As adopted by the 29th Central Convention of the YCL-LJC Canada, October 2023

Introduction

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles … Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 

Down through the ages, working youth have dreamed of a world of freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and misery. 

The year 1921 brought the birth of the Communist Party of Canada / Parti communiste du Canada, bringing together fighters for socialism under the banner of the Communist International. They gathered inside a barn outside Guelph, Ontario, under conditions of illegality to reject imperialism–the system that caused so much death and destruction during the war–and embrace the Bolshevik model. The founders of the party had their convictions forged in mass militant labour struggles such as the Winnipeg General Strike and the organised opposition to conscription in Quebec.  

Despite being a clandestine outlawed organization, the Party worked hard to establish a newspaper, The Worker, and then our organization, the Young Communist League / Ligue de la jeunesse communiste was built in 1923. Then as now, the Party understood the importance of an autonomous youth organisation for communists. Conditions have changed, but our goal remains the same. 

The “Dirty Thirties” saw YCLers organize the unorganized in work camps, fight for important reforms like unemployment insurance and universal healthcare, and volunteer to fight fascism in Spain. In the 1940s, due to a combination of the success of the Popular Front tactic establishing the Canadian Youth Congress as well as the return of illegality through the War Measures Act, the YCL-LJC became the National Federation of Labour Youth. The NFLY was a founding member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and went on to organise a coast-to-coast youth strike against the removal of price controls, known as the Candy Bar Strike. The 1960s saw workers holding state power for the first time in the Western hemisphere, students organising across the country, mass action against the American war on Vietnam, and the strengthening of the Indigenous sovereignty and Quebec national movements. The YCL-LJC was reformed at this time as a communist youth organization grounded in Marxism-Leninism. During the ‘70s the YCL-LJC organized against the coups in Chile and Argentina, campaigned for freedom for political prisoners like Angela Davis, and participated in a country-wide strike against wage controls. 

The end of the ‘80s was tumultuous times for the League, leading to its liquidation in 1991. Nevertheless, throughout the decade young communists were active in mass campaigns for peace and solidarity: campaigns against nuclear weapon proliferation, the BDS and anti-apartheid movement, and solidarity campaigns with Grenada and Nicaragua. Members and veterans of the YCL-LJC also helped in the struggle against liquidation of the CPC-PCC. They kept the movement alive, continuing to build proletarian internationalism and stoke the class struggle. 

The YCL-LJC was refounded in 2007 in recognition of the mass mobilizations of young people in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Free trade and globalisation, the invasion of Iraq, environmental devastation, struggles for social justice and equality, and a growing student movement had all brought youth to the streets and towards the Communist Party. In the wake of the counterrevolutions in the USSR and people’s democracies, and the turmoil in the CPC-PCC from the attempted liquidation, Social-Democracy, Anarchism, Liberalism, Reaction, Trotskyism, and Maoism, failed to provide young workers with a clear alternative to imperialism or even the tools to engage in the class struggle. This was not “the end of history” that some had hoped for. 

Since being refounded the YCL-LJC has relaunched our bilingual press, Rebel Youth/Jeunesse Militante, and worked to build clubs coast to coast. We are active in the campaigns of WFDY and the youth and student festival movement; we were protesting when the Canadian military waged war in Afghanistan and Libya; we continue to work to bring young workers and students into the Cuba and Palestine solidarity organisations; we fight to build a militant pan-Canadian student movement; we push for reforms as members of the labour movement such as raising the minimum wage and rights for migrant and gig workers; and we mobilise support for Indigenous peoples’ struggles against the state and transnational corporations. 

Throughout the history of the CPC-PCC, young communists have been dedicated fighters in the struggle for fundamental social change. This commitment has required great sacrifice, and we must recognise the work undertaken to have an independent communist youth organisation within the “small intestine of the beast.” We take the hard work of those who have come before us as an example as we build the League and the struggle for working class political power.  

As young communists, our role is to commit to building the movement for socialism-communism. The tasks ahead require discipline and fortitude, as well as opportunities to learn and grow collectively, to forge new and lasting bonds as comrades, and to do more than simply interpret the crisis around us. The ruling class has plenty of distractions for young people, and it is our role to raise class consciousness and bring our generation to the fight. We impose the daunting challenge on ourselves to build the League, but that load is lightened with every new recruit. We stand on the shoulders of our forebears as we continue their work in the YCL-LJC’s second century, a century that will see the workers of the world abolish bourgeois private property and build socialism. We have a long and proud history of struggle for the emancipation of working people, both in Canada and around the world–and as young communists it is our job to continue the history of struggle and keep the red flag flying!

Imperialism, the age of war and revolution 

“The period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution.”

Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism 

Vladimir Lenin 

Material production is the basis of human existence. To sustain life, people have to produce food, clothing, shelter and other vital necessities. The process of production consists in the interaction between society and nature consists of three elements–labour, objects of labour, and means of labour. 

Labour is the perennial process of purposeful activity aimed at adapting natural objects to satisfy human wants and needs. Labour is the application of human energy, intellect, and effort to transform natural objects. Labour is the prime basic condition for all human existence, in a sense labour created humanity itself. 

Objects of labour are things found in nature, to which people apply their labour. The range of objects of labour expands with the progress of science–new objects are discovered, such as synthetic materials. 

Means of labour are the things people use to act upon objects of labour. They can produce nothing by themselves, however, and must be put into operation by people. 

The means of labour and the objects of labour taken together constitute the means of production. The means of production and people with their experience and skills together constitute the productive forces of any given society. As societies change nature through the process of labour, people invariably enter into social relations with one another–individually and collectively. 

The mode of production is the dialectical unity of the productive forces and the productive relations. Different types of production relations can exist simultaneously in society. But it is the dominant or prevailing type of production relations which determine the mode of production. 

Modes of production have changed through history. Some examples are primitive-communal, slave owning, feudalism based on the land, capitalism based on industry, and socialism, the conquest of power by the exploited.

The capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production, has no future. Capitalism has outlived its usefulness, and it is incapable of meeting the needs and aspirations of the world’s peoples. By its very nature, capitalism generates and intensifies mass unemployment and poverty, national chauvinism and exclusivism, racism, gender inequality and oppression, environmental collapse, war and reaction. Capitalism in Canada and the world today is a crisis-ridden and decaying system. But, it is pregnant with the future, socialism. 

Capitalism as a mode of production has reached its final phase, imperialism. 

While there are those who present an overly simplistic analysis of imperialism, narrowly characterising it as the political and economic inequality existing between different countries, or sometimes merely (and opportunistically) the use of military force at all, there is only one theory and definition of imperialism which has proven consistent–that developed by Lenin. Lenin observed that imperialism is an inevitable stage of advanced capitalism in its decay, and not simply a policy. Imperialism cannot be fully understood by only examining the relationship between the advanced capitalist countries and those ‘backward’ countries where development has been distorted as a result of imperialism. This is because while countries may play a role, it is ultimately the global capitalist ruling class which plays the lead.  

