11 September 1938 Fourth International Youth Conference (held in conjunction with the Founding Conference of the Fourth International)
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Our international youth movement has just taken a great step forward. Our International Conference, even though it did not have the false majesty of the masquerades of the Kremlin, nor indeed all the scope that we would have wished to give it, has seriously and sincerely studied the problems that preoccupy the working youth of the whole world.
To all our youth organisations, to all our youth commissions, to all the sections of the Fourth International, it repeats, together with the programme adopted by the conference of the Fourth International: only the enthusiasm and the offensive spirit of youth can assure the first successes of the struggle.
Interpreting broadly the spirit of the programme adopted by the founding conference of the Fourth International and ratified by it, it addresses itself to all our youth organisations, to all our sections, to tell them: the working youth cannot be won to the Fourth International except by speaking its language, by expressing its aspirations, by giving it an organisation that is truly its own. No youth political parties. No academy for young graybeards! Organisations of combat, ardent, combative, mingling with youth — in the factory, in the barracks, in the fields, mingling also with its diversions — seeking to imbue every act of youth with a will to fight that lies latent within it and asks only to express itself. It is this orientation that is defined in the resolutions found below, adopted as the conclusions of warm and friendly debates.
It depends on our audacity, political and organisational, to make our international organisation the point of concentration for the exploited youth, marching towards a better future. Forward towards the working youth!
THE BOLSHEVIK-LENINISTS AND THE ORGANISATION OF REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH
1. The youth organisations of the Fourth International set themselves the task of building broad, autonomous communist organisations of young people. The task of these organisations is the defence of the demands of young workers, the anti-militarist struggle, the education of Bolshevik cadres for the parties of the Fourth International, in order to bring the working youth into the struggle alongside the proletariat for the power of the workers and peasants.
2. The Bolshevik-Leninists affirm that only a class organisation can express the true aspirations of the working youth; faced with the bourgeoisie and its reformist and Stalinist lackeys, they proclaim not only the right but also the duty of the working youth — exploited even more than their elders — to take part in this struggle. They denounce the reactionary character of the reformist campaigns, taken up by the Stalinists, which aim to confine the activity of youth to leisure alone. The Bolshevik-Leninists do not despise leisure; on the contrary, they regard the physical and intellectual development of the individual as one of the essential tasks of socialism; but they stress that to organise youth solely with a view to leisure, outside the struggle against capitalism and thus under the latter's tutelage, can only end by supplying the bourgeoisie with more docile cannon-fodder and labour-fodder.
To this reactionary conception, the Bolshevik-Leninists counterpose that of physical culture and intellectual culture conceived as specialised activities, placed at the service of the class objectives of the proletariat and used as means of the class struggle; just as they say to every young worker in uniform: "Take up the arms the bourgeoisie has entrusted to you and learn to use them well, the better to sweep away capitalism and bourgeois militarism," so they say to every young exploited person eager for physical exercise and knowledge: "Train your body; nourish your mind, so as to be better armed in the struggle to overthrow the exploiters who bruise your body and deny you culture."
3. The Bolshevik-Leninists affirm that the proletarian organisation of youth must be deeply conscious of the historic aims and needs of its class, that is to say it must be a communist organisation. They reject any idea of substituting for the class organisation of working youth an organisation without principles or programme that would group together youth in general, or "non-fascist" youth, along the lines of the formula of Dimitrov and Guyot, which led to the de facto liquidation of the legal sections of the Communist Youth International (KIM). The Bolshevik-Leninists explain to the working youth that neither horror of the executioner nor joie de vivre is a sufficient weapon in the struggle against fascism; that the latter is only an exacerbated form of capitalist domination, to which the bourgeoisie cannot fail to resort in the present situation of general crisis; that fascism can only be brought down by resolutely opposing proletarian violence to anti-working-class violence, by counterposing to the programme of the fascist counter-revolution the programme of the seizure of power by the proletariat — in a word, that it is only under the banner of the communism of the Fourth International that fascism can be effectively fought. This is why the youth organisations of the Fourth International can have no programme different from that of the adult organisations; they may neither amputate it nor diminish it in any part whatsoever. It is on the basis of this programme that the central committees and the congresses take their positions; it is this programme that guides every act of the national and international organisations.
4. This in no way implies that the youth organisation is a party of young people. The party is composed of the most educated and most conscious elements of the working class, who give their complete and total adherence to the platform of the Fourth International. The youth organisation, by contrast, while determining its actions according to this programme, while setting itself the task of educating the working youth on the basis of this programme, requires for membership only a general agreement — even one that is entirely of sentiment — with the goals pursued by the Fourth International and its methods of struggle. It is the expression of the instinctive revolt of working youth against super-exploitation, of the peasant youth chained to the land, of intellectual youth, of the millions of declassed young unemployed, the expression of their enthusiastic adherence to the revolution. In this sense it is a broader organisation than the party.
