AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Showing posts with label communist youth. Show all posts

Sunday, June 05, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Founding Conference of the 4th International (1938, Although It Could Have Been Written In 2011): "Resolution on Youth"(1973)

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.
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Founding Conference of the 4th International: "Resolution on Youth"

Introduction from Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 17, May-June 1973

Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations," and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (FI), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:

"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past… Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p. 45, Pathfinder Press edition

Trotsky had not forgotten the lesson of the collapse of the Second International and the building of the Third. When the leading parties of the Second International capitulated to the national chauvinism of WWI, it was the militants primarily concentrated in the Socialist youth and women’s groups (representing a more oppressed stratum of the working class than the privileged labor aristocracy—the most influential component of the Western European Socialist parties) who carried the banner of internationalism against the tide of national chauvinism. It was these militants who, under the impact of the Russian October, provided the precious founding cadre for the new Communist International (CI), With the destruction of the CI as a world revolutionary party under the heavy blows of the failure of the German Revolution, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism and the impending renewal of imperialist world war, the tasks of creating a new international were placed on the agenda. Trotsky, one of the creators of the CI who had authored its founding manifesto, turned to the generation of young workers, unscarred by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Hence, the founding manifesto of the FI ends with a clarion call to "Open the Road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!"

The seriousness with which Trotskyists undertook this necessary historical exhortation to find the road to the next generation of revolutionaries was displayed by the fact that—though the founding of the FI took place under the most difficult conditions requiring careful preparation and secrecy, at a time when the Trotskyists had meager resources and were being hounded throughout the world by the police and agents of all wings of the bourgeoisie from the fascists to the most "democratic" and, with special vehemence, by Stalin’s secret police—nonetheless the Founding Conference was followed one week later by the "World Youth Conference of the Fourth International." Both Conferences were held in September 1938; the former was attended by 21 delegates representing 11 countries, while the Youth Conference was attended by 19 delegates from 7 countries (Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, England, the U.S. and France). There was a considerable overlap in delegations and, in addition, the International Bureau of the FI, elected at the party Conference, sent three delegates to the Youth Conference. Besides adopting the "Resolution on the Youth," the World Youth Conference endorsed the Transitional Program and voted to affiliate as the official youth section of the FI.

As Nathan Gould, the youth delegate from the U.S., reported in the weekly organ of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Appeal (22 October 1938):

"The resolution on relations between the youth and adult Internationals accepted the classical Leninist concept of these relations. The Youth International, which accepts the proletarian revolutionary international leadership of its adult body is to be politically subordinate to and organizationally autonomous of the Fourth International."

Gould then stated that all decisions and resolutions of the Youth Conference, including the "Resolution on the Youth" flow "from and are subordinated to the demands of the theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism." Indeed, the capitalist death agony developed with such rapidity and acuteness that the "youth question" was soon superceded by the "military question." The principal concerns of working-class youth in civilian life under capitalism—the lack of jobs, education and social equality, problems with which the "Resolution on the Youth" were mainly concerned—were soon to be transcended as imperialist war gave these youth the "jobs," "education" and "social equality" of the barracks. Within the context of universal militarism, the Trotskyists conducted themselves with exemplary valor, e.g., building revolutionary cells within the German Army. But the objective conditions forced the FI to temporarily abandon the tasks set out in the "Resolution on the Youth" and the struggle for a Trotskyist youth international.

Rise of Pabloism

After WWII, the Trotskyist movement, decimated by fascism and Stalinism, tried to regroup and reorient itself. However, the destruction of a whole generation of Trotskyist cadre, including Trotsky himself, left the FI theoretically unarmed and isolated from the working class. The untested and inexperienced cadre that rose to the leadership of the FI, personified by Michel Pablo, were overtaken by the post-war pre-revolutionary upheavals whose course their weak forces could not significantly influence. These cadre were further disoriented by the apparent stabilization of capitalism on the one hand, and the growth of Stalinism and social democracy on the other (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21). Pabloism meant the abandonment of the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties and the liquidation of Trotskyist cadre into the existing Stalinist and social-democratic formations which were seen as playing an eventual revolutionary role under the impact of the "objective process." The corollary for Trotskyist youth was the command that they should bury themselves in the Stalinist and social-democratic youth groups and wait for the "objective process" to unfold.

Thus the "Resolution on the Youth" and the prospects for a Trotskyist youth international were abandoned when the FI succumbed to Pabloism. Although many of the specific demands and slogans of the "Resolution on the Youth" are clearly dated, the resolution possesses more than just historical interest. The document, especially section 14 entitled "The Revolutionary Program," is a valuable reaffirmation of the programmatic criteria governing youth work as Lenin, Trotsky and the early CI and FI conceived it. Such a reaffirmation is particularly important today when so many political tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist display the most elementary confusion on this question. The early CI and Young Communist International, and the Founding Conference of the FI and corresponding Youth Conference were explicit and insistent that the Leninist-Trotskyist youth group must be a section of the vanguard party which embodies the continuity, tested political leadership and developed programmatic clarity of the revolutionary movement. The program of the youth section must be developed within the framework of the party’s program, as the "Youth Resolution" states: "It is within the framework of the transitional programme of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied." "Youth" is not a class, there is no "youth program" as such. The program which addresses itself to the objective needs and special oppression of youth is part and parcel of the program for proletarian power. "The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed" ["Youth Resolution"].

