Love and Struggle:David Gilbert’s memoir helps us understand our history and the world today
By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012
[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]
This is the third review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle published on The Rag Blog. We have run multiple reviews of the same book in the past, when the articles have covered different territory and when we have considered the material to be of special interest to our readers. And we consider this to be a very important book. Also see the Rag Blog reviews of Love and Struggle by Ron Jacobs and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
As I write this, four presidents in Latin America are veterans of revolutionary guerrilla struggles of the 1960’s. Pepe Mujica of Uruguay was a member of the Tupamaros and among those political prisoners who escaped from Punta Carretas Prison in 1971; Mauricio Funes of El Salvador is a member of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) and his brother was killed fighting in the Salvadoran civil war; Daniel Ortega was a leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front which fought an 18-year guerrilla war; and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was a member of the urban guerrilla group National Liberation Command (COLINA) which carried out armed attacks and bank robberies in the late 60’s.
David Gilbert, who is of the same aspirational generation, is living a dramatically contrasting life -- presently doing life in a New York prison. His recently released memoir, Love and Struggle, My life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, opens the door onto a world that mostly exists as some distorted corner of the political imagination of the U.S. in 2012.
But it’s a world and a story that is vivid and compelling -- and one worth paying attention to at precisely this moment as a young generation of activists is generating its own stories on Wall Street and beyond.
Like Mujica, Funes, and Rousseff, Gilbert was a militant fighter in the 60s and 70s -- but he found himself at war from within what Che Guevara called the “belly of the beast.”
The actor and activist Peter Coyote had this to say about the memoir:
Like many of his contemporaries, David Gilbert gambled his life on a vision of a more just and generous world. His particular bet cost him the last three decades in prison and, whether or not you agree with his youthful decision, you can be the beneficiary of his years of deep thought, reflection, and analysis on the reality we all share. I urge you to read it.
Written under the appalling conditions of imprisonment in the massive U.S. prison-industrial complex -- under the endless dangers, harassments, and frustrations of life in various New York prisons -- the existence of this volume is itself an amazing accomplishment.
Gilbert explores crucial issues of the 60’s and today: racism, imperialism, the oppression of women, and the crisis of capitalism. The fact that it is self-critical without being maudlin or self-pitying, the fact that he has crafted a reflective, modest, and ultimately hopeful picture of his life and times, makes Love and Struggle particularly welcome.
We were, as a generation, born into war. After the “good war” to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, the U.S. continued a series of military engagements designed to defeat liberation movements and assure its economic dominance in the world. While most everyone today agrees that the war on Vietnam was at best a mistake and more accurately a genocidal horror, it is curious how the American narrative has twisted even that memory.
Those who seek to draw the U.S. into more military adventures cynically extol the veterans of the war as heroes while leaving a record number of homeless vets to fend for themselves on the streets or to populate the prisons. At the same time, they denigrate the veterans of the resistance. Those who were right, in other words, are never honored in the corporate media -- they are erased and disappeared
While David Gilbert represents an extreme of the resistance movement, and while the Brinks robbery which landed him in prison was thoughtless and harmful, Gilbert reminds us that it is essential to confront the many war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam -- and continues to commit here and around the world -- with no consequences.
David’s life sentence does not square with Lt. William Calley’s sentence of three years house arrest for the massacre of 104 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1971 or John McCain’s record of bombing civilians from the air, wanton crimes against humanity; and it does not make sense against the other My Lai’s that occurred on a weekly basis.
Beyond the actions of troops on the ground, a just society would have prepared war crimes trials for top military and political leaders who ordered carpet bombing of civilian areas, the vast deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” assassination program, the decade-long, “secret” aerial bombardment of Laos, as well as the Cointelpro attacks against African American and Native American activists in the U.S. that resulted in hundreds being killed and imprisoned.
David Gilbert does not ask us to forget the costly human consequences of the 1981 Brinks robbery in which three people were killed and which landed him in prison. But his memoir forces us to encounter and understand much more about the struggles of the 60s and 70s.
Since the release of Sam Greene and Bill Siegel’s film Weather Underground in 2002, there has been a resurgence of interest in those in the U.S. who went from protest to resistance and from resistance to clandestine actions. Five or six “Weather” memoirs have come out in the past decade -- each with a different approach or take on the history.
Two excerpts will perhaps capture some of the intensity of his insight and analysis. In discussing the work of the Weather Underground to build a clandestine movement against U.S. international wars, he reminds us of the example of Portugal:
1974 brought an unanticipated but exhilarating boost to the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism. On April 25, the dictatorship that had ruled Portugal with an iron hand since 1932 was overthrown. Popular discontent had been central and radicals, including socialists and communists, were major forces in the new constellation of power. The new government soon ceded independence to all of Portugal’s remaining colonies. The series of colonial wars in Africa had drained Portugal’s resources and economy, and that created the conditions for radical internal changes.
