Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 1 (January 1981).
We now have in existence a nationwide mass black youth movement, as a youth wing of the black working class movement.
This youth movement, however, has yet to develop its inner machinery of coordination and its national leadership. That is a task of the present period.
The youth movement is not now at a peak. This temporary and necessary ‘resting’ stage must be used to identify and digest the lessons of the past period. On that basis, the leaders of the youth can undertake the very serious and difficult tasks that the struggle now demands in order to reach the next and higher stage.
History has launched the risings of the black youth in two instalments-1976 and 1980. Together, these have made up the first round of the black youth movement of South Africa.
A second, greater round of the youth movement is bound to follow. If there is a lack of preparations, this will not prevent it. But a lack of preparations can lead to tragic disasters.
With proper preparations, the coming round of the youth movement will mean a huge advance for the whole struggle.
Learned
We have learned to evaluate the claims of the state about their good intentions, not on the basis of their utterances, but on the basis of their actual bloody deeds. We must urgently learn to evaluate both the words and deeds of our enemies on the basis of their real class needs.
The inevitability of a new round of the youth movement flows from the fact that official South Africa is incapable of removing the terrible regimentation of the black school youth. It found this system absolutely essential even during the past period of capitalist world boom. Much less can it choose to change in the present period of crisis.
The 1976 movement which preceded the 1980 movement by four years gave them enough warning to change if they could. Their failure to change precipitated the 1980 movement and was proof, if any was needed, of the total irreconcilability of their interests with those of the black youth.
Capitalism needs to train the black youth for docility and inferiority. Varnishing the vicious regimentation in the schools with a thin coat of ‘better classrooms’, etc., will not in any way change the system of preparing the black youth for wage-slavery.
The only system of production which will need the black youth to be trained in independent judgement and confidence, as a vital part of their preparation for life and work, is socialist production under the control and management of the workers.
The place of the black youth in their fight against inferior education is alongside their working parents in the struggle for workers’ democracy in South Africa.
Only work among and with the various sections of the black workers can provide the basis for unity of the youth on any significant national scale. And it is only through such work that the youth leadership scattered all over the country will find the way of creating a national leadership for the whole youth movement.
All discussions of the problems of inferior education which do not have as an immediate aim and do not achieve the involvement of the youth in actual political work within the workers’ movement, are bound to become abstract. They will lead only to frustration and division of the black youth.
All those who honestly devote themselves to ‘work within the workers’ movement (irrespective of their political affiliations at present) will in fact develop in the correct direction. Participation in the workers’ movement must be used as a measure of one’s seriousness in the struggle, as also it must be used to promote such seriousness.
There is an urgent need to expose at all times all the enemies of the workers’ movement, who for that very reason cannot be genuine friends of the black youth movement.
Underground
All the activists of the youth movement should continue to develop their underground links with the movement of the black working class as a whole, not neglecting but rather emphasising links with the migrant section of this movement. The underground links created during the high tide in 1976 and 1980 should be consolidated, and extended to areas not previously reached.
If careful preparations are made, the next round of the black youth movement can quickly take on a general national character and receive the backing of the black workers on a nationwide scale. But for that very reason, organisational preparations will not be enough: What is needed is a clear perspective, programme and strategy for a revolutionary victory of the working class in the coming period.
It is by thoroughly mastering the ideas of Marxism – the revolutionary science of the international working class – that the black youth can fulfil their potential in struggle. The need is for young militants to develop themselves consciously as Marxist cadres within the fighting ranks of the workers’ movement.
In that way the youth movement and the workers’ movement can rise together to their common tasks.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2021).