Youth Vanguardism From the SWP to the WL

The various pretenders to the banner of Trotskyism all reject Trotsky’s class approach to the youth question—namely, that the question of special oppression and needs of youth must be subordinated to and integrated into the revolutionary program for the working class, the Transitional Program. Modern Pabloism, embodied in organizations like the SWP, the International Marxist Group in England, the Ligue Communiste in France, and personified by "theoreticians" like Ernest Mandel and "activists" like Tariq Ali, after years of self-internment in reformist organizations, have recoiled from entrism and have tried, in their various ways, to jump on the bandwagon of the "international youth radicalisation." Starting from the proposition that we live not in the era of capitalist decay but in the era of "neo-capitalism," i.e., capitalist crises stabilized by state intervention into the economy (e.g., debt expansion), they come to the conclusion that therefore the "epicenter" of world revolution has shifted from the industrial to the colonial countries, or from the industrial working class to more peripheral "sectors" of the work force such as white-collar workers and white-collar "apprentices" (i.e., students). They see the industrial working class as hopelessly bureaucratized and bourgeoisified, only approachable from the "peripheries" of guerrilla warfare in the colonial countries and youth and petty-bourgeois vanguardism in the industrial countries. The SWP has surpassed Pabloism in adopting a non-proletarian ideology. It has lifted the "cultural autonomy" slogan from the Austro-Marxists and applied it to the present by having each oppressed "sector" of the population independently "self-determine" itself, into that pure realm of freedom which is, of course, obtainable only on the gilded comfort of the college campus. Each "sector" of society (students, blacks, Chicanos, women and yes, even the working class) is provided by the revisionists with its very own "transitional" program.

Departing from Trotskyism and proletarian revolution on another road, a road akin to "third-period" Stalinism, is the Socialist Labour League, its gang in the U.S., the Workers League, and their corresponding youth groups, both called "Young Socialist." Starting from a radical perspective—that capitalist productive forces can no longer grow and, therefore, capitalism can no longer grant long-lasting reforms—they draw a reformist conclusion, i.e., that the struggle for such reforms is inherently revolutionary. In fact, this is simply inverted social democracy—that socialism can be won through piecemeal reform struggles. The Transitional Program on the other hand, raises demands that flow from the real objective needs of the proletariat, but also prepare and mobilize the workers for the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power.

The WL’s treatment of the youth question is completely opportunist: Ignoring the heterogeneous social composition of youth, the WL calls upon youth (all youth) to pressure union bureaucrats to build a labor party, and presents transitional demands for youth, as an undifferentiated mass, to carry out. The WL’s line embodies classless youth vanguardism. The irony of the WL’s constant exhortations to the "youth" to build a labor party, create general strikes, etc., is that in the WL’s propaganda to the working class (e.g., in their auto program for 1973, Bulletin, 12 February, p. 18) it often "forgets" to mention the labor party as well as other key transitional demands like nationalization of industry under workers control. Its youth group, furthermore, has no internal political life but is a front group manipulated by the WL.

The Revolutionary Communist Youth, as the youth section of the Spartacist League, continues the traditions of the early CI and FI, the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, that the youth section must be programmatically linked and united to the vanguard party ("politically subordinate and organizationally autonomous"), that the special demands which address themselves to the problems of the youth must flow from the Transitional Program and must link the struggles of youth to the struggle of the proletariat for power.

—RCYN Editorial Board
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Resolution:

The Capitalist Impasse

(1.) Capitalism, whether it be authoritarian or liberal, admits the inability to bring the slightest relief to the misery and suffering of working-class youth. The young want a trade, and when (rarely enough!) it consents to give them one, it is only to chain them the better to a machine which tomorrow will stop and let them starve beside the very riches they have produced. The young want to work, to produce with their hands, to use their strength, and capitalism offers them the perspective of unemployment or of "the execution of work in conditions other than the normal conditions of production," according to the excellent hypocritical definition of labor-camps by the League of Nations, or of armament production, which engenders destruction rather than improvement. The young want to learn, and the way to culture is barred to them. The young want to live, and the only future offered them is that of dying of hunger or of rotting on the barbed wire of a new imperialist war. The young want to create a new world, and they are permitted only to maintain or to consolidate a rotting world that is falling to pieces. The young want to know what tomorrow will be, and capitalism’s only reply to them is: "Today you’ve got to tighten your belt another notch; tomorrow, we’ll see.… In any case, perhaps you’re not going to have any tomorrow."

Give Youth a Future—Give the World a Future

(2.) That is why youth will rally under the flag of those who bring it a future. Only the Fourth International, because it represents the historical interests of the only class which can reorganize the world upon new bases, only the Bolshevik-Leninists can promise youth a future in which it can put its abilities to full use. Only they can say to the youth: "Together with you, we want to make a new world!, where everyone works and is proud to work well, to know his job down to the smallest details; a world where everyone will eat according to his hunger, for production will be regulated according to the needs of the workers and not those of profit; a world where one must constantly learn, in order the better to subordinate the forces of nature to the will of man; a world where, by ceaselessly extending the domain of the application of science, humanity’s theoretic knowledge will be daily increased; a new world; a new man who can make real all the hopes and powers he bears within him." It is under the ensign of a new world and a new humanity that the Fourth International and its youth organizations must go on to win the working-class youth; it is under that ensign that they will win that youth.

