by Jacquie Henderson
(Young Socialist Forum, February 1970)
Ten years ago, on January 30, 1960, seven students and young workers
met in a cramped apartment in Toronto’s east end to found a revolutionary
socialist youth organization. Their group has now developed into the Young
Socialists/Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes, largest organization of Canadian
socialist youth. What brought these pioneers together, and set their group
on the road to such growth?
1960—there was no campus revolt. Universities and high schools still
lay under the deadening apathy and conservatism of the '50's. But the
founders of the "Young Socialist Alliance" in Toronto in 1960, and their
comrades in Vancouver who joined them shortly, came together in response
to the inspiration of two great political events that showed them the
challenge of the ’60s.
The Cuban revolution was rapidly heading for its showdown with U.S.
imperialism, and the establishment of a workers’ state in this hemisphere.
The Young Socialists saw their first task as defending the Americas’ first
socialist revolution against the campaign of slander and hysteria of the
U.S. state department and its Canadian flunkies.
Meanwhile Canadian workers were moving towards the formation of their
own political party, the New Democratic Party. The Young Socialists were
active in its formation—their first meeting centered its discussions on a
conference of youth supporters of the "new party" called for the next
week. They aimed to bring the message of Cuba—the necessity of socialist
solution to the gathering world crisis—to the militants of Canada’s new
labor party.
Later the Young Socialists rapidly responded to the greatest event of
the sixties—the attempt by U.S. imperialism to crush the Vietnamese
revolution. They centered their energies around helping to found an
anti-Vietnam war movement in Canada.
"A World to Win" read the motto on the early Young Socialists’ red
membership cards. But they were a small and unimposing group alongside the
rival forces of 1960 youth radicalism. There were strong clubs of the CCF
(predecessor of the NDP) on most campuses, where the Young Socialists’
talk of nationalizing big business was dismissed as dangerous dogmatism. A
"ban the bomb" movement had thousands of supporters among youth, but its
early leaders, the developing New Left, thought the YS call for a stand
against NATO was damaging and premature.
The Communist Party still had a cross-country youth organization with a
monthly newspaper, Advance. And the Young Socialists were a tiny
and inexperienced group.
How was the Young Socialists able to grow while other, initially far
more imposing organizations splintered, split and disintegrated? Unlike
the new left groups, CUCND [Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament] and its successor SUPA [Student Union for Peace Action], the
Young Socialists almost never made the newspapers. They didn’t have the
powerful support the NDP’s right-wing leadership granted its youth
supporters, or the financial resources of the Young Communist League.
But that small group did have a few things going for it. They knew
where to start. They began with the developed program of revolutionary
socialism. If the New Left leaders prided themselves on rejection of all
"dogmas", changing their strategies and principles with each new season,
the Young Socialists based their program on the experiences of one hundred
years of Marxist revolutionary thought and action. While many young
radicals preached "you can’t trust anyone over 30," the Young Socialists
saw nothing to fear in Marx’s grey beard or Lenin’s bald head. In their
day-to-day work they looked to the adult revolutionary organization the
League for Socialist Action, as the embodiment of these traditions. And
far from rejecting this adult organization, they collaborated with it,
were aided by it, and helped to build it.
The decade was to see their fundamental positions, at first scornfully
rejected by all other youth tendencies, win wide respect and often
universal acceptance on the student left.
The Young Socialists named the enemy—the capitalist profit system
organized around the world under the leadership of U.S. imperialism. They
demanded a fundamental solution, a revolution, to build a totally new,
socialist society. They looked to the working class as the key force to
bring about this change. While supporting the workers’ organizations, the
unions and their political party then in formation, they saw their task
as, together with the League for Socialist Action, a revolutionary
working-class organization, in building a new, revolutionary leadership
for this class. They foresaw a massive radicalization of students ahead
and aimed to win these students to revolutionary socialism. And they were
internationalists—defenders of Cuba, of Vietnam, of world socialism.
