Question. The leading candidates of the big-business parties for governor of California, Democrat Cruz Bustamante and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, are both responding to recent criticisms about things they are accused of having done in their youth. They have replied by saying they committed “youthful follies” but now have changed.

I’d like to ask you some questions about your record, and how it relates to what you are doing today and what your campaign stands for.

I understand you were a member of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in the early 1960s, and in fact became a member of its National Committee. Is that accurate? If so, can you explain how you got involved in the YSA and how you view that today?

Answer. Yes, I joined the Young Socialist Alliance in the spring of 1962, at the age of 20. It was a few weeks after participating in a large Easter Peace Walk that opposed U.S. nuclear tests. I was among those who walked from Evanston, Illinois, where I was a student at Northwestern University, to downtown Chicago.

If there was a youthful folly I committed in that period, it was carrying out an ultraleft act during that march. I was marching with a friend, and some ultrarightists from the John Birch Society were in a vehicle alongside, flying a red flag with a hammer and sickle while using a bullhorn to bait the demonstration as “communist.” This made me angry. I left the march for a few minutes, walked up behind the vehicle, grabbed the flag, and ran off with it for a few blocks to make sure I wasn’t caught. I made my way back to the demonstration and marched all the way downtown.

By joining the YSA soon thereafter, I developed an understanding of the importance of disciplined participation in protests like this one, rather than individual acts that could bring harm to the demonstration.

At that time we in the YSA were beginning to raise the question of Washington’s growing military intervention in Vietnam. The media was reporting that U.S. military “advisors” were in Vietnam. The liberal and pacifist leaders of this peace walk had let it be known that signs with slogans about anything other than “peace” in the abstract—such as demands that U.S. troops get out of Vietnam—were not welcome. So we had to defend our right to carry whatever signs we wanted to have.

That was the second demonstration I had been on. The first was a demonstration on the Northwestern University campus a little earlier, where members of the YSA joined other students in protesting the presence on campus of a U.S. Army general who was associated with the John Birch Society, Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, who was on a national speaking tour. As we were marching through this quad, out of a dormitory window a student supporting this general lowered a giant swastika flag.

At that time I was involved in classes organized by the members of the YSA and the Socialist Workers Party, studying the threat of fascism and how to fight it. Up to this point, I was becoming revolutionary-minded but wasn’t sure there could be a revolution in the United States. We studied various historical experiences of the working-class movement—why you need a revolutionary party, how we can make a workers revolution in this country.  
 
How I joined the YSA
The way I first came in contact with the communist movement was at a series of meetings in the fall of 1961, organized by students at Northwestern in collaboration with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

One of those was on the Bay of Pigs invasion—the U.S.-organized assault on Cuba in April 1961—which featured a Cuban movie on the invasion and how it was defeated by the working people of Cuba organized in militias and the Revolutionary Armed Forces. A dozen or more Cuban exile counterrevolutionaries disrupted this large meeting, but were not able to break it up.

At that meeting I talked to Betsey Stone, who was staffing a Fair Play for Cuba Committee display on the stage, and bought a pamphlet on the Bay of Pigs invasion; she was also a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. I went outside and another YSAer sold me a copy of the Young Socialist newspaper. Shortly thereafter, Jack Barnes, a YSA leader who was also a student at Northwestern, spoke on the agrarian reform in Cuba. I asked a question and he answered it, but suggested that we talk further about it afterward, which we did. I was invited over for dinner to continue the discussions.

From that night on, we had many political discussions on the Cuban Revolution and how working people can make a revolution in this country. We discussed the campaign to defend Robert F. Williams and members of his movement in Monroe, North Carolina, where Black rights fighters had organized armed self-defense of their community to repel attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams had recently left the country to avoid arrest on frame-up charges by the FBI. There was a shoot-to-kill wanted poster on him in post offices around the country. There was a big defense campaign that we were a leading part of.

In the series of classes, an important turning point in my decision to join the YSA was studying the 1954 events in Guatemala. This was an example of a potentially revolutionary struggle that was blocked by the Stalinist party in that country, which collaborated with what it considered a “progressive” wing of the capitalist class at the expense of the independent mobilization of workers and farmers against the CIA-organized overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz.

I was asked to teach a class that was part of a series on the Communist Manifesto. These took place right after the YSA meetings, held at the University of Chicago, which meant I had to come to the YSA meetings and wait outside. So I went down from Northwestern to the University of Chicago. I had to wait till the meeting was over because I wasn’t a member. So I decided that if I could teach a class on the Communist Manifesto, I could be in the Young Socialist Alliance. So I signed up.