The Struggle for a Future—The Struggle for Bread

(3.) The promise of a better future would be only demagogy if the Bolshevik-Leninists were not fighting for an immediate improvement in the situation of working-class youth, if they were not formulating youth’s immediate demands, if they were not spreading word of the necessity for working-class youth to fight by class-struggle methods for the satisfaction of these demands, and if, through this struggle and on the basis of the experience gained therein, they were not demonstrating to exploited youth that its demands could be finally satisfied only by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the struggle for these demands must be transformed into a struggle for power by means of a struggle for the control and management of the economic system.

We Demand the Right to Work

(4.) For the young workers engaged in production the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward slogans with the aim of (a.) measuring the work done by the young not according to the desire to drag as much profit as possible out of it, but on the contrary according to their degree of physical development; (b.) assuring them of a standard of living equal to that of adults, by that very fact assuring them of economic independence; (c.) raising their technical qualifications as far as possible; (d.) against the equal opportunity for young and old to be exploited by capitalism, setting up their equal rights.

For the young under 20, they also formulate the following demands:

Reduced working week, with schedules allowing young workers to engage in sports in the open air;

At least one month’s paid vacation per year;

The organizing, by factories or groups of factories, of training courses, at the bosses’ expense and under workers’ control;

Hours of craft training taken out of the working week, and paid for at regular rates;

Application of the principle "for equal work, equal pay," under workers control;

The fixing of a minimum living wage for young workers; fixing of the wages of young workers under the control of all the workers taken as a whole;

Prohibition of night-work, of over-laborious, unhealthy, or unwholesome tasks; workers’ control over the use of young labor.

Equality for Youth in Social Legislation—All Together for the Struggle!

(5.) In order to take the defense of their demands into their own hands, the young workers should have the right to choose their own delegates, whose task is above all to draw the attention of the adult delegates and of the workers in general to youth’s specific demands, to tie up the struggle for these particular demands with the struggle for the general demands of the working class. In the same way, in all branches of trade-union organizations, these must be created, and imposed upon the trade-union bureaucracy, union youth commissions, whose task shall be to. study the demands of the youth, and to recruit and educate young workers. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to take the lead in the organization of such commissions.

In order to throw trade-union doors wide open to exploited youth, the Bolshevik-Leninists demand the establishment of reduced dues for young workers.

We Want a Trade!

(6.) In the fight against unemployment the slogans, raise the school age, organize apprenticeship, make sense only to the extent that the weight of this must be borne, not by the working-class, but by the big capitalists. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists owe it to themselves to formulate the demands of working-class youth in this field, as follows:

Prolongation of the school age to 16, with a grant for family support in working-class and small farmer families.

Reorganization of the school in cooperation with the factory: the school should prepare children for life and work; it should weld the youth to the older generations; hence the demand for control by workers’ organizations over technical education.

Reduction of the period of apprenticeship to a maximum of two years.

Forbidding of all work not connected with the actual apprenticeship.

The setting up, at the expense of the bosses, in connection with every business or group of businesses engaged in manufacturing, mining, or trade, of apprentice schools, with an attendance of at least 3% of the personnel employed in the business or group of businesses.

Choosing of the instructors by the labor unions.

Control of these schools by a mixed commission of workers’ delegates and delegates of the apprentices themselves.

We Demand Our Right to Live!

(7.) The task of saving the unemployed youth from misery, despair, and fascist demagogy, of working them back into production and thereby binding them closely to the working class is a vital task for the future of the pro1etariat. Revolutionaries must struggle to force capitalism (a.) to undertake to work the unemployed youth back into production through the organization of technical education and guidance; (b.) to put the unemployed youth back immediately into productive activity; (c.) to organize such work not according to semi-military methods but on the basis of regular wages: Down with labor-camps, either voluntary or obligatory!; (d.) to furnish youth, which it is throwing into misery, the wherewithal to live. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following demands:

Unemployment benefits on the adult scale for all young unemployed, manual or intellectual, immediately upon their finishing school;

Forcing the big bosses to open technical re-education centers under workers’ control;

Technical re-education organized according to the needs of production, under the general control of the trade unions and the congresses of workers’ delegates;

Reopening of the shut-down factories;

Commencement of large-scale public works (hospitals, schools, low-cost housing projects, sports fields, stadia, swimming-pools, electric power-stations), paid at trade-union scales and under workers’ control from top to bottom.

For Our Brothers on the Farms!

(8.) The misery of the farm youth is no less than that of the industrial youth. For farm youth the Bolshevik-Leninists formulate the following general demands:

Strict application of all the above-named laws and social measures in the country just as in the city;

Suppression of the domestic exploitation of young children;

Particularly strict application of the principle: "For equal work, equal pay."

District organization of technical education at the expense of the big finance-capital farm-owners;

Healthy food and lodging for young farm workers living in their bosses’ houses;

Cheap credit for small-scale farmers, and especially for small-scale farmers with family responsibilities.

For Our Countryside

(9.) The industrial and farm youth are the most exploited part of all working-class youth. The youth organizations of the Fourth International must draw particular attention to the following demands:

Strict application of principle: "For equal work, equal pay!";

An extra day off per month;

The right to voluntary maternity;

A 6-months’ leave-of-absence for maternity;

Maternity grants for girl-mothers.

Open the Schools and Universities!

(10.) One of the necessary conditions for the progress of humanity is that large sections of working-class youth should have access to culture and science. The Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following slogans:

Open the schools and universities to all the young who are willing to study.

Free education and support for workers’ and farmers’ sons and daughters.

Bread, Books, and Civil Rights for Coolies!

