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Today, 25 May 2020 marks the 98th anniversary of the founding of the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA). The league was established by the Communist Party on 25 May 1922. In 1950, the apartheid regime, as one of its first major actions after coming to power, adopted the Suppression of Communism Act, banning the Communist Party and all other communist organisation and activity. 

The Young Communist League was also affected by the banning, which resulted in the Communist Party responding by means of underground organisation and later on also organising from exile as part of the pillars of the South African struggle for liberation and social emancipation. The SACP re-established the Young Communist League under legal conditions of existence in 2003.

The SACP congratulates the YCLSA for mobilising young people over the decades and also for contributing in no small measure to the growth of the SACP. Many of YCLSA members have through the years, while building the YCLSA and the SACP, also mobilised and united young people into various progressive organisations. 

Today the SACP can state proudly that, with consistent political education and practical activism in all key sites of struggle and youth activity, we indeed have the youth in the YCLSA that is capable of taking the revolution forward.

Founding of the YCLSA

The Young Communist League was officially formed within a period of approximately one year after the founding of the Communist Party, which was formed in July 1921. The year 2021 will therefore mark the centenary of the founding of the Party. A strong YCLSA democratically in the vanguard of the youth will be an invaluable contribution to the centenary celebrations of the Communist Party.

The formation of the Young Communist League was preceded by practical activities by young communists, mobilising largely young workers against capitalism, the face of which was the Chamber of Mines, and against racial and gender oppression. It was in the Young Communist League that young women leaders like Ruth First assumed a key leadership role, sending out a strong message to patriarchy, racism and the system of capitalist exploitation. The YCLSA should emulate that profound example in building itself to become the vanguard of the youth on a democratic basis.   

Localised political classes among young communists together with youth from various sectors also became an important step towards the formation of the Young Communist League. As an integral part of the Communist Party, the work of Young Communist League among young people helped to intensify the activist role of the Party. This manifested itself, first, during the 1922 mineworkers’ strike. 

The Communist Party regarded the strike as primarily a battle in the class struggle between labour and capital, but strongly condemned and distanced itself from the racist elements associated the strike. As the way forward, the Communist Party correctly pointed out that a white South Africa must be ruled out altogether, and called on workers to unite on a non-racial basis and intensify the overall class struggle to win their momentary objectives and ultimate goals.  

The Young Communist League gave practical support to the strike within the framework of the leadership guidance provided by the Communist Party. After the racist Chamber of Mines threatened to fire about 2 000 mineworkers, the Young Communist League, moving from a youth perspective, emphatically made it clear that the workers’ strike action had to be on a non-racial basis. This firm principled stance, rooted in Marxism-Leninism, distinguished the Young Communist League from other populist formations which vacillated in accordance with whatever was trending at each moment.

The Young Communist League, together with the Communist Party were the first in South Africa to organise under a non-racial trajectory and to be truly internationalist in outlook, with the aim of uniting the working class of South Africa with the rest of the workers of the world. As a disciplined and progressive internationalist youth formation, the Young Communist League affiliated under the Young Communist International (YCI). At that time many organisations were organised on racial lines. The line that was taken by the YCI was that the youth must be organised under a single organisation undivided by skin colour. 

Due to the non-racial outlook of the Young Communist League and its contribution in the working class struggle, many young African workers joined trade unions in droves and actively participated in the trade union movement. These workers would also join the Communist Party.  

Within the few years of its birth, the Young Communist League also started making contacts with various African youth organisations beyond the borders of South Africa. This, of course, had marked influence in the Communist Party. It is by no coincidence, therefore, that by 1924, the Party had already noted the vital activist role of the Young Communist League, including the formation of its branches across South Africa, in the process attracting young people into its ranks and those of the Party.

Until the banning of the Communist Party in 1950, the Young Communist League endured battering by the colonial regime, which resulted in a decline in some years. Some of its leaders faced arrests and victimisation from the colonial security forces. Consequently, the Young Communist League had to be revived time and again. 

One of the restorations of the Young Communist League took place in 1941. The process was mainly led by students based in Johannesburg, who were directed by the Communist Party. Their work led to its re-launch in 1942. Many young people were recruited to distribute leaflets and also produce written information and battle of ideas material. They also helped to sell the Youth for a New South Africa newspaper. One of the most revered Secretaries of the Young Communist League was Ruth First. Her writings spread the influence of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party beyond South African shores. She was later murdered by the apartheid regime through a letter bomb in 1982, while in exile in Mozambique. The murder was aimed at silencing her voice forever, but it failed to censor her, nonetheless.

Tasks of the YCLSA today

The 1994 radical democratic breakthrough ushered a new era and thereby demanded new forms of struggle. 

Since its relaunch in 2003, great work has been done by the YCLSA in building working class consciousness within South African youth, particularly consciousness based on the most advanced ideas, Marxism-Leninism. 

The YCLSA’s slogan, ‘Socialism in our lifetime’, should guide young communists on the urgency of the revolution. Vladimir Lenin’s 1920 directive on the tasks of the youth remains valid today. Lenin stated that “the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.” 

To learn, however, does not mean that the YCLSA must merely read resolutions of the SACP, consuming them merely for knowledge purposes. The history of the YCLSA shows that its influence within the Party was rooted in theoretically guided, practical work within the masses of the youth. It was not merely in Party congresses, conferences and meetings, though those platforms also played their key role. The YCLSA developed its leadership of the youth because of its intellectual development in the faculty of the science of society, Marxism-Leninism, and through its practical work in the theatre of action, class struggle. 

The process of lifelong learning contains vast amounts of work which must be undertaken by the YCLSA. Among other tasks, the YCLSA must form regular political schools in the townships, rural areas, workplaces, schools and institutions of higher education, and in the digital world, among others. Neoliberal propaganda has gripped many key sites of learning. It is the task of the YCLSA to mobilise the entire youth – that it, beyond the YCLSA – and work with the youth to oppose neoliberalism.

The role of the YCLSA in reaching out to, firstly, South African and Southern African youth as well as youth from the African continent and beyond is urgent. This decade of the 2020s must be marked by progressive and revolutionary youth activism in the continent in order to build true African sovereignty in opposition to imperialism and as an objective to uniting the working class of the world. 

Revolutionary democratic solidarity must be strengthened among the various peoples of the world. The YCLSA must thus contribute to the strengthening of the African Left Networking Forum, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and others. Opposition to narrow sexist, racist and African-chauvinist outlooks must also intensify.

It is important that, in democratically galvanising youth activism within our borders and beyond, the YCLSA becomes part of the youth, with the youth feeling – and fully understanding – that the demands espoused by the YCLSA after consultation with them are their own demands. Socialism will not be proclaimed in any session, meeting or on paper and the internet. It will be the result of active mobilisation and conscientising of the people through theoretically guided, practical activity. 

What that means is that the YCLSA cannot afford to be a purist organisation but must also link up with other youth formations and contribute to the improvement of their revolutionary working class consciousness. In all the progressive struggles of the youth, the YCLSA must not only contribute to them, but its contribution must clearly and manifestly be seen and understood by the youth and everyone else.

The SACP looks forward to a more vibrant and activist YCLSA in the vanguard of the youth and with their democratic support.  

Issued by The SACP