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.
*******
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.
Friday, June 03, 2011
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Hands Off Julian Assange!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Private Bradley Manning!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Francisco Torres Of The San Francisco Eight
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Of This And That Out In The North Adamsville Be-Bop Night Circa, 1960
Of This And That Out In The North Adamsville Be-Bop Night Circa, 1960
Markin comment:
I have, on more than one occasion, cursed the Internet to the high heavens for stirring up, or of being the catalyst to stir up ancient memories, ancient memories I was entirely willing to keep back in the deep recesses of my mind. And then the next moment I find that I need to bow down, profusely bow face to the floor, to its ability to make some necessary link information available at the touch of a mouse. The latter is such a moment here.
Recently I received an e-mail via one of the sites that I am linked to from an old high school flame, well, maybe more of a flicker, Betty Ann Kelly (maiden name), who e-mailed me in response to a general question that I had posed to my fellow classmates at old North Adamsville High School, Class of 1964. That question actually involved any memories, such as they were, remembered of those times, more specifically of North Adamsville Junior High days (now, Middle School) since when I posed the question we were in the throes of “celebrating” our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from that school (1960). Her response was simple- as will be noted below she had not actually attended North Adamsville Junior High (Middle School) but rather Adamsville Central Junior High (ditto on the middle school thing).
Needless to say, flame or flicker, I have some egg on my face for not remembering that she was not one of us-a North Adamsville Junior Higher- when the town junior high school rivalries were almost as intense as those of the cross-town rivalry between North Adamsville High and Adamsville High. More to the point I would have gone to my grave believing that she had been a classmate and so I bow down, profusely bow down, to the high tech Internet for making the connections that made that connection possible. My return e-mail is posted below to “enlighten” those of our generation who face some of the same issues-how to turn on the computer, how to deal with forgetfulness (I am being kind to all parties here), and how to “forget” that if one has a 50th middle school graduation anniversary in 2010 then a 50th high school anniversary is on the horizon. Ugh! Damn Internet.
*********
Dear Betty Ann,
Thanks for your note. Before I go on I just have to comment, kiddingly anyway, on this e-mail snafu. [The response e-mail was received about a year after the original one was sent-Markin.] At your expense? Well, yes. I thought, and correct me if I am wrong, that e-mail was supposed to be faster than the regular mails. And if not that, then at least faster than the Pony Express of old, old days. I do note that you are located in up- state New York so that explains a lot, an awful lot. Now for a little fun at my expense. It seems that I did not edit the e-mail that I sent you. I forgot to correct, retype actually, the quotation marks when I went from my word processor to the site e-mail screen. Thus, you got some strange Serbo-Croatian transliterations, or some other forgotten language, in your e-mail. I will take some laughs on that one.
Okay, now down to business. The thing that I requested in that e-mail, information and ideas in order to honor our 50th anniversary since graduation, if you had been a North Adamsville Junior High alumna and not a benighted Adamsville Central alumna I got another way. I actually worked around it and wrote from different angle from what I expected to do. If you look on the Class Wall of the Class Of 1964 homepage you will find it- Entering North-1960. You will also find a couple of other posts, as well. Also if you Google Tales From Old North Adamsville High you will be able to click to a blog I established last year about the old days when we all bled raider red. Such little subjects as summer beach nights, Tri-Hi-Y, Howard Johnson’s ice cream, boys’ and girls’ bowling teams, and some sad, some silly, and some just plain be-bop things as well. Of course, since this is your 50th anniversary of graduating from Adamsville Central Junior High (oops, Middle School) you are duty-bound to write a little something, and we will all meet up in the fall of 1961 to form the North Adamsville Class of 1964.
As for rumors, threats, dreads, and celebrations of our 50th anniversary since graduation from high school I have no particular information right now. Perhaps someone on the site might have some information. I will say this-in 2004 I received an invitation to our 40th reunion, although I did not attend. I have never attended any reunion (although I wrote about old friend, Bill Connolly, going to the fifth reunion in 1969- it is posted on that Tales blog). How about you? The people who put that one together were Linda Paul and Gary Docker. Linda has her name listed on this site so maybe you could check with her. In 2004 I was not bleeding raider red but now I am not sure that I would not attend a 50th reunion if it is organized.
Let me hear from you- soon (within a year, okay). Friendly regards. Peter Paul Markin
Markin comment:
I have, on more than one occasion, cursed the Internet to the high heavens for stirring up, or of being the catalyst to stir up ancient memories, ancient memories I was entirely willing to keep back in the deep recesses of my mind. And then the next moment I find that I need to bow down, profusely bow face to the floor, to its ability to make some necessary link information available at the touch of a mouse. The latter is such a moment here.
Recently I received an e-mail via one of the sites that I am linked to from an old high school flame, well, maybe more of a flicker, Betty Ann Kelly (maiden name), who e-mailed me in response to a general question that I had posed to my fellow classmates at old North Adamsville High School, Class of 1964. That question actually involved any memories, such as they were, remembered of those times, more specifically of North Adamsville Junior High days (now, Middle School) since when I posed the question we were in the throes of “celebrating” our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from that school (1960). Her response was simple- as will be noted below she had not actually attended North Adamsville Junior High (Middle School) but rather Adamsville Central Junior High (ditto on the middle school thing).
Needless to say, flame or flicker, I have some egg on my face for not remembering that she was not one of us-a North Adamsville Junior Higher- when the town junior high school rivalries were almost as intense as those of the cross-town rivalry between North Adamsville High and Adamsville High. More to the point I would have gone to my grave believing that she had been a classmate and so I bow down, profusely bow down, to the high tech Internet for making the connections that made that connection possible. My return e-mail is posted below to “enlighten” those of our generation who face some of the same issues-how to turn on the computer, how to deal with forgetfulness (I am being kind to all parties here), and how to “forget” that if one has a 50th middle school graduation anniversary in 2010 then a 50th high school anniversary is on the horizon. Ugh! Damn Internet.
*********
Dear Betty Ann,
Thanks for your note. Before I go on I just have to comment, kiddingly anyway, on this e-mail snafu. [The response e-mail was received about a year after the original one was sent-Markin.] At your expense? Well, yes. I thought, and correct me if I am wrong, that e-mail was supposed to be faster than the regular mails. And if not that, then at least faster than the Pony Express of old, old days. I do note that you are located in up- state New York so that explains a lot, an awful lot. Now for a little fun at my expense. It seems that I did not edit the e-mail that I sent you. I forgot to correct, retype actually, the quotation marks when I went from my word processor to the site e-mail screen. Thus, you got some strange Serbo-Croatian transliterations, or some other forgotten language, in your e-mail. I will take some laughs on that one.
Okay, now down to business. The thing that I requested in that e-mail, information and ideas in order to honor our 50th anniversary since graduation, if you had been a North Adamsville Junior High alumna and not a benighted Adamsville Central alumna I got another way. I actually worked around it and wrote from different angle from what I expected to do. If you look on the Class Wall of the Class Of 1964 homepage you will find it- Entering North-1960. You will also find a couple of other posts, as well. Also if you Google Tales From Old North Adamsville High you will be able to click to a blog I established last year about the old days when we all bled raider red. Such little subjects as summer beach nights, Tri-Hi-Y, Howard Johnson’s ice cream, boys’ and girls’ bowling teams, and some sad, some silly, and some just plain be-bop things as well. Of course, since this is your 50th anniversary of graduating from Adamsville Central Junior High (oops, Middle School) you are duty-bound to write a little something, and we will all meet up in the fall of 1961 to form the North Adamsville Class of 1964.
As for rumors, threats, dreads, and celebrations of our 50th anniversary since graduation from high school I have no particular information right now. Perhaps someone on the site might have some information. I will say this-in 2004 I received an invitation to our 40th reunion, although I did not attend. I have never attended any reunion (although I wrote about old friend, Bill Connolly, going to the fifth reunion in 1969- it is posted on that Tales blog). How about you? The people who put that one together were Linda Paul and Gary Docker. Linda has her name listed on this site so maybe you could check with her. In 2004 I was not bleeding raider red but now I am not sure that I would not attend a 50th reunion if it is organized.
Let me hear from you- soon (within a year, okay). Friendly regards. Peter Paul Markin
Thursday, June 02, 2011
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Website-Rally at Leavenworth June 4, 2011 for Bradley Manning! All Out To Defend Private Bradley Manning!
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry, dated Sunday, March 20, 2011, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner.
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-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.
*********
Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-Lessons from History
From Young Spartacist, No. 21, January-February 1974
The question of youth-party relations is an important aspect of Leninist organizational traditions. Many of those socialist youth sections that operated autonomously from the Social-Democratic Parties became pro-Bolshevik in WWI and the nuclei for the European Communist Parties. The heated discussion that took place later in the Communist Youth International over youth-party relations brought into question the basic Leninist conception of the vanguard party. Most of this history is today ignored by ostensibly revolutionary youth organizations like the Workers League’s Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance because they stand in the tradition of Stalinist or social-democratic conceptions of youth work, unlike the RCY, which stands in the Leninist tradition.
*******
In August 1914 the majorities of the major Western European Social Democratic Parties capitulated to pro-war sentiment, national chauvinism, and the pressures of their respective bourgeoisies. They pledged themselves to national defense, support of the imperialist war—and ultimately joined bourgeois governments. The statements of internationalism and commitments to the struggle against war— from the Amsterdam Conference of 1904 to the Basle Conference of 1912—became a dead letter. However, despite the capitulation of the party leaderships, a significant section of the loosely organized socialist youth retained an internationalist position. Threatened most directly by the imperialist war—for which they were the intended cannon fodder—and maintaining a revolutionary élan foreign to the bureaucracies in countries like Germany, France and Belgium, many sections of the youth refused to accept the Burgfrieden (social peace in a "beleaguered fortress") of the Eberts, Vanderveldes and Guesdes, as well as rejecting the ineffectual petty-bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky, who complained that "the International is founded for the purpose of peace and not for wartime."
