From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-
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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Workers Vanguard No. 1006
3 August 2012
Lockouts and the Class Struggle
(Quote of the Week)
With the U.S. economy continuing to falter and the labor movement in an extended retreat, lockouts have increasingly been used by the capitalists in their drive to wrest ever-greater concessions from the unions, or destroy them altogether. V. I. Lenin, writing in a period of intense strikes in Russia on the eve of World War I, discussed workers’ resistance to lockouts. Despite the different contexts, the role of Marxists in advancing the class consciousness of the proletariat remains unchanged.
Lockouts, i.e., the mass discharge of workers by common agreement among employers, is as necessary and inevitable a phenomenon in capitalist society as strikes are. Capital, which throws the whole of its crushing weight upon the ruined small producers and the proletariat, constantly threatens to force the conditions of the workers down to starvation level and condemn them to death from starvation. And in all countries there have been cases, even whole periods in the life of nations, when the failure of the workers to fight back has led to their being reduced to incredible poverty and all the horrors of starvation.
The workers’ resistance springs from their very conditions of life—the sale of labour-power. Only as a result of this resistance, despite the tremendous sacrifices the workers have to make in the struggle, are they able to maintain anything like a tolerable standard of living. But capital is becoming more and more concentrated, manufacturers’ associations are growing, the number of destitute and unemployed people is increasing, and so also is want among the proletariat; consequently, it is becoming harder than ever to fight for a decent standard of living. The cost of living, which has been rising rapidly in recent years, often nullifies all the workers’ efforts.
By drawing larger and larger masses of the proletariat into the organised struggle, the workers’ organisations, and first and foremost the trade unions, make the workers’ resistance more planned and systematic. With the existence of mass trade unions of different types, strikes become more stubborn: they occur less often, but each conflict is of bigger dimensions.
Lockouts are caused by a sharpening of the struggle, and in their turn, sharpen that struggle. Rallying in the struggle and developing its class-consciousness, its organisation and experience in that struggle, the proletariat becomes more and more firmly convinced that the complete economic reconstruction of capitalist society is essential.
Marxist tactics consist in combining the different forms of struggle, in the skilful transition from one form to another, in steadily enhancing the consciousness of the masses and extending the area of their collective actions, each of which, taken separately, may be aggressive or defensive, and all of which, taken together, lead to a more intense and decisive conflict.
—V. I. Lenin, “Forms of the Working-Class Movement (The Lockout and Marxist Tactics)” (April 1914)
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