We saw the relatively poor imperial nation of Portugal as a possible small-scale model of what could happen to the far more powerful U.S. after a protracted period of economic losses and strains brought on by "two, three, many Vietnams." The costs of a series of imperial wars could crack open the potential of radical change within the home country.
And he often counters narrow and stupid characterizations of the 60s and 70s, reminding us of the human faces behind the mythology of the radical movements.
In discussing the death of Teddy Gold, his old friend from Columbia University, he seeks to set the record straight:
When Teddy and two other comrades were killed in the tragic townhouse explosion, J. Kirkpatrick Sale immediately published a piece in The Nation defining Teddy as the epitome of "guilt politics." I don’t think Sale ever met Teddy; he certainly didn’t know him. Sale’s rush to judgment probably came from his urgency to discredit any political push toward armed struggle. The "guilt politics" mantra just didn’t fit the deep level of identification we felt with Third World people; and far from feeling guilt, with its condescending sense that we are so much better off than they are, we were responding to their leadership.
The national liberation movements were providing the tangible hope that a better world was possible. Those who caricatured him never saw Teddy on his return from Cuba -- the very picture of inspiration, energy, and hope. The word that captures Teddy’s psyche as he built the New York collective was not guilt but exuberance.
Whether you agree with much that David says or very little, Love and Struggle is a book you won’t soon forget.
[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu. Read more articles by Rick Ayers on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
Showing posts with label SDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SDS. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Monday, December 19, 2011
The Latest From The Rag Blog
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
The Latest From The Rag Blog
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Latest From The Rag Blog
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
**********
Thursday, August 11, 2011
From "The Rag Blog"-VERSE / Felix Shafer : hey, marilyn - In Honor Of The Late Class-War Prisoner Marikyn Buck
Click on the headline to line to The Rag Blog entry listed in the headline.
Markin comment:
Every labor militant should honor the memory of the late class-war prisoner Marilyn Buck. Whatever the political disagreements we could have used more like her then, and now.
Markin comment:
Every labor militant should honor the memory of the late class-war prisoner Marilyn Buck. Whatever the political disagreements we could have used more like her then, and now.
Friday, July 22, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- July 1971
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
This articles in this issue have already been commented on earlier in this series (see archives, March 2011) and the following comment on the subject of getting ROTC off American college and high school campuses is taken from that source.
Markin comment:
I do not believe, at least from the anecdotal evidence I have received from the younger people that I have talked to lately, that today’s students realize the importance of the struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to kick off, or keep off, ROTC from the campuses.
Of all the social turmoil, political fights, and disruptions caused by the disputes over the Vietnam War (and allied social questions around race, sex, and, a little, class) on campus the number one question after the ever present universal conscription draft on students’ minds then (male students in particular) was the many-stranded links between the university and what was then called (and still should be called) the military-industrial complex. Currently, absent a draft (although we all know that there is a de facto “economic draft” that is almost as insidious as the physically-imposed one), the most concrete way that students on campus (including on high school campuses) can slow down the war machine is by organizing to kick or keep ROTC off campus. In the end the military depends on their officer corps to stabilize their operations. When wars flare up the traditional academies are not nearly enough to staff that corps. We have every interest in making sure the American imperial state’s capacity to wage war is curtailed.
This article also spends a little time talking about the draft (universal conscription, or some such term). Recently I have also been hearing quite a bit about how the reinstatement of the draft is necessary. Am I hearing this from the American military? No, I think they are quite happy with an all-volunteer service with fewer malcontents than an army filled with “citizen soldiers” that still fills them with dread (and screaming in the night) from the last time they tried it in the Vietnam War period. Am I hearing it from military veterans who see such service as manly (or now womanly)? No. From right-wing ideologues worried about manpower shortages in an American imperial age with multi-front wars? No. I have been hearing it, and hearing it rather more consistently than I would like. from elements of the anti-war movement.
Why? The main argument runs like this. If there were a draft (presumably a male and female draft under current social norms) then today’s rather apathetic students would be pushed into a more pro-active stance against war as occurred as the Vietnam War continued endlessly on (well, almost endlessly, the DRV and NLF troops on the ground in Vietnam resolved that question finally). Wrong? Why would one, especially one who was arguing from an anti-war perspective , want to give the American military, the most destruction military power the world has ever known by orders of magnitude, addition cannon fodder on the off-chance that today’s pampered students might rebel against that condition. To ask the question is to give the answer, pretty or not. While I agree that it is frustrating to the nth degree to see the campuses so quiescent that is no solution. As this article point out our argument is- No Draft. And if a draft does come, then we, or I should say the young we, go into the military and raise that holy hell that the military brass hate to think about in their worst dreams. The rest of us will fight the war machine in other ways in support of you.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
This articles in this issue have already been commented on earlier in this series (see archives, March 2011) and the following comment on the subject of getting ROTC off American college and high school campuses is taken from that source.