This anti-war stance was not universal among the socialist youth. Major sections remained loyal to their reformist organizations—and thus tied themselves to their own imperialist bourgeoisies. Ludwig Frank of the South German Youth Guard became a model and martyr for the German social-patriotic youth by volunteering for the Kaiser’s army, and falling promptly on a French battlefield. The Austrian youth under Dannenberg accepted the Kautskyist stance of passive opposition to the war—and the suspension of internationalism for the duration. (Dannenberg hung a black-bordered sign on the door of the Youth Bureau in Vienna which read, "Temporarily closed on account of war.") But significant sections of the youth did not capitulate.
The political differentiation among the European youth groups can at least partially be laid to differences in historical development. The first socialist youth organization, the Belgian Young Guards (formed in 1886) was formed independently of the Social Democrats, for basically political motives, i.e., the desire to engage in anti-militarist agitation and propaganda.
The socialist youth groups formed in Sweden (1895), Switzerland (1900), Italy (1901), Norway (1902), Spain (1903) and southern Germany (1904) were based on the Belgian model—they were highly political and independent from the adult parties. The youth groups formed in Austria (1894) and northern Germany (1904-05) were concerned, primarily with improving the economic position of young workers and with raising their living standards. The youth organizations formed after 1907, as in Holland, France and the united youth organization in Germany (following Liebknecht’s arrest and removal from the southern German youth leadership by the Social-Democratic Party leadership) were based more on the less political Austrian model than on the Belgian one. The youth groups formed for economic reasons were usually formed and controlled by the socialist parties. During WWI, the youth organizations based on the Belgian model in general upheld their opposition to imperialist war and commitment to internationalism while the German and Austrian youth caved in to social chauvinism along with their parent parties.
The Berne Conference, 1915
After a process of regroupment, led initially by the Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian youth organizations, the oppositional youth called the first international conference since the outbreak of the war—at Berne, Switzerland from 4-6 April 1915.
The Berne conference represented a confusion of centrist and revolutionary political tendencies, and like the Zimmerwald conference which followed it, its resolution was tainted by social pacifism, i.e., the dominance of pacifist anti-war perspectives over a class-struggle approach. The cutting edge of the difference between the centrists and the left (the Bolsheviks) at the Zimmerwald conference was Lenin’s slogan, "Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War," whose concrete and immediate agitational demands were for the anti-war general strike and socialist propaganda in the army.
The Berne conference was a step forward of considerable significance. It represented a reaffirmation of internationalism in the face of nationalist war sentiment. It rejected the class collaboration of the social-democratic majorities; and, most significantly, it broke relations with the Bureau of the Second International, which, as Rosa Luxemburg was to remark, had become a "rotting corpse." Further, it established a new bureau of the Youth International, under the leadership of the left-wing German-Swiss, Willi Munzenberg. The Bolshevik organization, intervening in the conference, argued for the position of revolutionary defeatism. (Early on, the Bolshevik delegation had walked out over a dispute on the allotment of votes, but returned on the insistence of Lenin, who wanted to lose no chance of influencing the left-wing socialist youth towards a consistently revolutionary position.) Although the Bolshevik position was not accepted by the conference, it had considerable impact on the young militants.
The conference also established the publication of Die Jugendinternationale (The Youth International), which was to appear for the next three years and carry many articles by the representatives of the revolutionary left. The early issues of The Youth International showed the same political confusion as had characterized the Berne conference, carrying articles by pacifist reformists like Bernstein, as well as articles representing the centrists and the revolutionary left. Setting the tone, however, was the major article by Karl Liebknecht in the first two issues. Liebknecht’s article, "Antimilitarismus," was an impassioned indictment of the war: the militarization of state and factory as well as barracks and trenches; the lies of the imperialists, pandering Illusions of self-determination and self-defense. It was also a call for bitter and decisive opposition on all levels, for the class unity of the proletariat against the war—and for a new, revolutionary international. Although not the only voice raised in the early Youth International, it was the clearest, and soon dominated the rest.
Writing of The Youth International in December 1916, Lenin heralded its struggle for proletarian internationalism:
"With this state of affairs in Europe [the betrayal of the major social democracies], there falls on the League of Socialist Youth Organizations the tremendous, grateful but difficult task of fighting for revolutionary internationalism, for true socialism and against the prevailing opportunism which has deserted to the side of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The Youth International has published a number of good articles in defense of revolutionary internationalism, and the magazine as a whole is permeated with a fine spirit of intense hatred for the betrayers of socialism, the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the present war, and with an earnest desire to wipe out the corroding influence of chauvinism and opportunism in the international labor movement."
—Lenin, Works, Vol. 23, p. 163-64.
Lenin did not minimize the political differences lying between the Bolsheviks and the youth leagues and noted their lack of theoretical clarity, but he stressed the difference between this political unclarity and the betrayal of the hardened opportunists:
"Adults who lay claim to lead and teach the proletariat, but actually mislead it, are one thing: against such people a ruthless struggle must be waged. Organizations of youth, however, which openly declare that they are still learning, that their main task is to train party workers for the socialist parties, are quite another thing. We must be patient with their faults and strive to correct them gradually, mainly by persuasion, and not by fighting them."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Lenin strongly recommended the publication to the attention of Bolshevik cadre.
Lenin Calls for Independence of European Youth Groups
During this period, Lenin called for the "complete independence" of the European youth leagues, while reserving the right of "complete freedom of comradely criticism of their errors" (Works, Vol. 23, p. 64). This position must be viewed in its historical context. Because of the egregious betrayal of the Social Democracy, the first duty of revolutionaries had to be the separation of the proletarian internationalist elements from the "rotting corpse" of the Second International. It was impermissible to accept responsibility for the social chauvinists through the disciplined acceptance of their policies. In the major combatant countries of Western Europe there existed no revolutionary parties (with the exception of revolutionary propaganda groups like the Spartacus League and the Bremen Left in Germany). The discipline of a revolutionary is to the revolutionary movement, its principles and program—and to organizations which embody that program and continuity.
Subordination of the youth leagues to the social chauvinist leaders of the major European parties (with the exception of the Bolsheviks) meant their subjugation to the barracks discipline of their respective imperialist bourgeoisies. Thus Lenin hailed Liebknecht's vote against war credits in the German Reichstag as an act of discipline towards the revolution, although it represented a breach of the formal discipline of the German Social-Democratic Party.
The position of the revolutionary youth was a difficult one. They were forced to substitute themselves to a considerable degree for ‘revolutionary’ parties which did not exist. Substitute, because they generally lacked the experience and political clarity to become such parties themselves, although they helped to provide the nuclei of such parties in the period after 1917. Their "complete independence" was not a virtue in itself—quite the reverse—it was a byproduct of the Second International's betrayal of its leading role in the proletariat. Thus Liebknecht participated in the illegal conference of the oppositional German socialist youth in Jena, on 23-24 April 1916, and wrote the major political document of the conference, "The Tasks of the Proletarian Youth Movement." The document itself was a model of revolutionary fervor and called for "the proletarian youth movement to struggle against the war with all forces and all means, and to utilize the conditions created [by the war] to accelerate the collapse of capitalist class rule" (Liebknecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609).
But such cadre were in desperately short supply, and Liebknecht himself was arrested barely a week after the conference (for his call for revolutionary defeatism during the May 1st workers demonstration in Berlin). He remained imprisoned until the November revolution in 1918, and his guiding influence was thus lost to the German—and international—socialist youth for most of the duration of the war.
In the uprisings and revolutions following the October Revolution—in Berlin, Munich, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere—the socialist youth, like the proletariat as a whole, paid a bitter price for the non-existence of experienced and hardened revolutionary parties. But the lack of revolutionary leadership was least of all attributable to the oppositional youth leagues, of whom Liebknecht wrote:
"Its ranks were decimated, its leaders sent to the trenches, imprisoned in ‘protective custody,’ jail and prison. Class justice raged more mercilessly over them than upon the adults, and swept away many a warm young life to the hecatombs of slaughter. The free [oppositional socialist] youth, however, remained undaunted, and defied their enemies."
—Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609
Formation of the Communist Youth International
This bitter experience and the Socialist youth’s increasing understanding of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary program and analysis of the Second International’s collapse led to a coming together, of the European youth and the Russian Communist youth. On 20 November 1919, in the back room of a beer hall In Berlin, guarded by sentinels and pickets of the Berlin youth, the first Congress of the Communist Youth International (CYI) was held. There were present delegates from 12 countries, representing 200,000-300,000 members when the congress was called to order by Willi Munzenberg—recently released from prison. (By 1921, according to Munzenberg’s estimate, the number of affiliated sections rose to 15, with a membership of approximately 800,000.)
However, for some time the nature of the relationship of the CYI to the Communist International (CI) remained undefined. On 20 November 1920, the Russian Young Communist League proposed to the Executive Committee of the CYI the codification of youth-party relations as "political subordination and organizational independence." The majorities of other youth leagues, however, mindful of their recent experience with the betrayal of the Second International, were at first unwilling to accept such a relationship. They had generalized the conjunctural historical role they had played into a conception of an inherently vanguard role for the youth, or, at least, a political watchdog role for the youth in relation to the party.
It was not until the Second Congress of the CYI that the formula supported by the Russian League was adopted. The Congress began on 6 April in Jena (where the conference of the German oppositional youth had taken place in 1916), but was moved on 10 April for security reasons to Berlin. Finally, on the instruction of the Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI), the CYI Congress "continued" in Moscow from 9-23 June, immediately preceding the Third Congress of the CI.
