Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

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