Lessons of Revolution (PR5)

The split in Revolution raised a number of questions that we need to try and answer.

What type of youth movement are we trying to build and how is it linked to a revolutionary organisation? What do we mean by “an independent” youth movement?” How do members of a revolutionary organisation operate in an independent youth organisation – should democratic centralist discipline apply?

Shortly after the crisis in Revolution a former member of the LFI section and Revolution in Austria suggested in a letter to Permanent Revolution’s first conference that perhaps the method we used to build a youth movement was fundamentally wrong. The error, he argued, was “the attempt to develop not a Trotskyist but a broad movement/youth international”. He drew the parallel with centrist Trotskyism trying to build broad but non-Trotskyist internationals. He said, “For me a revolutionary youth organisation must be a Trotskyist cadre youth organisation” and proposed raising the age to 18-25, all of whom would be members of the party organisation. (1)

This raised the question, is it principled for revolutionary organisations to build youth movements that are not “Trotskyist cadre” organisations?

We think it is. The very nature of youth organisations that have any resonance amongst the masses means that they are not going to be built around perfectly rounded revolutionary programmes. Nor should they be, because the youth would learn nothing by such a process.

We do not think this is a departure from youth work as developed in the early international communist and -Trotskyist movements, although in different periods, according to the concrete circumstances faced by revolutionary organisations, the tactics in relation to building youth movements have been different. Sometimes youth movements have been more tightly organised by revolutionary parties, sometimes more loosely, but always, we would argue, revolutionaries have defended the organisational independence of the youth groups.

Communist youth organizations

The founding conference of the American Socialist Workers Party in 1938 passed the following resolution on Youth. We think it sums up the political basis for, and purpose of, a revolutionary youth movement:

“The creation of a special youth organisation is made necessary by recognition of the following:

1. The problems of life and manner of living of the youth create an outlook and psychology that differ from those of the adult.
2. Capitalism has created special social problems for the youth.
3. The fact that youth form the bulk of the armed forces of the state gives the youth organisation a special role in anti-militarist work.

“An organisation of socialist youth, approaching the problems and activities of the youth with a socialist, revolutionary understanding, could attract masses of youth, whereas the party could, through a direct political appeal, only win the few class conscious and intellectually advanced youth.

From this it follows that the youth organisation must be an auxiliary of the party, created for a special purpose. It must be politically subordinated to the party, but retain organisational autonomy within its sphere of work. Since it is the task of the youth organisation to educate and, through diverse activities, prepare the youth for later service in the party, its requirements for membership should be interest in and sympathy with the aims of the organisation, and not a requirement of full political understanding of its program. In other words, the youth organisation is a broad organisation, so functioning as to be able to attract the inexperienced, but ready to learn youth; although it remains narrow in the sense that the youth organisation will in no circumstances admit youth consciously opposed to its program.” (2)

Youth organisations are necessary to do a special type of work, work amongst young people. They aim to attract large numbers, whereas the revolutionary organisation, outside the context of mass revolutionary struggle, will initially only attract a handful of class conscious youth. They need to be “broad organisations” attracting “inexperienced but ready to learn” youth.

Even our very limited experience in the LFI with Revo groups showed this to be the correct approach. In -Sweden, where we had an approach to youth work that was “cadre” based and too narrow for a period – i.e. the Revo group was seen as a “young Arbetarmakt” – it stagnated and failed to recruit any significant numbers of revolutionary minded youth.

In Britain we launched Revo to try and intersect with a large number of youth coming into conflict with the Tory government over civil liberty questions, police repression, the environment, etc. Our initial attempts, aiming to build a broad youth movement, had some success given our small size and narrow geographical spread. We organised young people in Revolution on a fighting programme, taking up issues that affected youth in their daily lives or that they were already acting on – a campaign against BP in Colombia, a No Sweat Campaign against Nike and its sweatshops, campaigns against Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, against poverty wages for youth and against war.

In some ways it was broader than the youth movement envisaged by the Fourth International in 1938. We work in an environment where mass Communist Parties (CPs) no longer exist and where Stalinism and its top down dictatorship has deeply discredited “Leninism” and the “vanguard party” (despite the fact that Stalinism was, in practice, violently opposed to both!). The youth movements of today are less influenced by socialism and Marxism and more influenced by libertarianism and anti-party prejudices. Today there is no mass communist pole of attraction for youth.

