Fake Socialists Celebrate New Commander-in-Chief

SYC Speaker at Chicago Holiday Appeal

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below an edited excerpt from the presentation of Spartacus Youth Club spokesman Tom Allegri at the 14 December 2008 Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Chicago.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the youth of our generation have been told the lie that communism is dead, that the “end of history” has come with “democratic” capitalism. Our perspective is based on the model of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It destroyed the class rule of the bourgeoisie and laid the basis for a classless society based on material abundance. Even after its degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy beginning in 1923-24, the Soviet workers state offered the promise of jobs, medical care, schools and mass transit under a centralized, planned economy. That’s why we defended the Soviet degenerated workers state until the very end, just as we defend the remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

The bourgeoisie’s lie of the “death of communism” has a reflection in the myth of the “end of racism”—a myth that Obama’s campaign propped up—and in the burial of the struggle for racial integration as a “failed experiment.” It’s no surprise, then, that the same fake-socialist reformists in the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who criminally cheered the fall of the Soviet Union also echoed the bourgeois liberals’ pro-Obama chants of “Yes We Can!” with touching faith in a “post-racial” capitalist democracy. The ISO and other reformists bury the simple fact that the Democrats are the other party of racist U.S. imperialism and class enemies of the proletariat. The ISO even celebrated with a party in Harlem and called the victory a “transformative event.” The Revolutionary Communist Party’s World Can’t Wait flocked to Grant Park with throngs of Obama’s supporters on election night. And the Workers World Party’s Larry Holmes gushed about the “feeling of liberation” unleashed by Obama’s win. In stark contrast to the reformists’ bald-faced, class-collaborationist praise of U.S. imperialism’s chief executive, the SYC fought vigorously to break youth from any illusions in bourgeois candidates and capitalist electoral politics, and win them to the fight for a multiracial working-class party, which is the necessary instrumentality to get rid of this rotting capitalist system.

The fake socialists’ social-pacifist calls to “bring the troops home!” and for “jobs not war” build the dangerous illusion that capitalism can be reformed into a peaceful, democratic system that promotes the interests of the world’s proletariat and oppressed. But all the “peace-loving” sloganeering of our fake-socialist opponents belies one simple fact: that they have historically sided with the U.S. imperialists against the world’s working class. They did just that in their egregious opposition to the Red Army’s intervention into Afghanistan in the late ’70s and ’80s. That intervention raised pointblank the question of women’s liberation through extending the historic gains of the October Revolution.

Today, the reformists are so enamored of the “Obama phenomenon” that they have little to say about the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan—Obama, who sees this war as the “good war” and a “just response” to 9/11, has pledged more troops to continue the bloodletting there. This poses an increased danger to the world’s oppressed. We say: All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now!

As Rosa Luxemburg said, the question posed today is socialism or barbarism. With the Soviet Union gone, those workers and radical youth who identify their struggles with socialism are very exceptional and rare. The Spartacus Youth Club provides a training ground for the next generation of professional revolutionaries who want to dedicate their lives to the fight for a socialist future. Though small, we are armed with a powerful program and a deep memory of the working class’s struggles and victories. Our fundamental task remains to win those exceptional individuals to Marxism and arm them with its program, the only one that can lead the workers and oppressed to victory when they rise to struggle, as they inevitably will. Join us!

Free the class-war prisoners! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty!