From The Archives- We Shall Fight, We Shall Win - Paris, London, Athens, Dublin-Build The Resistance 2017!

Saturday, November 27, 2010

We Shall Fight, We Shall Win - Paris, London, Athens, Dublin


It is not everyday one gets the honour and privilege of being invited to do a Socialist Worker Student Society meeting on 'May 1968 - The Fire Last Time' amidst an actual student occupation (see also here), still less one amidst one of the largest and most significant waves of student revolt to hit University and College campuses in Britain in my living memory - see here and here. Admittedly, it would have been nice to have had more than 10 minutes notice before being asked to do the aforementioned meeting - and it would have been a bonus if the meeting had then happened at the time agreed (10pm) rather than er, just after midnight - but I guess this is the glorious messiness of real life struggle - and if twenty or so students after about 30 hours of maintaining an occupation are still up for a discussion about revolutionary politics from about half twelve until half one in the morning then who am I to refuse them such an opportunity?

Whether the student revolt in Britain has had its 'Grosvenor Square' moment - when 80,000 students protesting against the Vietnam War in March 1968 clashed with riot police outside the US Embassy yet or not is debatable, but certainly the demonstration of 50,000 students which ended with the trashing of the Tory HQ at Millbank - followed up with Day X's display of civil disobedience and mass direct action in which students were charged by the London Met's mounted police division has certainly brought student protest to the attention of the mass media - and their revolutionary spirit has acted as a beacon of inspiration and hope to millions of working people up and down the country in the face of the Tory onslaught of cuts and attacks. Britain is now well and truly part of the wave of resistance to austerity that has already been witnessed across the rest of Europe.

Theoretically, according to bourgeois social science, at least in its postmodern forms - the student revolt just shouldn't be happening. The marketisation and commodification of higher education that tuition fees represents should mean that students have lost any sense of collective identity and are now just individual consumers, buying a 'product' from The University Plc. The revolt shows students aren't prepared to just accept commodification passively, but are active agents of their own destiny - capable of raising the argument that 'another education and another world is possible'.

Just as the student revolt in 1968 detonated a wave of working class struggle, so the student revolt in Britain today is already making a political impact - what with the National Union of Teachers and the UCU lecturers union balloting for strike action in the new year, and public sector trade union leaders are making increasingly militant and fiery speeches against the government at a mushrooming number of anti-cuts meetings. Even Labour leader Ed Miliband is now, wait for it, 'listening' to the students sympathetically and, get this, is ''tempted' to maybe, possibly, even one day actually support them. The students are set to walk about again next Tuesday and again on the day the proposed massacre of higher education is voted on in Parliament. The task for socialists is to make sure that the students are not now left to fight on alone - which would see their struggle rise heroically and spectacularly like a rocket but then come down miserably like a little stick - but that when they next walk out, increasing numbers of workers are encouraged to also walk out, and stand and fight alongside the students - and ever growing numbers of networks of solidarity between students and workers are built. Building such networks would not only begin to encourage the kind of mass strike action British society so desperately needs if the Con-Dem led capitalist juggernaut is to be stopped in its tracks and British society shifted to the left politically - but such direct action by workers at the point of production can also begin to paralyse and undermine capital itself. As the great revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg put it - 'where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be

posted by Snowball @ 2:19 PM

2 Comments:
At 4:34 PM, Grim and Dim said...
The March 1968 demo was 20,000 at most, and not all of us were students. The big demo (up to 100,000) was in October, and didn't go to Grosvenor Square (just a few Maoist nutters and Mick Jagger went there).
This is not pedantry - well it is pedantry but it's also making the point that some recent demos have been considerably bigger than anything in the annus mirabilis of 1968. Grounds for hope.


At 2:43 PM, Snowball said...
Cheers for the clarification - grounds for hope indeed comrade...

The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- From The Pages Of "Young Spartacus"-"Capitalism Has Nothing to Offer Youth"

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:

Lately. particularly in regard to social struggles in Europe and the Middle East (and a little in America as well), I have been seeing a lot of talk about youth, undifferentiated youth, as something of a vanguard in today's struggles. I will let a quote from the speaker in this article put things in their proper perspective. And the current front-line class war events by the public workers unions in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) only confirm this notion.