(11.) In colonial and semi-colonial countries, laboring youth is the victim of a double exploitation—capitalist and patriarchal. In these and in imperialist countries the defense of the demands of the young colonial workers and peasants is the first duty in the fight against imperialism. This fight is carried on around the general slogan: The same rights for colonial youth as for the youth of the imperialist capital-city.

Organization of hygiene and similar care in all villages.

Organization of homes for young workers, peasants, and coolies, under the control of labor and nationalist organizations.

Schools for native children; teaching in the native language.

Open the government administration to native language.

Open the government administration to native intellectuals.

Take the necessary financial credits from the war and police budgets and imperialist privileges.

12) The bourgeoisie recognizes working youth’s right to be exploited; but refuses it the right to have anything to say about that exploitation, and deprives it of all political rights; in certain countries it even forbids youth under 18 to have any political activity whatever. The working class replies to these measures by saying: Whoever has the right to be exploited has also the right to struggle against the system which exploits him. Full political rights to young workers and peasants!

The right to vote beginning at 18, just as much in legislative and municipal elections as in the election of delegates.

Abolition of special laws forbidding youth to engage in political activity.

We Demand Our Right to Happiness!

(13.) Working-class youth’s need for relaxation is utilized by the bourgeoisie either to stupefy it or to make it submit to an even tighter discipline. The duty of the working class is to help create a youth that is strong and capable of throwing all its physical and mental strength into the fight against capitalism; to aid it in using what leisure capitalism gives it to learn to understand the world better, in order to be better able to change it. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists demand:

Free access to all sports fields, stadia, museums, libraries, theatres, and cinemas, for all young workers and unemployed;

The ordering of their leisure by the young unemployed themselves;

The using of young unemployed intellectuals for the organization of lectures and discussions, etc. on physics, chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, history of the labor movement, art, literature, etc.;

The establishment of homes open to the working and unemployed youth, where the young will not only have the opportunity to be amused and instructed, but can also study out for themselves the social problems with which they are faced; these homes to be managed by working-class youth itself under the supervision of the local trade-union organizations.

The Revolutionary Program

(14.) The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed. The final disappearance of unemployment among the youth is closely linked to the disappearance of general unemployment. The struggle for raising the school age and for compulsory technical re-education is closely linked with the struggle for the sliding scale in wages and in working hours. The struggle to drag out of capitalism those reforms which aim at developing the class-consciousness of working youth is closely linked with the struggle for workers’ control of industry and factory committees. The struggle for public works is closely linked with the fight for the expropriation of monopolies, for the nationalization of credit, banks, and key industries. The struggle to smash back all efforts to militarize is closely linked to the struggle against the development of authoritarian state tendencies and against fascism, the struggle for the organization of workers’ militias. It is within the framework of the transitional programme of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied. It is under the ensign of the proletariat fighting for power that the Fourth International will win the demands of exploited youth.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE YOUTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
Lausanne, 11 September 1938

Friday, June 03, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-The Spartacus Youth League and the Student Upsurge of the 1930’s-Lessons from History (1974)

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.

The Spartacus Youth League and the Student Upsurge of the 1930’s-
Lessons from History

From Young Spartacus No. 22, March-April 1974

The Lessons from History series has in the past included articles on the early years of the Communist Youth International and the development of a "Resolution on the Youth" at the founding Conference of the Fourth International. This article on the Spartacus Youth League, the first Trotskyist youth organization in the U.S., focuses on the SYL’s internal debates over a correct orientation to students and on the main aspect of its student work, namely, its intervention in the anti-war student movement, counterposing the Leninist slogans against imperialist war to the predominating petty-bourgeois pacifism and social patriotism.
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Today, student groups like the Maoist Revolutionary Union-dominated Attica Brigade and Progressive Labor’s SDS are organized along the same reformist, student-parochialist conceptions as the Stalinist National Student League of the 1930’s. So-called "socialist youth organizations" like the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) made themselves infamous by their consistent petty-bourgeois, single-issue reformism on the Vietnam War. Such anti-Leninist youth work is nothing new; rather, it is the heritage of the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International.

The new recruits to the Attica Brigade, YSA and SDS may not be familiar with the historical traditions of these aspects of youth work and are not aware that old mistakes are being repeated and old betrayals consciously rerun. An examination of these issues in the crisis years of the 1930’s sheds light on current differences between left-wing youth and student organizations.

The development of the Spartacus Youth League (SYL) took place in the context of a growing radical student movement, dominated politically by the National Student League (NSL), which was led by the Stalinist Young Communist League (YCL).

The YCL was changing rapidly in response to events in American society (the Depression, New Deal, renewed militancy in the working class and preparations for imperialist war) and internationally (the further political degeneration of the Soviet Union and the rise of fascism in Germany). The YCL, under the control of the Communist Party, subservient to the dictates of the Soviet bureaucracy, entered a period of crisis in the mid-thirties, losing members and influence, as the line of the sectarian "third period" was abruptly changed to the policy of the People’s Front.

The Stalinist youth liquidated all remnants of independent working-class politics in their program and gave uncritical support to the multi-class American Student Union and American Youth Congress (with the emphasis on the American!), leading them on to the football field to wave pompons and cheer for Roosevelt as he prepared another slaughter for the American workers.

The radical student movement of the early 1930’s, with an even greater percentage of students involved than the protest movements of the 1960’s, was the main battlefield in the political war between the left-wing youth organizations. The sporadic anti-ROTC campaigns and expressions of discontent in 1931 soon developed into a wave of militancy which expressed itself in numerous anti-ROTC and anti-war rallies, conferences on unemployment, fascism and the crisis in education caused by the Depression, and widespread support for striking workers.