Lenin correctly outlined five characteristics of imperialism. 

(1) The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; and (5) The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; the stage in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; the stage in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; the stage in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. 

These are important features of the phenomenon, not the criteria for which state is or is not imperialist. Imagine a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more “just” distribution of slaves. Would the question be which side to take, or is the question how to get rid of slavery? 

State monopoly capitalism is the union of the power of the great capitalist monopolies with the power of the state. A defining feature of the creation of state monopoly capitalism is the government pays for activities that are essential, but not profitable. The government, regardless of what party holds office in such a state, essentially becomes the political instrument of the top strata of monopoly capital. Monopoly uses the state to regulate the economy with financial aid through government orders, credits, forgivable loans, tax rebates, and various other forms of state subsidies, all of which, in addition to government fiscal and monetary policies, are used to redistribute the income of the country in favour of the monopolies. 

For all its state and international regulation, monopoly capitalism basically remains an anarchic market economy. Indeed, democratic regulation and planned development of the economy are fundamentally incompatible with capitalist relations of private ownership and the spontaneous forces of the capitalist market. The idea that the capitalist world is an affluent consumer society, that it has outlived economic crisis and can provide full employment and continuously rising living standards, is false. The idea that sustained economic growth and job creation can be achieved by increasing productivity and international competitiveness is equally false. Due to the overproduction of fictitious capital, the economy is in a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis, and stagnation. With this cycle comes the forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power, attempted for the purpose of cheapening commodities. Under all conditions capitalism works against the interests of the working class. Because the system is based on the exploitation of labour by capital for profit, there can be no real security for the working people. The insatiable drive of capital for profit and its ever-increasing exploitation and speed-up tend to undermine whatever wage gains are won through struggle. At the same time, monopoly capital extracts huge profits from wage-earners, and working people in general, by its manipulation of the money and credit system through tax avoidance schemes, accounting practices like ‘mark-to-market,’ and the purchase and sale of debt, and by government taxation policy which redistributes the national income in favour of the wealthy.

The revolution in science and technology has intensified the anarchy of production and the unevenness of capitalist development. The fierce competition between rival transnationals and financial groups drives each corporation to introduce cost-saving technology. But technological innovation is extremely expensive, and its application across an industry eventually cheapens the value of the goods produced and thereby intensifies the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Finance capital, in turn, tries to offset this tendency of declining rate of profit by: (1) driving down its labour costs through wage cuts, benefits cuts, pension cuts, speed-ups, lengthening the work day, contract work, redundancies, plant shutdowns, and other forms of corporate restructuring; (2) absorbing or merging with its competitors; (3) redistributing income from the working people to the capitalist class through taxation policies; (4) privatising parts of the public sector and turning them into new sources of profit; and (5) forcing open access to new markets through trade and investment agreements and, where necessary, through military aggression.

Imperialism is moribund capitalism and contains the embryo of socialism. Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it drags the capitalists, so to speak, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. Imperialism, in short, is capitalism in the age of financialised monopolies.

For most of the 20th century rivalry among capitalist states for economic advantage had been superseded by rivalry between a US-led capitalist world and Soviet-led socialist world. Now, wars between capitalist states are as a rule the consequence of their competition in the world market. What means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of spheres of influence for finance capital on the other? 

Imperialism and Canada

“In his masterly analysis of Imperialism, Lenin showed how monopoly characterizes that stage of capitalist development at which, ‘while commodity production continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, the big profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation.’ The truth of the statement may be verified by a study of the economy of any monopoly capitalist country; nowhere is it more fully verified than in the record of finance-capital in Canada.”

Canada: The Communist Viewpoint 

Tim Buck 

The central fact of political life in Canada is that state power is in the hands of Canadian finance capital. In capitalist society, the owners of the large-scale means of production, trade and finance control the state machinery: the armed forces, police, judiciary, and civil service. The capitalist state is thus an instrument of class rule. A small minority–the exploiting class–rules in fact over the great majority of the people who create all the wealth and provide all the services.

The Canadian people in the past waged a revolutionary struggle for democracy, for representative institutions, universal suffrage, and popular liberties. In 1837, popular anti-colonial uprisings led by the democratic forces of French and English Canada revolted against colonial officialdom and the reactionary and privileged strata (the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Chateau Clique in Lower Canada). The revolutionary uprising of the Métis and their First Nation allies followed in the west. But these struggles took place before and during the period of the birth of industrial capitalism in Canada; they opened the way to the development of industry and the political rule of the Canadian capitalist class.

Canada includes many nations. The word ‘nation’ is used in different ways, but what is meant here is an historically-constituted community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and national consciousness manifested in a common culture. Nations come into existence and pass out of existence, by forcible and peaceful historical processes, or a combination of both. It is a dynamic process in which the creation and development of each nation occurs in a specific and different way. As a result, the struggle for a democratic solution to the national question requires an understanding and respect for these objective differences.

Among the smaller nations in Canada are Indigenous peoples who are exercising their right to sovereignty with the demand for autonomy and self-government. Among these are the Northern Cree in Quebec, and the territory of Nunavut, the Nisga’a on the west coast, and others. The Acadians in the Maritimes also constitute a smaller nation in Canada. The two largest nations are English-speaking Canada and Quebec.

The crisis of confederation lies first and foremost in the refusal of the ruling class, the Canadian monopoly bourgeoisie, to recognize the right of each nation to self-determination; that is, the right to choose the form of sovereignty that the majority of the people of each nation desires, including the right to separate and form an independent state.

Sovereignty may be expressed in a free national choice of one of three following forms: a separate state, a confederation of equal nations or states, or autonomy.

We fight for a new constitution based on the equal and voluntary partnership of all nations in Canada. A genuinely democratic constitution that would correct the historic injustices suffered by the Indigenous peoples by recognising their full economic, social, national and political equality, and the just settlement of their land claims. 

The sharpest expression of the constitutional crisis–not where it manifests in the most oppressive or violent way, but where the most advanced national formation poses the greatest objective challenge to the Canadian constitutional order–relates to Quebec’s national status and the refusal of the Canadian state to recognise Quebec’s right to national self-determination, up to and including secession. This is evident in Quebec’s distinct political institutions, such as political parties and labour unions, the distinct material conditions of the Quebec working class won through its national struggle, and the continued relevance of the national question in electoral politics in Quebec.

This fight for constitutional change is crucial to the overall struggle for democracy, social advance and for socialism. Uniting the working class across the country will not be possible without combating national oppression and fighting to achieve a new, equal and voluntary partnership of Canada’s nations.

Canadian monopoly has its own independent interests to protect and advance. However, the dominant trend within Canadian monopoly circles today is toward economic integration and political collaboration with U.S. imperialism, and with international finance capital in general. In pursuit of maximising profit, Canadian monopoly is prepared to sacrifice the country’s economic and political sovereignty, so long as it can maintain a reasonable share of the plunder of Canada’s natural resources and domestic market, while expanding access to larger U.S., hemispheric, and global markets.