We organized a socialist summer school that year. Young people came in from around the Midwest. It was part of a process of young people being won to the communist movement, of renewing this proletarian party, and helping to make a transition in the party leadership over a period of years.  
 
None of the way with LBJ
In 1964 I was a Student for DeBerry and Shaw—Clifton DeBerry and Ed Shaw were the Socialist Workers candidates for president and vice president in 1964. I had been elected to the National Committee of the YSA by the delegates at the 1963 YSA convention, and in 1964 I went on a speaking tour for DeBerry and Shaw around the Midwest. We did this in face of all the pressure to, as the middle-class leftists said, go “part of the way with LBJ,” which was the slogan of a wing of the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society who advocated voting for Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic president.

We went none of the way with LBJ, who was carrying out an escalation of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam on behalf of the U.S. rulers. Instead, we campaigned through election day for DeBerry and Shaw.

As early as 1962 we would get together and watch Malcolm X on TV. He would appear periodically on the Kup Show, a late-night talk show hosted by Irv Kupcinet. We were attracted to Malcolm and viewed him as a revolutionary.

Q. I understand you went to Cuba in the early years of the revolution there. There’s a picture in the Militant in 1969 that shows you taking part in voluntary labor as part of a brigade of young people from the United States. Why did you go to Cuba and what did you do there?

A. The Young Socialist Alliance was invited to send a delegation to Cuba to join in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the victory of the revolution. We made a banner that read “Norteamericanos con Cuba”—Americans with Cuba—on a big piece of cloth a hotel worker got for us, and we held it up during the gigantic rally in Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) in Havana on January 2. During our trip we also did voluntary work one afternoon.

We went to Santiago de Cuba. There we visited the museum at the Moncada barracks and deepened our understanding of the trajectory of the young revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, who had attacked that garrison of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship on July 26, 1953, and had gone on to lead Cuban working people to power.

I remain proud of the fact that in the course of this trip we met representatives of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of Vietnam, which was leading the struggle in South Vietnam against U.S. intervention.

We had a substantial discussion and celebration in Havana with Huynh Van Ba, the head of the NLF diplomatic mission to Cuba on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Tet offensive carried out by the liberation fighters against the U.S. forces, a turning point in the war against U.S. imperialism.

That encounter included a visit to a National Liberation Front display at a museum in Havana.

Since all of us on this trip, about a dozen YSA members, were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it meant a great deal to us to see how these fighters, in many cases with very rudimentary weapons, were prevailing in the struggle against the mightiest and most brutal imperialist power in the world.

Our YSA delegation presented Van Ba with a statement we had drafted there, saluting the heroism and determination of the Vietnamese people in their struggle for national liberation.

“As part of a new generation of revolutionary youth that is arising in the United States, we pledge to redouble our efforts to end U.S. aggression in Vietnam and in other parts of the world. Your struggle is our example,” the statement read.

At a reception for international guests with Fidel Castro and other leaders of the revolution, we met representatives of the government and armed forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We congratulated them on their successful seizure of the USS Pueblo, a U.S. spy ship, a year earlier.  
 
Emulate example of Cuban Revolution
This trip helped solidify our commitment to building the kind of revolutionary leadership necessary in the United States to emulate the example of the Cuban working people in overthrowing capitalism and establishing a workers and farmers government.

In Cuba we visited schools, hospitals, and other sites. In our visits to factories and farms, we met a great many working people who told us about their participation in the revolution, including young working people who had lived in the United States in exile and had moved back. It was a very inspiring trip.

In Santiago we rode by truck into the Sierra Maestra mountains, to the scene of El Uvero, the first victorious battle of the Rebel Army in 1957, where after the revolutionary victory that site had been turned into a boarding school. I was reading what was then the edition available of Che Guevara’s Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

I’m proud to say that out of those on that trip who are still alive, five remain active in the communist movement—Linda Jenness, Robin Maisel, Dave Prince, Stu Singer, and myself.

Q. You said you were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Could you say a little more about that?

A. I was active in the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the SMC. And I was the Socialist Workers Party representative to the broader antiwar coalition in Chicago.

As part of leading an orientation toward building the kind of antiwar movement that could appeal to and involve working people, we reached out to men and women in uniform, at the military bases, bus depots, etc. I was at many of the big marches on Washington and San Francisco.