"Hand in hand with this understanding comes the realization that if students want to put an end to capitalism, they cannot do it alone. They must be allied with the working class, because only the working class has the power to shut down production and bring the whole capitalist system to a grinding halt. Right now, the students at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico are on strike against a tuition hike. The students are maintaining their strike in spite of violent repression from the cops and private security guards. The student action is courageous; however, the success of the student strike will hinge on whether or not it is joined by the workers. It was only through the united action of the students and workers that the campus strike last spring was victorious."

********
Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011

Capitalism Has Nothing to Offer Youth

SYC Speech at New York Holiday Appeal

(Young Spartacus pages)

On January 21, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, held its 25th annual Holiday Appeal benefit for class-war prisoners in New York City. A Spartacus Youth Club member gave the following speech, which has been slightly edited for publication.
It is important for revolutionary youth to take up the cause of the class-war prisoners because, as the old Industrial Workers of the World saying goes, “They are in there for us and we are out here for them.” Even if we do not share the same politics, we stand on the same side of the class line. If the working class is to move forward, it is essential that we defend our class brothers and sisters.

Around the world, the capitalists’ attempts to make the working class pay for the bosses’ recession have come down on youth especially hard. In the U.S., 43.8 percent of black teens are now unemployed as well as 23.5 percent of white teens.

Puerto Rico are raising tuition rates as part of broader “austerity measures,” i.e., attacks on the working class as a whole.

The capitalist class continues to uphold the bourgeois family, meaning one man on one woman for life. Maintaining this family structure requires the brutal repression of women and youth, as we saw in the case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who jumped off the nearby George Washington Bridge rather than face the torment of being a young gay man in America. Just weeks later, two young men in the Bronx were savagely beaten because they were suspected of being a couple.

Add to this the racist war on drugs, which continues to target black and minority youth. According to the New York Times one out of every nine black men between 20 and 34 is currently behind bars or on parole. The majority of these cases involve “drug-related offenses.”

Perhaps nothing explodes the “end of racism” myth more graphically than the fact that the police continue to gun down black and Latino youth no less under Obama than under any other administration. Witness Angel Alvarez and Luis Soto, who were shot down by the cops just blocks away from here. It is clear that capitalism has nothing to offer youth today. It is a brutal, exploitative and decaying system that must be completely uprooted and overthrown.

If we are to succeed, the youth must learn that the struggle to put an end to racism, sexism, starvation, exploitation, imperialist war, rampant disease and mass imprisonment is a class struggle. It is the struggle of the workers, who seek better wages, benefits, equality, etc., against the capitalists, who seek to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of the skins of the workers.

Hand in hand with this understanding comes the realization that if students want to put an end to capitalism, they cannot do it alone. They must be allied with the working class, because only the working class has the power to shut down production and bring the whole capitalist system to a grinding halt. Right now, the students at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico are on strike against a tuition hike. The students are maintaining their strike in spite of violent repression from the cops and private security guards. The student action is courageous; however, the success of the student strike will hinge on whether or not it is joined by the workers. It was only through the united action of the students and workers that the campus strike last spring was victorious.

These struggles are not new by any means! And just as capitalist repression has a long and bloody history, the working-class struggle to abolish oppression has a long and powerful history as well! The high point of this was the Russian Revolution, when the working class, under the leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, actually ripped state power out of the hands of the capitalists and established the first workers state in the history of the world.

It is important for revolutionary youth to remember that we are not alone! We are not the first people who have felt this way! Others started this fight long before we were born, and it is up to us to continue it in the future and bring the class struggle to its victorious conclusion.

It is also essential that the youth internalize the lessons that previous generations have learned in the class struggle. Central to these lessons is that the capitalists’ courts are never neutral. They are the exclusive instrument of the capitalist state, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the workers. From this understanding springs the slogan: There is no justice in the capitalist courts! If you are looking for proof of this slogan, look no further than the cases of the class-war prisoners. These courageous men and women are living the reality of this slogan every day.

