YOUNG SOCIALISTS CONSIDER NEXT STEPS IN FIGHT AGAINST WAR IN VIETNAM
By Les Evans
Almost three hundred students and young people from all over the United States met in Detroit March 24-26 for the Sixth National Convention of the Young Socialist Alliance. The spirited gathering marked a significant stride forward for the YSA in terms of size, political maturity and influence. YSAers attended from as far away as Seattle, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Madison. Two visitors from Atlanta, Georgia, joined the YSA at the convention.
Large delegations were present from New York, Berkeley, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Boston and Cleveland. More than 40 came from the West Coast, a distance of over 2,000 miles.
The convention was the culmination of a three-month discussion period in YSA locals across the country on the major political questions facing radicals in America today. The locals then elected delegates to the convention on the basis of their positions in the discussion, with the right of proportional representation for minority viewpoints.
The convention is the highest body of the YSA, representing all geographical areas and political positions of the membership throughout the national. The convention decides YSA policy on all basic questions until the next convention. The delegates, traditionally chosen from the ranks of the membership, also elect a new national leadership for the period between conventions.
The convention was opened on Friday by Lew Jones, national chairman of the YSA. The convention voted to send a telegram to the First National Congress of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire [Revolutionary Communist Youth] held by coincidence the same weekend in Paris. The telegram wished the new organization "the best possible success" in their deliberations. A message was received from the JCR saluting the YSA gathering and paying tribute to Leo Bernard, YSA member murdered in Detroit last May by a fanatical anti-Communist.
lew Jones then invited Tom Kerry, a leader of the Socialist Workers party and editor of the International Socialist Review, to present fraternal greetings from the SWP to the convention.
Kerry pointed to the responsibility of socialists to defend the Vietnamese revolution by demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, and building the antiwar movement into a massive force in the United States. He stressed the need to build a revolutionary-socialist party based on the principles of Lenin to organize the defeat of capitalism. This, he said, would be the only way to finally end the threat of war.
The convention in its three days and nights of intensive deliberations took up the American antiwar movement, the general political prospects for socialist youth in the U.S. and internationally, and the black freedom struggle in this country. It also dealt extensively with the organizational opportunities and perspectives of the YSA. Jacquie Henderson, a visitor from Toronto, told about the Canadian antiwar movement and the activities of young socialists in Canada.
Lew Jones delivered the major antiwar report. He outlined the contribution of the YSA, in cooperation with the SWP, in helping to build the broad coalition of forces against the war that has coalesced in the Spring Mobilization Committee. The Spring Mobilization Committee is the sponsor and organizer of the upcoming mammoth antiwar protest scheduled for April 15 in New York and San Francisco.
Jones emphasized the importance of the nonexclusive character of the movement: The movement solicits participation from both radical and more conservative organizations on the single criterion of opposition to the war. To insist on adherence to the specific viewpoint of any one tendency, he pointed out, would have the effect of destroying the united front by excluding those who did not agree. He discussed the importance of the entry of sections of the labor movement into the antiwar struggle for the first time. He pointed to the important role played by the Student Mobilization Committee as the most militant wing of the antiwar movement. Working closely with the Spring Mobilization Committee, the student organization also acted independently to mobilize students for "Vietnam Week," an intensive schedule of campus protest. to precede and build the April 15 Mobilization.
Tactics for the YSA within the antiwar movement were vigorously debated by the
delegates around the question of how best to advance the demand for the immediate withdrawal of troops while preserving and extending the united front that now exists.
Saturday's sessions began with the general political report given by Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Young Socialist. She described the opportunities before the YSA and its cothinkers in other countries. She said that both the Socialist and Communist parties and their youth organizations “have failed to wage a consistent struggle against American imperialist aggression in Vietnam." This places a heavy responsibility on revolutionary socialist youth like the YSA.
She showed how the YSA and its cothinkers have risen to the challenge, pointing to the growing antiwar movement in this and other countries. As an example, she cited the European-wide demonstration against the Vietnam war held at Liége, Belgium, last October. She addressed the rally there in the name of the YSA.
She summarized the experience of the various radical and socialist youth organizations in the U.S. in the past period.
The principal contenders for “the allegiance of socialist youth in the United States as in most other countries are the ideological currents of the Social Democracy, the Moscow and Peking oriented Communist parties, and Trotskyism. Since its founding in 1960, only the YSA, representing American Trotskyist youth, has been able to grow and prosper. All other socialist tendencies, with some ups and downs, have exhibited a pattern of sharp decline and demoralization.
In the early sixties, the largest socialist youth organization was the Young People's Socialist League, youth section of Norman Thomas' Socialist party. In 1964, YPSL refused to follow the lead of its elders in endorsing Lyndon Johnson for president, and the SP bureaucratically dissolved its own youth organization. The weakness of the Social Democratic youth was demonstrated by the fact that the organization disappeared almost without a trace, and has only recently begun to reconstruct a few scattered local units.
The Communist party for many years had no youth organization. Attempts to unify a few local organizations or to promote a national organization through various organizing committees resulted in failure.
Finally in June of 1964 a few hundred young people who looked generally to the Communist party for their ideological inspiration, founded the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America. Their political orientation was to involve themselves in reformist community organizing and class-collaborationist politics, pretending to be the student movement, and viewing organizations such as antiwar committees as competitors. After a short period of growth, the organization began to founder on the contradiction between its claim to be broad, all-inclusive, etc., and the control exercized at the top by conscious supporters of a pro-Moscow line. The DuBois Clubs began a sharp decline last year and a question mark must be placed over their continued existence.
