Youth, Class & Party

Section III. The Radical Student Movement and the Working Class

The anti-labor sentiments of the New Left were not an automatic reflection of the petty-bourgeois nature of students. Rather, they reflected to a certain degree the conservative character of the leadership of the American labor movement. “Progressive” trade union bureaucrats played an important conservative role in the civil rights movement and the early New Left. It was Walter Reuther who personally intervened in the 1963 March on Washington to get John Lewis of SNCC to tone down his speech. The New Left had to break from the strong organizational influence of the liberal trade-union bureaucrats to develop in a revolutionary direction. However, in keeping with its own liberal conceptions, the New Left regarded the anti-revolutionary politics of the union bureaucracy as genuinely representative of the American working class.

The New Left’s anti-labor attitudes were greatly strengthened by the doctrines of Third World Maoism which held that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries benefitted from imperialism. U.S. workers were viewed as junior partners of U.S. imperialism, whose living standards would be radically reduced by an international socialist revolution. This doctrine is completely false. By postulating a world-wide leveling attack on “privileges,” this doctrine denies the central Marxist thesis that the socialist revolution unleashes productive forces that would raise the living standards of the entire working class well above that of today’s better-paid workers. In this ultimate sense the overthrow of capitalism is in the interests of all workers. More immediately, it is the effective exploitation of the domestic working class that provides the economic and military basis for U.S. imperialism by making U.S. exports more competitive on the world market, in creating the economic surplus needed to maintain a huge military establishment and in supplying the cannon fodder in imperialist wars. Moreover, foreign investment, which is an essential element of capitalism in the imperialist epoch, contributes to domestic unemployment and holds down labor productivity and real wages. Trade union struggles objectively weaken U.S. imperialism. However, revolutionaries must fight to lead the labor movement in a consciously internationalist direction. While resolutely championing the impoverished masses in the colonial countries, we affirm that the decisive force bringing socialism to mankind will be the organized working. classes in the advanced capitalist countries, where the productive resources of human society’s are concentrated.

The dregs of imperialist exploitation are used to bribe a section of the proletariat, creating a division in the class between the labor aristocracy and the mass of the proletariat. This division is an important part of the material basis of reformism and chauvinism within the working-class movement. Reformism, expressed in class terms, is the alliance between a section of the proletariat and capitalists against the majority of the class. The struggle before us is to win the great mass of the proletariat from the reformist and revisionist leaderships.

Rejecting a labor-movement orientation, sections of the radical student movement sought to break out of a campus orientation through “community organizing” or “organizing the poor.” Such activities never resulted in stable organizations because, unlike the labor movement, ”the community” and “the poor” are not real social groups. Except in terms of ethnic solidarity, residents, of a geographical area do not identify , with one another against the ruling class. Poverty is a statistical, not a social, category. An unemployed coal miner in West Virginia and a Puerto Rican welfare mother in New York City may have the same income, but they do not and cannot identify with each other as members of the “poor. Social consciousness is determined by one’s role in productive relations and. it is on that axis that social revolution turns. Various sections of the oppressed, such as the unemployed and minorities, can only be united by the working class through its vanguard, the revolutionary party.

The French general strike of 1968 convinced many American radicals of the revolutionary potential of the working class in advanced capitalist countries. However, a number of wrong strategic and tactical conclusions were drawn. One of these was student vanguardism. Since the workers’ strike erupted after an important student-police battle, it was felt similar police-student confrontations in this country might provoke similar results. This naive theory has had ample opportunity to be proven disastrous. The decisive lesson of the French May events was that the

alliance of the Gaullist government with the Communist Party trade-union apparatus was able to crush the strike precisely because a revolutionary party with strong influence in the unions did not exist prior to the workers’ spontaneous upsurge. The French CP union bureaucracy was fairly successful in isolating militant workers from student radicals during the decisive period. Only the patient construction of a revolutionary workers party can enable spontaneous class action to be transformed into a successful socialist revolution.

Partly as a reflection of the French May events, partly in response to increased domestic labor struggles and partly through internal evolution and factional struggle, increasingly large sections of the radical student movement have adopted a pro-working-class perspective. This development has not produced significant radicalization within the labor movement nor has it laid the basis for a revolutionary workers party. This failure is not due to a lack of labor-oriented activity but to the political character of this activity.

The radical student movement’s approach to the working class has almost always taken on a social-work character. Workers have been approached as oppressed individuals and not as members of a revolutionary class. Support for important labor struggles like the ‘69 GE or ‘70 auto strike has been limited to material and moral support. This social workerism has characterized not only New Left groups and various Maoist collectives, but also the Progressive Labor Party.

The failure of radical students to treat struggling workers as potential comrades reflects, on the one hand, the. elitist conception that only intellectuals can be conscious socialists and the best workers can be is militant unionists; and on the other hand, petty-bourgeois guilt which manifests itself in the refrain “who are we to tell workers what to do?” For revolutionary intellectuals to suppress their political ideas when engaging in labor struggles is a betrayal of the interests of the working class. Workers political and social concepts are determined by the dominant bourgeois culture, modified by their particular experiences in class struggle. The historic importance of intellectuals within the revolutionary movement lies in their ability to effectively criticize bourgeois culture and develop socialist theory.

A social-work approach has caused much radical, labor-oriented activity to objectively serve the labor bureaucracy. As the history of the reformist Socialist Party’s youth group and the early- SDS demonstrates, the union bureaucracy is in favor of radical student support as long as that radicalism is not turned against them. Some groups claiming a labor movement orientation, notably the Labor Committee and the Workers League, have consciously offered themselves to the union bureaucracy as braintrusters and mobilizers of student-youth support. Despite frequent vehement denunciations of union bureaucrats, the Progressive Labor Party and various orthodox Maoist groups have passively adapted to the union bureaucracy by refusing to combine material support to labor struggles with a revolutionary program and strategy directed at breaking the rank and file from their sellout leaders.

The goal of the RCY’s intervention in working-class struggles is to aid in transforming the labor movement into a revolutionary socialist instrument. The RCY seeks to become the student-youth auxiliary of the communist opposition within the labor movement. As an outside youth organization, the RCY cannot directly challenge the bureaucracy for the leadership of particular labor actions. However, by combining support for workers’ struggles with a transitional socialist program we can influence the radicalization of the working class and strengthen the revolutionary forces within the labor movement.

The RCY recognizes that building the communist oppositions within the unions must go hand-in-hand with the construction of a revolutionary party which alone is capable of taking and holding state power. The RCY is the youth section of the Spartacist League, the nucleus of the American vanguard party. The RCY is organizationally independent of and politically subordinate to the SL. The RCY will provide a valuable training ground for young radicals who will fulfill themselves as professional revolutionaries within the vanguard party.

The need for a revolutionary youth group is based on the objective existence of generational distinctions and conflict. Youth enters a society whose cultural and social structure is given and can only acquire a social role through struggle, a struggle which is generational in form but in reality is against the capitalist class. An independent revolutionary youth group reflects the particularity of generational experience. By having their own organization, the younger comrades will be able to enjoy the experience of leadership and wide-ranging activity not immediately available to them in the party.

Adherence to the RCY presupposes a familiarity with the history and theory of revolutionary socialism. At this time the radical left student movement is relatively open to the contending currents within the ostensibly revolutionary movement, therefore, the RCY in this period will be a largely campus-based organization, with a thin layer of radicalized young workers.

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