Our class understanding of the state and its courts sets us apart from the rest of the left. A good example of this was seen last semester at CCNY, the college just across the street. The International Socialist Organization, or ISO, held a video showing of a new documentary about death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The ISO is in a campaign to pressure Obama to start a civil rights investigation into Mumia’s case. The Spartacus Youth Club was able to intervene at this event and point out, among other things, that Obama is the class enemy! He is the top cop of the capitalist state, whose job it is to maintain the racist capitalist system, which means getting rid of people who are perceived as threats to the capitalist order, like Mumia. When I asked the ISOers why they thought that Obama, who is explicitly pro-death penalty, would lift a finger to free Mumia, the ISO had no response.

Reformists like the ISO see the injustices against Mumia and the other class-war prisoners as an embarrassment to the capitalist state. They seek to build illusions in the capitalist courts and attempt to appeal to the capitalist rulers’ imaginary sense of justice. We know that the capitalists want anything but justice for the working class. While we support the pursuit of all legal means to free Mumia and all the class-war prisoners, we understand that ultimately it is only the working class who has the power to free them from the capitalists’ death grip.

Our class perspective also informs our position on military recruiters on campus. We have always opposed the recruiters because we understand the U.S. Army to be the tool of imperialist domination. This is why we protested their presence last semester at CCNY, and our relatively small team of demonstrators found considerable support among the other students. Liberals, however, have in recent years based their opposition to recruiters on the fact that the U.S. military discriminated against homosexuals, not because it is a tool for mass murder and imperialist plunder. These same liberals will find themselves ideologically disarmed this next semester, as the U.S. military is now an “equal opportunity employer.” While we always opposed “don’t ask, don’t tell” as part of our defense of basic democratic rights for homosexuals, it was never the basis of our unconditional opposition to the imperialist military.

As Marxists we understand that social struggle is inevitable. Witness the widespread outrage in Tunisia, or in Europe at the recent round of “austerity measures.” In London, students took to the streets by the tens of thousands to protest the tripling of their tuition. At the same time as the British ruling class is engaged in the largest attacks on the working class in years, Prince William and Kate Middleton are enjoying a rather different type of engagement, busy with the preparations of their outlandish royal wedding. Camilla and Prince Charles drove into one of these student demonstrations. When the students found out who was in the car, they surrounded the vehicle shouting, “Off with their heads!”

Class struggle is inevitable. What is not inevitable is who will win. For the working class to seize power from the hands of its oppressors and hold on to it requires the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party. As an older comrade said to me, “Marxism does not hover above the earth as a separate entity in space. Marxism exists only in human beings.”

And that is why, if you feel the way we do, if you understand that capitalism needs to be overthrown, if you want to fight for the emancipation of these prisoners and the emancipation of all of humanity, then join us in the struggle to overthrow this racist, sexist, bloody, oppressive capitalist system once and for all! Free the class-war prisoners! No illusions in the capitalist courts! Onward to a socialist future!

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marcus And The Labor Committee:Crackpot Social-Democracy (1971)

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 of trying to break with the Democrats and other so-called progressives in order to bring THEIR house down).The 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 politics.

I do not remember much about the Labor Committee or about Lynn Marcus, having not run into that particular group at the time, except that later Marcus and his coterie surfaced in Illinois capturing some Democratic Party primary nomination based on an eclectic, and anti-working class, mishmash. But that point the group had moved well outside the parameters of the left. Not the first, and probably not the last time, individuals and groups,that started left and moved right, way right. The best part of the article though is the point about “guru” Marcus claiming to be something like the first Marxist since Marx on the basis of some flimsy formulations. We have also all seen that phenomenon, as well. Remember this: guys like Marcus just muddy the waters and in the process waste precious cadre who, for one reason or another, get catch up in such movements-before they burn out or just go off the deep end. Take this as a cautionary tale.
************
From the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 9, October-November 1971.

