By the youth wing of the KAPD, the Kommunistische Arbeiter Jugend, this text talks about the role of youth in revolution and revolutionary organization and their relationship with the adults.
The ruthless exploitation and enslavement of young people at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century created an almost unbearable situation for them. (See Apprenticeship and misery.)
To fight against this, young people formed “workers' youth organizations”.
At that time, the adult parties were indifferent to those of their young class comrades, even adopting a hostile attitude towards them.
Organizational expansion and marxist-revolutionary penetration allowed the youth organizations to emerge as an independent revolutionary factor.
The parties, which had already succumbed to reformist influences, saw the emergence of independent revolutionary organizations as a danger that they tried to counter by all means.
While in Germany, for example, they succeeded in depriving youth organizations of their revolutionary independence and patronizing them organizationally and intellectually with the help of the 1908 ban on “political organizations of adolescents” under the pretext of pedagogical arguments about the harmfulness of politics for children, the youth organizations in Norway and Italy asserted their independence in the most tenacious struggle with the unrevolutionary parties and supported their left wing.
The independence of the revolutionary youth organizations from the reformist parties was a class struggle requirement before the war.
The world war had suffocated the last, non-reformist remnants of the socialist parties. The adult revolutionary workers' movement was dead (with a few exceptions). Social patriotism triumphed.
The youth organizations that remained independent, however, maintained their revolutionary stance, while large sections of the patronized - as in Germany - broke away from the unrevolutionary parties and created new organizations.
The absence of revolutionary international parties of adults forced the revolutionary youth organizations to take over their role, i.e., in reality, to be the (missing) revolutionary party. (Which was recruited mainly from young people).
The political abyss that separated the nationalist-reformist parties from the international-revolutionary (youth) organizations created conditions in which there could be no question not only of the subordination of the (revolutionary) youth organizations, but also of any kind of political cooperation.
In the years after the Great War, revolutionary parties emerged, most of whose core consisted of the revolutionary youth organizations.”
The existence of revolutionary parties and the fact that proletarian revolutionary adults and proletarian revolutionary youth now shared common principles created new foundations in the relations between the two.
The precondition for the creation of a relationship corresponding to these foundations is the elimination of
1. the remnants of the ideology of (today impossible) independence from the adults (and thus from the party) existing in the ranks of the revolutionary youth;
2. the widespread conservatism among the adults, which is expressed in the lower evaluation and paternalism of young people.
The young people must understand the necessity of their integration into the overall movement, learn to practice class discipline and the adults must regard the young people as comrades-in-arms and treat them accordingly!
Recognizing that the struggle for the interests and liberation of the revolutionary youth is only possible as a struggle of the entire proletarian class, which can only be united in the face of the united power of the bourgeoisie, the young proletarians join their class movement as equal members alongside the adults.
The young proletarians thus unite (alongside the adults) in the revolutionary workplace organization as the class organization of the proletariat and the most active and purposeful in the party.
As members of the party, young people have the same rights and duties as adults.
The psychological characteristics of the growing generation (e.g. the striving for equality with adults within the framework of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state) and the existence of a number of more or less social-democratic youth organizations require special propaganda methods of the party towards the proletarian youth.
From this follows the necessity of uniting the bearers of this youth propaganda, who for the most part must be the young members of the party itself, for the purpose of planned action among the proletarian youth in general.
This grouping does not have the character of an organization separate from the party, but rather the character of a department established for special purposes. It must carry out its special tasks in accordance with the decisions and measures of the Party as a whole.
In accordance with these principles, the Communist Workers' Party must take immediate action:
The amalgamation of its young members into youth sections alongside the Party organization;
the same central amalgamation according to the party district and national organization
and the creation of corresponding youth department bodies.
On an international scale, youth work is subject to a youth department to be set up within the Executive of the Communist Workers' International, whose responsible head is also a member of the Executive.
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