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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Markin comment on 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?
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From the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 13, August-September 1972.
Student Strikes And The Working Class
The wave of student protests that swept the country after Nixon's 1 May escalation speech posed yet again the problem of revolutionary leadership and the political mobilization of the working class as the key to changing protest into power. Again students took to the streets, barricaded federal buildings, seized administration buildings, jammed highways and airports; again the police fired point blank into a crowd; and again, this time within less than three weeks, all was as before—quiet on the campuses despite continued savage bombings in Vietnam.
The latest student outburst demonstrated the continuing widespread hatred of the war among college students; 27 percent of campuses had demonstrations, 3, 000 students were arrested in the first two weeks of the strikes (Guardian. 14 May 1972). In comparison to the May 1970 strikes around the Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State events, however, the recent upsurge fell far short:in both size and militancy.
The 1970 strikes reflected deep unrest and combativeness among students but was dissipated by its leadership. Mired in the Third Worldism of RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement, former right wing of SDS, split from SDS in May 1969) and the campus parochialism of Progressive Labor-led SDS, the "leadership" of the 1970 student strikes could not see the importance of spreading the strikes to a working class discontented with the war and increasingly engaged-in its own militant struggles. Ignoring the only social force which has the power to compel a U. S. withdrawal, the wave of student strikes quickly collapsed.
Two intervening years of disillusionment, de-politicalization and the retreat of most of the ostensibly revolutionary wing of the student movement into liberalism combined to produce, as Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong's harbor, little more than a pale shadow of the '70 up surge. Unable to develop program that went beyond the boundaries of the campus, the backwash of New Leftism was inevitably liberalism A small percentage of the strikers combined liberal politics with militant adventurist tactics in a display of desperation and impotence. For the majority, the short-lived strikes took the form of demonstrations of moral sentiment against the war with the McGovern campaign becoming the predominant political force. As can be expected the behavior of most of the ostensibly socialist political tendencies was groveling capitulation to the prevailing liberal mood.
Students unlike workers have neither the social power nor cohesion to carry out the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. They are therefore not a revolutionary class. College students, with their intellectual bent, youth and intermediate social position, are the most volatile section of the petty bourgeoisie. While on the one hand this means that students can become one of the major social supports for a fascist reaction, on the other hand important sections of the student population can be won to the cause of the proletariat.
Historically, intellectuals have contributed to the proletarian movement with theoretical and literary work and by maintaining revolutionary continuity during periods of quiescence or reaction. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg were all intellectuals who became important leaders of the international socialist movement.
France, 1968
As the French events of 1968 demonstrate, in periods when the working class is in motion, large numbers of students can be won to the support of the working class and serve as an important auxiliary social force. Large-scale student strikes at a moment of social crisis helped focus and generalize already-existing discontent and social ferment in the French working class and were an important component in precipitating the national general strike and revolutionary crisis. Far less resolute than the proletariat in the long run, students may at times initiate limited social struggles. The RCY categorically rejects theories of student vanguardism which see student leadership as essential to the success of the proletarian struggle, or dual-vanguard theories which see workers and students seizing state power simultaneously, through mutual support based on recognition of a so-called similar social position (as PL maintains). Students as a petty-bourgeois stratum have no program for their own class which is relevant to modern capitalist society in decay. Ideologically extremely heterogeneous, students will inevitably split in a revolutionary situation, one part supporting the proletariat and another the bourgeoisie. The extent to which the proletariat is capable of winning the support of students as well as the petty bourgeoisie as a whole depends on the strength of the working-class vanguard and will be an important factor in determining the relationship of forces in a revolutionary crisis.
The essential instrument of proletarian revolution is the political vanguard of the working class organized in the Leninist party. Only the mass implantation of the party in the class and its struggle for its program in the day-to-day work in the class can establish its political he¬gemony and win the workers to revolutionary consciousness. As the youth section of the nucleus of that party, the RCY will play an important auxiliary and supplementary role in building the Leninist party. The student strike wave gave the RCY a rare opportunity to intervene from outside to supplement the work of the Spartacist League in the labor movement, through RCY-led work stoppage committees. The work stoppage committees were proposed by the RCY to striking students as an arm of the student strike to carry out direct agitation in the working class for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze, and to propagandize for the construction of a labor party, victory to the Vietnamese revolution and opposition to the sellout peace plan of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. The international crisis precipitated by Nixon's escalation provided the temporary opportunity for students through such work stoppage committees to leaflet and directly address union meetings to help build for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze. Only this strategy would have allowed the student strike to effectively transcend the limitations of the campus and escape its impotence.
