Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/76

 aid to the activity of the Youth organisation on the part of the Party is frequently quite inadequate. The Y.C.I., thanks to its efforts during the last fifteen months, has succeeded in carrying out the important practical steps for the transformation of the organisation in the spirit of the decisions of the Second World Congress, thus laying the foundation for transforming it into a mass organisation. By its propaganda for economic and political militant demands, the Y.C.I, in many countries gained the adherence of the young workers, and a number of campaigns and concrete militant actions were undertaken and carried out.

The Y.C.I., either from the point of view of numbers or of organic contact with the masses and permanent influence over them, cannot yet be said to have completely become a mass organisation. Thus the organisation has still many tasks ahead.

2. The capitalist offensive has hit the working youth with greatest severity. Low wages, long hours, unemployment and exploitation hit the young workers much harder than the adults, and are accompanied by greater misery and oppression. At the same time, the young workers are exploited as a weapon against the adults to cut down wages, to take the place of strikers, and to increase the unemployment among the adult workers. This policy, calculated to do great harm to the working class as a whole, is supported and promoted by the treacherous attitude of the reformist trade union bureaucracy, which gives no heed to the young workers or sacrifices them entirely, while doing everything possible to keep the young workers away from the struggles of the adults. Quite frequently they are even denied admission to the unions. The rise of bourgeois militarism causes the further intensification of the sufferings of the young workers and peasants who are recruited into the capitalist armies as the cannon fodder for the future militarist wars. The European reaction makes the youth its particular prey, and in some places the young workers are not allowed to form their Young Communist organisations, even though the Communist Parties are toleratetd.

The two social-democratic Youth Internationals hitherto have been inactive in the face of the misery of the young workers, and attempted to prevent the masses of the young workers from joining in the common struggle of the working class. For this purpose they formed a bloc, which, in addition to preventing the suffering masses of young workers from forming a united front and joining the common struggle, was also directed against the Communist International, and brought about the amalgamation of the social-democratic Youth International.

The Communist International declares the absolute necessity for a united front between the young workers and the adults, and calls upon the Communist Parties and upon