Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
This articles in this issue have already been commented on earlier in this series (see archives, March 2011) and the following comment on the subject of getting ROTC off American college and high school campuses is taken from that source.
Markin comment:
I do not believe, at least from the anecdotal evidence I have received from the younger people that I have talked to lately, that today’s students realize the importance of the struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to kick off, or keep off, ROTC from the campuses.
Of all the social turmoil, political fights, and disruptions caused by the disputes over the Vietnam War (and allied social questions around race, sex, and, a little, class) on campus the number one question after the ever present universal conscription draft on students’ minds then (male students in particular) was the many-stranded links between the university and what was then called (and still should be called) the military-industrial complex. Currently, absent a draft (although we all know that there is a de facto “economic draft” that is almost as insidious as the physically-imposed one), the most concrete way that students on campus (including on high school campuses) can slow down the war machine is by organizing to kick or keep ROTC off campus. In the end the military depends on their officer corps to stabilize their operations. When wars flare up the traditional academies are not nearly enough to staff that corps. We have every interest in making sure the American imperial state’s capacity to wage war is curtailed.
This article also spends a little time talking about the draft (universal conscription, or some such term). Recently I have also been hearing quite a bit about how the reinstatement of the draft is necessary. Am I hearing this from the American military? No, I think they are quite happy with an all-volunteer service with fewer malcontents than an army filled with “citizen soldiers” that still fills them with dread (and screaming in the night) from the last time they tried it in the Vietnam War period. Am I hearing it from military veterans who see such service as manly (or now womanly)? No. From right-wing ideologues worried about manpower shortages in an American imperial age with multi-front wars? No. I have been hearing it, and hearing it rather more consistently than I would like. from elements of the anti-war movement.
Why? The main argument runs like this. If there were a draft (presumably a male and female draft under current social norms) then today’s rather apathetic students would be pushed into a more pro-active stance against war as occurred as the Vietnam War continued endlessly on (well, almost endlessly, the DRV and NLF troops on the ground in Vietnam resolved that question finally). Wrong? Why would one, especially one who was arguing from an anti-war perspective , want to give the American military, the most destruction military power the world has ever known by orders of magnitude, addition cannon fodder on the off-chance that today’s pampered students might rebel against that condition. To ask the question is to give the answer, pretty or not. While I agree that it is frustrating to the nth degree to see the campuses so quiescent that is no solution. As this article point out our argument is- No Draft. And if a draft does come, then we, or I should say the young we, go into the military and raise that holy hell that the military brass hate to think about in their worst dreams. The rest of us will fight the war machine in other ways in support of you.
Showing posts with label PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY. Show all posts
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-April 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Reposted from an earlier post commenting on this series.
Reflections On Old Time (Old Times 1960s) Revolutionary Methods Of Work- A Short Note
Markin comment on this article:
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era anti-war GI movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with the war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old time way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called good old days when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that was not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather resolution no in our favor) was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time the early parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson).
One of the most poignant moments for me in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. That described crude hectograph method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of work than today’s speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. He noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch. That is an additional image that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
And as I said there, and will repeat here. Be still my heart. A picture comes to mind very similar to what Trotsky described, all due technological advances considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971 Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building findable in any medium or large city, if you look hard enough, long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce work private detectives, penny ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell for the rent (discounted usually depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses). Or some clean, always clean, back room, down stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s distain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long in the tooth old time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, to produce the latest newsletter. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing”, that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-spell check days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about being only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused media-icon-obsessed Marshall McLuhan message age couldn’t take more than one sheet. Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… but enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty {referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know”, know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on you hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friend, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for the poster paste.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Reposted from an earlier post commenting on this series.
Reflections On Old Time (Old Times 1960s) Revolutionary Methods Of Work- A Short Note
Markin comment on this article:
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era anti-war GI movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with the war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old time way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called good old days when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that was not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather resolution no in our favor) was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time the early parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson).
One of the most poignant moments for me in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. That described crude hectograph method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of work than today’s speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. He noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch. That is an additional image that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
And as I said there, and will repeat here. Be still my heart. A picture comes to mind very similar to what Trotsky described, all due technological advances considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971 Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building findable in any medium or large city, if you look hard enough, long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce work private detectives, penny ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell for the rent (discounted usually depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses). Or some clean, always clean, back room, down stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s distain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long in the tooth old time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, to produce the latest newsletter. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing”, that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-spell check days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about being only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused media-icon-obsessed Marshall McLuhan message age couldn’t take more than one sheet. Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… but enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty {referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know”, know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on you hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friend, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for the poster paste.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1971
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- December 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
Monday, July 18, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- September 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:
There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.
The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:
There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.
The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-The Progressive Labor Party (PL) "Leads" Students For A Democratic Society (SDS)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on this article:
This article is a very concise and compact summary of the issues that were confronted, or not confronted, by the radical student movement, the driving edge of the radical movement of the late 1960s, the time when thoughtful radicals were turning to the “old left” working-class orientation where the core of the social power to change society in a progressive direction resided. Now, in hindsight, it is not at all that clear to me that there were objectively revolutionary opportunities to actually take on the government frontally and win. Not with the disarray of the left, and the mostly quiet working class. The defeat, the easy defeat, of the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. that I have written about previously as one of the key events in my own evolution to a working-class orientation, if nothing else, put paid to notion that it could be done without the social power of the working class behind it.
However, revolution, the word, the idea, the dream, was palpably in the air, or at least the smell of it and it was necessary to get, and keep, communist cadre ready for the long haul class-struggle from among those who flamed red in those days. Thus, even if we lived in a fool’s paradise about revolutionary prospects either on our own volition or through working class struggle we could have avoided squandering that cadre potential. In short, even if objective circumstances were not in our favor it was not necessary, consciously at least as with the case of Progressive Labor, to make every mistake in the revolutionary handbook. (And there were many other candidates as well, PL is just the subject here because in many ways it had the most thoughtful subjective revolutionaries and because it is a classic case study of where wrong theory leads an organization up a blind alley), . And leave a bitter, futile taste for those who come after.
And those who come after now are the youth of the early 21st century who need to read this article, and other critical articles, on the radical politics of the 1960s. As we baby-boomers retire and have more free time there are sure to be myriad memoirs and other productions by those who participated in that student radical minute in the 1960s so get ready for the onslaught. But read the stuff so this generation is better armed for the struggle than the 1960s rebels.
**********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) Newsletter: The Progressive Labor Party (PL) "Leads" Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) (headline edited by Markin)
The history of the decline of latter-day SDS is the history of Progressive Labor's criminal dissipation of revolutionary impulse and the loss of everything SDS had gained from its break from New Leftist populism in 1969. In April 1966 PL dissolved its youth front group, the May 2nd Movement, in favor of entry into the growing Students for a Democratic Society. In "A Statement on the Dissolution of M2M" PL put forward the following political thrust for SDS: "Our radicalism is based on the belief that the student movement cannot survive or grow without a socialist perspective. " (M2M's Free Student No. 7, April 1966)
Following its SDS entry, PL became the major force in SDS promoting a class analysis and a socialist goal, winning supporters on this basis.But since the SDS split in 1969 PL has systematically squandered this political capital and undercut the chance to build a strong organization of pro-working-class socialist students. While Revolutionary Communist Youth (formerly Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) led the struggle for a socialist class-struggle perspective for SDS, PL led SDS from a subjectively revolutionary working-class line to an economist working-class line, and finally, back to SDS's liberal reformist beginnings.
SDS: Social-Democratic Roots
SDS has its roots in labor reformism and social democracy, originating as the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization of liberal union bureaucrats and their kept intellectuals, politically associated with the pro-imperialist Socialist Party. Renamed SDS in 1950, the organization involved itself in the civil rights movement; in June 1962, it came out with the Port Huron statement advocating "participatory democracy" and reaffirming its anti-communism. In June 1965 SDS dropped from its constitution the ban on communist participation and on 1 January 1966 officially severed its connection with the LID, to which SDS had become something of an embarrassment. SDS had passed from establishment left-liberalism to petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Worker-Student Alliance
Following its massive entry into SDS, PL emerged as the pole of attraction in opposition to groupings which wrote off the working class as the vanguard of revolution. But when the hard New Leftists split in 1969 and PL took over leadership of SDS, the rotten and contradictory Stalinist roots of PL's brand of "Marxism" gradually began to erode the left thrust around which PL had built its Worker-Student Alliance caucus. This was apparent as early as the 1969 split convention itself.
Spartacist League members of SDS critically supported the WSA wing, introducing to the WSA's main motion proposing a working-class orientation an amendment calling upon SDS to declare itself a noh-exclusionist socialist youth group. Despite its stated intentions for dissolving M2M, PL opposed this amendment, insisting on defining SDS's program only negatively--!, e. , anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-male-chauvinist, etc. Still riding on the sharp polarization of the factional struggle, however, PL included the following slogan at the end of the WSA statement: "ALL POWER TO THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS!" When a Spartacist spokesman pointed out that the slogan had a certain communist flavor, PL did not reply, but when a final edition of the WSA statement was presented to the body for approval, the slogan had disappeared. This was a foretaste of things to come.
The degeneration of PL's line in SDS from a crude but real working-class orientation to an alliance with academic liberalism stems from an opportunist "two-stage theory" of revolutionary organization and the rejection of the transitional program. PL puts forward a minimum program for "mass organizations" (SDS), reserving for "cadre organizations" (PL) a "maximum program" of socialism. By this logic, PL must fight for reformism in organizations like SDS in order not to deprive itself of its very reason for existence.
At the root of the reformist content PL gives to the slogan of a worker-student alliance is an inability to grasp the Leninist insistence on the leading role of the industrial working class in the socialist revolution. The working class—by virtue of its role in production, the collective and cohesive social organization of its work, its existence as wage slaves rather than proprietors (small or large) of lander capital—is the only inherently revolutionary class in capitalist society. The petty bourgeoisie stands tangential to capitalist production, and its social position is highly unstable. In times of crisis, the petty bourgeoisie in its main motion supports whichever major class—bourgeoisie or proletariat-offers the greater social stability. The critical factor in gaining the support of sections of the petty bourgeoisie for socialist revolution is therefore the strength of the working class and its leadership, the Leninist party. In the absence of a politically conscious and organizationally cohesive working class contending for power, no section of the petty bourgeoisie as a group will transcend the varieties of capitalist ideology: liberalism or, in periods of crisis, fascism. But many individual students can and must be won to the side of the proletariat on the basis of a communist world view, as declassed revolutionary intelligentsia who will constitute an important part of the future Leninist vanguard party.
In a book called SDS—A Profile (New York, Scribner's, 1972), endorsed by PL with only the slightest qualifications (PL Magazine. March, 1972), Alan Adelson writes:
"A revolution is very much a possibility in this country, PL reasons, if the tremendous industrial work-force can be united in struggle with the legions of students. That powerful worker-student alliance would be enough to run out the entrenched 'rulers' here just as the fusion of workers and peasants established 'a dictatorship of the proletariat' in China. " (page 9)
Later, in discussing the failure of the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy at Berkeley, Adelson writes: "No one wanted to scrap the idea of trying to ally Berkeley's 'two oppressed groups'—the workers and the students.,.. " (page 91) PL's conception refuses to recognize the class difference between the petty bourgeoisie (to which both peasants and students belong) and the working class, and thus projects an equal
revolutionary role for each group. The "theoretical" codification of this obscuring of class lines is found in PL Magazine, November 1971 (see RCY Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972, "PL's Right Turn").
The Short but Dull Life of the CWSA
Rejection of the 1969 Spartacist proposal that SDS declare itself socialist was only the beginning of its retreat from the sharp leftist posture taken by PL in preparing for the SDS split. In the fall of 1969, just months after the split, PL pro¬posed the Campus Worker-Student Alliance stra¬tegy for SDS—a reformist working-class orientation economist in thrust and parochially confined to the campus. At the December 1969 SDS conference in New Haven, Spartacist members and supporters in SDS formed the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus. RMC pointed out that campus workers, having little social power, were being used by PL/SDS as a substitute for the decisive struggles in industry and within the union movement, and that the question of program was being shunted aside in favor of "show the workers SDS wants to help them. " PL vehemently opposed RMC demands to broaden working-class struggles beyond pure and narrow economism and to inject revolutionary political issues into SDS's mere atrocity-mongering propaganda. The oft-repeated "Students can't tell workers what to do" conflicted with the line that students and workers are natural allies with shared class interests, but it also represented a patronizing view of workers, a negation of the role of revolutionary theory and a dishonest cover for the desire to keep SDS a low-level front group so that revolutionary-minded-students could be drawn into an organization that could, presumably, "tell workers what to do": PL.