But a program, no matter how correct, doesn’t mean much unless
translated into a strategy for action aimed at real and immediate
possibilities. So the early Young Socialists Alliance hailed the formation
of the movement for nuclear disarmament as the vehicle to awaken youth to
the war danger posed by imperialism and to mobilize them towards disarming
the warmakers.
The leaders of the "ban the bomb" movement, the CUCND, rejected any
concept that the roots of war might lie in the capitalist system of profit
and world pillage, and believed the bomb made traditional ideological
divisions of left and right obsolete. In November 1960 the Young Socialist
Alliance, in the first issue of its Canadian Youth Bulletin called
on the CUCND to take a stand for the unilateral disarmament of the western
powers. It called for opposition to the Liberal and Tory war parties, for
immediate Canadian withdrawal from war alliances like NATO, and for the
right of the Canadian people to vote on the question of nuclear arms.
In the fall of 1960, YSers Dick Fidler and John Riddell initiated the
first high school anti-war movement in Toronto, the Canadian Students for
Nuclear Disarmament. In January 1961 hundred high schoolers came to a CSND
debate on NATO featuring unionist Doug Carr and Andrew Brewin of the CCF.
After a powerful YS intervention in the floor debate, the assembly voted
2-1 against NATO and NORAD, establishing itself thereby as the radical
wing of the anti-war movement.
In December 1960 John Darling ran as a YSA anti-war candidate for
Toronto’s Board of Education, receiving 6000 votes in a student-run
campaign against cadet-training in the schools and for students rights.
But the greatest challenge faced by the early Young Socialists was the
foundation of the New Democratic Party. They plunged into the building of
the new party’s youth wing. YSers John Wilson, Ernie Tate, Dick Fidler and
Toni Gorton initiated the first Toronto clubs. With the NDP’s founding the
Young Socialists gave up their independent organization in order to move
fully into the work of building the New Democratic Youth, and became its
organized revolutionary socialist wing.
By 1961, the Young Socialists had organized a group in British
Columbia, and formed a left alliance that won the leadership of the B.C.
New Democratic Youth. In January 1962 they launched Young Socialist
Forum, a mimeographed monthly magazine which served as the forum for
socialism in the B.C. NDY. Its chief editors were Ruth Tate and Phil
Courneyeur. The early YSF campaigned for a socialist NDY, featured
articles on the successes of the Cuban revolution and the war danger, and
achieved a broad circulation in the B.C. left.
For six years the Young Socialists participated in the New Democratic
Youth, building its clubs, promoting its activities, fighting for a
socialist program and leadership. They organized a Left Caucus, uniting a
broad range of forces to carry the socialist struggle in the organization.
In Toronto, they led the NDY in a dramatic and successful campaign for the
right to form political clubs in the high schools. Joe Young and Ken
Wolfson were among the YSers that led this campaign and eventually won the
partial agreement of the Toronto school board.
But the YS’s very success led to vicious reprisals by the Party’s right
wing that was embarrassed by their radicalness and couldn’t cope with the
power of their revolutionary ideas. Expulsions of YSers from the NDP took
place in British Columbia (1962) and Ontario (1963 and 1967). Yet the
forces and influence of the Young Socialists in the NDY continued to grow.
In December 1963, B.C.’s mimeographed Young Socialist Forum was
expanded into a monthly cross-Canada newspaper marking a turn to the
building of a cross-Canada movement. The YSF was sold at high
schools across the country, provoking considerable anger with high school
principals and several encounters with the police.
In the summer of 1964 four of YSF’s editors spent six weeks in
Cuba as part of a tour of 45 Canadian students. They returned to speak in
defense of the Cuban revolution at high schools and universities.
By 1965, YSF had a new headquarters at 32 Cecil St., and a
program of regular forums and parties that made its address known by
hundreds of youth as the meeting place for young radicals.
The summer 1964 issue of YSF carried this headline on the first
page: "Get U.S. Troops Out of Vietnam!" The article said, "The Vietnamese
are fighting for their independence and their right to determine their own
future. The U.S. has declared itself ready to plunge the world into war to
prevent this. Where does Canada stand? … Canada must act to stop the war
in Vietnam! As a member of the Geneva commission, Canada must demand
withdrawal of American forces, and assert the right of the Vietnamese to
determine their own future!"
