with the majority: it sometimes gives them permission to raise an opposing view, so that if they then don't, they stand as unserious, ashamed of their positions, etc.; however, if they do raise the differences, they are nonetheless at least informally condemned for breaking with the "best interests" of the party.
Inside the YSA-SWP
A brief review of the particular history of this question in the SWP should illustrate the general development of struggle which any incipient opposition would find as it begins the criticism of the centrist leadership of a once Bolshevik organization.
In 1957, the SWP had inaugurated the attempt to recreate a Trotskyist youth movement in the United States after a lapse of 17 years. The SWP, however, was no longer the same party it had been in 1940; thus the formula of an autonomous youth organization caused much uneasiness among the party brass. By 1961 their centrist fears proved justified: the Cuban question showed that they were indeed unable to politically lead their youth section. Accordingly, with a majority of the YSA central leadership going into opposition over Cuba, the SWP struck organizationally at the youth majority. The SWP took over a virtual receivership of the YSA, bringing in one Carl Feingold, an SWP National Committee member, to lead a special party commission on the YSA. In doing this it destroyed the embryo of Leninist youth-party relations which had been developing since 1957.
The fate of the key seventh document in this collection, the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, well exemplifies the situation. Faced with the perversion of the YSA's internal life, the youth leadership sought in this resolution to reaffirm absolutely unambiguously the necessary and historically tested relation in political struggle between revolutionaries of different generations. The document was drafted for submission to the YSA National Conference of December 1961. The party National Office decided instead to refer it to a party "Commission on Party-Youth Relations" which never met. And later the Political Committee forbade any discussion of the party-youth question inside the YSA by party members (i.e. by the leading half of the YSA!). Furthermore, since the SWP had just concluded a national convention, circulation of the draft resolution was forbidden within the party itself "until the next pre-convention discussion period", two years later.
Still Trying
Two years later, the immediate issue had long been resolved, with the YSA being held in the rigid administrative grip of the SWP, the youth majority leadership "dismissed" and the SWP's depoliticalized puppets completely instituted. However, in early May of the 1963 SWP pre-convention discussion period, the RT attempted to bring the general issue to light by submitting the bulk of the documents in this collection for internal circulation to the SWP membership. After waiting a bit, the SWP Political Committee abruptly proclaimed that since the Bloomington Indiana YSA was under prosecution for subversion by the local DA, and that since, by inference, the SWP being on the federal "subversive" list and the YSA not, discussion might incriminate the latter; therefore, once again, any and all discussion on youth-party relations must be rigidly denied for the good of the movement. The following is the motion adopted by the Political Committee on 24 May 1963:
"Motion by Cannon, Dobbs, Kerry and Warde:
"The revolutionary-socialist youth face a witch-hunting criminal indictment brought against them by agents of the ruling class. As part of the frame up which is intended to stifle the voice of socialist-minded youth, the prosecution falsely labels them a section of the adult revolutionary socialist movement. In view of this capitalist assault there can at present be only one single subject on the party agenda in the sphere of adult-youth relations, namely, defense of the youth against the class enemy. Attempts to precipitate disputes over questions of general cooperation between adults and youth who share common political views can only be prejudicial to defense of the youth against the witch hunt frameup, and such attempts will not be tolerated in any way, shape or forms. All party members are hereby instructed to conduct themselves accordingly. Any violation of this directive will be subject to disciplinary action by the appropriate party bodies."
The complete falsity of this "reason" is proved for example by the fact that the section of the indictment labeling the YSA as the youth section of the SWP had been struck by the Monroe County, Indiana, Circuit Court on 23 May 1963, one day before the PC motion was adopted. Despite the fact that the Militant (3 June 1963) itself printed the story that SWP-YSA relations were no longer an issue in the case, despite the repeated requests that the issue be opened for discussion when there were no more "legal" reasons for the continuing prohibition, the party ban was upheld until all of the dissidents of that period had been expelled or driven out of the SWP-YSA.
Contradiction Concealed
Behind this series of smokescreens of organizational and tactical objections stands the simple truth that the SWP was politically unable to function in a Leninist way toward its youth organization. Cannon flatly admitted this, but only to his National Committee, when he declared: "I don't think Lenin was a fetishist on the form of youth organization any more than on any other form." And further, "In fact, it [the problem of youth organization] never has been solved, not in this country or any other." (See document 8.)
Thus the SWP was caught in the archetypical centrist dilemma: making a qualitative, substantive repudiation of revolutionary practice, while insisting to the contrary. In the case of the youth question, flagrant suppression was the SWP's only means to conceal that contradiction.
We are not here concerned with merely raking over factional quarrels from 1960-61. And, as the material from documents three and four and the main point of the whole collection show, we were not then discussing formal schemas without a revolutionary content. Rather, the whole question is one of utmost importance to a growing revolutionary movement and is basic to overcoming the "old left"-"new left" generational gap. Very special needs are required to integrate young apprentice revolutionaries into the Marxist movement without their becoming office boys or sycophants. They must be assisted in acquiring, through struggle inside as well as outside the movement, the necessary revolutionary qualities of discipline and intransigence. But such struggle often clashes with internal order. Moreover, it places on the incumbent "adult" leadership the continuing responsibility and necessity to defend its program and tactics. The whole thrust of the documents contained here (except for the terminal one wherein Cannon decides to scrap Lenin's whole understanding of the importance of this relationship) outline the kind of movement, practices and relationships which are required and for which the progenitors of the Spartacist League fought.
WWP, PLP, SLL Too
The issues raised here exist and recur across the entire radical movement. The unthinking and total subordination of youth to adult in the radical movement facilitates, for examples, the mindless activism of Youth Against War and Fascism vis-a-vis the Workers World Party; or the way in which the Progressive Labor Party could from the outside suddenly and shatteringly dump the May 2nd Movement in favor of SDS entry; or, internationally, the cavalier blatancy with which the middle-aged Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League could personally and publicly act as a de facto general secretary of his unpolitical Young Socialists. The practices, long historically sanctioned, of the older reformist and Stalinist organizations present two fully developed models of how adult groups control their youth. The "democratic" Socialist Party has an outright and declared command over the Young People's Socialist League that would bring pleasure to a militarist disciplinarian. The Communist Party avoids the possibility of any organizational independence on the part of its youth by angrily repudiating as red-baiting any suggestion of openly facing the question of relations between the CPUSA and the long succession of its youth auxiliaries.
Reverse Control
Obviously it is the party in the long run that pays for the sterility it enforces on its youth as they begin their political development. But there is also a short-range danger to the party inherent in these practices. The only alternative to political development--if the youth do not totally stagnate--is a mindless militancy, which can be whipped up at the demagogic call of the party-sanctioned leaders. That militancy can be used by the party leadership as a club against the party itself. This danger is particularly crucial within a party which still retains a hint of its Trotskyist past, where some slightly left elements will vaguely remember their political history and will object to too headlong a revisionist flight. Thus Sam Marcy had this club available against Workers World; there is a hint of the same procedure in the way Jack Barnes of the SWP used the YSA to advance himself in the party; and Healy, along with his use of every other bureaucratic weapon available, certainly does not overlook the made-to-hand mindlessness of his personally-led Young Socialists as a weapon to keep order in the Socialist Labour League.
Leninist Position
It was in an attempt to counter the sterilizing effects on revolutionary development which such schemes contain that the Revolutionary Tendency submitted the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations. This document analyzes the necessary reciprocal relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth group and calls for the necessary tactical orientation which that relationship would have entailed for the SWP-YSA:
"The political education of the youth, in addition to discussion, involves the experiences of decision and action. One of the essential functions of a youth movement is precisely the education and development of responsible political leaders. The revolutionary youth movement therefore must not be a mere discussion group but must decide its own policies and choose its own leaders to bear responsibility for carrying out those policies.
"The distinct character of the revolutionary socialist youth is necessary but is subordinate to its place as a section of the international revolutionary movement. The Marxist revolutionary party embodies the historical experience of the working class and is alone capable of leading the struggle for socialism. Wherever national sections of this party exist a revolutionary youth movement cannot think in terms of acting as a party, of substituting itself for the existing section of the world party. On the contrary, whatever organizational forms may prevail in a given country the revolutionary youth must maintain unity in action and close political ties with the revolutionary party…
"The YSA is a democratic organization. The leadership of the YSA is elected by the members in accordance with the terms of the YSA Constitution and can be removed only in accordance with the governing Constitutional provisions. All members of the YSA have the right to express their political views within the YSA and to participate in the political decisions of the YSA. This internal democracy is combined with discipline in action in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism.
"From time to time there are necessarily differences of opinion between the SWP and the YSA. In the normal course of events such divergences can be handled through the regular channels of coordination and consultation between the two organizations. When, however, serious political disagreements arise, this procedure is inadequate. In such a case it is the obligation of the youth movement, insofar as its public political activity is concerned, to subordinate itself to the discipline of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The YSA recognizes and accepts this obligation."
Confronted with this restatement of a revolutionary, Leninist perspective, Cannon could do no more than offer the sophist truism that the "formula" of Lenin's was not "ideal" (!) and then pretend that a youth organization is an opponent organization, in which the party members need discipline in action (with the unique logic to this fake reasoning being the need to mobilize its members to fight its own young sympathizers!). This last is particularly grotesque and is indicative of the bureaucratic degeneration into which a once revolutionary organization can fall when, in order to cover for former opportunist positions advocated by the leadership, it begins to substitute the "authority" of that vested leadership for the independent democratic criticism and discussion through which the revolutionary movement must reach its political positions. It is the very bureaucratic distortions in Cannon's letter itself which best illustrate the necessity of the autonomous youth organization which the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations sketches out.
Marxist Bulletin staff
6 September 1967
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.
*******
Preface
The present collection of documents deals with the vital issue of the relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth organization. These documents, from the years 1957-61, set forth two aspects of contemporary party-youth relations: they reaffirm the earlier position of the Leninist and Trotskyist movement; and they present the history of those few years of Socialist Workers Party-youth relations during which the SWP re-established a nationwide revolutionary Marxist youth organization in this country after a lapse of nearly two decades. These documents, as a collection, but especially the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, have a long history of suppression in the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. Some of them have never before been circulated in any way.
Documents and Definitions
Document one was written in 1957 by Murry Weiss, the architect of the initial attempt to rebuild the SWP's youth organization under the conditions of the break-up of the CP. Because he was one of the very few continuing leaders of the SWP with any significant experience in its earlier youth group he was particularly interested and involved in the new attempt in 1957. What he did initially was to set forth the Leninist principles upon which the earlier Trotskyist youth organization had been founded, principles which documents two through seven also restated, a few years later when the SWP leadership began to turn its back on its own history.
These documents two through seven present the position on youth party relations of the YSA leadership both before and during the time the dispute over the Cuban Revolution forced many youth leaders to form the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, the forebears of the Spartacist League. This position, in brief, is that a youth organization should be autonomously related to the party, being organizationally independent, but ultimately politically subordinate.
Document eight, a letter by James P. Cannon, presents the antithetical position arrived at by the SWP majority leadership, namely that the youth organization, although not openly related to the party should be, through the fractional intervention of party members, in effect organizationally dependent and thus politically servile. Cannon's letter might appropriately have been titled "Epitaph", for it served that function in the discussion.
Stands Not Alone
Because of its peculiar nature, the youth question does not stand by itself. When it comes up, it is almost never raised as an abstract issue; instead it usually reflects disagreements within the party and the youth on other political issues. For example, in 1961, a majority of the central leadership, progenitors of the Spartacist League, viewing Castro as then petty-bourgeois, condemned the SWP's uncritical treatment of him as a great "proletarian revolutionary". (See Marxist Bulletin No.8, Cuba and Marxist Theory, for the discussion on Cuba.)
The youth leadership of 1961 started by criticizing the SWP's Pabloist adaptation to Castro; but when these criticisms brought forth the SWP's perversion of the YSA, the youth leadership was faced with the need to reaffirm the Leninist youth party relations which the SWP majority had found necessary to suppress. In order to do this, the YSA leadership based itself on the development and functioning of the Young Communist International in Lenin's time and on the YSA's own Educational Bulletin, "History of the International Socialist Youth Movement (to 1929)".
The RT's attempt to reaffirm the Leninist position made it very clear to the SWP majority that it would henceforth need to conduct discussions of youth-party relationships by concealing or prohibiting the early documents of the YSA and the earlier history of the communist youth movement. The importance of keeping today's YSAers in a state of virginal ignorance had been clearly demonstrated by the RT itself, which through its development in the YSA had understood the need for political opposition to the opportunism of the entrenched SWP leadership. Accordingly, the SWP has suppressed historically tested practices and has worked out a means for neutralizing any opposition in the YSA. It has a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if you-don't policy for those SWPers in the youth with some difference with the majority: it sometimes gives them permission to raise an opposing view, so that if they then don't, they stand as unserious, ashamed of their positions, etc.; however, if they do raise the differences, they are nonetheless at least informally condemned for breaking with the "best interests" of the party.
