Go to the International Communist League Website to purchase the full document or to the International Bolshevik Tendency Marxist Archives section of their website to download it.
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Preface
The present collection of documents deals with the vital issue of the relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth organization. These documents, from the years 1957-61, set forth two aspects of contemporary party-youth relations: they reaffirm the earlier position of the Leninist and Trotskyist movement; and they present the history of those few years of Socialist Workers Party-youth relations during which the SWP re-established a nationwide revolutionary Marxist youth organization in this country after a lapse of nearly two decades. These documents, as a collection, but especially the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, have a long history of suppression in the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. Some of them have never before been circulated in any way.
Documents and Definitions
Document one was written in 1957 by Murry Weiss, the architect of the initial attempt to rebuild the SWP's youth organization under the conditions of the break-up of the CP. Because he was one of the very few continuing leaders of the SWP with any significant experience in its earlier youth group he was particularly interested and involved in the new attempt in 1957. What he did initially was to set forth the Leninist principles upon which the earlier Trotskyist youth organization had been founded, principles which documents two through seven also restated, a few years later when the SWP leadership began to turn its back on its own history.
These documents two through seven present the position on youth party relations of the YSA leadership both before and during the time the dispute over the Cuban Revolution forced many youth leaders to form the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, the forebears of the Spartacist League. This position, in brief, is that a youth organization should be autonomously related to the party, being organizationally independent, but ultimately politically subordinate.
Document eight, a letter by James P. Cannon, presents the antithetical position arrived at by the SWP majority leadership, namely that the youth organization, although not openly related to the party should be, through the fractional intervention of party members, in effect organizationally dependent and thus politically servile. Cannon's letter might appropriately have been titled "Epitaph", for it served that function in the discussion.
Stands Not Alone
Because of its peculiar nature, the youth question does not stand by itself. When it comes up, it is almost never raised as an abstract issue; instead it usually reflects disagreements within the party and the youth on other political issues. For example, in 1961, a majority of the central leadership, progenitors of the Spartacist League, viewing Castro as then petty-bourgeois, condemned the SWP's uncritical treatment of him as a great "proletarian revolutionary". (See Marxist Bulletin No.8, Cuba and Marxist Theory, for the discussion on Cuba.)
The youth leadership of 1961 started by criticizing the SWP's Pabloist adaptation to Castro; but when these criticisms brought forth the SWP's perversion of the YSA, the youth leadership was faced with the need to reaffirm the Leninist youth party relations which the SWP majority had found necessary to suppress. In order to do this, the YSA leadership based itself on the development and functioning of the Young Communist International in Lenin's time and on the YSA's own Educational Bulletin, "History of the International Socialist Youth Movement (to 1929)".
The RT's attempt to reaffirm the Leninist position made it very clear to the SWP majority that it would henceforth need to conduct discussions of youth-party relationships by concealing or prohibiting the early documents of the YSA and the earlier history of the communist youth movement. The importance of keeping today's YSAers in a state of virginal ignorance had been clearly demonstrated by the RT itself, which through its development in the YSA had understood the need for political opposition to the opportunism of the entrenched SWP leadership. Accordingly, the SWP has suppressed historically tested practices and has worked out a means for neutralizing any opposition in the YSA. It has a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if you-don't policy for those SWPers in the youth with some difference with the majority: it sometimes gives them permission to raise an opposing view, so that if they then don't, they stand as unserious, ashamed of their positions, etc.; however, if they do raise the differences, they are nonetheless at least informally condemned for breaking with the "best interests" of the party.
Inside the YSA-SWP
A brief review of the particular history of this question in the SWP should illustrate the general development of struggle which any incipient opposition would find as it begins the criticism of the centrist leadership of a once Bolshevik organization.
In 1957, the SWP had inaugurated the attempt to recreate a Trotskyist youth movement in the United States after a lapse of 17 years. The SWP, however, was no longer the same party it had been in 1940; thus the formula of an autonomous youth organization caused much uneasiness among the party brass. By 1961 their centrist fears proved justified: the Cuban question showed that they were indeed unable to politically lead their youth section. Accordingly, with a majority of the YSA central leadership going into opposition over Cuba, the SWP struck organizationally at the youth majority. The SWP took over a virtual receivership of the YSA, bringing in one Carl Feingold, an SWP National Committee member, to lead a special party commission on the YSA. In doing this it destroyed the embryo of Leninist youth-party relations which had been developing since 1957.
