Selected Writings:
Anti-Fascist Alternatives for Youth
The Fascists Target Youth
Those of us involved in the youth movement, or concerned with the direction of the youth movement, need to carefully consider the question of where young people fit into all of this. It seems to me that for the most part, young people are in an ideological and political limbo. It is quite true, and encouraging, to see that many young people have resisted the temptation to passivity, and are active in a broad range of struggles.
On the other hand, it is still a fact that most young people remain inactive. It is hard to see how they can stay this way for long. Already fascists have made small but significant gains in recruiting young people to their cause, and the lessons of this are clear: the fascists are prepared to take advantage of and manipulate the frustrations and disillusionment felt by many young people in today’s Canada. These frustrations are very, very real.
The destruction of social programs, education and health care in particular, when combined with high levels of unemployment, mean that the choices for young people are becoming increasingly restricted, leaving them open to intensified exploitation in the workplace.
If anyone believes that the eight-hour day is legally enforced, or that employers respect at least the basics of labour legislation, let me point to the restaurant industry, where I work full-time during the summer and part-tine during the school year.
I work with a bunch of cooks, and in my particular restaurant, there is no such thing as a lunch break, just an eight-hour day, meaning eight straight hours of labour and compulsory overtime – no coffee breaks, no half-hour breaks. You are scheduled for an eight-hour shift, and there chances are that you will be there for twelve. But if it is slow, you will come in for your eight-hours shift and be sent home after three hours. There is a degree of arbitrariness and exploitation that should have become extinct long ago.
Most of the cooks in my restaurant are young people, twenty-two years-old and younger. We have two dishwashers, aged fifteen and sixteen, studying cooking at high school. They go to school all day long, then come to work in the restaurant almost every night. So they start at eight o’clock in the morning and often go home at two a.m., and then get up at six or seven in the morning to go back to school again the next day. What do they earn? Five dollars an hour, because they are young people.
It’s not much of a future, and people become frustrated and burned out. When you get into that kind of situation, you begin to look for an alternative, and it is a race to reach them between those of us on the left, saying that you can organize, you do have rights and you can take control of your life – and the fascists, who will use those frustrations to turn young people against their own interests.
Now what is the way out for these young people? What about going back to school, to university, to the technical institutes? Let me tell you about higher education today. When I started my undergraduate degree four years ago, I was paying about $750 tuition per semester, which I thought was a lot of money. Four years later, we’re paying $1,500 or $1,600 a semester – practically $3,000 a year. It is incredible.
Education is becoming an elitist institution, and when you are working for five bucks an hour washing dishes or sweating it out on the "line" in a restaurant, you don’t think very much about putting away $3,000 to pay for one year in university, let alone figuring out how to live while you are going to school. Government policies are closing the doors of post-secondary institutions to working class and poor youth.
I could go on, but I think most of you are familiar with the material problems that young people are facing.
The Anti-Fascist Alternative for Youth
The answer to how to respond to the fascist threat is easy in
principle, although difficult in practise. I can think of no easy
road, other than to organize young people. There are plenty of
examples from the past draw upon, such as the Canadian
Youth Congress in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the World Youth Festivals during the 1980s, which involved the Young Communist League and its allies in the youth movement, we managed to build up a fairly broad coalition of political organizations around a common program to fight for basic rights: the right to peace, the right to jobs, the right to education, the right to involvement in the political process. I think it will be necessary to look at those experiences and consider other past struggles.
But I want to argue here that the left and democratic movements have a number of different but related tasks in front of them, and also that we face a somewhat new and unique situation. Dealing with the last point first, we have a new situation in the sense that fascism has historically risen at a time when working class and communist movements have been strong, as a counterpoint used by the capitalists to protect their profits.
Today, the left in Canada is weak, but we are faced with a situation where capitalism has also entered a period of severe crisis. There is no positive program being advanced by the bourgeois parties, only a program of take-aways, belt-tightening, and deficit reduction. Young people are being asked – forced – to make sacrifices. But for what? Higher profits? Certainly not for anything constructive. They are not being mobilized to build a better Canada. They are asked to suffer more as the status quo degenerates before their eyes.
It is in these conditions that the fascists are advancing their extremist critique of the system, posing as radicals who want to build a better future, but without proposing anything that will change the essential nature of capitalism.
So our response – our attempt to organize young people – has to be based on a positive program that mobilizes young people with a vision of the future that will be theirs. In general, I think that we need to call on young people to fight for a program to rebuild Canada, to carry out an ecologically-sound re-industrialization of the country, that will provide them with jobs, security, and decent wages and work conditions, the right to learn and to have a real place for themselves in society.
In the short term, it is crucial that young people be organized in the workplace, that the trade union movement take on the job of organizing the workplaces where young people are concentrated. Young people must also be assisted in organizing their high schools, colleges and universities, to fight government policies that threaten their communities and their well-being. The fight against anti-democratic measures will require a broad mobilization of progressive forces in this country, one that is profoundly democratic in character.
But there must be a stronger socialist presence, and so we also have the job of rebuilding the socialist and labour movements in Canada, and to argue for a socialist Canada, which will guarantee the legitimate aspirations of young people for life and a future with meaning!
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