Marcus And The Labor Committee:Crackpot Social-Democracy

To call Marcus an obscurantist is an understatement on the order of calling Hitler mischievous. But there are more serious things wrong with Marcus and the Labor Committee. We find that the membership of the Marcusite Labor Committee is subjectively alien to revolutionary socialism, and therefore have not written much on them previously. But the fact that they are acting as a pole of attraction for ex-PLers and other young radicals indicates that a deeper analysis of this group is necessary. The Marcusites generally possess a wise-guy operator quality which prevents them from becoming Bolsheviks. If the average ISer tends to be a dilettante, the average Marcusite tends to be a hustler. Despite enormous political differences, we respect Progressive Labor because of the strength of their proletarian revolutionary impulses. As Trotsky said of some French Marcus types among his erstwhile followers, "Revolutionaries may be either educated or ignorant people, either intelligent or dull; but there can be no revolutionaries without the will that breaks obstacles, without devotion, without the spirit of sacrifice.' In a certain sense, a lack of revolutionary will and dedication can be more decisive than formal political and theoretical differences, although such attitudes also inevitably manifest themselves in the sharpest political differences.

Marcus — Self-Proclaimed Genius
Marcus, after spending time in the SWP as an inactive right-winger, joined Wohlforth after the latter had left the SWP to form what is now the Workers League, and became the principal theoretician of the Wohlforth tendency. Marcus and Wohlforth, during their collaboration in '65-'66, claimed they were in the Iskra period, by which they meant they should act as brain-trusters for the rest of the left. This concept is a consistent pillar of Marcusism, the contention that his claim to leadership rests on his being smarter than everybody else. Marcus uses Marxian economics the way Wohlforth uses Marxian philosophy, presenting it in a deliberately obscurantist manner, claiming it represents the key to the American revolution and only he and his disciples have mastered it. On a formal level, Marcus (like Wohlforth) is a rational idealist maintaining that if one understands reality one can control it, independent of the actualities of social power and interests: the perfect philosophy for an enlightened advisor to bureaucrats.

After the break with Wohlforth, Marcus joined the Spartacist League for a brief period, breaking with it over unanimous opposition to his position that the trouble with the Castroites was that Castro didn't know enough Marxian economics to maneuver successfully in the world market. This is the exact opposite of the truth-it is precisely the pressure upon a weak and isolated workers' state to adapt to bourgeois world hegemony that provides the impulse for Stalinism.

The Marcusite "United Front"

After breaking with organized Trotskyism, Marcus set up organizations which used the magic slogan "united front" as a short-cut to expected miracles of political organizing. Des¬pite grandiose goals, the West Side Tenants Union, the Garment Center Organizing Commit¬tee and so on came to nothing except passing out a lot of paper.

The LC's "United Fronts" have usually taken on a thoroughly dishonest front group character. The Marcusites have proven they will split from any "united front" if they don't like its program. When we organized a strike support action with the LC, along with the International Socialists and some Columbia U. independents, the LC simply pulled out its forces, because they feared our demands against the persecution of the Panthers, against the war and for a workers' party would alienate the liberal bourgeoisie they wanted to pull in. A united front is only a bloc of organizations to achieve a particular end, preserving the right to criticize one another and raise one's full program. By transforming a united front into a single issue organization, the LC can plausibly impose its lowest common denominator, economist politics in the same man¬ner as the SWP.

The Strike Support Coalition

The LC's strike support coalition is merely a more sophisticated version of PL's "worker-student alliance." From the IWW and the Socialist Labor Party to Marcus, attempts to establish outside organizations which will substitute for the existing unions have been Utopian. They have also been Utopian in that they offer an attractive, apparent short-cut to the hard job of fighting for leadership in the unions. The LC's politics are strongly motivated by its cadres' desire to mam tain petty-bourgeois life styles while enjoying the illusion that they can lead large numbers of workers.

The Marcusites claim that unions, because of their particularist character, are structurally incapable of organizing the outside support needed to win a strike. This is inverted syndical ism, seeking an organizational solution to a political problem. In most major strikes (e. g. the GM and GE strikes) the union has enough bargaining power to win the strike. It is the union bureaucrats whose social position forces them to compromise the interests of the workers. If the union leaderships wanted to bring in other workers or students, they could organize that far better than any outside group.