Q. The big-business press has widely reported accusations by some opponents of Bustamante, such as recall candidate and State Senator Thomas McClintock and right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, that while in college in the 1970s Bustamante was a member of MEChA, which they label a radical, “violent,” and “racist” organization. They cite MEChA literature advocating the defense of “la Raza,” “the liberation of Aztlán,” and the self-determination of the Chicano people. They single out the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), a document adopted by the 1969 National Chicano Youth Conference in Denver that led to the founding of MEChA. McClintock even equated MEChA with the Ku Klux Klan. What was your association with the Chicano rights movement at that time?

A. I first developed an interest in the Chicano liberation struggle in the mid-1960s during the farm workers’ struggles in California. I was in Chicago at that time and I took part in Militant Labor Forums on that movement, including a forum that featured speakers from the United Farm Workers. In 1967—I was 25 years old then—I moved to Los Angeles, where I began to learn more about that. For example, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance helped organize coverage for the Militant of the land-grant movement in New Mexico led by Reies López Tijerina.

In October 1968 I met with two Chicano community activists at the Socialist Workers Party headquarters in Los Angeles. We discussed how, in the context of all the high school walkouts—known as “blowouts”—and other actions by Chicanos at that time, we could build support for the young people in Mexico who were demanding justice in the aftermath of the Massacre of Tlatelolco, in which police and army troops fired on student demonstrators in Mexico City and killed hundreds of youth.  
 
MEChA and Plan de Aztlán
Members of the YSA and Socialist Workers Party took part in the Chicano youth conferences in Denver, organized by the Crusade for Justice that took place in 1969 and 1970. I was responsible for our party’s collaboration with our members who participated in these conferences. Our comrades took part in the March 1969 National Chicano Youth Conference in Denver, which adopted the Plan de Aztlán, considered so outrageous by the scandalmongers today. That document was a program for the mass mobilization of Chicanos for community control.

The Plan de Aztlán raised the concept that the liberation of the Chicano people would ultimately require “a nation autonomously free, culturally, socially, economically, and politically.” It projected the creation of an independent Chicano political party because “the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feeds from the same trough.” Following the second Denver conference in 1970, the Raza Unida Party in Colorado was launched.

At our 1971 national convention, the Socialist Workers Party adopted a resolution on the Chicano liberation struggle, which is the main document in The Politics of Chicano Liberation, published by Pathfinder Press. I helped in the drafting of that resolution.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was part of the efforts by our movement’s leadership to support and promote the development of independent working-class political action that took the form of the Raza Unida Party. That included a visit to Crystal City, Texas, where one of the families leading the struggle hosted us.

Crystal City is a small town near the border with Mexico that is majority Chicano. But it had been dominated by an all-white city government for decades. The struggle involved fighting against the brutality of the local police and the Texas Rangers, a notoriously racist special state police unit that routinely acted as judge, jury, and executioner against working people, especially Chicanos.

There was a struggle by Chicanos to take over the local government there, which they eventually did. It was one of the first successful examples of independent Chicano political action. The Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance supported this development.

I also attended a public session of the 1972 Raza Unida Party national gathering in El Paso, Texas.

There were different currents within the Chicano movement. There were some elements that were against revolutionary socialism, considering Marxism to be a “European import.” But we were an active part of this movement, and we were welcomed by many of the militants in the Chicano movement who were open to a working-class political trajectory.

MEChA is a Chicano student organization with chapters on campuses throughout the Southwest and other parts of the country. In recent years, MEChA chapters in Southern California helped organize speaking tours for Cubans to tell the truth about the Cuban Revolution. These included Carlos Tablada, the author of Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism, and Cuban revolutionary youth leaders. This past summer a number of the young people who took part in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange trip to Cuba were members of MEChA who traveled there to see Cuba for themselves.

The attacks on MEChA as a “racist” organization are a reactionary slander. MEChA, like other Chicano organizations, supports demands aimed at combating the oppression of the Chicano people. You can’t identify the nationalism of the oppressed with the nationalism of the oppressor. I was taught this when I joined the communist movement. At that time we studied the discussions with Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky that were later published by Pathfinder as Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination.

Our movement’s collaboration with Malcolm X, and our understanding of the revolutionary dynamic of Malcolm’s political evolution, prepared us for the nationalist awakening among the Chicano people and the development of a fighting movement of Chicanos. It was led by young people who wanted not to be ashamed of using Spanish and to learn about the history and traditions of the Chicano people. These are issues that the Plan de Aztlán, for example, centered on. Young people today can find out the truth about these struggles in books such as The Politics of Chicano Liberation and The Changing Face of U.S. Politics.

(In the second part of this interview, Britton describes, among other things, his activity in the communist movement during the rise of the Black liberation struggle in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s.)
 
 
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