The political struggle was sharp, both over youth-party relations and the "theory of the revolutionary offensive," the position of the left in the CI itself (grouped around Bela Kun, Maslow and Fischer), which was initially supported by the majority of the youth. This conception failed to recognize the relative capitalist restabilization which had ensued after the defeats of the 1918-20 period, and contended that continued frontal assault of the proletarian forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of world capitalism.
CI Resolution on Youth-Party Relations
The questions of "political subordination" and "the revolutionary offensive" were linked, since acceptance of the political supremacy of the CI meant disciplined acceptance of the tactics of regroupment and the united front, the laborious "winning of the masses" demanded by the CI leadership around Lenin and Trotsky. The political debate over the question in the CI itself was to prove very heated, with a large minority supporting the "lefts," and Lenin and Trotsky winning a majority only after a long struggle. The position of the Bolshevik majority and the Russian youth league, however, finally carried the conference. At the Third Congress of the CI, from 22 June to 12 July 1921, the following resolution on youth-party relations was accepted:
"The relation of Communist Youth Organizations to the Communist Parties is fundamentally different from that of the revolutionary youth organizations to the social democratic parties. In the common struggle for the quick accomplishment of the proletarian revolution the greatest unity and strictest centralization is necessary. The political direction and leadership can lie internationally only with the CI, and in the individual countries only with the national sections. It is the duty of the CYO’s to subordinate themselves to this political direction (program, tactics and political directives), and to integrate themselves into the common revolutionary front… The CYO’s, which have begun to organize their own ranks on the principles of the strictest centralization, will exercise iron discipline towards the CI as bearer and leader of the proletarian revolution. The CYO’s shall occupy themselves within its organizations with all political and tactical questions, will take a position, and work for these resolutions within, but never against, the CP of their country. In cases of serious differences of opinion between the CP’s and CYO’s the right of appeal to the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International) shall be utilized. The surrender of their political independence means under no circumstances the renunciation of their organizational independence, which is indispensable on educational grounds."
—Resolution on the Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
The political subordination of the youth to the party flows from the principle of discipline towards the revolutionary movement, and in the concrete instance the recognition that the CI was the bearer of revolutionary continuity and the revolutionary program. The CI Resolution placed the relationship of youth and party clearly in historical and political context:
"In some countries where the building of the communist parties is still in progress and the youth have just split from the Social Patriot and Centrist parties the slogan of absolute political and organizational independence of the youth movement dominates, and in this situation this slogan is objectively revolutionary. The slogan of absolute independence is wrong in those countries where strong Communist parties already exist and where the slogan of absolute independence is used by the Social Patriots and Centrists for misleading the youth against the communist youth organization. In these cases, the communist youth organization follows the program of the communist party."
—quoted in Richard Cornell, The Origins and Development of the Communist Youth International, 1914-1924 (PhD thesis), p. 316
The Danger of Dual Vanguardism
Whereas it was indispensable for the revolutionary youth organizations in WWI to separate themselves politically from the treacherous and class collaborationist leadership of the Second International, and struggle to develop and implement a revolutionary program, so conversely it was necessary for the youth to subordinate itself to a truly revolutionary international—which genuinely embodied the program of proletarian revolution. To do otherwise would be to engage in dual vanguardism—in the last analysis to challenge the International for the leadership of the class. The CI resolution is quite explicit:
"With the formation of the CI and the CP’s in the individual countries, the role of the proletarian youth organizations changes within the common proletarian movement. The continued existence of the CYO’s as politically independent and leading organizations would lead to the formation of two competing communist parties, differentiated merely by the age of their members."
—Resolution…
The recognition of the necessity of one vanguard, as the consistent revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, and the necessity of this role lying with the most tested, experienced and capable proletarian revolutionaries—i.e., with the CI and the communist parties, also implies the imperative of political differences being fought out internally, should they arise between party and youth. The youth must enjoy full rights of political discussion within its own ranks, and the possibility of influencing the party through its representatives. Conversely, the party must have the opportunity of exercising its guidance at all times upon the youth, of aiding the political maturation of the youth cadre, and maintaining its revolutionary orientation. Should a serious political difference develop, it is imperative that there be channels for its internal political resolution (thus, the right of appeal first to the Executive Committee of the CYI, then to the ECCI and finally to the World Congresses as the highest bodies of the common movement). The party is the concentrated subjective element of the proletarian revolution, and where principled agreement exists no breach is legitimate unless all avenues of internal discussion have been exhausted. Ultimately, of course, the final arbiter of any deep-going dispute is history—and its motor force, the class struggle—thus no organizational mechanism can guarantee that schisms will not develop. However, a split within the revolutionary vanguard—especially between party and youth, where it implies a terrible break in continuity—can only be justified by a deep-going principled counterposition. This was precisely the case with the Second International after 1914, but such an eventuality can only be considered as a last resort.
In order to provide for the requisite reciprocal political influence, the CI resolved:
"The close political co-operation of the CYO’s with the CP’s must also be expressed in a firm organizational connection between the organizations. A constant reciprocal representation of the organization and party leaderships, from the regional, district and local organizations down to the cells of the communist groups in industry and in the unions, as well as a strong reciprocal representation at all conferences and congresses is unconditionally required. In this way it will be possible for the CP’s to continually influence the political line and activity of the youth, and, on the other hand, for the youth to exercise an effective influence on the party."
—Resolution…
Importance of Organizational Independence for the Youth
The political subordination of the youth to the party—the proletarian vanguard—does not, however, invalidate the need for organizational independence for the youth. Lenin had outlined the reasons for this organizational independence long before the Third Comintern Congress, in his review of The Youth International:
"…the youth must of necessity advance to socialism in a different way, by other paths, in other forms, in other circumstances than their fathers. Incidentally, that is why we must decidedly favor organizational independence of the Youth League, not only because the opportunists fear such independence, but because of the very nature of the case. For unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Each generation faces a unique conjuncture of problems and tasks, which lead by different routes to the development of communist consciousness. While the fundamental causes are essentially identical (the contradictions of a capitalism which has outlived its progressiveness) the unique character of the process for each generation must be recognized and an organizationally flexible context provided for the development of creative revolutionary response. Although the youth needs the guidance of the party, it also needs to develop the initiative, judgment and political experience of its own leadership and cadre, and to do so vis-Ã -vis the specific problems facing the youth as a specially oppressed group within capitalist society. The primary educative mechanism of the youth is in its own experience of the class struggle.
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.
*********
Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-Lessons from History
From Young Spartacist, No. 21, January-February 1974
The question of youth-party relations is an important aspect of Leninist organizational traditions. Many of those socialist youth sections that operated autonomously from the Social-Democratic Parties became pro-Bolshevik in WWI and the nuclei for the European Communist Parties. The heated discussion that took place later in the Communist Youth International over youth-party relations brought into question the basic Leninist conception of the vanguard party. Most of this history is today ignored by ostensibly revolutionary youth organizations like the Workers League’s Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance because they stand in the tradition of Stalinist or social-democratic conceptions of youth work, unlike the RCY, which stands in the Leninist tradition.
*******
In August 1914 the majorities of the major Western European Social Democratic Parties capitulated to pro-war sentiment, national chauvinism, and the pressures of their respective bourgeoisies. They pledged themselves to national defense, support of the imperialist war—and ultimately joined bourgeois governments. The statements of internationalism and commitments to the struggle against war— from the Amsterdam Conference of 1904 to the Basle Conference of 1912—became a dead letter. However, despite the capitulation of the party leaderships, a significant section of the loosely organized socialist youth retained an internationalist position. Threatened most directly by the imperialist war—for which they were the intended cannon fodder—and maintaining a revolutionary élan foreign to the bureaucracies in countries like Germany, France and Belgium, many sections of the youth refused to accept the Burgfrieden (social peace in a "beleaguered fortress") of the Eberts, Vanderveldes and Guesdes, as well as rejecting the ineffectual petty-bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky, who complained that "the International is founded for the purpose of peace and not for wartime."
This anti-war stance was not universal among the socialist youth. Major sections remained loyal to their reformist organizations—and thus tied themselves to their own imperialist bourgeoisies. Ludwig Frank of the South German Youth Guard became a model and martyr for the German social-patriotic youth by volunteering for the Kaiser’s army, and falling promptly on a French battlefield. The Austrian youth under Dannenberg accepted the Kautskyist stance of passive opposition to the war—and the suspension of internationalism for the duration. (Dannenberg hung a black-bordered sign on the door of the Youth Bureau in Vienna which read, "Temporarily closed on account of war.") But significant sections of the youth did not capitulate.
The political differentiation among the European youth groups can at least partially be laid to differences in historical development. The first socialist youth organization, the Belgian Young Guards (formed in 1886) was formed independently of the Social Democrats, for basically political motives, i.e., the desire to engage in anti-militarist agitation and propaganda.
The socialist youth groups formed in Sweden (1895), Switzerland (1900), Italy (1901), Norway (1902), Spain (1903) and southern Germany (1904) were based on the Belgian model—they were highly political and independent from the adult parties. The youth groups formed in Austria (1894) and northern Germany (1904-05) were concerned, primarily with improving the economic position of young workers and with raising their living standards. The youth organizations formed after 1907, as in Holland, France and the united youth organization in Germany (following Liebknecht’s arrest and removal from the southern German youth leadership by the Social-Democratic Party leadership) were based more on the less political Austrian model than on the Belgian one. The youth groups formed for economic reasons were usually formed and controlled by the socialist parties. During WWI, the youth organizations based on the Belgian model in general upheld their opposition to imperialist war and commitment to internationalism while the German and Austrian youth caved in to social chauvinism along with their parent parties.