Inside the YSA-SWP
A brief review of the particular history of this question in the SWP should illustrate the general development of struggle which any incipient opposition would find as it begins the criticism of the centrist leadership of a once Bolshevik organization.
In 1957, the SWP had inaugurated the attempt to recreate a Trotskyist youth movement in the United States after a lapse of 17 years. The SWP, however, was no longer the same party it had been in 1940; thus the formula of an autonomous youth organization caused much uneasiness among the party brass. By 1961 their centrist fears proved justified: the Cuban question showed that they were indeed unable to politically lead their youth section. Accordingly, with a majority of the YSA central leadership going into opposition over Cuba, the SWP struck organizationally at the youth majority. The SWP took over a virtual receivership of the YSA, bringing in one Carl Feingold, an SWP National Committee member, to lead a special party commission on the YSA. In doing this it destroyed the embryo of Leninist youth-party relations which had been developing since 1957.
The fate of the key seventh document in this collection, the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, well exemplifies the situation. Faced with the perversion of the YSA's internal life, the youth leadership sought in this resolution to reaffirm absolutely unambiguously the necessary and historically tested relation in political struggle between revolutionaries of different generations. The document was drafted for submission to the YSA National Conference of December 1961. The party National Office decided instead to refer it to a party "Commission on Party-Youth Relations" which never met. And later the Political Committee forbade any discussion of the party-youth question inside the YSA by party members (i.e. by the leading half of the YSA!). Furthermore, since the SWP had just concluded a national convention, circulation of the draft resolution was forbidden within the party itself "until the next pre-convention discussion period", two years later.
Still Trying
Two years later, the immediate issue had long been resolved, with the YSA being held in the rigid administrative grip of the SWP, the youth majority leadership "dismissed" and the SWP's depoliticalized puppets completely instituted. However, in early May of the 1963 SWP pre-convention discussion period, the RT attempted to bring the general issue to light by submitting the bulk of the documents in this collection for internal circulation to the SWP membership. After waiting a bit, the SWP Political Committee abruptly proclaimed that since the Bloomington Indiana YSA was under prosecution for subversion by the local DA, and that since, by inference, the SWP being on the federal "subversive" list and the YSA not, discussion might incriminate the latter; therefore, once again, any and all discussion on youth-party relations must be rigidly denied for the good of the movement. The following is the motion adopted by the Political Committee on 24 May 1963:
"Motion by Cannon, Dobbs, Kerry and Warde:
"The revolutionary-socialist youth face a witch-hunting criminal indictment brought against them by agents of the ruling class. As part of the frame up which is intended to stifle the voice of socialist-minded youth, the prosecution falsely labels them a section of the adult revolutionary socialist movement. In view of this capitalist assault there can at present be only one single subject on the party agenda in the sphere of adult-youth relations, namely, defense of the youth against the class enemy. Attempts to precipitate disputes over questions of general cooperation between adults and youth who share common political views can only be prejudicial to defense of the youth against the witch hunt frameup, and such attempts will not be tolerated in any way, shape or forms. All party members are hereby instructed to conduct themselves accordingly. Any violation of this directive will be subject to disciplinary action by the appropriate party bodies."
The complete falsity of this "reason" is proved for example by the fact that the section of the indictment labeling the YSA as the youth section of the SWP had been struck by the Monroe County, Indiana, Circuit Court on 23 May 1963, one day before the PC motion was adopted. Despite the fact that the Militant (3 June 1963) itself printed the story that SWP-YSA relations were no longer an issue in the case, despite the repeated requests that the issue be opened for discussion when there were no more "legal" reasons for the continuing prohibition, the party ban was upheld until all of the dissidents of that period had been expelled or driven out of the SWP-YSA.
Contradiction Concealed
Behind this series of smokescreens of organizational and tactical objections stands the simple truth that the SWP was politically unable to function in a Leninist way toward its youth organization. Cannon flatly admitted this, but only to his National Committee, when he declared: "I don't think Lenin was a fetishist on the form of youth organization any more than on any other form." And further, "In fact, it [the problem of youth organization] never has been solved, not in this country or any other." (See document 8.)
Thus the SWP was caught in the archetypical centrist dilemma: making a qualitative, substantive repudiation of revolutionary practice, while insisting to the contrary. In the case of the youth question, flagrant suppression was the SWP's only means to conceal that contradiction.
We are not here concerned with merely raking over factional quarrels from 1960-61. And, as the material from documents three and four and the main point of the whole collection show, we were not then discussing formal schemas without a revolutionary content. Rather, the whole question is one of utmost importance to a growing revolutionary movement and is basic to overcoming the "old left"-"new left" generational gap. Very special needs are required to integrate young apprentice revolutionaries into the Marxist movement without their becoming office boys or sycophants. They must be assisted in acquiring, through struggle inside as well as outside the movement, the necessary revolutionary qualities of discipline and intransigence. But such struggle often clashes with internal order. Moreover, it places on the incumbent "adult" leadership the continuing responsibility and necessity to defend its program and tactics. The whole thrust of the documents contained here (except for the terminal one wherein Cannon decides to scrap Lenin's whole understanding of the importance of this relationship) outline the kind of movement, practices and relationships which are required and for which the progenitors of the Spartacist League fought.
WWP, PLP, SLL Too
The issues raised here exist and recur across the entire radical movement. The unthinking and total subordination of youth to adult in the radical movement facilitates, for examples, the mindless activism of Youth Against War and Fascism vis-a-vis the Workers World Party; or the way in which the Progressive Labor Party could from the outside suddenly and shatteringly dump the May 2nd Movement in favor of SDS entry; or, internationally, the cavalier blatancy with which the middle-aged Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League could personally and publicly act as a de facto general secretary of his unpolitical Young Socialists. The practices, long historically sanctioned, of the older reformist and Stalinist organizations present two fully developed models of how adult groups control their youth. The "democratic" Socialist Party has an outright and declared command over the Young People's Socialist League that would bring pleasure to a militarist disciplinarian. The Communist Party avoids the possibility of any organizational independence on the part of its youth by angrily repudiating as red-baiting any suggestion of openly facing the question of relations between the CPUSA and the long succession of its youth auxiliaries.
Reverse Control
Obviously it is the party in the long run that pays for the sterility it enforces on its youth as they begin their political development. But there is also a short-range danger to the party inherent in these practices. The only alternative to political development--if the youth do not totally stagnate--is a mindless militancy, which can be whipped up at the demagogic call of the party-sanctioned leaders. That militancy can be used by the party leadership as a club against the party itself. This danger is particularly crucial within a party which still retains a hint of its Trotskyist past, where some slightly left elements will vaguely remember their political history and will object to too headlong a revisionist flight. Thus Sam Marcy had this club available against Workers World; there is a hint of the same procedure in the way Jack Barnes of the SWP used the YSA to advance himself in the party; and Healy, along with his use of every other bureaucratic weapon available, certainly does not overlook the made-to-hand mindlessness of his personally-led Young Socialists as a weapon to keep order in the Socialist Labour League.
Leninist Position
It was in an attempt to counter the sterilizing effects on revolutionary development which such schemes contain that the Revolutionary Tendency submitted the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations. This document analyzes the necessary reciprocal relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth group and calls for the necessary tactical orientation which that relationship would have entailed for the SWP-YSA:
"The political education of the youth, in addition to discussion, involves the experiences of decision and action. One of the essential functions of a youth movement is precisely the education and development of responsible political leaders. The revolutionary youth movement therefore must not be a mere discussion group but must decide its own policies and choose its own leaders to bear responsibility for carrying out those policies.
"The distinct character of the revolutionary socialist youth is necessary but is subordinate to its place as a section of the international revolutionary movement. The Marxist revolutionary party embodies the historical experience of the working class and is alone capable of leading the struggle for socialism. Wherever national sections of this party exist a revolutionary youth movement cannot think in terms of acting as a party, of substituting itself for the existing section of the world party. On the contrary, whatever organizational forms may prevail in a given country the revolutionary youth must maintain unity in action and close political ties with the revolutionary party…
"The YSA is a democratic organization. The leadership of the YSA is elected by the members in accordance with the terms of the YSA Constitution and can be removed only in accordance with the governing Constitutional provisions. All members of the YSA have the right to express their political views within the YSA and to participate in the political decisions of the YSA. This internal democracy is combined with discipline in action in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism.
"From time to time there are necessarily differences of opinion between the SWP and the YSA. In the normal course of events such divergences can be handled through the regular channels of coordination and consultation between the two organizations. When, however, serious political disagreements arise, this procedure is inadequate. In such a case it is the obligation of the youth movement, insofar as its public political activity is concerned, to subordinate itself to the discipline of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The YSA recognizes and accepts this obligation."
Confronted with this restatement of a revolutionary, Leninist perspective, Cannon could do no more than offer the sophist truism that the "formula" of Lenin's was not "ideal" (!) and then pretend that a youth organization is an opponent organization, in which the party members need discipline in action (with the unique logic to this fake reasoning being the need to mobilize its members to fight its own young sympathizers!). This last is particularly grotesque and is indicative of the bureaucratic degeneration into which a once revolutionary organization can fall when, in order to cover for former opportunist positions advocated by the leadership, it begins to substitute the "authority" of that vested leadership for the independent democratic criticism and discussion through which the revolutionary movement must reach its political positions. It is the very bureaucratic distortions in Cannon's letter itself which best illustrate the necessity of the autonomous youth organization which the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations sketches out.
Marxist Bulletin staff
6 September 1967
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Hands Off Assata Shakur!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free All Irish Republican Political Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
********
*On The 30th Anniversary Of The Irish Republican Hunger Strikers-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP- The Struggle Continues
Reposted from 2006
COMMENTARY
ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the deaths of Bobby Sands and the 10 Irish Republican Freedom Fighters as a result of their hunger strikes against the British Occupation. Hunger strikes are a way, and justifiably so, of gaining the world’s attention to an injustice done to downtrodden and unequally matched people struggling against occupation. That was certainly the situation in the North at that time. Unfortunately there still is no peace in the North nor can there be until the bloody British Army gets out. That is the primary condition necessary before real peace will come. Nationalists, Republicans and Socialists may disagree on the political configurations of the future governments in Ireland but all can, and should, demand the end of the occupation. To really honor these heroes raise the demand- ALL BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF IRELAND (and get the hell out of Iraq while we are at it). And to honor James Connolly, Commandant, Irish Citizens Army, an earlier Irish martyr, let us fight for socialist solutions to the “Troubles”. Chocky Ar la (Our Day Will Come).
*******
"Easter, 1916"-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Labels: bobby sands, defending national liberation struggles, irish disapora, IRISH LIBERATION STRUGGLE, republican hunger strikers
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
********
*On The 30th Anniversary Of The Irish Republican Hunger Strikers-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP- The Struggle Continues
Reposted from 2006
COMMENTARY
ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the deaths of Bobby Sands and the 10 Irish Republican Freedom Fighters as a result of their hunger strikes against the British Occupation. Hunger strikes are a way, and justifiably so, of gaining the world’s attention to an injustice done to downtrodden and unequally matched people struggling against occupation. That was certainly the situation in the North at that time. Unfortunately there still is no peace in the North nor can there be until the bloody British Army gets out. That is the primary condition necessary before real peace will come. Nationalists, Republicans and Socialists may disagree on the political configurations of the future governments in Ireland but all can, and should, demand the end of the occupation. To really honor these heroes raise the demand- ALL BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF IRELAND (and get the hell out of Iraq while we are at it). And to honor James Connolly, Commandant, Irish Citizens Army, an earlier Irish martyr, let us fight for socialist solutions to the “Troubles”. Chocky Ar la (Our Day Will Come).
*******
"Easter, 1916"-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Labels: bobby sands, defending national liberation struggles, irish disapora, IRISH LIBERATION STRUGGLE, republican hunger strikers
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Website-Rally at Leavenworth June 4, 2011 for Bradley Manning! All Out To Defend Private Bradley Manning!
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry, dated Sunday, March 20, 2011, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner.
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
Friday, June 03, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- An Editorial On The American Anti-War Movement-"Shocking! There’s Gambling in Rick’s Café"
Markin comment:
Most of the time I do not comment on some organization’s editorial but this one is too good to pass up. In a few paragraphs, via a commentary on an academic sociological work that did more critical analysis than it was suppose to, it explains exactly, concisely, precisely and very other “-ly” the malaise of the American anti-war movement and the shifts and shakes of that movement as the Democrats went for the main chance over the past few years- bourgeois political power. And for its subservient efforts the anti-war movement is now in desperate need of a very, very high-powered microscope to order to find evidence of its presence on the mean streets of America. (As I know from first-hand experience as I run into the same twenty to fifty or so activists wherever I go.) Don’t be shocked then if you “reap what you sow,” as the old biblical phrase goes. Certainly Captain Renault would not be shocked. He would do just as the Democrats did, take the money and run.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 981
27 May 2011
Shocking! There’s Gambling in Rick’s Café
(Editorial Note)
Captain Renault announced that he was “shocked, shocked” to see gambling in Rick’s café in the 1942 film Casablanca, as he pocketed his winnings for the evening. It was about as shocking to learn that the reformist-led “antiwar movement,” which was premised on “Anybody but Bush” politics, plummeted following the Democratic Party’s gains in the 2006 midterm elections and Obama’s victory in 2008. Such were the conclusions of a recent study by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University titled, “The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009.”