Probably the most grossly opportunist group during these strikes was the Workers League/ Young Socialists. The WL/YS attempted to suck up one week to the student movement and to denounce it the next week in typical flip flop fashion. The 24 April issue of the Bulletin boasted: "What is now expressed in these campus actions is the sharp struggle of the social classes in this period, and the tremendous offensive of the working class. " A few days later at Boston University, Pat Connolly of the WL was the only one to vote against striking. Subsequent issues of the Bulletin repeated this same flip flop, alternatively condemning the student strikes as simply "middle-class frenzy" and enthusing over them The National Caucus of Labor Committees was more consistently sectarian and abstentionist-
it denounced the student strikes throughout, refusing, at Columbia University in New York to join picket lines, and calling for citywide meetings of the "non-ruling-class population" to come together on a "common-interest program" as alternative to the strike. It opposed RCY's proposals at Columbia to expand the political strike to the working class through work stoppage committees, and once such a committee had been up under RCY leadership came to one of the e meetings to attack its existence and politics. The NCLC cannot tell working-class interests from a hole in the wall. It declares that the Vietnam war is an "irrelevant" issue for the working class, thus counterposing itself to the Leninist struggle for international proletariat solidarity. It counterposes classless, populist conferences and coalitions to the struggle for a working-class revolutionary vanguard party will fight for a socialist revolution—led by the working class and supported by important sec of the petty bourgeoisie.
The RCY fought consistently during the student upsurge for broadening the strikes to the working class and for a class struggle program again the war.
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STUDENT STRIKES: Opportunists in
Liberal Bloc
BERKELEY—Nixon's escalation against the DRV/ NLF offensive found the University of California, Berkeley campus embroiled in a major labor struggle. The building trades unions, threatened with job reclassifications meaning large wage cuts, went on strike. AFSCME and other campus unions joined the strike, bringing the striking force to over 1000 workers. The very right to organize and strike was at issue—the University refused to sign contracts with any of its employees and strikes of public employees are illegal here.
The sell-out policy of the union bureaucrats emerged in their refusal to publicly call a state-wide strike of state employees toward state recognition of campus and all public employees' unions, a demand which cannot be won locally. While adamantly defending the union against the state, the RCY has fought to expose its leadership's rotten policies.
In late April, a student strike in support of the workers' struggle and in response to Nixon's escalation began to develop. The labor bureaucrats, conscious that massive support and militant student participation on picket lines would be an encouragement to the union ranks for a real fight, spoke against a student strike. They hastily approved an "official" statement against the war, a sop to placate the students and to neutralize student hostility to the union due to its past political stances (rather than insisting from a class perspective on the necessity of active support for the trade unions). It was also intended to anticipate and defuse the real possibility of rank-and-file sentiment for labor action against the war. The RCY called for the student strike to take up the call for "A GENERAL STRIKE AGAINST THE WAR AND THE WAGE FREEZE" and to bring this demand to the striking campus workers and the labor movement as a whole. RCY formed and led the Labor Strike Support Committee and went to several unions agitating around this demand with some success—AFSCME Local 1695's vote in favor of it being an example.
Anxious to contain and depoliticize any movement among the students was the YSA/student' government bloc, which tailed the bureaucrats in hopes of heading off a student strike, and insisted on phony education campaigns in opposition to militant picketing. Essentially the SWP/YSA counterposed their popular-front anti-war activities to action around the workers' strike. When the student strike became a reality, this bloc consistently voted with the Campus Anti-Imperialist Coalition (a group of Revolutionary Union members and other Maoists rapidly finding the liberal road) to insure that political discussion and alternative strike strategies were not discussed at mass meetings.
PL/SDS's total disorientation and liberal approach was revealed in their refusal to insist on priorities for the student strike, thereby capitulating to demands for student power and to anti-working class attitudes among the students. PL/SDS formed a Strike Action Group (SAG) with the International Socialists who excused the union bureaucrats by blaming the bureaucrats' strategy on "blindness" or by saying that the bureaucrats were merely following the orders of their lawyers. The SAG's strategy for the strike consisted mainly of guerilla theater and collecting food and money for the strikers. This social-work approach is an abstention from political struggle and is a tailing after the bureaucrats, insuring that the only politics or strategy to which the rank and file is exposed is that of their sell-out mis-leaders.
