Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM
6. ECYCI, Remove the Frontiers!, 9.
7. Young, No More War, 11.
8. This position was severely modified on the basis of working with Trotskyist influenced youth groups. Though young
communists were willing to work with all segments of youth including conservative youth on the basis of a minimum antifascist
program, they consistently insisted that Trotskyism represented an ideology that was incompatible with the goals of
the Popular Front and that no common action would be tolerated with the followers of Trotsky. Though many of the anti-
Trotsky positions became increasingly irrational and were reprehensible in their representation of Trotskyists as class
enemies and agents of fascism, the traditional Bolshevism of the Trotskyist movement made many of their theories and
practices incompatible with the revisionism of the Popular Front. The reality that lay behind these Popular Front tensions
is that Trotskyism represented a trend of revolutionary Bolshevism that strategically relied upon entryism and disruption of
existing organizations as potential opponents and that this position was not compatible with the revisionism of the Popular
Front. While Trotskyism was incompatible with the Popular Front, it did represent an existing left revolutionary and
working-class tradition and assertions that it stood for fascism were blatantly false distortions.
9. VI Lenin, "Report to the Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on the St. Petersburg Split and the Institution of the Party Tribunal
Ensuing Therefrom," in VI Lenin Internet Archive .
10. One of the earliest complaints waged by socialists against the communists is that they were intentionally destroying any
unity that existed within the working class movement. Young socialists who did not join the YCI asserted that they opposed
both Capitalist Dictatorship and Bolshevik Terror, insisting that the programme of the YCI "did not serve the aims
of the youth but exclusively those of the Russian Communists." See "The Programme of the Social Democratic Internationals
of Youth," in ECYCI, Fundamental Problems, 65-81.
11. ECYCI, Programme, 82.
12. ECCI, "Theses On The United Front Adopted by the EC, December 1921," in Communist International History Internet
Archive .
13. ECYCI, Fundamental Problems, 81.
14. Gyptner, From Isolation, 6.
15. ECYCI, Draft Programme of the Young, 45-46, 47.
16. Ibid., 56.
17. Mick Jenkins, "History and Programme of the YCL Vol. 2," (CP/IND/MISC/5/4: YCLGB, 1929), 22.
18. ECYCI, From Third to Fourth, 6.
19. CPGB, The Role and Tasks of the YCL, 7.
20. ECYCI, Programme of the YCI (No City/Publisher, 1929), 29.
21. Denunciations and vehement attacks were not just directed against outward organizations, but were also an internalized
phenomenon within the young communist movement. The YCI insisted it was necessary to win the most committed following
to a "correct" Bolshevik line, even if this meant expelling large numbers of their own activists. In evaluating the
development of their movement, the YCI insisted that "new groupments of forces and many expulsions were necessary"
within the communist movement to create a solid base of Leninist cadres. To be a young communist meant to accept
without hesitation the international leadership of the Comintern on issues of communist theory and practice. International
discipline and Bolshevik self-criticism were expounded as the highest virtues for young communists to emulate as evidence
of their Leninist divergence with Social Democracy. During the period of Bolshevization, the YCI directed the energies
and outlook of their membership inward towards denouncing ideological deviations from Comintern policy within
the youth and adult movements. The YCI asserted that their position was "correct" since it struggled "against both the
Right opportunist digressions and the ultra-left mistakes" by evaluating their comrades strictly from the "standpoint of
Leninism and of bolshevism." The trend towards an internalized youth culture to enforce Comintern dictates was intensified
during the turbulent years of the Third Period. See ECYCI, From Third to Fourth, 4; ECYCI, Resolutions Adopted at
the Fourth, 11.
22. Ibid., 33.
23. "Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Young Communist International," Youth: Official Organ of the Young Workers'
League 1, no.1 (February, 1922): 11.
24. Dimitrov, "The Fascist Offensive," 22-23.
25. Ibid., 65.
26. Ibid., 66.
27. Kuusinen, Youth and Fascism,12, 25.
28. Ibid., 11.
29. Ibid., 18.
30. Ibid., 22.
31. Ibid., 26.
32. Michal, Youth Marches, 8.
33. Ibid., 9.
34. Ibid., 13.
35. Ibid., 15.
36. Ibid., 38.
37. Ibid., 41.
38. Kuusinen, Youth and Fascism, 24.
39. Dimitrov, "The Fascist Offensive," 88.
40. Georgi Dimitrov, "Youth Against Fascism," in The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism And War (San Francisco:
Proletarian Publishers, 1975), 150.
41. Kuusinen, Youth and Fascism, 21.
42. Michal, 36.
43. Ibid., 26.
44. Ibid., 21.
45. Assertions in the communist press that slandered Trotsky and his followers as terrorists and agents of fascism were false
and unwarranted, but both movements vehemently asserted that their ideological positions made them political enemies.
46. Georgi Dimitrov, "The Tenth Anniversary of Stato Operaio," in The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism And War
(San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1975), 223.
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