The authors conclude that the antiwar movement was essentially a movement of the Democratic Party and was dissolved once the Democrats won office. To readers of Workers Vanguard, these conclusions are hardly news. But at least they’re now documented with numerous tables and graphs, packaged in excruciating acadamese.
Where once hundreds of thousands could be mobilized in protest against “Bush’s war” in Iraq, today it takes a microscope to spot any opposition in the streets. In evaporating such opposition, the Democrats had the help of the reformist left, which promoted the lie that the imperialist rulers can be pressured to make their system more humane, peaceful and democratic. In fact, the bloodthirsty depredations of U.S. imperialism continue apace across the world under the Obama administration. U.S. troops still occupy Iraq; an intensified U.S./NATO war rages against the peoples of Afghanistan; U.S. drone strikes and special operations have escalated in Pakistan; the U.S. and NATO are bombing Libya on behalf of a pro-imperialist “opposition.”
The data used in the Heaney/Rojas study were gleaned from Listservs managed by the now-defunct United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, the World Can’t Wait, MoveOn.org and the Washington Peace Center. The researchers maintained “personal relationships with leading activists,” conducted interviews with some of them and surveyed attendees at some 27 events nationally. The study notes early on that “Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan” and that the “antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.” The paper’s conclusion reads in part:
“The Democrats and the antiwar movement struck a useful alliance from 2003 to 2006. The antiwar movement helped to demonstrate grassroots support for a key party issue and the party helped to provide activists, resources, and legitimacy for the movement. By early 2009, however, it was abundantly clear that Democrats were no longer interested in this alliance.”
The alliance certainly was useful for the Democrats. But then the authors continue: “Abandonment by the Democrats gave the movement the independence it desired, but also stripped it of its capacity for political influence. While Obama’s election was heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement, Obama’s election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.” This greatly prettifies the liberal and reformist left—the UFPJ; the ANSWER Coalition (once sponsored by the Workers World Party and now by its split organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation); the World Can’t Wait outfit, sponsored by the Revolutionary Communist Party; the International Socialist Organization, which participated in any number of such coalitions. These organizations never desired “independence” from the Democratic Party, whose fortunes they promoted.
Obama did not “betray” the reformist left. Rather, it was the reformists who betrayed the interests of the proletariat by chaining opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations to the capitalist Democratic Party, the other party of exploitation, oppression and war. From the outset, the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth Clubs called for the military defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against U.S. imperialism and fought for class struggle at home against America’s capitalist rulers. The bankruptcy of the reformist left was succinctly captured by then-Trotskyist James Burnham in his 1936 piece, “War and the Workers”: “No one can uphold capitalism—whether directly, as an open adherent of the capitalists, or indirectly, from any shade of liberal or reformist position—and fight against war, because capitalism means war.”
Most of the time I do not comment on some organization’s editorial but this one is too good to pass up. In a few paragraphs, via a commentary on an academic sociological work that did more critical analysis than it was suppose to, it explains exactly, concisely, precisely and very other “-ly” the malaise of the American anti-war movement and the shifts and shakes of that movement as the Democrats went for the main chance over the past few years- bourgeois political power. And for its subservient efforts the anti-war movement is now in desperate need of a very, very high-powered microscope to order to find evidence of its presence on the mean streets of America. (As I know from first-hand experience as I run into the same twenty to fifty or so activists wherever I go.) Don’t be shocked then if you “reap what you sow,” as the old biblical phrase goes. Certainly Captain Renault would not be shocked. He would do just as the Democrats did, take the money and run.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 981
27 May 2011
Shocking! There’s Gambling in Rick’s Café
(Editorial Note)
Captain Renault announced that he was “shocked, shocked” to see gambling in Rick’s café in the 1942 film Casablanca, as he pocketed his winnings for the evening. It was about as shocking to learn that the reformist-led “antiwar movement,” which was premised on “Anybody but Bush” politics, plummeted following the Democratic Party’s gains in the 2006 midterm elections and Obama’s victory in 2008. Such were the conclusions of a recent study by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University titled, “The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009.”
The authors conclude that the antiwar movement was essentially a movement of the Democratic Party and was dissolved once the Democrats won office. To readers of Workers Vanguard, these conclusions are hardly news. But at least they’re now documented with numerous tables and graphs, packaged in excruciating acadamese.
Where once hundreds of thousands could be mobilized in protest against “Bush’s war” in Iraq, today it takes a microscope to spot any opposition in the streets. In evaporating such opposition, the Democrats had the help of the reformist left, which promoted the lie that the imperialist rulers can be pressured to make their system more humane, peaceful and democratic. In fact, the bloodthirsty depredations of U.S. imperialism continue apace across the world under the Obama administration. U.S. troops still occupy Iraq; an intensified U.S./NATO war rages against the peoples of Afghanistan; U.S. drone strikes and special operations have escalated in Pakistan; the U.S. and NATO are bombing Libya on behalf of a pro-imperialist “opposition.”
The data used in the Heaney/Rojas study were gleaned from Listservs managed by the now-defunct United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, the World Can’t Wait, MoveOn.org and the Washington Peace Center. The researchers maintained “personal relationships with leading activists,” conducted interviews with some of them and surveyed attendees at some 27 events nationally. The study notes early on that “Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan” and that the “antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.” The paper’s conclusion reads in part:
“The Democrats and the antiwar movement struck a useful alliance from 2003 to 2006. The antiwar movement helped to demonstrate grassroots support for a key party issue and the party helped to provide activists, resources, and legitimacy for the movement. By early 2009, however, it was abundantly clear that Democrats were no longer interested in this alliance.”
The alliance certainly was useful for the Democrats. But then the authors continue: “Abandonment by the Democrats gave the movement the independence it desired, but also stripped it of its capacity for political influence. While Obama’s election was heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement, Obama’s election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.” This greatly prettifies the liberal and reformist left—the UFPJ; the ANSWER Coalition (once sponsored by the Workers World Party and now by its split organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation); the World Can’t Wait outfit, sponsored by the Revolutionary Communist Party; the International Socialist Organization, which participated in any number of such coalitions. These organizations never desired “independence” from the Democratic Party, whose fortunes they promoted.
Obama did not “betray” the reformist left. Rather, it was the reformists who betrayed the interests of the proletariat by chaining opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations to the capitalist Democratic Party, the other party of exploitation, oppression and war. From the outset, the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth Clubs called for the military defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against U.S. imperialism and fought for class struggle at home against America’s capitalist rulers. The bankruptcy of the reformist left was succinctly captured by then-Trotskyist James Burnham in his 1936 piece, “War and the Workers”: “No one can uphold capitalism—whether directly, as an open adherent of the capitalists, or indirectly, from any shade of liberal or reformist position—and fight against war, because capitalism means war.”
From the Archives of Marxism-"Palestinian Trotskyists on the Partition of Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israel War"
Workers Vanguard No. 981
27 May 2011
From the Archives of Marxism
Palestinian Trotskyists on the Partition of Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israel War
Each May, as the Zionist rulers celebrate the anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinians across the Near East mark the nakba, or catastrophe: the expulsion in 1948 of more than 700,000 Arabs from their homeland in Palestine. The United Nations General Assembly had voted the previous year in favor of ending the British mandate in Palestine and creating two independent states, one Zionist and the other Palestinian Arab. Through mass killings and terror, the Zionists drove out most of the Palestinian population from their homes and villages. Following the declaration of the founding of the Israeli state in May 1948, a number of bourgeois Arab regimes intervened militarily, not to defend the Palestinians but to seize land that had been allotted to them under the UN partition plan.
The small Palestinian Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), upheld the position of communist internationalism in the 1948 War between Israel and the Arab states. While recognizing the right of both the Hebrew-speaking and Palestinian Arab peoples to national self-determination, the RCL resolutely opposed the imperialist-imposed partition and took a position of revolutionary defeatism toward both sides in the war. That position is today upheld by the International Communist League.
We reprint below an excerpted editorial, titled “Against the Stream,” that was originally published in the RCL’s Hebrew organ Kol Ham’amad (Voice of the Class). The English translation was published by the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in Fourth International (May 1948). The excerpts refer to Ernest Bevin, who was foreign minister in Britain’s Labour Party government; Chaim Weitzmann (Weizmann), Israel’s first president; and the Husseinis, a clan of Palestinian landowners and political leaders.
* * *
Politicians and diplomats are still trying to find a formula for the disastrous situation into which Palestine has been plunged by the UNO [United Nations Organization] deciding upon partition. Is this a “breach of international peace” or are we dealing with merely “hostile acts”? As far as we are concerned there is no point in this distinction. We are daily witnessing the killing or maiming of men and women, old and young, Jew or Arab. As always, the working masses and the poor suffer most.
Not so very long ago the Arab and Jewish workers were united in strikes against a foreign oppressor. This common struggle has been put to an end. Today the workers are being incited to kill each other. The inciters have succeeded….
“Keeping order” in Palestine costs England over 35 million Pounds a year, an amount which exceeds the profit she can extort from this country. Partition will release her from her financial obligations, enable her to employ her soldiers in the productive process while her source of income will remain intact. — But this is not all. By partition a wedge is driven between the Arab and Jewish worker. The Zionist state with its provocative lines of demarcation will bring about the blossoming forth of irredentist (revenge) movements on either side, there will be fighting for an “Arab Palestine” and for a “Jewish state within the historic frontiers of Eretz Israel (Israel’s Land).” As a result, the chauvinistic atmosphere created thus will poison the Arab world in the Middle East and throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist favors….
If the Anglo-American imperialists had forced this “solution” on Palestine of their own, the rotten game would have been patent in the whole Arab East. However, they dodged: the “problem” was passed on to the UNO. The function of the UNO was to sweeten the bitter dish cooked in the imperialist cuisine, dressing it, in Bevin’s words, with the twaddle of the “conscience of the world that has passed judgment.” Exactly! And the diplomats of the lesser countries danced to the tune of the dollar flute, reiterating the “public opinion of the world.” And the peculiar casts in this performance enabled Great Britain to appear as the Guardian Angel overflowing with sympathy for either side.
And the Soviet Union? Why did not her representatives call the UNO game the swindle it really is?—Apparently, the present foreign policy of the SU is not concerned with the fighting of the colonial masses. And as the Palestine question is a second-rate affair for the “Big,” the Soviet diplomats saw fit to dwell upon what Stalin had said about “the Soviet Union being ready to meet America and Britain halfway, economic and social differences notwithstanding.”…
The Jewish worker having been separated from his Arab colleague and prevented from fighting a common class struggle will be at the mercy of his class enemies, imperialism and the Zionist bourgeoisie. It will be easy to arouse him against his proletarian ally, the Arab worker, “who is depriving him of jobs and depressing the level of wages” (a method that has not failed in the past!). Not in vain has Weitzmann said that “the Jewish state will stem Communist influence.” As a compensation, the Jewish worker is bestowed with the privilege of dying a hero’s death on the altar of the Hebrew state.
And what promises does the Jewish state hold out? Does it really mean a step toward the solution of the Jewish problem?
The partition was not meant to solve Jewish misery nor is it likely ever to do so. This dwarf of a state which is too small to absorb the Jewish masses cannot even solve the problems of its citizens. The Hebrew state can only infest the Arab East with anti-Semitism and may well turn out—as Trotsky said—a bloody trap for hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The leaders of the Arab League reacted to the decision on partition with speeches full of threats and enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, a Zionist state is to them a godsend from Allah. Calling up the worker and fellah [peasant] for the “holy war to save Palestine” is supposed to stifle their cries for bread, land and freedom. Another time-honored method of diverting an embittered people against the Jewish and communist danger.
In Palestine the feudal rule has of late begun to lose ground. During the war the Arab working class has grown in numbers and political consciousness. Jewish and Arab workers stood up against the foreign oppressor, against whom they together went on strikes. A strong leftist trade union had come into existence; and the “Workers’ Association of the Arabs of Palestine” had been well on the way of freeing itself from the influence of the Husseinis. The murder of its leader, Sami Taha, committed by hirelings of the Arab High Committee could not restrain this development. But where the Husseinis failed, the decision of the imperialist agency, the UNO succeeded. The partition decision stifled the class struggle of the Palestine workers. The prospect of being at the hands of the Zionist “conquerors of soil and labor” is arousing fear and anxiety among the Arab workers and fellahs. Nationalist war slogans fall on fertile soil. And feudal murderers see their chance. Thus the policy of partition enables the feudalists to turn back the wheels of history….