State monopoly capitalism in Canada also benefits from dividing the working class through the systematic oppression of women, youth, Indigenous and racialized peoples, two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer people, people with disabilities, and those living in poverty. It is a system that strips people of human dignity.

The policy of multiculturalism advanced by the Canadian state over the past half-century contends that the Canadian identity is formed solely by the contribution of a mosaic of different ethnic groups, equal among themselves, who have arrived as immigrants and who, for the most part, have quickly integrated and continue to integrate mainly into the dominant English-speaking nation of Canada.

This policy was created ostensibly to differentiate Canada’s multiculturalism from the US “melting pot” which forces immigrants to abandon their mother-tongue and their culture when they immigrate to the US.

In fact, Canada’s multiculturalism policy was created to deny the existence of nations within 

Canada, to deny their national rights, to maintain the dominance of English-speaking Canada over all others, and to maintain the power of the English-speaking capitalist class.

But the multi-national character of Canada cannot be denied indefinitely. The democratic national sentiments of the peoples will make themselves heard in their demands for recognition and redress. The YCL-LJC advocates a new, equal, and voluntary partnership of Canada’s nations in a new Constitution, based on recognition of the right of nations to self-determination up to and including the right to secession.

The historical development of the peoples and nations of Canada bears many similarities to the peoples formerly trapped within the Tsarist “prisonhouse of nations” prior to the Great October Socialist Revolution. Owing to the tendency of unequal development characteristic of capitalism, many peoples within the Russian Empire lagged behind in their socio-economic development.

The October Revolution proclaimed that the right to self-determination was a right of all oppressed peoples. It was necessary therefore that liberation from colonialism took place in conjunction with the struggle for social emancipation through socialist revolution, international in its spirit, objectives and factors–factors predetermined by the intensity and interconnection of national and social contradictions typical of the epoch of imperialism. The October Revolution accomplished these anti-imperialist, anti-colonial national revolutions in the USSR not under the banner of national enmity and conflict, that of bourgeois nationalism, but through mutual confidence and fraternal rapprochement; not in the name of nationalism, but in the name of internationalism.

That is also our goal in Canada, where the form resulting from the full and free development of nations cannot be determined in advance, but will be determined organically and democratically. This can only be achieved by linking the struggle for self-determination with the struggle for proletarian revolution, and ultimately, through the elimination of capitalist relations of production. 

Immigrant workers from many lands have played a vital part in building Canada’s industries, railways, and agriculture. New immigrants form a considerable portion of Canada’s labour force. Immigrant workers continue to suffer from acute discrimination, arising in the main from capitalist exploitation and attitudes of national chauvinism. From its foundation the YCL-LJC has struggled to end discrimination against immigrant workers, working to expose how capitalism generates racism and national chauvinism, profits from low-wage areas, and divides the working class to hold back the overall struggle.

For Canadians to exercise genuine people’s rule over the collective life of the country, they must control Canada’s economy. Democracy therefore requires socialism: the social ownership of the machinery, raw materials and other means of production used to sustain and enhance human life. 

As a result of the victory of the socialist revolution, a new state power will emerge. Its task, above all: the breakdown of the old state apparatus, and the implementation of urgent democratic transformations which were not accomplished under the previous exploitative system. The essence of the new socialist state is the power of the working people headed by the working class. The socialist state emerges and initially exists as a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary to politically dominate the overthrown exploiters who put up resistance to the new power of the workers. The new socialist state needs to lead the petty-bourgeois, non-proletarian strata of the working masses in building socialism. It is incorrect to imagine the dictatorship of the proletariat only as coercion. The principal issue for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the working class’s leadership of the popular masses and creative work aimed at building socialism. 

Socialism in our country will develop along lines democratically decided by the working class and its allies. It will exhibit unique features, reflecting Canada’s history and current level of development, and its rich and diverse cultures and social traditions. Socialism will develop at its own pace, and with its own content, based on the planned, balanced and proportionate development of the economy through public ownership of the means of production. There is no universal model of socialism, nor any pre-determined timetable or schedule its development must follow.

But socialism will not be re-invented from scratch. Careful account needs to be taken of the important positive and negative lessons on the building of socialism from the experiences in many countries over the past century. Where appropriate, these experiences and lessons will have to be creatively applied to the building of socialism in Canada.

Despite setbacks in the revolutionary process, this is the historical epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale, a process in which the working class plays a central and growing role in advancing democratic, progressive, and revolutionary transformations.

Youth and Ideology 

Young men, help, do help me!                                  And heard ye not that shout of scorn,

I love my country so.                                                         your tyrant masters send?

That is why I am fighting.                                         O’er the Atlantic wave tis borne-

                                                                                              awake, your chains to rend.

War Chant                                                                                                 

Sitting Bull                                                                       Arise – Canadians

                                                                                           William Lyon Mackienzie

C’est le jour des banquiers! Demain sera notre heure!

 Aujourd’hui l’oppression, demain la liberté!

 Aujourd’hui l’on fustige un peuple entier qui pleure, Demain l’on voit debout tout un peuple ameuté!

 Aujourd’hui le forfait et demain la vengeance!

Aujourd’hui c’est de l’or et demain c’est du fer!

L’Union des Canadas ou la fête des banquiers

Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau 

The main contradiction of capitalism is the antagonistic, non-reconcilable conflict between capital and labour, between those who own the means of production, and those who are forced to sell their labour power as a commodity and surrender the fruits of their labour. We must be clear, the problems of young people in Canada arise from the main contradiction of our society. The problems our generation faces are a reflection of the main class contradiction in a specific area. The solution to our problems as young people is therefore dependent upon the outcome of the class struggle. 

There is no doubt at all that in the concrete conditions of social life and social strife our generation occupies a vital place in the conflicts of our society. But it cannot be reduced to a conflict between young and old. Unless the problems and possibilities of young people are examined within the historical arena of the class struggle, we will not only fail to provide answers, but we may actually draw conclusions that could aid capitalism in its anti-working class offensive. And of course, a very large part of this offensive is aimed directly at young people. 

This is because elements from the ‘right’ and ‘left’, from Anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists, social-chauvinists, radical petit-bourgeois liberalism to reaction, the Tories, the so-called People’s Party, and nihilism, are trying to use young people as a breeding ground for their anti-class theories and a jumping-off spot for penetration into the labour union movement. Their bag of tricks ranges from ‘revolutionary adventurism’ to neo-fascism. For young communists to realise and expose this is a must, but to limit our role to the defensive would be a terrible underestimation of the possibilities and the great potential social power of youth. Especially since the objective needs and subjective yearnings of youth are both the result of and coincide with the struggles and objectives of the working class. 

It is not enough for Young Communists to resist and repel these viewpoints among young workers, we must organize them and equip them for the struggle against imperialism. Ultra-leftist approaches attack the student and labour movement’s lack of revolutionary fervour without doing the work to build or develop class consciousness among the large mass of workers and youth, while right-opportunist approaches funnel young workers into “progressive” elements of bourgeois society, rather than preparing and equipping the working class to take power for itself. 