Markin comment:
I do not believe, at least from the anecdotal evidence I have received from the younger people that I have talked to lately, that today’s students realize the importance of the struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to kick off, or keep off, ROTC from the campuses.
Of all the social turmoil, political fights, and disruptions caused by the disputes over the Vietnam War (and allied social questions around race, sex, and, a little, class) on campus the number one question after the ever present universal conscription draft on students’ minds then (male students in particular) was the many-stranded links between the university and what was then called (and still should be called) the military-industrial complex. Currently, absent a draft (although we all know that there is a de facto “economic draft” that is almost as insidious as the physically-imposed one), the most concrete way that students on campus (including on high school campuses) can slow down the war machine is by organizing to kick or keep ROTC off campus. In the end the military depends on their officer corps to stabilize their operations. When wars flare up the traditional academies are not nearly enough to staff that corps. We have every interest in making sure the American imperial state’s capacity to wage war is curtailed.
This article also spends a little time talking about the draft (universal conscription, or some such term). Recently I have also been hearing quite a bit about how the reinstatement of the draft is necessary. Am I hearing this from the American military? No, I think they are quite happy with an all-volunteer service with fewer malcontents than an army filled with “citizen soldiers” that still fills them with dread (and screaming in the night) from the last time they tried it in the Vietnam War period. Am I hearing it from military veterans who see such service as manly (or now womanly)? No. From right-wing ideologues worried about manpower shortages in an American imperial age with multi-front wars? No. I have been hearing it, and hearing it rather more consistently than I would like. from elements of the anti-war movement.
Why? The main argument runs like this. If there were a draft (presumably a male and female draft under current social norms) then today’s rather apathetic students would be pushed into a more pro-active stance against war as occurred as the Vietnam War continued endlessly on (well, almost endlessly, the DRV and NLF troops on the ground in Vietnam resolved that question finally). Wrong? Why would one, especially one who was arguing from an anti-war perspective , want to give the American military, the most destruction military power the world has ever known by orders of magnitude, addition cannon fodder on the off-chance that today’s pampered students might rebel against that condition. To ask the question is to give the answer, pretty or not. While I agree that it is frustrating to the nth degree to see the campuses so quiescent that is no solution. As this article point out our argument is- No Draft. And if a draft does come, then we, or I should say the young we, go into the military and raise that holy hell that the military brass hate to think about in their worst dreams. The rest of us will fight the war machine in other ways in support of you.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-April 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Reposted from an earlier post commenting on this series.
Reflections On Old Time (Old Times 1960s) Revolutionary Methods Of Work- A Short Note
Markin comment on this article:
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era anti-war GI movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with the war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old time way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called good old days when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that was not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather resolution no in our favor) was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time the early parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson).
One of the most poignant moments for me in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. That described crude hectograph method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of work than today’s speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. He noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch. That is an additional image that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
And as I said there, and will repeat here. Be still my heart. A picture comes to mind very similar to what Trotsky described, all due technological advances considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971 Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building findable in any medium or large city, if you look hard enough, long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce work private detectives, penny ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell for the rent (discounted usually depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses). Or some clean, always clean, back room, down stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s distain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long in the tooth old time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, to produce the latest newsletter. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing”, that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-spell check days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about being only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused media-icon-obsessed Marshall McLuhan message age couldn’t take more than one sheet. Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… but enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty {referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know”, know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on you hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friend, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for the poster paste.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Reposted from an earlier post commenting on this series.
Reflections On Old Time (Old Times 1960s) Revolutionary Methods Of Work- A Short Note
Markin comment on this article:
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era anti-war GI movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with the war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old time way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called good old days when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that was not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather resolution no in our favor) was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time the early parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson).
One of the most poignant moments for me in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. That described crude hectograph method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of work than today’s speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. He noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch. That is an additional image that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
And as I said there, and will repeat here. Be still my heart. A picture comes to mind very similar to what Trotsky described, all due technological advances considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971 Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building findable in any medium or large city, if you look hard enough, long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce work private detectives, penny ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell for the rent (discounted usually depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses). Or some clean, always clean, back room, down stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s distain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long in the tooth old time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, to produce the latest newsletter. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing”, that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-spell check days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about being only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused media-icon-obsessed Marshall McLuhan message age couldn’t take more than one sheet. Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… but enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty {referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know”, know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on you hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friend, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for the poster paste.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1971
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- December 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
Monday, July 18, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- September 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:
There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.