However, in the present situation, where the traditional leaderships of working youth, reformist and Stalinist, are striving to chain the working youth to the bourgeoisie, where the Marxist-Leninist vanguard remains numerically weak, the youth organisations of the Fourth International cannot instantly win over the working youth. On the other hand, it is their task to polarise the instinctive revolt of youth against class collaboration. The agonising situation of working youth, the growing proportion of the workless and the declassed among youth, accentuate the spontaneity, the confusion and the violence of the political currents emerging among youth. They reinforce the need for an unshakeable fidelity to the Bolshevik programme, for a thorough Marxist education. But at the same time this dictates to each of our organisations an extremely bold organisational attitude, so as to gather within its ranks all these combative but confused elements. It is possible, under these conditions, that our youth organisations may take positions that diverge from those of the Fourth International. But the remedy is not to be sought in bureaucratic measures; on the contrary, the more impetuous and enthusiastic, the more full of initiative youth is — even where mistaken — the more possibilities it will have to educate itself, provided that our leaderships and the leaderships of our parties show themselves to be extremely firm on the political terrain, use every initiative to educate youth in the school of the Marxist-Leninist programme, to forge its class consciousness and to weld the struggle of working youth to the overall struggle of the proletariat.
5. The communist youth organisation is an autonomous organisation. It determines for itself its own political orientation, both as regards general political questions and as regards the particular demands of young people. Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the working class can only learn by climbing the calvary of its defeats, by drawing the lessons of experience. True on the historical scale for the proletariat, this statement is even more particularly true for youth: one cannot make it assimilate the historical lessons of a hundred years of proletarian struggle through the reading of textbooks of labour history. It can only understand the history of the class struggle through its own struggle against the exploiters. Struggle is the great educator of youth. That is precisely why youth must be able to enter the struggle having prepared itself, with its own ideas, its own illusions, but also its enthusiasm and its faith. It must determine for itself how it will fight in a given circumstance, even if it should afterwards discover that its assessment of the situation was inadequate, that the methods it had chosen were not appropriate to the situation. Only in this way will it be able to understand the historical experience of the proletariat through its own experience and use the lessons of the past to understand its own mistakes. On this point the Fourth International takes up in full this saying of Lenin's: "Without complete independence, youth will be unable to produce from its own ranks good socialists, nor to prepare itself to carry socialism forward."
6. The organisational autonomy of Youth in no way means that it does not call upon the party organisations to guide and advise it, to draw on the greater theoretical knowledge and experience of the party's militants. This does not mean, however, that the task of theoretical education (schools, journals, newspaper articles on the one hand; political discussion on the problems facing the organisation on the other) should be carried out exclusively by party officials. "It is not uncommon for people of a certain age, or the old, to be unable to approach as they should this youth, which, by force of circumstance, is obliged to come to socialism differently, by other paths, in other forms and under other conditions than its fathers. That is why we must be unreserved supporters of an independent organisation of the Union of Youth, and this not only because the opportunists fear this independence, but on principle." (Lenin, 1916). The theoretical education of Youth, like the entire political activity of the Youth organisation, must be autonomous; at the same time it must be the object of careful attention and constant vigilance on the part of the most experienced militants of the party. The autonomy of Youth implies not only the right of the party to criticise, but also its duty to do so, in full comradeship but without evasion, for every fault committed by the youth organisation.
7. Likewise Youth must learn the practice of organisational tasks by itself taking in hand the management of finances, administration, its newspaper, etc. However, in the whole series of illegal activities that must necessarily be carried out by a revolutionary organisation, and for which it is necessary to educate young revolutionaries, the principle of organisational autonomy cannot be introduced without danger to the organisation itself. It is therefore appropriate to create commissions functioning under the full control of the party, in which comrades from the Youth take part with the same rights and the same duties as the representatives of the party.
8. The theoretical control, the political and organisational support that the party must provide to Youth, is achieved through the appointment of delegates from party bodies to the corresponding Youth bodies at every level, who carefully follow the life of the Youth organisation, who set themselves the task of advising it without dictating orders to it, but also without letting it commit the slightest fault without having warned it; the activity of the party delegates must always consist in patiently explaining, in teaching fraternally, without pedantry; they must in no case aim to rule the young by ukase and thereby to break the élan and the enthusiasm that are youth's finest capital.