In the period since WWI, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a bloc of the social-democratic Young People’s Socialist League (who formed its leadership) with liberal Christian "socialists," had been the dominant leftist group on the campuses, while the Young Workers League (previous name of the YCL) had concentrated on work among the young proletariat. The SLID in 1931 was an exhausted and demoralized organization with no enthusiasm to greet the outburst of campus radicalism.

National Student League

The SLID never gained the influence or numbers of the early-thirties National Student League (NSL), the dominant left-wing campus organization throughout this period. The NSL began as a YCL-led split from the SLID in September 1931, a split based on the "third period" line that social democrats were social fascists and on the Stalinists’ organizational appetite for a youth group of their own.

Centered in New York City, the group at first called itself the New York Student League, but the rapid gain in national membership soon justified a name change to National Student League. Publication of a monthly magazine, the Student Review, was begun in December 1931.

At that time the Trotskyist movement held that the Communist Parties were susceptible to reform from within. Consistent with this political orientation, the young Trotskyists considered themselves to be part of the YCL. At first organized into Spartacus Youth Clubs (SYC), sympathizing circles of the Communist League of America (CLA), the young Trotskyists concentrated on education of their membership and periphery in the historical lessons of Marxism and on intervention into YCL activities.

The SYC attempted to introduce resolutions in defense of a revolutionary perspective at YCL meetings and conferences, called on young militants to join the YCL, encouraged Trotskyist sympathizers to remain within the YCL to seek to win over the organization as a whole to Trotskyism, and themselves sought readmission to the organization, from which Trotskyists had been expelled in 1928. The Young Spartacans defended the YCL politically against the YPSL which at that time criticized the Soviet Union from the right and had not even partially broken with the betrayals of the Second International.

Young Spartacus and the Student Movement

The first volume of the paper circulated by the SYC, Young Spartacus, published by the National Youth Committee of the Communist League of America, reflected this strong orientation to the YCL, correct for that period. A real weakness, however, of the early Young Spartacus was a failure to recognize the political importance of certain student protest actions, which it either ignored or gave brief and routine press coverage.

The first two issues contained nothing about the vital and expanding student movement but a one-column editorial which gave a formally correct but abstract analysis of the student’s role in the revolutionary movement. The initial events surrounding the rise of the NSL to popularity such as the student delegation to Harlan County, Kentucky, to demonstrate support for the striking miners and the Columbia University strike in support of expelled liberal student editor Reed Harris, merited only short articles in back pages of Young Spartacus.

With the turning of the YCL more and more to the student arena, however, and the growth of a tremendous anti-war movement within that arena, the Young Spartacus began to devote more space to the student movement, and soon began to publish a monthly column called "Student Notes." The last issue of the paper (December 1935) was devoted exclusively to discussion of the issues surrounding the reunification of the NSL and SLID to form the American Student Union.

The orientation to the student movement necessitated more than just an abstract, formally correct understanding of the student question. Several debates on this question took place in the SYL, reflecting problems experienced in the arena.

Development of Leninist Position on Student Work

While favoring work among students, the SYL held the correct position that separate student self-interest organizations were necessarily reformist dead-ends and that it was not the task of communists to organize front groups for student "economism." Students are a socially heterogeneous group lacking the concentrated social power of the proletariat, which can stop capitalist production by withholding its labor. Therefore students are incapable of playing an independent or consistent political role or of posing a serious threat to the power of the capitalists.

While subordinate to the party’s main work in the class, an orientation by the youth group to students is, however, important in the construction of a vanguard party as—and this was the case in the 1930’s—the student movement, is frequently the arena, for ideological debates within the left. Student work can thus be an important component of the splits, fusions and regroupments that lead to the crystallization of a vanguard nucleus. In the longer view, it will be important in defeating the forces of capitalist reaction to win as large a section of the politically volatile student population as possible, as well as other non-working-class layers, to identify their interests with those of the proletariat.

The SYL sought to build a Leninist youth group which included both students and young workers and to focus its intervention in the student movement on the need to link up with working-class struggles through the class’s political leadership, namely, a Leninist vanguard party. This did not preclude entry or intervention into existing student organizations when principled and tactically advisable. In fact, such work was vital to the growth of the SYL.

Leftism and Rightism on the Student Question

Having overcome its early tendency to abstain from student work, the SYL initially adopted a correct tactical orientation of entry into the NSL with the goal of winning its majority to revolutionary politics. This tactic was arrived at after an internal debate in which sectarian workerist elements advocating a principle of non-entry were defeated.

Nevertheless, a tendency toward sectarianism continued to manifest itself in certain areas of student work, for example, in the SYL’s orientation to the Oxford Pledge movement. This movement originated at Oxford University when the student union voted that "This House will not fight for King and Country in any war." The pledge was picked up by students in other countries, including the U.S., where it was generalized to declarations of refusal to fight for "our government" in any war.

The SYL, correctly noting the pacifist content of the Pledge and narrow, student character of the movement, concluded that a posture of hostility and organizational abstention was therefore appropriate. They thereby cut themselves off from a layer of potential recruits who, while entertaining pacifist illusions, were also motivated by anti-patriotic, implicitly internationalist sentiments (and the movement did take on an international character, at least organizationally). This anti-patriotic sentiment was evident in the declarations’ insistent opposition to participation by "our government" (or "our King and Country") in any war, rather than a general statement of opposition to war.