The youth involved in the struggles of the late 1980s and 1990s wanted loose forms of organisation, individual and group direct action, affinity groups. They were politically attracted to various forms of anarchism and militant environmentalism. This political tendency amongst youth is not just a British phenomenon. It is evident throughout the anti-capitalist movement, in Europe and the US, and with the Zapatista influence in Latin America.

Very small groups have to win large numbers of radicalised young people to the need for parties, for centralised and disciplined organisational forms, for a revolutionary programme. We have to convince the youth on these points. We can best do this by organising alongside them on as broad a basis as possible. This means that any revolutionary youth movement built today that recruits largish numbers of young people is going to reflect diverse political currents. A youth movement that excluded anyone for showing anarchistic or libertarian ideas would remain a small sect.

These ideas need to be debated in a mass youth movement, through a democratic internal life and good and relevant education. Otherwise they will remain barren arguments amongst irrelevant sects. And this might mean that an independent youth movement, despite being in solidarity with a Trotskyist group, adopts some positions at variance with the adult organisation’s programme. The key question then becomes how does the “adult” party/group handle this problem?

How broad, how narrow?

The 1938 formulation, quoted above, on the relationship between the adult party and the youth organisation, one of “political subordination but organisational independence”, is drawn from the Communist International (CI), specifically the position it adopted after 1921. In an earlier period the Bolsheviks and the CI had a significantly different position. (3) It is worth going over how the tactic changed to show how the Bolsheviks used different tactics in different situations.

The youth organisations that developed between the 1880s and 1900s and were linked with the Second International, such as the Belgium Young Guard, the Swiss, Italian and Norwegian youth, were very independent both politically and organisationally. They were often in conflict with their increasingly conservative adult parties. The Second International leadership tried to exert control over them and even close them down. The youth organisations took the lead in opposing the war at the 1915 Bern conference of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organisations.

Lenin at this time called for their complete organisational and political independence as part of the struggle against the pro-war Second International. By the end of the war and with the founding of the CI the aim was to win these youth movements over to the new -international. Many of these youth groups had effectively become political parties by this time, used to acting and leading struggles on their own.

In November 1919 a conference representing 200-300,000 young members formed the Communist Youth International (CYI) and affiliated to the CI. Not surprisingly, they were not at all enthusiastic about becoming politically subordinate to the adult CPs, given their experience with the Second International. The compromise formula that was adopted was: “The central organs of the CYI are organisationally linked with the Third International and struggle in closest partnership with it.” (4)

The CI’s Second Congress Theses on Youth (August 1920), passed by its Executive meeting together with the youth leadership, reflected this compromise position and the fluid situation in 1920 with regard to the formation of CPs and splits from Social Democracy. It says relations between CPs and youth organisations will take different forms based on “objective conditions”.

Where the formations of CPs are “still in flux” and the youth are just breaking away from centrist and reformist parties “our main slogan is that of absolute political and organisational independence of the youth movement”. In countries where the CPs were strong, however, it says this would be a wrong slogan – here communist youth organisations should base themselves “on the programme of the CP.” (5)

The slogan of “political and organisational independence” used as a weapon against the Second International was also, as the theses note, potentially a weapon against the CI. It was taken up by the parties of the Second International and centrists where mass CPs existed, to prevent the youth from allying with the Communists. It was a double-edged sword which the CI quickly abandoned.

By the CI’s Third Congress a different resolution was passed. In November 1920 the Russian YCL proposed to the CI that the relationship between youth and adult parties should be “political subordination and organisational independence”. The resolution of the CI of July 1921 says:

“With the establishment of the CI and in some countries, of CPs, the role of the revolutionary youth organisation changes . . . the youth movement relinquishes to the CPs its vanguard role of organising independent activity and providing political leadership. The further existence of Young Communist organisations as politically independent leading organisations would mean that two CPs existed, in competition with one another and differing only in the age of their membership.” (6)

The resolution emphasises that relations between the YCLs and the CI are very different to those between the Second International and its youth movement: “. . . the greatest unity and strictest centralisation are essential . . . it is the duty of the Young Communist organisation to follow this political leadership (its programme, tactics and political directives) and merge with the general revolutionary front.” It was this policy the Trotskyists adopted in the 1930s when they came to build their own youth movements. But clearly this was not the only model, as the tactic adopted from 1915-20 shows.

