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open letter to the
young communist league
The Young Communist League was born in the struggle against the last world war. When the entire world, under the guise of a struggle for democracy, was engaged in the business of scientifically organizing mass murders, when the fields of Europe were soaked with the blood of the world working class, and all humanity seemed sunk into the hideous abyss of medievalism, young communists courageously raised the red banner, the symbol of revolt against war and oppression, the symbol of the struggle for a new society. Their slogan “TURN THE IMPERIALIST WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR,” was heard by the war-weary masses. The Russian workers, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, overthrew the Tsar and organized the new Soviet Government. The German workers overthrew the Kaiser, and throughout the world the working class shook its fist in the face of the their rulers, the bosses.
But since this heroic struggle over 20 years have passed, and these two decades have tragically seen the growth of reaction and the parallel degeneration of the Communist International. The once revolutionary movement of the Third International, in the footsteps of the Social Democrats, has abandoned the independent struggle of the workers for socialism and joined in the new, more gigantic fraud of the bosses for another world war for “democracy.”
The American Student Union, controlled by the Y.C.L., at its national convention in December, abandoned the struggle of militant students against the R.O.T.C. and publicly proclaimed their loyal support of Roosevelt’s plans to use the unemployed youth on N.Y.A. to train pilots of death. The ex-Communist Party has more than once expressed its whole-hearted support of naval and army expansion. One cannot read the ex-communist press without amazement at their open pro-war, patriotic propaganda. The red flag is replaced by the American flag. The song of world working-class solidarity, the International, is substituted by the song of American imperialism, the Star-Spangled Banner.
You want to fight fascism? So do we; as is evident, not only by our general propaganda, but in action by the anti-Franco demonstration in Oakland where two of our comrades were arrested, by the anti-fascist picket line in New York, in Los Angeles, and in many other sections of the country. But we can’t fight fascism by supporting the system the system that breeds it. Nor by giving our pledge of allegiance to the Roosevelt government that, in order to prevent the workers from voicing their opposition to the imperialist slaughter, will organize a fascist, military regime themselves, e.g. the M-Day Plan. Fascism must be fought by the independent struggle of the workers, by the trade union movement.
Members of the Y.C.L.! Join the revolutionary struggle against the coming imperialist war! Join the militant struggle against the fascists! Join the Young Peoples Socialist League, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
BUILD WORKERS’ DEFENSE GUARDS!
ALL WAR FUNDS TO THE UNEMPLOYED!
YOUTH PEOPLES SOCIALIST LEAGUE,
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!!
The text above is from a flier put out by the American Trotskyist youth group just prior to World War II. Youth for Socialist Action is reproducing it to give an illustration of the betrayals by Stalinism of the international working class. Tens of millions of workers of from around the world would go on to loose their life during World War II, which the Stalinists never ceased to actively support, going so far as to oppose any efforts by labor or Blacks to strike or protest against discrimination for fear it would disrupt the war effort.