The two camps today mobilize the masses under the mask of “self-defense.” “We have been attacked, let us defend ourselves!”—say the Zionists. “Let us ward off the danger of a Jewish conquest!”—declares the Arab Higher Committee. Where does the truth lie?
War is the continuation of politics by other means. The war led by the Arab feudalists is but the continuation of their reactionary war on the worker and the fellah who are striving to shake off oppression and exploitation. For the feudal effendis [lords] “Salvation of Palestine” means safeguarding their revenues at the expense of the fellahin, maintaining their autocratic rule in town and country, smashing the proletarian organizations and international class solidarity.
The war waged by the Zionists is the continuation of their expansionist policy based on discrimination between the two peoples: they defend kibbush avoda (ousting of Arab labor), kibbush adama (ousting of the fellah), boycott of Arab goods, “Hebrew rule.” The military conflict is a direct result of the policy of the Zionist conquerors.
This war can on neither side be said to bear a progressive character. The war does not release progressive forces or do away with social and economic obstacles in the path of development of the two nations. Quite the opposite is true. It is apt to obscure the class antagonism and to open the gate for nationalist excesses. It weakens the proletariat and strengthens imperialism in both camps.
Each side is “anti-imperialist” to the bone, busy detecting the reactionary—in the opposite camp. And imperialism is always seen—helping the other side. But this kind of exposure is oil on the imperialist fire. For the inveigling policy of imperialism is based upon agents and agencies within both camps. Therefore, we say to the Palestine people in reply to the patriotic warmongers: Make this war between Jews and Arabs, which serves the end of imperialism, the common war of both nations against imperialism!
This is the only solution guaranteeing a real peace. This must be our goal which must be achieved without concessions to the chauvinist mood prevailing at present among the masses.
How can that be done?
“The main enemy is in our own country!”—this was what Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had to say to the workers when imperialists and social democrats were inciting them to the slaughter of their fellow workers in other countries. In this spirit we say to the Jewish and Arab workers: The enemy is in your own camp!
Jewish workers! Get rid of the Zionist provocateurs who tell you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of the Hebrew state.
Arab worker and fellah! Get rid of the chauvinist provocateurs who are getting you into a mess of blood for their own sake and pocket.
Workers of the two peoples, unite in a common front against imperialism and its agents!
27 May 2011
From the Archives of Marxism
Palestinian Trotskyists on the Partition of Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israel War
Each May, as the Zionist rulers celebrate the anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinians across the Near East mark the nakba, or catastrophe: the expulsion in 1948 of more than 700,000 Arabs from their homeland in Palestine. The United Nations General Assembly had voted the previous year in favor of ending the British mandate in Palestine and creating two independent states, one Zionist and the other Palestinian Arab. Through mass killings and terror, the Zionists drove out most of the Palestinian population from their homes and villages. Following the declaration of the founding of the Israeli state in May 1948, a number of bourgeois Arab regimes intervened militarily, not to defend the Palestinians but to seize land that had been allotted to them under the UN partition plan.
The small Palestinian Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), upheld the position of communist internationalism in the 1948 War between Israel and the Arab states. While recognizing the right of both the Hebrew-speaking and Palestinian Arab peoples to national self-determination, the RCL resolutely opposed the imperialist-imposed partition and took a position of revolutionary defeatism toward both sides in the war. That position is today upheld by the International Communist League.
We reprint below an excerpted editorial, titled “Against the Stream,” that was originally published in the RCL’s Hebrew organ Kol Ham’amad (Voice of the Class). The English translation was published by the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in Fourth International (May 1948). The excerpts refer to Ernest Bevin, who was foreign minister in Britain’s Labour Party government; Chaim Weitzmann (Weizmann), Israel’s first president; and the Husseinis, a clan of Palestinian landowners and political leaders.
* * *
Politicians and diplomats are still trying to find a formula for the disastrous situation into which Palestine has been plunged by the UNO [United Nations Organization] deciding upon partition. Is this a “breach of international peace” or are we dealing with merely “hostile acts”? As far as we are concerned there is no point in this distinction. We are daily witnessing the killing or maiming of men and women, old and young, Jew or Arab. As always, the working masses and the poor suffer most.
Not so very long ago the Arab and Jewish workers were united in strikes against a foreign oppressor. This common struggle has been put to an end. Today the workers are being incited to kill each other. The inciters have succeeded….
“Keeping order” in Palestine costs England over 35 million Pounds a year, an amount which exceeds the profit she can extort from this country. Partition will release her from her financial obligations, enable her to employ her soldiers in the productive process while her source of income will remain intact. — But this is not all. By partition a wedge is driven between the Arab and Jewish worker. The Zionist state with its provocative lines of demarcation will bring about the blossoming forth of irredentist (revenge) movements on either side, there will be fighting for an “Arab Palestine” and for a “Jewish state within the historic frontiers of Eretz Israel (Israel’s Land).” As a result, the chauvinistic atmosphere created thus will poison the Arab world in the Middle East and throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist favors….
If the Anglo-American imperialists had forced this “solution” on Palestine of their own, the rotten game would have been patent in the whole Arab East. However, they dodged: the “problem” was passed on to the UNO. The function of the UNO was to sweeten the bitter dish cooked in the imperialist cuisine, dressing it, in Bevin’s words, with the twaddle of the “conscience of the world that has passed judgment.” Exactly! And the diplomats of the lesser countries danced to the tune of the dollar flute, reiterating the “public opinion of the world.” And the peculiar casts in this performance enabled Great Britain to appear as the Guardian Angel overflowing with sympathy for either side.
And the Soviet Union? Why did not her representatives call the UNO game the swindle it really is?—Apparently, the present foreign policy of the SU is not concerned with the fighting of the colonial masses. And as the Palestine question is a second-rate affair for the “Big,” the Soviet diplomats saw fit to dwell upon what Stalin had said about “the Soviet Union being ready to meet America and Britain halfway, economic and social differences notwithstanding.”…
The Jewish worker having been separated from his Arab colleague and prevented from fighting a common class struggle will be at the mercy of his class enemies, imperialism and the Zionist bourgeoisie. It will be easy to arouse him against his proletarian ally, the Arab worker, “who is depriving him of jobs and depressing the level of wages” (a method that has not failed in the past!). Not in vain has Weitzmann said that “the Jewish state will stem Communist influence.” As a compensation, the Jewish worker is bestowed with the privilege of dying a hero’s death on the altar of the Hebrew state.
And what promises does the Jewish state hold out? Does it really mean a step toward the solution of the Jewish problem?
The partition was not meant to solve Jewish misery nor is it likely ever to do so. This dwarf of a state which is too small to absorb the Jewish masses cannot even solve the problems of its citizens. The Hebrew state can only infest the Arab East with anti-Semitism and may well turn out—as Trotsky said—a bloody trap for hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The leaders of the Arab League reacted to the decision on partition with speeches full of threats and enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, a Zionist state is to them a godsend from Allah. Calling up the worker and fellah [peasant] for the “holy war to save Palestine” is supposed to stifle their cries for bread, land and freedom. Another time-honored method of diverting an embittered people against the Jewish and communist danger.
In Palestine the feudal rule has of late begun to lose ground. During the war the Arab working class has grown in numbers and political consciousness. Jewish and Arab workers stood up against the foreign oppressor, against whom they together went on strikes. A strong leftist trade union had come into existence; and the “Workers’ Association of the Arabs of Palestine” had been well on the way of freeing itself from the influence of the Husseinis. The murder of its leader, Sami Taha, committed by hirelings of the Arab High Committee could not restrain this development. But where the Husseinis failed, the decision of the imperialist agency, the UNO succeeded. The partition decision stifled the class struggle of the Palestine workers. The prospect of being at the hands of the Zionist “conquerors of soil and labor” is arousing fear and anxiety among the Arab workers and fellahs. Nationalist war slogans fall on fertile soil. And feudal murderers see their chance. Thus the policy of partition enables the feudalists to turn back the wheels of history….
The two camps today mobilize the masses under the mask of “self-defense.” “We have been attacked, let us defend ourselves!”—say the Zionists. “Let us ward off the danger of a Jewish conquest!”—declares the Arab Higher Committee. Where does the truth lie?
War is the continuation of politics by other means. The war led by the Arab feudalists is but the continuation of their reactionary war on the worker and the fellah who are striving to shake off oppression and exploitation. For the feudal effendis [lords] “Salvation of Palestine” means safeguarding their revenues at the expense of the fellahin, maintaining their autocratic rule in town and country, smashing the proletarian organizations and international class solidarity.
The war waged by the Zionists is the continuation of their expansionist policy based on discrimination between the two peoples: they defend kibbush avoda (ousting of Arab labor), kibbush adama (ousting of the fellah), boycott of Arab goods, “Hebrew rule.” The military conflict is a direct result of the policy of the Zionist conquerors.
This war can on neither side be said to bear a progressive character. The war does not release progressive forces or do away with social and economic obstacles in the path of development of the two nations. Quite the opposite is true. It is apt to obscure the class antagonism and to open the gate for nationalist excesses. It weakens the proletariat and strengthens imperialism in both camps.
Each side is “anti-imperialist” to the bone, busy detecting the reactionary—in the opposite camp. And imperialism is always seen—helping the other side. But this kind of exposure is oil on the imperialist fire. For the inveigling policy of imperialism is based upon agents and agencies within both camps. Therefore, we say to the Palestine people in reply to the patriotic warmongers: Make this war between Jews and Arabs, which serves the end of imperialism, the common war of both nations against imperialism!
This is the only solution guaranteeing a real peace. This must be our goal which must be achieved without concessions to the chauvinist mood prevailing at present among the masses.
How can that be done?
“The main enemy is in our own country!”—this was what Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had to say to the workers when imperialists and social democrats were inciting them to the slaughter of their fellow workers in other countries. In this spirit we say to the Jewish and Arab workers: The enemy is in your own camp!
Jewish workers! Get rid of the Zionist provocateurs who tell you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of the Hebrew state.
Arab worker and fellah! Get rid of the chauvinist provocateurs who are getting you into a mess of blood for their own sake and pocket.
Workers of the two peoples, unite in a common front against imperialism and its agents!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"New York City-Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!"-And Teamsters Organize Those Trucks
Markin comment:
Labor militants-Forget about funding Democratic party campaigns! Forget about pats on the back (really stabs in the back)from Obama! Organize Wal-Mart and raise plenty of dough to do it. And for starters, Teamsters organize those several thousand Wal-Mart trucks that almost endlessly clog up the highways with goods. If you need instruction just go back to your roots in the 1930s when the Trostkyists and other militants organized the over-the-road drivers.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 981
27 May 2011
NYC
Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!
Anti-union colossus Wal-Mart wants to boldly go where it has never gone before: New York City. In response, a coalition led by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and including small business owners, bourgeois politicians, community groups and churches is beseeching the Democrat-led City Council to stop the “invasion” with zoning law changes and other legal obstacles. The interests of the working class and poor are not served by agitating over which capitalist retail chain distributes wares in what market. Instead, labor needs to seize the opportunity of the corporate behemoth’s arrival in one of the most heavily unionized cities in the U.S. and finally begin an aggressive campaign to organize Wal-Mart!
Everyone has heard horror stories about this giant retailer, which, originating in Arkansas, brought the racist, anti-union “open shop” of the Southern bourgeoisie with it as it moved into the rest of the country and a large chunk of the world. (It is currently making a bid to buy South African retailer Massmart.) Off-the-clock overtime, employees locked in overnight, violation of child labor laws, flagrant discrimination against women, racist hiring practices—the list of Wal-Mart crimes grows by the day.
These iniquities, however, do not particularly distinguish Wal-Mart from Home Depot, Target, the German grocer Aldi or, for that matter, small independent grocers. Whatever the difference in scale, each is a capitalist enterprise whose profit is based on the exploitation of labor. Squeezing workers dry is what they do.
The average wage for a full-time Wal-Mart worker in the U.S. in 2008 was $10.86 per hour. Many of the workers who might be able to afford the company’s lousy health plan leave Wal-Mart, which is notorious for its high turnover rate, before they are eligible for the program. Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages have the effect of driving down wages and working conditions for all workers.
Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, is angling for a space in the Gateway II shopping center in Brooklyn’s East New York ghetto as its entry point into the New York market. Following a well-tested playbook, the company is counting on being positively received by residents, whose access to a variety of goods and lower prices—much less a decent supermarket—is very limited. Unemployment is 13.9 percent in East New York, almost 5 percent higher than the city average, and Wal-Mart is promising jobs to area residents. At the same time, it is appealing to the beleaguered NYC construction trade unions by pledging to build its stores with union labor—before slamming the door on unions once they open.
In the few instances in which local workers have succeeded in organizing a Wal-Mart department or an entire store, the company has picked up its marbles and gone elsewhere. When meat cutters in the Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas, won union representation, Wal-Mart disbanded its butcher shops nationwide and switched to pre-packaged meats. When workers at the store in Jonquière, Quebec, voted to join the UFCW, the first such success in North America, Wal-Mart closed the store.