Anti-War Upsurge Bypasses SDS
RMC argued that SDS must address itself to the critically important issue of the Vietnam war, with a revolutionary class program demanding labor strikes against the war. But SDS continued to push the CWSA line, and the national student strike in the wake of the Cambodia invasion and the murders of students at Kent and Jackson State caught SDS totally unprepared. When the student strike wave erupted over its head, SDS chased frantically around campuses trying to seize , buildings and get campus workers to join the de¬monstrations. Only the RMC, pointing out that student strikes are impotent unless they are extended to the working class, which has the power to stop capitalist production, distributed propaganda at union meetings and worked with workers who were agitating in their unions for labor strikes against the war.
PL let the CWSA die quietly, admitting to each other that it had been a failure (as Adelson openly states in his book) and switching SDS's attention to assorted on-campus issues like day care, ROTC, right-wing professors, and resisting any serious orientation to major labor struggles--all this against the background of an increasingly -militant wave of strikes all across the country.
During the summer of 1971, PL held numerous "Fight Unemployment" marches in its own name (around essentially economist demands) but in SDS confined itself to demanding an end to campus unemployment! In August, when Nixon declared the wage freeze, PL responded with the call for a general strike and "30 for 40" (demands lifted directly from the Spartacist program) but opposed RMC's attempt to get SDS to join in agitation for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze.
We Both Get Thrown Out of NPAC
Belatedly, PL/SDS turned its attention to the anti-war movement and began attending the meetings of the National Peace Action Coalition, the Socialist Workers Party's single-issue popular-front alliance with the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie. At the Cleveland December 1970 NPAC meeting, PL/SDS blocked with Spartacist/RMC to militantly oppose the participation of bourgeois representatives in the anti-war movement.
At the July 1971 NPAC conference in New York, PL/SDS and Spartacist/RMC were violently ejected for shouting down Senator Vance Hartke. Like it or not (and they didn't) PL/SDS found itself in an anti-class-collaboration bloc with Trotskyists. It managed to differentiate itself by organizing a token kamikaze attack on the conference the following day and by its position that trade union bureaucrats are the same as capitalist politicians and should equally be excluded from the anti-war movement.
By the time the November NPAC peace marches came around, PL/SDS declared its support for them. At the December NPAC conference in Cleveland, PL/SDS humbled itself many times over to the leadership of this alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, pledging its support to the next march and generally adopting the posture of NPAC loyalists. The SL/RCY alone at the con¬ference stood in militant and unconditional opposition to class collaboration. What PL learned from the NPAC experience was apparently that capitulation works, and began developing its own reformist single-issue campaign, SDS's "Fight Racist Textbooks" line, complete with endorser lists signed by liberal professors.
PL opposed the welding of a political alliance between radical students and class-conscious workers (the formation of a fighting youth auxiliary to communist opposition in the unions), pre¬ferring to establish such an alliance on an appeal to moral do-goodism and the obscuring of a class line. PL's own inability as a would-be revolutionary party to develop a program to bridge the gap between trade union and socialist conscious¬ness, its adherence to the sterile minimum/ maximum program, fed its tendency to progressively lower the political level of SDS.
Throughout our existence as. the left opposition to PL in SDS, Revolutionary Communist Youth has raised the need for a socialist orientation based on transitional demands--demands which raise the issue of class power, connecting the felt needs of workers to their larger political interests—e. g., strikes against the war and wage freeze, "30 for 40", construction of a labor party, etc. Marked by a rejection of a communist approach, the history of PL's "leadership" of SDS is a sad story of the squandering of precious political capital. Now the sellout-to-liberalism "Fight Racist Textbooks" campaign marks a qualitative shift in the political character of SDS. It is a betrayal and has transformed SDS into an organization whose thrust is dangerous to the working class. The RCY must struggle politically to defeat SDS, counterposing itself as the genuine communist youth organization.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on this article:
This article is a very concise and compact summary of the issues that were confronted, or not confronted, by the radical student movement, the driving edge of the radical movement of the late 1960s, the time when thoughtful radicals were turning to the “old left” working-class orientation where the core of the social power to change society in a progressive direction resided. Now, in hindsight, it is not at all that clear to me that there were objectively revolutionary opportunities to actually take on the government frontally and win. Not with the disarray of the left, and the mostly quiet working class. The defeat, the easy defeat, of the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. that I have written about previously as one of the key events in my own evolution to a working-class orientation, if nothing else, put paid to notion that it could be done without the social power of the working class behind it.
However, revolution, the word, the idea, the dream, was palpably in the air, or at least the smell of it and it was necessary to get, and keep, communist cadre ready for the long haul class-struggle from among those who flamed red in those days. Thus, even if we lived in a fool’s paradise about revolutionary prospects either on our own volition or through working class struggle we could have avoided squandering that cadre potential. In short, even if objective circumstances were not in our favor it was not necessary, consciously at least as with the case of Progressive Labor, to make every mistake in the revolutionary handbook. (And there were many other candidates as well, PL is just the subject here because in many ways it had the most thoughtful subjective revolutionaries and because it is a classic case study of where wrong theory leads an organization up a blind alley), . And leave a bitter, futile taste for those who come after.
And those who come after now are the youth of the early 21st century who need to read this article, and other critical articles, on the radical politics of the 1960s. As we baby-boomers retire and have more free time there are sure to be myriad memoirs and other productions by those who participated in that student radical minute in the 1960s so get ready for the onslaught. But read the stuff so this generation is better armed for the struggle than the 1960s rebels.
**********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) Newsletter: The Progressive Labor Party (PL) "Leads" Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) (headline edited by Markin)
The history of the decline of latter-day SDS is the history of Progressive Labor's criminal dissipation of revolutionary impulse and the loss of everything SDS had gained from its break from New Leftist populism in 1969. In April 1966 PL dissolved its youth front group, the May 2nd Movement, in favor of entry into the growing Students for a Democratic Society. In "A Statement on the Dissolution of M2M" PL put forward the following political thrust for SDS: "Our radicalism is based on the belief that the student movement cannot survive or grow without a socialist perspective. " (M2M's Free Student No. 7, April 1966)
Following its SDS entry, PL became the major force in SDS promoting a class analysis and a socialist goal, winning supporters on this basis.But since the SDS split in 1969 PL has systematically squandered this political capital and undercut the chance to build a strong organization of pro-working-class socialist students. While Revolutionary Communist Youth (formerly Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) led the struggle for a socialist class-struggle perspective for SDS, PL led SDS from a subjectively revolutionary working-class line to an economist working-class line, and finally, back to SDS's liberal reformist beginnings.
SDS: Social-Democratic Roots
SDS has its roots in labor reformism and social democracy, originating as the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization of liberal union bureaucrats and their kept intellectuals, politically associated with the pro-imperialist Socialist Party. Renamed SDS in 1950, the organization involved itself in the civil rights movement; in June 1962, it came out with the Port Huron statement advocating "participatory democracy" and reaffirming its anti-communism. In June 1965 SDS dropped from its constitution the ban on communist participation and on 1 January 1966 officially severed its connection with the LID, to which SDS had become something of an embarrassment. SDS had passed from establishment left-liberalism to petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Worker-Student Alliance
Following its massive entry into SDS, PL emerged as the pole of attraction in opposition to groupings which wrote off the working class as the vanguard of revolution. But when the hard New Leftists split in 1969 and PL took over leadership of SDS, the rotten and contradictory Stalinist roots of PL's brand of "Marxism" gradually began to erode the left thrust around which PL had built its Worker-Student Alliance caucus. This was apparent as early as the 1969 split convention itself.
Spartacist League members of SDS critically supported the WSA wing, introducing to the WSA's main motion proposing a working-class orientation an amendment calling upon SDS to declare itself a noh-exclusionist socialist youth group. Despite its stated intentions for dissolving M2M, PL opposed this amendment, insisting on defining SDS's program only negatively--!, e. , anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-male-chauvinist, etc. Still riding on the sharp polarization of the factional struggle, however, PL included the following slogan at the end of the WSA statement: "ALL POWER TO THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS!" When a Spartacist spokesman pointed out that the slogan had a certain communist flavor, PL did not reply, but when a final edition of the WSA statement was presented to the body for approval, the slogan had disappeared. This was a foretaste of things to come.
The degeneration of PL's line in SDS from a crude but real working-class orientation to an alliance with academic liberalism stems from an opportunist "two-stage theory" of revolutionary organization and the rejection of the transitional program. PL puts forward a minimum program for "mass organizations" (SDS), reserving for "cadre organizations" (PL) a "maximum program" of socialism. By this logic, PL must fight for reformism in organizations like SDS in order not to deprive itself of its very reason for existence.
At the root of the reformist content PL gives to the slogan of a worker-student alliance is an inability to grasp the Leninist insistence on the leading role of the industrial working class in the socialist revolution. The working class—by virtue of its role in production, the collective and cohesive social organization of its work, its existence as wage slaves rather than proprietors (small or large) of lander capital—is the only inherently revolutionary class in capitalist society. The petty bourgeoisie stands tangential to capitalist production, and its social position is highly unstable. In times of crisis, the petty bourgeoisie in its main motion supports whichever major class—bourgeoisie or proletariat-offers the greater social stability. The critical factor in gaining the support of sections of the petty bourgeoisie for socialist revolution is therefore the strength of the working class and its leadership, the Leninist party. In the absence of a politically conscious and organizationally cohesive working class contending for power, no section of the petty bourgeoisie as a group will transcend the varieties of capitalist ideology: liberalism or, in periods of crisis, fascism. But many individual students can and must be won to the side of the proletariat on the basis of a communist world view, as declassed revolutionary intelligentsia who will constitute an important part of the future Leninist vanguard party.
In a book called SDS—A Profile (New York, Scribner's, 1972), endorsed by PL with only the slightest qualifications (PL Magazine. March, 1972), Alan Adelson writes:
"A revolution is very much a possibility in this country, PL reasons, if the tremendous industrial work-force can be united in struggle with the legions of students. That powerful worker-student alliance would be enough to run out the entrenched 'rulers' here just as the fusion of workers and peasants established 'a dictatorship of the proletariat' in China. " (page 9)
Later, in discussing the failure of the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy at Berkeley, Adelson writes: "No one wanted to scrap the idea of trying to ally Berkeley's 'two oppressed groups'—the workers and the students.,.. " (page 91) PL's conception refuses to recognize the class difference between the petty bourgeoisie (to which both peasants and students belong) and the working class, and thus projects an equal
revolutionary role for each group. The "theoretical" codification of this obscuring of class lines is found in PL Magazine, November 1971 (see RCY Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972, "PL's Right Turn").
The Short but Dull Life of the CWSA
Rejection of the 1969 Spartacist proposal that SDS declare itself socialist was only the beginning of its retreat from the sharp leftist posture taken by PL in preparing for the SDS split. In the fall of 1969, just months after the split, PL pro¬posed the Campus Worker-Student Alliance stra¬tegy for SDS—a reformist working-class orientation economist in thrust and parochially confined to the campus. At the December 1969 SDS conference in New Haven, Spartacist members and supporters in SDS formed the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus. RMC pointed out that campus workers, having little social power, were being used by PL/SDS as a substitute for the decisive struggles in industry and within the union movement, and that the question of program was being shunted aside in favor of "show the workers SDS wants to help them. " PL vehemently opposed RMC demands to broaden working-class struggles beyond pure and narrow economism and to inject revolutionary political issues into SDS's mere atrocity-mongering propaganda. The oft-repeated "Students can't tell workers what to do" conflicted with the line that students and workers are natural allies with shared class interests, but it also represented a patronizing view of workers, a negation of the role of revolutionary theory and a dishonest cover for the desire to keep SDS a low-level front group so that revolutionary-minded-students could be drawn into an organization that could, presumably, "tell workers what to do": PL.
Anti-War Upsurge Bypasses SDS
RMC argued that SDS must address itself to the critically important issue of the Vietnam war, with a revolutionary class program demanding labor strikes against the war. But SDS continued to push the CWSA line, and the national student strike in the wake of the Cambodia invasion and the murders of students at Kent and Jackson State caught SDS totally unprepared. When the student strike wave erupted over its head, SDS chased frantically around campuses trying to seize , buildings and get campus workers to join the de¬monstrations. Only the RMC, pointing out that student strikes are impotent unless they are extended to the working class, which has the power to stop capitalist production, distributed propaganda at union meetings and worked with workers who were agitating in their unions for labor strikes against the war.