The Berne Conference, 1915
After a process of regroupment, led initially by the Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian youth organizations, the oppositional youth called the first international conference since the outbreak of the war—at Berne, Switzerland from 4-6 April 1915.
The Berne conference represented a confusion of centrist and revolutionary political tendencies, and like the Zimmerwald conference which followed it, its resolution was tainted by social pacifism, i.e., the dominance of pacifist anti-war perspectives over a class-struggle approach. The cutting edge of the difference between the centrists and the left (the Bolsheviks) at the Zimmerwald conference was Lenin’s slogan, "Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War," whose concrete and immediate agitational demands were for the anti-war general strike and socialist propaganda in the army.
The Berne conference was a step forward of considerable significance. It represented a reaffirmation of internationalism in the face of nationalist war sentiment. It rejected the class collaboration of the social-democratic majorities; and, most significantly, it broke relations with the Bureau of the Second International, which, as Rosa Luxemburg was to remark, had become a "rotting corpse." Further, it established a new bureau of the Youth International, under the leadership of the left-wing German-Swiss, Willi Munzenberg. The Bolshevik organization, intervening in the conference, argued for the position of revolutionary defeatism. (Early on, the Bolshevik delegation had walked out over a dispute on the allotment of votes, but returned on the insistence of Lenin, who wanted to lose no chance of influencing the left-wing socialist youth towards a consistently revolutionary position.) Although the Bolshevik position was not accepted by the conference, it had considerable impact on the young militants.
The conference also established the publication of Die Jugendinternationale (The Youth International), which was to appear for the next three years and carry many articles by the representatives of the revolutionary left. The early issues of The Youth International showed the same political confusion as had characterized the Berne conference, carrying articles by pacifist reformists like Bernstein, as well as articles representing the centrists and the revolutionary left. Setting the tone, however, was the major article by Karl Liebknecht in the first two issues. Liebknecht’s article, "Antimilitarismus," was an impassioned indictment of the war: the militarization of state and factory as well as barracks and trenches; the lies of the imperialists, pandering Illusions of self-determination and self-defense. It was also a call for bitter and decisive opposition on all levels, for the class unity of the proletariat against the war—and for a new, revolutionary international. Although not the only voice raised in the early Youth International, it was the clearest, and soon dominated the rest.
Writing of The Youth International in December 1916, Lenin heralded its struggle for proletarian internationalism:
"With this state of affairs in Europe [the betrayal of the major social democracies], there falls on the League of Socialist Youth Organizations the tremendous, grateful but difficult task of fighting for revolutionary internationalism, for true socialism and against the prevailing opportunism which has deserted to the side of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The Youth International has published a number of good articles in defense of revolutionary internationalism, and the magazine as a whole is permeated with a fine spirit of intense hatred for the betrayers of socialism, the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the present war, and with an earnest desire to wipe out the corroding influence of chauvinism and opportunism in the international labor movement."
—Lenin, Works, Vol. 23, p. 163-64.
Lenin did not minimize the political differences lying between the Bolsheviks and the youth leagues and noted their lack of theoretical clarity, but he stressed the difference between this political unclarity and the betrayal of the hardened opportunists:
"Adults who lay claim to lead and teach the proletariat, but actually mislead it, are one thing: against such people a ruthless struggle must be waged. Organizations of youth, however, which openly declare that they are still learning, that their main task is to train party workers for the socialist parties, are quite another thing. We must be patient with their faults and strive to correct them gradually, mainly by persuasion, and not by fighting them."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Lenin strongly recommended the publication to the attention of Bolshevik cadre.
Lenin Calls for Independence of European Youth Groups
During this period, Lenin called for the "complete independence" of the European youth leagues, while reserving the right of "complete freedom of comradely criticism of their errors" (Works, Vol. 23, p. 64). This position must be viewed in its historical context. Because of the egregious betrayal of the Social Democracy, the first duty of revolutionaries had to be the separation of the proletarian internationalist elements from the "rotting corpse" of the Second International. It was impermissible to accept responsibility for the social chauvinists through the disciplined acceptance of their policies. In the major combatant countries of Western Europe there existed no revolutionary parties (with the exception of revolutionary propaganda groups like the Spartacus League and the Bremen Left in Germany). The discipline of a revolutionary is to the revolutionary movement, its principles and program—and to organizations which embody that program and continuity.
Subordination of the youth leagues to the social chauvinist leaders of the major European parties (with the exception of the Bolsheviks) meant their subjugation to the barracks discipline of their respective imperialist bourgeoisies. Thus Lenin hailed Liebknecht's vote against war credits in the German Reichstag as an act of discipline towards the revolution, although it represented a breach of the formal discipline of the German Social-Democratic Party.
The position of the revolutionary youth was a difficult one. They were forced to substitute themselves to a considerable degree for ‘revolutionary’ parties which did not exist. Substitute, because they generally lacked the experience and political clarity to become such parties themselves, although they helped to provide the nuclei of such parties in the period after 1917. Their "complete independence" was not a virtue in itself—quite the reverse—it was a byproduct of the Second International's betrayal of its leading role in the proletariat. Thus Liebknecht participated in the illegal conference of the oppositional German socialist youth in Jena, on 23-24 April 1916, and wrote the major political document of the conference, "The Tasks of the Proletarian Youth Movement." The document itself was a model of revolutionary fervor and called for "the proletarian youth movement to struggle against the war with all forces and all means, and to utilize the conditions created [by the war] to accelerate the collapse of capitalist class rule" (Liebknecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609).
But such cadre were in desperately short supply, and Liebknecht himself was arrested barely a week after the conference (for his call for revolutionary defeatism during the May 1st workers demonstration in Berlin). He remained imprisoned until the November revolution in 1918, and his guiding influence was thus lost to the German—and international—socialist youth for most of the duration of the war.
In the uprisings and revolutions following the October Revolution—in Berlin, Munich, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere—the socialist youth, like the proletariat as a whole, paid a bitter price for the non-existence of experienced and hardened revolutionary parties. But the lack of revolutionary leadership was least of all attributable to the oppositional youth leagues, of whom Liebknecht wrote:
"Its ranks were decimated, its leaders sent to the trenches, imprisoned in ‘protective custody,’ jail and prison. Class justice raged more mercilessly over them than upon the adults, and swept away many a warm young life to the hecatombs of slaughter. The free [oppositional socialist] youth, however, remained undaunted, and defied their enemies."
—Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609
Formation of the Communist Youth International
This bitter experience and the Socialist youth’s increasing understanding of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary program and analysis of the Second International’s collapse led to a coming together, of the European youth and the Russian Communist youth. On 20 November 1919, in the back room of a beer hall In Berlin, guarded by sentinels and pickets of the Berlin youth, the first Congress of the Communist Youth International (CYI) was held. There were present delegates from 12 countries, representing 200,000-300,000 members when the congress was called to order by Willi Munzenberg—recently released from prison. (By 1921, according to Munzenberg’s estimate, the number of affiliated sections rose to 15, with a membership of approximately 800,000.)
However, for some time the nature of the relationship of the CYI to the Communist International (CI) remained undefined. On 20 November 1920, the Russian Young Communist League proposed to the Executive Committee of the CYI the codification of youth-party relations as "political subordination and organizational independence." The majorities of other youth leagues, however, mindful of their recent experience with the betrayal of the Second International, were at first unwilling to accept such a relationship. They had generalized the conjunctural historical role they had played into a conception of an inherently vanguard role for the youth, or, at least, a political watchdog role for the youth in relation to the party.
It was not until the Second Congress of the CYI that the formula supported by the Russian League was adopted. The Congress began on 6 April in Jena (where the conference of the German oppositional youth had taken place in 1916), but was moved on 10 April for security reasons to Berlin. Finally, on the instruction of the Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI), the CYI Congress "continued" in Moscow from 9-23 June, immediately preceding the Third Congress of the CI.
The political struggle was sharp, both over youth-party relations and the "theory of the revolutionary offensive," the position of the left in the CI itself (grouped around Bela Kun, Maslow and Fischer), which was initially supported by the majority of the youth. This conception failed to recognize the relative capitalist restabilization which had ensued after the defeats of the 1918-20 period, and contended that continued frontal assault of the proletarian forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of world capitalism.
CI Resolution on Youth-Party Relations
The questions of "political subordination" and "the revolutionary offensive" were linked, since acceptance of the political supremacy of the CI meant disciplined acceptance of the tactics of regroupment and the united front, the laborious "winning of the masses" demanded by the CI leadership around Lenin and Trotsky. The political debate over the question in the CI itself was to prove very heated, with a large minority supporting the "lefts," and Lenin and Trotsky winning a majority only after a long struggle. The position of the Bolshevik majority and the Russian youth league, however, finally carried the conference. At the Third Congress of the CI, from 22 June to 12 July 1921, the following resolution on youth-party relations was accepted:
"The relation of Communist Youth Organizations to the Communist Parties is fundamentally different from that of the revolutionary youth organizations to the social democratic parties. In the common struggle for the quick accomplishment of the proletarian revolution the greatest unity and strictest centralization is necessary. The political direction and leadership can lie internationally only with the CI, and in the individual countries only with the national sections. It is the duty of the CYO’s to subordinate themselves to this political direction (program, tactics and political directives), and to integrate themselves into the common revolutionary front… The CYO’s, which have begun to organize their own ranks on the principles of the strictest centralization, will exercise iron discipline towards the CI as bearer and leader of the proletarian revolution. The CYO’s shall occupy themselves within its organizations with all political and tactical questions, will take a position, and work for these resolutions within, but never against, the CP of their country. In cases of serious differences of opinion between the CP’s and CYO’s the right of appeal to the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International) shall be utilized. The surrender of their political independence means under no circumstances the renunciation of their organizational independence, which is indispensable on educational grounds."
