From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 1 No. 3, 28 August 1937, p. 9.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“The Yipsels show in advance what the party will be like a year from now” – that is what the left wing Yipsels used to boast during the last few years, When each advance of the party to the left was presaged and prepared by a similar movement among the youth. In the fight against the first Old Guard, the YPSL was. won soonest, and became a powerful lever in swinging the party.
Today too the national YPSL belongs to the left wing. And this is one of the reasons why the Right wing entered upon its present desperate campaign to split and liquidate the party before the left wing gains a majority. It is also one of the surest indications that the Appeal group is the heir and continuator of the best left wing traditions of the movement.
An overwhelming majority of the YPSL supports the left wing Appeal group. Here is a quick survey of the national situation.
And the little-tin-soldier leaders of Clarity pretend that they are the mass-workers while we are ... sectarians!
Clarity however controls the NEC (elected two years ago) and the national machinery; and like the capitalist class, they are determined that the Left shall not win legally. Panicky, they are resorting to every shady trick to keep a formal majority at the coming National Convention in September.
In New York the Clarity-Right wing bloc in control of the YPSL has recently been conducting as real a split campaign as has Altman in the party. When four Yipsel applicants for the party were rejected as “Trotskyites” (two of them with the consent of two Clarityites on the party Executive), the YPSL Clarityites illegally dropped them from the League also, because “Altman demands it”. All posts are being denied Appealites. Unprecedentedly flimsy charges have been brought against Appealite Executive Committee members. The latest move was the expulsion of Comrade Bergner, who recently broke with Clarity on uncovering the letter referred to above and preferred charges against Barshop. The charges against Barshop were not taken up, but instead Bergner was illegally expelled with no quorum present!
These crooked dealings and provocative attacks on the left wing have so far resulted only in the resignation of a group of members from the YPSL Clarity caucus in New York.
What stands out above all is: if the three-way split which Clarity so desires takes place, there will be no youth organization left but ours. Clarity (and, it goes without saying, Altman) will not be able to salvage enough from their wreckage to maintain a pretense of an organization. The YPSL will continue its traditional custom of going with the left.
Last updated on 19 November 2014