Youth, Class & Party

Section IV. The RCY and the Left

The RCY is certainly not the only youth group claiming adherence to the Marxian socialist tradition. The existence of other ostensible revolutionary organizations is both a challenge and an obstacle to building the revolutionary movement. A successful revolution requires that the majority of genuine socialist militants are united in a party embodying correct revolutionary politics. We maintain that, despite the subjective attitude of their members, the politics of other ostensibly revolutionary groups lead in an objectively anti-revolutionary direction, reflecting the enormous pressure which bourgeois society brings to bear on the revolutionary movement. In the last analysis, systematic tendencies toward opportunism and sectarianism reflect the existence of alien class forces--the former, the great attractive power of the bourgeois order and the latter, petty-bourgeois impatience and elitism. Our strategy toward the rest of the left is one of revolutionary regroupment, seeking to create the basis for a mass party through a process of splits and fusions. Where there exists essential political agreement, we have sought and effected fusions with other revolutionary groups. Recently, the Spartacist League effected a principled fusion with the Communist Working Collective (Los Angeles), a former Maoist group.

Recognizing the contradictory character of other left groups and desiring to win over their militants, we resolutely oppose gangsterism within the radical movement. Treating opposing radical groups as if they were the class enemy destroys the unity in action of the revolutionary and working-class movements. In addition, it is a cowardly substitute for political struggle within the movement, hindering the process of political polarization and clarification which is a necessary preliminary to principled unity around a revolutionary program. The RCY pledges itself to fight for democracy within the left and defend all radical groups against attacks by the police, right-wing vigilantes and sectarian gangsterism.

A central tactic in our revolutionary regroupment strategy is that of the united front. The united front has a dual purpose--to mobilize the greatest possible forces against concrete acts of ruling-class oppression and to demonstrate the leading capacity of the vanguard. If the second element is suppressed, the united front degenerates into single-issue, lowest-common-denominator politics, which becomes an obstacle to building the revolutionary movement. We therefore maintain our organizational and political independence in any united front--or in Lenin’s words, we “march separately and strike together.”

We counterpose the revolutionary tactic of the united front to the Stalinist strategy of the Popular Front, a bloc with a section of the liberal bourgeoisie. Seeking unity at any price, the program of the Popular Front must be acceptable to a section of the ruling class, thereby tying the workers to the liberal bourgeoisie and preventing the development of revolutionary leadership. The final result can only be the eventual destruction of the working-class movement along with its vanguard as was demonstrated in China in 1926-27, in Spain in 1936, Indonesia in 1965 and today in Ceylon. Recent examples of Popular Fronts in the U.S. are the Panthers’ United Front Against Fascism, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC).

The following organizations claim to be in the Marxian socialist tradition. To justify our independent organizational existence, it is necessary to demonstrate that despite their pretensions, these organizations are obstacles to the socialist revolution.

Communist Party and Young Workers Liberation League

Originally the American section of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky, the CPUSA underwent Stalinist degeneration along with the CPUSSR and its counterparts around the world. Since it gave its support to the “progressive anti-fascist” Roosevelt, the CP has shown a doglike loyalty to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Having built a considerable trade union base in the ‘2O’s and ‘30's, the CP used this Influence to mobilize substantial working-class support for the American imperialist effort in WWII, an the grounds that the war was anti-fascist. This policy was matched with total adherence to the wage freeze and no-strike pledge. The CP supported the prosecution of the SWP under the Smith Act during WWII, only to fall victim to the same law during the McCarthy witchhunt. The witchhunt also meant the systematic purge of CP’ers as well as other militants from the union movement, a purge savagely conducted by the labor bureaucracy in collaboration with the police arm of the state. In most cases, the Stalinists did not even protest their expulsions from the unions. The repression was effective and today the CP retains only remnants of its once-powerful trade union base. However with increased radicalization within the labor movement the CP can still be a force keeping rank-and-file discontent within reformist limits as was demonstrated by their June ‘70 “Rank and File” Conference in Chicago.

The CP’S. loyalty to the liberal bourgeoisie is exceeded only by its loyalty to the Moscow bureaucracy. For 35 years it has supported every counterrevolutionary betrayal committed by the Russian Stalinists, e.g., the political liquidation of the Chinese CP into the Kuomintang paving the way for the physical liquidation of the CCP by the KMT, allowing fascism to triumph in Germany without a fight, the suppression of the Spanish Revolution clearing the path for Franco’s victory, selling out revolution in France, Italy and Greece after WWII, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in1956 and the Czechoslovak invasion in1968.