—Resolution on the Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
The political subordination of the youth to the party flows from the principle of discipline towards the revolutionary movement, and in the concrete instance the recognition that the CI was the bearer of revolutionary continuity and the revolutionary program. The CI Resolution placed the relationship of youth and party clearly in historical and political context:
"In some countries where the building of the communist parties is still in progress and the youth have just split from the Social Patriot and Centrist parties the slogan of absolute political and organizational independence of the youth movement dominates, and in this situation this slogan is objectively revolutionary. The slogan of absolute independence is wrong in those countries where strong Communist parties already exist and where the slogan of absolute independence is used by the Social Patriots and Centrists for misleading the youth against the communist youth organization. In these cases, the communist youth organization follows the program of the communist party."
—quoted in Richard Cornell, The Origins and Development of the Communist Youth International, 1914-1924 (PhD thesis), p. 316
The Danger of Dual Vanguardism
Whereas it was indispensable for the revolutionary youth organizations in WWI to separate themselves politically from the treacherous and class collaborationist leadership of the Second International, and struggle to develop and implement a revolutionary program, so conversely it was necessary for the youth to subordinate itself to a truly revolutionary international—which genuinely embodied the program of proletarian revolution. To do otherwise would be to engage in dual vanguardism—in the last analysis to challenge the International for the leadership of the class. The CI resolution is quite explicit:
"With the formation of the CI and the CP’s in the individual countries, the role of the proletarian youth organizations changes within the common proletarian movement. The continued existence of the CYO’s as politically independent and leading organizations would lead to the formation of two competing communist parties, differentiated merely by the age of their members."
—Resolution…
The recognition of the necessity of one vanguard, as the consistent revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, and the necessity of this role lying with the most tested, experienced and capable proletarian revolutionaries—i.e., with the CI and the communist parties, also implies the imperative of political differences being fought out internally, should they arise between party and youth. The youth must enjoy full rights of political discussion within its own ranks, and the possibility of influencing the party through its representatives. Conversely, the party must have the opportunity of exercising its guidance at all times upon the youth, of aiding the political maturation of the youth cadre, and maintaining its revolutionary orientation. Should a serious political difference develop, it is imperative that there be channels for its internal political resolution (thus, the right of appeal first to the Executive Committee of the CYI, then to the ECCI and finally to the World Congresses as the highest bodies of the common movement). The party is the concentrated subjective element of the proletarian revolution, and where principled agreement exists no breach is legitimate unless all avenues of internal discussion have been exhausted. Ultimately, of course, the final arbiter of any deep-going dispute is history—and its motor force, the class struggle—thus no organizational mechanism can guarantee that schisms will not develop. However, a split within the revolutionary vanguard—especially between party and youth, where it implies a terrible break in continuity—can only be justified by a deep-going principled counterposition. This was precisely the case with the Second International after 1914, but such an eventuality can only be considered as a last resort.
In order to provide for the requisite reciprocal political influence, the CI resolved:
"The close political co-operation of the CYO’s with the CP’s must also be expressed in a firm organizational connection between the organizations. A constant reciprocal representation of the organization and party leaderships, from the regional, district and local organizations down to the cells of the communist groups in industry and in the unions, as well as a strong reciprocal representation at all conferences and congresses is unconditionally required. In this way it will be possible for the CP’s to continually influence the political line and activity of the youth, and, on the other hand, for the youth to exercise an effective influence on the party."
—Resolution…
Importance of Organizational Independence for the Youth
The political subordination of the youth to the party—the proletarian vanguard—does not, however, invalidate the need for organizational independence for the youth. Lenin had outlined the reasons for this organizational independence long before the Third Comintern Congress, in his review of The Youth International:
"…the youth must of necessity advance to socialism in a different way, by other paths, in other forms, in other circumstances than their fathers. Incidentally, that is why we must decidedly favor organizational independence of the Youth League, not only because the opportunists fear such independence, but because of the very nature of the case. For unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Each generation faces a unique conjuncture of problems and tasks, which lead by different routes to the development of communist consciousness. While the fundamental causes are essentially identical (the contradictions of a capitalism which has outlived its progressiveness) the unique character of the process for each generation must be recognized and an organizationally flexible context provided for the development of creative revolutionary response. Although the youth needs the guidance of the party, it also needs to develop the initiative, judgment and political experience of its own leadership and cadre, and to do so vis-Ã -vis the specific problems facing the youth as a specially oppressed group within capitalist society. The primary educative mechanism of the youth is in its own experience of the class struggle.
***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- When Frankie Was A Corner Boy King Of The North Adamsville Night
***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- When Frankie Was A Corner Boy King Of The North Adamsville Night
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning From The Ohio 7
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Leonard Peltier Now!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free The Cuban Five- Defend The Cuban Revolution!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoners honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers-The Struggle Against Nuclear War
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Peace Action (successor organization to the SANE organization mentioned below).
Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers
He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie DeAngelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie depth psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it used to it but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness (yes, girls scared him, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off to no avail) on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.
See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.
What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.
Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.
Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-today.
But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Ya, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.
Heady stuff, ya, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.
Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew who how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.
But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against badman Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.
On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap”, and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and go.
That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.
Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime any way) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused they unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that draw Peter Paul’s attention this day. So , after running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally is to take place he is amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.
Arriving at the bandstand he sees about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spots a clot of people who are wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and is starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He goes over to the clot and introduces himself and tells them how he came to be here. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.
Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.
Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.
But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh ya, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.
Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers
He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie DeAngelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie depth psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it used to it but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness (yes, girls scared him, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off to no avail) on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.
See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.
What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.
Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.
Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-today.
But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Ya, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.
Heady stuff, ya, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.
Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew who how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.
But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against badman Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.
On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap”, and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and go.
That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.
Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime any way) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused they unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that draw Peter Paul’s attention this day. So , after running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally is to take place he is amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.
Arriving at the bandstand he sees about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spots a clot of people who are wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and is starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He goes over to the clot and introduces himself and tells them how he came to be here. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.
Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.
Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.
But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh ya, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-What (Class Struggle) Defense Policy for Revolutionaries? (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.
**********
What Defense Policy for Revolutionaries?
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 17, May-June 1973
The decline of U.S. economic hegemony and the resultant economic chaos has meant intensified capitalist attacks on the labor and radical movements. Facing an increasing inability to provide the minimal democratic and economic rights of working people and oppressed minorities, the American capitalist class has pursued a dual offensive: governmental legislation to curb the power of the trade-union movement and tie it more closely to the state machinery, combined with persecution of the left to forestall any resurgence of even the reformist social-protest movement of the 1960’s. Central to the ruling-class policy is to forestall the growth of any organized left oppositions in the labor movement. While the radical students, women’s liberationists and black nationalists who typified 1960’s radicalism lacked the social strength to seriously threaten capitalist rule, the current growth of the left in the labor movement poses a much greater potential threat. The gross violation of democratic rights in the Watergate affair indicates the Nixon regime’s contempt for the formalities of bourgeois democracy, a contempt that will be violently amplified in dealing with an actual left threat. The strategy to defeat ruling-class attacks on the labor and radical movements must be based on an examination of the historic experience of the working-class movement.
The International Red Aid
In the early 1920’s, the Communist International (CI) organized the International Red Aid as a broad defense organization of working-class militants. While the CI rejected bourgeois-democratic illusions and idealizations, it recognized the need to defend the democratic gains of the bourgeois revolutions and proletarian struggle as an integral part of the class struggle. Lenin summarized the communist perspective toward democratic struggles:
"It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy."
--Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 133
The International Red Aid was also an application of the united-front policy of the CI under Lenin and Trotsky, which proposed joint action of workers’ organizations over specific and concrete tasks. The united front was designed to unite the working class against capitalist attacks and in doing so create an arena in which the Communist parties, retaining full freedom to criticize other participants, could counterpose their program to the social-democratic misleadership in order to "set the base against the top." The slogan of the united front was "March Separately, Strike Together."
The International Labor Defense (ILD), the American affiliate of the International Red Aid, led the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, C.E. Ruthenberg, imprisoned Wobblies and numerous strike efforts. In a period of sharp class struggle, the ILD utilized all legal rights, seeking support from professional petty-bourgeois forces, while always emphasizing the importance of mass working-class action. It welcomed support from all quarters, but refused to politically compromise itself in order to gain support from non-proletarian elements. James P. Cannon, National Secretary of the ILD until his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, summarized this policy in writing on the Sacco and Vanzetti case:
"Our policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations--organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions…. The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’… of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the ‘vulgar and noisy’ demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and ‘clemency’ for Sacco and Vanzetti, in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent."
--"Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?" Labor Defender, January 1927
This was the consistent policy of the CI throughout its early years. The ILD never blurred the nature of the capitalist state or bourgeois justice; its policy was "class against class," combatting the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state through the independent mobilization of the proletariat.
The Policy of Social Fascism
In conjunction with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the world-historic defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927 and the internal Soviet need for rapid agricultural collectivization, the CI's political line switched in 1928 to the policy of the "third period." The Stalinist CI claimed the social-democratic parties were more of a threat to the proletariat than ascending fascism, labeling them "social fascists" and rejecting joint defense against the fascist threat. This policy, which amounted to a refusal to challenge the social-democratic arch-betrayers’ hegemony over the German working class, allowed Hitler to rise to power without a shot being fired. "Social fascism" became the guiding theory of the ILD, which rejected the defense of democratic rights and united fronts because this would "create illusions." Breaking with the tradition of its earlier years, the ILD often ignored legal work, romanticizing the use of non-professional workers’ self-defense in the courts. This foolish ultra-leftism allowed many courageous workers, unversed in court procedure and legal jargon, to be sent to jail, compliments of "Communist" advice.