In China, a deformed workers state, workers at all Wal-Mart stores are organized by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s trade-union federation. This is doubly ironic. The pro-capitalist labor tops at unions like the UFCW and its Retail, Wholesale and Department store affiliate, who are heading up the “Walmart Free NYC” coalition, have barely lifted a finger to organize the retailer in the U.S. But they sure do blow hard with anti-Communist China-bashing and “America first” protectionist poison (see “Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!” WV No. 851, 8 July 2005).
By focusing on blocking new Wal-Mart stores, in more than one city the labor bureaucracy has found itself opposed by sections of the black and minority population looking for cheaper commodities. But there is a way for the unions to fight for their own interests as well as those of the ghetto and barrio poor: undertaking a massive and combative union organizing drive. Unionizing Wal-Mart will require the kind of hard class struggle that built the country’s CIO unions in the 1930s—mass pickets, occupations and strike action. This militant perspective is utterly counterposed to the “corporate” and “community” campaigns the current labor leadership favors.
What better place to kick off such a drive than New York City, historically a labor stronghold in a state with the highest union membership rate in the country at over 24 percent. Today NYC labor is under attack by a capitalist class that is chalking up one victory after another in its relentless drive to cripple the unions if not destroy them outright. Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council to which “Walmart Free NYC” appeals are busy bashing the teachers and other city workers. A bare-knuckles campaign to organize Wal-Mart combined with vigorous defense of the public employee and construction workers unions now under attack would go a long way to turn this around. Success in the UFCW’s current drive to organize Target stores in the NYC area would be a good start.
Our goal is not just to see WalWal-Mart should be harnessed by a centrally planned economy under workers rule. To this end, there must be a struggle to break the multiracial working class from the capitalist Democratic Party and to build a workers party that fights for a workers government!
Labor militants-Forget about funding Democratic party campaigns! Forget about pats on the back (really stabs in the back)from Obama! Organize Wal-Mart and raise plenty of dough to do it. And for starters, Teamsters organize those several thousand Wal-Mart trucks that almost endlessly clog up the highways with goods. If you need instruction just go back to your roots in the 1930s when the Trostkyists and other militants organized the over-the-road drivers.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 981
27 May 2011
NYC
Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!
Anti-union colossus Wal-Mart wants to boldly go where it has never gone before: New York City. In response, a coalition led by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and including small business owners, bourgeois politicians, community groups and churches is beseeching the Democrat-led City Council to stop the “invasion” with zoning law changes and other legal obstacles. The interests of the working class and poor are not served by agitating over which capitalist retail chain distributes wares in what market. Instead, labor needs to seize the opportunity of the corporate behemoth’s arrival in one of the most heavily unionized cities in the U.S. and finally begin an aggressive campaign to organize Wal-Mart!
Everyone has heard horror stories about this giant retailer, which, originating in Arkansas, brought the racist, anti-union “open shop” of the Southern bourgeoisie with it as it moved into the rest of the country and a large chunk of the world. (It is currently making a bid to buy South African retailer Massmart.) Off-the-clock overtime, employees locked in overnight, violation of child labor laws, flagrant discrimination against women, racist hiring practices—the list of Wal-Mart crimes grows by the day.
These iniquities, however, do not particularly distinguish Wal-Mart from Home Depot, Target, the German grocer Aldi or, for that matter, small independent grocers. Whatever the difference in scale, each is a capitalist enterprise whose profit is based on the exploitation of labor. Squeezing workers dry is what they do.
The average wage for a full-time Wal-Mart worker in the U.S. in 2008 was $10.86 per hour. Many of the workers who might be able to afford the company’s lousy health plan leave Wal-Mart, which is notorious for its high turnover rate, before they are eligible for the program. Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages have the effect of driving down wages and working conditions for all workers.
Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, is angling for a space in the Gateway II shopping center in Brooklyn’s East New York ghetto as its entry point into the New York market. Following a well-tested playbook, the company is counting on being positively received by residents, whose access to a variety of goods and lower prices—much less a decent supermarket—is very limited. Unemployment is 13.9 percent in East New York, almost 5 percent higher than the city average, and Wal-Mart is promising jobs to area residents. At the same time, it is appealing to the beleaguered NYC construction trade unions by pledging to build its stores with union labor—before slamming the door on unions once they open.
In the few instances in which local workers have succeeded in organizing a Wal-Mart department or an entire store, the company has picked up its marbles and gone elsewhere. When meat cutters in the Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas, won union representation, Wal-Mart disbanded its butcher shops nationwide and switched to pre-packaged meats. When workers at the store in Jonquière, Quebec, voted to join the UFCW, the first such success in North America, Wal-Mart closed the store.
In China, a deformed workers state, workers at all Wal-Mart stores are organized by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s trade-union federation. This is doubly ironic. The pro-capitalist labor tops at unions like the UFCW and its Retail, Wholesale and Department store affiliate, who are heading up the “Walmart Free NYC” coalition, have barely lifted a finger to organize the retailer in the U.S. But they sure do blow hard with anti-Communist China-bashing and “America first” protectionist poison (see “Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!” WV No. 851, 8 July 2005).
By focusing on blocking new Wal-Mart stores, in more than one city the labor bureaucracy has found itself opposed by sections of the black and minority population looking for cheaper commodities. But there is a way for the unions to fight for their own interests as well as those of the ghetto and barrio poor: undertaking a massive and combative union organizing drive. Unionizing Wal-Mart will require the kind of hard class struggle that built the country’s CIO unions in the 1930s—mass pickets, occupations and strike action. This militant perspective is utterly counterposed to the “corporate” and “community” campaigns the current labor leadership favors.
What better place to kick off such a drive than New York City, historically a labor stronghold in a state with the highest union membership rate in the country at over 24 percent. Today NYC labor is under attack by a capitalist class that is chalking up one victory after another in its relentless drive to cripple the unions if not destroy them outright. Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council to which “Walmart Free NYC” appeals are busy bashing the teachers and other city workers. A bare-knuckles campaign to organize Wal-Mart combined with vigorous defense of the public employee and construction workers unions now under attack would go a long way to turn this around. Success in the UFCW’s current drive to organize Target stores in the NYC area would be a good start.
Our goal is not just to see WalWal-Mart should be harnessed by a centrally planned economy under workers rule. To this end, there must be a struggle to break the multiracial working class from the capitalist Democratic Party and to build a workers party that fights for a workers government!
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-The Spartacus Youth League and the Student Upsurge of the 1930’s-Lessons from History (1974)
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.
The Spartacus Youth League and the Student Upsurge of the 1930’s-
Lessons from History
From Young Spartacus No. 22, March-April 1974
The Lessons from History series has in the past included articles on the early years of the Communist Youth International and the development of a "Resolution on the Youth" at the founding Conference of the Fourth International. This article on the Spartacus Youth League, the first Trotskyist youth organization in the U.S., focuses on the SYL’s internal debates over a correct orientation to students and on the main aspect of its student work, namely, its intervention in the anti-war student movement, counterposing the Leninist slogans against imperialist war to the predominating petty-bourgeois pacifism and social patriotism.
*******
Today, student groups like the Maoist Revolutionary Union-dominated Attica Brigade and Progressive Labor’s SDS are organized along the same reformist, student-parochialist conceptions as the Stalinist National Student League of the 1930’s. So-called "socialist youth organizations" like the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) made themselves infamous by their consistent petty-bourgeois, single-issue reformism on the Vietnam War. Such anti-Leninist youth work is nothing new; rather, it is the heritage of the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International.
The new recruits to the Attica Brigade, YSA and SDS may not be familiar with the historical traditions of these aspects of youth work and are not aware that old mistakes are being repeated and old betrayals consciously rerun. An examination of these issues in the crisis years of the 1930’s sheds light on current differences between left-wing youth and student organizations.
The development of the Spartacus Youth League (SYL) took place in the context of a growing radical student movement, dominated politically by the National Student League (NSL), which was led by the Stalinist Young Communist League (YCL).
The YCL was changing rapidly in response to events in American society (the Depression, New Deal, renewed militancy in the working class and preparations for imperialist war) and internationally (the further political degeneration of the Soviet Union and the rise of fascism in Germany). The YCL, under the control of the Communist Party, subservient to the dictates of the Soviet bureaucracy, entered a period of crisis in the mid-thirties, losing members and influence, as the line of the sectarian "third period" was abruptly changed to the policy of the People’s Front.
The Stalinist youth liquidated all remnants of independent working-class politics in their program and gave uncritical support to the multi-class American Student Union and American Youth Congress (with the emphasis on the American!), leading them on to the football field to wave pompons and cheer for Roosevelt as he prepared another slaughter for the American workers.
The radical student movement of the early 1930’s, with an even greater percentage of students involved than the protest movements of the 1960’s, was the main battlefield in the political war between the left-wing youth organizations. The sporadic anti-ROTC campaigns and expressions of discontent in 1931 soon developed into a wave of militancy which expressed itself in numerous anti-ROTC and anti-war rallies, conferences on unemployment, fascism and the crisis in education caused by the Depression, and widespread support for striking workers.
In the period since WWI, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a bloc of the social-democratic Young People’s Socialist League (who formed its leadership) with liberal Christian "socialists," had been the dominant leftist group on the campuses, while the Young Workers League (previous name of the YCL) had concentrated on work among the young proletariat. The SLID in 1931 was an exhausted and demoralized organization with no enthusiasm to greet the outburst of campus radicalism.
National Student League
The SLID never gained the influence or numbers of the early-thirties National Student League (NSL), the dominant left-wing campus organization throughout this period. The NSL began as a YCL-led split from the SLID in September 1931, a split based on the "third period" line that social democrats were social fascists and on the Stalinists’ organizational appetite for a youth group of their own.
Centered in New York City, the group at first called itself the New York Student League, but the rapid gain in national membership soon justified a name change to National Student League. Publication of a monthly magazine, the Student Review, was begun in December 1931.
At that time the Trotskyist movement held that the Communist Parties were susceptible to reform from within. Consistent with this political orientation, the young Trotskyists considered themselves to be part of the YCL. At first organized into Spartacus Youth Clubs (SYC), sympathizing circles of the Communist League of America (CLA), the young Trotskyists concentrated on education of their membership and periphery in the historical lessons of Marxism and on intervention into YCL activities.
The SYC attempted to introduce resolutions in defense of a revolutionary perspective at YCL meetings and conferences, called on young militants to join the YCL, encouraged Trotskyist sympathizers to remain within the YCL to seek to win over the organization as a whole to Trotskyism, and themselves sought readmission to the organization, from which Trotskyists had been expelled in 1928. The Young Spartacans defended the YCL politically against the YPSL which at that time criticized the Soviet Union from the right and had not even partially broken with the betrayals of the Second International.
Young Spartacus and the Student Movement
The first volume of the paper circulated by the SYC, Young Spartacus, published by the National Youth Committee of the Communist League of America, reflected this strong orientation to the YCL, correct for that period. A real weakness, however, of the early Young Spartacus was a failure to recognize the political importance of certain student protest actions, which it either ignored or gave brief and routine press coverage.
The first two issues contained nothing about the vital and expanding student movement but a one-column editorial which gave a formally correct but abstract analysis of the student’s role in the revolutionary movement. The initial events surrounding the rise of the NSL to popularity such as the student delegation to Harlan County, Kentucky, to demonstrate support for the striking miners and the Columbia University strike in support of expelled liberal student editor Reed Harris, merited only short articles in back pages of Young Spartacus.
With the turning of the YCL more and more to the student arena, however, and the growth of a tremendous anti-war movement within that arena, the Young Spartacus began to devote more space to the student movement, and soon began to publish a monthly column called "Student Notes." The last issue of the paper (December 1935) was devoted exclusively to discussion of the issues surrounding the reunification of the NSL and SLID to form the American Student Union.
The orientation to the student movement necessitated more than just an abstract, formally correct understanding of the student question. Several debates on this question took place in the SYL, reflecting problems experienced in the arena.
Development of Leninist Position on Student Work
While favoring work among students, the SYL held the correct position that separate student self-interest organizations were necessarily reformist dead-ends and that it was not the task of communists to organize front groups for student "economism." Students are a socially heterogeneous group lacking the concentrated social power of the proletariat, which can stop capitalist production by withholding its labor. Therefore students are incapable of playing an independent or consistent political role or of posing a serious threat to the power of the capitalists.
While subordinate to the party’s main work in the class, an orientation by the youth group to students is, however, important in the construction of a vanguard party as—and this was the case in the 1930’s—the student movement, is frequently the arena, for ideological debates within the left. Student work can thus be an important component of the splits, fusions and regroupments that lead to the crystallization of a vanguard nucleus. In the longer view, it will be important in defeating the forces of capitalist reaction to win as large a section of the politically volatile student population as possible, as well as other non-working-class layers, to identify their interests with those of the proletariat.