Withdraw U.S. troops. End Canada’s complicity in the war. Around these
demands and the concept that it is necessary to mobilize large numbers of
people in Canada and around the world to force the imperialist to concede
them, the Young Socialists and the League for Socialist Action helped to
build the Canadian anti-Vietnam war movement and have been its strongest
builders ever since.
In July 1965, delegates representing 60 Young Socialists in groups
formed around Young Socialist Forum in Toronto, Vancouver and
Ottawa met in the YS’s first cross-Canada convention.
The convention was something new for the Canadian radical youth
movement. It was far from the "group grope" and therapy marathons of New
Left gatherings. Months of discussion had ensured that all members had
heard all the points of view in question, and when delegates were elected,
after these discussions, they came equipped to democratically resolve the
questions in dispute. The New Democratic Youth and the activity on the
campuses were two of the major topics discussed.
But the great debate took place around the future direction of the
publication, YSF. Two proposals were put forward when the
discussion opened in April. Allan Engler and Jean Rands in Vancouver
called for YSF to become a quarterly magazine to serve as a
theoretical commentator on the student movement. YSF’s editor, Art
Young, and the Toronto editorial board said YSF should remain a
popular monthly newspaper able to intervene in the student struggles
rather than just comment on them. At the convention a synthesis of the two
positions was reached. YSF was to become a bimonthly magazine—but
one which retained a broad popular appeal and orientation to intervening
in student struggles.
The following years saw rapid changes and new beginnings on the student
left. The policy of inaction and expulsions of the New Democratic Youth’s
leadership was reducing a once broad and promising organization to a
bypassed and isolated grouplet. SUPA, the powerful new left organization,
floundered and dissolved. At the same time, the first beginnings of the
student power movement could be discerned. The Young Socialists grew
rapidly, rising to prominence on the campuses for the first time through
their leadership role in the anti-war movement.
In the fall of 1966 the Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes, a group parallel
to the Young Socialists, was formed in Montreal. The following July the
groups in both the English and French nations came together to form the
Young Socialists/Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes. The 150 participants from
seven major Canadian cities founded Canada’s only bi-national socialist
youth movement and, fully a year before the "student revolt" was generally
recognized and analyzed, adopted a far-reaching analysis of youth
radicalism and the coming upheaval on the campuses.
One document, by Jean Rands, a delegate from Vancouver, called for the
formation of a federated socialist youth movement that would include
different forces on the student left. The majority of the convention
delegates argued against this idea. They felt such an organization would
be based on the bringing together of different groups with fundamental
programmatic differences, that could only lead to the disintegration of
forces rather than their strengthening.
The revolutionary youth organization, the delegates argued, had to be
based on a clear program which could not be compromised to meet some
immediate whim or opportunity. On this programmatic base the organization
would have to be highly organized, demanding a high level of understanding
and activity from all its members. After an extensive discussion the
federated youth movement proposal was withdrawn and this position was
unanimously adopted.
Jean Rands also submitted a document on the need to orient to the
Students for a Democratic University formations. Left unresolved was a
marked difference in emphasis between the independent work of the YS/LJS
and support of these reemerging new left groupings. This question was to
be the center of discussion at the convention the following year.
In addition to the resolutions passed providing the basis for the
activities of the YS/LJS, the convention elected a cross country
leadership for the organization. This Executive Council was made up not of
individual stars, but rather a group of people who the delegates felt
together would build a strong leadership team. Following the convention
the Executive Council met and elected a Central Executive Council to
handle the day to day problems of leadership. They elected Gary Porter to
the post of Executive Secretary of the YS/ LJS.
The following years saw rapid progress for the YS/LJS on the
campuses—and yet its very growth and the opening up of the student
movement posed new problems, and sharpened old differences. So in July
1968 the organization met in an emergency convention called by a dissident
minority in its ranks. Two counterposed positions on the building of the
organization were submitted, one by the Central Executive Council, and one
by Jean Rands and Brian Slocock from Vancouver.
