Pe aR nn ne Ne

Fight for jobs, peace
and socialism legacy
of young communists

The Young Communist League
celebrates the 60th anniversary this year with
a legacy of involvement on all fronts of the
struggle for a progressive Canada waged by
youth with a Marxist-Leninist outlook.

Over six decades the emphasis has shifted,
to meet the political demands of the times,
among the areas of work among workers,
the unemployed, students, the peace move-
ment and the civil rights movement. There
has also been a variety of names — the
Young Workers League, the Young Com-
munist League, the Labor Youth Federa-
tion, the National Federation of Labor
Youth and the Socialist Youth League.

The character of the communist youth
organizations has changed as well. At certain
historical periods the need for a specifically
Marxist-Leninist organization took
precedence over the mass organizational
character of its predecessors. But
throughout that history, the necessity of
broadening the struggles through links —
formal or otherwise — with other youth
groups has always been paramount.

Today the YCL concentrates its energies
on the peace movement and work among the
country’s growing army of unemployed
youth. In British Columbia, new emphasis is
placed on YCL involvement in the Solidarity
Coalition fighting the Socred budget and
legislation, always with the principle that
organizing youth requires a special ap-
proach.

That principle — a Leninist one — lay
“behind the founding of the Communist Par-
ty of Canada. It was then, and remains to-
day, an automous organization which
develops its own forms of work, while,
“maintaining the closest ties with the Com-
munist Party and recognizing the party’s
leading role in the progressive movement,”’
states an historical perspective in a recent
edition of the CP theoretical journal, Com-
munist Viewpoint.

In pursuit of these aims the YCL and its
predecessors have worked to build cultural
and recreational organizations and facilities,
but have also played both a supportive and
active role in strikes, protests and interna-
tional solidarity efforts.

“The YCL has been involved in all the
great struggles,”’ said Maurice Rush, leader
of the Communist Party in B.C. and a
general secretary of the provincial YCL in
the mid-30s.

“Our job was mainly to work among
youth — to educate young people in working
class principles,’’ said Rush, noting that the
problem then, as now, was to acquaint the
thousands of young jobless workers with the
trade union perspective in the fight for jobs.

Throughout the latter part of the 30s the
YCL was active in organizing workers in the
“relief camps’’ that constituted the federal
government’s 20-cents-a-day-wage answer
to the unemployed situation. In B.C. those
efforts brought about a relief camp workers’
strike and the famous On-to-Otawa Trek, as
well as a mass May Day rally of 35,000 in
Stanley Park in 1935.

From 1936-37, the YCL assisted in the
sucessful, if short-lived drive to organize
newspaper carriers and delivery boys.

During the Spanish Civil War, YCL sup-
port ranged from members volunteering for
military action to solidarity work at home.
In B.C. a women’s brigade organized sup-
port and raised funds for the Republican
cause.

The growth of fascism on the world scene
also became a focus of YCL work as the
decade drew to a close. In Vancouver,
several YCLers, including Rush, were ar-
rested at a demonstration to protest the con-
tinued shipping of scrap iron to Japan dur-
ing that country’s period of growing

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 21, 1983—Page 10

pp =

Rush also remembered the supporting
role the YCL played in the Vancouver oc-
cupation of the main post office by
unemployed workers in 1938. When that
occupation was brutally supressed by police,
YCL members cared for the routed and
wounded occupiers in a kitchen and medical
aid centre set up in the Ukrainian Hall on
East Pender Street.

The latter 30s also saw the creation’ of a
new type of organization, the Canadian
Youth Congress. The YCL played a major
part in the formation and the policies of this
broadly based group composed of major
church youth leagues, the YM/YWCA and
several other groups. The congress engaged
in numerous international solidarity ac-
tivities, established local youth councils and
recreation centres, and pressed for legisla-
tion to address youth needs.

During the war the YCL, along with the
Communist Party, was declared illegal and
YCL members were forced into hiding. But,
said Rush, ‘‘when the war became a just war,
many YCL members joined active service
and gave their lives in the fight against
facism.”’

After the war, the B.C. YCL became ac-
tive in the veterans’ fight for housing, play-
ing a major role in organizing around a
veterans occupation of the old Vancouver
Hotel.

In the period after World War II the com-
munist youth movement was reconstituted
as the National Federation of Labor Youth,
first as a mass youth grouping, and later as a
specifically communist youth organization.
Amongits activities were a ‘‘youth lobby” to
Otawa and a successful campaign to roll
back a three-cent hike in chocolate bar
prices. With the advent of the Cold War and
the Korean War, its activities became
centered around the fight for world peace.

Campaigns around cultural and recrea-
tional issues — the organization even had its
own intermediate-league baseball team, the
N-flyers, in Montreal — also constituted a
good deal of the NFLY’s work.

_The Cold War played its part in the
disintegration of the NFLY in 1957. It was
succeded almost immediately by the
Socialist Youth League, which renamed
itself the Young Communist League in 1961.