PL let the CWSA die quietly, admitting to each other that it had been a failure (as Adelson openly states in his book) and switching SDS's attention to assorted on-campus issues like day care, ROTC, right-wing professors, and resisting any serious orientation to major labor struggles--all this against the background of an increasingly -militant wave of strikes all across the country.
During the summer of 1971, PL held numerous "Fight Unemployment" marches in its own name (around essentially economist demands) but in SDS confined itself to demanding an end to campus unemployment! In August, when Nixon declared the wage freeze, PL responded with the call for a general strike and "30 for 40" (demands lifted directly from the Spartacist program) but opposed RMC's attempt to get SDS to join in agitation for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze.
We Both Get Thrown Out of NPAC
Belatedly, PL/SDS turned its attention to the anti-war movement and began attending the meetings of the National Peace Action Coalition, the Socialist Workers Party's single-issue popular-front alliance with the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie. At the Cleveland December 1970 NPAC meeting, PL/SDS blocked with Spartacist/RMC to militantly oppose the participation of bourgeois representatives in the anti-war movement.
At the July 1971 NPAC conference in New York, PL/SDS and Spartacist/RMC were violently ejected for shouting down Senator Vance Hartke. Like it or not (and they didn't) PL/SDS found itself in an anti-class-collaboration bloc with Trotskyists. It managed to differentiate itself by organizing a token kamikaze attack on the conference the following day and by its position that trade union bureaucrats are the same as capitalist politicians and should equally be excluded from the anti-war movement.
By the time the November NPAC peace marches came around, PL/SDS declared its support for them. At the December NPAC conference in Cleveland, PL/SDS humbled itself many times over to the leadership of this alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, pledging its support to the next march and generally adopting the posture of NPAC loyalists. The SL/RCY alone at the con¬ference stood in militant and unconditional opposition to class collaboration. What PL learned from the NPAC experience was apparently that capitulation works, and began developing its own reformist single-issue campaign, SDS's "Fight Racist Textbooks" line, complete with endorser lists signed by liberal professors.
PL opposed the welding of a political alliance between radical students and class-conscious workers (the formation of a fighting youth auxiliary to communist opposition in the unions), pre¬ferring to establish such an alliance on an appeal to moral do-goodism and the obscuring of a class line. PL's own inability as a would-be revolutionary party to develop a program to bridge the gap between trade union and socialist conscious¬ness, its adherence to the sterile minimum/ maximum program, fed its tendency to progressively lower the political level of SDS.
Throughout our existence as. the left opposition to PL in SDS, Revolutionary Communist Youth has raised the need for a socialist orientation based on transitional demands--demands which raise the issue of class power, connecting the felt needs of workers to their larger political interests—e. g., strikes against the war and wage freeze, "30 for 40", construction of a labor party, etc. Marked by a rejection of a communist approach, the history of PL's "leadership" of SDS is a sad story of the squandering of precious political capital. Now the sellout-to-liberalism "Fight Racist Textbooks" campaign marks a qualitative shift in the political character of SDS. It is a betrayal and has transformed SDS into an organization whose thrust is dangerous to the working class. The RCY must struggle politically to defeat SDS, counterposing itself as the genuine communist youth organization.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement (Vietnam War): A Militant Trade-Union Leader Speaks On The New Left (1980)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
Markin comment on this article
This article is place here mainly to give a flavor of the times (early 1970s) when every self-respecting extra-parliamentary leftist was struggling to find the road to the working class. There were plenty of groups, committees, leagues, tendencies and what not to the left of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party (both dismissed almost out of hand as too tame for revolutionary hearts based on practical experience in running up against them in the process of trying to break with the Democrats and other so-called progressives as a preclude to bringing THEIR, the Democrats, house down). The speaker’s general comments, and specific insights, could have been written by me, or any number of leftist militants, back then as we struggled to break out of the youth vanguard milieu and learn a couple of things about revolutionary politics
As Bob Mandel pointed out in this article, youth vanguardism was rampant in the New Left as the student movement began to swing dramatically leftward. I was fully in tune with that sentiment, at least for a while. What I was not tuned into, and as he also mentioned here, was the other strong current coming out of the New Left, especially from those elements reacting to those of us who were starting, gropingly, to reach out to the working class was the notion that the “most oppressed were the most revolutionary.” And the reason was not some esoteric theory but pure fact.
I came from a segment of that milieu as it was left behind in post World War II America- the working poor, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled day workers, and those drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, as my school days friend Frankie used to say, who fed off their misery. In short, the lumpen proletariat parasites. These segments need a revolution; desperately need a revolution but their life circumstances almost preclude political action unless some bigger turmoils are occurring in society. A lot of the New Left glorification stemmed, frankly, from ignorance of the ways of life down at the very edges of society. And "Third-World-ist" book romance with Franz Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth and a movie like Battle Of Algiers. I have written previously on the latter and will do a review in the future on Fanon’s work.
********
From Young Spartacus, May 1980, Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement (Vietnam War): A Militant Trade-Union Leader Speaks On The New Left.
We print below an edited text of the talk given by Bob Mandel at a Spartacus Youth League forum entitled "No to the Draft! Down with Carter's Anti-Soviet War Drive!" held March 7 at Stanford University.
Mandel was an early civil rights organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later became a prominent Bay Area anti-Vietnam War activist. In 1967 he helped organize "Stop the Draft Week," a successful—if short-lived—street action to shut down the Army Induction Center in Oakland, California. For his leading role in this action, Mandel was tried (and acquitted) along with six others in the "Oakland 7" conspiracy trial.
Shortly thereafter Mandel became an active member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). He is currently a member of the General Executive Board of ILWU Local 6 in the Bay Area and a leader of the Militant Caucus, a class-struggle opposition within the union. Last month Mandel was convenor of the April 19 Committee Against Nazis, which organized a 1,200-strong mobilization of labor and minorities in San Francisco to stop the Nazis from celebrating Hitler's birthday.
Many leaders of the student struggles of the 60s and early 70s passed through the Democratic Party on their way out of politics. Others adopted China as the "socialist fatherland," and are today abject apologists for the anti-Soviet U.S.-China alliance and enemies of world revolution. The tragedy of the New Left is that so many who at one time despised the racist imperialism of the United States failed to find the revolutionary program to guide the oppressed in overthrowing that system.
Mandel's remarks are a guide for today's young militants who wish to
avoid the mistakes of the New Left, which led to an accommodation to U.S. imperialism. To find the road to revolution, one must examine the Trotskyist program. It is only the Spartacist League and its youth section,
the Spartacus Youth League, which fights to implement that program.
**************
In one very major sense, the new anti-draft movement is different from the New Left. I remember, when in 1965 Johnson rigged the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify bombing North Vietnam, that 3,000 people marched through the streets of San Francisco and ran an NLF (National Liberation Front) flag up on the Federal Building flagpole. Almost from the beginning the New Left had a very clear side.
Now the New Left came out of a series of experiences domestically. There had been the civil rights sit-ins beginning in 1960 in Greensboro, and an educational process had gone on. People initially started off involved in these struggles believing that reform could be effected within the context of capitalism. And the first Kennedy administration consciously played into that illusion. In fact, Kennedy gave money to the SNCC civil rights workers to do voter registration to bolster the illusion that if you vote Democratic things will improve in the U.S. And initially SNCC believed that. But in 1964 an organization called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had been organized by the left wing of the student civil rights movement, came to the Democratic Party convention and was simply rudely swept off the floor, and all the old white racists were seated in toto. People's eyes began to open.
It took the New Left a hell of a long time to draw the conclusion that the Democrats were bankrupt, and most of the New Left didn't. That's why the left today in the U.S. is very small. So I want to go through some of the mistakes that the New Left made and some of the New Left's history.
New Left Rejects History
The central mistake is that it rejected history, and it said that the old politics, the politics of the American CP (Communist Party), the question of what the Soviet Union is, what China is and what Cuba is, were irrelevant. It just closed the book, decided to start all over again, and it kept feeling its way along. So you start with militant non-violence with SNCC and the MFDP, then black power.
What "Stop the Draft Week" in 1967 represented in the largely white student
milieu was a conscious break from non-violence. We split with Joan Baez and David Harris. The first day of "Stop the Draft Week" they sat in at the induction center and made their moral protest; there were about 150 people. The second to fifth days of "Stop the Draft Week" 3,000 and then 10,000 students and some young workers and blacks from the city of Oakland fought the cops. We were going to show working-class kids in this country that they didn't have to burn their draft cards and set themselves up or go to jail, but that somebody was actually going to fight to stop the draft. Now, it was illusory. What can 3,000 or 10,000 students do? They can riot, but they sure as hell can't bring down state power. They couldn't even bring down state power in one city. But what it represented was a significant empirical lurch to the left: enough of this sitting down and saying, "Drag me off and put me in jail and then I can't do anything anymore."
At the same time that "Stop the Draft Week" was going on, Huey Newton was shot and the Panthers became nationally known. 1968 brought the Chicago demonstrations around the Democratic Party convention and the new element there was that black and white GIs at Fort Hood and Fort Carson rebelled and refused to go on riot duty in Chicago. Cops beating students wasn't so new, but that rebellion was new.
New Left and the Democratic Party
The anti-draft movement became consciously anti-imperialist in that period and started talking not about bad U.S. policy, but that there was some¬thing endemic in the capitalist system which had led to the Vietnam War. One of the real hallmarks of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in those days— when students in Berkeley were talking about anti-imperialism and the nature of the capitalist system—was telling people to link up with Vance Hartke, link up with the liberals in the Democratic Party, that it can be cleaned up and American capitalism can be reformed. They were trying to construct what is called a popular front, an alliance between leftist and working-class forces and capitalist forces.
1971 was the peak of the mass demonstrations. That was the year the 10,000 hippies and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members went to Washington to shut down the govern¬ment, and the government simply moved in and picked them all up and locked them up. They had no social power and the U.S. government, intent on maintaining its imperial empire, was not about to let 10,000 hippies of 10,000 people with Viet Cong flags disrupt its central government. You began to have splits from 1969 to 1971, splits all over the place in the left, as people groped for new solutions, because they kept coming up against their powerlessness.
So on the one extreme you had the Weathermen going underground and bombing the Capitol, and on the other extreme—and this is far and away the most significant, it was the death of the New Left—you had the McGovern campaign with literally tens of thousands of students who had been very active in the struggles against the war going back into the Democratic Party in the hope that the party that had sponsored the war in the first place would somehow clean up its act. And central in people going back into the Democratic Party was the SWP with their line that there weren't class questions posed in Vietnam: it was not the workers and peasants vs. the landlords and U.S. imperialism, it was simply a question of should American boys be killed. So under a socialist guise, it's the Tom Hayden line of today and it was the line of the various "doves" of those days: American boys shouldn't be killed; let's bring the troops home now. And the question that the New Left was groping toward was that imperialism isn't a policy. Imperialism is, as Lenin said a longtime ago, a phase of capitalist development—the international extension of markets, the dominance of finance capital. It's part of the growth of the capitalist system.
Destruction of the Black Panthers
Another key thing that happened was that as large parts of the antiwar movement went into the Democratic Party, the Black Panther Party was being annihilated and was also going back into the Democratic Party, having tried to substitute a heroic handful of black kids for mass working-class struggles. They went up against the police in city after city; they went up against the federal police and they were murdered systematically.
Now one of the key things in the defeat of the Panthers was that the left consciously hid its politics. The left had this theory that the most oppressed were the most revolutionary. Remember that the New Left had been inspired by the civil rights struggles in the South and by the Black Panthers. It looked around and saw that most important fights were being fought by blacks primarily so that there was a certain reflex reaction that blacks were by definition the most revolutionary.
A lot of the New Left simply did not know history. But there were parts of the left, like the CP and the SWP, that very much did know it. Unlike the Spartacist League (SL), they refused to criticize in a comradely way. They contributed to the defeat and destruction of the Panthers by not saying, "Look, we sympathize with what you are doing, but the power in the U .S. is in the factories, in those sections of the working class which are already in interracial unions and which already have some basic sense of solidarity of workers against bosses."