The retention of the Oxford Pledge became a polarizing issue in the antiwar student movement of the late 1930’s when the social pressures to be patriotic were increasingly felt. The Stalinists opposed the Pledge while the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League-Fourth Internationalist (SYL’s successor) argued for its retention, capitalizing on its anti-patriotic, internationalist implications, opposing pacifist interpretations of it, and fighting to link it to anti-imperialist, revolutionary class-struggle demands.

Following the debate in the SYL over a general orientation to students, a rightist minority emerged, advocating abstractly the formation of a national "militant mass student movement" that would be anti-fascist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist and would "take up the struggles of the students around student issues" (Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934). This centrist formulation failed to put forward a positive socialist program, and instead defined the organization through negatives and as narrowly studentist. It was strikingly similar to Progressive Labor’s 1969 program for SDS (which has since moved from centrism to reformism pure and simple) and the Revolutionary Union’s current program for the Attica Brigade.

The SYL majority counterposed to this the Leninist conception:

"An organization which aims to educate the students in the character of the class struggle, and the duties which result from it can only do so on the basis of a clear program, a communist program. Clarity, which is always essential, is doubly so where different class elements are involved…. organizations, which, like the NSL, move in the direction of organizing the students solely on the problems of the student issues, are…. intolerable. A left-wing group must take sides for and against each of the classes that comprise society. A union, and the NSL contemplates a union, is predicated upon a unity of interests. That unity does not exist among the students; for, they contain representatives of all classes."
—Young Spartacus supplement, October 1934

NSL’s Turn to Popular Frontism

While the rightist minority position was rejected at the SYL Founding Conference, a certain tendency to tail-end the NSL had developed. By 1935, the yearly NSL-led anti-war student strikes had become formations identical to the Socialist Workers Party’s National Peace Action Coalition of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: subordination of revolutionary politics for the sake of the "movement."

This development coincided with the Stalinists’ turn away from "third period" sectarianism towards the class collaboration of the popular front. The seeds for the capitulation to social patriotism were planted in the "third period," when the Stalinist parties, while following in the main a sectarian policy, zigzagged off into classless "anti-war" actions under the pressure of their role as defenders of the Soviet bureaucracy abroad.

Thus the Stalinists endorsed the infamous 1932 Amsterdam Conference dominated by the wretched politics of the pacifist literary figure Henri Barbusse. Barbusse’s document, which was passed at the Conference, failed to distinguish between reactionary wars of imperialism and revolutionary wars of the proletariat against capitalism. Trotsky denounced the Communist International’s (CI) behavior at the Conference as "monstrous, capitulatory, and criminal crawling of official communism before petty-bourgeois pacifism" ("Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam," Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932). The Trotskyists’ resolution calling on the Communist International to organize an international anti-war congress of all labor organizations to plan a united front action on a concrete program against war could not even obtain a vote and they were heckled and prevented from getting the floor.

The Stalinists’ pacifism blossomed into open social patriotism in the popular-front period. In the NSL the formerly sectarian and crude but pro-working-class line was totally abandoned in favor of pacifism and social patriotism; the SYL should have recognized this as a qualitative degeneration into a hardened reformism and left the NSL, attempting to take with it any remaining subjectively revolutionary elements.

Instead, the SYL continued to conceive of itself as a left pressure group within the NSL, making formally correct political statements about the NSL’s pacifist anti-war activities, but characterizing such activities as "errors made by the National Student Strike Committee [of the NSL]… [For example,] the failure to include working class youth organizations in the strike committee…. The second error was to allow for unclarity [by omitting] the slogan ‘against imperialist war’…. In certain instances, notably CCNY and New York University, the SYL forced the use of the word ‘imperialist’" (Young Spartacus, May 1935).

The SYL should have denounced the conscious capitulation to the bourgeoisie that these politics represented, rather than creating the illusion of good-willed, but incompetent, opponents of imperialist war. Thus, while the SYL organized support for the anti-war strikes around Leninist slogans, its failure to counterpose itself clearly to the Stalinist NSL undercut its work.

Nevertheless, the SYL continued to recruit from the YCL and its periphery. In Chicago particularly, where several vigorous and active SYL chapters existed, a small but steady trickle sided with the Young Spartacans. The NSL grew so desperate that it attempted to pass a motion barring "Trotskyites" from membership. YCL members attacked SYLers at an NSL meeting against war; Spartacus leader Nathan Gould was attacked by YCLers when attempting to distribute a leaflet, and YCLers issued threats of violence if the Trotskyists did not cease to speak to their members. Such thuggery was the Stalinists’ only "defense" against the SYL’s revolutionary criticism of YCL capitulation. This desperation grew so intense that the Chicago NSL dissolved the organization rather than allow two SYLers to join!

American Youth Congress

This motion from crude pro-working-class radicalism to alliance with the bourgeoisie was repeated in the American Youth Congress (AYC). In August 1934 a Roosevelt supporter by the name of Viola Ilma called upon all youth organizations to "convene and discuss the problems confronting the young people of this country." At the first convention, there was a split between the Ilmaites and the left (predominantly the YCL and YPSL); Ilma withdrew from the Congress, leaving the YCL, YPSL, YMCA-YWCA, the Boy Scouts and a few church organizations.

