From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Remember Jackson State"-"Workers Vanguard" (April 5, 1985)

Markin comment on this series:

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.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State

Atlanta, GA 16 February

Editor, Workers Vanguard

Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly tho­roughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of stu­dents were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropri­ately mentioned, we should remem­ber that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, Febru­ary 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).

Comradely, Joe Vetter

P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.