(The following article has been translated from the December 27 issue of
Belgian revolutionary-socialist the weekly La Gauche.]
More than a hundred activists participated in the national congress of the JGS Jeune Garde Socialiste — Socialist Young Guard which was held in Ghent this weekend [December 20- 21). The majority were university and high-school students but there were also workers from private industry and the public services, as well as young teachers.
There was no more-or-less self-congratulatory juggling of successes against failures. The traditional formulas stressing "the positive" were out. But one elementary necessity was atfirmed - the need to achieve the theoretical and organizational means for action. These were some of the aspects of a congress which marked the point of takeoff, a qualitative leap for the JGS.
Two reports were discussed at this meeting-a political report and an organizational report. The latter proposed a new constitution for the movement. The primary objective of both reports was to offer a unified answer to the problems facing activists in the regions where they are established and in the JGS's areas of work - the university, worker, high-school, and anti-imperialist arenas.
The political report sought to show that the different aspects of the same general capitalist reality that we face are tied together by essential common elements. It sought to bring out these elements by analyzing the international context in which Belgian capitalism operates. The report sought to explain what overall goals the bourgeoisie is pursuing even through the many different spheres and manifold aspects of its activity.
At the same time, the political report posed the necessity for revolutionists to respond on the same overall level through varied tactics adjusted to fit specific audiences and re- January 19, 1970
gions. It set forth the necessity of revolutionists mounting a general coun terattack, a counterattack requiring a unified strategy by the vanguard organization to which all tacties and partial struggles must be subordinated.
Partial struggles acquire meaning and value only as the specific expressions of such a general strategy. Thus, the vanguard refuses to combat any single aspect or component of capitalism in separation from the struggle against capitalism per se.
The JGS rejected once and for all the narrow-minded "realism" that consists of treating every problem separately as it arises, in sovereign disregard for the broad economic, social, and political reality that shapes and determines it. Such "realism" results in an attitude of abdication, of "acting" while "waiting for the revolution."
This abdication may take either a reformist aspect (parliamentary "action" and discreet invocations of our socialist future in Labor Day speeches)
Mao-spontanéist asor an ultralett, pect (repetitious "actions" "in the service of the people" lacking any strategic tie-up, awaiting the Great Day that will inevitably come when the interminable revolutions of the activist prayer wheel reach the celestial number).
The function of the political report was to analyze the present capitalist reality, and propose a strategy and tactics based on it. The report on the new constitution had the aim of providing the organization with a structure enabling it to carry out this policy.
This meant unifying the work of the JGS in different areas into a coherent whole. It meant unifying and centralizing the organization, which will plan this work as well as execute it. Above all, it meant selecting a political and organizational leadership.
The questions of strategy, organization, and leadership obviously could not be solved with the wave of a magic wand. In adopting a political report, in laying out a line of action, in adopting democratic socialist organizational forms, in establishing membership standards, and in electing a political leadership which will guide the overall work of the JGS in all its aspects, the activists present in Ghent realized that they had not solved everything.
The December
1969 congress opened a period of discussion on the central political document which will last a full year. Discussion and political education work will go hand in hand, since many theoretical problems must be dealt with and thoroughly understood by the JGS members before they can fully assume the main obligations of this document.
In February a national conference will discuss tasks and tactics in the movement's arenas of work.
As of now, however, our activity will be based on clear political guidelines. As a result, this activity will serve to test our orientation and to increase understanding of it and the theoretical considerations on which it is based.
Beginning now, confronted by a series of concrete tasks, the leadership team elected by the congress will be obliged to transform itself into a responsible political leadership. The organizational and political framework that the congress established for its functioning will force this.
In the immediate period ahead, the centralization of our work within the context of a political line already assimilated by the JGS activists will give them a new broader understanding and increase their effectiveness, even if we still far from exhaust the potentialities such centralization offers.
The JGS has irrevocably begun the process of building a vanguard youth organization, taking the first step on the road toward building a revolutionary party. The activists who voted almost unanimously for the reports, after discussing them and amending them with a seriousness and self-discipline quite new in the movement, clearly realized this. And because they lized it, they also voted for the part of the report that defined the JGS as having a Trotskyist line and as a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International.
The revolutionary party must be an international party confronting world capitalism. Setting out on the path to building such a party brings you toward those who have not merely piously desired an international party but who have concretely tried to construct one.
