Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM
The Popular Front program called for a complete revision in the relationship between
the YCI and its affiliated leagues. The Comintern "liberalized" its relations with Communist
Parties in 1935 to allow greater national flexibility, but did not revise the initial
"Twenty-One Points of Admission" it established in 1920. In a divergent trend, the YCI
insisted that it needed to completely transform its relationship with its national sections.
In his speech at the 1935 YCI Sixth World Congress, Wolf Michal described this transformation:
The reconstruction of the Youth Leagues therefore means the reconstruction of the
Young Communist International as a whole and its system of leadership. It seems to me
that we must thus widen the conditions of acceptance into the Young Communist International
so that not only Communist youth organizations can join it, but Socialist, national
emancipatory, national revolutionary and anti-fascist youth organizations which
base themselves on international cooperation. The widest democracy must prevail in all
the work and in the character of the Young Communist International and the Youth
Leagues affiliated to it. Thus, we must reorganize the internal life of the Young Communist
International so that the youth organizations affiliated to it will have the greatest
independence. 50
An article by the YCLGB reiterated the profound impact the YCI Congress had:
The Sixth World Congress of the YCI have had profound and far-reaching effects on the
whole course of development of the world youth movement… the YCI placed as a key
question in achieving these objectives the "necessity for a change in the character of the
youth leagues." We must find such ways, such forms, and methods of work as will assure
the formation in the capitalist countries of a new type of mass youth organisation, to
which no vital interest of the toiling youth will be alien, organisation which, without
copying the party, will fight for all the interests of the youth, will bring up the youth in
the spirit of the class struggle, of proletarian internationalism, in the spirit of Marxism-
Leninism… our League must be a non-party educational organisation of the democratic,
anti-fascist youth, open to all democratic youth. 51
The YCI was no longer to act as an "international general staff" of revolutionary youth
assisting the work of the Comintern. The Popular Front League embraced the "spirit,"
not the "science" of Marxism-Leninism. The new propagated role of the YCI was to act
as an international coordination centre for all "democratic youth" while "leaving national
sections a free hand" in developing their own anti-fascist programs. 52
The YCI urged youth to break with internalized practices of the past and to shift their
attention externally to assisting other youth movements. The Leninist Generation of the
YCL acted primarily as auxiliary and supportive organizations for the Communist
Parties, focussing on internal party disputes and "ideological correctness." In turn, the
Parties often fuelled this internalizing trend by essentially "raiding YCL ranks to seize its
most effective organizers" who were supportive of present Comintern lines. 53 Otto
Kuusinen rebuked this traditional trend in relations between the YCL and the Party:
All Communist Parties, all leaders of the Communist Parties must understand once for
all that the youth movement is the heart of the movement for social emancipation… it
will not do for every functionary of a Young Communist League who had proved himself
to be a capable worker in the youth movement to be immediately taken away from
44