Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf
Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf
Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf
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YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM<br />
student youth and children of the intelligentsia were often condemned as counterrevolutionaries."<br />
121 Movements that appealed to youth en-masse were simply denounced.<br />
The YCI argued broad youth movements were largely "sentimental" and ultimately<br />
"poisonous" to young workers minds:<br />
These petty bourgeois sentimental dreams of "youth" as such, who, irrespective of their<br />
social and economic class position have the same interests and must organize themselves<br />
in order to create, far from the terrible "today," the "new" life of youth, are a gigantic<br />
fraud which also affects the working class… a real flood of poison is shed over the<br />
minds of the young workers from all the sluices of capitalism. Church, press, bourgeois<br />
literature, and "art," cinemas, alcoholism, etc., are working day and night to alienate the<br />
working youth from their class and subject them to the influence of the bourgeoisie. 122<br />
All forms of non-communist youth culture and movements were treated as dangerous<br />
tools of class rule that instilled further illusions in the youth concerning capitalism and<br />
class collaboration. 123<br />
The YCI analysis of capitalist society went further in denouncing Western political<br />
culture, dismissing forms of parliamentary democracy as an illusionary form of class<br />
rule. Young communists embraced Lenin's critique that the state was simply "an organ<br />
of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." 124 The YCI dismissed<br />
socialist arguments that the expansion of democratic rights had changed power relations<br />
within capitalist society. Lenin contended political democracy did not change the realities<br />
of class relationships. The democratic form of government further solidified class<br />
societies by propagating rhetoric that fermented illusions about equality. Lenin argued<br />
that even the most democratic of states would never bring about equality, nor will it ever<br />
strive to since its economic and political foundations rested in the power of capital:<br />
Every state in which private ownership of the land and means of production exists, in<br />
which capital dominates, however democratic it may be, is a capitalist state, a machine<br />
used by the capitalists to keep the working class and the poor peasants in subjection;<br />
while universal suffrage, a Constituent Assembly, a parliament are merely a form, a sort<br />
of promissory note, which does not change the real state of affairs. The forms of domination<br />
of the state may vary: capital manifests its power in one way where one form exists,<br />
and in another way where another form exists-but essentially the power is in the hands of<br />
capital, whether there are voting qualifications or some other rights or not, or whether<br />
the republic is a democratic one or not-in fact, the more democratic it is the cruder and<br />
more cynical is the rule of capitalism. 125<br />
Although the democratic republic had played a progressive role in replacing feudal<br />
political structures, under the "era of Imperialism" bourgeois democracy had ceased to<br />
play a progressive role in history. Capitalist economics necessitated the maintenance of<br />
the social status quo and bourgeois democracy in turn was both unwilling and unable to<br />
change class relations.<br />
William Rust, an early YCLGB leader, critiqued the interplay of socialists, voting and<br />
the nature of bourgeois democracy. Rust's comments centred on exposing the realities of<br />
social and economic power in the democratic republic:<br />
28