The CEC position laid the emphasis for the YS/ LJS work on the campus
on the independent activities of the YS/LJS, its participation in student
struggles and its unity in action with other groups around specific
questions such as the war in Vietnam, student power, etc. The position put
forward by Rands and Slocock saw the SDU’s as the road forward for the
student movement and said the YS/LJS should see as a priority the support
and building of these organizations at the expense of building the YS/ LJS.
The CEC position was adopted by 32 votes against 16 for the Rands-Slocock
position.
The Executive Council elected at that convention included in its
numbers Jean Rands, Brian Slocock and many of their supporters. The plenum
following the convention re-elected Gary Porter Executive Secretary and
elected Jacquie Henderson editor of YSF.
Differences in the YS are looked on as healthy signs of a vital
movement and the rights of minorities are protected. But later in 1968
both leading proponents of the SDU position followed the logic of their
position. Taking with them a few of their previous supporters, they left
the YS/LJS to build the new left SDU on Simon Fraser (an organization
which subsequently declared itself defunct!).
The Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes was a small organization in Quebec
when, in October 1968, thousands of students held strikes in their schools
over the inadequate educational system and the discrimination against the
French Canadians. But the LJS had a strong socialist program which had as
its foremost point the demand for self-determination for Quebec, and an
analysis of the English Canadian capitalist exploitation of Quebec. With
this program and the cadre it had already gathered, the LJS intervened
energetically in the mass movement of October and were the only force to
pose the necessity for coordination of the struggle and defense of the
student movement. The student union, UGEQ, showed a remarkable lack of
leadership in the events. Out of this struggle Jeune Garde, the
paper of the LJS, was born.
Christmas 1968 and February 1969 saw two important conferences of the
movement. The first was of the Young Socialists, the second a large
conference of the Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes including many new French
Canadian revolutionaries who joined the LJS during and after the October
events. The October 1969 convention of the YS/LJS too reflected the big
developments in Quebec. It adopted the first YS/LJS resolution analyzing
the national oppression of the Quebecois.
Looking back ten years to the optimistic forecasts of these first Young
Socialists we can see that for all their enthusiasm they were not
wide-eyed idealists out of touch with reality. In ten years of rising
world revolution, the program the Young Socialists put forward. regarded
then by other student radicals as totally irrelevant, has now been largely
accepted by many of those same radicals and, more importantly, by growing
numbers of Canadian students. The character of imperialism, the inadequacy
of reforming society and the need for a socialist revolution, the working
class as the agent of social change, support for the Cuban and Vietnamese
revolutions are just some of the points that the Young Socialists
initially put forward alone.
Likewise the organizational concepts adopted by the early YS and
reaffirmed through the ten years have been shown in life to be correct.
Many groups and individuals had different ideas about how to build a
radical youth movement. Many gimmicks were tried: community organizing,
students ‘winning’ strikes for workers, and confrontations ‘sparking’ mass
reaction were just a few. Many groups that had dashing leaders, loose
organizational frameworks, many supporters—still ended up in "the dustbin
of history.".
For a few years the Canadian press was full of reports of SUPA and its
supporters throughout the country. It projected a "new" road forward for
revolutionary youth. But SUPA died years ago. And the organizations to
come out of it, the SDUs, have in turn split and are disintegrating. But
the Young Socialists, organized as a cohesive action oriented pan-Canadian
unit with a well defined program has steadily grown.
The events of the world revolution too have proven the correctness in
orientation of the YS. Since the upsurge of the French working class in
May 1968 the YS position on the working class has become generally
accepted. Likewise the failure of the French workers to seize power has
pointed out very sharply the need to build a revolutionary combat party to
lead the workers to victory.
The Young Socialists/ Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes, allied with the
League for Socialist Action/ Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière, pose this task
concretely before Canadian students. The challenge is to build the
leadership organization of the coming Canadian revolution. If that
revolution is to be successful in this decade—in the ’70s—if humanity is
to survive the ever-present threat of extermination, then this leadership
must be built.
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