9. The Youth congress is its sovereign body. In the event of political disagreements between the youth organisation and the party, the latter cannot bureaucratically impose its policy on the youth organisation. In such a case the task of the party leadership is to appeal to the Youth militants, to show them wherein their position is mistaken, and to bring them to reverse their positions through free and responsible decisions.
10. The Youth International is a section of the Fourth International. As such, its mission is to apply the sovereign decisions of the congresses of the Fourth International. However, just as the Fourth International cannot impose automatic discipline on its sections, no more does it impose its orientation on the Youth International; this is determined by the international congresses and conferences of the Youth, in agreement with the programme and principles of the Fourth International. Should a dispute arise between the Fourth International and the Youth International, the sovereign decision would fall, after thorough discussion, to the Executive Committee of the Fourth International.
PLATFORM OF STRUGGLE OF THE WORKING YOUTH
I. Capitalism, whether authoritarian or liberal, proves incapable of bringing the slightest remedy to the misery and anguish of the working youth. The young want a trade, and when it consents (very rarely!) to give them one, it is only the better to chain them to a machine that will tomorrow stop producing and leave them to starve alongside the wealth they will have produced. The young want to work, to produce with their hands, to use their strength, and capitalism offers them as a prospect unemployment or "the carrying out of work under conditions other than the normal conditions of production," according to the excellent and hypocritical definition given of labour camps by the League of Nations, or else the production of armaments, which engenders destruction and not well-being. The young want to learn, and they are refused access to culture. The young want to live, and the only future offered to them is to starve or to perish in a new imperialist war. The young want to build a new world, and they are permitted only to maintain or consolidate a rotten world that is collapsing. The young want to know what tomorrow will be, and the only answer capitalism gives them is this: "Today you must still tighten your belt one more notch; tomorrow, we shall see... Besides, perhaps there will be no tomorrow for you."
Give a future to youth; give a future to the world.
2. That is why youth will rally beneath the banner of those who bring it a future. Only the Fourth International, because it represents the historic interests of the one class capable of reorganising the world on new foundations; only the Bolshevik-Leninists can promise youth a future in which it will be able to make full use of its capacities. Only they can say to youth: "We want to build with you a world where everyone works and takes pride in working well, in mastering their trade down to its smallest details; a world where everyone will eat their fill, because production will be regulated according to the needs of the workers and not according to profit; a world where it will be necessary to keep learning, so as better to subject the forces of nature to man's will; a world where, by constantly widening the field of application of the sciences, humanity's theoretical knowledge will be extended day by day; a new world; a new man who realises everything in you of aspiration and power." It is under the sign of a new world and a new humanity that the Fourth International and its youth organisations must go forth to win the working youth; it is under this sign that they will win the working youth.
STRUGGLE FOR THE FUTURE: STRUGGLE FOR BREAD
3. The promise of a better future would be mere demagogy if the Bolshevik-Leninists did not struggle to improve, here and now, the situation of the working youth, if they did not formulate the immediate demands of youth, if they did not propagate the necessity of fighting by class methods for the satisfaction of these demands, and if, through this struggle and on the basis of the experience acquired in struggle, they did not demonstrate to the exploited youth that its demands can ultimately be satisfied only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the struggle for these demands must be transformed into a struggle for power through the struggle for control and direction of the economy.
We want our right to work!
4. For young workers engaged in production, the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward demands aimed at:
1. measuring the work demanded of the young not according to the will to extract the maximum profit from it, but on the contrary according to their degree of physical development; 2. ensuring them a standard of living equal to that of adults, thereby assuring them economic independence; 3. raising their technical qualification as far as possible; 4. countering the equality of young and adults before capitalist exploitation with the equality of their rights.
For young people under twenty, they formulate the following demands:
A shortened working week, with hours enabling young workers to practise sport in the open air.
A paid holiday of at least one month a year;
Organisation, by factory or group of factories, of advanced training courses, at the employer's expense and under workers' control.
Hours of professional advancement taken from the working week and paid at the normal rate.
Application of the principle "equal pay for equal work," under workers' control.
Fixing of a minimum living wage for young workers; fixing of young workers' wages under the control of the workers as a whole.
Prohibition of night work, and of arduous, unhealthy or insalubrious labour; workers' control over the use of young labour.
Equality of young people before social legislation.
All together for the struggle!
5. To take in hand the defence of their demands, young workers must have the right to appoint their own delegates, whose task is above all to draw the attention of adult delegates and of the workers as a whole to the specific demands of youth, to link the struggle for these particular demands to the struggle for the general demands of the working class. Likewise, trade-union youth commissions must be created at every level and imposed on the trade-union bureaucracy, whose task will be to study the demands of youth, to recruit and educate young workers. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to take the lead in organising such commissions.
