Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

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VANGUARD OF THE RED DAWN:
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE LENINIST
GENERATION
All we have to do is recruit young people… without fearing them. This is a time of war.
The youth… will decide the issue of the whole struggle.
-Lenin, 1905 1
The workers had to pay for the fraud for years of an International which, in truth, never
existed, and paid at the cost of 90 millions of cripples, 10 millions of dead and of nameless
misery for the lack of a strong and determined international organization. The
young workers ought to remember this.
-Executive Committee of the Young Communist International, 1920 2
In November, 1919 the Young Communist International established itself as the youth
coordinating body of the Communist International. 3 The YCI was neither a creation of
Lenin's Bolshevik Party nor did it originate in the young Soviet Republic. 4 The YCI
grew out of the anti-war struggles of the socialist youth, proclaiming itself as the direct
organizational heir of the pre-war Socialist Youth International (SYI). During World
War I, socialist youth increasingly rejected the "national defense" positions of the Socialist
Parties of the Second International (SI), facilitating generational tensions over the antiwar
militancy of the youth. 5 Lenin's Bolshevik Party capitalized upon this dynamic,
courting the SYI to leave the Second International en masse in 1919. During the twenties,
the YCI sought to construct a "Leninist Generation" of revolutionary youth, free
from the ideologies and traditions of the Second International. The Leninist Generation
demanded a strict oppositional political culture, denouncing all other traditions, organizations
and ideologies for enabling the survival of capitalism and betraying the advance of
revolution. 6 This YCI analysis blurred the important ideological discrepancies of postwar
political movements, significantly underestimating the dangers of fascism.
The YCI's initial program and political identity was constructed in part by the
Comintern, but also in reaction to the experiences of youth during WWI. Young communists
insisted capitalism and imperialism were the causes of modern warfare. In order
to abolish modern warfare, young communists asserted that capitalism needed to be
destroyed. The YCI contended that in following the "correct" lead of the Comintern, the
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