The pro-Mao Progressive Labor party has failed either to grow itself, or to found a youth wing.
Thus while all the socialist organizations in the United States including the YSA are small, the YSA has been flexible enough to attract many radicalizing youth who are moving toward revolutionary socialism. It is today the strongest socialist youth group in the country. Above all, it avoided the error made by all of its opponents, of trying to build an illusory “mass" socialist youth group on a minimal reformist program and loose organizational precepts. The YSA was built on the concept of training a cadre of conscious revolutionary youth. In the last years it has proven the effectiveness of a youth group based on democratic centralisn.
The reporter went on to discuss the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS]. This organization, although it cannot be called socialist, is easily the largest youth organization in the country. It embodies many currents, from procapitalist liberals to revolutionists. It is mainly characterized by its unfinished state, in that the majority of its members have no finished ideas on what kind of social change is necessary in America or how it is to be accomplished.
The YSA has encouraged SDS to develop in a socialist direction. The greatest weakness of SDS has been its failure to come to grips with the Vietnam war. While SDS opposes the war, they have been sharply divided on whether or not to build the antiwar movement. After the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, which the SDS called in 1965, they began a retreat from antiwar work. (SDS voted to endorse the April 15 Mobilization only on April 5, although many individual members and chapters had joined
the work of building the protest action earlier.)
In closing, Mary-Alice Waters warned that as the 1968 elections approach, liberals and many "socialists" will increase the pressure to blunt the antiwar movement by channelling it into support for so-called "peace" candidates.. These capitalist politicians will try to divert the movement from mass mobilizations against the war.
Derrick Morrison, YSA National Committee member from Detroit, reported on the Negro struggle. He said that "The 1964 rebellions in Northern black ghettos exploded the myth of progress under capitalism." He charged that the "war on crime" is an "excuse for beefing up local police forces to use against the ghetto masses."
Morrison described the spread of the ideas of Malcolm X and their effect on the rise of the black power movement. He said that "The question of black power rests in . the last analysis on a break with the Republican and Democratic parties." He said the best example of black power today is the Lowndes County Freedom party in Alabama. This all-black political party, better known as the "Black Panther Party," challenged the Democrats and Republicans in elections last November, winning over 40 percent of the vote and securing a permanent place on the ballot ‘’as a legal party.
A lively discussion, led off by other black YSAers, followed the report.
The session closed Saturday afternoon with a report on the Bloomington case. This now famous case involved three YSA members, students at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, who were indicted in 1963 for "subversion." Joyce DeGroot, national secretary of the Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students, told the audience that the case has finally been dropped by the prosecution. This brought a big response from the assembly, for it had been a tough fight and marked an important victory for the YSA.
Ralph Levitt, one of the three defendants, received a tremendous ovation when he described how the YSA had mobilized its entire resources in defense of its members under attack and defeated the witch-hunt.
On Sunday morning, Doug Jenness, YSA National Executive Committee member, presented the organizational report. As the session opened, one delegate who had failed to win any votes for a proposal that the YSA give unconditional support to Mao's "cultural revolution," walked out of the convention. His five followers, who had been visitors to the convention, left with him.
In his report, Jenness enumerated important gains for the YSA in all fields: recruitment of new members, circulation of its press and publications, increase in its finances, and the building of a strong national leadership team.
He pointed out that the income of the YSA had increased by ten times in the last five years, based solely on contributions from its own members. He said that the "YSA is the only youth organization in the country that is financially self-sufficient," and probably the only one that is not in debt.
Jenness announced plans to expand the organization's bimonthly magazine, the Young Socialist, to a monthly publication. He reported that the YSA's pamphlet, War and Revolution in Vietnam, had sold over 25,000 copies. More than 54,000 copies of three brochures printed by the YSA to build the April 15 Mobilization had already been distributed.
Three trips were made by YSA leaders to Lowndes County, Alabama, last year. Reports on the development of the Freedom party there were printed in the Young Socialist and in the pamphlet, The Black Panther Party, published by Merit Publishers.
Four national speaking tours were made by YSA leaders in the year since the previous convention. They covered all sections of the U.S., including the South. Thousands of students heard YSA speakers on the war in Vietnam, the Black Panther party, and the "new left."
The YSA has also carried out extensive educational work in the basic political, philosophical and economic ideas of Marxism. Ten locals ran extensive summer schools last year with numerous classes on various subjects.
Jenness reported that the average age in the organization is 22.
Most impressive under both the organizational and antiwar points on the agenda were reports on YSA participation in the antiwar movement. Doug Jenness summed this up when he commented that "many of the leaders of the antiwar movement are at this conven-
tion."
After the organizational report the new National Committee was elected by the delegates. It then met briefly to elect the new national officers: Lew Jones, national chairman, Mary-Alice Waters, national secretary; and Doug Jenness, national organizational secretary.
The delegates voted to send a telegram to Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry, demanding immediate clemency for imprisoned Peruvian peasant leader Hugo Blanco. A telegram was also sent to Hugo Blanco himself, in the prison fortress of El Fronté6n. It declared: "The Sixth National Convention of the Young Socialist Alliance extends its solidarity to you in your struggle....Your revolutionary example has been an inspiration to us. Your struggle is our struggle."
The convention closed as the whole assembly stood for the singing of "The Internationale."