Imperialism finds itself in its twilight heading towards sure negation by socialism. To plan for and prepare for the present and future struggles of this generation is to understand that youth are growing up in the death throes of a collapsing society. We know that the profiteers and rulers of this society fear the real possibility of the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement; a new horizon of abundance under socialism. That is why the ruling class spreads class nihilism, brutality, and animal savageness. Imperialism, to prepare its forces for the lost battle to preserve itself, must insist on the complete acquiescence of its people; it must, because time is running out, resort more and more to the expediency of economic domination, moral corruption, the propagation of reactionary ideology, and finally terrorism against the working class and popular masses.  

Class nihilism has been introduced as a weapon aimed to substitute for organization while it has fostered apathy and disillusionment. The working class is the battleground for accepting or rejecting their fate in the crises we are living through, and the youth of today will be essential in deciding the course of history that pivots between abundance or disaster for all.

Our cities have become enormous centres of production and the social life of the working people is put as much as possible on a commodity basis. Commodification is the driving force behind alienation which in a large scale separates the working class from the social process of labor, the products they create, and the products that are consumed. Young people are compelled to develop in a situation in which all the necessary activities of youth must be carried out in an atmosphere which seems to resent their existence except as consumers. The internet is accelerating this process. 

The immense development of science and technology and corresponding political developments which put in sight an end to poverty amidst plenty, opening up the prospect of a new social order, to abolish exploitation of person by person, and gear social life to satisfy the material, cultural and creative social nature of humanity. 

We treat informatics and its applications as a tool that has created huge new possibilities in production, communication, education, etc. These possibilities will be liberated and they will serve the working class when, for example, the internet stops developing based on the needs of its current owners, which are the monopoly groups. An independent issue is social media, which has been widely propagated, with the highest rate of use among young people.

The reactionary utilisation of the internet and the social media in capitalism makes real contact and socialisation of young people harder. It is no coincidence that the phenomenon of internet addiction is growing. Reactionary oversight and control of social media, and the growing gig economy are examples of how the internet and mass media have been used to divide workers from associating with their fellow worker, have restricted individuals from connecting to their local community, and have isolated people from understanding their own reality at both the local and global scale. Our social relationships have become incredibly scarce, and in their place, skepticism, addiction, panic, and apathy have become commonplace in dominant culture.

To be born into a world where a new advanced social order is emerging is a challenge. To grow up in a world where the conditions have made the job of living, learning, fighting for life and its meaning very necessary , is most exciting. To live in an environment in the heart of capitalism where the struggles of the working class have wrenched some guarantees of human rights and legal protection, where labour union representation is a partly established institution, where revolution is rising on the horizon, where human productivity and technology provides even the most unthinking with the knowledge that suffering and want can be ended forever, is most thrilling and inspiring to the youth. 

It is with immortal respect that we must honour the people, young and old, who not only have stood fast in the face of this onslaught of imperialism, but who generation after generation struggle for peace, security, democracy, creativity and a happy life. We identify with the current of humanitarianism and desire for peace that has run through generations. We carry it forward on the shoulders of the working class with the noble goal of socialism and communism. 

It is in the framework of these revolutionary developments, aided by highly developed communication and ideological struggle that youth in Canada learn to swim. The outcome is related to and dependent on the main struggle of the working class and the bourgeois class in our society. Its starting point and most decisive battles take place at the point of production, where the material and spiritual wealth is created. It is not possible for the capitalists to enter into this main area of social life and conduct their ideological offensive without coming up against the stringent rules of class warfare. It is in this sphere that the main contradiction between capital and labour asserts itself. 

Amongst young people the bourgeoisie wage a constant war of class nihilism, They advance a corrupt and misleading interpretation of history; they destroy genuine culture and replace it with cosmopolitanism; they follow a policy of economic restrictions, mass underemployment and mass unemployment, and reduction of education grants; they elevate barbarity, perversion, and vulgar sensationalism as enjoyment; they replace creativity and social being, and seek to destroy the social nature of collectivity by advancing the cult of the individual. Racism and national and sexual chauvinism are their weapons. These ideas are the weapons of a system in decay.  

But are these the characteristic features of our generation? The answer is no. It is true that in our environment we all absorb a certain amount of this poison, but it would be entirely incorrect to attribute to the youth the characteristics of the sick society we live in. Because youth is not a class, and because morals as well as other social attitudes in general depend on one’s relation to the mode of production, we must examine the attitude, reaction, and progress among young people according to their class positions. 

The interests and future of most young people coincide with the historical path of the working class and its allies, with the path of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and with socialism. More and more young people are awakening to this reality. The interests of the working class represent the new and advanced social order, as opposed to the bourgeois interests which represent a dying social order. All young people who desire progress and prosperity are potential allies of the working class. 

Young people, particularly students, are in a transitional time of their life, and we know generally but not specifically which class they will become part of. The effects of the capitalist ideological offensive will be less successful among those young people who come under the influence of the working class, especially and specifically those who enter into the process of production. As a rule, young people from the middle strata are more prone to be susceptible to the ideology, cynicism and despair of capitalism than young people from or close to the working class. 

We are not idealists; we know progressives and reactionaries are not born, but rather, they develop in the process of the struggle. Alongside the growth of mass spontaneous progressiveness of young people there emerges a hard core of reactionaries. They are in the minority, but are dangerous because they represent the class which rules our society and wields great power. These reactionary young people are being schooled for their role and are more class-conscious than those who are cynical and full of despair. The ruling class has agents on the ‘right’ and on the ‘left,’ but in the long run they are two sides of the same coin, even if some of them disguise themselves in the process. 

We cannot confine ourselves to an academic analysis of our generation. We are Marxist-Leninists, and we seek to not merely interrupt the world around us, but to change it. When we consciously systematically inject communist ideology into the great mass spontaneous desire for social change amongst young people, we are dealing with the distinctive role of young Communists. Desire for change is one thing; the strategy and tactics of how to achieve it in the youth and student movements is another, and this is precisely the role of the YCL-LJC under the guidance and leadership of the Communist Party. 

Convergence of Struggles

“If reforms are necessary and sensible but cannot be the aim of the party, then what exactly are they in regard to the party’s aim of destroying the exploiting class and initiating a classless society? In short, they are “quantities” in the struggle to bring about a qualitative change, a negation, a leap, revolution. As such, they must not be viewed only as building blocks of developing contradiction, but as part of the dynamic that can, depending on the historical and social environment, plod along or explode.” 

Reform and Class Struggle

Sam Hammond 

As communists, our vocation is to intervene on all political and social subjects. Our proposals must bring them together in the various struggles likely to defeat the policy of capital. 

