Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

NATIONALISM
men, women or child merely for their nationality; I can only love the working-class all
the world over – that is my class, a slave class. I am a slave; all the world's workers are
slaves. I am a slave in revolt. I am not a patriot, I am an internationalist. 10
Nationalism mobilized "slaves" to fight a war that was not in their class interests.
Internationalism encouraged these "slaves" to unite internationally in service of their
class. Such emotionally charged rhetoric encouraged working-class youth to reject
nationalism for the strict internationalism of the Comintern.
Early YCI publications articulated appeals to the youth in strict internationalist and
class terms. Nationalism and national reconstruction were linked as attributes associated
with the Second International. In the immediate aftermath of the war, socialist parties
throughout Europe assisted their national governments in demobilizing efforts and
economic transitions centred on rationalization and speed-ups to foster reconstruction.
Socialists believed such "national efforts" and their wartime service would accord them
greater state influence and political power to implement their socialist programs. In one
of their first publications, aptly entitled Remove the Frontiers! An Appeal for the International
Organization of all Young Workers, the YCI boldly asserted that "the realization of
economic freedom is impossible through a nationally bounded struggle." 11 To maximize
upon the disillusionment of youth, the YCI assessed that youth had been used by capitalists
during the war to suppress their international class brethren. By following the
program of the YCI, young communists assured the youth that "never again as in the late
war, are hundreds of thousands of the youngest, best and boldest of us to die for the
naked interests of the money-bags of imperialism." 12 The YCI contended "the Communist
International must be an International of Action, or it will be nothing at all." 13 The
YCI encouraged youth to denounce socialists for their national reconstruction efforts
stating, "Tear off their masks! Unveil their real faces and show them to the broad masses
of your friends. Frustrate their tricks with pitiless straightforwardness." 14 The YCI
insisted any capitulation to such forms of nationalist strategies in the West was out of the
question for communist youth.
The Leninist Generation of the YCI posited internationalist class appeals were the
only "correct" method for mobilizing the youth. Internationalist appeals were framed to
dissuade youth from identifying with the bourgeois state. Leninist tactics called for the
revolutionary overthrow of the state as a prerequisite to the establishment of socialism.
Youth needed to be indoctrinated with a revolutionary and international class consciousness
to prepare them for a revolutionary seizure of state power. Nationalism led to
identification with the state which promoted reformist tactics while Leninism called for
treasonous tactics to establish working-class power. As revolution subsided in the West,
internationalism increasingly became associated with allegiance to the Comintern and the
Soviet Union. Fascism and other anti-communist movements capitalized on this phenomenon
to portray communism as a foreign aligned movement. Fascists posited that
communists stood for the state interests of the Soviet Union while their movement stood
for interests of their own nation.
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