So, for instance, when 1 worked in General Motors in 1970, there was a Black Panther Party caucus in GM. They had about a dozen cadre and 200 to 300 active supporters. If, when the cops framed up Newton or Bobby Seale or murdered Bobby Button in Oakland, the Panther caucus (which had large
support among the white workers in the plant) had shut the plant down to demand cops out or to demand a political strike against the frame-up trials, that would have been power. That would have cost the American bourgeoisie millions of dollars and worried them about the fact that the working class in its organized forms was beginning to come into play.
New Left Turns to the Workers
You had at this same time whole sections of the left turning to the, but turning very empirically. The New Left was influenced by the 1968 general strike in France, which came within a hair's breadth of toppling the capitalist government. There was also a strike wave in the U.S. from 1969 to 1971. So, in 1970 the postal workers went out in an unprecedented strike, and the National Guard was brought in to break that strike. Essentially for the same reasons, Teamsters went out in the Midwest. For about a week and a half the news every night on TV would have scenes of National Guard convoys escorting scab trucks—the stuff that we all saw a little bit of during the miners strike in 1978—and there would be the Teamsters up in the hills shooting at the scab trucks.
One of the contingents of the National Guard that was used to try to break that Teamsters strike was the contingent that went over to Kent State in 1970 and massacred the students who were protesting the bombing of Cambodia. And there was a lesson there: that the students had no social power. Students can play an important role. Students carry ideas, students historically have been catalysts, students historically have played important roles in building revolutionary parties; but you shut a university down, so what? It is a symbolic act; it can have certain political impact. But if the National Guard had turned around and shot four or five or ten Teamsters in the Midwest, then the U.S. government faced the possibility of a nationwide strike of Teamsters in protest. And, there is the obvious link-up: the troops are shooting the Vietnamese in Vietnam, the troops are shooting blacks in the ghettos, and the troops are shooting striking workers. Well, what's going on here?
So there was an enormous opening for the left, and unfortunately, most of the left went into the labor movement in a very touchy-feely fashion. Maybe that's not doing it justice. Most of the left went in with the same prejudices that it carried. There's a connection here. In 1969 SDS split into two camps, and then one of those camps split a lot more.
One of those camps was Progressive Labor (PL)/SDS. The other was the Weathermen and all the Maoist groups which developed. The theory of the Weathermen was that the American working class, and centrally its white component, is a labor aristocracy which is hopelessly backward, hopelessly racist and which can never be won to revolutionary politics. Therefore: "forget about them, we're going to go underground, we'll be the Third World army in the cities and we'll blow up this and that and the other thing." Their lack of belief that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics was symmetrical with everybody who went into the Democratic Party, because going into the Democratic Party was essentially a statement that there is no other route for the working class in the U.S. except through the dominant capitalist parties.
PL/SDS said that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics, but PL had a lot of the same intellectual baggage. So it went into the labor movement thinking that workers were dumb, workers were bought off and that workers could not be educated. Therefore PL tended to jump back and forth. So that on the one hand, it had a very leftist impulse; on the other hand, it had a theory that you had to accommodate to existing consciousness. For instance, on the woman question, PL opposed free abortion on demand because male chauvinism is rather rampant in American society and PL simply accommodated to that backwardness.
Then there was another side to it. PL opposed both open admissions and free college education. When this was raised in a successful student strike at the City College of New York, PL opposed it because it decided that workers would be bought off if their kids could go to college. Now, what kind of crap is that? What lies there is the basic assumption that you better suffer a lot or you'll never be a revolutionary. It is the same old "the most oppressed are the most revolutionary." In fact, the most oppressed are very often the most backward.
The second half of the SDS split in 1969 was the Revolutionary YouthMovement, a bloc of the terrorist Weathermen and assorted Maoists which rapidly splintered into a myriad of competing groups. All the Maoist groupings went through the same thing. One has to examine, in any given instance like Afghanistan, what are the forces at work, which side should you be on- and draw essential conclusions. What was wrong with the New Left was that it had no program to run on. When people vote for us they know they are voting against the capitalist system and against the Democratic Party, for the workers running their own government.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
Markin comment on this article
This article is place here mainly to give a flavor of the times (early 1970s) when every self-respecting extra-parliamentary leftist was struggling to find the road to the working class. There were plenty of groups, committees, leagues, tendencies and what not to the left of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party (both dismissed almost out of hand as too tame for revolutionary hearts based on practical experience in running up against them in the process of trying to break with the Democrats and other so-called progressives as a preclude to bringing THEIR, the Democrats, house down). The speaker’s general comments, and specific insights, could have been written by me, or any number of leftist militants, back then as we struggled to break out of the youth vanguard milieu and learn a couple of things about revolutionary politics
As Bob Mandel pointed out in this article, youth vanguardism was rampant in the New Left as the student movement began to swing dramatically leftward. I was fully in tune with that sentiment, at least for a while. What I was not tuned into, and as he also mentioned here, was the other strong current coming out of the New Left, especially from those elements reacting to those of us who were starting, gropingly, to reach out to the working class was the notion that the “most oppressed were the most revolutionary.” And the reason was not some esoteric theory but pure fact.
I came from a segment of that milieu as it was left behind in post World War II America- the working poor, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled day workers, and those drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, as my school days friend Frankie used to say, who fed off their misery. In short, the lumpen proletariat parasites. These segments need a revolution; desperately need a revolution but their life circumstances almost preclude political action unless some bigger turmoils are occurring in society. A lot of the New Left glorification stemmed, frankly, from ignorance of the ways of life down at the very edges of society. And "Third-World-ist" book romance with Franz Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth and a movie like Battle Of Algiers. I have written previously on the latter and will do a review in the future on Fanon’s work.
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From Young Spartacus, May 1980, Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement (Vietnam War): A Militant Trade-Union Leader Speaks On The New Left.
We print below an edited text of the talk given by Bob Mandel at a Spartacus Youth League forum entitled "No to the Draft! Down with Carter's Anti-Soviet War Drive!" held March 7 at Stanford University.
Mandel was an early civil rights organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later became a prominent Bay Area anti-Vietnam War activist. In 1967 he helped organize "Stop the Draft Week," a successful—if short-lived—street action to shut down the Army Induction Center in Oakland, California. For his leading role in this action, Mandel was tried (and acquitted) along with six others in the "Oakland 7" conspiracy trial.
Shortly thereafter Mandel became an active member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). He is currently a member of the General Executive Board of ILWU Local 6 in the Bay Area and a leader of the Militant Caucus, a class-struggle opposition within the union. Last month Mandel was convenor of the April 19 Committee Against Nazis, which organized a 1,200-strong mobilization of labor and minorities in San Francisco to stop the Nazis from celebrating Hitler's birthday.
Many leaders of the student struggles of the 60s and early 70s passed through the Democratic Party on their way out of politics. Others adopted China as the "socialist fatherland," and are today abject apologists for the anti-Soviet U.S.-China alliance and enemies of world revolution. The tragedy of the New Left is that so many who at one time despised the racist imperialism of the United States failed to find the revolutionary program to guide the oppressed in overthrowing that system.
Mandel's remarks are a guide for today's young militants who wish to
avoid the mistakes of the New Left, which led to an accommodation to U.S. imperialism. To find the road to revolution, one must examine the Trotskyist program. It is only the Spartacist League and its youth section,
the Spartacus Youth League, which fights to implement that program.
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In one very major sense, the new anti-draft movement is different from the New Left. I remember, when in 1965 Johnson rigged the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify bombing North Vietnam, that 3,000 people marched through the streets of San Francisco and ran an NLF (National Liberation Front) flag up on the Federal Building flagpole. Almost from the beginning the New Left had a very clear side.
Now the New Left came out of a series of experiences domestically. There had been the civil rights sit-ins beginning in 1960 in Greensboro, and an educational process had gone on. People initially started off involved in these struggles believing that reform could be effected within the context of capitalism. And the first Kennedy administration consciously played into that illusion. In fact, Kennedy gave money to the SNCC civil rights workers to do voter registration to bolster the illusion that if you vote Democratic things will improve in the U.S. And initially SNCC believed that. But in 1964 an organization called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had been organized by the left wing of the student civil rights movement, came to the Democratic Party convention and was simply rudely swept off the floor, and all the old white racists were seated in toto. People's eyes began to open.
It took the New Left a hell of a long time to draw the conclusion that the Democrats were bankrupt, and most of the New Left didn't. That's why the left today in the U.S. is very small. So I want to go through some of the mistakes that the New Left made and some of the New Left's history.
New Left Rejects History
The central mistake is that it rejected history, and it said that the old politics, the politics of the American CP (Communist Party), the question of what the Soviet Union is, what China is and what Cuba is, were irrelevant. It just closed the book, decided to start all over again, and it kept feeling its way along. So you start with militant non-violence with SNCC and the MFDP, then black power.
What "Stop the Draft Week" in 1967 represented in the largely white student
milieu was a conscious break from non-violence. We split with Joan Baez and David Harris. The first day of "Stop the Draft Week" they sat in at the induction center and made their moral protest; there were about 150 people. The second to fifth days of "Stop the Draft Week" 3,000 and then 10,000 students and some young workers and blacks from the city of Oakland fought the cops. We were going to show working-class kids in this country that they didn't have to burn their draft cards and set themselves up or go to jail, but that somebody was actually going to fight to stop the draft. Now, it was illusory. What can 3,000 or 10,000 students do? They can riot, but they sure as hell can't bring down state power. They couldn't even bring down state power in one city. But what it represented was a significant empirical lurch to the left: enough of this sitting down and saying, "Drag me off and put me in jail and then I can't do anything anymore."
At the same time that "Stop the Draft Week" was going on, Huey Newton was shot and the Panthers became nationally known. 1968 brought the Chicago demonstrations around the Democratic Party convention and the new element there was that black and white GIs at Fort Hood and Fort Carson rebelled and refused to go on riot duty in Chicago. Cops beating students wasn't so new, but that rebellion was new.
New Left and the Democratic Party
The anti-draft movement became consciously anti-imperialist in that period and started talking not about bad U.S. policy, but that there was some¬thing endemic in the capitalist system which had led to the Vietnam War. One of the real hallmarks of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in those days— when students in Berkeley were talking about anti-imperialism and the nature of the capitalist system—was telling people to link up with Vance Hartke, link up with the liberals in the Democratic Party, that it can be cleaned up and American capitalism can be reformed. They were trying to construct what is called a popular front, an alliance between leftist and working-class forces and capitalist forces.
1971 was the peak of the mass demonstrations. That was the year the 10,000 hippies and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members went to Washington to shut down the govern¬ment, and the government simply moved in and picked them all up and locked them up. They had no social power and the U.S. government, intent on maintaining its imperial empire, was not about to let 10,000 hippies of 10,000 people with Viet Cong flags disrupt its central government. You began to have splits from 1969 to 1971, splits all over the place in the left, as people groped for new solutions, because they kept coming up against their powerlessness.
So on the one extreme you had the Weathermen going underground and bombing the Capitol, and on the other extreme—and this is far and away the most significant, it was the death of the New Left—you had the McGovern campaign with literally tens of thousands of students who had been very active in the struggles against the war going back into the Democratic Party in the hope that the party that had sponsored the war in the first place would somehow clean up its act. And central in people going back into the Democratic Party was the SWP with their line that there weren't class questions posed in Vietnam: it was not the workers and peasants vs. the landlords and U.S. imperialism, it was simply a question of should American boys be killed. So under a socialist guise, it's the Tom Hayden line of today and it was the line of the various "doves" of those days: American boys shouldn't be killed; let's bring the troops home now. And the question that the New Left was groping toward was that imperialism isn't a policy. Imperialism is, as Lenin said a longtime ago, a phase of capitalist development—the international extension of markets, the dominance of finance capital. It's part of the growth of the capitalist system.
Destruction of the Black Panthers
Another key thing that happened was that as large parts of the antiwar movement went into the Democratic Party, the Black Panther Party was being annihilated and was also going back into the Democratic Party, having tried to substitute a heroic handful of black kids for mass working-class struggles. They went up against the police in city after city; they went up against the federal police and they were murdered systematically.
Now one of the key things in the defeat of the Panthers was that the left consciously hid its politics. The left had this theory that the most oppressed were the most revolutionary. Remember that the New Left had been inspired by the civil rights struggles in the South and by the Black Panthers. It looked around and saw that most important fights were being fought by blacks primarily so that there was a certain reflex reaction that blacks were by definition the most revolutionary.