In order to open wide the doors of the trade unions to exploited youth, the Bolshevik-Leninists demand the fixing of reduced trade-union dues for young workers.
We want a trade!
6. In the struggle against unemployment, the slogans "Prolongation of schooling," "Organisation of apprenticeship," can only have meaning insofar as their burden is made to fall not on the working class but on the big capitalists. The Bolshevik-Leninists must therefore formulate the demands of working youth in this field as follows:
Prolongation of schooling to the age of sixteen, with a family allowance for the families of workers and small peasants.
Reorganisation of the school in connection with the factory; the school must prepare children for life and work; it must weld working youth to the older generations; hence the demand for control by workers' organisations over technical education.
Reduction of the period of apprenticeship to a maximum of two years.
Prohibition of all work unrelated to the apprenticeship.
Creation, at the employer's expense, alongside every industrial, mining or commercial enterprise or group of enterprises, of apprenticeship schools, with an enrolment of at least 3% of the personnel employed in the enterprise or group of enterprises.
Appointment of instructors by the trade unions.
Control of the schools by a joint commission of workers' delegates and delegates of the apprentices themselves.
We want our right to life!
7. The task of saving young unemployed people from misery, despair and fascist demagogy, of reintegrating them into production and thereby closely binding them to the working class, is a vital task for the future of the proletariat. Revolutionaries must fight to impose on capitalism:
1. that it prepare the definitive reintegration of unemployed youth into production through the organisation of vocational education and guidance; 2. that it immediately integrate unemployed youth into productive activity; 3. that it organise such work not by paramilitary methods but on the basis of free wage-labour: "Down with labour camps, whether voluntary or compulsory"; 4. that it furnish to the youth it plunges into poverty the means to live. The Bolshevik-Leninists therefore put forward the following demands:
Unemployment benefit equal to that of adults for young people out of work, manual and intellectual, from the moment they leave school.
Obligation on big employers to open centres of vocational retraining under workers' control.
Vocational retraining organised according to the needs of production, under the general control of the trade unions and congresses of workers' delegates.
Reopening of closed factories.
Launching of major public-works projects (hospitals, schools, low-cost housing, sports grounds, stadiums, swimming pools, power stations), paid at trade-union rates and under workers' control from top to bottom.
For our brothers in the countryside!
8. The distress of the peasant youth is no less great than that of the working youth. For young peasants, the Bolshevik-Leninists formulate the following general demands:
Strict application of all the social laws and measures listed above in both town and country: abolition of the domestic exploitation of young children. Particularly strict application of the principle "equal pay for equal work."
Regional organisation of vocational education at the expense of the big landowners.
Healthy lodging and food for young workers living with their employers.
Cheap credit for small farmers, and especially for small farmers with families to support.
For our sisters!
9. Young women workers and peasants are the most exploited part of the working youth. The youth organisations of the Fourth International must pay particular attention to the defence of their demands:
Strict application of the principle: "equal pay for equal work."
One additional day off per month;
Right to conscious motherhood.
Six months' maternity leave.
Maternity benefit for unmarried mothers.
Open the schools and the universities!
10. Access of the broad layers of the working youth to culture and science is one of the necessary conditions for the progress of humanity. The Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following slogans:
Schools and universities open to all young people who wish to study.
Free study and maintenance for the sons and daughters of workers and peasants.
Bread, books, rights for the coolies!
11. In the colonies and semi-colonies, the working youth is the victim of a double exploitation, capitalist and patriarchal. In these countries and in the imperialist countries, the defence of the demands of young colonial workers and peasants is the first duty of the anti-imperialist struggle. This struggle is waged around the general slogan: the same rights for colonial youth as for the youth of the metropolis.
Organisation of hygiene and health care in every village.
Organisation of hostels for young workers, peasants and coolies, under the control of the workers' and nationalist organisations.
Schools for native children; teaching in the native language.
The administration open to native intellectuals.
Levy of the necessary funds from the budgets for war and police, and from the privileges of imperialism.
12. The bourgeoisie recognises the right of working youth to be exploited; it denies it the right to pronounce on this exploitation, and deprives it of all political rights; in certain countries it even forbids all political activity to those under eighteen. The working class answers these measures by saying: "Whoever has the right to be exploited has the right to fight against the regime that exploits them. All political rights to young workers and peasants."
Right to vote from the age of eighteen, for legislative and municipal elections alike, as well as for the election of delegates.