The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:
There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.
The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-May-June 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue:
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for an labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue:
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for an labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Friday, July 15, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-February 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on this issue:
As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 1-8, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.
Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.
It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.
Additional Note:
The four-point program presented here by the RMC, culminating in breaking with the Democrats and the fight for a labor party, was just such a counterposed program to attract serious student militants at the time. Particularly when PL, the CP, the SWP, and others had lost their moorings and began to cater to what? Liberalism, narrow campus-issue-ism (WSA), social workerism (CWSA), and so on. In the next student upsurge, or general working class upsurge, that we have seen just the glimmer of signs of this year with the public workers union struggles we will need just such a program to attract, and keep, serious militants.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
**********
Markin comment on this issue:
As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 1-8, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.
Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.
It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.
Additional Note:
The four-point program presented here by the RMC, culminating in breaking with the Democrats and the fight for a labor party, was just such a counterposed program to attract serious student militants at the time. Particularly when PL, the CP, the SWP, and others had lost their moorings and began to cater to what? Liberalism, narrow campus-issue-ism (WSA), social workerism (CWSA), and so on. In the next student upsurge, or general working class upsurge, that we have seen just the glimmer of signs of this year with the public workers union struggles we will need just such a program to attract, and keep, serious militants.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
When Did The 1960s End?- Doctor Hunter S. Thompson's Take (Doctor Gonzo)- From "Fear and And Loathing In Las Vegas-" High-Water Mark"
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for background on the anti-Vietnam War actions of May Day 1971.
The late Hunter Thompson's take on the headline question:
HIGH-WATER MARK
STRANGE MEMORIES ON this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the tollgate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The whole concept of decades is wrong. That is why people have trouble with it. A decade is ten years, which some people will tell you is about as long as a dime. The only people who still talk in terms of decades are Australians and possibly some New Zealanders, but the Aussies will tell you that the New Zealanders think more in terms of twenty years, like us. In politics, a "generation" is twenty years: ten is not enough. Time flies when you do most of your real work after midnight—five months can go by and it feels like one sleepless night.
Las Vegas, 1976
*********
...and Markin's
Wednesday, July 04, 2007, American Left History:
*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.
The late Hunter Thompson's take on the headline question:
HIGH-WATER MARK
STRANGE MEMORIES ON this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the tollgate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The whole concept of decades is wrong. That is why people have trouble with it. A decade is ten years, which some people will tell you is about as long as a dime. The only people who still talk in terms of decades are Australians and possibly some New Zealanders, but the Aussies will tell you that the New Zealanders think more in terms of twenty years, like us. In politics, a "generation" is twenty years: ten is not enough. Time flies when you do most of your real work after midnight—five months can go by and it feels like one sleepless night.
Las Vegas, 1976
*********
...and Markin's
Wednesday, July 04, 2007, American Left History:
*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.
Saturday, July 02, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Campus Spartacist" (NYC, November 1965)
Click on the headline to link to the Campus Spartacist archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Campus Spartacist
Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 through 1971. The list below reflects these local versions.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
The following is a commentary taken from one of the G.I. Voice series of archival articles. Since the key historical youth article in htis issue centers on the question of "We won't go" as a civilian respond to the drums of war the points made there on the military side apply here as well:
"On Bolshevik Work In The Military- A Short Note
In the last of a recent series of posts in this blog entitled From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs (see archives, dated May11-18, 2011) I noted that in late 1969 and early 1970 there was desperate need for Bolsheviks in the American military, especially among the ground troops (“grunts” for those who know military terminology then, and now) in Vietnam who, according to estimates by the knowledgeable and un-ostrich-like sectors of the Army brass, were “unreliable”. Unreliable for the brass meaning that the troops could no longer automatically be counted on to pack up their gear at a minute’s notice, go out on patrol, blow away some forsaken village in conjunction with eight billion tons of airborne bombs raining down all around them, and then come back to barracks, or more usually, some ill-defined base camp, kick back, have a few beers (or a couple of joints, ya, it was like that at the end of the 1960s), and forget about it. Unreliable for a Bolshevik of course meaning something different, that the rebellious mass of troops who were sticking it to the brass in their own ill-defined way needed some political direction if the whole thing was not to just blow up in a huge increase of stockade numbers, or worst, just the endless quagmire of drink, drugs, and isolated officer fraggings.
