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	Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

SYC Speaker at NYC Holiday Appeal

Take a Side for a Socialist Future

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Dianna Faustine of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on December 7 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.

The Spartacus Youth Club is the youth auxiliary of the Spartacist League, and we solidarize with the class-war prisoners, many of whom were thrown into prison when they were around our age because they hated the injustice of this capitalist system.

There is no future for youth in a capitalist system. Young people, particularly black and Latino youth, have been driven from the universities with rising tuition. The bourgeoisie seeks to channel youth anger and militancy into voting for the Democrats, a prettier face of the bourgeois state whose task is to protect the property of the capitalist overlords. Our opponents on the left, some of whom campaigned for Obama in recent elections, seek to pressure the Democratic Party into being less repressive. But the only way forward for youth is to ally with the working class, which is the class that creates all the wealth in society and has the power to shut down capitalist production and smash the bourgeois state.

After Hurricane Sandy some residents, particularly in poor and working-class neighborhoods, are still struggling to get basic needs like food, water and shelter. They have only been able to obtain anything through volunteers, like those involved with the populist movement of Occupy Sandy, which Occupy defines as “people-powered relief.” While we are not opposed to those who choose to volunteer, the bourgeoisie hails volunteerism because it’s not in the interest of the capitalists to provide genuinely decent living conditions for the masses. Reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) have attached themselves to Occupy Sandy as a way to build a liberal “movement.” The ISO has its niche in the sellout union bureaucracy and among bourgeois liberals, and is ready to glom onto whatever is moving to shore up the capitalist system.

There’s a lot of anger about the outrageous cost of tuition and cutbacks to education. Right now there is a student occupation happening at Cooper Union, a historically free campus where the administration is attempting to impose tuition for the first time in 110 years. There is a racist purge of colleges and universities occurring through tuition hikes. A small number of black and Latino students have had limited gains through affirmative action. But the black-robed purveyors of the injustice system are again in the midst of ruling on its legality because, like all things wrested from the capitalists, these gains are reversible.

Fundamentally, the capitalists only support education insofar as it produces the future maintainers of this anarchic system. Students who are burdened with thousands of dollars of debt (which often can only be canceled by death) live in indentured servitude hell after college, if they can even afford to graduate! We demand: Open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all! Abolish the student debt! Nationalize the private universities! Abolish the administration—for worker/student/teacher control of the university! Cops off campus!

While student struggles have sometimes been the ignition source for social battles especially around youth unemployment and imperialist wars, students have no direct relationship to the means of production and must ally with the working class. There were massive student protests in Quebec around draconian tuition hikes this summer. The working class mobilized in support of the students but the union misleaders and the petty-bourgeois populists of Québec Solidaire channeled anger into Québécois nationalism and bourgeois electoralism. Throughout their courageous struggle, the protesters faced intense police repression. The PDC defends these protesters and we say: An injury to one is an injury to all!

Friedrich Engels wrote that Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action, and from that we take our cue. In August we brought students to a PDC-initiated protest against the massacre of South African miners. In late September, the SYC initiated a protest at City College of New York against a speech by war criminal Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO is a U.S.-dominated imperialist alliance formed after World War II whose aim was the destruction of the degenerated Soviet workers state. Today these war criminals are responsible for imperialist terror around the world. We say: U.S./NATO hands off the world! A leading activist for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in New York stood apart from our anti-NATO protest and refused to join it.

The FRSO [the New York group’s split-off in the Midwest, which publishes Fight Back!] wrote “it is better to vote against Romney” and we all know that means voting for the lesser evil of the Democratic Party or the Greens—both capitalist parties. Like the ISO, they adapt to prevailing bourgeois consciousness. We fight to break the working class and militant youth from false consciousness and argue for the need to get rid of the whole capitalist system of exploitation, poverty, racism and war.

People may have heard of the recent outrageous death of a woman who was denied an abortion in Ireland. Here in this country both the Democrats and Republicans have carried out a war against abortion rights. Just look at Obama’s ban of over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers! The SYC fights for free abortion on demand, for free public health care for all, and separation of church and state.

We seek to win a new generation of young workers and students to the principles and program of Trotskyism, recognizing that a revolutionary party is built through the fusion of declassed revolutionary intellectuals with the most advanced layers of the proletariat. We do so through exemplary action, as illustrated by our NATO protest and participation in picket lines, and through education like the class series we held this semester on basic Marxism. So, if you don’t want to live in a world of war and starvation, in the words of the Harlan County coal miners and the women who bravely stood alongside them fighting for a decent life, ask yourself: “Which side are you on?” Join the SYC!