Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 995
3 February 2012
SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Rosie Gonzalez of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on January 6 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.
Welcome! My name is Rosie and this is my third Holiday Appeal. I joined the Spartacus Youth Club a little over a year ago, after I broke from radical-liberal activism. I came to understand the class nature of the capitalist state, the social power of the labor movement, and based on this I learned that it is simply not enough to just have good intentions and to put your body on the street. One must have a party based on a Marxist program, developed through the study of victories and defeats of the past. Now I can stand here and say: We Trotskyists of the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the immediate freedom of all class-war prisoners and all fighters against capitalist oppression! We say they should not have spent one second in jail.
We do not rely on the capitalist injustice system to free these brave men and women. The SYCs fight against any illusions in the bourgeois state on the campuses, in demonstrations, and in the streets. We fight to win youth to the side of the working class—this is where the social power lies in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, women and all of the oppressed. We of the SYC understand that only through workers revolution will the racist horrors of American capitalism be tossed into the dustbin of history—all the fighters against oppression, the women and men that are behind bars today, tomorrow will be free.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the Trotskyist Spartacist League, the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). We intervene into social struggles armed with a revolutionary-internationalist program. At Zuccotti Park we intervened into different demonstrations surrounding the “Occupy” movement. We did sales, gave a presentation about Marxism to a left-wing group called “Class War Camp” and we protested the police repression of the Occupiers.
We also took students and other youth with us to the Verizon strike pickets to show them some class struggle and why the defense of unions is so central. The working class has been on the defensive for years now, particularly since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. At the same time, every strike is an opening for the Spartacist League to show the need to fight for class-struggle leadership.
The politics of the protesters whom we met at Occupy Wall Street ranged anywhere from open patriotism to anarchoid idealism. We found that the best way to show them the power of the revolutionary working class was to study the Russian Revolution. We encountered real interest at our class series on the Russian Revolution at City College (CCNY). We presented the lessons of this world-historic working-class victory as a counterposition to the stupefying, populist, anti-Marxist slogan of “We are the 99 percent,” which does not recognize the sharp class divisions in society and instead disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all of its political parties. It lumps the working class together with the petty bourgeoisie and even parts of the capitalist class as well. The truth is that the problem is not the “greed” of the bankers (although there is plenty of that); the problem is the whole capitalist system itself. What is really necessary is the mobilization of the working class against the property-owning capitalist class. The working class has the social power and the historic interest to overthrow the whole capitalist profit system and lay the basis for a socialist society free from exploitation and oppression.
The Russian Revolution showed us how the Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in soviets, to power and threw off the chains of oppressive imperial Russia. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model—for new October Revolutions worldwide!
This sets us apart from so-called socialists like Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are lapping up the liberal politics of the Occupy movement. Workers World called the Occupy protests a “fledgling revolution” and the ISO recently stated that they had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.” Tell that to workers like the militant ILWU pickets in Longview, Washington, who were attacked by the cops last year. That’s the political landscape! So the question is why would these self-proclaimed socialist organizations be uncritically hailing a movement that has no intention of dismantling capitalism? Because they have no interest in dismantling capitalism. In essence, these groups lend ardent support to bourgeois democracy. Just take, for example, the enthusiastic support the ISO gave to the Libyan “rebels” last year. These “rebel” forces were supported by U.S. imperialism and its Commander-in-Chief, Obama, who bombed Tripoli in the name of “democracy.” At home, the reformist left’s support to the Occupy movement is just another expression of its “fight the right” agenda, which amounts to nothing more than building illusions in and support for the Democrats.
The Occupy protesters constantly talk about “reclaiming our democracy.” This country was founded on the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.
We, as communist revolutionaries, always ask the question—democracy for which class? The facade of democracy serves to obscure the fact that the capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence—at its core the police, military, courts and prisons—for maintaining capitalist rule. From CCNY to Zuccotti Park, we are constantly arguing against illusions in the cops. Cops are not workers—they are strikebreakers who act in the interest of the fundamentally racist ruling class, the bourgeoisie. And that’s why we read and teach Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
In November, at a demonstration at City College, students protested a planned tuition hike and we led the chants, “Cops off campus! Free quality education! Abolish the administration!” We raised the call for worker/teacher/student control of the schools. The student protesters, many of whom were black and Latino, had picked up some of our slogans. These chants were counterposed to the politics of the liberal leadership of the demonstration, Students United for a Free CUNY, who accept the framework of capitalism by begging for a few crumbs.
Our starting point is to have a clear class opposition to capitalist politicians like Obama and the Democratic Party. The Democrats were once the party in defense of slavery and later the party of Jim Crow. They aim, as does the bourgeoisie as a whole, to “divide and conquer” so their profits will rise. Racism is all part and parcel of the maintenance of the capitalist order. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” the war against abortion rights—these are wars on blacks, women and the working class as a whole! Just look at Obama’s outrageous ban on over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers. These are young women under 17 years old who will not have easy access to a simple pill, making it harder for them to avoid having children. This is criminal! It serves to tighten the grip of social control and enforce the sexual repression of young women. Again and again you can see that the Democrats are really just the other party of capitalism and war. This is why we have always and consistently raised the slogan “Break with the Democrats!” and why we call to build a multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.
The only way out of this hell is through workers revolution. The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved only through the struggle of the multiracial working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of the struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between these different sections of the working class. Then, we will ensure at last the end of wage slavery, racism, and exploitation. Join this fight! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!
No comments:
Post a Comment