YCL-LJC, Central Executive Committee

March, 2016

In response to the dissolution of the Young Communist League USA, made public on January 26th, 2016 in a letter on the Communist Party USA’s website, the Young Communist League of Canada (YCL-LJC) wishes to make the following commentary based on our own recent experience.

The YCL-LJC salutes the proud revolutionary history of the YCL USA and its predecessor organizations in their fight for socialism in the United States. This 90 year history contributed greatly to the youth and student movement in that country.

This history includes organizing young workers in the struggles that led to the foundation of today’s labour movement, organizing hundreds of YCLers to fight fascism in Spain as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, leading the fight against segregation in the area of sports and music, fighting for peace and against McCarthyism and anti-communism during the cold war, contributing greatly in the struggle against racism, and fighting for an end to the horrendous crimes of US imperialism in Vietnam.

After the crisis in the Communist movement and the counterrevolutions in Eastern Europe, the YCL USA continued its struggle and refused to be dissolved by the massive capitalist ideological offensive claiming that “the end of history” had arrived. As our organization was liquidated due to this climate of ideological confusion, the YCL USA remained to contribute to the struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s, especially the revitalized anti-war movement.

The YCL USA influenced thousands of young people, including those that contributed greatly to the history of the 20th century, such as Harry Simms, Claudia Jones and Pete Seeger. The YCL USA stood with us in solidarity in our struggles across Canada and carried out their own activities with heroic determination, all the while facing the particularly difficult circumstances created by having to fight “inside the belly of the beast”.

And so it is with regret that we read the decision to dissolve the YCL USA. We must say that from our perspective in Canada, we do not share the analysis in the statement that “the YCL organizational form didn’t fit the new forms of activism of today’s young generations, their growing interest in socialism and radical change.” Our recent history has shown the opposite.

In the early 1990s, during the height of confusion brought on by the counterrevolutions in the USSR and the socialist states in Eastern Europe, our organization debated its future. Simultaneously there was an attack on the Communist Party coming from both outside and inside the Party. One proposal for the YCL-LJC was to dissolve into a broad left formation called “Rebel Youth”, named after the YCL-LJC’s print magazine. This discussion surrounded debates around whether or not the YCL-LJC should reject Leninism and democratic centralism in favor of a ‘pluralist’ organizing model open to more than one political line and strategy for winning a socialist Canada. But this ‘new’ organization never emerged. The YCL-LJC proceeded to close its office and adopted the analysis that there was little interest in carrying on. This led to 12 years of inactivity of the YCL-LJC, it left young Canadians without a voice in the Communist movement and it gave more ground to bourgeois and class collaborationist ideas in the youth and student movement as a whole.

In the late 1990s and 2000, there were attempts to reorganize the YCL-LJC that ultimately failed. Some of the same thinking that led to our 1991 liquidation reappeared in 2000. What began as an effort to bring back the YCL-LJC led to a “broad radical left” organization called “Young Left”, which concentrated mainly on international solidarity work. After breaking from political unity with the Communist Party of Canada, this group soon dissolved.

When the successful reorganization of the YCL-LJC began in 2004, the comrades involved were able to learn from these mistakes. We openly declared that the YCL-LJC “aspires to be a Marxist-Leninist force in the youth movement, and in the struggle for socialism”(YCL-LJC Constitution) and adopted democratic centralism as the organizational principle by which the YCL-LJC operates. This allowed us to build political unity on a more solid ideological foundation instead of the quick sand of ‘pluralism’ which left itself open to social democratic and ultra left ideas and rejected the idea of unity in action.

This process of reorganization led to our re-founding 24th Convention in 2007 and our subsequent 25th and 26th Convention in 2010 and 2014. Since that time we have been steadily growing and maturing politically as an organization building political unity through struggle. We can say now that we are still small, but have become a cross-Canada organization with a united central leadership that makes a real contribution to the youth and student movement in several cities across the country.

We are politically united with the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), but organizationally independent. Many of our members hold dual membership, but approximately an equal number do not. We have come to recognize the value of this relationship. It is necessary to work towards political unity with the CPC because as young Communists we recognize the need for a revolutionary political party of the working class, and this role cannot be taken up by the YCL-LJC. But we maintain organizational independence in order to more effectively fight in the youth and student movement by not limiting ourselves to young members of the CPC and having a closer relationship with the masses of youth through having a membership which is entirely made up of young people. It allows the particularities of the youth movement to be better expressed in the Communist movement as a whole. As Lenin argued, each generation will find its way to socialism in a different way and this needs to be reflected in a Communist youth organization.

