The YSA. How it began

 

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The YSA. How it began

— ICFI (1953) Supporters (@1953Icfi) November 11, 2022

Snippet from The Bulletin

Snippet from The Bulletin

         The all-pervading cynicism is then reflected in the snide way the very fundamentals of our movement are treated. Foley refers to our struggle for Marxist philosophy as "'the Healyites' much celebrated 'method.'" In similar fashion his mentor Joseph Hansen writes: "The 'principles' to which the SLL leaders adhere should not be overlooked in seeking to understand why they follow courses that sometimes seem irrational. From the ultra-left sectarian viewpoint of the SLL, students bear an original taint - they are 'petty bourgeois,' not 'proletarian.' An influx of students would confront the SLL with the danger of having the class composition of the membership 'watered down'"! 

          We take questions of principle seriously and proceed at all times from them. We begin with the division between the working class and the capitalist class fighting for the construction of a working class party, made up of workers, deeply rooted in the working class. It is not a question of original taints or sins but of the objective class character of students. It is not even a matter of their recruitment to the party - which is essential - but whether the party bases itself and its perspective on the working class or the middle classes. This is a principled question.

Abandoning Working Class Youth - A Manifestation of the Turn Towards the Middle-class

Abandoning Working Class Youth - A Manifestation of the Turn Towards the Middle-class

An examination of the history of the ICFI and its approach to the youth exposes the approach of the modern ICFI as having less and less to do with a genuine Trotskyist approach to youth. In the history of the ICFI, mass youth organizing has occupied a place of central importance. The significance attached to organizing working class youth on a mass scale was manifested in the organization of "Young Socialists" around the world. 

The "Young Socialists" played an important role in the history of the ICFI. In contrast to all of the revisionist tendencies, the ICFI had considered the building of a cadre amongst working class youth essential to the building of revolutionary parties and the fight for world socialist revolution. The approach of the ICFI towards building a youth movement was rooted in the Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky: 

"The Fourth International pays particular attention to the young generation of the proletariat. All of its policies strive to inspire the youth with belief in its own strength and in the future. Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution. Thus it was thus it will be.

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class..."

On the basis of this perspective towards the working class youth, the ICFI was able to win control of the Labour Party (UK) youth organization, which after being expelled by the Labour bureaucracy became the independent Young Socialists, affiliated with the British section of the ICFI.

The approach of the ICFI towards building a youth movement, focused on disadvantaged and working class youth "in the neighborhoods," highschools, etc rather than solely on college students, drew the ire of petty-bourgeois and revisionist groups internationally, including groups such as the Spartacist League. Expressing their real attitude towards the working class, the Spartacists wrote condescendingly that the members of the Young Socialists in the United States were "overwhelmingly ghettoized black and Spanish-speaking youth, a generation or two removed from rural isolation and poverty, very heavily chronically unemployed, in a country with no political class consciousness and themselves with so little access to the labor movement that economic class consciousness often appears as a privilege of older white workers." Retreating from the difficulties involved in finding a road to the most oppressed layers of young workers, they claimed that "a nationalist or Maoist rhetoric corresponds far more closely to the ideological proclivities of American raw ghetto youth." Some of these tendencies have already paid the price for their error, and hardly exist anymore.

However, the youth organizing of the ICFI provided a vehicle for outstanding youth leaders who contributed, such as Chris Talbot, Julie Hyland, Ernst Schwarz, Tom Henehan and D'artagnan Collier to name a few, to rise into positions of leadership within the Trotskyist movement. Furthermore the youth organized through these efforts would prove to be a bulwark against opportunism. In opposition to the later cynicism of the WRP, the youth cadre assembled by the ICFI took the theoretical capital of the movement's struggles for genuine Trotskyism seriously. The primary theoretician of the ICFI during the split with the WRP, David North, was introduced to the Young Socialists in Connecticut on campus alongside another major leader of the modern ICFI, Bill Van Auken. 

As the revisionists who viciously attacked the approach of the ICFI adapted themselves to the petty-bourgeois radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s they rediscovered the importance of the youth - middle class youth, to be precise. These youth were praised as some sort of new vanguard that would allow for bypassing the struggle to win over the working class.

Internationally, the Young Socialists actively engaged in intense political, theoretical and educational projects aimed at bringing Marxism to a younger generation of workers. In the UK, the paper of the Young Socialists reached a circulation of more than 10,000. In Germany, more than 50 Young Socialist branches held meetings each week. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s the Young Socialists in the United States played a leading role in various important campaigns, such as the fight for the release of 26-year-old Gary Tyler, a 26-year-old black youth from Louisiana who was falsely accused of murder. Tens of thousands of copies of The Frameup of Gary Tyler, a pamphlet published by The Young Socialists, were sold throughout its three printings. Hundreds of thousands of workers and young people signed a petition after the Young Socialists organized support for Gary on an international scale among the working class. 

Young Socialists march through Harlem in support of Gary Tyler, December 1976

        In the aftermath of the heinous assassination of Tom Henehan, Young Socialists fought vigorously to bring his killers to justice. The campaigns organized by Young Socialists found a powerful response amongst youth in the United States, Britain, Germany and throughout the world. 

In the split with the WRP, the ICFI found the strongest support amongst the British Young Socialists. The modern leadership of the ICFI, acutely aware of the role historically played by youth in resisting opportunist shifts, have steadily abandoned the goal of organizing the most oppressed layers of young people. 

The ultimate fate of the Young Socialist movements affiliated with the ICFI is unclear to this author, but by the second half of the 90s the ICFI had responded to the difficulties of that decade by abandoning its earlier perspectives of finding a way towards the working class youth. Instead, it reoriented itself in favor of a turn exclusively towards students on campus, particularly those of a middle class background, with the formation of the "Students for Social Equality," later the "International Students for Social Equality" and, in an attempt to deflect attention from its exclusively student focused orientation, the "International Youth and Students for Social Equality." This name change did not indicate any real turn away from the campuses. While many of the best elements among working class youth pursue tertiary education, the IYSSE is not a movement rooted in more working class based community colleges, trade schools, etc. but draws its sustenance from University's out of reach to the majority of young proletarians. Further, the meetings of the ICFI are almost exclusively held in the campus environment, alienating the working class public.

The modern ICFI's turn away from proletarian youth is bound up with a class shift within the ICFI, away from the working class and towards the middle class, that has been gaining momentum throughout the 21st century. We have commented on this class shift and IYSSE before, primarily in reference to the IYSSE's organization along controlled and bureaucratic anti-Trotskyist lines. In its modern form, the youth movement of the ICFI primarily exists as a vehicle for winning over elements from this middle class layer who match the social profile of the middle class faction within the ICFI.  In the process, the modern ICFI has come to resemble its middle-class critics in the 60s and 70s more than a genuinely Trotskyist tendency oriented towards the most oppressed layers of the working class, such as proletarian youth and women. In contrast to this approach, ICFI (1953) supporters seek to revive the declaration of the Transitional Program:

"Down with the bureaucracy and careerism!

Open the road to the youth!

Turn to the woman worker!

These slogans are emblazoned on the banner of the Fourth International."