During the Scottsboro defense, the ILD refused the support of the NAACP, another "social-fascist" outfit. Instead, the ILD posed the "united front from below"--unity of the CP, CP front groups and local unions somehow untainted by their "social-fascist" leaderships [see, for example, Scottsboro Boys National Bureau Letter, No. 1, 1932, p. 4].
The "Social-Fascists" Become the Great Defenders of Democracy
Recoiling empirically from a policy which had resulted in the destruction of the German labor movement, the CI dumped "social fascism" but, in typical Stalinist fashion, embraced a symmetrically disastrous line having nothing in common with the Leninist policy of the united front. At the 7th World Congress, Georgi Dimitrov formulated the policy of the popular front--a strategic alliance with the social democrats and the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie to defend bourgeois democracy against the fascist onslaught.
Marxists recognize that bourgeois democracy is simply one form of the dictatorship of capital, which is, however, forced to preserve some limited democratic rights which are vital to the self-organization of the proletariat. The working class thus has an interest in the defense of bourgeois-democratic rights against fascism and bonapartism, but not at the expense of tying itself politically to the bourgeoisie and subordinating its own organizations to bourgeois leadership. Thus, Marxists may call for limited blocs with the representatives of bourgeois democracy (e.g., the suppression of the Kornilov assault on the bourgeois Kerensky regime) but at all times seek the independent mobilization of the working class through its own organizations and under its own slogans. These tactical blocs are not a defense of the bourgeois order, but are steps on the road of replacing bourgeois democracy by the proletarian dictatorship.
Paving the way for Communist participation in capitalist governments (as in France and Spain), the Dimitrov popular-front policy, based on the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy, has been a central point of Stalinist theory and practice (Soviet and Chinese alike) for the last 35 years.
The Trotskyist movement upheld the united-front policy of the Third and Fourth CI Congresses--"class against class." The Fourth International understood that the task of communists was to promote class unity against fascism, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution. While the Stalinists sought "national unity," the Trotskyists called for workers militias formed through a united front of all proletarian organizations, and raised demands such as nationalization of industry under workers control. In this way they attempted to prepare the working class for a successful fight against fascism, while raising demands that pointed to the need for the working class to organize production in its own interest.
Except for the brief period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the CPUSA loyally supported the "anti-fascist" democracy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During WW II, the CP became the staunchest adherent of "national unity" in the labor movement. Placing itself in the right wing of the trade-union movement, it denounced all strikes as "fascist-inspired" and proposed speed-up to strengthen the "national war drive." As a result of the CP’s patriotic frenzy, defense work became virtually nonexistent; the CP ignored the round-up of Japanese-Americans into detention camps and the continued repression of blacks.
In the most important frame-up of the war years, the Smith Act prosecution of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, the CP rejected the principle of labor solidarity and heartily endorsed the government’s prosecution [see Daily Worker, 16 August 1941]. (The CP’s treachery in abetting the government in setting a precedent by the imprisonment of the 18 SWP leaders for "conspiracy to violently overthrow the government" paved the way for the virtual destruction of the CP in the McCarthy witchhunt. The bitter truth that "an injury to one is an injury to all" became clear after the war, when CP members were constantly prosecuted under similar indictments.) Abandoning the elementary duties of class solidarity, the International Red Aid was disbanded in the mid-forties and the CP junked the ILD.
The CP’s "lesser-evil" strategy has been maintained to this day, with Nixon substituted for Hitler as "the main enemy." The task of programmatically "uniting all progressive forces" remains the common thread of all variants of Stalinism. The Stalinists use defense efforts to cement the "anti-monopoly" popular front, watering down the thrust and program of campaigns to snare a few liberals. The CP worked tirelessly to promote a respectable image for Angela Davis--cooling down the emphasis on the anti-communist character of her trial, refusing to tie her defense with the less popular Ruchell Magee case, at one point limiting her defense to a call for bail, unwilling to take the defense into the trade-union movement--all in an attempt to pacify liberals. In a recent march in Buffalo protesting the murders at Attica, the CP-supported coalition went so far as to make the major operational thrust of the demonstration the demand for the state to construct a memorial statue to the slain Attica prisoners outside the prison alongside the already completed memorial for slain prison guards! The CP constantly muddles the nature of the state and the capitalist political parties, attacking the Republican Party without condemning the Democratic Party in the Davis case.
The "Anti-Revisionist" Left
The ostensible left groupings outside the CP have failed to pursue a principled united-front policy. The Panthers "United Front Against Fascism" Conference in 1969 saw an amalgam of the CP, the Maoist Revolutionary Union, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (later to dissolve into the RU and October League) and the Workers World Party, all enthusiastically tailing after the Panthers "community control" popular-front program (complete with appropriate quotes from Dimitrov). Their enthusiasm spilled over into the streets with forcible exclusion and beating of members of the Spartacist League, Progressive Labor, International Socialists and the Workers League.
PL for a number of years pursued a carbon-copy replica of "third-period" defense tactics, rejecting united fronts with "revisionists," spurning the struggle for democratic rights and using political differences as an excuse to avoid unconditionally defending the Panthers and Weathermen against ruling-class repression. The WL stubbornly refused support from other left tendencies in the Juan Fariñas defense campaign, and the once-Trotskyist, now-reformist SWP limits all its defense activities to civil-libertarian politics.
The SL/RCY unconditionally defends the left and working-class movement from bourgeois repression and right-wing attack, in spite of our political differences with any particular victimized group or individual. We have refused to opportunistically restrict our defense work to those campaigns which garnish temporary popularity and liberal support in the bourgeois-press cocktail circuit, such as the Panther and Angela Davis defense campaigns; we have explicitly made clear our solidarity with those less popular groups like the Weathermen and Venceremos, which, no matter how misguided their actions, nonetheless are part of the left. Successful government repression of such groups represents a threat to all left and working-class organizations--defense is not a moral question, but a class question. It is necessary to have a Marxist comprehension of the words, "an injury to one is an injury to all." Groups like PL, the SWP, CP, WL and National Caucus of Labor Committees--which claimed to defend the Panthers but, at the height of the FBI-led anti-Weathermen hysteria, joined in the chorus of bourgeois "public opinion" condemning the Weathermen as "proto-fascists," "criminals" and "crazies"--thereby demonstrated that they are more concerned about their respectability in the eyes of radical petty-bourgeois "public opinion" than in the elementary obligation of working-class solidarity.
At the same time, we distinguish between the self-destructive substitutionism of the Weathermen, who chose as the targets for their bombs the symbols of the bourgeois order, and the indiscriminate terror of some elements in the Irish Republican Army, or the Japanese supporters of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When the former blows up working-class pubs in Belfast or the latter machine-guns a crowd in an Israeli airline hangar, it has crossed the class line.
Such "exemplary" actions exemplify genocide, and while they may be motivated by the frustrated aspirations of the oppressed, Marxists cannot possibly solidarize with activities which have as their targets not the bourgeois order but simply people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Such actions may be akin to racial or religious war, but not class war.
As part of our struggle for both the unity and the political clarity of the left and labor movement, we are unconditionally opposed to substitution of gangsterism for political struggle. Thus, we defended a Boston Student Mobilization Committee meeting on 24 May 1970 from an unprovoked attack by PL. And we defended PL from the SWP goons at the July 1971 National Peace Action Coalition Conference in New York when the SWP physically excluded PL (followed by the physical exclusion of the SL and Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) for vocal opposition to the presence of bourgeois politician Vance Hartke.
Only militant defense campaigns based on the Leninist conception of the united front can effectively defend left and working--class tendencies from bourgeois attack. The slogan of the united front is "March Separately, Strike Together," i.e., each participant in the united front, while agreeing on common actions, keeps its organizational and political independence. Thus the unity of the class is maintained without compromising political clarity. In recent cases in San Francisco and New Orleans (see RCYN, No. 15 and 16), where we have been denied our legal right to function on campus, our campaigns have had a dual character: We have fought for our democratic rights, while exposing the anti-communist character of the attacks on our rights. We formed united fronts for defense around the demand, "Rescind the Ban on RCY," and worked with all forces in agreement with the slogan, while maintaining our independent propaganda and revolutionary program.
The united front is an important component part of the tactic of revolutionary regroupment. The superiority of the revolutionary program is demonstrated by the testing in action of competing political programs. The best militants who gave their allegiances to other programs and banners yesterday, rally to the banner and program of proletarian revolution in the course of the struggle. For the unity of the class, for communist hegemony--these were the goals of the united-front and defense work of Lenin and Trotsky and the early CI, and the defense work of the early SWP. It is to that heritage and to those goals that the RCY is committed.
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.
**********
What Defense Policy for Revolutionaries?
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 17, May-June 1973
The decline of U.S. economic hegemony and the resultant economic chaos has meant intensified capitalist attacks on the labor and radical movements. Facing an increasing inability to provide the minimal democratic and economic rights of working people and oppressed minorities, the American capitalist class has pursued a dual offensive: governmental legislation to curb the power of the trade-union movement and tie it more closely to the state machinery, combined with persecution of the left to forestall any resurgence of even the reformist social-protest movement of the 1960’s. Central to the ruling-class policy is to forestall the growth of any organized left oppositions in the labor movement. While the radical students, women’s liberationists and black nationalists who typified 1960’s radicalism lacked the social strength to seriously threaten capitalist rule, the current growth of the left in the labor movement poses a much greater potential threat. The gross violation of democratic rights in the Watergate affair indicates the Nixon regime’s contempt for the formalities of bourgeois democracy, a contempt that will be violently amplified in dealing with an actual left threat. The strategy to defeat ruling-class attacks on the labor and radical movements must be based on an examination of the historic experience of the working-class movement.