"Socialist Reconstruction"

Until recently, a characteristic aspect of the LC's propaganda was "socialist reconstruction." They insisted that policies directed at improving the efficiency of the American economy (usually through some crackpot fiscal gimmick) were necessary because a), people were hostile to socialism because they didn't think socialism could run the economy constructively and b). people would not support the demands of particular workers for fear that it would reduce their own incomes. The first proposition is inane and the second fails to see that workers can be won to supporting social struggles they are not involved in out of a sense of elementary class solidarity and hostility to the ruling class rather than out of calculated consumerist interests. The postal wildcat had widespread sympathy among large sections of the population, who were not worried about the price of stamps. It is important that the labor movement not be held responsible for the health of the economy and that the ruling class not be allowed to blame workers' militancy for unemployment, inflation, etc. We are in favor of socialist reconstruction in a soc¬ialist society. To even imply that economic policy under capitalism can be part of a socialist reconstruction policy legitimizes all forms of state interference.

"Outside support" is so vague a term as to be practically meaningless. The most effective outside support is secondary strike and boycott action by other workers. But to organize a wildcat on behalf of workers in other unions requires an extra-ordinary level of class consciousness and effective union organization. What the LC really means by outside support is merely good public relations. The LC literally presents itself to the left bureaucrats as public relations men promising to present their case so that it appears sympathetic and beneficial to the "public." The LC refuses to attack imperialism, racial oppression or the Democratic Party because this would threaten their "respectability" and compromise their role as union public relations men.

Outside groups can only engage in effective strike support with the cooperation of the workers' leaders. Since most strikes are firmly con¬trolled by union bureaucrats, who will not co¬operate with reds who attack them, genuine revolutionaries are usually limited to outside propaganda unless they have comrades in the striking unions. The LC has sought to win the cooperation of union bureaucrats by not fighting them. Their high point thus far was in the Newark Teachers' Strike, where they ran around chaperoning Orrie Chambers, the NTU organizer, from campus to campus. The NTU leadership made a de facto alliance with the Imperiale forces, a group of anti-Black vigilantes with real proto-fascist tendencies. Two members of the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus were physically assaulted by Imperiale supporters, while six members of the LC stood by!

Blacks and Women: "Dog Liberation"?

In a leaflet satirizing the SWP, the LC likened the black liberation movement with "dog liberation" as if the treatment of blacks in American society should be of no more concern to social¬ists than the treatment of animals. By consistently failing to oppose the oppression of blacks and women, the LC is openly catering to working-class backwardness.

The Marcusites have systematically overstated the degree to which black nationalism and anarcho-Maoism could contribute to American fascism. Tony Pappert wrote a polemic against Mark Rudd in the pages of New America, the paper of the CIA-supported, pro-war Socialist Party. By continually identifying the ultra-New Left with fascism, the Marcusites bear some of the responsibility for the repression against them.

Marcus has recently moved well to the right, abandoning his "socialist reconstruction" rhetoric and limiting himself to purely defensive postures on the grounds that fascism is imminent. The Socialist Labor Committee split is to the left of the LC's current line, reflecting the academic-technocratic socialism of the earlier Marcus.

The Marcusites do not deserve any respect or serious consideration from anyone consider¬ing himself a revolutionary. Their cadre tend toward personal hustlerism, lacking the will and dedication required of communists. Marcus1 world-view is technocratic rationalism, a form of idealism particularly well suited to intellectuals desirous of advising men in power; their conception of leading workers through outside propaganda and organizations alone has been well proven historically bankrupt; and by deli¬berately catering to racism, chauvinism and other reactionary attitudes within the working class the Marcusites have forfeited any claim they may make to being any sort of leadership in the struggle for socialism.

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Student Strikes And The Working Class (1972)

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

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

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

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?
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From the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 13, August-September 1972.

Student Strikes And The Working Class

The wave of student protests that swept the country after Nixon's 1 May escalation speech posed yet again the problem of revolutionary leadership and the political mobilization of the working class as the key to changing protest into power. Again students took to the streets, barricaded federal buildings, seized administration buildings, jammed highways and airports; again the police fired point blank into a crowd; and again, this time within less than three weeks, all was as before—quiet on the campuses despite continued savage bombings in Vietnam.

