Blind Obedience, Revolutionary Discipline, and the Youth

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Declaration of the International Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists) to the Youth Conference at Paris

The workers of the world stand at a turning point. After a series of victories of imperialist reaction, particularly fascism, the proletariat will have to pass through years of hard tests and difficult struggle. The continuity of the revolutionary movement can be assured only on the condition that new troops of convinced and tested fighters emerge from the younger generation.

The Social Democracy, as its flight before Hitler conclusively shows, is able to educate lackeys, not fighters. The young workers have nothing to learn in the school of this party. The school of Marx and Lenin alone shows them the way to break through the imperialist and fascist hell into a socialist society.

Although we appeal to the workers to rally around the banner of the Comintern, we believe it mandatory to clearly point out that its revision of the principles of communism and the bureaucratic degeneration of its regime enormously hamper the influence of the Comintern on the young workers and make their correct revolutionary education difficult

The revision of principle has found its worst expression in the theory of "socialism in one country," which undermines proletarian internationalism and covers up all types of petty-bourgeois, reactionary, utopian, and nationalist tendencies in the workers' ranks.

The International Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists), in a series of programmatic documents based on the experience of the last ten years, has denounced the fatal distortions introduced by bureaucratic centrism into the theory and practice of communism. It is necessary here at this youth conference to strenuously protest against the bureaucratic regime instituted in the party which stifles the internal life of the Communist vanguard and closes the road to an independent development of the youth.

Blind obedience is a virtue in a soldier of a capitalist army but not in a proletarian fighter. Revolutionary discipline is rooted in collective thought and will. A supporter of the theory of scientific communism does not take anything on word. He judges everything by reason and experience. The youth cannot accept Marxism on command; it must assimilate it for itself through an independent effort of thought This is precisely why the youth should have the opportunity not only to educate itself but also to make mistakes in order to rise through its own errors to a Communist conception. Bureaucratic and artificial discipline has crumbled to dust at the moment of danger. Revolutionary discipline does not exclude but demands the right of checking and criticism. Only in this way can an indestructible revolutionary army be created.

The young worker needs leadership from the party. But this should not be leadership by command. When at every step coercion is substituted for persuasion, the breath of life disappears from the organization, and with it, the people.

Not only must we reject but also mercilessly destroy the use of repression, slander, and physical methods in the struggle of the different groups and factions inside the workers' movement These invidious methods have nothing in common with the arsenal of Communist education. Brought into the workers' movement during the last ten years by the Stalinist bureaucracy, they have poisoned the atmosphere of the proletarian vanguard, particularly among the youth, and isolated the organizations from the broad working masses.

We must free the revolutionary program and the internal regime from Stalinism and return the Comintern to the path of Marx and Lenin.