Despite the protests of the YCL, the SYL was present, although it correctly refused to endorse or join this wretched front for American bourgeois interests in the growing imperialist antagonisms. At the same time, the SYL maintained an active intervention into AYC meetings, sharply counterposing revolutionary class-struggle dethands to the AYC’s class collaborationism.

The AYC adopted a vague program of protest, pointing out the social problems of unemployment, transiency and militarization suffered by American youth. The second Congress, held in January 1935, had no agenda point for discussion. More vague resolutions were adopted—to be brought to Roosevelt and members of the U.S. Congress. Young Spartacus printed a scathing attack on this Congress, which was a pompous facade of fake radical-sounding speeches by Norman Thomas and various liberal Congressmen about the plight of American youth. Since the Congress was a bloc of tendencies representing different classes in society, no concrete program of action that would serve all interests could be adopted; in fact, the program of the bourgeoisie predominated.

The third meeting, in Detroit in July 1935, represented an apt culmination of this motion toward impotent liberalism and moral outrage. The SYL described the meeting in the August 1935 Young Spartacus:

"The congress opened with the singing at an outdoor mass meeting, attended by 2,000, of ‘America.’ In consideration of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, ten o’clock mass was arranged at which Reverend Ward preached a delightful and most interesting sermon.

"Having completed its graduation to pacifism, the congress was no longer dignified by a reluctant opposition to IMPERIALIST war. Resolutions congruous with revolutionary spirit were supplanted entirely by the slogans of the pacifists. Thus, at last, the congress reeked from beginning to end with ‘peace.’

"The Stalinists, chief sponsors of the congress, blocked every formulation, resolution or amendment that stood to the left of the proposed program. Every resolution introduced to the right of the program was carried with passionate enthusiasm and exhilaration…. Every left or semi-left proposal was combatted by a classically opportunist argument: ‘Everybody knows that my organization is heartily in favor of that resolution. However, it must be defeated because its acceptance will narrow the congress to purely labor organizations.’"

The Stalinists thus consciously tried to prevent the drawing of the class line in the Congress.

NSL Rises to FDR’s "Challenge"

The main documents of the Congress, the American Youth Act and the Declaration of Rights of American Youth, were enthusiastically supported by the NSL. The Student Review quoted President Roosevelt’s words—"Therefore to the American youth of all Parties I Submit a Message of Confidence: Unite and Challenge!"—and reprinted the two documents in their entirety. The American Youth Act was the AYC’s version of the New Deal National Youth Administration, and demanded simply a little more money and representatives of "youth" and "education" on the administrative board of the NYA. A campaign was initiated for the passage of this act by the Congress. The Declaration of Rights of American Youth was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and was identical to it in political content. Later in the 1930’s the AYC became the ersatz New Deal youth organization.

The NSL pursued a parallel course. The 7th Congress of the CI adopted the Dimitrov Popular-Front line and extended it to the youth organizations by liquidating the Communist Youth International into the World Federation of Democratic Youth—a fusion of Stalinist and right-wing social-democratic youth groups based on a bourgeois program.

American Student Union Jamborees for ‘Democracy’

In the U.S., after four years of separation, the NSL and SLID were reunited in December 1935 to form the American Student Union (ASU). This unity was initiated by the NSL itself, in accordance with instructions from the CI that "unity at all costs of the young generation against war and fascism" was to be effected immediately. In 1938 the ASU gave up opposition to compulsory ROTC. Roosevelt’s "collective security" was adopted as the ASU line on the war question, with the feeble left cover that support for American imperialism against German fascism was necessary for defense of the Soviet Union. Under the leadership of the YCL, the ASU became a totally social-patriotic organization.

A reporter from the New Republic described a 1939 ASU convention in these words:

"… enthusiasm reached its peak at the jamboree in the huge jumbo jaialai auditorium of the Hippodrome (seating capacity 4,500) which was filled to its loftiest tier. There were a quintet of white flannelled cheerleaders, a swing band and shaggers doing the Campus Stomp (‘everybody’s doing it, ASUing it!’)—confetti. There were ASU feathers and buttons, a brief musical comedy by the Mob Theatre and pretty ushers in academic caps and gowns. All the trappings of a big game rally were present and the difference was that they were cheering, not the Crimson to beat the Blue, but Democracy to beat Reaction."

During the same period, the YCL itself liquidated its 16-year-old paper Young Worker in favor of Champion which featured articles by liberal senators, Farmer-Labor Governor Olson from Minnesota, famous for his savage attempts to crush the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and a regular "Miss America" column which gave advice to young female revolutionaries on what kinds of make-up and bathing suits to buy.

The SYL remained intransigent against the growing social chauvinism of the period, directing Leninist antiwar propaganda at students, unemployed youth and young workers:

"How do wars come about? Are they due to ‘bad politicians’?

"We International Communists do not think so. We understand that wars are the logical development of class politics. Capitalist politics have various forms the essence of which is the same: the continuation and development of the system of wage slavery, of exploitation of the many by the few….

"In such a war the working class can gain nothing by the victory of either power. They must fight to defeat their own government so that working class victory can really be the outcome of the war….