Drawing the practical conclusions from what was called for in theory, the JGS showed that it had passed a landmark. Its last links with Social Democracy and centrism have been cut. It has a year to show that it was right in moving forward against the tide of skepticism, dilettantism, and immobilism. As far as we are concerned, we have no doubt that our choice will bring good results.
Soviet Union
'Clinic' to Probe Natalia Gorbanevskaya's Politics
Natalia Gorbanevskaya, who was arrested in Moscow December 24, will reportedly be sent to a psychiatric clinic this month for pretrial examination. The thirty-three-year-old poetess is threatened with confinement in a mental institution, an increasingly common device for disposing of political dissidents without the embarrassment of a public trial.
Mrs. Gorbanevskaya, the mother of two boys, was one of a group who demonstrated in Red Square on August 25, 1968, protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was one of the thirty-nine signers of an open letter circulated on the eve of Stalin's ninetieth birthday anniversary December 21, 1969, protesting the ouster of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the writers' union.
The June 30. 1969. issue of the Un-
The June 30, 1969, issue of the Underground Soviet periodical Chronicle of Current Events carried a description of the treatment of persons declared mentally ill because of their political beliefs. Its account was summarized by Neal Ascherson in the London Observer and in the Washington Post of January 5.
The Chronicle said that a panel of psychiatric experts, called the "Special Diagnosis" department, exists at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow which handles such cases. The panel is headed by Professor D. R. Lunts, chief of the "Politicals Department" of the Serbsky Institute in the 1950s.
"Experience makes it clear," the Chronicle said, "that each decision is taken at the KGB [secret police] level, and Prof. Lunts has only to wrap it up in the form of a medical conclusion."
Recent "patients" include former Ma- 32
jor General Pyotr G. Grigorenko, former Latvian collective farm chairman Ivan Yakhimovitch, and Ilya Rips, the student who set himself on fire in Riga to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The other patients in these special hospitals, according to the Chronicle, are those who have "committed serious crimes (brutal murder, rape, thuggery), and are not answerable for their actions as being in a mentally disturbed state, and are therefore exempt from trial."
to injections of large doses of aminazin and sulfazin which cause depressive shock reaction and serious physical disorders . . . sometimes sodium aninate, a strong narcotic, is administered by injection to weaken the patient, and after the injection he is interrogated."
According to the Chronicle, the hospital staff consists in part of security police with white overalls over their uniforms. Persons who are released from these hospitals are given a spe-
Political "patients" are kept in the "on the whole, hardly
Italian Anarchists Charge Frame-up same cells as regular patients. Ascherson quotes from the Chronicle on their treatment: the politicals are "subjected
At a press conference in Paris January 2, French and Italian anarchist leaders denounced police attempts to pin the blame for the December 12 bombings in Rome and Milan on their cothinkers. They called it a "new Sacco and Vanzetti case."
The conference was organized by the Fédération Anarchiste [Anarchist Federation] and le Monde Libertaire, the organization's monthly organ. The speakers were Hemel, the general secretary of the Fédération Anarchiste; Roland Bosdeveix, the organization's secretary of externa! affairs; Maurice Joyeux, the editor of le Monde Libertaire; and Marco Airoldi, a representative of the Libertarian Youth of Milan.
Hemel explained that while anarchists are not opposed to terrorism, it must have a political aim. The Italian bombings made no political sense cial identity card. "Those who perany hope of getting out to freedom."
from their point of view. "The authors of anarchist attacks, have always openly proclaimed their responsibility for them," Hemel said. "Ravacho! mounted the steps of the scaffold singing. An act of terrorism has no meaning unless someone takes credit for it. That is why it is absurd to attribute the anonymous explosions in Rome and Milan, the acts of irresponsible malefactors, to anarchists.
The speakers stressed the lack of solid evidence against Pietro Valpreda and the five Roman anarchists arrested in connection with the bombings. They denounced as arbitrary the arrest of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist activist, who died in a mysterious fall from the fourth floor of police headquarters. "They committed Pinelli's suicide for him," one of the speakers said.
North Vietnam
Praise for the Gravedigger of Revolutions
Nhan Dan, the official North Vietnamese government newspaper, car-, ried a front-page editorial December 22 commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Stalin. According to a report in the December 23 Washington Post, the Vietnamese described the late dictator as "an em-
Marxist-Leninist theoretician, inent great leader of the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement."