A lot of the New Left simply did not know history. But there were parts of the left, like the CP and the SWP, that very much did know it. Unlike the Spartacist League (SL), they refused to criticize in a comradely way. They contributed to the defeat and destruction of the Panthers by not saying, "Look, we sympathize with what you are doing, but the power in the U .S. is in the factories, in those sections of the working class which are already in interracial unions and which already have some basic sense of solidarity of workers against bosses."
So, for instance, when 1 worked in General Motors in 1970, there was a Black Panther Party caucus in GM. They had about a dozen cadre and 200 to 300 active supporters. If, when the cops framed up Newton or Bobby Seale or murdered Bobby Button in Oakland, the Panther caucus (which had large
support among the white workers in the plant) had shut the plant down to demand cops out or to demand a political strike against the frame-up trials, that would have been power. That would have cost the American bourgeoisie millions of dollars and worried them about the fact that the working class in its organized forms was beginning to come into play.
New Left Turns to the Workers
You had at this same time whole sections of the left turning to the, but turning very empirically. The New Left was influenced by the 1968 general strike in France, which came within a hair's breadth of toppling the capitalist government. There was also a strike wave in the U.S. from 1969 to 1971. So, in 1970 the postal workers went out in an unprecedented strike, and the National Guard was brought in to break that strike. Essentially for the same reasons, Teamsters went out in the Midwest. For about a week and a half the news every night on TV would have scenes of National Guard convoys escorting scab trucks—the stuff that we all saw a little bit of during the miners strike in 1978—and there would be the Teamsters up in the hills shooting at the scab trucks.
One of the contingents of the National Guard that was used to try to break that Teamsters strike was the contingent that went over to Kent State in 1970 and massacred the students who were protesting the bombing of Cambodia. And there was a lesson there: that the students had no social power. Students can play an important role. Students carry ideas, students historically have been catalysts, students historically have played important roles in building revolutionary parties; but you shut a university down, so what? It is a symbolic act; it can have certain political impact. But if the National Guard had turned around and shot four or five or ten Teamsters in the Midwest, then the U.S. government faced the possibility of a nationwide strike of Teamsters in protest. And, there is the obvious link-up: the troops are shooting the Vietnamese in Vietnam, the troops are shooting blacks in the ghettos, and the troops are shooting striking workers. Well, what's going on here?
So there was an enormous opening for the left, and unfortunately, most of the left went into the labor movement in a very touchy-feely fashion. Maybe that's not doing it justice. Most of the left went in with the same prejudices that it carried. There's a connection here. In 1969 SDS split into two camps, and then one of those camps split a lot more.
One of those camps was Progressive Labor (PL)/SDS. The other was the Weathermen and all the Maoist groups which developed. The theory of the Weathermen was that the American working class, and centrally its white component, is a labor aristocracy which is hopelessly backward, hopelessly racist and which can never be won to revolutionary politics. Therefore: "forget about them, we're going to go underground, we'll be the Third World army in the cities and we'll blow up this and that and the other thing." Their lack of belief that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics was symmetrical with everybody who went into the Democratic Party, because going into the Democratic Party was essentially a statement that there is no other route for the working class in the U.S. except through the dominant capitalist parties.
PL/SDS said that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics, but PL had a lot of the same intellectual baggage. So it went into the labor movement thinking that workers were dumb, workers were bought off and that workers could not be educated. Therefore PL tended to jump back and forth. So that on the one hand, it had a very leftist impulse; on the other hand, it had a theory that you had to accommodate to existing consciousness. For instance, on the woman question, PL opposed free abortion on demand because male chauvinism is rather rampant in American society and PL simply accommodated to that backwardness.
Then there was another side to it. PL opposed both open admissions and free college education. When this was raised in a successful student strike at the City College of New York, PL opposed it because it decided that workers would be bought off if their kids could go to college. Now, what kind of crap is that? What lies there is the basic assumption that you better suffer a lot or you'll never be a revolutionary. It is the same old "the most oppressed are the most revolutionary." In fact, the most oppressed are very often the most backward.
The second half of the SDS split in 1969 was the Revolutionary YouthMovement, a bloc of the terrorist Weathermen and assorted Maoists which rapidly splintered into a myriad of competing groups. All the Maoist groupings went through the same thing. One has to examine, in any given instance like Afghanistan, what are the forces at work, which side should you be on- and draw essential conclusions. What was wrong with the New Left was that it had no program to run on. When people vote for us they know they are voting against the capitalist system and against the Democratic Party, for the workers running their own government.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
*SDS 2009,This Is Not Your Parents' (Or, Ouch, Grandparents') SDS 1969
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Students For Democratic Society (SDS) of the 1960s (Old Believers).
Commentary
I have spilled plenty of ink over the past year or so discussing the ‘fresh’ breeze that has come through the political atmosphere as a result of the Obama whirlwind. I have, endlessly it seems, compared this phenomena to the one of my youth in the 1960s, the election and truncated presidency of John F. Kennedy. A large piece of that comparison has been the way that today’s youth, especially college students, have gravitated toward Obama in the hope of getting out of the abyss of the past eight years. Fair enough, for now. Although today I am older and wiser and therefore cannot join the young in their enthusiasms I will nevertheless stick to my position that I have held over this past period of seeing this political awakening as a first positive step toward an understanding for the need for socialist solutions after the Obama ship runs aground.
That said, one must recognize that today is not the 1960’s and that history does not (and as a rule should not) repeat itself. Nevertheless one organization that was pivotal in the student struggle s of the 1960’s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has been resurrected over the past few years and therefore is subject to comment on as a link between the generations. Below is an article gleaned from the “Young Spartacus” pages of “Workers Vanguard”, Number 927, dated January 2, 2009 that polemicizes against today’s SDS and also provides some information about the history the 1960’s organization, its aims, achievements and failures. This article provides a good place to start a discussion about the way that socialists can tap into the political energy on today’s campuses.
As the article makes clear today’s SDS makes no pretense to be a socialist organization, has a merely marginal critique of contemporary American society and on the face of it does not rise to the level of politics that build the old SDS. Some of these shortcomings appears to be done willfully so. The earlier SDS faced that same problem, a problem that I argue today’s SDS will willy-nilly be forced to face. Either SDS will make serious anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of American society and take actions based on those understandings or fold its tent. Look, generations of political activists, young and old, have broken their teeth trying to position themselves just slightly to the left of the Democratic Party or act as an ‘outside’ pressure on that organization. The hard reality, my young friends, is that if that is to be the fate of today’s SDS then the Young Democrats can do it better, have a history of doing this kind of donkey work (no pun intended, I do not think). And have jobs to offer.
However, that is music for the future. Right now serious, mainly liberal (hey we all started out from that position back in the days), students have to develop their critiques and march to a different drummer than that of the Young Democrats. I would argue that there is plenty of room for an all-inclusive socialist student organization where individual students and organizations (including the dreaded ‘vanguard’ organizations that everyone runs in fear of) can fight for their programs and unite on individual actions that are collectively agreed upon. One of the abiding sorrows of the old “New Left”, as the struggle in SDS intensified, is that an issue that never really got fought out was building this kind of organization. Not as a pro-socialist organization, any way. Read the article and think about this a bit.
SDS Old & New
From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again
(Young Spartacus pages)
A “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 2006, has mushroomed on campuses across the country. This heterogeneous lash-up pounded the pavement to bring out voters for the Democratic Party (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” p. 5), but it has also occupied military recruitment centers. Disdainful of “ideology” and dominated by hysterical liberal anti-Communists, the new SDS sticks together by shunning political debate in favor of “politically correct” platitudes about democracy. So, for example, SDS’s voluminous “Who We Are” statement does not take a position on a single concrete political issue (studentsforademocraticsociety.org, 2007). Veterans of the early SDS, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Mike Klonsky, have rallied around the new SDS, giving talks and raising money, as well as holding their own tepid liberal protests and nostalgic conferences under the auspices of a refounded Movement for a Democratic Society.
So, what’s in a name? SDS cofounder Pat Korte explained, “The reason we chose to keep the name SDS is because it accurately describes us (we are students for a democratic society)” (“The New SDS: Towards a Radical Youth Movement,” CounterPunch, 10 July 2006). What being “for a democratic society” means in racist, capitalist America becomes clear from a look at SDSers’ activities. Having gained some experience at the business end of a nightstick, the original SDS was known for its petty-bourgeois radical “off the pig” rhetoric—but the new SDS in Boston went on hunger strike in support of security guards at Harvard! Former SDS News Bulletin coeditor and UCLA SDS honcho Dave Shukla wants to braintrust the Feds, who witchhunted the first SDS, by “developing a model for mass participation and engagement with institutional design and policy formation for each agency and program in the federal government” (“Left Forum 2008 Speaker Bio,” leftforum.org, undated). At Rutgers, SDS has taken up local New Jersey gerrymandering so “each [ward] gets to elect it’s OWN Council person to represent their neighborhood” and “the student community will get the representation it deserves” (Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society Facebook page, undated).
The institutions of bourgeois democracy are institutions of capitalist class rule with which the bourgeoisie dupes, defrauds and represses working people and the oppressed. SDS’s pushing of “democratic models” diverts young activists into the dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. What unites the liberals in the new SDS with reformists of all varieties is the view that the capitalist system can be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to win youth to building a revolutionary workers party that can lead the working class in the struggle to overthrow the whole rotten capitalist system and lay the basis for an egalitarian, communist society.
Pushing the myth that communism destroyed the first SDS, the new SDS’s leadership raises the spectre of “sectarian takeovers” and “totalitarian principles” in the service of liberal anti-communism. Voicing her opposition to members of the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization being in SDS, New York SDS honcho Rachel Haut told Platypus magazine: “I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization. Why should we be having these conversations with them, including them in the discussion, if their ideology is in direct opposition to building a democratic society?” (September 2008). Who needs the House Committee on Un-American Activities when you have the new SDS! The Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other reformists work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” than about the reformists’ toothless politics. They must feel right at home with the new SDS’s parochial campus activism and Democratic Party lesser-evilism.
Forty years ago, Students for a Democratic Society played a prominent role in protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The dirty, losing Vietnam War, initiated and escalated under Democratic Party presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was a burning issue. Most of the protesters in Chicago in 1968 opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Kirkpatrick Sale described in SDS, his well-known history of the organization, SDSers rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDSers propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten, and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine.
Last August, the new SDS mobilized for protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. They did so as part of the Alliance for Real Democracy, whose stated intention was “to convince and pressure Democrats to work for just and progressive policies at home and abroad” (realdemocracy2008.org, undated).
Ostensibly more radical chapters of SDS, including the one from Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated in their call to action, “If we, as a radical movement, are going to attempt to pressure the Democratic Party candidates, the time to do so is before they are elected” (“SDS Call to Action: Disrupt the DNC,” undated). The new SDS is a far cry from the iconic New Left organization of the 1960s, but the history of the old SDS sheds light on the new one.
Heirs of Stodgy Cold Warriors
While the first SDS emerged as part of a radicalization of U.S. society, the new SDS reflects a rightward social shift in a period of little struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a grave defeat for working people and the oppressed worldwide. It ushered in a period of bourgeois triumphalism over the “death of communism,” in which social struggle has been limited and isolated. In their works Empire and Multitude, American academic Michael Hardt and his mentor, veteran Italian New Left intellectual Antonio Negri, developed on the bourgeois idea that communism has failed—an idea also embraced by the new SDS. As our article “Empire, Multitude and the ‘Death of Communism’: The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism,” noted:
“Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as ‘old, tired and faded’ notions….
“In the late 1930s, following the victory of fascism in Germany and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed: ‘As always during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans appear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolutionary thought’ (Transitional Program [1938]). The triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in the early 1990s has nurtured a new generation of ideological quacks and charlatans. Hardt and Negri peddle their ideological wares to young leftists who, having no sense of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, accept the subjective outlook that a new world will be won not by uprooting the material reality of oppression but by changing the ideas in people’s heads.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Dismissing communist revolution as a “failed experiment,” today’s SDSers are left with nothing more than the grubby politics of “lesser evil” capitalism. They are running the film of the first SDS’s radicalization in reverse.
The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and the labor movement, peddling the virtues of “democratic,” “anti-authoritarian” capitalism. Populated by “State Department socialists” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members the labor traitors Victor and Walter Reuther, who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s, and Sidney Hook, a former Communist turned “god that failed” supporter of the established order. Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Despite posturing as champions of democracy in the Cold War, the U.S. imperialists supported right-wing military dictatorships, reactionary regimes and the remnants of European colonial rule around the world. On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly anachronistic as industrialization in the American South during and following World War II drew blacks into the working class. By the mid 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society.