The fate of the key seventh document in this collection, the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, well exemplifies the situation. Faced with the perversion of the YSA's internal life, the youth leadership sought in this resolution to reaffirm absolutely unambiguously the necessary and historically tested relation in political struggle between revolutionaries of different generations. The document was drafted for submission to the YSA National Conference of December 1961. The party National Office decided instead to refer it to a party "Commission on Party-Youth Relations" which never met. And later the Political Committee forbade any discussion of the party-youth question inside the YSA by party members (i.e. by the leading half of the YSA!). Furthermore, since the SWP had just concluded a national convention, circulation of the draft resolution was forbidden within the party itself "until the next pre-convention discussion period", two years later.
Still Trying
Two years later, the immediate issue had long been resolved, with the YSA being held in the rigid administrative grip of the SWP, the youth majority leadership "dismissed" and the SWP's depoliticalized puppets completely instituted. However, in early May of the 1963 SWP pre-convention discussion period, the RT attempted to bring the general issue to light by submitting the bulk of the documents in this collection for internal circulation to the SWP membership. After waiting a bit, the SWP Political Committee abruptly proclaimed that since the Bloomington Indiana YSA was under prosecution for subversion by the local DA, and that since, by inference, the SWP being on the federal "subversive" list and the YSA not, discussion might incriminate the latter; therefore, once again, any and all discussion on youth-party relations must be rigidly denied for the good of the movement. The following is the motion adopted by the Political Committee on 24 May 1963:
"Motion by Cannon, Dobbs, Kerry and Warde:
"The revolutionary-socialist youth face a witch-hunting criminal indictment brought against them by agents of the ruling class. As part of the frame up which is intended to stifle the voice of socialist-minded youth, the prosecution falsely labels them a section of the adult revolutionary socialist movement. In view of this capitalist assault there can at present be only one single subject on the party agenda in the sphere of adult-youth relations, namely, defense of the youth against the class enemy. Attempts to precipitate disputes over questions of general cooperation between adults and youth who share common political views can only be prejudicial to defense of the youth against the witch hunt frameup, and such attempts will not be tolerated in any way, shape or forms. All party members are hereby instructed to conduct themselves accordingly. Any violation of this directive will be subject to disciplinary action by the appropriate party bodies."
The complete falsity of this "reason" is proved for example by the fact that the section of the indictment labeling the YSA as the youth section of the SWP had been struck by the Monroe County, Indiana, Circuit Court on 23 May 1963, one day before the PC motion was adopted. Despite the fact that the Militant (3 June 1963) itself printed the story that SWP-YSA relations were no longer an issue in the case, despite the repeated requests that the issue be opened for discussion when there were no more "legal" reasons for the continuing prohibition, the party ban was upheld until all of the dissidents of that period had been expelled or driven out of the SWP-YSA.
Contradiction Concealed
Behind this series of smokescreens of organizational and tactical objections stands the simple truth that the SWP was politically unable to function in a Leninist way toward its youth organization. Cannon flatly admitted this, but only to his National Committee, when he declared: "I don't think Lenin was a fetishist on the form of youth organization any more than on any other form." And further, "In fact, it [the problem of youth organization] never has been solved, not in this country or any other." (See document 8.)
Thus the SWP was caught in the archetypical centrist dilemma: making a qualitative, substantive repudiation of revolutionary practice, while insisting to the contrary. In the case of the youth question, flagrant suppression was the SWP's only means to conceal that contradiction.
We are not here concerned with merely raking over factional quarrels from 1960-61. And, as the material from documents three and four and the main point of the whole collection show, we were not then discussing formal schemas without a revolutionary content. Rather, the whole question is one of utmost importance to a growing revolutionary movement and is basic to overcoming the "old left"-"new left" generational gap. Very special needs are required to integrate young apprentice revolutionaries into the Marxist movement without their becoming office boys or sycophants. They must be assisted in acquiring, through struggle inside as well as outside the movement, the necessary revolutionary qualities of discipline and intransigence. But such struggle often clashes with internal order. Moreover, it places on the incumbent "adult" leadership the continuing responsibility and necessity to defend its program and tactics. The whole thrust of the documents contained here (except for the terminal one wherein Cannon decides to scrap Lenin's whole understanding of the importance of this relationship) outline the kind of movement, practices and relationships which are required and for which the progenitors of the Spartacist League fought.