The CP in recent years has been content to bring its reformist approach to petty-bourgeois radicalism. Their favorite tactic has been building front groups with a minimum of politics and a maximum of name changes to insure rigid organizational control while trying to pretend that is not really their front group at all. Of course, they fool only themselves. Thus we have seen in rapid succession: the Freedom and Peace Party, the Mobe, the New Mobe, the National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression, and most recently the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. These organizations have been characterized by a curious assortment of reformist black race-baiters, fellow-traveler red -baiters, Sta1inist Quakers, aging yippies and New Left leftovers, pacifists and terrorists. Probably the most serious damage to the left the CP has managed in recent years is their role in the reformist degeneration of the Black Panther Party. Beginning with that resurrected corpse from the ‘30's, the United Front Against Fascism, the process has recently reached a new low with the Panthers’ turn toward black capitalism and the Baptist Church, positions not incompatible with the CP’s own polities.

Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance

Once one of the leaders in fighting for a proletarian revolutionary strategy against revisionism within the Trotskyist movement, today the SWP stands at the far right wing of the loose conglomeration of organizations parading as a revolutionary International and known as the United Secretariat. The SWP’s flight from Trotskyism reached full speed in the early ‘60's with the complete capitulation to the Fidelist leadership of the Cuban Revolution, despite the fact that the Cuban Revolution was made without the working class and without the political forms of workers democracy, or soviets. Castro and Guevara were hailed as “unconscious Marxists” on the level of Lenin and Trotsky. At the same time the SWP adopted a position of support to black nationalism and negotiated reunification with the International Secretariat from which the SWP had broken in 1953 because of the revisionism of the IS leadership. Against this degeneration, the Revolutionary Tendency, forerunner of the Spartacist League, crystallized within the SWP. Although never violating party discipline, the RT was expelled from the SWP at the 1963 National Convention.

The degeneration into a fully reformist organization was completed in the mid-‘60's as the SWP adopted their single-issue peace march approach to the. antiwar movement. The SWP and its youth front group YSA have been the principal ideological exponents of petty-bourgeois radicalism of all sorts in opposition to proletarian socialism. With the same monotonous rhetoric the SWP gave its support to black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Native American, gay and women’s liberation movements advocating separatism and illusionary nationalism wherever possible. In reality, this adapted to the most backward consciousness in all these movements prohibiting the development of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness and thereby succeeded in tying movements of-the oppressed to the bourgeoisie through their petty-bourgeois leaderships. The SWP is in the process of supplanting the SP/YPSL as the organizational broker between the liberal bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois radicals. Recently the SWP has resurrected its “working-class orientation” by actively seeking the support of labor bureaucrats for its antiwar campaign. Not only does this lend legitimacy to these sellout leaders, but it also provides the labor bureaucrats with the means to come out against the war without having to mobilize their rank and file through such tactics as political strikes. The SWP calls on labor to oppose the war solely because the war causes inflation. This approach distorts even the nature of inflation. While the war contributes to inflation, ultimately it is the functioning of the capitalist system which causes both war and inflation. Instead of using the current social crisis of capitalism to lay bare the nature of capitalism, the SWP blocs with liberal ideologues who claim that if only the war was ended inflation would end, the cities would be rebuilt, the starving would be fed, the sick made well, and women and blacks would be liberated. By neglecting the primary reason why revolutionaries oppose the war, i.e., to help achieve a victorious social revolution in Vietnam, the SWP reveals the lack of even the vestiges of an international revolutionary outlook. No longer subjectively revolutionary, the SWP’s vaunted independence from capitalist parties is a thin cover for their desire to achieve an alliance-with the liberal bourgeoisie.

