Contribution of the PCTE to the ECA Teleconference
September 28, 2024
Dear comrades,
The particular concern of communists for their work among the youth answers to the fundamental political need to preserve and develop, through militant generations, the Party and its influence among the mass movement. In the historical development, all over the more than one hundred years of experience of the international communist youth movement, as well as the different national experiences, we can find invaluable lessons that help us today in deepening and defining the principles of our political work among the youth. To this end, as an annex to the Manifest-Program, the PCTE and the CJC count with the document The Role of the Communist Youth in the Organization of the Socialist Revolution, a material with a strategic nature in which the specific tasks of our youth organization for the revolutionary process are defined.
1. History and Basis of the Communist Youth Organizations as “School of Cadres”
The concern for the work among the youth is constant in the history of our political tradition. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, in the context of growing militarism and repression to the workers’ movement, the Second International started to promote the first socialist movements specifically for the youth. The International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) is created as the youth branch of the Second International. The outbreak of the war in 1914 and the treason of opportunism accelerates the split between social-democracy and communism — the best socialist youngsters take side for the founding of an independent path away from the immobility of the Second International.
Barely two years later, the Great Socialist October Revolution breaks the ice, and the time for proletarian revolutions was opened. The Komsomol (RCYU) is born as the union of the multiple youth expressions bonded to the Bolshevik Party and exerts a remarkable influence within the international communist youth movement with its example.
The imperialist war widens the abyss between social-democratic parties and their youth organizations. Young proletarians, affected by the exploitative conditions and forced mobilization, display a wide rejection to war; the socialist youth organizations —more receptive to Bolshevism— become the place for the regrouping of revolutionary forces. This specified a particular form of the general battle between reform and revolution, between social-democracy and communism, in the relations between parties and youth organizations. However, this was the precondition for the initial mistakes in the characterization of communist youth organizations. Some of them still find a political expression nowadays.
The stances defending the independence of youth organizations from communist parties grew for two reasons: first, the character as a place for the revolutionary regrouping carried out by these youth organizations; second, the full autonomy with respect to the socialist parties during the process of ideological demarcation.
The Communist Youth International —the youth section of the Communist International (CI) established in 1919 from the IUSY— rejected such idea and came out in favor of the leadership of youth organizations by communist parties. The divergences between “Vanguardist” and “Massist” stances also emerged. Both were incapable of understanding the particular role played by the Communist Youth in the revolutionary process. It is not a Youth Party, nor a mass structure comparable to the other organizations that structure the social alliance. This discussion had been previously resolved by the Komsomol, which concluded that the communist youth organizations had the nature of “school of cadres”. In its 3rd Congress, the CI finished unifying and clarifying the relationship of communist parties and their youth organizations as well as the particular role played by the youth organizations in the revolutionary process: “The youth movement relinquishes to the Communist Parties its vanguard role . . . the role of the Young Communist movement is to organize the mass of young workers, educate them in the ideas of Communism, and draw them into the struggle for the Communist revolution.”
Such foundation of the youth organizations as the school and transmission belt of communist politics among the youth masses comes from the Leninist theory on the party of a new type and, consequently, from the dialectics of revolution in the era of monopoly capitalism. The party of a new type recovered a revolutionary understanding of the process towards the seizure of power by the proletariat, carrying out the theses exposed by Marx and Engels on the relevance of an independent working-class political party. The Communist Youth is the extension of such party between the youth of the working class and the popular strata. This is the reason why it is not a youth party — its nature and vanguard action is so insofar it is aimed at politically raising the youth masses. This role, apart from being a need in the revolutionary process, becomes an essential element in the training of the future cadres of the Party.
The school nature means that the borders of the communist youth organization are somewhat less robust than those of the Party. This is also due to the intervention on a section of the working class under training which is constituting itself as social subjects, therefore has less assumed the bourgeois ideology as a prejudice. As noted by the Third International: “Young workers, because of their economic position and because of the psychological make-up, are more easily won to Communist ideas.” Nevertheless, the young sections are also more permeated by the contemporary ideological bourgeois trends and are less experienced in class struggle. This demands the combination of wider organizational criteria ans a larger insistence in the centrality of training, understood as a combined process of study and active participation in the class-based struggle.