WWP, PLP, SLL Too
The issues raised here exist and recur across the entire radical movement. The unthinking and total subordination of youth to adult in the radical movement facilitates, for examples, the mindless activism of Youth Against War and Fascism vis-a-vis the Workers World Party; or the way in which the Progressive Labor Party could from the outside suddenly and shatteringly dump the May 2nd Movement in favor of SDS entry; or, internationally, the cavalier blatancy with which the middle-aged Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League could personally and publicly act as a de facto general secretary of his unpolitical Young Socialists. The practices, long historically sanctioned, of the older reformist and Stalinist organizations present two fully developed models of how adult groups control their youth. The "democratic" Socialist Party has an outright and declared command over the Young People's Socialist League that would bring pleasure to a militarist disciplinarian. The Communist Party avoids the possibility of any organizational independence on the part of its youth by angrily repudiating as red-baiting any suggestion of openly facing the question of relations between the CPUSA and the long succession of its youth auxiliaries.
Reverse Control
Obviously it is the party in the long run that pays for the sterility it enforces on its youth as they begin their political development. But there is also a short-range danger to the party inherent in these practices. The only alternative to political development--if the youth do not totally stagnate--is a mindless militancy, which can be whipped up at the demagogic call of the party-sanctioned leaders. That militancy can be used by the party leadership as a club against the party itself. This danger is particularly crucial within a party which still retains a hint of its Trotskyist past, where some slightly left elements will vaguely remember their political history and will object to too headlong a revisionist flight. Thus Sam Marcy had this club available against Workers World; there is a hint of the same procedure in the way Jack Barnes of the SWP used the YSA to advance himself in the party; and Healy, along with his use of every other bureaucratic weapon available, certainly does not overlook the made-to-hand mindlessness of his personally-led Young Socialists as a weapon to keep order in the Socialist Labour League.
Leninist Position
It was in an attempt to counter the sterilizing effects on revolutionary development which such schemes contain that the Revolutionary Tendency submitted the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations. This document analyzes the necessary reciprocal relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth group and calls for the necessary tactical orientation which that relationship would have entailed for the SWP-YSA:
"The political education of the youth, in addition to discussion, involves the experiences of decision and action. One of the essential functions of a youth movement is precisely the education and development of responsible political leaders. The revolutionary youth movement therefore must not be a mere discussion group but must decide its own policies and choose its own leaders to bear responsibility for carrying out those policies.
"The distinct character of the revolutionary socialist youth is necessary but is subordinate to its place as a section of the international revolutionary movement. The Marxist revolutionary party embodies the historical experience of the working class and is alone capable of leading the struggle for socialism. Wherever national sections of this party exist a revolutionary youth movement cannot think in terms of acting as a party, of substituting itself for the existing section of the world party. On the contrary, whatever organizational forms may prevail in a given country the revolutionary youth must maintain unity in action and close political ties with the revolutionary party…
"The YSA is a democratic organization. The leadership of the YSA is elected by the members in accordance with the terms of the YSA Constitution and can be removed only in accordance with the governing Constitutional provisions. All members of the YSA have the right to express their political views within the YSA and to participate in the political decisions of the YSA. This internal democracy is combined with discipline in action in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism.
"From time to time there are necessarily differences of opinion between the SWP and the YSA. In the normal course of events such divergences can be handled through the regular channels of coordination and consultation between the two organizations. When, however, serious political disagreements arise, this procedure is inadequate. In such a case it is the obligation of the youth movement, insofar as its public political activity is concerned, to subordinate itself to the discipline of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The YSA recognizes and accepts this obligation."
Confronted with this restatement of a revolutionary, Leninist perspective, Cannon could do no more than offer the sophist truism that the "formula" of Lenin's was not "ideal" (!) and then pretend that a youth organization is an opponent organization, in which the party members need discipline in action (with the unique logic to this fake reasoning being the need to mobilize its members to fight its own young sympathizers!). This last is particularly grotesque and is indicative of the bureaucratic degeneration into which a once revolutionary organization can fall when, in order to cover for former opportunist positions advocated by the leadership, it begins to substitute the "authority" of that vested leadership for the independent democratic criticism and discussion through which the revolutionary movement must reach its political positions. It is the very bureaucratic distortions in Cannon's letter itself which best illustrate the necessity of the autonomous youth organization which the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations sketches out.
