Youth, Class & Party

PROGRAM AND PERSPECTIVES

Section I. The Rise and Fall of the New Left

The New Left student movement, as it developed in the late ‘50's and early ‘60's, differed sharply from the historic left in that it was based directly neither on the central social conflict of our time, that of labor versus capital, nor on the central ideo1ogical conflict of our time, socialism versus capitalism. Rather, the New Left reflected the conflict between liberal idealism and the reactionary character of American society and government policy. The political battles which gave birth to the New Left were all fought out in the name of liberal principles. The Southern civil rights movement was aimed at achieving basic bourgeois-democratic rights for black people. The “Ban the Bomb” movement reflected pacifist internationalism in the Wilsonian tradition. And opposition to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ attempts to crush the Cuban Revolution was motivated less by solidarity with the social revolution in Cuba than by repulsion at the naked intervention of the U.S. in other countries. The name of the major Cuba-support organization-the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee”-well conveys the political attitudes of the New Left in that period.

The New Left’s rejection of traditional proletarian socialism was partly based on the belief that the Keynesian stabilization policy had effectively muted the major contradictions of capitalism. Therefore, workers could not be driven to accept socialism out of the material suffering caused by the capitalist system.

Having asserted the economic viability of capitalism, New Left “socialism” was forced along one of two tracks. One tendency, represented by the SDS Port Huron statement, justified socialism in terms of democratic idealism. The notion that the desire to “control one’s own life” (itself an example of individualist idealism) could motivate mass revolutionary activity is a good example of the influence of liberal idealism. The other tendency, represented by the “Marxists” in the Monthly Review, argued that the main economic contradictions were between the metropolitan and backward countries. Successful colonial revolutions such as those of Cuba and China were held to be the precondition for serious revolutionary activity in the advanced countries. The American left was relegated to defense committees and press agencies for Third World revolutionaries.

While the New Left underwent considerable radicalization in the late ‘60's, its liberal heritage continues to shape the movement to this day. Precisely because it could not envision a revolutionary reconstruction of society its characteristic outlook was protest politics. Political activity was seen not in terms of building an effective revolutionary mass movement, but as a moral gesture against injustice. Politics as a gesture of protest runs like a thread from the pacifist resistance of the “Ban the Bomb” movement to the Weatherman and May Day Tribe.

Since the New Left failed to develop a unified conception of American society and regarded itself as opposing particular injustices, the radical student movement was characterized by single issueism and mindless activism. In the absence of a clear class analysis and the strategy which flows from it, activity became an end in itself. This injected an element of opportunism into the movement as activists looked around for an issue which would bring out the largest number of people regardless of its long-term or intrinsic importance.

The belief that the mass of American people could not be won to the radical cause led the New Left to view the social base of radicalism in those groups outside the mainstream of American society. In particular, the left was seen as a coalition of blacks and other oppressed minorities with intellectuals who were presumably sensitive to social injustice and repelled by the philistinism of American culture.

In the mid ‘60's it was far from clear that the New Left would evolve in a revolutionary direction. Johnson’s demagogic War on Poverty and the creation, of organizations like Vista and the Peace Corps raised the possibility that the evident desire of thousands of young people to combat social injustice would be channeled into harmless social workerism. It was the Vietnam war that broke the radical student movement from the liberal bourgeoisie. As New Left writer Bob Wolfe put it, “Bayard Rustin’s idea of a coalition stretching from SNCC to the White House was buried, along with much else, in the swamps of Vietnam. In 1964 the Socialist Party

dissolved its youth group for refusing to support Johnson against Goldwater. More importantly, shortly thereafter, SDS’ split from its parent group, the League for Industrial Democracy (an organization of liberal, trade-union bureaucrats and their kept intellectuals like Rustin and Harrington) around the issues of non-exclusion of reds, no support to the Democratic Party and opposition to the Vietnam war. 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. The New Left failed to see that the opportunism of the Soviet Union and the apparent militancy of “Third World” Stalinists flow from the same source, the conservative and ultimately counterrevolutionary self-interest of a bureaucratic, parasitic caste based on working-class property forms. Castro’s support for the Allende government in Chile and the military junta in Peru, Mao’s support for the West Pakistani massacre of the Bengalis and the recent U.S.-China rapprochement demonstrate that the “Third World” Stalinists are just as willing as their Soviet counterparts to trade anti-imperialist rhetoric for diplomatic favors. Nevertheless, the great heroism of the Stalinist-led forces in Vietnam and the obvious justice of their cause drove the New Left to re-evaluate the Cold War. In place of the neutral pacifism of the early New Left, the Cold War came to be seen as a conflict between American imperialism and the masses in the backward countries. In a few years SDS went from an organization which excluded communists to one in which both major factions waved Mao’s “Red Book” at one another.