Our long-term goal is clear: socialism. However, this does not mean that we shy away from the movements that are created around immediate demands. They are not in contradiction with the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, nor with the struggle for working-class political power. On the contrary, these are complementary struggles in which we young communists must intervene. We know that no revolution comes from nothing and that revolutionary periods of uprising never follow a pre-established agenda. These are the result of battles in which we are not always victorious, but in which the masses of the people learn, become hardened by the struggle, and develop their class consciousness. We also understand that it is the masses themselves who are the architects of any revolution, not a political party, not even the Communist Party. The role of the communists boils down to a role of providing a sense of direction to the various struggles. However, to really be able to lead the struggles of the working masses, it is not enough to declare oneself in the vanguard to be an avant-garde organisation. We do not impose ourselves as leaders; rather, we strive to gain the trust of the masses. 

This confidence is gained over many years of dialogue with the activists of the different popular and democratic movements, thanks both to the accuracy of our analysis and our ideology, but also thanks to our presence in the various cardinal struggles of these movements. We must intervene with these different movements, keeping in mind that it is much easier to lose the confidence of the masses than to gain it, and that once it is lost, it becomes much more difficult to regain it.  

As young communists, we do not position ourselves on the fringes of the various movements and struggles. We are not afraid of debating our ideas, and this is precisely the reason for our enthusiasm to get involved in different struggles. We know that this is the only way to put forward our ideas and try to win over the most aware activists to our cause, that it is the only way, in the long term, to increase our influence. We know that the class question must never be opposed to other social questions; on the contrary, it is the common denominator, the factor of unity. 

We do not reduce the concept of socialism to an empty slogan. Socialism is at the same time the struggle for collective ownership of the means of production and exchange, the exercise of political power by the working class and its allies, and the progressive satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, creating the conditions for the development of each personality. 

Nor is it an unattainable goal or a claim to be kept “for later.” In an economically developed country like Canada, the objective conditions are all met to ensure the transition to socialism, but not the subjective conditions. This is in contrast to non-revolutionary socialists who claim that both subjective and objective conditions are not sufficient, but also in contrast to ultra-leftists who claim that both objective and subjective conditions are met and therefore, the only element missing is an organisation, an event or an individual able to mechanistically and spontaneously spark an uprising. 

Without neglecting the centrality of the struggle for socialism, we also know how to develop strategies and tactics which allow us to fight effectively for the construction of socialism. Thus, we subordinate our action in the various struggles on the basis of building a popular anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist coalition. To be effective, this coalition must be based on rallying the popular struggles. 

We have seen young people faced with the ever more violent attacks of capital; the youth has risen to the challenge of mobilisation. Unfortunately, these actions were largely spontaneous. The absence of solid organisation and coordination capable of leading these struggles to a higher degree of mobilisation is the result of the almost avowed aversion of the leaders of the various democratic and popular movements, including the labour and student movements, to the need for independent, political and mass mobilisations. The Gordian knot that it is incumbent upon us is to isolate liberal influences from the social democratic right which subordinates all action to the election of the NDP in English-speaking Canada, from the narrow-nationalist elements mobilizing for a national “sacred union” in Quebec, and probably, in the years to come, no doubt from the Green Party in search of more seats in Parliament. 

In short, we need to isolate the right-wing elements that are more interested in co-opting the different struggles for their own interests and oppose them with perspectives that are likely to bring struggles to a higher level of mobilisation, to a stronger level of unity and coordination between the different movements. 

It must be clear, however, that the success of this roadmap consists in our daily activism, in our ability to win young people from all walks of life to these ideas. To do so, we must neither neglect our independent activist activities, nor neglect our activities within the various struggles that mobilise our generation. We must also have the firm conviction that our generation is not only a generation of resistance, but that the guarantee of our future befits its capacity to become an offensive generation. This is why we must approach in a positive way the different struggles, by understanding their limitations if taken individually, but also by being firm, revolutionary, and above all constructive in our remarks. 

Why have we organised as a League of Young Communists? 

“Lenin always argued in favor of a distinct and organizationally independent communist youth organization. His view was that militant young workers who reject the idea of an integral world outlook are not necessarily lost to the revolutionary movement if they can be persuaded to join the communist youth organization, be brought into contact with Marxists, and encouraged to study Marxism. If they fall by the wayside in the process, that is just too bad. but they are not lost to Marxism simply because in their naive ebullience they declare “I don’t reject anything.” It is the task of the Communist Party to find ways and means of capturing the interest of such young people so that if they have a sincere desire to take part in the revolutionary movement they may be helped to learn how. He knew that some of them, perhaps only a very small percentage, would come to understand what he always described as “the old but eternally new truths of Marxism.” He was for a youth organization as the training ground for the party.”

Lenin and Canada

Tim Buck

It is essential for the working class movement to agitate young workers, raising their class consciousness and bringing them into the class struggle. It is necessary for this work to be carried out at all times to ensure a steady and regular flow of new and fresh forces for the class struggle. Without intervention from the working class movement, young workers can get caught in the traps of class collaboration, reaction, and individualism. 

As the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party especially needs a reserve that can guarantee future cadres and serve as a school of struggle, training the next generation of workers for the Communist Party. The Communist Party needs an organisation that can appeal to, organise, and lead the popular youth in the struggle for working class political power. 

The situation of young workers under capitalism and the peculiarities of young people in general demand a special organisation for youth, where they can learn to struggle, be trained in the communist style of work, and be given the space and opportunity to develop their own initiative and discipline. The Young Communist League is not a party of youth–young workers belong to the working class, there is only one working class, and the working class has the Communist Party. The Communist Party must strive to be a disciplined, centralised organisation, the highest form of working-class organisation possible. Such an organisation cannot be sectionalised; it must be monolithic, a fighting whole. Therefore the YCL-LJC cannot be a section or wing of the centralised Party. The Young Communist League is a Marxist-Leninist organisation open to working youth and the best elements of the popular youth who openly declare they follow the political leadership of the Communist Party and will work to bring the popular youth and working youth in particular into the class struggle, the struggle for socialism. 

Our action is primarily based on collective struggle and group work. Our organisational model, based on democratic centralism, is above all vertical and hierarchical. Our political priorities are determined by the Convention and the Central Committee, not on the latest trends or the latest political gossip. We are struggling for the long haul, which involves patience and tact in the way we interact with our friends and allies. 

Democratic centralism combines the maximum of democratic discussion and participation of the membership in club life, with the self-imposed obligation to carry out majority decisions and execution of these decisions by an elected centralised leadership capable of directing the entire league. Democratic centralism was refined and advanced by communists around the world; however, democratic centralism is natural to the working class. There is no better example of democratic centralism than the strike: no matter how a worker votes on the question, the union requires the discipline of all members to adhere to the majority. 