The SYL sought to build a Leninist youth group which included both students and young workers and to focus its intervention in the student movement on the need to link up with working-class struggles through the class’s political leadership, namely, a Leninist vanguard party. This did not preclude entry or intervention into existing student organizations when principled and tactically advisable. In fact, such work was vital to the growth of the SYL.
Leftism and Rightism on the Student Question
Having overcome its early tendency to abstain from student work, the SYL initially adopted a correct tactical orientation of entry into the NSL with the goal of winning its majority to revolutionary politics. This tactic was arrived at after an internal debate in which sectarian workerist elements advocating a principle of non-entry were defeated.
Nevertheless, a tendency toward sectarianism continued to manifest itself in certain areas of student work, for example, in the SYL’s orientation to the Oxford Pledge movement. This movement originated at Oxford University when the student union voted that "This House will not fight for King and Country in any war." The pledge was picked up by students in other countries, including the U.S., where it was generalized to declarations of refusal to fight for "our government" in any war.
The SYL, correctly noting the pacifist content of the Pledge and narrow, student character of the movement, concluded that a posture of hostility and organizational abstention was therefore appropriate. They thereby cut themselves off from a layer of potential recruits who, while entertaining pacifist illusions, were also motivated by anti-patriotic, implicitly internationalist sentiments (and the movement did take on an international character, at least organizationally). This anti-patriotic sentiment was evident in the declarations’ insistent opposition to participation by "our government" (or "our King and Country") in any war, rather than a general statement of opposition to war.
The retention of the Oxford Pledge became a polarizing issue in the antiwar student movement of the late 1930’s when the social pressures to be patriotic were increasingly felt. The Stalinists opposed the Pledge while the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League-Fourth Internationalist (SYL’s successor) argued for its retention, capitalizing on its anti-patriotic, internationalist implications, opposing pacifist interpretations of it, and fighting to link it to anti-imperialist, revolutionary class-struggle demands.
Following the debate in the SYL over a general orientation to students, a rightist minority emerged, advocating abstractly the formation of a national "militant mass student movement" that would be anti-fascist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist and would "take up the struggles of the students around student issues" (Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934). This centrist formulation failed to put forward a positive socialist program, and instead defined the organization through negatives and as narrowly studentist. It was strikingly similar to Progressive Labor’s 1969 program for SDS (which has since moved from centrism to reformism pure and simple) and the Revolutionary Union’s current program for the Attica Brigade.
The SYL majority counterposed to this the Leninist conception:
"An organization which aims to educate the students in the character of the class struggle, and the duties which result from it can only do so on the basis of a clear program, a communist program. Clarity, which is always essential, is doubly so where different class elements are involved…. organizations, which, like the NSL, move in the direction of organizing the students solely on the problems of the student issues, are…. intolerable. A left-wing group must take sides for and against each of the classes that comprise society. A union, and the NSL contemplates a union, is predicated upon a unity of interests. That unity does not exist among the students; for, they contain representatives of all classes."
—Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934
NSL’s Turn to Popular Frontism
While the rightist minority position was rejected at the SYL Founding Conference, a certain tendency to tail-end the NSL had developed. By 1935, the yearly NSL-led anti-war student strikes had become formations identical to the Socialist Workers Party’s National Peace Action Coalition of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: subordination of revolutionary politics for the sake of the "movement."
This development coincided with the Stalinists’ turn away from "third period" sectarianism towards the class collaboration of the popular front. The seeds for the capitulation to social patriotism were planted in the "third period," when the Stalinist parties, while following in the main a sectarian policy, zigzagged off into classless "anti-war" actions under the pressure of their role as defenders of the Soviet bureaucracy abroad.
Thus the Stalinists endorsed the infamous 1932 Amsterdam Conference dominated by the wretched politics of the pacifist literary figure Henri Barbusse. Barbusse’s document, which was passed at the Conference, failed to distinguish between reactionary wars of imperialism and revolutionary wars of the proletariat against capitalism. Trotsky denounced the Communist International’s (CI) behavior at the Conference as "monstrous, capitulatory, and criminal crawling of official communism before petty-bourgeois pacifism" ("Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam," Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932). The Trotskyists’ resolution calling on the Communist International to organize an international anti-war congress of all labor organizations to plan a united front action on a concrete program against war could not even obtain a vote and they were heckled and prevented from getting the floor.
The Stalinists’ pacifism blossomed into open social patriotism in the popular-front period. In the NSL the formerly sectarian and crude but pro-working-class line was totally abandoned in favor of pacifism and social patriotism; the SYL should have recognized this as a qualitative degeneration into a hardened reformism and left the NSL, attempting to take with it any remaining subjectively revolutionary elements.
Instead, the SYL continued to conceive of itself as a left pressure group within the NSL, making formally correct political statements about the NSL’s pacifist anti-war activities, but characterizing such activities as "errors made by the National Student Strike Committee [of the NSL]… [For example,] the failure to include working class youth organizations in the strike committee…. The second error was to allow for unclarity [by omitting] the slogan ‘against imperialist war’…. In certain instances, notably CCNY and New York University, the SYL forced the use of the word ‘imperialist’" (Young Spartacus, May 1935).
The SYL should have denounced the conscious capitulation to the bourgeoisie that these politics represented, rather than creating the illusion of good-willed, but incompetent, opponents of imperialist war. Thus, while the SYL organized support for the anti-war strikes around Leninist slogans, its failure to counterpose itself clearly to the Stalinist NSL undercut its work.
Nevertheless, the SYL continued to recruit from the YCL and its periphery. In Chicago particularly, where several vigorous and active SYL chapters existed, a small but steady trickle sided with the Young Spartacans. The NSL grew so desperate that it attempted to pass a motion barring "Trotskyites" from membership. YCL members attacked SYLers at an NSL meeting against war; Spartacus leader Nathan Gould was attacked by YCLers when attempting to distribute a leaflet, and YCLers issued threats of violence if the Trotskyists did not cease to speak to their members. Such thuggery was the Stalinists’ only "defense" against the SYL’s revolutionary criticism of YCL capitulation. This desperation grew so intense that the Chicago NSL dissolved the organization rather than allow two SYLers to join!
American Youth Congress
This motion from crude pro-working-class radicalism to alliance with the bourgeoisie was repeated in the American Youth Congress (AYC). In August 1934 a Roosevelt supporter by the name of Viola Ilma called upon all youth organizations to "convene and discuss the problems confronting the young people of this country." At the first convention, there was a split between the Ilmaites and the left (predominantly the YCL and YPSL); Ilma withdrew from the Congress, leaving the YCL, YPSL, YMCA-YWCA, the Boy Scouts and a few church organizations.
Despite the protests of the YCL, the SYL was present, although it correctly refused to endorse or join this wretched front for American bourgeois interests in the growing imperialist antagonisms. At the same time, the SYL maintained an active intervention into AYC meetings, sharply counterposing revolutionary class-struggle dethands to the AYC’s class collaborationism.
The AYC adopted a vague program of protest, pointing out the social problems of unemployment, transiency and militarization suffered by American youth. The second Congress, held in January 1935, had no agenda point for discussion. More vague resolutions were adopted—to be brought to Roosevelt and members of the U.S. Congress. Young Spartacus printed a scathing attack on this Congress, which was a pompous facade of fake radical-sounding speeches by Norman Thomas and various liberal Congressmen about the plight of American youth. Since the Congress was a bloc of tendencies representing different classes in society, no concrete program of action that would serve all interests could be adopted; in fact, the program of the bourgeoisie predominated.
The third meeting, in Detroit in July 1935, represented an apt culmination of this motion toward impotent liberalism and moral outrage. The SYL described the meeting in the August 1935 Young Spartacus:
"The congress opened with the singing at an outdoor mass meeting, attended by 2,000, of ‘America.’ In consideration of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, ten o’clock mass was arranged at which Reverend Ward preached a delightful and most interesting sermon.
"Having completed its graduation to pacifism, the congress was no longer dignified by a reluctant opposition to IMPERIALIST war. Resolutions congruous with revolutionary spirit were supplanted entirely by the slogans of the pacifists. Thus, at last, the congress reeked from beginning to end with ‘peace.’
"The Stalinists, chief sponsors of the congress, blocked every formulation, resolution or amendment that stood to the left of the proposed program. Every resolution introduced to the right of the program was carried with passionate enthusiasm and exhilaration…. Every left or semi-left proposal was combatted by a classically opportunist argument: ‘Everybody knows that my organization is heartily in favor of that resolution. However, it must be defeated because its acceptance will narrow the congress to purely labor organizations.’"
The Stalinists thus consciously tried to prevent the drawing of the class line in the Congress.
NSL Rises to FDR’s "Challenge"
The main documents of the Congress, the American Youth Act and the Declaration of Rights of American Youth, were enthusiastically supported by the NSL. The Student Review quoted President Roosevelt’s words—"Therefore to the American youth of all Parties I Submit a Message of Confidence: Unite and Challenge!"—and reprinted the two documents in their entirety. The American Youth Act was the AYC’s version of the New Deal National Youth Administration, and demanded simply a little more money and representatives of "youth" and "education" on the administrative board of the NYA. A campaign was initiated for the passage of this act by the Congress. The Declaration of Rights of American Youth was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and was identical to it in political content. Later in the 1930’s the AYC became the ersatz New Deal youth organization.
The NSL pursued a parallel course. The 7th Congress of the CI adopted the Dimitrov Popular-Front line and extended it to the youth organizations by liquidating the Communist Youth International into the World Federation of Democratic Youth—a fusion of Stalinist and right-wing social-democratic youth groups based on a bourgeois program.
American Student Union Jamborees for ‘Democracy’
In the U.S., after four years of separation, the NSL and SLID were reunited in December 1935 to form the American Student Union (ASU). This unity was initiated by the NSL itself, in accordance with instructions from the CI that "unity at all costs of the young generation against war and fascism" was to be effected immediately. In 1938 the ASU gave up opposition to compulsory ROTC. Roosevelt’s "collective security" was adopted as the ASU line on the war question, with the feeble left cover that support for American imperialism against German fascism was necessary for defense of the Soviet Union. Under the leadership of the YCL, the ASU became a totally social-patriotic organization.
A reporter from the New Republic described a 1939 ASU convention in these words:
"… enthusiasm reached its peak at the jamboree in the huge jumbo jaialai auditorium of the Hippodrome (seating capacity 4,500) which was filled to its loftiest tier. There were a quintet of white flannelled cheerleaders, a swing band and shaggers doing the Campus Stomp (‘everybody’s doing it, ASUing it!’)—confetti. There were ASU feathers and buttons, a brief musical comedy by the Mob Theatre and pretty ushers in academic caps and gowns. All the trappings of a big game rally were present and the difference was that they were cheering, not the Crimson to beat the Blue, but Democracy to beat Reaction."
During the same period, the YCL itself liquidated its 16-year-old paper Young Worker in favor of Champion which featured articles by liberal senators, Farmer-Labor Governor Olson from Minnesota, famous for his savage attempts to crush the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and a regular "Miss America" column which gave advice to young female revolutionaries on what kinds of make-up and bathing suits to buy.
The SYL remained intransigent against the growing social chauvinism of the period, directing Leninist antiwar propaganda at students, unemployed youth and young workers:
"How do wars come about? Are they due to ‘bad politicians’?
"We International Communists do not think so. We understand that wars are the logical development of class politics. Capitalist politics have various forms the essence of which is the same: the continuation and development of the system of wage slavery, of exploitation of the many by the few….
"In such a war the working class can gain nothing by the victory of either power. They must fight to defeat their own government so that working class victory can really be the outcome of the war….
"By strikes and demonstrations, fraternization with the ‘enemy’ on the war front, the militant workers’ movement can grow until it is in a position, with the majority of toilers behind it, to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and establish a workers’ dictatorship which will suppress the former master’s class and lead the way for a classless society."
—Young Spartacus, March 1934
While remaining critical of certain tactical mistakes made by the SYL, the Revolutionary Communist Youth, youth section of the Spartacist League, holds up as a model the SYL’s conception of a correct orientation to students and its history of Leninist intervention into the student anti-war movement. An assimilation of this history is important in politically defeating reformist organizations like the Attica Brigade, the Young Socialist Alliance and SDS and winning over their serious militants to Marxism.
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.
The Spartacus Youth League and the Student Upsurge of the 1930’s-
Lessons from History
From Young Spartacus No. 22, March-April 1974
The Lessons from History series has in the past included articles on the early years of the Communist Youth International and the development of a "Resolution on the Youth" at the founding Conference of the Fourth International. This article on the Spartacus Youth League, the first Trotskyist youth organization in the U.S., focuses on the SYL’s internal debates over a correct orientation to students and on the main aspect of its student work, namely, its intervention in the anti-war student movement, counterposing the Leninist slogans against imperialist war to the predominating petty-bourgeois pacifism and social patriotism.
*******
Today, student groups like the Maoist Revolutionary Union-dominated Attica Brigade and Progressive Labor’s SDS are organized along the same reformist, student-parochialist conceptions as the Stalinist National Student League of the 1930’s. So-called "socialist youth organizations" like the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) made themselves infamous by their consistent petty-bourgeois, single-issue reformism on the Vietnam War. Such anti-Leninist youth work is nothing new; rather, it is the heritage of the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International.