: During the 60s the focus of work changed
to reflect the growing activities in the student
movement, as universities opened their
doors to the maturing members of the post-
war baby boom. Peace remained a key issue
in the early 60s, with major efforts by the
Y¥CL around the ban-the-bomb movement.
Civil rights support work, engendered by the
mass marches against racist policies in. the
United States became another focus, and, as
the U.S. intensified military action in
southeast Asia, so did work in the anti-
Vietnam-war movement.

The 70s saw the YCL reconstituted, after
a brief period of dissolution in the latter 60s,
and concentrating its activities in the student
movement. Indeed, YCLers were among
those student leaders who, following the
dissolution of the old Canadian Union of
Students in 1969, pushed for and helped
organize the National Union of Students, as
= as provincial federations in Ontario and

While student work continued, the YCL
also turned its attention to young workers, as
succeeding generations emerged from secon-
dary and post-secondary schools into a
shrinking job market. In B.C. that work
revolved around the Union of Unemployed
Youth in the mid-70s.

Today the YCL in B.C. continues the
work around jobless youth, with members
active in the leadership of the B.C. Federa-
tion of Labor’s unemployed committees and
action centres.

FEATURE

YCL plans for future
on 60th anniversary

’

The fight for jobs, peace and women’s
equality is the key task facing the Young
Communist League as it celebrates six
decades of the communist youth move-
ment, according to the general secretary
of the Young Communist League.

And in B.C., that means involvement
in the Solidarity Coalition fighting the

Socred budget, Sylvie Baillargeon told.

the Tribune.

“The most immediate task is to raise as
much youth support for Operation
Solidarity as possible — in high schools
and unemployed organizations, the YCL
should be involved in getting young peo-
ple acctive,”’ she said.

‘We are not nostalgic about the past,
but are using our legacy in organizing the
fight for jobs today,’’ said Baillargeon on
the first leg of a cross-country tour of
YCL clubs.

Baillargeon is travelling Canada pro-
moting the 60th anniversary celebrations
and the upcoming national YCL conven-
tion in Toronto next month. Social
events, regional conventions .and_ban-
quets have been set. re a

The B.C. YCL convention Sept. 10-11
drew delegates from around B.C. to
discuss national convention’ documents
and select seven delegates for the national
conference, to be held Oct. 8-10.

Convention delegates, ‘‘half of whom
were contacts,” agreed that the primary
focus of the B.C. YCL was to become
“concretely involved in the Solidarity
Coalition under the name of the YCL,”’
said B.C. general secretary Kim Zander.

YCLers also pledged to become more
involved in the unemployed movement
“because young people ask the most fun-
damental questions when the’re
unemployed,”’ Zander, who is also coor-
dinator of the Vancouver unemployed
action centre, said.

And, she said, the B.C. YCL has
renewed a commitment to the peace
movement: ‘‘Now that the peace ques-
tion has become a motherhood issue, it’s
important to take it a qualitative step for-
ward and centre discussion around just
who is responsible for the arms race.’’

Additionally, the YCL convention
decided that more personal appearances
by spokesmen and more public meetings
would be undertaken in the future, said
Zander.

Baillargeon said the YCL sees as a

most pressing issue the need to organize
jobless youth ‘“‘to work in conjunction
with the trade union movement, because
there is a real danger that young people
can be used against the trade unions.”’
There is ‘‘a growing politicization of
youth around the questions of jobs, peace

and women’s equality’’ said Baillargeon,

BC YCL. . . pledge to join in Solidarity Coalition work.

- said.

TRIBUNE PHOTO — SEAN GRIFFIN

SYLVIE BAILLARGEON ... leader

promotes 60th anniversary.

and youth are asking questions such aS,"
‘Why is unemployment so high?,’ ‘Why
is education inaccessible?,’ and ‘Why is
there a-war threat?’.’’ ;
‘Ultimately, the answer is that
capitalism is the cause of those problems, —
and that social change is necessary,’’ she

“Young people are taking up the pro-—
gressive banner — but at the same time
they are vulnerable to right-wing
demagoguery,’’ Baillargeon warned,
while noting that ‘‘There are class dif-
ferences within the youth movement
itself.”

While the YCL has plans to increaseitS _
role in progressive movements under its
own name, the young communists also
unite with other youth groups. In eastern —
Canada, the league is one of several |
groups united in the Canadian Youth for
Peace Network, formed after the Con
tinental Meeting of North Americal
Youth for Peace, Detente and Disarma
ment in March, 1982.

The broadly-based organization,
which includes student associations and
federations and several church youth
groups, distributes educational material
on the arms race and has sponsor
drives to declare secondary schools
nuclear-weapons-free zones.

And the YCL is inviting represen-
tatives of religious groups, student —
organizations and others to the Octobef |
national convention, said Baillargeon.
Several international guests will also jo!
the approximately 125 delegates, she

60th anniversary of the communist you
movement with a banquet Saturdays
Sept. 24, 6:30 p.m. at the Peretz School
6184 Ash St. in Vancouver. ~