Of course Bolsheviks were as scarce as hen’s teeth on the military ground in Vietnam, and here in America, for that matter. My point, and I included myself as a target of that 1969 point, was that there were real possibilities for serious Bolshevik inroads among the troops just then, and from there who knows. And that is where the real heart of my comment was directed. The mainline policy of the left, organized and unorganized, in regard to anti-war GIs (to the extent that some elements even saw that as a fruitful area of work, except as the “vanguard” of the eight million “mass marches” in such frontline “hot spots” as New York City, San Francisco and Washington, but certainly not Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon) was directed, if anything, at providing, in essence, social services to get individual GIs out anyway they could, or to provide a platform for free speech, free class-war prisoners-type legal defense efforts once the brass started to seriously pull down the hammer on GI anti-war activities (notably in places like Fort Hood Texas, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina) .
Needless to say this comment evoked a certain degree of incomprehension and misunderstanding among some of the younger comrades that I work with in a local anti-imperialist, anti-war committee. The thrust of one comrade’s argument is what has prompted this short note. His argument/question was basically what was wrong with Bolsheviks (or leftists in general since the questioner does not consider himself a Bolshevik devotee), acting in their role as “tribunes of the people” (my shorthand phrase for what he was getting at) in trying to get individuals soldiers out of the military, and out of harm’s way. Of course my short answer to that was “nothing, nothing at all.” In a mass struggle situation with a workers party representative in some bourgeois legislative body, or better, as a commissar in some incipient workers’ council of course such “constituency services” are part of the job. In the direct military context a union for enlisted service personnel would perform such tasks as part of their work, just like a trade union does for its members. Of course that begs the long answer.
The long answer really defines the different in approach and, frankly, outlook between those very large forces who were committed to a moral opposition to war, perhaps any war, and those who actually wanted to end an unjust war, and Vietnam as an unjust war qualified for that designation in triplicate. As I also noted in that last post comment mentioned above when active duty GIs started to emerge looking for civilian support the bulk of the anti-war movement embraced that sector in the same way that it related to the military draft of that day-“hell no, we won’t go.” And that slogan really gets to the crux of the matter. Since we live in not military draft times I will quickly outline the Bolshevik position on military service. We did not then, or do not now, volunteer for the imperial military services. But then, if drafted, you go. No shilly-shallying about it. And if ordered to Vietnam (or wherever) you go, even if that means the possibility of shooting at comrades on the other side, and even if you wish to high heaven for the victory of the other side, like the DNV-NLF in Vietnam. Today, obviously, with a formally all-volunteer military service corps, some of the above does not apply but if we run into a radicalized soldier, and in turn recruit him or her, then they go. No shilly-shallying now either.
That said, most of the other points in that last post can be placed here to buttress my argument above:
“Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if that is where the fates took them. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and that of those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
And that last phrase, my friends, is what separates the Bolsheviks from everybody else, always."
*********
Campus Spartacist
Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 through 1971. The list below reflects these local versions.
—Riazanov Library
******
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.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
The following is a commentary taken from one of the G.I. Voice series of archival articles. Since the key historical youth article in htis issue centers on the question of "We won't go" as a civilian respond to the drums of war the points made there on the military side apply here as well:
"On Bolshevik Work In The Military- A Short Note
In the last of a recent series of posts in this blog entitled From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs (see archives, dated May11-18, 2011) I noted that in late 1969 and early 1970 there was desperate need for Bolsheviks in the American military, especially among the ground troops (“grunts” for those who know military terminology then, and now) in Vietnam who, according to estimates by the knowledgeable and un-ostrich-like sectors of the Army brass, were “unreliable”. Unreliable for the brass meaning that the troops could no longer automatically be counted on to pack up their gear at a minute’s notice, go out on patrol, blow away some forsaken village in conjunction with eight billion tons of airborne bombs raining down all around them, and then come back to barracks, or more usually, some ill-defined base camp, kick back, have a few beers (or a couple of joints, ya, it was like that at the end of the 1960s), and forget about it. Unreliable for a Bolshevik of course meaning something different, that the rebellious mass of troops who were sticking it to the brass in their own ill-defined way needed some political direction if the whole thing was not to just blow up in a huge increase of stockade numbers, or worst, just the endless quagmire of drink, drugs, and isolated officer fraggings.
Of course Bolsheviks were as scarce as hen’s teeth on the military ground in Vietnam, and here in America, for that matter. My point, and I included myself as a target of that 1969 point, was that there were real possibilities for serious Bolshevik inroads among the troops just then, and from there who knows. And that is where the real heart of my comment was directed. The mainline policy of the left, organized and unorganized, in regard to anti-war GIs (to the extent that some elements even saw that as a fruitful area of work, except as the “vanguard” of the eight million “mass marches” in such frontline “hot spots” as New York City, San Francisco and Washington, but certainly not Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon) was directed, if anything, at providing, in essence, social services to get individual GIs out anyway they could, or to provide a platform for free speech, free class-war prisoners-type legal defense efforts once the brass started to seriously pull down the hammer on GI anti-war activities (notably in places like Fort Hood Texas, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina) .