The International Red Aid
In the early 1920’s, the Communist International (CI) organized the International Red Aid as a broad defense organization of working-class militants. While the CI rejected bourgeois-democratic illusions and idealizations, it recognized the need to defend the democratic gains of the bourgeois revolutions and proletarian struggle as an integral part of the class struggle. Lenin summarized the communist perspective toward democratic struggles:
"It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy."
--Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 133
The International Red Aid was also an application of the united-front policy of the CI under Lenin and Trotsky, which proposed joint action of workers’ organizations over specific and concrete tasks. The united front was designed to unite the working class against capitalist attacks and in doing so create an arena in which the Communist parties, retaining full freedom to criticize other participants, could counterpose their program to the social-democratic misleadership in order to "set the base against the top." The slogan of the united front was "March Separately, Strike Together."
The International Labor Defense (ILD), the American affiliate of the International Red Aid, led the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, C.E. Ruthenberg, imprisoned Wobblies and numerous strike efforts. In a period of sharp class struggle, the ILD utilized all legal rights, seeking support from professional petty-bourgeois forces, while always emphasizing the importance of mass working-class action. It welcomed support from all quarters, but refused to politically compromise itself in order to gain support from non-proletarian elements. James P. Cannon, National Secretary of the ILD until his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, summarized this policy in writing on the Sacco and Vanzetti case:
"Our policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations--organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions…. The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’… of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the ‘vulgar and noisy’ demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and ‘clemency’ for Sacco and Vanzetti, in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent."
--"Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?" Labor Defender, January 1927
This was the consistent policy of the CI throughout its early years. The ILD never blurred the nature of the capitalist state or bourgeois justice; its policy was "class against class," combatting the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state through the independent mobilization of the proletariat.
The Policy of Social Fascism
In conjunction with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the world-historic defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927 and the internal Soviet need for rapid agricultural collectivization, the CI's political line switched in 1928 to the policy of the "third period." The Stalinist CI claimed the social-democratic parties were more of a threat to the proletariat than ascending fascism, labeling them "social fascists" and rejecting joint defense against the fascist threat. This policy, which amounted to a refusal to challenge the social-democratic arch-betrayers’ hegemony over the German working class, allowed Hitler to rise to power without a shot being fired. "Social fascism" became the guiding theory of the ILD, which rejected the defense of democratic rights and united fronts because this would "create illusions." Breaking with the tradition of its earlier years, the ILD often ignored legal work, romanticizing the use of non-professional workers’ self-defense in the courts. This foolish ultra-leftism allowed many courageous workers, unversed in court procedure and legal jargon, to be sent to jail, compliments of "Communist" advice.
During the Scottsboro defense, the ILD refused the support of the NAACP, another "social-fascist" outfit. Instead, the ILD posed the "united front from below"--unity of the CP, CP front groups and local unions somehow untainted by their "social-fascist" leaderships [see, for example, Scottsboro Boys National Bureau Letter, No. 1, 1932, p. 4].
The "Social-Fascists" Become the Great Defenders of Democracy
Recoiling empirically from a policy which had resulted in the destruction of the German labor movement, the CI dumped "social fascism" but, in typical Stalinist fashion, embraced a symmetrically disastrous line having nothing in common with the Leninist policy of the united front. At the 7th World Congress, Georgi Dimitrov formulated the policy of the popular front--a strategic alliance with the social democrats and the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie to defend bourgeois democracy against the fascist onslaught.
Marxists recognize that bourgeois democracy is simply one form of the dictatorship of capital, which is, however, forced to preserve some limited democratic rights which are vital to the self-organization of the proletariat. The working class thus has an interest in the defense of bourgeois-democratic rights against fascism and bonapartism, but not at the expense of tying itself politically to the bourgeoisie and subordinating its own organizations to bourgeois leadership. Thus, Marxists may call for limited blocs with the representatives of bourgeois democracy (e.g., the suppression of the Kornilov assault on the bourgeois Kerensky regime) but at all times seek the independent mobilization of the working class through its own organizations and under its own slogans. These tactical blocs are not a defense of the bourgeois order, but are steps on the road of replacing bourgeois democracy by the proletarian dictatorship.
Paving the way for Communist participation in capitalist governments (as in France and Spain), the Dimitrov popular-front policy, based on the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy, has been a central point of Stalinist theory and practice (Soviet and Chinese alike) for the last 35 years.
The Trotskyist movement upheld the united-front policy of the Third and Fourth CI Congresses--"class against class." The Fourth International understood that the task of communists was to promote class unity against fascism, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution. While the Stalinists sought "national unity," the Trotskyists called for workers militias formed through a united front of all proletarian organizations, and raised demands such as nationalization of industry under workers control. In this way they attempted to prepare the working class for a successful fight against fascism, while raising demands that pointed to the need for the working class to organize production in its own interest.
Except for the brief period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the CPUSA loyally supported the "anti-fascist" democracy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During WW II, the CP became the staunchest adherent of "national unity" in the labor movement. Placing itself in the right wing of the trade-union movement, it denounced all strikes as "fascist-inspired" and proposed speed-up to strengthen the "national war drive." As a result of the CP’s patriotic frenzy, defense work became virtually nonexistent; the CP ignored the round-up of Japanese-Americans into detention camps and the continued repression of blacks.
In the most important frame-up of the war years, the Smith Act prosecution of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, the CP rejected the principle of labor solidarity and heartily endorsed the government’s prosecution [see Daily Worker, 16 August 1941]. (The CP’s treachery in abetting the government in setting a precedent by the imprisonment of the 18 SWP leaders for "conspiracy to violently overthrow the government" paved the way for the virtual destruction of the CP in the McCarthy witchhunt. The bitter truth that "an injury to one is an injury to all" became clear after the war, when CP members were constantly prosecuted under similar indictments.) Abandoning the elementary duties of class solidarity, the International Red Aid was disbanded in the mid-forties and the CP junked the ILD.
The CP’s "lesser-evil" strategy has been maintained to this day, with Nixon substituted for Hitler as "the main enemy." The task of programmatically "uniting all progressive forces" remains the common thread of all variants of Stalinism. The Stalinists use defense efforts to cement the "anti-monopoly" popular front, watering down the thrust and program of campaigns to snare a few liberals. The CP worked tirelessly to promote a respectable image for Angela Davis--cooling down the emphasis on the anti-communist character of her trial, refusing to tie her defense with the less popular Ruchell Magee case, at one point limiting her defense to a call for bail, unwilling to take the defense into the trade-union movement--all in an attempt to pacify liberals. In a recent march in Buffalo protesting the murders at Attica, the CP-supported coalition went so far as to make the major operational thrust of the demonstration the demand for the state to construct a memorial statue to the slain Attica prisoners outside the prison alongside the already completed memorial for slain prison guards! The CP constantly muddles the nature of the state and the capitalist political parties, attacking the Republican Party without condemning the Democratic Party in the Davis case.
The "Anti-Revisionist" Left
The ostensible left groupings outside the CP have failed to pursue a principled united-front policy. The Panthers "United Front Against Fascism" Conference in 1969 saw an amalgam of the CP, the Maoist Revolutionary Union, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (later to dissolve into the RU and October League) and the Workers World Party, all enthusiastically tailing after the Panthers "community control" popular-front program (complete with appropriate quotes from Dimitrov). Their enthusiasm spilled over into the streets with forcible exclusion and beating of members of the Spartacist League, Progressive Labor, International Socialists and the Workers League.
PL for a number of years pursued a carbon-copy replica of "third-period" defense tactics, rejecting united fronts with "revisionists," spurning the struggle for democratic rights and using political differences as an excuse to avoid unconditionally defending the Panthers and Weathermen against ruling-class repression. The WL stubbornly refused support from other left tendencies in the Juan Fariñas defense campaign, and the once-Trotskyist, now-reformist SWP limits all its defense activities to civil-libertarian politics.
The SL/RCY unconditionally defends the left and working-class movement from bourgeois repression and right-wing attack, in spite of our political differences with any particular victimized group or individual. We have refused to opportunistically restrict our defense work to those campaigns which garnish temporary popularity and liberal support in the bourgeois-press cocktail circuit, such as the Panther and Angela Davis defense campaigns; we have explicitly made clear our solidarity with those less popular groups like the Weathermen and Venceremos, which, no matter how misguided their actions, nonetheless are part of the left. Successful government repression of such groups represents a threat to all left and working-class organizations--defense is not a moral question, but a class question. It is necessary to have a Marxist comprehension of the words, "an injury to one is an injury to all." Groups like PL, the SWP, CP, WL and National Caucus of Labor Committees--which claimed to defend the Panthers but, at the height of the FBI-led anti-Weathermen hysteria, joined in the chorus of bourgeois "public opinion" condemning the Weathermen as "proto-fascists," "criminals" and "crazies"--thereby demonstrated that they are more concerned about their respectability in the eyes of radical petty-bourgeois "public opinion" than in the elementary obligation of working-class solidarity.
At the same time, we distinguish between the self-destructive substitutionism of the Weathermen, who chose as the targets for their bombs the symbols of the bourgeois order, and the indiscriminate terror of some elements in the Irish Republican Army, or the Japanese supporters of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When the former blows up working-class pubs in Belfast or the latter machine-guns a crowd in an Israeli airline hangar, it has crossed the class line.
Such "exemplary" actions exemplify genocide, and while they may be motivated by the frustrated aspirations of the oppressed, Marxists cannot possibly solidarize with activities which have as their targets not the bourgeois order but simply people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Such actions may be akin to racial or religious war, but not class war.