"By strikes and demonstrations, fraternization with the ‘enemy’ on the war front, the militant workers’ movement can grow until it is in a position, with the majority of toilers behind it, to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and establish a workers’ dictatorship which will suppress the former master’s class and lead the way for a classless society."
—Young Spartacus, March 1934

While remaining critical of certain tactical mistakes made by the SYL, the Revolutionary Communist Youth, youth section of the Spartacist League, holds up as a model the SYL’s conception of a correct orientation to students and its history of Leninist intervention into the student anti-war movement. An assimilation of this history is important in politically defeating reformist organizations like the Attica Brigade, the Young Socialist Alliance and SDS and winning over their serious militants to Marxism.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-What (Class Struggle) Defense Policy for Revolutionaries? (1973)

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

From The "International Socialist Review" Website- The Student Upsurge In Britain

Click on the headline to link to an International Socialist Review online article on the student upsurge in Britain.

Markin comment on this article:

Or rather on an archival article from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (1972) giving my comments on the question of youth vanguardism posed in that article. The comments used for that article, reposted below, can be aptly applied to the thrust of this article.

"This 1972 RCY Newletter article is more directly timely than some of the other material I have placed under this headline. In 2010 there were significant student strikes in Europe as well as important, if smaller and more localized (mainly California), student strikes in the United States against budget cuts to public education, including, critically, public higher education. The obvious need is to link up the student struggles against budget cuts, increased tuition, and harder financial aid standards with the other struggles of the working class to defend its historic and hard fought gains like pensions, social services, and health care, as noted in France where masses of students came out to support the struggle against raising pension eligibility ages. There will be more such struggles ahead, in Europe and elsewhere.

Sometimes student struggles have their own parochial quality (around specific campus issues like dormitory regulations, etc.), other times they intersect the working class. What is important to remember is that it is the working class that has the social power (and has had it for a long time now, although mainly unused) to bring society to a standstill but also to win victories, defensive or offensive as the case may be, against the bourgeoisie. That simple fact, as the article here alludes to, often got lost in the old days of the 1960s old New Left. Youth vanguardism was rampant. The assumption then (and maybe now, a little) was that the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” (at least relatively) and therefore was no longer, as Marx and his followers projected, a potentially revolutionary force. A very dangerous, but very common notion then, and now as well.

This time around, hopefully, we will not have to “relive” history on that question. At least for those of us who have seen a few things, especially the volatility of the petty bourgeois students, over time. There is, unfortunately, nothing inherently revolutionary about youth, in itself, all self-image to the contrary. Let’s, however, not neglect to work in that milieu and see what flies out in the days ahead.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?"

Monday, December 20, 2010

On “Professional” Protesters- A 50th Anniversary, Of Sorts- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for SANE (or rather its successor, Peace Action)

Markin comment:

As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries my very first public political act occurred in 1960 when I attended a SANE anti-nuclear weapons demonstration on the Boston Common. I was thrilled, if somewhat apprehensive as a fourteen year old (and youngest participant in the demo, as I recall), to be marching in the same cause as Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberal luminaries of the day. I was also somewhat naïve, as to be expected, about how that task, in my mind the task of American unilateral nuclear disarmament, was to take place. The naïve part then was really the failure to know that such a task would take a revolution, would take a life and death struggle against American imperialism, and was not going to take place with Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and those other liberal luminaries at my side. But such is political life.

So much for nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia for the old days. The central purpose of this entry is rather to mark my 50 years of “professional” protesting with a few comments, more random musings than anything else. Those quote marks around the word professional are placed there because this is what an old girlfriend back in the days called me. Especially every time I balked at a date because I had some pressing political task to do. But see, here is where she was wrong (as I told her at the time). If by professional she meant that I was getting paid for my profession (which WAS her meaning) then over the last fifty years of political work I have a net loss balance. If I had to subsist on “earnings” from politics I would be on the dole. This same girlfriend (who, by the way, at that time was no mean politico herself) called me, on another occasion, a “chronic” protester. Well, perhaps, but I think that if she had, in either case, just called me a wannabe-Bolshevik I would not have quarreled with that. Although that is my assessment now, more so than then. Needless to say that girlfriend and I did not last long. The last I heard, several years back, she was married to a dentist and a happy grandmother. I hope so.

At that first SANE demonstration, beside the thrill of being there with my liberal heroes at my back (not literally, of course), I had my first “red-baiting” incident. Needless to say I was furious because then although I was rather agnostic on working with communists, known or unknown (mostly the latter as I found out later), I was emphatically not one myself. I was in my family-of-the left phase (although I would not have known then to call it that) where anyone who was for nuclear disarmament, black civil rights in the South, and other good things was my kindred. Funny, how things turn around though. Later in some causes, especially in the later parts of the anti-Vietnam War struggle, when "redness" was a badge of political correctness I was worried when I was not called a Bolshevik. So be it.

I will not bore the reader with a list of various demonstrations, meetings, conferences, sit-ins, and strikes that I have participated in, one way or the other, over the past fifty years. Praise be. Except to say the following and kind of bring things to the present. At that now hallowed SANE demonstration, with its twenty or thirty participants, there were mainly Quakers, pacifists, closet “reds”, and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (to use a phrase of the day to designate oddball political types). Recently, on December 16, 2010, I was down in Washington, D.C. in support of the Veterans For Peace-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House in order to protest his Afghan and Iraq war policies. Among the few hundred demonstrators (and 131 civil disobedience arrestees), beside the veterans, were Quakers, pacifists, and little old ladies in running shoes (progress on the foot apparel front, right?).

But know this, apart from obvious political disagreements with other participants, this action was an appropriate way to end my first fifty years of political activism. And I hope as long as I can I will be that chronic "professional" protester of that long ago girlfriend’s fury. More importantly, mark this date- December 16, 2010-haltingly or not, politically naïve or not, few in number or not-The Resistance Has Begun!