The new recruits to the Attica Brigade, YSA and SDS may not be familiar with the historical traditions of these aspects of youth work and are not aware that old mistakes are being repeated and old betrayals consciously rerun. An examination of these issues in the crisis years of the 1930’s sheds light on current differences between left-wing youth and student organizations.
The development of the Spartacus Youth League (SYL) took place in the context of a growing radical student movement, dominated politically by the National Student League (NSL), which was led by the Stalinist Young Communist League (YCL).
The YCL was changing rapidly in response to events in American society (the Depression, New Deal, renewed militancy in the working class and preparations for imperialist war) and internationally (the further political degeneration of the Soviet Union and the rise of fascism in Germany). The YCL, under the control of the Communist Party, subservient to the dictates of the Soviet bureaucracy, entered a period of crisis in the mid-thirties, losing members and influence, as the line of the sectarian "third period" was abruptly changed to the policy of the People’s Front.
The Stalinist youth liquidated all remnants of independent working-class politics in their program and gave uncritical support to the multi-class American Student Union and American Youth Congress (with the emphasis on the American!), leading them on to the football field to wave pompons and cheer for Roosevelt as he prepared another slaughter for the American workers.
The radical student movement of the early 1930’s, with an even greater percentage of students involved than the protest movements of the 1960’s, was the main battlefield in the political war between the left-wing youth organizations. The sporadic anti-ROTC campaigns and expressions of discontent in 1931 soon developed into a wave of militancy which expressed itself in numerous anti-ROTC and anti-war rallies, conferences on unemployment, fascism and the crisis in education caused by the Depression, and widespread support for striking workers.
In the period since WWI, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a bloc of the social-democratic Young People’s Socialist League (who formed its leadership) with liberal Christian "socialists," had been the dominant leftist group on the campuses, while the Young Workers League (previous name of the YCL) had concentrated on work among the young proletariat. The SLID in 1931 was an exhausted and demoralized organization with no enthusiasm to greet the outburst of campus radicalism.
National Student League
The SLID never gained the influence or numbers of the early-thirties National Student League (NSL), the dominant left-wing campus organization throughout this period. The NSL began as a YCL-led split from the SLID in September 1931, a split based on the "third period" line that social democrats were social fascists and on the Stalinists’ organizational appetite for a youth group of their own.
Centered in New York City, the group at first called itself the New York Student League, but the rapid gain in national membership soon justified a name change to National Student League. Publication of a monthly magazine, the Student Review, was begun in December 1931.
At that time the Trotskyist movement held that the Communist Parties were susceptible to reform from within. Consistent with this political orientation, the young Trotskyists considered themselves to be part of the YCL. At first organized into Spartacus Youth Clubs (SYC), sympathizing circles of the Communist League of America (CLA), the young Trotskyists concentrated on education of their membership and periphery in the historical lessons of Marxism and on intervention into YCL activities.
The SYC attempted to introduce resolutions in defense of a revolutionary perspective at YCL meetings and conferences, called on young militants to join the YCL, encouraged Trotskyist sympathizers to remain within the YCL to seek to win over the organization as a whole to Trotskyism, and themselves sought readmission to the organization, from which Trotskyists had been expelled in 1928. The Young Spartacans defended the YCL politically against the YPSL which at that time criticized the Soviet Union from the right and had not even partially broken with the betrayals of the Second International.
Young Spartacus and the Student Movement
The first volume of the paper circulated by the SYC, Young Spartacus, published by the National Youth Committee of the Communist League of America, reflected this strong orientation to the YCL, correct for that period. A real weakness, however, of the early Young Spartacus was a failure to recognize the political importance of certain student protest actions, which it either ignored or gave brief and routine press coverage.
The first two issues contained nothing about the vital and expanding student movement but a one-column editorial which gave a formally correct but abstract analysis of the student’s role in the revolutionary movement. The initial events surrounding the rise of the NSL to popularity such as the student delegation to Harlan County, Kentucky, to demonstrate support for the striking miners and the Columbia University strike in support of expelled liberal student editor Reed Harris, merited only short articles in back pages of Young Spartacus.
With the turning of the YCL more and more to the student arena, however, and the growth of a tremendous anti-war movement within that arena, the Young Spartacus began to devote more space to the student movement, and soon began to publish a monthly column called "Student Notes." The last issue of the paper (December 1935) was devoted exclusively to discussion of the issues surrounding the reunification of the NSL and SLID to form the American Student Union.
The orientation to the student movement necessitated more than just an abstract, formally correct understanding of the student question. Several debates on this question took place in the SYL, reflecting problems experienced in the arena.
Development of Leninist Position on Student Work
While favoring work among students, the SYL held the correct position that separate student self-interest organizations were necessarily reformist dead-ends and that it was not the task of communists to organize front groups for student "economism." Students are a socially heterogeneous group lacking the concentrated social power of the proletariat, which can stop capitalist production by withholding its labor. Therefore students are incapable of playing an independent or consistent political role or of posing a serious threat to the power of the capitalists.
While subordinate to the party’s main work in the class, an orientation by the youth group to students is, however, important in the construction of a vanguard party as—and this was the case in the 1930’s—the student movement, is frequently the arena, for ideological debates within the left. Student work can thus be an important component of the splits, fusions and regroupments that lead to the crystallization of a vanguard nucleus. In the longer view, it will be important in defeating the forces of capitalist reaction to win as large a section of the politically volatile student population as possible, as well as other non-working-class layers, to identify their interests with those of the proletariat.
The SYL sought to build a Leninist youth group which included both students and young workers and to focus its intervention in the student movement on the need to link up with working-class struggles through the class’s political leadership, namely, a Leninist vanguard party. This did not preclude entry or intervention into existing student organizations when principled and tactically advisable. In fact, such work was vital to the growth of the SYL.
Leftism and Rightism on the Student Question
Having overcome its early tendency to abstain from student work, the SYL initially adopted a correct tactical orientation of entry into the NSL with the goal of winning its majority to revolutionary politics. This tactic was arrived at after an internal debate in which sectarian workerist elements advocating a principle of non-entry were defeated.
Nevertheless, a tendency toward sectarianism continued to manifest itself in certain areas of student work, for example, in the SYL’s orientation to the Oxford Pledge movement. This movement originated at Oxford University when the student union voted that "This House will not fight for King and Country in any war." The pledge was picked up by students in other countries, including the U.S., where it was generalized to declarations of refusal to fight for "our government" in any war.
The SYL, correctly noting the pacifist content of the Pledge and narrow, student character of the movement, concluded that a posture of hostility and organizational abstention was therefore appropriate. They thereby cut themselves off from a layer of potential recruits who, while entertaining pacifist illusions, were also motivated by anti-patriotic, implicitly internationalist sentiments (and the movement did take on an international character, at least organizationally). This anti-patriotic sentiment was evident in the declarations’ insistent opposition to participation by "our government" (or "our King and Country") in any war, rather than a general statement of opposition to war.
The retention of the Oxford Pledge became a polarizing issue in the antiwar student movement of the late 1930’s when the social pressures to be patriotic were increasingly felt. The Stalinists opposed the Pledge while the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League-Fourth Internationalist (SYL’s successor) argued for its retention, capitalizing on its anti-patriotic, internationalist implications, opposing pacifist interpretations of it, and fighting to link it to anti-imperialist, revolutionary class-struggle demands.
Following the debate in the SYL over a general orientation to students, a rightist minority emerged, advocating abstractly the formation of a national "militant mass student movement" that would be anti-fascist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist and would "take up the struggles of the students around student issues" (Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934). This centrist formulation failed to put forward a positive socialist program, and instead defined the organization through negatives and as narrowly studentist. It was strikingly similar to Progressive Labor’s 1969 program for SDS (which has since moved from centrism to reformism pure and simple) and the Revolutionary Union’s current program for the Attica Brigade.
The SYL majority counterposed to this the Leninist conception:
"An organization which aims to educate the students in the character of the class struggle, and the duties which result from it can only do so on the basis of a clear program, a communist program. Clarity, which is always essential, is doubly so where different class elements are involved…. organizations, which, like the NSL, move in the direction of organizing the students solely on the problems of the student issues, are…. intolerable. A left-wing group must take sides for and against each of the classes that comprise society. A union, and the NSL contemplates a union, is predicated upon a unity of interests. That unity does not exist among the students; for, they contain representatives of all classes."
—Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934
NSL’s Turn to Popular Frontism
While the rightist minority position was rejected at the SYL Founding Conference, a certain tendency to tail-end the NSL had developed. By 1935, the yearly NSL-led anti-war student strikes had become formations identical to the Socialist Workers Party’s National Peace Action Coalition of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: subordination of revolutionary politics for the sake of the "movement."
This development coincided with the Stalinists’ turn away from "third period" sectarianism towards the class collaboration of the popular front. The seeds for the capitulation to social patriotism were planted in the "third period," when the Stalinist parties, while following in the main a sectarian policy, zigzagged off into classless "anti-war" actions under the pressure of their role as defenders of the Soviet bureaucracy abroad.
Thus the Stalinists endorsed the infamous 1932 Amsterdam Conference dominated by the wretched politics of the pacifist literary figure Henri Barbusse. Barbusse’s document, which was passed at the Conference, failed to distinguish between reactionary wars of imperialism and revolutionary wars of the proletariat against capitalism. Trotsky denounced the Communist International’s (CI) behavior at the Conference as "monstrous, capitulatory, and criminal crawling of official communism before petty-bourgeois pacifism" ("Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam," Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932). The Trotskyists’ resolution calling on the Communist International to organize an international anti-war congress of all labor organizations to plan a united front action on a concrete program against war could not even obtain a vote and they were heckled and prevented from getting the floor.
The Stalinists’ pacifism blossomed into open social patriotism in the popular-front period. In the NSL the formerly sectarian and crude but pro-working-class line was totally abandoned in favor of pacifism and social patriotism; the SYL should have recognized this as a qualitative degeneration into a hardened reformism and left the NSL, attempting to take with it any remaining subjectively revolutionary elements.
Instead, the SYL continued to conceive of itself as a left pressure group within the NSL, making formally correct political statements about the NSL’s pacifist anti-war activities, but characterizing such activities as "errors made by the National Student Strike Committee [of the NSL]… [For example,] the failure to include working class youth organizations in the strike committee…. The second error was to allow for unclarity [by omitting] the slogan ‘against imperialist war’…. In certain instances, notably CCNY and New York University, the SYL forced the use of the word ‘imperialist’" (Young Spartacus, May 1935).
The SYL should have denounced the conscious capitulation to the bourgeoisie that these politics represented, rather than creating the illusion of good-willed, but incompetent, opponents of imperialist war. Thus, while the SYL organized support for the anti-war strikes around Leninist slogans, its failure to counterpose itself clearly to the Stalinist NSL undercut its work.
Nevertheless, the SYL continued to recruit from the YCL and its periphery. In Chicago particularly, where several vigorous and active SYL chapters existed, a small but steady trickle sided with the Young Spartacans. The NSL grew so desperate that it attempted to pass a motion barring "Trotskyites" from membership. YCL members attacked SYLers at an NSL meeting against war; Spartacus leader Nathan Gould was attacked by YCLers when attempting to distribute a leaflet, and YCLers issued threats of violence if the Trotskyists did not cease to speak to their members. Such thuggery was the Stalinists’ only "defense" against the SYL’s revolutionary criticism of YCL capitulation. This desperation grew so intense that the Chicago NSL dissolved the organization rather than allow two SYLers to join!
American Youth Congress
This motion from crude pro-working-class radicalism to alliance with the bourgeoisie was repeated in the American Youth Congress (AYC). In August 1934 a Roosevelt supporter by the name of Viola Ilma called upon all youth organizations to "convene and discuss the problems confronting the young people of this country." At the first convention, there was a split between the Ilmaites and the left (predominantly the YCL and YPSL); Ilma withdrew from the Congress, leaving the YCL, YPSL, YMCA-YWCA, the Boy Scouts and a few church organizations.
Despite the protests of the YCL, the SYL was present, although it correctly refused to endorse or join this wretched front for American bourgeois interests in the growing imperialist antagonisms. At the same time, the SYL maintained an active intervention into AYC meetings, sharply counterposing revolutionary class-struggle dethands to the AYC’s class collaborationism.
The AYC adopted a vague program of protest, pointing out the social problems of unemployment, transiency and militarization suffered by American youth. The second Congress, held in January 1935, had no agenda point for discussion. More vague resolutions were adopted—to be brought to Roosevelt and members of the U.S. Congress. Young Spartacus printed a scathing attack on this Congress, which was a pompous facade of fake radical-sounding speeches by Norman Thomas and various liberal Congressmen about the plight of American youth. Since the Congress was a bloc of tendencies representing different classes in society, no concrete program of action that would serve all interests could be adopted; in fact, the program of the bourgeoisie predominated.