Progressive Labor Party

The Progressive Labor Movement began as a Maoist left split from the CPUSA in 1962. Once a rather stylish Maoist-Guevarist-Fidelist group with a large periphery among New Left campus radicals, it hardened into a square, anti-libertarian, tightly-controlled “super-proletarian,” hard-line Maoist organization. More recently its genuine subjective proletarian revolutionary impulse has brought PL into increasing conflict with its formal adherence to Maoism leading to a break with Mao and the Chinese Communist Party over the recent events in Pakistan and Ceylon. Failing to analyze its Stalinist-Maoist past and lacking a Trotskyist program, PL has repeatedly fallen into opportunism or an ultra-left sectarianism. It has gone from uncritical enthusing over China, Cuba, etc., to calling these states capitalist and even to opposing the shipment of Soviet and Chinese arms to North Vietnam. Along the same lines, PL has gone .from support of black nationalism to a crudely economist analysis of racial oppression failing to deal with the special racial oppression of blacks under capitalism. Recently, PL has even denied the validity of demands to end colonial or national oppression under imperialism. This consistent failure to treat contradictory phenomena with a revolutionary program has been the hallmark of PL’s centrism. It is most acutely felt in the lack of a transitional program for working-class struggle. The concept of “left-center coalition” has meant everything from an alliance with union bureaucrats to an excuse for keeping every struggle at a reformist level. The gap between capitalism and socialism must be bridged concretely and programmatically with a program around which workers can struggle, not with abstract rhetoric about socialism. The social workerism of the Worker-Student Alliance is simply another example of PL’s failure to approach the working class with a program for political struggle. Reacting in horror to the opportunism of the CWSA and the left-center coalition, PL has turned to furious Challenge sales and endless demonstrations for socialism. Literature sales and demonstrations when appropriately carried out are tactics which can at best supplement work within the trade unions, the primary arena of the class struggle. Consistent with all this has been PL’s inability to distinguish between the class enemy and other political tendencies within .the working-class movement. Consequently, PL has often used gangsterist attacks rather than political struggle against its opponents on the left.

On two events in the recent period which have proven the acid test for left groups in regard to defense of the left–military support for the DRV-NLF and defense of the Weathermen--PL has stood with the worst cold-war liberals and the CIA-funded Socialist Party in calling for a complete military boycott of the DRV-NLF and condoning the prosecution of the Weathermen.

International Socialists

The political tendency represented by the International Socialists had its origin in the split of the Shachtmanite tendency from the SWP in 1940 around the question of the class nature of the Soviet state. Despite the unprincipled nature of the split in the face of a new world war and a potential revolutionary crisis, the Workers Party, an aggressive left-centrist group, was able to compete effectively with the SWP as the Trotskyist party. Gradually losing touch with Marxist theory as a result of their bureaucratic collectivist position and unable to withstand the fierce cold-war ideology of the post-WWII period, the WP degenerated into a social-democratic formation eventually liquidating into the Socialist Party. It emerged from the SP in the early ‘60's as the Independent Socialist Clubs, later to become the IS.

The International Socialists in its fundamental political thrust embodies the politics of the extreme left wing-of the Social Democracy. This is most clearly reflected in their initiating the petty-bourgeois, classless Peace and Freedom Party, their frequent omission of the demand for a workers party in favor of the classless demand for independent political action (24 April 1971 NPAC march on Washington), and their recent attempt to play the role of loyal left opposition in the pop-front NPAC. The most striking feature about the politics of the IS is their adaptability to current popular petty-bourgeois pressures on the left. Thus they sought during the Peace and Freedom period to become the ideological spokesmen for the Black Panther Party, and have in general adapted completely to black nationalism. They have continually called for defense of the Panthers but not the Weathermen, a group unpopular in left-liberal circles. In the same fashion, they have sought to attract some of the worst petty-bourgeois elements in the women’s and gay liberation movements, while refusing to raise a working-class program within these movements. Even more importantly, despite their refusal to defend the deformed workers states and in flat contradiction to their theory of bureaucratic collectivism, a theory developed during the cold-war period, they have, since 1968, called for a military victory for the Stalinist Viet Cong. In spite of some recent motion in a working-class direction, the utter lack of seriousness of the IS is revealed by their failure to develop a consistent program for the trade unions, their lack of democratic-centralist discipline, and their chaotic press policy.

Workers League

The political group currently known as the Workers League began in a common political tendency with the SL within the SWP. Faced with the threat of losing his leadership of the Revolutionary Tendency, Wohlforth, with the aid of Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, engineered an unprincipled split in the RT and soon afterward provoked the ejection of the RT from the SWP (see Marxist Bulletins No. 3, parts i, ii and iv). Following their own expulsion from the SWP, the Wohlforthites existed with Spartacist as one of the two American groups in political agreement with the International Committee of Gerry Healy. Wanting puppets rather than a disciplined revolutionary section, Healy preferred the Wohlforthites to the SL and brought about the latter’s ejection from the IC 1966 conference on a trumped-up organizational basis.