Democratic centralism includes full discussion by the entire membership of the policies necessary to advance the aims of our program. Decisions as to what these policies must be are made by majority vote and are then binding on all members. This enables the YCL-LJC to act as a united whole in all conditions of the struggle. Unity derives from agreement on the socialist programs of the Communist Party and the YCL-LJC, as well as the recognition that while differences may arise as to how best to advance the aims of the program under changing circumstances, there must be unity of action in executing decisions once they are made by majority vote. Thus the league is a united, militant organisation in which factional or splitting activities are impermissible. All league members must carry out league decisions, the minority must abide by majority decisions, and lower organisations must carry out decisions of higher organisations.

When we organise demonstrations, we know that the success of our mobilisations does not come from our online presence, but rather from our daily activism, in person, and from our capacity to build a militant network that we can activate when needed. This too is a long-term job that requires patience and perseverance, as well as a firm desire to converse in person at our places of study, in our neighborhoods or at work. 

As young communists, we have fundamental differences with social-reformists as to the role and character of young people and youth organisations. There are some minor shadings of difference between social-reformists and the bourgeoisie, but the fundamental conception is the same. Social-reformism for the most part declares the role of the youth organisations is purely cultural or educational. Social-reformism is nervous about the active participation of youth in the political struggle, as social democrats believe young people are not capable of active participation in political struggle. Social-reformism has put class collaboration in place of the class struggle, and it seeks to train the working youth in the facade of class peace. 

Reactionary organisations are focusing their attention on the youth. The bourgeoisie and reactionary organisations work to disguise their intentions with populist sloganeering. Their role is to convince working youth there are no class divisions or class rule, ‘What is best for Canada’, i.e. the ruling class, is best for them. 

Both the reactionaries and the social-reformists want young workers to focus on cultural issues. Cultural issues are often cross-class issues, and can divert the youth from the class struggle. When the social-reformists talk about youth, they speak in general without regard to class differences. The social-reformists and liberals give their youth organisations the utopian and petty-bourgeois task of creating the ‘new person’ by means of cultural work undertaken in the still-existent capitalist society. The social-reformists and liberals do not want young workers confronted with the real conditions of class society and the hard facts of the class struggle. The result of social-reformism can be to divert the youth from the class struggle and turn them into accomplices of the bourgeoisie. 

The Young Communist League rejects the hypocrisy of the bourgeois and social-reformists that want to keep the youth out of politics. The energetic participation of the young workers in the political struggle of their class would mean a powerful shift in the balance of forces. It is the task of the young communists to tirelessly endeavor to bring their peers into the political arena, the struggle for socialism. 

The Young Communist League is a political organization. The YCL-LJC is an organization that trains the laboring youth for the struggle. Our view, the Marxist-Leninist outlook, does not allow for any separation of theory from practice. There is no contradiction between education and struggle. No fight is too big or too small for the YCL-LJC. The youth are the future and the future is socialism!     

Young Communists and labour movement 

“It is the duty of the Young Communist League to root itself in the masses of the young workers and initiate struggles against these barriers to progress. The membership must be made to realize that wherever possible they must become members of the trade unions; that the formation of shop nuclei of the young workers can make a struggle for these things possible, and to gain the support of the masses, the League has to fight for the needs of the young workers. The economic demands of the Canadian youth must form the actual basis of all future work of the League.

Transform the Young Communist League as it at present exists into a real proletarian youth organisation that will actually struggle for a betterment of the conditions of the working youth until the fight is transformed into a revolutionary struggle for emancipation.”

Youth and the Unions 

Leslie Morris, first General Secretary of the YCL-LJC

In the 1930s, in the midst of an economic crisis, the young communists were able to make significant steps, in particular by organising the unorganised. There are several similarities between the conditions of young workers of that time and today, in particular the universalisation of precarious work, a very high unemployment, and union leaderships more or less sensitive to improvement of the working conditions of this unemployed youth. 

Our task is therefore twofold. We must, on the one hand, fight within our respective unions to raise awareness among both the grassroots and the union leaderships of the particular conditions of young workers. We must convince them of the need to mobilise and refuse any form of discriminatory clauses that divides workers, while mobilising the unorganised around demands linked in particular to increasing the minimum wage to a living wage and the fighting against precarious work, including fighting against temporary work agencies for which an increased number of young workers, especially immigrant ones, will be called to work. Our comrades in the various unions have an important responsibility in mobilising the most progressive elements in order to ensure a class union movement that refuses any collaboration with the employers.

In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, we must do more to mobilise around the issues related to health and security on workplaces, and demand that workers have the right to refuse to work in unsafe conditions and that protective equipment be granted to them by the employer at no cost. Similarly, for those who work from home, remote work is likely to be synonymous, with increased stress and exploitation, longer working hours, but also a more atomised working environment making collective organisation more difficult. 

The offensive of imperialism has allowed big business to tighten their grip over the world’s nations and states, over their people and resources, to make national laws and borders subservient to the free global movement of their capital, their economic domination and exploitation of resources. This is at the expense of sovereignty, national culture, democracy, peace, the environment and most of all the working class. Every hour of every day, young people in Canada are affected by these conditions.

State monopoly capitalism, checked only by the struggle of the working class and its allies, and the revolutionary parties, have acted as instruments of the transnational corporations, have passed laws and developed agendas that support regional, national and international free trade agreements, wipe out protective tariffs and environmental laws, and destroy public institutions and social programs.

The institutions, superstructure and social programs that took the working class in Canada generations to create are being privatised, deregulated and dismantled. The attack on the people and their institutions includes a vicious onslaught against trade union and democratic rights, repressive new security laws and a decrease of access to the electoral system. 

If there were no working class, the capitalists would have to create one. Indeed, historically they did, because they cannot exist without the working class, which is the essential element of the productive forces. On the other hand, the working class does not need the capitalists to exist. In fact, the capitalists are a retardant to the further development of the working class and its role as liberator of humanity from exploitation. 

This is not speculation, but rather the observation of the objective development of human society. The slaves did not need the slave‑owners, the feudal serfs did not need the landowners, and the working class does not need the capitalists. The slaves and the serfs surged up socially and their masters disappeared, but the workers’ agenda is still unfulfilled. 

The degree to which people understand this is a measure of their historical and class consciousness. Evaluating class consciousness is vital to an analysis of the level of the class struggle and the formulation of organisational and tactical responses.

Unions, historically, have developed uniquely as defence mechanisms that exist as permanent institutions within exploiting society, and especially within the leading industrial capitalist states.

Labour unions, and in particular the unions of the industrial proletariat, are breeding grounds of resistance, of organisation, and a valuable training ground for workers. They develop representatives who are expert in carrying out their programs and very well trained in resistance at the point of production, as well as being capable of forming central bodies and alliances for mass action. Labour unions historically tend to become reformist in nature if their development is left to spontaneity and their historical social role is not expanded by the injection of political ideology with an aggressive future program, the liberation of the working class. 

The very strength of labour unions–their ability to carry on economic struggle because of the economic relationship between capitalist and workers–is also their weakness if this ability is allowed to stagnate at the reformist and economic level, and not tied to a historic goal.