It is important to note that this much more centralised approach did not remove the idea of organisational independence. The theses re-affirm, “Loss of political independence in no way implies loss of the organisational independence which is so essential for political education.” The CI and the Bolsheviks always fought for independent youth organisations in this sense. Lenin had explained why it was so important in 1916:

“. . . the youth must of necessity advance to socialism in a different way, by other paths, in other forms, in other circumstances than their fathers. Incidentally, that is why we must decidedly favour organisational independence of the Youth League, not only because the opportunists fear such independence, but because of the very nature of the case. For unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward.” (7)

Was the Revolution tactic principled?

The Fourth Internationalists developed their youth work in the 1930s on the basis of the model of the CI from 1921, and we too, in the LRCI/LFI looked at the past to learn the lessons. We looked at the growing youth radicalisation in Europe and around the world – the anti-globalisation struggles, the anti-war movement etc. But, unlike the Troskyists in 1938, we drew on the experience of the youth movements of 1915-20 and the theses of the Second Congress (rather than the Third) for a model of youth work. As we said:

“Today we are closer to the conditions the Second Congress describe, in which the absence of mass communist parties puts the radicalised youth in the vanguard. Our task is to initiate and build mass organisations of the revolutionary youth, independent of the apparatus of reformism . . .” (8)

We also drew the conclusion that we could not adopt the Third Congress method of affiliation of the youth movement to the party, establishing the equivalent of “Young Communist Leagues” (YCLs). We were in a situation where we did not have mass revolutionary parties, but rather a few small fighting propaganda groups trying to build a youth movement. Instead we talked about winning independent Revo groups to “political solidarity” with the LRCI/LFI programme and activity rather than having to “subordinate themselves to the decisions of such groups”. (9) We even assumed that different tendencies could be involved in the Revo groups, not all in solidarity with the LFI and Trotskyism. The CI/CYI in contrast, had decided as early as 1919 that organised syndicalists and anarchists would not be part of a communist youth movement.

Lessons of the split in Revolution

What is now clear is that despite the positions formally adopted by the LFI, in practice at the first sign of political opposition amongst the youth the LFI leadership trampled all over them. The LFI’s fraction in Revolution, always in a complete majority at international meetings, was used to negate the principle of organisational independence of the youth organisation with predictable results – the independent youth upped and left.
The comrades of the iRevo tendency have tended to concentrate on the dangers of a party/organisation using party discipline over its youth fraction members to ensure the positions of the adult party are passed. They marshal some evidence from the experience of the SWP (US) in the late 1950s and 1960s to prove that imposing democratic centralist discipline on a party youth fraction in a youth movement is alien to the Trotskyist tradition. But this was not the only cause of the bad practice in Revolution, and it is not as clear cut as the comrades imply that party youth fractions traditionally have not been expected to work in a democratic centralist fashion in the youth movements.

Tim Wolforth was certainly right when he argued “No young person in his right mind (and these are the only young people we want) would join a youth group if its policies were determined by a caucus of that group composed of members of an adult party. The quickest way to kill the youth movement is to impose that type of discipline within it.” (10) But there are various ways the communist movement has attempted to avoid such a situation apart from relaxing discipline over its members.

For a start it is always important that the party fraction in a youth movement is a minority, that it has to win its arguments politically rather than by force of numbers. This is even more vital in the leading bodies of youth groups. Trotsky was insistent on this in his discussions with the SWP in the 1930s where he suggested that only seven out of 19 of the national youth leadership should be party members. “. . . if you (the party) are not capable of winning them (the 12 independents) for your decision, then the decision is bad, or the decision comes too early for this organisation and then you must postpone it.” (11)

The SWP also had fairly strict rules about age limits for youth work (21 years) and in the overlapping of party membership with youth membership only a “necessary core” of party members were allowed dual membership – once you joined the party your time in the youth group was limited to six months, and only extended with permission of the youth group and the party. (12)

Such safeguards of the independence of youth organisation have regularly been ignored by small revolutionary organisations – and certainly were in the LFI. This happens sometimes for understandable reasons. In the early stages of building a youth group, older members with experience, organisational and political skill, and discipline learned in the adult organisation, can be important in getting youth groups and their newspapers started and sustained. The danger comes when the use of such older comrades becomes a substitute for recruiting new layers of youth or when it is decided that it is easier and more effective to keep older comrades in charge than allow the younger and perhaps less organised comrades to take over. This tendency certainly came to dominate in the LFI, and we know from the history of other “youth movements” – the Young Socialists led by the SLL/WRP or later by the Militant – how common this tendency is.