Marxist Bulletin staff
6 September 1967
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Preface
The present collection of documents deals with the vital issue of the relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth organization. These documents, from the years 1957-61, set forth two aspects of contemporary party-youth relations: they reaffirm the earlier position of the Leninist and Trotskyist movement; and they present the history of those few years of Socialist Workers Party-youth relations during which the SWP re-established a nationwide revolutionary Marxist youth organization in this country after a lapse of nearly two decades. These documents, as a collection, but especially the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, have a long history of suppression in the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. Some of them have never before been circulated in any way.
Documents and Definitions
Document one was written in 1957 by Murry Weiss, the architect of the initial attempt to rebuild the SWP's youth organization under the conditions of the break-up of the CP. Because he was one of the very few continuing leaders of the SWP with any significant experience in its earlier youth group he was particularly interested and involved in the new attempt in 1957. What he did initially was to set forth the Leninist principles upon which the earlier Trotskyist youth organization had been founded, principles which documents two through seven also restated, a few years later when the SWP leadership began to turn its back on its own history.
These documents two through seven present the position on youth party relations of the YSA leadership both before and during the time the dispute over the Cuban Revolution forced many youth leaders to form the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, the forebears of the Spartacist League. This position, in brief, is that a youth organization should be autonomously related to the party, being organizationally independent, but ultimately politically subordinate.
Document eight, a letter by James P. Cannon, presents the antithetical position arrived at by the SWP majority leadership, namely that the youth organization, although not openly related to the party should be, through the fractional intervention of party members, in effect organizationally dependent and thus politically servile. Cannon's letter might appropriately have been titled "Epitaph", for it served that function in the discussion.
Stands Not Alone
Because of its peculiar nature, the youth question does not stand by itself. When it comes up, it is almost never raised as an abstract issue; instead it usually reflects disagreements within the party and the youth on other political issues. For example, in 1961, a majority of the central leadership, progenitors of the Spartacist League, viewing Castro as then petty-bourgeois, condemned the SWP's uncritical treatment of him as a great "proletarian revolutionary". (See Marxist Bulletin No.8, Cuba and Marxist Theory, for the discussion on Cuba.)
The youth leadership of 1961 started by criticizing the SWP's Pabloist adaptation to Castro; but when these criticisms brought forth the SWP's perversion of the YSA, the youth leadership was faced with the need to reaffirm the Leninist youth party relations which the SWP majority had found necessary to suppress. In order to do this, the YSA leadership based itself on the development and functioning of the Young Communist International in Lenin's time and on the YSA's own Educational Bulletin, "History of the International Socialist Youth Movement (to 1929)".
The RT's attempt to reaffirm the Leninist position made it very clear to the SWP majority that it would henceforth need to conduct discussions of youth-party relationships by concealing or prohibiting the early documents of the YSA and the earlier history of the communist youth movement. The importance of keeping today's YSAers in a state of virginal ignorance had been clearly demonstrated by the RT itself, which through its development in the YSA had understood the need for political opposition to the opportunism of the entrenched SWP leadership. Accordingly, the SWP has suppressed historically tested practices and has worked out a means for neutralizing any opposition in the YSA. It has a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if you-don't policy for those SWPers in the youth with some difference with the majority: it sometimes gives them permission to raise an opposing view, so that if they then don't, they stand as unserious, ashamed of their positions, etc.; however, if they do raise the differences, they are nonetheless at least informally condemned for breaking with the "best interests" of the party.
Inside the YSA-SWP
A brief review of the particular history of this question in the SWP should illustrate the general development of struggle which any incipient opposition would find as it begins the criticism of the centrist leadership of a once Bolshevik organization.
In 1957, the SWP had inaugurated the attempt to recreate a Trotskyist youth movement in the United States after a lapse of 17 years. The SWP, however, was no longer the same party it had been in 1940; thus the formula of an autonomous youth organization caused much uneasiness among the party brass. By 1961 their centrist fears proved justified: the Cuban question showed that they were indeed unable to politically lead their youth section. Accordingly, with a majority of the YSA central leadership going into opposition over Cuba, the SWP struck organizationally at the youth majority. The SWP took over a virtual receivership of the YSA, bringing in one Carl Feingold, an SWP National Committee member, to lead a special party commission on the YSA. In doing this it destroyed the embryo of Leninist youth-party relations which had been developing since 1957.
