SYC Speaker at Chicago Holiday Appeal

Students Must Ally with the Power of the Working Class!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Alan of the Chicago Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on 15 December 2013 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Chicago.

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Hi, I am Alan and I am a member of the Spartacus Youth Club. The Spartacus Youth Club is the youth group of the Spartacist League. We stand in solidarity with the class-war prisoners, many of whom were youth when they were thrown in prison for protesting the injustices of capitalism.

The future for youth under capitalism is bleak, especially for black and Latino youth, who face high unemployment, are driven off campuses due to rising tuition costs and face racist cop terror. Liberal and reformist politicians seek to channel the anger and militancy of youth into voting for the Democratic Party, the other party of Wall Street, war, racism and poverty. Our opponents on the left, some of whom campaigned for Obama, seek to pressure the Democrats to “fight” for a few more crumbs for working people and for the capitalist state to be less repressive. The capitalist state is not a neutral force. This state consists of the military, police, courts and prisons which function to protect the class rule of the bourgeoisie and its system of production and exploitation.

Class is the main division in society, but not the only one. Like countless black men, women and children, Trayvon Martin was a victim of the racist American capitalist system which was built on slavery and is maintained by black racial caste oppression. The SYC went to protests for Trayvon and met people who were justifiably angry. However, the anger was channeled by the reverends and the reformist left into the idea that the oppressive state which oversees and defends this racist capitalist system can bring justice for Trayvon Martin and can be reformed to meet the interests of the workers and the oppressed. Justice for Trayvon will come, and the needs of workers and the oppressed will be met, once the American capitalist rulers are swept away by socialist revolution.

As they have done with the class-war prisoners for whose freedom we are fighting today, the U.S. and its allies are doing all they can to silence people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who have lifted the veil on U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars, drone attacks, mass surveillance and torture chambers. Chelsea Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison and was given a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. military. Edward Snowden, who has avoided capture by the U.S. rulers, depends on a one-year residency permit granted by Russian president Vladimir Putin who, nonetheless, described the NSA’s mass surveillance programs as “The way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.” Snowden, Manning and Julian Assange deserve full credit for exposing a part of the atrocities of the imperialists and revealing to the working class the systematic workings of the state run by and for the capitalist rulers.

Students and youth have every reason to protest the atrocities of U.S. imperialist capitalism. While student struggles can ignite social battles, students have no direct relationship to the means of production, meaning they do not have social power. The working class, which does have a direct relationship to the means of production, has the social power to shut down capitalist production and ultimately to overthrow the entire capitalist system. Students and youth must ally with the power of labor against capital!

The fight to overthrow capitalism is not going to be spontaneous. The SYC recognizes that a revolutionary party, built from the most advanced layers of the multiracial proletariat and declassed revolutionary intellectuals, is necessary to raise the consciousness of the proletariat to the need to fight for a socialist revolution.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 pointed the way forward for the international working class. The Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in workers councils (soviets), to power and smashed the rule of the Russian landlords and capitalists. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model. For new October Revolutions worldwide!

The Russian question is one of the major programmatic differences that sets the SYC and SL apart from the fake socialists. The International Socialist Organization (ISO), who you probably have heard of or run into in Chicago, called the fall of the Soviet Union a moment when socialists should be rejoicing. The fall of the Soviet Union has meant free rein for the imperialists to redivide the world in order to plunder markets, establish spheres of exploitation and carry out all-out attacks on the living conditions of the working class.

As with the former Soviet Union, the SYC and SL unconditionally defend the deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam from imperialism and internal capitalist counterrevolution. The parasitic, nationalist, Stalinist bureaucracies who hold political power need to be ousted by proletarian political revolution. The ISO refuses to defend these workers states and instead sides with the imperialist powers in the name of “Democracy.” As Marxists, we ask, “Democracy for what class?”

Answering these types of questions, studying revolutionary Marxism and intervening in labor and student struggles are key to building a revolutionary, multiracial workers party. The SYC seeks to recruit revolutionary-minded youth and students, who want to see the world run according to the needs of humanity. Capitalism can never be reformed to meet the needs of humanity. The emancipation of humanity from sexism, racism and exploitation will come through socialist revolution, nothing less. Join this fight! Join the SYC!