Abolition of the special laws forbidding all political activity to the young.
We want our right to joy!
13. The bourgeoisie exploits the need of the working youth for relaxation, either to stupefy it or to subject it to reinforced discipline. It is the duty of the working class to help produce a strong youth, capable of throwing all its physical and intellectual strength into the struggle against capitalism; to help it use the leisure that capitalism gives it in order to learn to know the world better, the better to be able to transform it. The Bolshevik-Leninists therefore demand:
Free access for unemployed and working youth to all sports grounds, stadiums, museums, libraries, theatres and cinemas.
Organisation of leisure by the unemployed youth themselves.
Use of unemployed intellectual youth to organise lectures, talks, etc., on physics, chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, the history of the workers' movement, art and literature.
Establishment of centres open to working and workless youth, where young people would have not only the possibility of amusement and instruction, but also of studying for themselves the social problems that confront them; management of these centres by the working youth itself under the control of the local trade-union organisations.
PROGRAMME OF REVOLUTION
14. The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the whole set of demands of the workers, employed and unemployed. The definitive disappearance of youth unemployment is bound up with the disappearance of unemployment in general. The struggle for the prolongation of schooling, for compulsory vocational retraining, is bound up with the struggle for the sliding scale of wages and the sliding scale of hours of work. The struggle to wrest from capitalism reforms aimed at developing the class consciousness of working youth is bound up with the struggle for workers' control and for factory committees. The struggle for great public works is bound up with the struggle for the expropriation of the de facto monopolies, for the nationalisation of credit, of the banks and of the key industries. The struggle to break the attempts to militarise youth is bound up with the struggle against the development of authoritarian statist tendencies and against fascism, with the organisation of workers' militias. It is within the framework of the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International that the present programme must be developed and applied. It is under the sign of the proletariat's struggle for power that the Fourth International will bring about the triumph of the demands of the exploited youth. (9-1938)
The International Youth Conference of the Fourth [International].
STATUTES OF THE YOUTH INTERNATIONAL
1. All the youth sections of the national organisations of the Fourth International unite in a single, centralised international organisation, the youth section of the Fourth International (World Party of Socialist Revolution). Its task is the defence of the demands of young workers, manual and intellectual, the anti-militarist struggle, the education of Bolshevik cadres for the parties of the Fourth International, in order to bring the working youth into the struggle alongside the proletariat for the power of the workers and peasants.
2. As a section of the Fourth International, the Youth International is politically subordinate to the Fourth International. On the other hand, it is organisationally autonomous and determines for itself its policy and orientation in agreement with the principles and programme of the Fourth International.
3. Membership of the Youth International is founded on acceptance of the programme of the Fourth International and the application of the decisions of its responsible bodies, as well as of the programme and decisions of the Youth International.
4. Under no circumstances may a youth organisation join the Youth International if it is not affiliated to a party of the Fourth International, where one exists in that country.
5. The supreme body of the Youth International is its congress, which will meet at least every two years, immediately after the congress of the Fourth International. The decisions of its congress are subject to ratification by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.
The congress may be convened in extraordinary session at the request of at least one third of the sections.
6. The congress elects the International Bureau, drawn from among the leaders of the national organisations, the number of whose members is fixed for each congress.
7. In extraordinary circumstances the sections may replace, by other comrades, those members of their organisation who sit on the bureau, subject to ratification by an absolute majority of the latter.
8. The International Bureau is the leading political body between congresses. It must meet at least every three months. It may be convened in extraordinary session at the request of a third of its members.
9. The International Bureau elects the International Secretariat, whose number of members and seat it fixes. The majority of the members of the International Secretariat must be drawn from among the members of the International Bureau.
10. The International Secretariat is above all a body of liaison and administration. It publishes international bulletins, at least in French and in English. It may be convened in extraordinary session at the request of one of its members.
11. The International Bureau has the right to accept the affiliation of national sections or to pronounce their exclusion.
12. Any individual or group of individuals excluded by a national organisation, or any national section excluded by the bureau, may appeal against this decision before the International Conference.
The International Youth Conference of the Fourth International, meeting on 11 September, having heard the report of the delegation to the International Conference of the Fourth International on the decisions that were adopted, gives its full approval to the decisions of the conference and to the policy adopted by it.
It wishes to emphasise its enthusiastic adherence to the programme adopted by the conference of the Fourth International and to the proclamation of the Fourth International. It appeals to all its sections and to the working youth of the whole world to defend with all their strength the programme, the decisions and the slogans of the Fourth International.
Long live the Fourth International (World Party of Socialist Revolution)!