The latest student outburst demonstrated the continuing widespread hatred of the war among college students; 27 percent of campuses had demonstrations, 3, 000 students were arrested in the first two weeks of the strikes (Guardian. 14 May 1972). In comparison to the May 1970 strikes around the Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State events, however, the recent upsurge fell far short:in both size and militancy.

The 1970 strikes reflected deep unrest and combativeness among students but was dissipated by its leadership. Mired in the Third Worldism of RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement, former right wing of SDS, split from SDS in May 1969) and the campus parochialism of Progressive Labor-led SDS, the "leadership" of the 1970 student strikes could not see the importance of spreading the strikes to a working class discontented with the war and increasingly engaged-in its own militant struggles. Ignoring the only social force which has the power to compel a U. S. withdrawal, the wave of student strikes quickly collapsed.

Two intervening years of disillusionment, de-politicalization and the retreat of most of the ostensibly revolutionary wing of the student movement into liberalism combined to produce, as Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong's harbor, little more than a pale shadow of the '70 up surge. Unable to develop program that went beyond the boundaries of the campus, the backwash of New Leftism was inevitably liberalism A small percentage of the strikers combined liberal politics with militant adventurist tactics in a display of desperation and impotence. For the majority, the short-lived strikes took the form of demonstrations of moral sentiment against the war with the McGovern campaign becoming the predominant political force. As can be expected the behavior of most of the ostensibly socialist political tendencies was groveling capitulation to the prevailing liberal mood.

Students unlike workers have neither the social power nor cohesion to carry out the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. They are therefore not a revolutionary class. College students, with their intellectual bent, youth and intermediate social position, are the most volatile section of the petty bourgeoisie. While on the one hand this means that students can become one of the major social supports for a fascist reaction, on the other hand important sections of the student population can be won to the cause of the proletariat.

Historically, intellectuals have contributed to the proletarian movement with theoretical and literary work and by maintaining revolutionary continuity during periods of quiescence or reaction. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg were all intellectuals who became important leaders of the international socialist movement.

France, 1968

As the French events of 1968 demonstrate, in periods when the working class is in motion, large numbers of students can be won to the support of the working class and serve as an important auxiliary social force. Large-scale student strikes at a moment of social crisis helped focus and generalize already-existing discontent and social ferment in the French working class and were an important component in precipitating the national general strike and revolutionary crisis. Far less resolute than the proletariat in the long run, students may at times initiate limited social struggles. The RCY categorically rejects theories of student vanguardism which see student leadership as essential to the success of the proletarian struggle, or dual-vanguard theories which see workers and students seizing state power simultaneously, through mutual support based on recognition of a so-called similar social position (as PL maintains). Students as a petty-bourgeois stratum have no program for their own class which is relevant to modern capitalist society in decay. Ideologically extremely heterogeneous, students will inevitably split in a revolutionary situation, one part supporting the proletariat and another the bourgeoisie. The extent to which the proletariat is capable of winning the support of students as well as the petty bourgeoisie as a whole depends on the strength of the working-class vanguard and will be an important factor in determining the relationship of forces in a revolutionary crisis.

The essential instrument of proletarian revolution is the political vanguard of the working class organized in the Leninist party. Only the mass implantation of the party in the class and its struggle for its program in the day-to-day work in the class can establish its political he¬gemony and win the workers to revolutionary consciousness. As the youth section of the nucleus of that party, the RCY will play an important auxiliary and supplementary role in building the Leninist party. The student strike wave gave the RCY a rare opportunity to intervene from outside to supplement the work of the Spartacist League in the labor movement, through RCY-led work stoppage committees. The work stoppage committees were proposed by the RCY to striking students as an arm of the student strike to carry out direct agitation in the working class for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze, and to propagandize for the construction of a labor party, victory to the Vietnamese revolution and opposition to the sellout peace plan of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. The international crisis precipitated by Nixon's escalation provided the temporary opportunity for students through such work stoppage committees to leaflet and directly address union meetings to help build for labor strikes against the war and the wage freeze. Only this strategy would have allowed the student strike to effectively transcend the limitations of the campus and escape its impotence.

