Published: Buffalo Student, Volume 1, Number 2, May 3, 1972.�
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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An entirely “new type” of conference has taken place in Buffalo. A conference in the style of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in the style of the Internationalists, a conference entirely consistent with all that is new, vigorous and developing in our country, a conference entirely consistent with the revolutionary aspirations of the American proletariat – the recent Buffalo Student Movement Conference “UPHOLD THE REVOLUTIONARY ASPIRATIONS OF THE AMERICAN PROLETARIAT” was definitely a conference of this type; It was neither a revisionist conference to promote reformism and social fascist ideology or an “ultra-left” conference divorced from the masses, but a proletarian revolutionary and mass democratic conference held in the midst of the masses and carried out in the spirit of uncompromising class struggle against all bourgeois trends. It was truly a C0NFERENCE OF THE NEW and a CONFERENCE OF UNITY.
From the first day of the conference the proletarian revolutionaries met for the sole purpose of summing up their experience in BUILDING THE PARTY and AROUSING THE MASSES in order to put into practice definite guidelines for broadening and deepening their work. The report from the representative of the American Communist Workers’ Movement which called on the comrades to begin to carry out massive, external consolidation of the movement to establish MASS DEMOCRACY among the people and to strive hard to participate in building the Centralized Organs of the PARTY and which summed up, in detail, the political situation locally and the methods used in building the PARTY was unanimously accepted and immediately put into practice. The Central Unit of the Buffalo Student Movement was elected and the program of the BSM, unit of American Student Movement, under the leadership of ACWM (M-L) was approved. The Central Unit immediately met and elected its public spokesman, Comrade David Katzman, decided on methods of putting the Buffalo Student Movement program into practice and undertook the work of leading the whole conference.
On the second evening of the conference, intense class struggle broke out between the proletarian revolutionary line of the American Communist Workers’ Movement (Marxist-Leninist) that WITHOUT A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY THERE CAN BE NO REVOLUTIONARY STUDENT MOVEMENT and that to build the Party we must LEARN FROM THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION, GRASP THE INTERNATIONALIST METHODS OF WORK and the bourgeois reactionary line of a tiny handful of “curiosity seekers” and chance individuals who came to the conference to push the foul line that “material conditions aren’t ripe for revolution so we had better call upon the masses to fight for reform.” Trying to subvert the revolutionary form of the conference these idlers raised all sorts of objections and questions out of thin air in order to oppose the proletarian revolutionaries from summing up actual experience and applying the lessons learned to concretely further the anti-fascist revolution of the American working class and people. To these “worthies” the fact of the American working class and people uniting to overthrow fascism is a matter of discussion, definition and personal taste – they prefer to engage in sterile discussion on so-called “material conditions” or “political economy” than to integrate with actual revolutionary practice of our people. The revolutionaries united as one to smash this revisionist line of organizing to “understand the world” and upheld the proletarian line of “organizing to change the world.”
For the next three days the revolutionaries took the line of the conference deep among the student masses at SUNYAB and Buffalo State, thus beginning the work of establishing MASS DEMOCRACY among the people by holding mass democratic meetings in which the masses could freely air their views and unite with the communists to begin discussion on how the American people can take their destiny in their own hands.
After a GRAND RALLY on Friday night, entitled MAO TSETUNG THOUGHT IS THE BRIGHT RED BANNER OF THE ANTI-FASCIST REVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS AND PEOPLE, which was attended by nearly 50 comrades and friends of the Buffalo Student Movement, the Final Session of the conference was held. The representative from the American Communist Workers’ Movement gave the main address, summing up the victory of the proletarian revolutionary line in the conference and calling upon comrades to UPHOLD MASS DEMOCRACY AS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE IN BUILDING THE PARTY. Under the leadership of the Central Unit of the Buffalo Student Movement all comrades organized themselves into definite teams to carry through the line of the conference of UPHOLD THE REVOLUTIONARY ASPIRATIONS OF THE AMERICAN PROLETARIAT on the basis of MAO THOUGHT by following action with analysis, the mass democratic method of work and building conscious and compact communist groups among students.