The main activity of the New Left became support work for Third World national liberation movements which were defined to include blacks and other oppressed minorities in the U.S. New Left politics became a form of vicarious nationalism--the New Leftists were nationalists of countries other than the U.S. Defense of national liberation struggles, especially when under direct attack from U.S. imperialism, is essential for U.S. revolutionaries. However, defense of national liberation struggles exists in a void if it is not intimately connected with deepening the domestic class struggle and building for the American revolution.

Due to the isolation of the radical student movement from the rest of American society, opposition to the Vietnam war also gave rise to “student power” politics. In the mid-‘60's the civil rights movement died and the black movement turned nationalist and exclusionist. The liberal establishment lined up behind the Vietnam war. The mass of Americans appeared passive. The radical student movement felt that the entire weight of opposing the Vietnam war fell on its shoulders. Out of this feeling arose the theory that students were the vanguard of the American revolution and that the goal of revolutionary activity was the disruption of campuses. 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.

The chief architect of an alliance with the liberals is the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). Using the single issue of “immediate withdrawal from Vietnam,” the SWP/YSA has created an alliance of those opposed to American imperialism in principle with those farsighted elements in the ruling class who believe that withdrawal from Vietnam is in the best tactical interests of U.S. imperialism. The SWP/YSA use of single-issue, minimum-program to establish an alliance with bourgeois liberalism is most evident in the antiwar movement, but it also plays an important role in women’s liberation, black liberation and other arenas.

The main exponents of confrontation politics are the Weathermen and Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF) along with scattered remnants of the old SDS in the May Day Tribe.

During its last years the New Left became frustrated with the failure of respectable semi-annual peace crawls to do anything about the war. In the absence of any revolutionary working-class strategy, the only available path was the constant escalation of the level of protests culminating in confrontationalist politics. These tactics were then given an “orthodox Marxist-Leninist” facade by using Mao-Guevara slogans about the primacy of armed struggle.

Confrontationism and terrorism are the consummate expression of petty -bourgeois radicalism–its instability, impatience and lack of faith in the ability of the masses to develop a revolutionary consciousness. The RCY stands in the Marxist tradition, as against Bakunin and Blanqui, in opposing the attempts of small groups of largely petty-bourgeois radicals in trying to overthrow the state or aggressively confront the armed forces of the state. Recent attempts at symbolically overthrowing the state, such as the May Day demonstrations in Washington, cause the mass of workers who have strong democratic illusions to rally to the defense of “their” government against the radical student movement, which does not appear to represent the workers’ interests. We recognize that radicals who engage in confrontationism and terrorism are personally courageous and dedicated members of the left and all groups on the left must defend them. The RCY strongly supports self-defense against police attacks in the context of genuine mass struggle (e.g., strikes, demonstrations). Many of our comrades have been jailed and prosecuted for confronting the armed forces of the state during such mass struggles. We also combat right-wing and fascist goons by any means necessary.

The RCY had its origins in the 1969 SDS split, when the Spartacist League critically supported Progressive Labor and their supporters as a subjectively pro-working class tendency to the left of their New Left-anarcho-Maoist opponents. The forerunner to the RCY, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) was formally established as a left-oppositional caucus in SDS after the New Haven National Council meeting in December 1969. RMC was formed in opposition to the campus parochialism and social-work reformism of the “campus worker-student alliance” projected by PL as the main strategy for SDS. RMC counterposed transforming SDS into the student-youth auxiliary of a left opposition in the labor movement. To PL’s sectarian policy of assaulting or ignoring other left groups, we counterposed principled political struggle leading to a regroupment of all genuine proletarian revolutionary forces.

The RMC did not limit itself to internal political struggle in SDS. During the Kent-Cambodia crisis, the RMC actively participated in work-stoppage committees, raising the need to transform the student strike into a worker-student general strike. We resolutely defended, all left groups against state prosecution. We defended not only the Panthers, whose cause was fairly popular in left-liberal circles, but also groups like the Weathermen, at a time when most left groups we’re busy disassociating themselves from the Weathermen. The RMC played an active role in support of the 1971 Newark teachers’ strike and in fighting cutbacks in the California state budget. We intervened in the important NPAC conference in July ‘71 to fight the alliance made by the SWP/YSA with the liberal bourgeoisie which has kept the antiwar movement impotent.

While intense factional struggle within the New Left was both inevitable and desirable, the destruction of SDS as an umbrella organization of all student radicals was neither inevitable nor desirable. An organization like SDS should have continued to exist as a non-exclusionist

socialist youth organization. The majority tendency would determine policy at the national or chapter level, but members would not be required to adhere to the, majority line. With the rapid decline of SDS and its refusal to become an explicitly socialist organization, the objective organizational basis for an inclusive socialist youth group does not exist at this time. However, the RCY continues to favor the existence of such an organization and will actively participate in any serious attempt to create one.

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