p Operating among the youth, the Trotskyites not only take advantage of their ignorance about the past and present of Trotskyism, but also try to capitalize on some attitudes among the youth.

p A fairly large part of Left-radical young people want to put an end to the social injustice of capitalist society at once, and chafe at any delay. What such young people say and do is marked by a high level of emotionalism that springs from a sense of indignation.

p However, these young people have a very vague idea as to how to fight effectively. Their 40 spontaneous action looks more like a demonstrative outburst which now and again assumes absurd forms (like the assertion that it is better to set fire to a department store than to own one, and to act accordingly, slogans like "Peace to Men, War on Institutions" or terroristic acts resulting in the senseless loss of life).

p Such actions harm, rather than advance, the revolutionary struggle, since they help the reactionaries to compromise the very idea of revolution. They cause fairly large sections of the working people to recoil from participation in the anti-imperialist movement, and do much harm to the young people themselves. There is good reason why a series of such excesses, which do nothing to change the state of affairs, is usually followed by a lengthy interval of political apathy and passivity.

p It would be wrong, of course, merely to condemn some of the actions taken by these young people without seeing what causes them. One must realize that these young people, indignant at the injustices of capitalist society, challenge it in forms which, they think, make it clear what side they are on.

p Indeed, these young people are searching for ways and means of struggle, now and again groping blindly in the dark, and wasting their young strength and energy in endless discussions and debates. Thus, students of British academic institutions stage “referenda” that go on and on without producing results, or "general assemblies" to discuss "all matters" for days on end.

p All of his, including the shortcomings as well, shows that the young people are becoming more 41 radical and persistent, and that they have a growing sense of social responsibility. The process of radicalization itself must be welcomed by those who want to see the revolutionary potential built up and the political army of antiimperialist fighters increased.

p However, the Left-radical young people now and again put one in mind of a boat which has shoved off from one shore and is floating in midstream. These young men and women have already freed themselves from the influence of the prevailing bourgeois ideology or are in the process of doing so, but they have not yet joined the proletariat, the only consistent revolutionary class of capitalist society. In their efforts to take an independent stand, the Left-radical young people insist on keeping the proletariat at arms’ length as well.

p These young people do not always realize that their conflict with capitalist society is a class conflict which goes to the very roots of society and cannot be resolved except in close alliance with the other anti-imperialist movements.

p Those who now take an ultra-Leftist stand fall into two categories. The first lot includes those who sincerely believe that revolutionary spirit is determined by the number of windows broken in the course of demonstrations and the height of the flames in burning buildings. They accuse those who do not approve such false stereotypes of revolutionary struggle of being overly cautious or cowardly.

p And besides these honestly misled people there are the ones who feed on the ideas of "Left radicalism" and use them for purposes of 42 mimicry and to strengthen their own positions in the revolutionary movement. The pseudo-Leftist ideas they spread are not due to erroneous conceptions or lack of information, but a deliberate and malicious policy of encouraging Leftist mistakes and helping them take root.

p The purpose of this is to create favourable conditions for introducing conceptions which have nothing in common with the interests of the revolutionary struggle or the needs of the youth.

p Herbert Marcuse, an American professor, owes his recent popularity in the Left-radical movement to the fact that some of the young people flirted with the ideas of nihilism. Marcuse rejected the legal forms of class struggle and "totally repudiated" the modern industrial society, thereby seeking to provide a theoretical basis for adventurist, anarchist action.

p This outwardly respectable elderly man delighted in the wildest anarchist pranks. He glorified anarchist action which he termed extremely progressive. He once told a correspondent that he regarded the anarchist element as a very powerful and highly progressive force.

p At one time, some young people succumbed to Marcuse’s influence, and almost accepted him as the champion of their interests and idol of the Left-radical movement. But very soon the young people, who are sensitive to any pretence, saw through the fine words and swiftly realized that Marcuse was, in fact, little concerned with fundamental change. The young people began to throw his books into the scrap heap, and attended his lectures across Europe merely to throw rotten eggs and tomatoes.

p The anarchists have also continued their attempts to capitalize on the impatience of the youth. Their predecessors, the 19th-century anarchists, used to say that every man had a devil on his left shoulder and an angel on his right one. The one induced man to rebel and the other to conform. Today, the anarchists clearly direct their appeal to the devil, in an effort to incite the worst in the young which is presented as ultra-revolutionariness.

p Here is an excerpt from the book Obsolete Communism—the Left-Wing Alternative by Cohn-Bendit, one of the “ideologists” of modern anarchism. He says: "Put on your clothes now—we hope you have read these pages in bed—and go to cinema. Look there at the sad tedium of a life from which you are generally excluded. See the sequences dancing before your eyes, the actors enacting what you experience daily, except that with you it is unfortunately no acting. Then, as soon as the first ad of the next show appears on the screen, take out your tomatoes or rotten eggs and act. Say ‘No’ to everything. After that, go out and tear off all posters... And so, act! Seek a new relationship with your girl-friend, love in a different way, say ‘No’ to the family. Begin the revolution here and now—not for others, for yourself.”   [43•1 

p It is hard to say whether this “advice” is prompted more by the urge for publicity by extolling base instincts or attempts to stultify young people and to discredit the very idea of 44 revolutionary struggle. At any rate, many young men and women managed to see through CohnBendit and declared him to be an unprincipled political careerist, whose “recommendations” were not worth much.

p They did take some of his advice, though. When he tried to speak at public lectures he was pelted with rotten tomatoes. Cohn-Bendit found himself in the same boat with his rival Herbert Marcuse.

p Of course, it would be premature to conclude that Marcuse and Cohn-Bendit are completely out of the picture. They still have some followers among the youth, but their influence among the ultra-Leftist youth has sharply declined. This is a situation which the Trotskyites would like to make the most of and to win over the ones who have dropped Marcuse and Cohn- Bendit. There are people in the "Fourth International" who believe that advantage could be taken of the increasing exodus of young people from the Maoist groups. One writer said in a Trotskyite mouthpiece in May 1971: "I have no doubt that many of the Maoist organizations’ members will either leave disillusioned or be expelled. That is those members who had believed in the ‘anti-imperialist’ Maoist phraseology”.   [44•1 

p The Trotskyites have, consequently, tried to cast their net fairly far out in the hope that someone would fall into it, be it the “ Marcuseans” or the anarchists, or even the disillusioned members of Maoist organizations.

p The bait they use is the old one of expressing sympathy and praising various reckless actions 45 by the Left-radical youth. The negative features of the student movement are played up as virtues. However, the Trotskyites regard the movement itself as a distorting mirror in which the beautiful may appear ugly and the ugly seem quite presentable.

p They have praised the youth to the skies for their impetuousness and lack of restraint insisting that these are the qualities which enable young people to play a leading role in the revolutionary struggle.

p In efforts to please the anarchist-minded section of the youth and to win them over, the Trotskyites have even been prepared to include some anarchist slogans in their own “ theoretical” platform. The French Trotskyites, grouped round the magazine Verite, have formulated the following programme to lure the youth: "A government without rulers," without police, without bureaucrats." This has much in common with the calls issued by some neo-anarchists.

p It is true that now and again Trotskyite journals criticize certain anarchist actions by the students, but this is being done in passing, without any clear-cut repudiation of anarchist ideology, or any condemnation, which would alienate those who favour nothing but "direct action.”

p The Trotskyites seek to create the impression that they alone know just how the energies of the Left-radical youth should be directed. They claim that they know how to activate the youth, because they alone have a clear-cut idea of the ways of the class struggle.

Actually, the Trotskyites have no such programme at all.