The Welsh branch of the YCL recently held a political discussion centred on the article ‘The Young Communist League as a mass organisation for youth’ by YCL General Secretary, Georgina Andrews, on Challenge. Various points were raised in this discussion that we believe further this analysis, and we will present these in this article.
The central thesis of Andrews’ article is that the ‘YCL is a mass organisation “spiritually bound” to the Party.’ This raises the question: is this how the organisation has acted in the past? We would argue no, however we also argue that this has had beneficial effects on the League. The League has experienced extraordinary growth in the past 5-10 years but in this time we believe that the League has been more selective than perhaps the epithet of ‘mass organisation’ might suggest, however had the expansion of the League been more rapid it is possible that the density of experienced comrades would have been too small to adequately steer and educate newer members. Instead, we find ourselves in the position where there is a strong core of cadres who have the knowledge and experience to lead a mass organisation. This is a qualitative shift in the League whereby we are in a stronger position to grow rapidly as a mass organisation with less risk of diluting our political aims.
Secondly, most members of the League are also members of the Party. While the League and Party are ‘spiritually bound’, a point was raised that there is a contradiction between the goals of the League as a mass organisation and Party as a vanguard. In many countries one cannot be a member of both the Party and League which raises the question of whether we should move to end dual membership in Britain? To this we answer no. The principal contradiction within the work of the League and Party currently is between the scale of work required and the numerically small party. To split membership of the League and Party would weaken both organisations and, in many areas where both organisations are less developed, this would risk splitting the League and Party into groups which both lack the critical mass to be sustainable and effective. We expect that as the League and Party continue to grow this will eventually trigger a qualitative shift wherein this analysis would need to be revisited.
Finally, we discussed precisely what it means for the League to be a ‘mass organisation’. Let us compare the League to another type of mass organisation: the Trade Union. In the case of trade unions, the only requirement in most cases is that the individual work in an area that said union organises. There are no penalties for publicly speaking out against established union policy. In other words, these organisations do not practice democratic centralism. If the League is to be a mass organisation that enforces democratic centralism then we must be a mass organisation ‘of a special kind’. Precisely what this means is something that should be discussed further within the League.
We hope this article proves to be useful to League members and furthers the analysis into the nature of our organisation.
YCL Wales Branch
