Eastern European Militants And The 4th International

Eastern European Militants And The 4th International

Reprinted in Bulletin Vol. 7 No. 6 

Comrades, 

We are convinced that the Revolutionary International of Youth will be built! That it will attract the youth under the control of the Kremlin bureaucracy to the side of the young revolutionaries of the capitalist countries for the RIY answers their profound aspirations. 

These youth, trapped in bureaucratic organizations, are seeking to create independent organizations. Enclosed within these boundaries planted with mines, they are also seeking, more than any other youth, to form organic bonds with the youth of the whole world. The history of the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since 1953 is striking testimony of this. Even to this day, the resistance of the Czech workers continues, in which the youth play an important role. In Yugoslavia, since the student struggles of June 1968 the bureaucracy was forced to dissolve not less than eight youth organizations, and to complete these attacks with the liquidation of Student, the newspaper of the revolutionary students. 

Comrades, 

The Revolutionary International of Youth not only corresponds to the profound aspirations of these youth but at the same: time constitutes a pole of political attraction on an international level. 

Comrades, 

This youth is not able to join you. Go to meet them! Go forward to build the Revolutionary Youth International everywhere in Eastern Europe! 

Faced with its mortal crisis, imperialism has no other solution than the destruction of the working class and particularly its youth, as the barbarism of the war against the workers and peasants of Indochina shows. The bourgeoisie wants to expel millions of workers and youth from production, from education, culture and leisure. 

At the same time they increase their pressure on the countries of Eastern Europe in order to penetrate them and destroy the socialist conquests. In these countries where the bourgeoisie was expropriated and where its power was overturned, the Kremlin bureaucracy and its satellites in order to preserve their privileges, transmit this pressure onto the backs of the workers and youth. This policy is a direct attack against the socialist conquests of the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky. 

By its cooperation and class collaboration with world imperialism the bureaucracy is the agent of imperialism and its attack on the socialist conquests.

In these countries also it is the youth who are most affected. The number of places in secondary and higher education is shrinking in relation to needs, the number of places for children from working class or poor peasant backgrounds is increasingly smaller. Housing conditions are deplorable, especially among the youth. Hundreds of thousands of youth are already unemployed. Like the workers, the youth are deprived of any means of expression, of organization, of creativity. In the absence of any perspective, alcoholism and delinquency are assuming alarming proportions among them. 

Comrades, 

The working class and its youth do not accept and will not accept the solution that capital, and its ally, the bureaucracy propose. In the West as in the East they are rising up in gigantic struggles against imperialism and the bureaucracy. 

The youth, students and workers were in the front lines of these struggles in Eastern Europe, led primarily for democratic rights which on the basis of socialist conquests could only be won through the power of the workers’ councils. They were there in East Berlin in 1953. Students and young workers were the first to throw themselves into the fight against the bureaucracy in the ‘‘Polish spring’’ in 1956. It was a demonstration of solidarity of all the youth of Budapest with the Polish youth which gave the signal of the revolution of workers’ councils in Hungary, October 23, 1956. The demonstration of students at the University Charles of Prague at the end of 1967 announced what followed: the ‘‘Prague spring.’’ 

In Czechoslovakia, all these struggles - during the process of political revolution, in the resistance to the invaders and to the ‘‘normalization’’ - have showed the extraordinary combativity of the youth and the primary role they play in these struggles. Today in the Soviet Union itself, the youth take their place in the new communist opposition: the young worker Anatoli Martchenko, the young intellectuals, Yuri Daniel and Boukovski, the students of Leningrad and the Ukraine have joined the older ones like Grigorenko and together they form this new communist opposition whose courageous fight heralds the entry into struggle of the Russian working class. 

Comrades, 

The bureaucracy has no other answer to the demands of the workers and the youth than savage repression. Hundreds of thousands of militant communists and youth are threatened, witchhunted, arrested and put in jails and camps in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union. 

Comrades, We will never accept the ‘‘normalization’’ that the bureaucracy wants to impose, especially on the workers and youth of Czechoslovakia. Immediate withdrawal of the armed forces of the Kremlin from Czechoslovakia! Defend the Czech militants threatened with terror! 

Comrades, 

Great class battles are beginning. The necessity of an organized vanguard, the construction of a world proletarian party which is the Fourth International is more than ever on the agenda. 

For these reasons, confident of taking forward the aspirations and desires of the youth in Eastern Europe, the Organizing Committee of Eastern European militants is part of the struggle for the Revolutionary Youth International for it believes that its construction must embrace the youth of Eastern Europe. 

Long live the First Congress of AJS! 

Long Live the world revolutionary unity of the proletariat and its youth! 

Forward to the construction of the Revolutionary Youth International.