In all these different ways, we are meeting workers and various young people who get involved in actions, who begin to resist what capitalism is producing. And we find that a growing number of them become interested in broader political ideas and decide to join the communist movement. We should glory in this process. Because it is the heat lightning of much bigger class battles.

Young people are being radicalized. Youth become sensitive to the political, social, cultural, and moral implications of capitalism's breakdowns earlier than other layers of society. They react to the injustices, and they are ready as individuals to make commitments to do something about them.

The important question for the communist movement is this: How do these radicalizing youth find their way to the working class? This is not a question of class origins. We are talking about how radicalizing young people in general can be won to the working class, not just youth from the middle class. Being born and raised in a working-class family does not by itself bring anybody to the working class politically.

Lenin expressed a very radical view that was disliked by some "orthodox Marxists" of his time. He said that students — what we would today call high school and college youth — are going through a period in their lives when their class is not a settled question; they are to some degree determining what class they will be part of. Of course, no one can choose to become part of the bourgeoisie. Wealth and class privilege in capitalist society are passed along through blood lines. The working class, too, is a hereditary class, with only relatively small numbers climbing into the middle class (and even smaller numbers during periods of social crisis like today, with growing numbers from the lower middle class being pushed into the working class as well).

That was not Lenin's point, however. He was making a political point about student youth. He was not talking about the thin, privileged layer being trained in special, elite institutions for their roles in the ruling class. Lenin's point was that if you take student youth as a whole, in the high schools and universities, those individuals most open to politics are not blocked by their class origins from coming to revolutionary proletarian conclusions if they find the revolutionary proletarian organization.

Even if a young person is open to politics, of course, it is not until they become active that they begin to understand what politics really is. That is, they discover they must decide which class's line of march is worth fighting to advance. Which class provides effective social and political answers worth committing their lives to? Which class has the program, strategy, and social power to wipe the filth, the unconscionable relations among human beings produced and reproduced by capitalism, off the face of the earth and begin reorganizing society on new foundations?

It is not unusual, nor should it be surprising, for young people to ask questions about whether workers can actually build a socialist world. In fact, the correct answer is: "No, we can't; not as we are today. We make no pretense otherwise."

But there is a much deeper truth, which has been at the heart of Marxism from its origins and which Che Guevara endeavored with such clarity and eloquence to salvage from decades of Stalinist muck. That is, in any true social revolution, workers begin the process of transforming themselves as they collaborate, mobilize, organize, and educate themselves to transform the exploitative class relations they inherit from capitalist society.

That fact is the root of the greatest contradiction that has, since the Stalinist counterrevolution, confronted the workers states in the former Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, and in China. That is why Khrushchev's boast "We will bury you!" could only be a reactionary fantasy. Through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the foundations for a planned economy, the indispensable base had been laid for workers to begin collectively transforming themselves and their social relations, becoming thinking human beings of a new type as they advanced the transition to socialism — at whatever pace and with whatever detours the course of the world revolution made necessary.

But thinking, self-acting workers are a deadly threat to any entrenched bureaucracy. And so at the point that economic output in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe could no longer be expanded by drawing another layer of rural toilers into the factories, progress began slowing to a crawl. Because only a politically class-conscious and motivated working class could organize under those conditions —outside the domination of the law of value —to advance labor productivity. But a class-conscious working class was precisely what the petty-bourgeois Stalinist regimes could never tolerate, let alone encourage.  
 

'Revolutionize society'

Workers, however, can organize ourselves to revolutionize society and begin our own transformation in the process. This is what young fighters, young revolutionists can be won to. As Farrell Dobbs often explained, young people at any time can come to the working class politically through the revolutionary party.

What the communist movement has to offer young fighters is not riches, not a powerful apparatus to become dependent on, either politically or financially. What the communist movement has to offer above all are the generalized lessons, the truthful written record, of the experience of the modern working-class struggle over the past century and a half. It is only by reading, by doing the hard work of studying, and then collectively discussing these lessons that we can redeem what others before us have fought for and won, often at great sacrifice. That is the only way we can learn from their successes, avoid their mistakes, and put ourselves and our class on a stronger footing to fight effectively and win.

I think many of us over the weekend were struck in particular by Tom Leonard's two classes, the one on immigrants I mentioned previously and the one on the unions and the fight against imperialist war. For the majority of us, this was an opportunity to learn from the experiences of a veteran revolutionary worker, from how he personally discovered some of the biggest transformations in world politics as he traveled the seas as a maritime worker during and after World War II.

For many in this room, it was an opportunity to draw lessons from a period of time when you were not yet even on the face of this earth. At the same time, there is also one participant in this conference, Harry Ring, who will soon celebrate his sixtieth year in the communist movement. And we have others here who are well into their fourth decade in the movement, or their third, or their second.

So, the political continuity of the communist movement exists not only through books —nor can it ever, solely — but also through a living web of practical political work and experience. That is why we place such importance on forging a cadre and a leadership that braids together these generations and their overlapping experiences and transforms them into a disciplined combat organization and world communist movement.

It is not just youth, not just thinking political workers, who are attuned to the elemental shifts in politics and the class struggle, even before sustained mass action gets going. These rumblings are detected, if not fully understood, by the most alert spokespeople for the bourgeoisie as well. More and more of them are worried by signs that working people are being pressed too hard, signs that unexpected fights may be brewing.

Remember the brief excerpts I read during the discussion period the day before yesterday.... We are breeding a class war, these bourgeois voices are saying, and we must either prepare for it or try somehow to slow it down. But the capitalists can never prepare sufficiently for the uncontrollable and unforeseeable forces their declining system is producing. Moreover, the crisis itself places ever-sharper limits on the concessions they can make to the toilers, if not to slow down the decline then at least to buffer its consequences.

In their own fashion, sections of the trade union bureaucracy sense these changes too. These bureaucrats are social parasites, even if in a different way from the bondholders and other capitalists. The officialdom makes its living by trying to make sure you do what they want you to do, so they can keep collecting your dues and at the same time maintain the backing of their masters in the employing class. Daniel DeLeon was an old socialist from the turn of the last century who got a lot of things wrong, but among the things he got right was a name for the labor bureaucrats — a name that Lenin loved. DeLeon called them "the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class."

They are ultimately a very weak layer, whose berths will be quickly threatened in the course of any substantial upswing in labor struggles. So out of an instinct for self-preservation, some of them have developed a nose for when class equilibrium is becoming unsettled and things could start getting dicey.

At such times, the officialdom starts reaching out to radicalized workers — including to many like you in this room — to try to get your eyes off the ranks of the working class...

That is why there are few errors worse for class-conscious workers to make right now than to allow ourselves to be drawn into taking responsibility, under whatever guise, for the formal mechanisms of the trade union movement...

Many young people who become sensitive to these changes, however, do so for reasons diametrically opposite to those of the bourgeois commentators or trade union hacks. Young people want to take action against the horrors bred by the capitalist system. And as they do so, some are attracted to a communist workers movement that not only understands and can explain the social and political roots of these horrors, but that looks forward to a good fight and aspires to build on and add to the legacy of all the revolutionary struggles of the past.  
 
 
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