Needless to say this comment evoked a certain degree of incomprehension and misunderstanding among some of the younger comrades that I work with in a local anti-imperialist, anti-war committee. The thrust of one comrade’s argument is what has prompted this short note. His argument/question was basically what was wrong with Bolsheviks (or leftists in general since the questioner does not consider himself a Bolshevik devotee), acting in their role as “tribunes of the people” (my shorthand phrase for what he was getting at) in trying to get individuals soldiers out of the military, and out of harm’s way. Of course my short answer to that was “nothing, nothing at all.” In a mass struggle situation with a workers party representative in some bourgeois legislative body, or better, as a commissar in some incipient workers’ council of course such “constituency services” are part of the job. In the direct military context a union for enlisted service personnel would perform such tasks as part of their work, just like a trade union does for its members. Of course that begs the long answer.
The long answer really defines the different in approach and, frankly, outlook between those very large forces who were committed to a moral opposition to war, perhaps any war, and those who actually wanted to end an unjust war, and Vietnam as an unjust war qualified for that designation in triplicate. As I also noted in that last post comment mentioned above when active duty GIs started to emerge looking for civilian support the bulk of the anti-war movement embraced that sector in the same way that it related to the military draft of that day-“hell no, we won’t go.” And that slogan really gets to the crux of the matter. Since we live in not military draft times I will quickly outline the Bolshevik position on military service. We did not then, or do not now, volunteer for the imperial military services. But then, if drafted, you go. No shilly-shallying about it. And if ordered to Vietnam (or wherever) you go, even if that means the possibility of shooting at comrades on the other side, and even if you wish to high heaven for the victory of the other side, like the DNV-NLF in Vietnam. Today, obviously, with a formally all-volunteer military service corps, some of the above does not apply but if we run into a radicalized soldier, and in turn recruit him or her, then they go. No shilly-shallying now either.
That said, most of the other points in that last post can be placed here to buttress my argument above:
“Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if that is where the fates took them. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and that of those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
And that last phrase, my friends, is what separates the Bolsheviks from everybody else, always."
Thursday, April 07, 2011
From The Bob Feldman 1968 Blog- Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Mark Rudd was the chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt; and Rudd’s autobiography, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen was finally published in March 2009.
In a 2009 email interview for the Toward Freedom anti-war website, Rudd responded to some questions about how U.S. pacifists might consider responding to the role U.S. universities play in the current historical era of “permanent war abroad and economic depression at home” and about his new book. And he also indicated, at that time, that he still opposed the training of U.S. military officers on U.S. university campuses.
(1) In 2009, some U.S. pacifists seem to regard elite universities like Columbia as institutions that have, both historically and currently, opposed war and opposed racism—since they hire both anti-war and African-American professors and administrators, implement affirmative action hiring programs, set up “peace studies” and “African-American studies” departments, steer foundation grants and scholarship money in the direction of students from historically oppressed communities and to local community groups, and provide free or low-rent meeting room space for anti-war students and off-campus pacifist groups.
Yet in the preface to your book, you write that between 1965 and 1968 you were “a member of SDS at Columbia University” and “made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies.” In what ways were Columbia University’s policies “pro-war and racist” in 1968 and in what ways are the policies of Columbia University and other elite U.S. universities “pro-war and racist” in 2009?
Mark Rudd [MR]: The specific demands we raised leading up to the spring of 1968--training and recruitment of military officers for the war in Vietnam, weapons research for the war, the building of a gym in public park land--were only the tip of the iceberg of Columbia's policies. Within months of the strike, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) produced a book entitled "Who Rules Columbia," in which they detailed the military, State Dept., and CIA contracts and connections with the School of International Affairs, the various geographical "area studies," such as the East Asia Institute, as well as the revolving door between Columbia and the government; also Columbia's expansion into the surrounding community at the expense of non-white residents. Most of these connections and policies are still in place; almost all major research universities are still major war contractors. The point is that student activists have their work cut out for them to research and expose what's correctly called the military-industrial-academic complex.
(2) In chapter 1 of your book, titled “A Good German,” you recall that when you first met the then-chairman of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) anti-war student group--current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert—in early 1966, Gilbert mentioned that in May 1965 his group had “held an antiwar protest at the Naval ROTC graduation ceremony” at Columbia. And later in the “A Good German” chapter you mention that in March 1967 you had “taken part in a sit-in at a Naval ROTC class” at Columbia.