2. The CJC as the school of cadres of the PCTE
All the above-mentioned sets the historical and political-ideological criteria on which the relationship between the PCTE and our youth organization —the CJC— is based. The communist youth is an organization for the struggle that learns in the heat and in relation to the active participation within class struggle. Both the theoretical study and the practical training are defined by the Party leadership, which establishes the training system of the ensemble of the project as well as the political guidelines and the general orientation, updated to the juncture for the mass intervention among the ensemble of the working class and the popular strata.
Although there is no organizational independence between Youth and Party, for reasons of training and political functionality, the CJC give themselves an autonomous structure ruled by democratic centralism. Nevertheless, there is a solid organic connection between both organizations. The Youth participates in the political life of the Party, and the Party assists the Communist Youth at all levels. The collaboration between Party and Youth aims at being the narrowest. Even though it is marked by the leading character of the Party, its leadership is neither paternalism nor authoritarian imposition, but comradely training and support.
In the following years, we aim at deepening the youth organizational model and its relationship with the Party in a functional way in order to carry out its tasks in the intervention and raise between the young sections of the class.
3. The Tasks of the Communist Youth in the Organization of the Socialist Revolution — The Communist Work Between the Youth.
As we were saying, the Communist Youth aims at becoming a guarantee of the constant process of rejuvenation of the revolutionary mass movement and its growing preparation for the assault for power. To this end, it intervenes in all the spheres of life, study, and work of the youth, seeking to raise the political and organizational abilities of the children of the working class. Its role is preparing the subjective factor under non-revolutionary conditions, giving to such preparation an organizational and institutional coverage, i.e. promoting from its youth side the constitution of the social alliance that, under revolutionary conditions, shapes a workers’ and people’s front capable of overthrowing the capitalist dictatorship and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The working class is the leading force of the revolution. Its articulation can be only ensured by turning workplaces into the epicenter of the revolutionary movement and the new revolutionary institutions born from the workers’ and people’s struggle. The PCTE does not advocate the establishment of organizational differences between the adult and young workers’ movements, but the young working class is traversed by a series of particularities that require a specific work for its organization in the productive sphere. The working-class youth is part of the industrial reserve army and is used as such against the ensemble of the class in order to downgrade wages and labor conditions. This means their exploitative conditions are more acute. Besides, the update of exploitative forms has significantly got young people away from their participation in trade unions. This is why the CJC are carrying out a primary and constant work towards the working-class youth and workplaces, worrying about increasing the proletarian composition of their ranks.
The other primary front of intervention is the students’ movement, in which the promotion of associationism and militancy of youngsters during their training time is sought, as well as the direct struggle against the ideological reproduction of capitalism that finds an essential path in the education. In Spain, the CJC are intervening in the different educational levels, at high schools, university faculties, vocational training centers, and so on. They encourage the organization in the Front of Students; lead the action towards political struggle, enlarge the borders of the revolutionary students’ movement; find ways for the participation, struggle, and discussion of masses; and promote the highest unity with the ensemble of the workers’ movement. The intervention in the students’ movement is not only a guarantee for the preparation of future generations of workers, but also a key space for the forging of the social alliance of the working class with the oppressed popular sections.
The communist youth also has to intervene in a planned way in other spheres of social life or in different mass movements and struggles, such as the neighborhood movement, the international solidarity, or the struggle of working-class women. It should add the youth to those struggles and organizations, as particular expressions of the general and single struggle led by the Party. It also intervenes in sports, leisure, and arts associations in which the youth is also participating; as well as it is carrying out its own initiatives and spaces for the promotion of new cultural forms and interpersonal relations through the Workers’ and Popular Centers in working-class neighborhoods. In the case of the CJC, the Youth Camp is a key axis in this policy of generation of alternative spaces to the leisure, relationship, and cultural expression of capitalism.
4. Learners of Present, Makers of Tomorrow
Comrades, as a synthesis, the specific tasks of the communist parties towards and between the youth come from the acknowledgment of particularities, limits, and potentialities of such section of the class which require particular attention in the process of building the social alliance. These tasks means the concern of parties by the creation and development of communist youth organizations as a youth-based expression of the revolutionary project itself, and whose differential element with respect to the vanguard detachment is therefore its nature as a school.
Having a strong Communist Youth, rooted at workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, capable of diligently implementing the Party policy to the reality of the youth and understanding the relevance of the revolutionary training in order to dismantle and slow down every bourgeois ideology as well as conceive the world from the revolutionary worldview from a young age — this is the biggest guarantee for widening the influence of communism in every new generation and strengthening the Party with cadres already forged in the heat of the revolutionary struggle.