Economism, which is the basis of social‑reformism, is an objective and natural phenomenon, but it tends to narrow class struggle and specialise it to the end of gaining reforms and economic gains from the capitalists. If left to spontaneous development, this objective phenomenon tends to produce leadership specialised in a process that actually extends the existence of the exploiter‑exploited relationship, because it dwells exclusively within this relationship, and does not seek to destroy it or replace it. Because social-reformism and economism do not challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie and their right to exploit labour, they tend to develop a professional leadership within the working class who grow more and more into junior partners of capital. This gives opportunism an economic base, produces leadership who have a vested interest in exploitation and corrupts labour organisation into a corporate model: business unionism. 

Revolutionary ideology is also an objective and natural phenomenon that develops from the origins of the working class, but has always had a higher ideological understanding of what is required to gain a better life and maintain it. A revolutionary transition from exploiting to non‑exploiting society with a state created from this revolution with the social, legal and military apparatus to maintain it. Social‑reformism is not a threat to capitalism, revolutionary ideology is. 

Does that mean that workers’ demands for wages, security, everything that provides a better life, are backward and opportunist? Of course not. 

It is the responsibility of every worker, and especially young Communist workers, to fight hard for these things. It is how the economic struggle, the struggle for social reforms, relates to the struggle for revolutionary socialism that we must develop. It is only when reforms become the only goal, an end in themselves, that they diminish struggle and fail to even maintain the reforms that have been won. Revolutionary ideology sees reforms as steps, quantitative components of struggle leading to qualitative change, tactical struggles that raise the consciousness of the working class to the point where it can protect its gains and project a permanent solution. Without this historical perspective the class struggle is channeled by the ‘Judas’ of collaboration onto the treadmill of one step forward, two steps back that seems to prove that capitalism is the final page of history and gains can never be maintained. 

The working class, at all costs, must fight to maintain itself and what it has won. In order to do this it must re-evaluate its leadership. In order to accomplish this there must be a rebirth of rank and file control, which is directly tied to a struggle for inner democracy. How can there be unity without a consistent struggle against collaboration and opportunism? 

We must always remember that opportunism and collaboration require a capitalist system, another class to collaborate with. In this sense the real enemy is capitalism, and its lackeys are just that.

Labour strength is in decline, especially in manufacturing which is key to political struggle.  Labour leaders more and more tend to organise where they can easily do so, ignore smaller groups as impractical cost‑wise, seek to capture smaller unions, raid each other for members, look at mergers and cannibalism as growth, and diversify out of their historic core areas. 

The labour movement in Canada, and especially the industrial labour movement, was born out of larger social struggles that preceded and impelled it. The labour movement became both a recipient and a motivator in these struggles, but has lost much of its cutting edge due to the lack of class struggle leadership, and due to the lack of implementation of progressive convention decisions. Labour must revive leadership that accepts the larger social agenda as part of labour’s responsibility.  Leadership at all levels that is economically, socially and politically integrated with its members. Not only from the working class but of the working class. 

Where labour fights it finds allies, where labour finds allies the struggle broadens, where the struggle broadens labour wins, and where labour wins the entire working class moves forward. It is the working class in motion that will swell the ranks of labour. This is the integrated spiral of struggle and growth so necessary to renewal. This needs a political agenda and an organisational expression. 

There has never been a working class struggle without revolutionaries. The numbers or effectiveness can vary due to historical phenomena, due to repression or due to victory. The Communist Party emerged historically as a weapon for the use of repressed peoples in their struggle for liberation. The role of young communists is to maintain this weapon and keep its ideology creative and current, so that when the people need it, it will be there. This is achieved first and foremost by active participation in the programs and struggles of the people, by application. 

Another stage of social organisation is absolutely necessary and inevitable. That new society is socialism. That new society first appeared in 1917, struggled heroically and unfortunately failed in the 1980’s. During its short life it changed world politics forever and left behind the legacy of the workers’ republic, which has found its home in other nations and lives vibrantly wherever people struggle for peace and justice. The Soviet Union’s numerous achievements were just a taste of what is to come and its shortcomings are ours to learn from. 

Young Communists and Peace 

‘Comrades, the all-pervading issue for Canada’s youth today is the arms race. The arms race might seem a little distant to the young workers who see their living standards declining every day, who are threatened with layoffs; it might seem distant to the unemployed youth who desperately searches for work or to the student who is faced with declining quality education and rising tuition fees. But the fact of the matter is that the arms race stands in the way of rising living standards, an expanding job market, a growing economy, and a quality education accessible for all. The arms race stands in the way of youth rights and democracy in general. To put it bluntly, the arms race is a war in and of itself, a war against the people and the youth of Canada’ 

Keynote Address 20th Convention of the YCL-LJC (1980)

Sylvie Baillargeon then General Secretary YCL-LJC 

The capitalist system is structurally in crisis. It is confronted with its main contradiction: the increasingly social nature of the production of goods, and the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands. The race for profits is therefore held back by the limitations inherent to the system. This is the general downward trend in profit rates.

To escape unscathed, the capitalists must impose the price of the crisis on the working class and the popular masses, in an increasingly violent manner, hence the return to strength of right-wing and far-right populist movements and ideas. They must also indulge in a more and more irrational exploitation of natural resources, inevitably leading toward the climate catastrophe. Finally, the progressively more concentrated capital is no longer satisfied with the old divisions of the world inherited from the last thirty years and, in search of new markets, access, raw materials and cheap labor, is preparing to resort to the most violent methods to ensure its hegemony against the rival blocs: war.

Therefore, wherever we are, whether we are young workers, feminists, student activists, environmentalists, we must be seen everywhere across the country as resolute supporters of peace. We urgently need to mobilise for Canada’s immediate withdrawal from NATO and NORAD, the first necessary step to adopt a Canadian foreign policy based on peace, solidarity and sustainable development.

We must convince our generation that they have an important battle to fight here, because the danger of war is as important as the danger of the destruction of our environment. The clock is ticking and unfortunately, the forces which mobilised millions of people around the world to prevent the invasion of Iraq in 2003, including the student movement, are today silent and in a state of total confusion as to which is the main enemy. We must convince our fellows by our own action that globalised capitalism is imperialism, and imperialism is war.

We understand the link between the fight for peace and international solidarity. To make this link is to bet that the working class in Canada has more to do with the working class and the peoples of the world than with “our” bourgeoisie. In an imperialist country like Canada, this testimony of international solidarity is essential and represents the strongest profession of faith in favour of the working class, the exploited and the oppressed. It would therefore be a serious error to dissociate our work of international solidarity and in favour of peace from the various social problems that we are experiencing here. 

We must constantly struggle to interject our anti-imperialist perspectives into the youth and student movements. As the sole member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Canada, we have a particular role to bring the ideology of proletarian internationalism among young people. We are a member organisation of both the Canadian Peace Congress and Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix. We work to build the anti-imperialist peace and solidarity movement through working to strengthen CPCon and MQP local councils. Our members in the mass movements cultivate relations with youth and student organisations aiming to bring them into the CPCon and MQP as affiliates. 

