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 early 1960s 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 just 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 for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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WHEN DID THE 1960'S END?-The Anti-Vietnam War Events Of May Day 1971
Markin comment:
I have recently been reviewing books and documentaries about radical developments in the 1960’s. They included reviews of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the memoirs of Bill Ayers, a central figure in that movement. Throughout this work one thing that I noticed was that the various interviewees had different takes on when that period ended. Although in the end the periodization of history is a convenient journalistic or academic convention in the case of the 1960’s it may produce a useful political guide line.
It is almost universally the case that there is agreement on when the 1960’s started. That is with the inauguration of Democratic President John F. Kennedy and his call to social activism. While there is no agreement on what that course of action might entail political figures as diverse as liberals Bill Clinton and John Kerry on to radicals like Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers and this writer agree that this event and its immediate aftermath figured in their politicization.
What is not clear is when it ended. For those committed to parliamentary action it seems to have been the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the events around the Democratic Convention in 1968 that led to the election of one Richard Milhous Nixon as President of the United States. For mainstream black activists its seems to have been the assassination of Martin Luther King that same year ending the dream that pacifist resistance could eradicate racial injustice. For mainstream SDSers apparently it was the split up of that student organization in 1969. For the Black Panthers, the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark proving for all to see who wanted to see that the American government was really out to get militant blacks off the streets. For those who thought that the counterculture might be the revolution the bloody Rolling Stone’s concert at Altamont in California in 1969 seems to have signaled the end. For the Weather Underground the 1970 New York townhouse explosion and death of their comrades was the signpost. Since everyone can play this game here is my take.
I can name the day and event exactly when my 1960’s ended. The day- May Day 1971 in Washington D.C. The event- a massive attempt by thousands, including myself, to shut down the government over the Vietnam War. We proceeded under the slogan- IF THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT SHUT DOWN THE WAR-WE WILL SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT. At that time I was a radical but hardly a communist. However, the endless mass marches and small local individual acts of resistance seemed to me to be leading to a dead end. But the war nevertheless continued on its savagely endless way. In any case, that day we formed up in collectives with appropriate gear to take over the streets of Washington and try to get to various government buildings. While none of us believed that this would be an easy task we definitely believed that it was doable. Needless to say the Nixon government and its agents were infinitely better prepared and determined to sweep us from the streets-by any means necessary. The long and short of it was that we were swept off the streets in fairly short order, taking many, many arrests.
I walked away from that event with my eyes finally opened about what it would take to made fundamental societal changes. On reflection, on that day we were somewhat like those naïve marchers in St. Petersburg, Russia that were bloodily suppressed by the Czarist forces at the start of the revolution there in January 1905. Nevertheless, in my case, from that point on I vowed that a lot more than a few thousand convinced radicals and revolutionaries working in an ad hoc manner were going to have to come together if we were to succeed against a determined and ruthless enemy. Not a pretty thought but hard reality nevertheless. Enough said.
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