The third meeting, in Detroit in July 1935, represented an apt culmination of this motion toward impotent liberalism and moral outrage. The SYL described the meeting in the August 1935 Young Spartacus:
"The congress opened with the singing at an outdoor mass meeting, attended by 2,000, of ‘America.’ In consideration of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, ten o’clock mass was arranged at which Reverend Ward preached a delightful and most interesting sermon.
"Having completed its graduation to pacifism, the congress was no longer dignified by a reluctant opposition to IMPERIALIST war. Resolutions congruous with revolutionary spirit were supplanted entirely by the slogans of the pacifists. Thus, at last, the congress reeked from beginning to end with ‘peace.’
"The Stalinists, chief sponsors of the congress, blocked every formulation, resolution or amendment that stood to the left of the proposed program. Every resolution introduced to the right of the program was carried with passionate enthusiasm and exhilaration…. Every left or semi-left proposal was combatted by a classically opportunist argument: ‘Everybody knows that my organization is heartily in favor of that resolution. However, it must be defeated because its acceptance will narrow the congress to purely labor organizations.’"
The Stalinists thus consciously tried to prevent the drawing of the class line in the Congress.
NSL Rises to FDR’s "Challenge"
The main documents of the Congress, the American Youth Act and the Declaration of Rights of American Youth, were enthusiastically supported by the NSL. The Student Review quoted President Roosevelt’s words—"Therefore to the American youth of all Parties I Submit a Message of Confidence: Unite and Challenge!"—and reprinted the two documents in their entirety. The American Youth Act was the AYC’s version of the New Deal National Youth Administration, and demanded simply a little more money and representatives of "youth" and "education" on the administrative board of the NYA. A campaign was initiated for the passage of this act by the Congress. The Declaration of Rights of American Youth was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and was identical to it in political content. Later in the 1930’s the AYC became the ersatz New Deal youth organization.
The NSL pursued a parallel course. The 7th Congress of the CI adopted the Dimitrov Popular-Front line and extended it to the youth organizations by liquidating the Communist Youth International into the World Federation of Democratic Youth—a fusion of Stalinist and right-wing social-democratic youth groups based on a bourgeois program.
American Student Union Jamborees for ‘Democracy’
In the U.S., after four years of separation, the NSL and SLID were reunited in December 1935 to form the American Student Union (ASU). This unity was initiated by the NSL itself, in accordance with instructions from the CI that "unity at all costs of the young generation against war and fascism" was to be effected immediately. In 1938 the ASU gave up opposition to compulsory ROTC. Roosevelt’s "collective security" was adopted as the ASU line on the war question, with the feeble left cover that support for American imperialism against German fascism was necessary for defense of the Soviet Union. Under the leadership of the YCL, the ASU became a totally social-patriotic organization.
A reporter from the New Republic described a 1939 ASU convention in these words:
"… enthusiasm reached its peak at the jamboree in the huge jumbo jaialai auditorium of the Hippodrome (seating capacity 4,500) which was filled to its loftiest tier. There were a quintet of white flannelled cheerleaders, a swing band and shaggers doing the Campus Stomp (‘everybody’s doing it, ASUing it!’)—confetti. There were ASU feathers and buttons, a brief musical comedy by the Mob Theatre and pretty ushers in academic caps and gowns. All the trappings of a big game rally were present and the difference was that they were cheering, not the Crimson to beat the Blue, but Democracy to beat Reaction."
During the same period, the YCL itself liquidated its 16-year-old paper Young Worker in favor of Champion which featured articles by liberal senators, Farmer-Labor Governor Olson from Minnesota, famous for his savage attempts to crush the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and a regular "Miss America" column which gave advice to young female revolutionaries on what kinds of make-up and bathing suits to buy.
The SYL remained intransigent against the growing social chauvinism of the period, directing Leninist antiwar propaganda at students, unemployed youth and young workers:
"How do wars come about? Are they due to ‘bad politicians’?
"We International Communists do not think so. We understand that wars are the logical development of class politics. Capitalist politics have various forms the essence of which is the same: the continuation and development of the system of wage slavery, of exploitation of the many by the few….
"In such a war the working class can gain nothing by the victory of either power. They must fight to defeat their own government so that working class victory can really be the outcome of the war….
"By strikes and demonstrations, fraternization with the ‘enemy’ on the war front, the militant workers’ movement can grow until it is in a position, with the majority of toilers behind it, to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and establish a workers’ dictatorship which will suppress the former master’s class and lead the way for a classless society."
—Young Spartacus, March 1934
While remaining critical of certain tactical mistakes made by the SYL, the Revolutionary Communist Youth, youth section of the Spartacist League, holds up as a model the SYL’s conception of a correct orientation to students and its history of Leninist intervention into the student anti-war movement. An assimilation of this history is important in politically defeating reformist organizations like the Attica Brigade, the Young Socialist Alliance and SDS and winning over their serious militants to Marxism.
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Hands Off Julian Assange!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Private Bradley Manning!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Francisco Torres Of The San Francisco Eight
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Of This And That Out In The North Adamsville Be-Bop Night Circa, 1960
Of This And That Out In The North Adamsville Be-Bop Night Circa, 1960
Markin comment:
I have, on more than one occasion, cursed the Internet to the high heavens for stirring up, or of being the catalyst to stir up ancient memories, ancient memories I was entirely willing to keep back in the deep recesses of my mind. And then the next moment I find that I need to bow down, profusely bow face to the floor, to its ability to make some necessary link information available at the touch of a mouse. The latter is such a moment here.
Recently I received an e-mail via one of the sites that I am linked to from an old high school flame, well, maybe more of a flicker, Betty Ann Kelly (maiden name), who e-mailed me in response to a general question that I had posed to my fellow classmates at old North Adamsville High School, Class of 1964. That question actually involved any memories, such as they were, remembered of those times, more specifically of North Adamsville Junior High days (now, Middle School) since when I posed the question we were in the throes of “celebrating” our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from that school (1960). Her response was simple- as will be noted below she had not actually attended North Adamsville Junior High (Middle School) but rather Adamsville Central Junior High (ditto on the middle school thing).
Needless to say, flame or flicker, I have some egg on my face for not remembering that she was not one of us-a North Adamsville Junior Higher- when the town junior high school rivalries were almost as intense as those of the cross-town rivalry between North Adamsville High and Adamsville High. More to the point I would have gone to my grave believing that she had been a classmate and so I bow down, profusely bow down, to the high tech Internet for making the connections that made that connection possible. My return e-mail is posted below to “enlighten” those of our generation who face some of the same issues-how to turn on the computer, how to deal with forgetfulness (I am being kind to all parties here), and how to “forget” that if one has a 50th middle school graduation anniversary in 2010 then a 50th high school anniversary is on the horizon. Ugh! Damn Internet.
*********
Dear Betty Ann,
Thanks for your note. Before I go on I just have to comment, kiddingly anyway, on this e-mail snafu. [The response e-mail was received about a year after the original one was sent-Markin.] At your expense? Well, yes. I thought, and correct me if I am wrong, that e-mail was supposed to be faster than the regular mails. And if not that, then at least faster than the Pony Express of old, old days. I do note that you are located in up- state New York so that explains a lot, an awful lot. Now for a little fun at my expense. It seems that I did not edit the e-mail that I sent you. I forgot to correct, retype actually, the quotation marks when I went from my word processor to the site e-mail screen. Thus, you got some strange Serbo-Croatian transliterations, or some other forgotten language, in your e-mail. I will take some laughs on that one.
Okay, now down to business. The thing that I requested in that e-mail, information and ideas in order to honor our 50th anniversary since graduation, if you had been a North Adamsville Junior High alumna and not a benighted Adamsville Central alumna I got another way. I actually worked around it and wrote from different angle from what I expected to do. If you look on the Class Wall of the Class Of 1964 homepage you will find it- Entering North-1960. You will also find a couple of other posts, as well. Also if you Google Tales From Old North Adamsville High you will be able to click to a blog I established last year about the old days when we all bled raider red. Such little subjects as summer beach nights, Tri-Hi-Y, Howard Johnson’s ice cream, boys’ and girls’ bowling teams, and some sad, some silly, and some just plain be-bop things as well. Of course, since this is your 50th anniversary of graduating from Adamsville Central Junior High (oops, Middle School) you are duty-bound to write a little something, and we will all meet up in the fall of 1961 to form the North Adamsville Class of 1964.
As for rumors, threats, dreads, and celebrations of our 50th anniversary since graduation from high school I have no particular information right now. Perhaps someone on the site might have some information. I will say this-in 2004 I received an invitation to our 40th reunion, although I did not attend. I have never attended any reunion (although I wrote about old friend, Bill Connolly, going to the fifth reunion in 1969- it is posted on that Tales blog). How about you? The people who put that one together were Linda Paul and Gary Docker. Linda has her name listed on this site so maybe you could check with her. In 2004 I was not bleeding raider red but now I am not sure that I would not attend a 50th reunion if it is organized.
Let me hear from you- soon (within a year, okay). Friendly regards. Peter Paul Markin
Markin comment:
I have, on more than one occasion, cursed the Internet to the high heavens for stirring up, or of being the catalyst to stir up ancient memories, ancient memories I was entirely willing to keep back in the deep recesses of my mind. And then the next moment I find that I need to bow down, profusely bow face to the floor, to its ability to make some necessary link information available at the touch of a mouse. The latter is such a moment here.
Recently I received an e-mail via one of the sites that I am linked to from an old high school flame, well, maybe more of a flicker, Betty Ann Kelly (maiden name), who e-mailed me in response to a general question that I had posed to my fellow classmates at old North Adamsville High School, Class of 1964. That question actually involved any memories, such as they were, remembered of those times, more specifically of North Adamsville Junior High days (now, Middle School) since when I posed the question we were in the throes of “celebrating” our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from that school (1960). Her response was simple- as will be noted below she had not actually attended North Adamsville Junior High (Middle School) but rather Adamsville Central Junior High (ditto on the middle school thing).
Needless to say, flame or flicker, I have some egg on my face for not remembering that she was not one of us-a North Adamsville Junior Higher- when the town junior high school rivalries were almost as intense as those of the cross-town rivalry between North Adamsville High and Adamsville High. More to the point I would have gone to my grave believing that she had been a classmate and so I bow down, profusely bow down, to the high tech Internet for making the connections that made that connection possible. My return e-mail is posted below to “enlighten” those of our generation who face some of the same issues-how to turn on the computer, how to deal with forgetfulness (I am being kind to all parties here), and how to “forget” that if one has a 50th middle school graduation anniversary in 2010 then a 50th high school anniversary is on the horizon. Ugh! Damn Internet.
*********
Dear Betty Ann,
Thanks for your note. Before I go on I just have to comment, kiddingly anyway, on this e-mail snafu. [The response e-mail was received about a year after the original one was sent-Markin.] At your expense? Well, yes. I thought, and correct me if I am wrong, that e-mail was supposed to be faster than the regular mails. And if not that, then at least faster than the Pony Express of old, old days. I do note that you are located in up- state New York so that explains a lot, an awful lot. Now for a little fun at my expense. It seems that I did not edit the e-mail that I sent you. I forgot to correct, retype actually, the quotation marks when I went from my word processor to the site e-mail screen. Thus, you got some strange Serbo-Croatian transliterations, or some other forgotten language, in your e-mail. I will take some laughs on that one.
Okay, now down to business. The thing that I requested in that e-mail, information and ideas in order to honor our 50th anniversary since graduation, if you had been a North Adamsville Junior High alumna and not a benighted Adamsville Central alumna I got another way. I actually worked around it and wrote from different angle from what I expected to do. If you look on the Class Wall of the Class Of 1964 homepage you will find it- Entering North-1960. You will also find a couple of other posts, as well. Also if you Google Tales From Old North Adamsville High you will be able to click to a blog I established last year about the old days when we all bled raider red. Such little subjects as summer beach nights, Tri-Hi-Y, Howard Johnson’s ice cream, boys’ and girls’ bowling teams, and some sad, some silly, and some just plain be-bop things as well. Of course, since this is your 50th anniversary of graduating from Adamsville Central Junior High (oops, Middle School) you are duty-bound to write a little something, and we will all meet up in the fall of 1961 to form the North Adamsville Class of 1964.
As for rumors, threats, dreads, and celebrations of our 50th anniversary since graduation from high school I have no particular information right now. Perhaps someone on the site might have some information. I will say this-in 2004 I received an invitation to our 40th reunion, although I did not attend. I have never attended any reunion (although I wrote about old friend, Bill Connolly, going to the fifth reunion in 1969- it is posted on that Tales blog). How about you? The people who put that one together were Linda Paul and Gary Docker. Linda has her name listed on this site so maybe you could check with her. In 2004 I was not bleeding raider red but now I am not sure that I would not attend a 50th reunion if it is organized.
Let me hear from you- soon (within a year, okay). Friendly regards. Peter Paul Markin
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