About the Young Communist League of Canada

Together we can stop the attack on youth and students

Millions march against war and environmental destruction around the world. Everywhere students and youth are on the front lines, together with working people.

Young workers and students across Canada are frustrated and angered by the bad deal we get today. We work for poverty wages in dead-end jobs, carry crushing student debt, while corporate taxes hit record lows and billions of public dollars are spent on war and occupation.

Is this right? We say NO.

Now is the time to join a movement for socialism and real democracy.

Join to defeat Capitalism! Join to help build a broad and powerful youth movement!

Our future, our fight!

We think Canada needs to make a sharp break with the current big business agenda immediately, putting people and nature before profits. Mobilizing for OUR agenda on the streets is crucial.

The Young Communist League is working today across Canada to help build the fightback by youth in labour and democratic movements, including anti-war committees, student groups, and trade unions.

Together, we can defeat austerity, the destruction of our environment and imperialist aggression.

Towards Socialism

Many important gains needed today could be won with a broad, powerful people’s coalition on the streets, with labour at the core, and also reflected in parliament. We need a new type of political movement championing real democratic alternatives for working people and defeating global capitalism and its war machine.

We think that to truly transform society towards peace, social progress, environmental justice, and full equality, we need to overturn the capitalist system. We need a socialist Canada, a more democratic system, where the people own the economy and control the country, not the big corporations.

About the YCL-LJC

The YCL-LJC is Canada’s oldest revolutionary youth organization. Formed in 1923, we struggled against the Great Depression, sent brigades to fight fascism during the Spanish civil war, resisted the cold war, and rallied for peace and nuclear disarmament. We helped build today’s student movement. The YCL-LJC is made up of school and community clubs across the country. We are a bilingual organization. We recognize that Canada is a country of many nations, bound unequally together, Indigenous (including First Nations, Inuit and Métis), Quebecois, and the dominant English-speaking nation. Our unity is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-chauvinist, anti-transphobic and anti-ableism.

The YCL-LJC is politically united with the Communist Party, and is organizationally autonomous with our own constitution, conventions, & membership.

We write as we fight! The YCL-LJC is the proud publisher of Rebel Youth magazine and the Ligue de la Jeunesse communiste du Québec produces Jeunesse Militant.

Our goals are clear – short term, build the youth resistance. Long term, to build socialism. We contribute a Marxist-Leninist and internationalist viewpoint to the youth movement, to fight for the benefit of working people.

We connect political debate with action — both as the YCL-LJC and in broad coalitions. We call for a stronger, more active and more united youth and student movement.

Be Part of the Global Struggle

We recognize the need for global unity to defeat imperialism and build a world of peace, solidarity and social transformation.

The YCL-LJC is a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which unites communist and anti-imperialist youth groups from every continent, such as those in Palestine, Lebanon, Western Sahara, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, India, Vietnam, Korea, South Africa, Portugal and Greece.

We are also members of the Canadian Network on Cuba, a coalition dedicated towards building friendship and solidarity with socialist Cuba, and the Canadian Peace Congress, which is a Canadian anti-imperialist organization.

Join the fightback!

The YCL-LJC has been active fighting in major social movement struggles like Occupy, the Québec Student Strike, Idle No More, as well as campaigns for climate justice not the Tar Sands, pipelines and oil tankers, raising the minimum wage, and a united and fighting student movement. Join today!