The fate of the key seventh document in this collection, the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations, well exemplifies the situation. Faced with the perversion of the YSA's internal life, the youth leadership sought in this resolution to reaffirm absolutely unambiguously the necessary and historically tested relation in political struggle between revolutionaries of different generations. The document was drafted for submission to the YSA National Conference of December 1961. The party National Office decided instead to refer it to a party "Commission on Party-Youth Relations" which never met. And later the Political Committee forbade any discussion of the party-youth question inside the YSA by party members (i.e. by the leading half of the YSA!). Furthermore, since the SWP had just concluded a national convention, circulation of the draft resolution was forbidden within the party itself "until the next pre-convention discussion period", two years later.
Still Trying
Two years later, the immediate issue had long been resolved, with the YSA being held in the rigid administrative grip of the SWP, the youth majority leadership "dismissed" and the SWP's depoliticalized puppets completely instituted. However, in early May of the 1963 SWP pre-convention discussion period, the RT attempted to bring the general issue to light by submitting the bulk of the documents in this collection for internal circulation to the SWP membership. After waiting a bit, the SWP Political Committee abruptly proclaimed that since the Bloomington Indiana YSA was under prosecution for subversion by the local DA, and that since, by inference, the SWP being on the federal "subversive" list and the YSA not, discussion might incriminate the latter; therefore, once again, any and all discussion on youth-party relations must be rigidly denied for the good of the movement. The following is the motion adopted by the Political Committee on 24 May 1963:
"Motion by Cannon, Dobbs, Kerry and Warde:
"The revolutionary-socialist youth face a witch-hunting criminal indictment brought against them by agents of the ruling class. As part of the frame up which is intended to stifle the voice of socialist-minded youth, the prosecution falsely labels them a section of the adult revolutionary socialist movement. In view of this capitalist assault there can at present be only one single subject on the party agenda in the sphere of adult-youth relations, namely, defense of the youth against the class enemy. Attempts to precipitate disputes over questions of general cooperation between adults and youth who share common political views can only be prejudicial to defense of the youth against the witch hunt frameup, and such attempts will not be tolerated in any way, shape or forms. All party members are hereby instructed to conduct themselves accordingly. Any violation of this directive will be subject to disciplinary action by the appropriate party bodies."
The complete falsity of this "reason" is proved for example by the fact that the section of the indictment labeling the YSA as the youth section of the SWP had been struck by the Monroe County, Indiana, Circuit Court on 23 May 1963, one day before the PC motion was adopted. Despite the fact that the Militant (3 June 1963) itself printed the story that SWP-YSA relations were no longer an issue in the case, despite the repeated requests that the issue be opened for discussion when there were no more "legal" reasons for the continuing prohibition, the party ban was upheld until all of the dissidents of that period had been expelled or driven out of the SWP-YSA.
Contradiction Concealed
Behind this series of smokescreens of organizational and tactical objections stands the simple truth that the SWP was politically unable to function in a Leninist way toward its youth organization. Cannon flatly admitted this, but only to his National Committee, when he declared: "I don't think Lenin was a fetishist on the form of youth organization any more than on any other form." And further, "In fact, it [the problem of youth organization] never has been solved, not in this country or any other." (See document 8.)
Thus the SWP was caught in the archetypical centrist dilemma: making a qualitative, substantive repudiation of revolutionary practice, while insisting to the contrary. In the case of the youth question, flagrant suppression was the SWP's only means to conceal that contradiction.
We are not here concerned with merely raking over factional quarrels from 1960-61. And, as the material from documents three and four and the main point of the whole collection show, we were not then discussing formal schemas without a revolutionary content. Rather, the whole question is one of utmost importance to a growing revolutionary movement and is basic to overcoming the "old left"-"new left" generational gap. Very special needs are required to integrate young apprentice revolutionaries into the Marxist movement without their becoming office boys or sycophants. They must be assisted in acquiring, through struggle inside as well as outside the movement, the necessary revolutionary qualities of discipline and intransigence. But such struggle often clashes with internal order. Moreover, it places on the incumbent "adult" leadership the continuing responsibility and necessity to defend its program and tactics. The whole thrust of the documents contained here (except for the terminal one wherein Cannon decides to scrap Lenin's whole understanding of the importance of this relationship) outline the kind of movement, practices and relationships which are required and for which the progenitors of the Spartacist League fought.