Why did you oppose Naval ROTC at Columbia in the 1960s? And do you think U.S. pacifists should consider opposing ROTC on U.S. university campuses in 2009?
MR: The issue is fundamentally moral. Is the training of people to wage war against other countries, carrying out a criminally aggressive military policy, appropriate in an institution that pretends to seek the truth? Our answer to this question was NO, because we believed in the necessity to oppose U.S. violence as a moral value. Remember, too, that the time we lived in was essentially post-World War II, and the problem of values in society was still being debated in the aftermath of Nazism. I have no doubt that contemporary students will be taking this up again in the near future.
(3) In chapter 2 of your book, you mention that anti-war students at Columbia protested against recruitment on campus by external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines. Why did you think that it was morally wrong for Columbia University to allow external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus in 1967? And do you think U.S. pacifists in 2009 should also protest against U.S. universities that allow the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus while the Pentagon’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues?
MR: Same response as #2 above. Whether recruitment is "external" (e.g., Marine recruiters) or "internal" (Military Science Dept. training future naval officers), it amounts to the same thing. The resources of the university are being used to help wage war.
( 4) In chapter 3 of your book, titled “Action Faction,” you write that on March 27, 1968 “SDS had fifteen hundred names on a petition calling for the severing of “ Columbia University’s “ties with the Pentagon think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA);” and “IDA…became the shorthand symbol for Columbia’s huge network of complicity with the war.”
In 2009, IDA still exists. Do you think that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that IDA be finally shut down by the Democratic Obama Administration and that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that U.S. universities like Columbia, MIT and Harvard stop performing war research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] in 2009?
MR: I believe that the entire US military budget should be cut back and the money used for social needs both in this country and around the world. Security would be much better served by the development of true international law, not more nuclear weapons. If that doesn't happen in the 21st century, we're doomed. All war research should immediately stop everywhere and the money be put into peace, diplomacy, law, and sustainable energy development. To do less now is not only suicidal, it's downright dumb.
(5) In your book, you mention that you and Abbie Hoffman were both arrested at a November 1967 anti-war protest in Midtown Manhattan against the Foreign Policy Association giving an award to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Abbie’s death. How would you characterize the role that Abbie Hoffman played in U.S. anti-war movement history and his historical relationship to U.S. pacifists and non-violent anti-war activists like Dave Dellinger?
MR: Abbie was essentially a comedian and an organizer. He was not at all violent; he always encouraged mass organizing, though often in the form of provocative guerilla theater, like the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968. I forget how he and Dave Dellinger got along in Chicago, both in 1968 and during the conspiracy trial the next year. My guess is that they respected each other. Perhaps you know more specifics.
(6) Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, how would you respond to Professor Jonah Raskin’s assertion in his review of your book which was posted on The Rag Blog that “like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life—he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants;” and “Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed…It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd.”?
MR: I wonder if Jonah actually read my book.
(7) Why do you think the right-wing media monitoring pressure group” Accuracy In Media” [A.I.M.] apparently attempted to pressure Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing firm to not promote your book, according to the” Accuracy In Media” web site?
MR: Just another way for the far right to try get at Obama, but it's so indirect that it makes zero sense to anybody else. There was a tiny connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, but that fact gained no votes for John McCain. These people are so stupid that they're still pursuing a tactic that's already failed. I find that a rather comforting fact.
(8) Do you think it’s likely that Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board will decide to give you a Pulitzer Prize for writing Underground—after Columbia University’s current president--a current board member of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate named Lee Bollinger—reads what you’ve written about Columbia University?
MR: I'm a shoe-in.
Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Mark Rudd was the chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt; and Rudd’s autobiography, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen was finally published in March 2009.
In a 2009 email interview for the Toward Freedom anti-war website, Rudd responded to some questions about how U.S. pacifists might consider responding to the role U.S. universities play in the current historical era of “permanent war abroad and economic depression at home” and about his new book. And he also indicated, at that time, that he still opposed the training of U.S. military officers on U.S. university campuses.
(1) In 2009, some U.S. pacifists seem to regard elite universities like Columbia as institutions that have, both historically and currently, opposed war and opposed racism—since they hire both anti-war and African-American professors and administrators, implement affirmative action hiring programs, set up “peace studies” and “African-American studies” departments, steer foundation grants and scholarship money in the direction of students from historically oppressed communities and to local community groups, and provide free or low-rent meeting room space for anti-war students and off-campus pacifist groups.
Yet in the preface to your book, you write that between 1965 and 1968 you were “a member of SDS at Columbia University” and “made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies.” In what ways were Columbia University’s policies “pro-war and racist” in 1968 and in what ways are the policies of Columbia University and other elite U.S. universities “pro-war and racist” in 2009?