Seeking to refurbish its image and in response to early struggles, the U.S. capitalist class made some concessions, notably in the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that mandated the integration of public schools. But implementation of this ruling proceeded at a snail’s pace. Young liberal activists, black and white, came forward courageously in lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides. Students from the North, defiant in the face of the murder of young civil rights militants, poured into the South to register black voters. In this changed climate, in January 1960 SLID changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society; its membership began to grow.
Early SDS: Confronting Cold War Anti-Communism
The Cuban Revolution coincided with the civil rights movement, reinforcing the appeal of more radical ideas among young activists. In January 1959, Castro’s rebel army overthrew the brutal, corrupt, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A petty-bourgeois nationalist, Castro formed a coalition government with venal local bourgeois forces and pledged to protect their interests. However, Castro’s program of land redistribution and the measures taken against Batista’s police torturers alienated Castro’s Cuban bourgeois supporters and the U.S. imperialists, including Eisenhower’s CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, both major stockholders in the United Fruit Company. Eisenhower responded with brute economic pressure to bring Castro’s regime to heel. This pushed Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. By early 1961, the holdings of the National City Bank, United Fruit, Standard Oil, the sugar barons and the Mafia—as well as the Cuban bourgeoisie—had been expropriated, and the Cuban capitalists were either in exile or in prison.
Facing the unrelenting pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Castro government sought the protection of the Soviet Union. It was compelled under these circumstances to liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, carrying out a social revolution. Cuba became a bureaucratically deformed workers state in which capitalism had been overthrown but political power was held by a parasitic bureaucratic caste fundamentally sharing the nationalist political program of “socialism in one country” with the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. In 1961, newly elected president Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, attempting to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and establish a puppet regime. Leftist youth were inspired by the Cubans’ defense of their revolution against U.S. imperialism. However, other guerrilla insurgencies aiming to overthrow right-wing capitalist regimes in Latin America were crushed with murderous repression.
In response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, SDSers posed the question “whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways” (The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, July 1962). Early SDSers were increasingly at odds with the Cold War-era anti-Communism of their parent organization, which they rightly saw as a loyalty oath to the powers that be. The Port Huron Statement, adopted at SDS’s June 1962 National Convention, sought “to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions.” It criticized the Cold War as “not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world” and argued that “the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.” A delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee was allowed to attend the convention as an observer.
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ,” maintaining that the Democratic Party platform was “superior to any passed by a major national party since the first New Deal” and that a victory by arch-conservative Barry Goldwater would spell disaster (Sale, SDS).
But the times, they were a-changin’. In 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) broke out against the Berkeley administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown, FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest against American imperialist aims to the moral outrage felt by student activists. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from the LID entirely.
Radicalization: the Civil Rights Movement
When the civil rights movement spread to the North, fighters for black freedom confronted not Southern legal segregation, but the vicious inequality and racial oppression embedded in the American capitalist system. The struggle for fundamental change in the conditions of black life—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The Northern ghettos were exploding in protest. At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the Johnson/Humphrey machine crushed the attempt by delegates from the anti-racist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the Jim Crow Mississippi delegation.
The civil rights movement was fracturing as young militants broke from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., who said of the Watts ghetto upheaval, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them” (New York Times, 16 August 1965). As we wrote in “Black Power—Class Power”:
“In contrast to the reform program of the civil rights movement, the demands of the black masses are necessarily and inherently class demands, and demands which the ruling class cannot meet…. It is this transition which is represented by the black power slogan. Its popularization represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces.”
—Spartacist West No. 8, 30 September 1966, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), September 1978
At the same time, we warned of the “black power” slogan, in the absence of a broader class fight:
“It can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
This was a prescient warning. As struggle ebbed, such was exactly the bill of goods sold to the black masses.
Co-optation was one weapon of the racist rulers; extermination was another. The best elements of radicalized black youth drawn to the Black Panther Party faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them vulnerable to state repression. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party and its lawyers, as well as of the Democratic Party. (See “Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], September 1978.)
The Vietnam War
Today, the SDS of the second mobilization displays chauvinist support for the forces of U.S. imperialism. In a grotesque testament to “support our troops” patriotism, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chapter of SDS “collected and sent care packages to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is now going to be a monthly event…” (SDS News Bulletin No. 4, May/June 2008). The University of North Carolina-Asheville chapter set out white flags commemorating U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq together with shoes representing Iraqis killed under the American occupation (“UNCA SDS Iraq Body Count,” SDS News Bulletin No. 1, October 2007). SDS’s University of Chicago chapter has close relations with Platypus, an organization known for not opposing the occupation of Iraq (see “Platypus Group: Pseudo-Marxist, Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap,” Workers Vanguard No. 908, 15 February 2008).
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was also another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend this to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans, including “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution…No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, draft resistance spread among militant youth and SDS members. We oppose the draft, demanding “not one man, not one penny” for the imperialist military. But in the event of a draft, as we argued in “You Will Go!”, adapted from a position paper we put forward in SDS, we oppose the voluntary purging of radicals from the army, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. Instead, we said young militants should go with the working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation (see Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968).
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” As we explained in the founding document of our youth organization, Youth, Class and Party (adopted in 1971; reprinted as a pamphlet in December 1974):
“When the liberal establishment backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam, it drove the radical student movement to the left and opened the path to revolutionary politics.
“As the Vietnam war drove the New Left away from the liberals, the New Left began to re-examine the ‘Communist bloc’ and came to identify with Stalinism in its ‘militant Third World’ form. New Lefters did not consciously identify with the legacy of Stalinism as embodied in the Soviet Union. Instead they created a false dichotomy between the conservatism and opportunism of Soviet Stalinism and the apparent militancy of ‘Third World’ Stalinist governments and leaderships like those of China, Cuba and the NLF.”
Several variants of Maoism would attract a following in SDS. One was Progressive Labor Party (PL), a left split from the pro-Moscow Communist Party. PL put forward a crude working-class line against the blatant petty-bourgeois politics of Mike Klonsky’s wing of SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which advanced a petty-bourgeois notion of sectoralist struggle, according to which the Vietnamese would fight for their liberation and independence, blacks in the U.S. for theirs, women for theirs, and so forth. By RYM’s lights, the role of revolutionary-minded students was to act as propaganda bureaus and support groups for these various “vanguards.” Ultimately, this sectoralism was just a “radical” version of standard ward-heeling-type Democratic Party constituency politics, with the working class relegated at best to another “oppressed” constituency rather than the agency for fundamental social change. Various Maoist outfits contended within and emerged from RYM, including what would become today’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration, but rather “Khrushchevism under the gun” of U.S. imperialism. Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, we exposed the Chinese Maoists’ repeated attempts to form a reactionary, anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes rained death and destruction on Vietnam, and it eventually destroyed the Maoist movement for all intents and purposes within the “belly of the U.S. beast.”
As we stated in Youth, Class and Party: “Only by replacing the Stalinist parties with parties unalterably committed to internationalism can the power of the Sino-Soviet states be used to further the struggle for world socialism. Recognizing that collectivized property and economic planning constitute a major qualitative gain for the workers in the Sino-Soviet states, we unconditionally defend these property forms against imperialist attacks and capitalist encroachment.” Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Student Radicals in Search of Revolutionary Program
By the end of the spring of 1968, universities had been shut down and reopened, administration buildings occupied and then abandoned. This did not stop the Vietnam War—the government escalated troop deployments to Vietnam. Radical youth within SDS were becoming increasingly restive with student-centered politics. Clearly, there was a limit to “student power.” The question was posed: if not students, then what force could bring social change? The French general strike of May 1968 gave an answer. This incipient workers revolution in France exposed the charlatanry of an earlier generation of “post-Marxist” ideologues such as Herbert Marcuse, who had written off the revolutionary potential of the working class. May ’68 forced the New Left to confront the key question of class, laying the basis for new layers of youth to be won to revolutionary Marxism.
SDS’s rejection of the “Old Left” was in large measure a response to the boring reformist politics of the Stalinist Communist Party, which had been deeply ensconced in Democratic Party politics for decades and whose idea of black struggle was to follow the lead of the “respectable,” religious black leaders. The most widely known self-styled Trotskyist organization at the time, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), was moving rapidly to the right when our founding cadres were expelled as a left-wing opposition in 1963-64. The SWP and its National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) gave Trotskyism a bad name as they promoted “peaceful, legal” single-issue antiwar peace crawls in order to make a reformist alliance with the defeatist wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie and social-democratic trade-union bureaucrats. The SWP’s alliance with liberal imperialists was sealed in blood when Spartacist supporters along with PLers and SDSers were beaten and expelled from a 1971 NPAC conference for protesting the presence of ruling-class politician Vance Hartke on the platform. (See “The Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the National Peace Action Coalition,” WV No. 920, 12 September 2008).
Our Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical-minded students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world’s first successful workers revolution, which pulled Russia out of the bloody slaughter of World War I, expropriated the capitalist class, and placed Russia’s economy under the control of democratic workers rule through soviets (workers councils). The RMC also sought to lay out Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution (see our pamphlet, The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited).
In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of Progressive Labor’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When PL refused to take the bait, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference. We remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) wing of SDS, based on its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. But while PL correctly opposed the RYM splitters’ sectoralism, it also advanced (as it continues to do) a line of indifference toward special oppression, for example, racial and sexual oppression. We fought for a proletarian orientation on this question—we issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (see “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008).
PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their reformist “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice. We warned: “By attempting to build on social guilt, moralism, and empiricism, the three most obnoxious and defective characteristics of the American left, PL creates the conditions for its own defeat and the continuous splits to the right…. Without a clearly reasoned theoretical explanation for its break with Stalinist theory, without an institution of real inner party democracy, and without a transitional program which bridges the gap between ‘rubber mats’ [PL’s concrete demands for workers struggle on campus were usually grotesquely minimal] and the dictatorship of the proletariat, PL is bound to create within itself right wing splits and transmit the same process to SDS” (“Final SDS Convention?”, Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter No. 6, March 1971). Indeed, PL eventually “led” its WSA-SDS in retreat into outright liberal idealism, campus parochialism and ordinary reformism.
Terrorism and Communism
As we wrote in Youth, Class and Party:
“The break-up of the New Left, most evident in the 1969 SDS split, was caused by the inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late ’60’s. With the collapse of the traditional New Left, there remained three general political tendencies on the left. One is an attempt to re-establish the ties between the left and the liberal political establishment, now possible because of the deep split in the ruling class over the Vietnam war. The second is a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state and terrorism practiced in the name of Third World nationalism. The third tendency is that of proletarian socialism of which the Revolutionary Communist Youth is an important element.”
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, some in the RYM wing ended up in the Weather Underground. The Weathermen would conduct acts of individual terror that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism, but in fact a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to the government’s crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile; at the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. As comrade Trotsky wrote of a German youth who had assassinated a Nazi:
“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road.”
—“For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels,” February 1939
While politically in opposition to the Weathermen, we fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” We wrote:
“The real crime vis-a-vis terror politics and heroic individualism is that it allows the revolutionary energies of some of the movement’s most talented, dedicated people to be channeled into futile and self-destructive actions. It is our job to seek to redirect these energies into genuinely revolutionary directions.”
—“Terrorism and Communism,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 17-18, August-September 1970
Other so-called “socialists” refused to defend the Weathermen and often even joined the witchhunting chorus against them. The Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party both denounced this small, isolated, and persecuted outfit of misguided radical youth. For its part, PL branded the Weathermen “police agents.”
Although the new SDS is divided over whether the Weathermen were heroic, criminal or simply irrelevant, the Weathermen’s politics have a pale echo in the new SDS’s “acts of resistance” which, even at their most militant, lack both the social power and political program required to challenge the class rule of the capitalists. Like much of the “anti-globalization” movement, these protests are based on “the dangerously false idea that the capitalist U.S. is or could be pressured into being a democracy ‘for the people’ if only the anti-globalization youth were determined or creative enough to make the rulers pay attention…. Lacking a perspective of mobilizing the working class against the rule of capital, such confrontations with the cops amount to the streetfighting face of reformism” (“What Strategy to Defeat Imperialism?” WV No. 817, 9 January 2004).