More than any other youth organisation in Canada, we have been the standard-bearers of international solidarity, anti-imperialism and peace. Some criticise us for it, but we must be proud of it, because our internationalist commitment is undoubtedly the strongest affirmation there is against capitalism in these times. To call oneself an internationalist is to take the oath that we, the youth of Canada, have more in common with our brothers and sisters from Syria, Venezuela, Cuba or Iran than with the bosses of local businesses, than with ‘our bourgeoisie.’

Young Communists and Student movement 

‘Communists do not stand aside from the student movement. They actively participate in it. Their task is to bring Marxism, scientific socialism, to students, at the same time explaining and exposing the dangers inherent in anarchist and pseudo-revolutionary theories spread among them— theories and practices which are harmful and self-defeating. Communists work to strengthen students’ understanding of the leading role of the working class in the struggle for a radical change of society.’ 

Towards Socialism 

William Kashtan 

In the student movement, the YCL-LJC endeavors to put forward our policy and our main demand, free education, with a stipend for post-secondary. It is this demand which, more than any other, is able to mobilize the greatest number of students and which also makes it possible to distance education from the dictates of the capitalist economy and to make it a public utility. This last point is all the more fundamental since public education–both at the graduate and elementary levels–is constantly under attack from austerity. Students are forced to take on massive debt, establishing a form of mercantilist relationship in front of the diplomas to be acquired. In addition, business representatives occupy seats on the various university boards of directors. 

Knowing how to put forward both a unifying and mobilising slogan is not an easy task and is a matter of careful study of the situation, and this is where we the communists must come into play. This is where we must put forward our demand for free education, encourage student organisations to ally themselves with other democratic and popular movements as well as anti-imperialist student movements around the world, notably the Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes. We know these are demands that affect the majority of students, an increasing number of whom rely on food banks to survive.

To fight this eminently political fight, we must fight by all possible means. Thus, despite the justified criticism of the various student unions, we do not want to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and stress the importance of participating as well as possible in our respective student unions. Student unions are not revolutionary organisations, but mass organisations based on the unity of all their members around a common demand. Within these organisations, the role of the communists is not to marginalise themselves by pushing the demands to the extreme, but rather to find the demands capable of mobilising the greatest number of students in a spirit of unity and struggle.

Depending on the degree to which a student union is democratic and its membership is mobilized, it is not always the best use of energy to seek to occupy formal positions of leadership. Above all, we must struggle to build the broadest possible mobilization and strengthen internal democracy, as in labour unions.

The crisis in the student movement that we are facing stems in part from the lack of presence of young communists active in the various unions, student associations, etc. Indeed, by leaving the reins to opportunist elements on the right and on the left, there is no doubt that the student movement will not be able to develop to its full potential.

In addition to post-secondary student questions, the YCL-LJC tries to pay particular attention to study conditions in other cycles, especially in secondary school. Several perspectives of struggle could be developed, in particular against public funding of private schools, for massive reinvestment in the public education network, against too high a teacher-student ratio, for better working conditions for teachers, in defense of school democracy, against the frantic pace of assessments and the pressure that is being put on more and more students. Our schools must train emancipated human beings, not robots.

As young communists our position is clear. We need to agitate for public monopolies on all social services, both to create new full-time jobs and to increase the social wage: education, healthcare, childcare, transportation, culture, recreation, and more. Young communists need to issue the battle cry: no more defence against privatizations, now is the time for socialization! 

Our Press Rebel Youth- Jeunesse militante 

I have eaten my fill 

Of printed pulp 

Have Gorged on lies. 

And gulp by gulp, 

Swallowed water

From Poisoned wells,

Yarn on yarn
The kept press tells.

Followed a fancy 

Into the flops 

And swamped my brains

For knock out drops 

All too often 

They got my goat- 

Now I carry

The antidote

A worker’s paper 

That turns each week, inside out

The lies they speak

With facts that dazzle 

With words that scorch 

Today a guide- 

Tomorrow a torch. 

I Have Eaten My Fill

Joe Wallace 

Our central organ, Rebel Youth – Jeunesse Militante needs the participation of all members in writing, reading and distributing. We work to make our press our primary collective pan-Canadian organising tool, our educational study guide, and our agitational propaganda material.   

Without a political organ, a political movement is inconceivable. Without such a political journal we cannot possibly fulfill our tasks. Rebel Youth – Jeunesse Militante must be a communist publication, not one of the broad left. We have a duty to advance our policies, in a principled and organised way, in the youth and student movements. No one else will bring the campaigns of WFDY to the working youth and students in Canada. No other organisation in Canada shares the bonds with the communist youth organisations around the world like we do, learning from each other and sharing our collective experiences. We need to put forward our perspectives, our style of work and tactics. And most of all we need to advance the case for Socialism-Communism. 

The role of a magazine, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political 

education, and to the enlistment of political allies. Our magazine is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator: it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding around a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of our magazine, and through it, our organisation will naturally grow so that we can engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and we will train each other to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the youth and students, and develop effective means for the League to influence these events. The mere technical task of regularly supplying the website and magazine with articles and of promoting regular physical distribution will necessitate activity in the clubs. 

As members of the communist movement, we also have a responsibility to read and circulate the press of the Party, Clarté, The Spark!, and People’s Voice. Reading the communist press and discussing its content in clubs not only aids in our work for our own publication, but it also aids our development as future Party members generally. 

The task of the YCL-LJC: Struggle to Learn, Learn to Struggle!

‘Because it depends on you, above all the new generation, to ensure that our Revolution reaches where it has to go.’

Speech at World Festival of Youth and Students 1995

Fidel Castro 

The foremost and central task of the communist movement in Canada is to strengthen and lead the working class forces to win the community and engage in uncompromising struggle with state monopoly capitalism and imperialism, and in the course of the struggles build working class consciousness. The CPC-PCC has a strong record and program to achieve this aim. But a very important way in which the movement carries the working class ideology of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism into a specific area, the youth of today and tomorrow, brings us to our role and task in the communist movement. 

As members of the YCL-LJC we accept the task of building the league as a strong, conscious voice of the working people among our generation. We all accept this as our responsibility. The YCL-LJC is not a political party. It is a communist youth organisation. We are a vehicle to bring ideological clarity, to build unity in struggle around immediate issues and advocate the noble goal of socialism. We must operate in a special way, expressing in form and content the vigor and enthusiasm of youth. 

Our biggest job is to unite the progressive youth, give revolutionary voice to their desires, combat commodified culture, war, and all the abusive and dangerous ideological weapons. We are the guardians of working-class ideology together with and on behalf of the Communist Party among our generation. We must work with the Communist Party, our ideological leader, on all levels from coast to coast. 

The Communist Party is the vanguard of revolutionary thought and struggle; the YCL-LJC is the main carrier of this into a very wide and seething part of the population, young people. 

The Youth are the Future!

The Future is Socialism!