Mark Rudd [MR]: The specific demands we raised leading up to the spring of 1968--training and recruitment of military officers for the war in Vietnam, weapons research for the war, the building of a gym in public park land--were only the tip of the iceberg of Columbia's policies. Within months of the strike, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) produced a book entitled "Who Rules Columbia," in which they detailed the military, State Dept., and CIA contracts and connections with the School of International Affairs, the various geographical "area studies," such as the East Asia Institute, as well as the revolving door between Columbia and the government; also Columbia's expansion into the surrounding community at the expense of non-white residents. Most of these connections and policies are still in place; almost all major research universities are still major war contractors. The point is that student activists have their work cut out for them to research and expose what's correctly called the military-industrial-academic complex.
(2) In chapter 1 of your book, titled “A Good German,” you recall that when you first met the then-chairman of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) anti-war student group--current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert—in early 1966, Gilbert mentioned that in May 1965 his group had “held an antiwar protest at the Naval ROTC graduation ceremony” at Columbia. And later in the “A Good German” chapter you mention that in March 1967 you had “taken part in a sit-in at a Naval ROTC class” at Columbia.
Why did you oppose Naval ROTC at Columbia in the 1960s? And do you think U.S. pacifists should consider opposing ROTC on U.S. university campuses in 2009?
MR: The issue is fundamentally moral. Is the training of people to wage war against other countries, carrying out a criminally aggressive military policy, appropriate in an institution that pretends to seek the truth? Our answer to this question was NO, because we believed in the necessity to oppose U.S. violence as a moral value. Remember, too, that the time we lived in was essentially post-World War II, and the problem of values in society was still being debated in the aftermath of Nazism. I have no doubt that contemporary students will be taking this up again in the near future.
(3) In chapter 2 of your book, you mention that anti-war students at Columbia protested against recruitment on campus by external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines. Why did you think that it was morally wrong for Columbia University to allow external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus in 1967? And do you think U.S. pacifists in 2009 should also protest against U.S. universities that allow the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus while the Pentagon’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues?
MR: Same response as #2 above. Whether recruitment is "external" (e.g., Marine recruiters) or "internal" (Military Science Dept. training future naval officers), it amounts to the same thing. The resources of the university are being used to help wage war.
( 4) In chapter 3 of your book, titled “Action Faction,” you write that on March 27, 1968 “SDS had fifteen hundred names on a petition calling for the severing of “ Columbia University’s “ties with the Pentagon think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA);” and “IDA…became the shorthand symbol for Columbia’s huge network of complicity with the war.”
In 2009, IDA still exists. Do you think that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that IDA be finally shut down by the Democratic Obama Administration and that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that U.S. universities like Columbia, MIT and Harvard stop performing war research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] in 2009?
MR: I believe that the entire US military budget should be cut back and the money used for social needs both in this country and around the world. Security would be much better served by the development of true international law, not more nuclear weapons. If that doesn't happen in the 21st century, we're doomed. All war research should immediately stop everywhere and the money be put into peace, diplomacy, law, and sustainable energy development. To do less now is not only suicidal, it's downright dumb.
(5) In your book, you mention that you and Abbie Hoffman were both arrested at a November 1967 anti-war protest in Midtown Manhattan against the Foreign Policy Association giving an award to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Abbie’s death. How would you characterize the role that Abbie Hoffman played in U.S. anti-war movement history and his historical relationship to U.S. pacifists and non-violent anti-war activists like Dave Dellinger?
MR: Abbie was essentially a comedian and an organizer. He was not at all violent; he always encouraged mass organizing, though often in the form of provocative guerilla theater, like the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968. I forget how he and Dave Dellinger got along in Chicago, both in 1968 and during the conspiracy trial the next year. My guess is that they respected each other. Perhaps you know more specifics.
(6) Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, how would you respond to Professor Jonah Raskin’s assertion in his review of your book which was posted on The Rag Blog that “like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life—he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants;” and “Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed…It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd.”?
MR: I wonder if Jonah actually read my book.
(7) Why do you think the right-wing media monitoring pressure group” Accuracy In Media” [A.I.M.] apparently attempted to pressure Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing firm to not promote your book, according to the” Accuracy In Media” web site?
MR: Just another way for the far right to try get at Obama, but it's so indirect that it makes zero sense to anybody else. There was a tiny connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, but that fact gained no votes for John McCain. These people are so stupid that they're still pursuing a tactic that's already failed. I find that a rather comforting fact.
(8) Do you think it’s likely that Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board will decide to give you a Pulitzer Prize for writing Underground—after Columbia University’s current president--a current board member of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate named Lee Bollinger—reads what you’ve written about Columbia University?
MR: I'm a shoe-in.
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