In the case of the LFI and Revolution this bad practice was compounded by a disastrously wrong perspective that saw the formation of a new international and new youth international as an immediate prospect – one coming out of the anti-capitalist movement and the World Social Forum and its regional offshoots. So urgent was this task that Revolution had to be rushed into a premature democratic centralist structure as a short step on the road to the imminent “Youth International”. So important was this that opposition had to be overridden by the majority block vote of the LFI youth fraction, directed by the International Secretariat. It was a practice that had little in common with Trotsky’s advice on youth/party relations and was a symptom of the bureaucratism which had become the method of the LFI’s leadership.

But is it the case that “the root of all evil” lies in the youth members of an adult party/organisation acting as a democratic centralist fraction in the youth movement? Is it a principle of youth work that differences in the adult party are necessarily taken into the youth movement?

It is certainly dangerous to rely on the politics of Murry Weiss or other SWP (US) leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. By this time, politically, the SWP had moved a long way from Trotsky’s positions – on Stalinism, nationalism etc. They were by then what we would call centrists (vacillating between revolutionary and reformist positions), not consistent revolutionaries.

Of course this does not negate their arguments but it does mean we need to question them. For example, when Murry Weiss says that, “no one who held the Leninist view of the revolutionary party’s relation to the youth movement, has to my knowledge, ever attempted to introduce the practice of party fraction in the youth movement” and that “Only the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies ultimatistically imposed their control over the radical youth – in the name of party discipline and no factionalism”13 he is clearly overstating the case.

To give one example: where differences appeared between the young communists and the CI in the early 1920s, the CI insisted that such differences would be resolved by the leadership of the CI. In the early 1920s the CYI was heavily influenced by the leftist Bela Kun/ Fischer/Maslow faction – which supported the “theory of the revolutionary offensive”. The CI leadership at the time was attempting to reorient the CI towards the policy of the united front. When it became clear that the leftists were going to use their support amongst the youth to get the Second Congress of the CYI to take a position opposed to the CI leadership, the Congress was suspended on instructions of the CI executive and reconvened in Moscow to prevent a leftist victory! This was clearly related to the position that the youth organisations were not separate parties but politically subordinate to the CI.

How a party youth fraction relates to a broad youth organisation is a matter of experiment not of a pre-ordained thesis handed down to us by a previous revolutionary generation. Just as with democratic centralism itself, it is something that can and must change, depending upon context and circumstance. As James Cannon said on many occasions “organisational forms are not sacred in themselves.”

Obviously it is sensible in youth organisations for the party members to be as open as possible and not to appear as a “closed group” directed by an adult party, a group that has its discussions elsewhere and presents its position as a take it or leave it decision. It is far better to have the discussions in the youth organisation, to allow minorities and majorities within the party youth fraction to argue their point of view, but making clear what the party majority thinks.

This means being far more open about differences within a revolutionary organisation than the LFI was willing to be. Indeed it raises a different but related question of how we approach democratic centralism in the current period, especially when we are trying to build broad and open youth organisations.

Obviously what a party could not allow would be a consistently disloyal minority in its ranks undermining its decisions despite having lost the vote on those decisions within the party. The party would justifiably stop such a minority trying to mobilise the youth movement against a vital decision that had been agreed democratically. The fraction would be entirely within its rights to unite – in a disciplined fashion – against a minority fighting to turn the youth movement against the very party that the youth movement is in political solidarity with.

The danger with focusing mainly on the question of the party fraction as the cause of the crisis in Revolution is that it could run the risk of becoming an anti-party approach to youth movement building. If the root of all evil is the Leninist democratic centralist fraction then the simplest way of eliminating it would be to ban any party that had a fraction from a youth movement – a sort of “soviets without Bolsheviks” approach.

This would be every bit as anti-democratic as the methods used by the LFI in the last period to keep control of Revolution, and would not take the building of a revolutionary youth movement one step forward. Which just goes to prove that on the whole youth organisation issue, it is a debate that we need to take forward rather than regard it as all having been solved for us back in the 1920s!

Tue 09, October 2007 @ 15:50