WWP, PLP, SLL Too
The issues raised here exist and recur across the entire radical movement. The unthinking and total subordination of youth to adult in the radical movement facilitates, for examples, the mindless activism of Youth Against War and Fascism vis-a-vis the Workers World Party; or the way in which the Progressive Labor Party could from the outside suddenly and shatteringly dump the May 2nd Movement in favor of SDS entry; or, internationally, the cavalier blatancy with which the middle-aged Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League could personally and publicly act as a de facto general secretary of his unpolitical Young Socialists. The practices, long historically sanctioned, of the older reformist and Stalinist organizations present two fully developed models of how adult groups control their youth. The "democratic" Socialist Party has an outright and declared command over the Young People's Socialist League that would bring pleasure to a militarist disciplinarian. The Communist Party avoids the possibility of any organizational independence on the part of its youth by angrily repudiating as red-baiting any suggestion of openly facing the question of relations between the CPUSA and the long succession of its youth auxiliaries.
Reverse Control
Obviously it is the party in the long run that pays for the sterility it enforces on its youth as they begin their political development. But there is also a short-range danger to the party inherent in these practices. The only alternative to political development--if the youth do not totally stagnate--is a mindless militancy, which can be whipped up at the demagogic call of the party-sanctioned leaders. That militancy can be used by the party leadership as a club against the party itself. This danger is particularly crucial within a party which still retains a hint of its Trotskyist past, where some slightly left elements will vaguely remember their political history and will object to too headlong a revisionist flight. Thus Sam Marcy had this club available against Workers World; there is a hint of the same procedure in the way Jack Barnes of the SWP used the YSA to advance himself in the party; and Healy, along with his use of every other bureaucratic weapon available, certainly does not overlook the made-to-hand mindlessness of his personally-led Young Socialists as a weapon to keep order in the Socialist Labour League.
Leninist Position
It was in an attempt to counter the sterilizing effects on revolutionary development which such schemes contain that the Revolutionary Tendency submitted the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations. This document analyzes the necessary reciprocal relationship between a revolutionary party and its youth group and calls for the necessary tactical orientation which that relationship would have entailed for the SWP-YSA:
"The political education of the youth, in addition to discussion, involves the experiences of decision and action. One of the essential functions of a youth movement is precisely the education and development of responsible political leaders. The revolutionary youth movement therefore must not be a mere discussion group but must decide its own policies and choose its own leaders to bear responsibility for carrying out those policies.
"The distinct character of the revolutionary socialist youth is necessary but is subordinate to its place as a section of the international revolutionary movement. The Marxist revolutionary party embodies the historical experience of the working class and is alone capable of leading the struggle for socialism. Wherever national sections of this party exist a revolutionary youth movement cannot think in terms of acting as a party, of substituting itself for the existing section of the world party. On the contrary, whatever organizational forms may prevail in a given country the revolutionary youth must maintain unity in action and close political ties with the revolutionary party…
"The YSA is a democratic organization. The leadership of the YSA is elected by the members in accordance with the terms of the YSA Constitution and can be removed only in accordance with the governing Constitutional provisions. All members of the YSA have the right to express their political views within the YSA and to participate in the political decisions of the YSA. This internal democracy is combined with discipline in action in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism.
"From time to time there are necessarily differences of opinion between the SWP and the YSA. In the normal course of events such divergences can be handled through the regular channels of coordination and consultation between the two organizations. When, however, serious political disagreements arise, this procedure is inadequate. In such a case it is the obligation of the youth movement, insofar as its public political activity is concerned, to subordinate itself to the discipline of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The YSA recognizes and accepts this obligation."
Confronted with this restatement of a revolutionary, Leninist perspective, Cannon could do no more than offer the sophist truism that the "formula" of Lenin's was not "ideal" (!) and then pretend that a youth organization is an opponent organization, in which the party members need discipline in action (with the unique logic to this fake reasoning being the need to mobilize its members to fight its own young sympathizers!). This last is particularly grotesque and is indicative of the bureaucratic degeneration into which a once revolutionary organization can fall when, in order to cover for former opportunist positions advocated by the leadership, it begins to substitute the "authority" of that vested leadership for the independent democratic criticism and discussion through which the revolutionary movement must reach its political positions. It is the very bureaucratic distortions in Cannon's letter itself which best illustrate the necessity of the autonomous youth organization which the draft Resolution on Party-Youth Relations sketches out.
Marxist Bulletin staff
6 September 1967