The Nhan Dan editorial reportedly said thai Stalin was Lenin's "disciple, comrade-in-arms and successor," and that he "waged an unremitting struggle to preserve the purity of Marxism- Leninism and develop its creative power" while opposing "opportunism under all forms."
Nhan Dan urged the "entire Vietnamese party, army and people" to learn from Stalin's "revolutionary spirit."
Even Pravda, in its December 21 editorial on Stalin's birth, included criticism of his "unjustified repression" of the Soviet people, although the Soviet CP paper painted a more favorable picture of Stalin than at any time since the Khrushchev revelations in 1956.
It can hardly be supposed that the North Vietnamese leaders are unaware of the truth about Stalin. Lenin, rather than regarding him as his "disciple, comrade-in-arms, and successor," demanded that the party remove Stalin as general secretary. After Lenin's death, Stalin became the spokesman for the privileged bureaucratic caste that suppressed every expression of proletarian democracy in the Soviet Union and murdered virtually a!! of Lenin's closest collaborators.
Instead of opposing "opportunism under all forms," it was Stalin who made "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism a central tenet of the Communist International in place of Lenin's policy of advancing revolutionary struggles.
The Vietnamese people have had bitter experiences with Stalinism. After World War II, when the French sought to reoccupy Indochina and crush the new Viet Minh regime, the
French Communist party-then, as now, one of the most servilely pro- Moscow CPs in the world-supported the de Gaulle regime against the Vietnamese.
The French CP was, in fact, in the government, and in March 1947 all the Communist cabinet members voted to support the military expedition. Maurice Thorez, then head of the Communist party and a vice-premier, personally signed the military orders. L'Humanité, the French CP newspaper, although it formally called for negotiations with Ho Chi Minh's government, declared in the July 24, 1946 issue, that it did not wish to see France reduced to "its own small metropolitan territory ...
"Are we," l'Humanité added, "after having lost Syria and Lebanon yesterday, to lose Indochina tomorrow, north Africa the day after?"
In 1954, after the French had been defeated at Dienbienphu, decisively Stalin's immediate successors and their Chinese counterparts insisted that the victorious Viet Minh accept the extremely disadvantageous terms proposed by the French and their American allies: that the Viet Minh withdraw north of the seventeenth parallel and turn the south over to the French puppet emperor Bao Dai, thus setting the stage for the present American intervention in support of an "independent" South Vietnamese regime.
Durdin, writing from
Tillman Geneva in the July 24, 1954, New York Times, said: "Evidence has accumulated here that Viet Minh leaders are not entirely happy about the peace settlement for Vietnam. A number of members of the Vietnam delegation have declared openly that pressure from Chinese Communist Premier Chou En Lai and Soviet Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov [to this day a diehard defender of Stalin's record forced their regime to accept less than it rightly should have obtained here."
It must be recognized, of course, that the Vietnamese leaders are under heavy pressure from both Moscow and Peking, which control the major sources of arms for the freedom fighters in South Vietnam. Neither of the bureaucratic giants would hesitate a moment to cut off even the small flow of aid they have granted the Vietnamese it political concessions were not forthcoming.
The fact that the Hanoi leaders feel it necessary to pay such blackmail (or to hail Stalin for reasons of their own) does not lessen the duty of revolutionists throughout the world to actively demonstrate their solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution and to do everything within their power to force the United States to withdraw all its troops at once from Vietnam.
At the same time, it must be stated that putting Stalin in a place of honor injures the Vietnamese revolution. Stalinism has accurately been described as the syphilis of the labor movement. Millions of people who are opposed to what U.S. imperialism is doing in Vietnam can become uncertain and even more accessible to imperialist propaganda if Hanoi fails to recognize where Stalin stands in informed public opinion internationally today.
Turkish Students Take Over Buses
In a protest action against cancellation of reduced-fare permits, students at Ankara University on Jaunary 5 took over more than thirty buses run by the city, according to Associated Press.
The students stopped the buses in various areas and ordered the passengers to get out. Then they took the buses to the university campus and other locations.
For four hours, traffic was paralyzed. The students finally released the buses after a battle with the police in which seven cops were injured. Thirty-four students were arrested.
Passes had previously been issued by the student government. They entitled students to ride at half price and to enter movie theaters at reduced prices.
Ankara municipal authorities claimed that the system had been abused and that persons not enrolled at the university had been getting the passes.
Correction
In the article in our last issue "YSA Convention Registers New Gains," George Fyson was listed (page 5) as being from the Socialist Action League of Australia. That should have been New Zealand.