Probably the most grossly opportunist group during these strikes was the Workers League/ Young Socialists. The WL/YS attempted to suck up one week to the student movement and to denounce it the next week in typical flip flop fashion. The 24 April issue of the Bulletin boasted: "What is now expressed in these campus actions is the sharp struggle of the social classes in this period, and the tremendous offensive of the working class. " A few days later at Boston University, Pat Connolly of the WL was the only one to vote against striking. Subsequent issues of the Bulletin repeated this same flip flop, alternatively condemning the student strikes as simply "middle-class frenzy" and enthusing over them The National Caucus of Labor Committees was more consistently sectarian and abstentionist-
it denounced the student strikes throughout, refusing, at Columbia University in New York to join picket lines, and calling for citywide meetings of the "non-ruling-class population" to come together on a "common-interest program" as alternative to the strike. It opposed RCY's proposals at Columbia to expand the political strike to the working class through work stoppage committees, and once such a committee had been up under RCY leadership came to one of the e meetings to attack its existence and politics. The NCLC cannot tell working-class interests from a hole in the wall. It declares that the Vietnam war is an "irrelevant" issue for the working class, thus counterposing itself to the Leninist struggle for international proletariat solidarity. It counterposes classless, populist conferences and coalitions to the struggle for a working-class revolutionary vanguard party will fight for a socialist revolution—led by the working class and supported by important sec of the petty bourgeoisie.

The RCY fought consistently during the student upsurge for broadening the strikes to the working class and for a class struggle program again the war.
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STUDENT STRIKES: Opportunists in
Liberal Bloc

BERKELEY—Nixon's escalation against the DRV/ NLF offensive found the University of California, Berkeley campus embroiled in a major labor struggle. The building trades unions, threatened with job reclassifications meaning large wage cuts, went on strike. AFSCME and other campus unions joined the strike, bringing the striking force to over 1000 workers. The very right to organize and strike was at issue—the University refused to sign contracts with any of its employees and strikes of public employees are illegal here.

The sell-out policy of the union bureaucrats emerged in their refusal to publicly call a state-wide strike of state employees toward state recognition of campus and all public employees' unions, a demand which cannot be won locally. While adamantly defending the union against the state, the RCY has fought to expose its leadership's rotten policies.

In late April, a student strike in support of the workers' struggle and in response to Nixon's escalation began to develop. The labor bureaucrats, conscious that massive support and militant student participation on picket lines would be an encouragement to the union ranks for a real fight, spoke against a student strike. They hastily approved an "official" statement against the war, a sop to placate the students and to neutralize student hostility to the union due to its past political stances (rather than insisting from a class perspective on the necessity of active support for the trade unions). It was also intended to anticipate and defuse the real possibility of rank-and-file sentiment for labor action against the war. The RCY called for the student strike to take up the call for "A GENERAL STRIKE AGAINST THE WAR AND THE WAGE FREEZE" and to bring this demand to the striking campus workers and the labor movement as a whole. RCY formed and led the Labor Strike Support Committee and went to several unions agitating around this demand with some success—AFSCME Local 1695's vote in favor of it being an example.

Anxious to contain and depoliticize any movement among the students was the YSA/student' government bloc, which tailed the bureaucrats in hopes of heading off a student strike, and insisted on phony education campaigns in opposition to militant picketing. Essentially the SWP/YSA counterposed their popular-front anti-war activities to action around the workers' strike. When the student strike became a reality, this bloc consistently voted with the Campus Anti-Imperialist Coalition (a group of Revolutionary Union members and other Maoists rapidly finding the liberal road) to insure that political discussion and alternative strike strategies were not discussed at mass meetings.

PL/SDS's total disorientation and liberal approach was revealed in their refusal to insist on priorities for the student strike, thereby capitulating to demands for student power and to anti-working class attitudes among the students. PL/SDS formed a Strike Action Group (SAG) with the International Socialists who excused the union bureaucrats by blaming the bureaucrats' strategy on "blindness" or by saying that the bureaucrats were merely following the orders of their lawyers. The SAG's strategy for the strike consisted mainly of guerilla theater and collecting food and money for the strikers. This social-work approach is an abstention from political struggle and is a tailing after the bureaucrats, insuring that the only politics or strategy to which the rank and file is exposed is that of their sell-out mis-leaders.