In the Pacific Northwest, SDSers and others have repeatedly blocked military convoys, delaying shipments of war materiel to Iraq. These courageous protesters have been arrested, beaten and pepper-sprayed, but they lack the social power and political program needed to stop the U.S. imperialists’ overwhelming military might. Despite our vast political differences, we revolutionary Marxist youth defend SDS when it runs afoul of the state (see “UCLA: 16 Arrested at SDS/SWF Protest—Drop the Charges! For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!” WV No. 918, 1 August 2008, and “Drop Charges Against Evergreen 6! Reinstate Olympia SDS!” WV No. 914, 9 May 2008).
SDS Today: Second Time Farce…
Once the U.S. had been defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam and mass protests had ended, many former SDSers reconciled themselves to the capitalist system. Tom Hayden, for example, went on to become a well-known California Democrat and state senator. Many other leading lights from the “generation of ’68” went to work for Democratic Party mayors who oversee the oppression of the working class and oppressed in major urban centers. Former radicals also people the union bureaucracies and liberal civil liberties outfits, as well as the Democratic Party itself. Most recently, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson and others got involved in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama, having been vetted and approved by the ruling class, is about to assume the role of overseer of the whole plantation.
The Republicans had attempted to make electoral hay out of Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, a luminary for many new SDSers. Chicago machine Democrat and mayor Richard M. Daley (whose father unleashed the police on the ’68 protests) testified to Ayers’ “rehabilitation”: “This is 2008, people make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life” (New York Times, 4 October 2008). It is also the case that a section of the ruling class will never forgive the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, no matter how “rehabilitated” they are by other sections of the bourgeoisie with whom they have made their peace. Even more vicious has been the continuing racist persecution of former Panthers, not least Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost death row political prisoner (see “D.A. Petitions Supreme Court to Reinstate Death Penalty,” p. 2). The racist rulers have long memories. Believe it: they seek to stamp out even the hint of the militant challenge, however politically flawed, which faced them during the social explosions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Our model is not the confused, eclectic radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s but rather the Bolsheviks who led the 1917 Russian Revolution. Alienated radical students have no social power per se; they can, however, be won to the fight for a revolutionary workers party, one that struggles for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and for workers’ state power. Today the fight for revolutionary consciousness is surely an uphill battle, but a necessary one. There is a massive gulf between this understanding and that of the liberal politics, including their more “militant” face, of the present SDS.
Commentary
I have spilled plenty of ink over the past year or so discussing the ‘fresh’ breeze that has come through the political atmosphere as a result of the Obama whirlwind. I have, endlessly it seems, compared this phenomena to the one of my youth in the 1960s, the election and truncated presidency of John F. Kennedy. A large piece of that comparison has been the way that today’s youth, especially college students, have gravitated toward Obama in the hope of getting out of the abyss of the past eight years. Fair enough, for now. Although today I am older and wiser and therefore cannot join the young in their enthusiasms I will nevertheless stick to my position that I have held over this past period of seeing this political awakening as a first positive step toward an understanding for the need for socialist solutions after the Obama ship runs aground.
That said, one must recognize that today is not the 1960’s and that history does not (and as a rule should not) repeat itself. Nevertheless one organization that was pivotal in the student struggle s of the 1960’s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has been resurrected over the past few years and therefore is subject to comment on as a link between the generations. Below is an article gleaned from the “Young Spartacus” pages of “Workers Vanguard”, Number 927, dated January 2, 2009 that polemicizes against today’s SDS and also provides some information about the history the 1960’s organization, its aims, achievements and failures. This article provides a good place to start a discussion about the way that socialists can tap into the political energy on today’s campuses.
As the article makes clear today’s SDS makes no pretense to be a socialist organization, has a merely marginal critique of contemporary American society and on the face of it does not rise to the level of politics that build the old SDS. Some of these shortcomings appears to be done willfully so. The earlier SDS faced that same problem, a problem that I argue today’s SDS will willy-nilly be forced to face. Either SDS will make serious anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of American society and take actions based on those understandings or fold its tent. Look, generations of political activists, young and old, have broken their teeth trying to position themselves just slightly to the left of the Democratic Party or act as an ‘outside’ pressure on that organization. The hard reality, my young friends, is that if that is to be the fate of today’s SDS then the Young Democrats can do it better, have a history of doing this kind of donkey work (no pun intended, I do not think). And have jobs to offer.
However, that is music for the future. Right now serious, mainly liberal (hey we all started out from that position back in the days), students have to develop their critiques and march to a different drummer than that of the Young Democrats. I would argue that there is plenty of room for an all-inclusive socialist student organization where individual students and organizations (including the dreaded ‘vanguard’ organizations that everyone runs in fear of) can fight for their programs and unite on individual actions that are collectively agreed upon. One of the abiding sorrows of the old “New Left”, as the struggle in SDS intensified, is that an issue that never really got fought out was building this kind of organization. Not as a pro-socialist organization, any way. Read the article and think about this a bit.
SDS Old & New
From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again
(Young Spartacus pages)
A “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 2006, has mushroomed on campuses across the country. This heterogeneous lash-up pounded the pavement to bring out voters for the Democratic Party (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” p. 5), but it has also occupied military recruitment centers. Disdainful of “ideology” and dominated by hysterical liberal anti-Communists, the new SDS sticks together by shunning political debate in favor of “politically correct” platitudes about democracy. So, for example, SDS’s voluminous “Who We Are” statement does not take a position on a single concrete political issue (studentsforademocraticsociety.org, 2007). Veterans of the early SDS, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Mike Klonsky, have rallied around the new SDS, giving talks and raising money, as well as holding their own tepid liberal protests and nostalgic conferences under the auspices of a refounded Movement for a Democratic Society.
So, what’s in a name? SDS cofounder Pat Korte explained, “The reason we chose to keep the name SDS is because it accurately describes us (we are students for a democratic society)” (“The New SDS: Towards a Radical Youth Movement,” CounterPunch, 10 July 2006). What being “for a democratic society” means in racist, capitalist America becomes clear from a look at SDSers’ activities. Having gained some experience at the business end of a nightstick, the original SDS was known for its petty-bourgeois radical “off the pig” rhetoric—but the new SDS in Boston went on hunger strike in support of security guards at Harvard! Former SDS News Bulletin coeditor and UCLA SDS honcho Dave Shukla wants to braintrust the Feds, who witchhunted the first SDS, by “developing a model for mass participation and engagement with institutional design and policy formation for each agency and program in the federal government” (“Left Forum 2008 Speaker Bio,” leftforum.org, undated). At Rutgers, SDS has taken up local New Jersey gerrymandering so “each [ward] gets to elect it’s OWN Council person to represent their neighborhood” and “the student community will get the representation it deserves” (Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society Facebook page, undated).
The institutions of bourgeois democracy are institutions of capitalist class rule with which the bourgeoisie dupes, defrauds and represses working people and the oppressed. SDS’s pushing of “democratic models” diverts young activists into the dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. What unites the liberals in the new SDS with reformists of all varieties is the view that the capitalist system can be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to win youth to building a revolutionary workers party that can lead the working class in the struggle to overthrow the whole rotten capitalist system and lay the basis for an egalitarian, communist society.
Pushing the myth that communism destroyed the first SDS, the new SDS’s leadership raises the spectre of “sectarian takeovers” and “totalitarian principles” in the service of liberal anti-communism. Voicing her opposition to members of the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization being in SDS, New York SDS honcho Rachel Haut told Platypus magazine: “I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization. Why should we be having these conversations with them, including them in the discussion, if their ideology is in direct opposition to building a democratic society?” (September 2008). Who needs the House Committee on Un-American Activities when you have the new SDS! The Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other reformists work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” than about the reformists’ toothless politics. They must feel right at home with the new SDS’s parochial campus activism and Democratic Party lesser-evilism.
Forty years ago, Students for a Democratic Society played a prominent role in protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The dirty, losing Vietnam War, initiated and escalated under Democratic Party presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was a burning issue. Most of the protesters in Chicago in 1968 opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Kirkpatrick Sale described in SDS, his well-known history of the organization, SDSers rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDSers propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten, and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine.
Last August, the new SDS mobilized for protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. They did so as part of the Alliance for Real Democracy, whose stated intention was “to convince and pressure Democrats to work for just and progressive policies at home and abroad” (realdemocracy2008.org, undated).
Ostensibly more radical chapters of SDS, including the one from Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated in their call to action, “If we, as a radical movement, are going to attempt to pressure the Democratic Party candidates, the time to do so is before they are elected” (“SDS Call to Action: Disrupt the DNC,” undated). The new SDS is a far cry from the iconic New Left organization of the 1960s, but the history of the old SDS sheds light on the new one.
Heirs of Stodgy Cold Warriors
While the first SDS emerged as part of a radicalization of U.S. society, the new SDS reflects a rightward social shift in a period of little struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a grave defeat for working people and the oppressed worldwide. It ushered in a period of bourgeois triumphalism over the “death of communism,” in which social struggle has been limited and isolated. In their works Empire and Multitude, American academic Michael Hardt and his mentor, veteran Italian New Left intellectual Antonio Negri, developed on the bourgeois idea that communism has failed—an idea also embraced by the new SDS. As our article “Empire, Multitude and the ‘Death of Communism’: The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism,” noted:
“Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as ‘old, tired and faded’ notions….
“In the late 1930s, following the victory of fascism in Germany and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed: ‘As always during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans appear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolutionary thought’ (Transitional Program [1938]). The triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in the early 1990s has nurtured a new generation of ideological quacks and charlatans. Hardt and Negri peddle their ideological wares to young leftists who, having no sense of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, accept the subjective outlook that a new world will be won not by uprooting the material reality of oppression but by changing the ideas in people’s heads.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Dismissing communist revolution as a “failed experiment,” today’s SDSers are left with nothing more than the grubby politics of “lesser evil” capitalism. They are running the film of the first SDS’s radicalization in reverse.
The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and the labor movement, peddling the virtues of “democratic,” “anti-authoritarian” capitalism. Populated by “State Department socialists” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members the labor traitors Victor and Walter Reuther, who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s, and Sidney Hook, a former Communist turned “god that failed” supporter of the established order. Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Despite posturing as champions of democracy in the Cold War, the U.S. imperialists supported right-wing military dictatorships, reactionary regimes and the remnants of European colonial rule around the world. On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly anachronistic as industrialization in the American South during and following World War II drew blacks into the working class. By the mid 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society.
Seeking to refurbish its image and in response to early struggles, the U.S. capitalist class made some concessions, notably in the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that mandated the integration of public schools. But implementation of this ruling proceeded at a snail’s pace. Young liberal activists, black and white, came forward courageously in lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides. Students from the North, defiant in the face of the murder of young civil rights militants, poured into the South to register black voters. In this changed climate, in January 1960 SLID changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society; its membership began to grow.
Early SDS: Confronting Cold War Anti-Communism
The Cuban Revolution coincided with the civil rights movement, reinforcing the appeal of more radical ideas among young activists. In January 1959, Castro’s rebel army overthrew the brutal, corrupt, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A petty-bourgeois nationalist, Castro formed a coalition government with venal local bourgeois forces and pledged to protect their interests. However, Castro’s program of land redistribution and the measures taken against Batista’s police torturers alienated Castro’s Cuban bourgeois supporters and the U.S. imperialists, including Eisenhower’s CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, both major stockholders in the United Fruit Company. Eisenhower responded with brute economic pressure to bring Castro’s regime to heel. This pushed Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. By early 1961, the holdings of the National City Bank, United Fruit, Standard Oil, the sugar barons and the Mafia—as well as the Cuban bourgeoisie—had been expropriated, and the Cuban capitalists were either in exile or in prison.
Facing the unrelenting pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Castro government sought the protection of the Soviet Union. It was compelled under these circumstances to liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, carrying out a social revolution. Cuba became a bureaucratically deformed workers state in which capitalism had been overthrown but political power was held by a parasitic bureaucratic caste fundamentally sharing the nationalist political program of “socialism in one country” with the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. In 1961, newly elected president Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, attempting to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and establish a puppet regime. Leftist youth were inspired by the Cubans’ defense of their revolution against U.S. imperialism. However, other guerrilla insurgencies aiming to overthrow right-wing capitalist regimes in Latin America were crushed with murderous repression.