Our organizational independence also allows for us to grow as Communists in different ways and develop as cadre in the Communist movement as a whole. As Lenin said when advocating the independence of the Communist youth leagues: “…unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward.” (Lenin, 1916)

It is true that much of the youth and student movement in Canada does not resemble the “YCL organizational form”. Young people today are under attack. This is a time when youth unemployment is at its highest in decades, when student debt is skyrocketing, racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia and homophobia are increasingly used to divert a united struggle, when youth are increasingly being thrown into prisons or sent off to war, and the capitalist climate crisis’ effects are starting to be felt. The root cause of these and other ills is the capitalist system itself. One of the results of this deepening attack on working people as a whole has been an increase in the militancy in the youth and student movement.

In Canada since the 2008 crisis we have seen notable cross-Canada movements, with many youth playing a prominent role. These include the G20 protests in Ontario in 2010, the Occupy movement across Canada in 2011, the Quebec Student Strike of 2012 and the Idle No More movement for Indigenous rights in 2012-13. These were important struggles that we supported wherever we could, and we made a contribution as the YCL-LJC. As our 26th Convention analyzed, these and other smaller or more local struggles have been largely characterized by their spontaneity and inability to build the necessary levels of unity with other struggles to win substantial immediate demands or go further towards revolutionary change. Recognizing that the youth and student movement as a whole has not adopted a revolutionary perspective, or that it is currently at the stage of somewhat sporadic spontaneous struggle, does not mean that the youth movement doesn’t need a Communist youth organization both now and in the future.

Communications technology has changed and that social media allows for new communications practices and opportunities for new approaches to agitational work. However, social media cannot come close to building the necessary level of political and organizational unity. Hashtags can enable spontaneous movements, which do advance the struggle, but they cannot build the organization and unity needed for the long-term struggle for socialism.

There is always a need for building an organization of young Communists that struggles for immediate reforms to improve the conditions of young people under capitalism, which seeks unity with all other forces who will fight for this or that advancement, while at the same time never losing sight of the necessity of winning socialism. We have the clear perspective that there can be no other road to socialism other than through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This is our main contribution to the youth movement in Canada, and if we don’t bring this perspective to the front lines of the struggle, who will do it?

We are not currently living a revolutionary moment in Canada, but it is absolutely necessary to build youth organizations with a revolutionary perspective in order to overcome subjective weaknesses in the immediate struggles of the youth movement, in order to build the unity and militancy necessary to open the door to socialist revolution in the (hopefully near) future.

The YCL-LJC Canada recognizes a need for our organization to continue to be build across the country as an organization:

• Which seeks to unite all revolutionary youth in Canada: young workers & students, young women, non-binary people, and men, cis and trans, queer and straight, young people of all ethnicities and from all nations within Canada,uniting nations in an equal and voluntary partnership (Indigenous nations, Métis, Québécois, Acadian, and English-speaking Canada).
• That has an independent political line that speaks with its own voice and publishes its own press (Rebel Youth & Jeunesse Militante).
• That endeavours to deepen our understanding and analysis through systematic study of Marxism-Leninism, the creative application of this study to our practical political work. The YCL-LJC is an organization that “learns to struggle, and struggles to learn!”
• That works to build political unity with the Communist Party of Canada, which is necessary to strengthen the overall struggle for socialism in Canada, while maintaining organizational independence and a focus on the Pan-Canadian youth and student movement.
• That seeks to build the broadest possible unity in any immediate struggle for jobs, education, equality, the environment and democracy. We see building unity as necessary, and should be approached without losing our political independence through a political process of participating in practical work, through “unity of action”. It is in the struggle where different left ideas are tested, not through polemics with advocates of reformist or ultra left ideas.
• That is upholds proletarian internationalism as a principle and seeks to unite the global youth and student movement in the anti-imperialist struggle. We recognize that the future of Canada and the world is tied with winning peace and the success of national liberation and anti-imperialist movements. We declare our solidarity with young people building socialism in socialist countries.
• That we combat and overcome anti-Communism. We openly and honestly uphold the Communist label, picking up the revolutionary banner held by working people and youth around the world fighting against capitalism and for socialism.