While sharing many formal Trotskyist positions with the SL/RCY, the Workers League is characterized by complete cynicism and opportunism. So great are the opportunist zigzags of these political bandits that it is impossible at any time to determine their politics. The WL uses rhetoric about dialectical method to cover over their willingness to say or do anything to woo groups they are seeking to win over or influence. At one and the same time they can orient toward the Panthers and the police: the Panthers by claiming that Newton’s abstract talk about dialectics was an indication of movement in a revolutionary direction, and the police by supporting the recent New York police strike, completely failing to apply an elementary Leninist conclusion about the class nature of the police. In spite of having condoned physical assaults on the SWP and their British co-thinkers (by the Healyite Socialist Labour League), the WL was comfortable in its role of assisting the class-collaborationist SWP in the brutal expulsion from the recent NPAC conference (July 1971) of the SL and the subjectively revolutionary Progressive Labor Party and SDS. The WL’s history of condoning violence against left groups gives a lie to their campaign, formally on a principled Trotskyist basis, against gangsterism in the movement, following an attack by the MPI [Movimiento Pro Independencia de Puerto Rico, now the Puerto Rican Socialist Party] on the WL. In a typical manner, the WL proclaims that “only the Workers League” fights for a revolutionary leadership in the unions against the sellout union bureaucrats. At the same time, these bureaucrats who betray the working class are called on by the WL to form a labor party “now.” The opportunism of the WL is matched only by its total subservience on international matters to the British SLL, Thus its theory of the phantom capitalist state in Cuba and its enthusiasm for the “Arab Revolution” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

Labor Committee

The Labor Committee crystallized as a tendency within the old SDS and was expelled for its support to the 1968 New York teachers’ strike. Originally a loose left-moving tendency with a proletarian orientation, the LC following its expulsion from SDS underwent a rightward degeneration culminating in a redbaiting attack on PL and SDS in the press of the rabidly anti-communist Socialist Party. Eventually the group hardened around the crackpot theories of its current leader, Lyn Marcus.

Despite certain formal differences, the Labor Committee represents a political tendency whose thrust is qualitatively similar to the International Socialists, their frequent political allies. Where differences exist they often lead to diametrically-opposed conclusions based upon similar defects in theory. Thus, while the lack of a genuinely revolutionary program for the black and women’s movements leads the IS to adapt to these movements, the LC chooses to avoid the question of program for these struggles, thereby playing up to some of the most reactionary tendencies in the working class. Similarly, rather than, adapting to bourgeois anti-communism, the LC avoids completely the question of Stalinism, a sort of “third camp” by implication. The theory of “pan-union caucuses” has led to an approach of propagandizing the working class from the outside. The avoidance of the real struggle of the class within the unions allows the LC to ignore the treacherous role of the union bureaucracy for whom they seek to become the enlightened advisors. In the recent split, the Socialist Labor Committee reflects an academic technocratic tendency, while the LC has developed in a more openly opportunist manner.

Revolutionary Union

The RU was formed out of two political currents which have recently come apart again. One was a left split from the CP specializing in tailing Third World struggles. The other developed as a Red Guard enthusiast group of the “armed struggle now” variety. The RU began its political activities supporting the Panthers who were just beginning to receive national attention. Subsequently, as part of their Third World Maoist orientation the RU has slavishly followed the Panthers though every turn until the Panthers themselves broke with Mao.

The conflicting tendencies which went into forming the RU represent the more general contradiction contained in trying to apply Maoism as a revolutionary strategy. The “Strategic United Front,” the main strategy of the RU and an outgrowth of the Maoist “united front against imperialism” (In turn an outgrowth of the Stalinist Popular Front) has at one pole military confrontationist strategy (People’s War) and at the other pole collaboration with the “progressive” capitalists against “reactionary” capitalists. Central to this contradiction is the absence of a revolutionary proletarian perspective. Even “armed Maoism” (“countryside surrounding the cities”) sees no role for the proletariat. Maoism is a variant of Stalinism (“socialism in one country”) which like the Soviet Union subordinates the international revolution to its “socialism” or narrow national interests. No amount of rhetoric about the dictatorship of the proletariat can cover Mao’s or the RU’s lack of a revolutionary program for the working class. The recent split in the RU into the Venceremos group, the “armed struggle now” tendency, and the RU, the openly reformist tendency, lays bare the fundamental contradiction of Maoism. In addition, it foreshadowed a similar split in the Panthers some months later. The RU’s Stalinist politics are embodied in its lack of a transitional program, its repeated use of violence against opponents on the left and its tendency to work through front groups.

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