In response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, SDSers posed the question “whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways” (The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, July 1962). Early SDSers were increasingly at odds with the Cold War-era anti-Communism of their parent organization, which they rightly saw as a loyalty oath to the powers that be. The Port Huron Statement, adopted at SDS’s June 1962 National Convention, sought “to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions.” It criticized the Cold War as “not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world” and argued that “the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.” A delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee was allowed to attend the convention as an observer.
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ,” maintaining that the Democratic Party platform was “superior to any passed by a major national party since the first New Deal” and that a victory by arch-conservative Barry Goldwater would spell disaster (Sale, SDS).
But the times, they were a-changin’. In 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) broke out against the Berkeley administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown, FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest against American imperialist aims to the moral outrage felt by student activists. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from the LID entirely.
Radicalization: the Civil Rights Movement
When the civil rights movement spread to the North, fighters for black freedom confronted not Southern legal segregation, but the vicious inequality and racial oppression embedded in the American capitalist system. The struggle for fundamental change in the conditions of black life—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The Northern ghettos were exploding in protest. At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the Johnson/Humphrey machine crushed the attempt by delegates from the anti-racist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the Jim Crow Mississippi delegation.
The civil rights movement was fracturing as young militants broke from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., who said of the Watts ghetto upheaval, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them” (New York Times, 16 August 1965). As we wrote in “Black Power—Class Power”:
“In contrast to the reform program of the civil rights movement, the demands of the black masses are necessarily and inherently class demands, and demands which the ruling class cannot meet…. It is this transition which is represented by the black power slogan. Its popularization represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces.”
—Spartacist West No. 8, 30 September 1966, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), September 1978
At the same time, we warned of the “black power” slogan, in the absence of a broader class fight:
“It can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
This was a prescient warning. As struggle ebbed, such was exactly the bill of goods sold to the black masses.
Co-optation was one weapon of the racist rulers; extermination was another. The best elements of radicalized black youth drawn to the Black Panther Party faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them vulnerable to state repression. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party and its lawyers, as well as of the Democratic Party. (See “Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], September 1978.)
The Vietnam War
Today, the SDS of the second mobilization displays chauvinist support for the forces of U.S. imperialism. In a grotesque testament to “support our troops” patriotism, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chapter of SDS “collected and sent care packages to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is now going to be a monthly event…” (SDS News Bulletin No. 4, May/June 2008). The University of North Carolina-Asheville chapter set out white flags commemorating U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq together with shoes representing Iraqis killed under the American occupation (“UNCA SDS Iraq Body Count,” SDS News Bulletin No. 1, October 2007). SDS’s University of Chicago chapter has close relations with Platypus, an organization known for not opposing the occupation of Iraq (see “Platypus Group: Pseudo-Marxist, Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap,” Workers Vanguard No. 908, 15 February 2008).
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was also another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend this to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans, including “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution…No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, draft resistance spread among militant youth and SDS members. We oppose the draft, demanding “not one man, not one penny” for the imperialist military. But in the event of a draft, as we argued in “You Will Go!”, adapted from a position paper we put forward in SDS, we oppose the voluntary purging of radicals from the army, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. Instead, we said young militants should go with the working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation (see Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968).
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” As we explained in the founding document of our youth organization, Youth, Class and Party (adopted in 1971; reprinted as a pamphlet in December 1974):
“When the liberal establishment backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam, it drove the radical student movement to the left and opened the path to revolutionary politics.
“As the Vietnam war drove the New Left away from the liberals, the New Left began to re-examine the ‘Communist bloc’ and came to identify with Stalinism in its ‘militant Third World’ form. New Lefters did not consciously identify with the legacy of Stalinism as embodied in the Soviet Union. Instead they created a false dichotomy between the conservatism and opportunism of Soviet Stalinism and the apparent militancy of ‘Third World’ Stalinist governments and leaderships like those of China, Cuba and the NLF.”
Several variants of Maoism would attract a following in SDS. One was Progressive Labor Party (PL), a left split from the pro-Moscow Communist Party. PL put forward a crude working-class line against the blatant petty-bourgeois politics of Mike Klonsky’s wing of SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which advanced a petty-bourgeois notion of sectoralist struggle, according to which the Vietnamese would fight for their liberation and independence, blacks in the U.S. for theirs, women for theirs, and so forth. By RYM’s lights, the role of revolutionary-minded students was to act as propaganda bureaus and support groups for these various “vanguards.” Ultimately, this sectoralism was just a “radical” version of standard ward-heeling-type Democratic Party constituency politics, with the working class relegated at best to another “oppressed” constituency rather than the agency for fundamental social change. Various Maoist outfits contended within and emerged from RYM, including what would become today’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration, but rather “Khrushchevism under the gun” of U.S. imperialism. Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, we exposed the Chinese Maoists’ repeated attempts to form a reactionary, anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes rained death and destruction on Vietnam, and it eventually destroyed the Maoist movement for all intents and purposes within the “belly of the U.S. beast.”
As we stated in Youth, Class and Party: “Only by replacing the Stalinist parties with parties unalterably committed to internationalism can the power of the Sino-Soviet states be used to further the struggle for world socialism. Recognizing that collectivized property and economic planning constitute a major qualitative gain for the workers in the Sino-Soviet states, we unconditionally defend these property forms against imperialist attacks and capitalist encroachment.” Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Student Radicals in Search of Revolutionary Program
By the end of the spring of 1968, universities had been shut down and reopened, administration buildings occupied and then abandoned. This did not stop the Vietnam War—the government escalated troop deployments to Vietnam. Radical youth within SDS were becoming increasingly restive with student-centered politics. Clearly, there was a limit to “student power.” The question was posed: if not students, then what force could bring social change? The French general strike of May 1968 gave an answer. This incipient workers revolution in France exposed the charlatanry of an earlier generation of “post-Marxist” ideologues such as Herbert Marcuse, who had written off the revolutionary potential of the working class. May ’68 forced the New Left to confront the key question of class, laying the basis for new layers of youth to be won to revolutionary Marxism.
SDS’s rejection of the “Old Left” was in large measure a response to the boring reformist politics of the Stalinist Communist Party, which had been deeply ensconced in Democratic Party politics for decades and whose idea of black struggle was to follow the lead of the “respectable,” religious black leaders. The most widely known self-styled Trotskyist organization at the time, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), was moving rapidly to the right when our founding cadres were expelled as a left-wing opposition in 1963-64. The SWP and its National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) gave Trotskyism a bad name as they promoted “peaceful, legal” single-issue antiwar peace crawls in order to make a reformist alliance with the defeatist wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie and social-democratic trade-union bureaucrats. The SWP’s alliance with liberal imperialists was sealed in blood when Spartacist supporters along with PLers and SDSers were beaten and expelled from a 1971 NPAC conference for protesting the presence of ruling-class politician Vance Hartke on the platform. (See “The Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the National Peace Action Coalition,” WV No. 920, 12 September 2008).
Our Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical-minded students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world’s first successful workers revolution, which pulled Russia out of the bloody slaughter of World War I, expropriated the capitalist class, and placed Russia’s economy under the control of democratic workers rule through soviets (workers councils). The RMC also sought to lay out Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution (see our pamphlet, The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited).
In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of Progressive Labor’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When PL refused to take the bait, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference. We remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) wing of SDS, based on its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. But while PL correctly opposed the RYM splitters’ sectoralism, it also advanced (as it continues to do) a line of indifference toward special oppression, for example, racial and sexual oppression. We fought for a proletarian orientation on this question—we issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (see “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008).
PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their reformist “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice. We warned: “By attempting to build on social guilt, moralism, and empiricism, the three most obnoxious and defective characteristics of the American left, PL creates the conditions for its own defeat and the continuous splits to the right…. Without a clearly reasoned theoretical explanation for its break with Stalinist theory, without an institution of real inner party democracy, and without a transitional program which bridges the gap between ‘rubber mats’ [PL’s concrete demands for workers struggle on campus were usually grotesquely minimal] and the dictatorship of the proletariat, PL is bound to create within itself right wing splits and transmit the same process to SDS” (“Final SDS Convention?”, Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter No. 6, March 1971). Indeed, PL eventually “led” its WSA-SDS in retreat into outright liberal idealism, campus parochialism and ordinary reformism.
Terrorism and Communism
As we wrote in Youth, Class and Party:
“The break-up of the New Left, most evident in the 1969 SDS split, was caused by the inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late ’60’s. With the collapse of the traditional New Left, there remained three general political tendencies on the left. One is an attempt to re-establish the ties between the left and the liberal political establishment, now possible because of the deep split in the ruling class over the Vietnam war. The second is a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state and terrorism practiced in the name of Third World nationalism. The third tendency is that of proletarian socialism of which the Revolutionary Communist Youth is an important element.”
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, some in the RYM wing ended up in the Weather Underground. The Weathermen would conduct acts of individual terror that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism, but in fact a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to the government’s crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile; at the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. As comrade Trotsky wrote of a German youth who had assassinated a Nazi:
“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road.”
—“For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels,” February 1939
While politically in opposition to the Weathermen, we fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” We wrote:
“The real crime vis-a-vis terror politics and heroic individualism is that it allows the revolutionary energies of some of the movement’s most talented, dedicated people to be channeled into futile and self-destructive actions. It is our job to seek to redirect these energies into genuinely revolutionary directions.”
—“Terrorism and Communism,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 17-18, August-September 1970
Other so-called “socialists” refused to defend the Weathermen and often even joined the witchhunting chorus against them. The Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party both denounced this small, isolated, and persecuted outfit of misguided radical youth. For its part, PL branded the Weathermen “police agents.”
Although the new SDS is divided over whether the Weathermen were heroic, criminal or simply irrelevant, the Weathermen’s politics have a pale echo in the new SDS’s “acts of resistance” which, even at their most militant, lack both the social power and political program required to challenge the class rule of the capitalists. Like much of the “anti-globalization” movement, these protests are based on “the dangerously false idea that the capitalist U.S. is or could be pressured into being a democracy ‘for the people’ if only the anti-globalization youth were determined or creative enough to make the rulers pay attention…. Lacking a perspective of mobilizing the working class against the rule of capital, such confrontations with the cops amount to the streetfighting face of reformism” (“What Strategy to Defeat Imperialism?” WV No. 817, 9 January 2004).
In the Pacific Northwest, SDSers and others have repeatedly blocked military convoys, delaying shipments of war materiel to Iraq. These courageous protesters have been arrested, beaten and pepper-sprayed, but they lack the social power and political program needed to stop the U.S. imperialists’ overwhelming military might. Despite our vast political differences, we revolutionary Marxist youth defend SDS when it runs afoul of the state (see “UCLA: 16 Arrested at SDS/SWF Protest—Drop the Charges! For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!” WV No. 918, 1 August 2008, and “Drop Charges Against Evergreen 6! Reinstate Olympia SDS!” WV No. 914, 9 May 2008).
SDS Today: Second Time Farce…
Once the U.S. had been defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam and mass protests had ended, many former SDSers reconciled themselves to the capitalist system. Tom Hayden, for example, went on to become a well-known California Democrat and state senator. Many other leading lights from the “generation of ’68” went to work for Democratic Party mayors who oversee the oppression of the working class and oppressed in major urban centers. Former radicals also people the union bureaucracies and liberal civil liberties outfits, as well as the Democratic Party itself. Most recently, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson and others got involved in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama, having been vetted and approved by the ruling class, is about to assume the role of overseer of the whole plantation.
The Republicans had attempted to make electoral hay out of Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, a luminary for many new SDSers. Chicago machine Democrat and mayor Richard M. Daley (whose father unleashed the police on the ’68 protests) testified to Ayers’ “rehabilitation”: “This is 2008, people make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life” (New York Times, 4 October 2008). It is also the case that a section of the ruling class will never forgive the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, no matter how “rehabilitated” they are by other sections of the bourgeoisie with whom they have made their peace. Even more vicious has been the continuing racist persecution of former Panthers, not least Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost death row political prisoner (see “D.A. Petitions Supreme Court to Reinstate Death Penalty,” p. 2). The racist rulers have long memories. Believe it: they seek to stamp out even the hint of the militant challenge, however politically flawed, which faced them during the social explosions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Our model is not the confused, eclectic radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s but rather the Bolsheviks who led the 1917 Russian Revolution. Alienated radical students have no social power per se; they can, however, be won to the fight for a revolutionary workers party, one that struggles for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and for workers’ state power. Today the fight for revolutionary consciousness is surely an uphill battle, but a necessary one. There is a massive gulf between this understanding and that of the liberal politics, including their more “militant” face, of the present SDS.
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