As part of our struggle for both the unity and the political clarity of the left and labor movement, we are unconditionally opposed to substitution of gangsterism for political struggle. Thus, we defended a Boston Student Mobilization Committee meeting on 24 May 1970 from an unprovoked attack by PL. And we defended PL from the SWP goons at the July 1971 National Peace Action Coalition Conference in New York when the SWP physically excluded PL (followed by the physical exclusion of the SL and Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) for vocal opposition to the presence of bourgeois politician Vance Hartke.
Only militant defense campaigns based on the Leninist conception of the united front can effectively defend left and working--class tendencies from bourgeois attack. The slogan of the united front is "March Separately, Strike Together," i.e., each participant in the united front, while agreeing on common actions, keeps its organizational and political independence. Thus the unity of the class is maintained without compromising political clarity. In recent cases in San Francisco and New Orleans (see RCYN, No. 15 and 16), where we have been denied our legal right to function on campus, our campaigns have had a dual character: We have fought for our democratic rights, while exposing the anti-communist character of the attacks on our rights. We formed united fronts for defense around the demand, "Rescind the Ban on RCY," and worked with all forces in agreement with the slogan, while maintaining our independent propaganda and revolutionary program.
The united front is an important component part of the tactic of revolutionary regroupment. The superiority of the revolutionary program is demonstrated by the testing in action of competing political programs. The best militants who gave their allegiances to other programs and banners yesterday, rally to the banner and program of proletarian revolution in the course of the struggle. For the unity of the class, for communist hegemony--these were the goals of the united-front and defense work of Lenin and Trotsky and the early CI, and the defense work of the early SWP. It is to that heritage and to those goals that the RCY is committed.
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
**********
Vindictive Transfer to Texas Prison
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Last December, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was transferred to FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The government vindictively denied her request to be sent to a prison in Connecticut, instead locking her up more than 1,000 miles away from her family and core of supporters in New York. Known for her decades-long defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state, Lynne Stewart was incarcerated for zealously defending her client, an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s.
Stewart, along with her interpreter Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar, was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and to defraud the U.S. government. What constituted “material support” was Stewart’s statement to a Reuters reporter that her client urged his supporters in the Islamic Group to reconsider their cease-fire with the Mubarak dictatorship. As we wrote at the time of the conviction in WV No. 842 (18 February 2005): “The verdict gives the government a green light to prosecute lawyers for the alleged crimes of their clients, thereby shooting the basic right to counsel to hell.… And if nobody can get a lawyer to zealously defend him from prosecution, then fundamental liberties, from the right to a trial and an attorney, to even the right of free speech and assembly, are choked.”
Stewart was originally sentenced to 28 months in prison. On 15 July 2010, federal district judge John Koeltl, who was directed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to resentence Stewart, more than quadrupled her original sentence. This is a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no letup in the massive attacks on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart is currently appealing her conviction before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As for her codefendants, Yousry is imprisoned on a term of 20 months while Abdel Sattar was additionally convicted of conspiracy to “kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country” and is locked away for 24 years. None of them should have been charged or spent a day in prison.
In sentencing Stewart to ten years, the government is essentially seeking to impose a death sentence on this 71-year-old woman who has been battling breast cancer and chronic diseases. Her transfer to FMC Carswell places her health at even greater risk. The reality of “Federal Medical Center Carswell” prison has been extensively documented by Betty Brink, an award-winning journalist with the Fort Worth Weekly. Brink has written numerous exposés chronicling the deaths of prisoners through “medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays” in treatment, to use the words of a former Carswell doctor. Eight prison employees have been convicted of rape and other crimes against the inmates at this women’s prison.
Speaking at the January 21 New York City Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, conveyed a defiant message from her: “I’m going to continue speaking out about what’s wrong with this government.” He had recently returned from Texas, and described the ordeal both he and Lynne went through just to be able to see each other, with prison officials forcing him to wait more than three hours to get into the visiting room. Poynter thanked the PDC—which recently added Stewart to its monthly stipend program—for continuing to defend her when some liberals abandoned her cause. He also read Lynne’s greetings to the event, in which she roundly denounced the FBI persecution of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, pro-Palestinian activists and other leftists (see “FBI Infiltration Exposed” WV No. 973, 4 February):
“We stand strong with the resisters who elect not to become part of the same prosecution team that has terrorized the world. Now the so-called Department of Justice (ha!) has decided to focus on support groups of the world’s peoples and also on ecoterrorism. Why? Because they can! It sends a message to the people that it’s dangerous; don’t join, don’t resist. That message once again must be shouted down, first by the resisters who will go to jail and second by us, the movement who must support them by always filling those cold marble courtrooms to show our solidarity and speaking out so that their sacrifice is constantly remembered.”
The defense of Stewart and her codefendants is an elementary duty for socialist opponents of U.S. imperialism. Yet in their capitulation to “respectable” bourgeois liberals who sought to separate Stewart’s defense from that of her codefendants, Workers World Party, Socialist Action and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have abandoned the defense of Yousry and Abdel Sattar, refusing to raise the call for their freedom. National Lawyers Guild attorney Liz Fink, who quit the legal team just days before Stewart’s resentencing, filed court papers that despicably attempted to exonerate Stewart by framing up Yousry! The prosecution seized on this in the resentencing to mock the defense team. Stewart, to her credit, directed the defense attorney to reply that those were Fink’s words, not Stewart’s.
Lynne Stewart must not become another forgotten person locked up in this country’s vast prison system. The government vendetta against her and the other class-war prisoners is intended to intimidate and silence opponents of racist oppression, capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. It is in the vital interest of the labor movement and all defenders of civil liberties to demand immediate freedom for Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
The PDC has contributed to Stewart’s legal defense fund and encourages others to do the same. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Letters can be mailed to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, FMC Carswell, Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 975, 4 March 2011)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
**********
Vindictive Transfer to Texas Prison
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Last December, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was transferred to FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The government vindictively denied her request to be sent to a prison in Connecticut, instead locking her up more than 1,000 miles away from her family and core of supporters in New York. Known for her decades-long defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state, Lynne Stewart was incarcerated for zealously defending her client, an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s.
Stewart, along with her interpreter Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar, was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and to defraud the U.S. government. What constituted “material support” was Stewart’s statement to a Reuters reporter that her client urged his supporters in the Islamic Group to reconsider their cease-fire with the Mubarak dictatorship. As we wrote at the time of the conviction in WV No. 842 (18 February 2005): “The verdict gives the government a green light to prosecute lawyers for the alleged crimes of their clients, thereby shooting the basic right to counsel to hell.… And if nobody can get a lawyer to zealously defend him from prosecution, then fundamental liberties, from the right to a trial and an attorney, to even the right of free speech and assembly, are choked.”
Stewart was originally sentenced to 28 months in prison. On 15 July 2010, federal district judge John Koeltl, who was directed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to resentence Stewart, more than quadrupled her original sentence. This is a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no letup in the massive attacks on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart is currently appealing her conviction before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As for her codefendants, Yousry is imprisoned on a term of 20 months while Abdel Sattar was additionally convicted of conspiracy to “kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country” and is locked away for 24 years. None of them should have been charged or spent a day in prison.
In sentencing Stewart to ten years, the government is essentially seeking to impose a death sentence on this 71-year-old woman who has been battling breast cancer and chronic diseases. Her transfer to FMC Carswell places her health at even greater risk. The reality of “Federal Medical Center Carswell” prison has been extensively documented by Betty Brink, an award-winning journalist with the Fort Worth Weekly. Brink has written numerous exposés chronicling the deaths of prisoners through “medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays” in treatment, to use the words of a former Carswell doctor. Eight prison employees have been convicted of rape and other crimes against the inmates at this women’s prison.
Speaking at the January 21 New York City Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, conveyed a defiant message from her: “I’m going to continue speaking out about what’s wrong with this government.” He had recently returned from Texas, and described the ordeal both he and Lynne went through just to be able to see each other, with prison officials forcing him to wait more than three hours to get into the visiting room. Poynter thanked the PDC—which recently added Stewart to its monthly stipend program—for continuing to defend her when some liberals abandoned her cause. He also read Lynne’s greetings to the event, in which she roundly denounced the FBI persecution of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, pro-Palestinian activists and other leftists (see “FBI Infiltration Exposed” WV No. 973, 4 February):
“We stand strong with the resisters who elect not to become part of the same prosecution team that has terrorized the world. Now the so-called Department of Justice (ha!) has decided to focus on support groups of the world’s peoples and also on ecoterrorism. Why? Because they can! It sends a message to the people that it’s dangerous; don’t join, don’t resist. That message once again must be shouted down, first by the resisters who will go to jail and second by us, the movement who must support them by always filling those cold marble courtrooms to show our solidarity and speaking out so that their sacrifice is constantly remembered.”
The defense of Stewart and her codefendants is an elementary duty for socialist opponents of U.S. imperialism. Yet in their capitulation to “respectable” bourgeois liberals who sought to separate Stewart’s defense from that of her codefendants, Workers World Party, Socialist Action and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have abandoned the defense of Yousry and Abdel Sattar, refusing to raise the call for their freedom. National Lawyers Guild attorney Liz Fink, who quit the legal team just days before Stewart’s resentencing, filed court papers that despicably attempted to exonerate Stewart by framing up Yousry! The prosecution seized on this in the resentencing to mock the defense team. Stewart, to her credit, directed the defense attorney to reply that those were Fink’s words, not Stewart’s.
Lynne Stewart must not become another forgotten person locked up in this country’s vast prison system. The government vendetta against her and the other class-war prisoners is intended to intimidate and silence opponents of racist oppression, capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. It is in the vital interest of the labor movement and all defenders of civil liberties to demand immediate freedom for Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
The PDC has contributed to Stewart’s legal defense fund and encourages others to do the same. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Letters can be mailed to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, FMC Carswell, Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 975, 4 March 2011)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
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