Contribution of the Communist Revolutionary Party of France

Comrades,

In order to tackle the question in a practical way, we would like to look back at some of the characteristics of working-class youth in France. Today, at the age of 21, almost half of young people have stopped their studies, 28% are employed and 21% are unemployed or inactive, according to INSEE (the official French polling institute), in 2020. More generally, from the age of 20 onwards, more than a fifth of young people are inactive or unemployed. When it comes to the apprenticeships so vaunted by the bourgeoisie, 40% of apprentices are either without a permanent contract or unemployed 5 years after their contract. With the deepening crisis of capitalism and mass unemployment, the false promises of public higher education and its opportunities are revealed for what they are: ephemeral compromises always at the mercy of the exploiting class.
Nearly a quarter of young people aged 18 to 29 abstain from all elections, with almost half doing so in the early parliamentary elections of 2024. A real gap appeared between young people and the French bourgeois state apparatus. However, this gap expresses much more a disappointment with capitalism and its institutions than a real political awareness, which is still in its infancy.

Indeed, major obstacles stand in the way of the revolutionary organisation of popular youth. The absence of a recognised revolutionary party in France, following the degeneration of the French Communist Party (PCF) and the deep roots of opportunism in France, has left an ideological vacuum into which petty-bourgeois ideas have infiltrated, taking the form of pessimism and individualism. Without a strong revolutionary alternative, social democracy and the reformist currents remain hegemonic in France in their role of channelling and defusing the beginnings of potentially revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness in young people. We're thinking of La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc-Mélenchon, for example, whose radicalism is purely rhetorical (on Palestine in particular), but also the MJCF, affiliated to the PCF, where many young activists are still trapped in the mistaken idea that they can change the social-democratic PCF from the inside, or the many Trotskyist organisations present in universities.

As the PCRF is a young party founded in 2016, it is therefore fighting for the strengthening and recognition of its apparatus as that of a revolutionary vanguard party on a national scale. This implies a number of things for the youth organisation in France to ensure this strengthening and recognition.

First of all, our party's youth, the Union de la Jeunesse Communiste (UJC) has been conceived since 2017 as the PCRF's strategy towards popular youth: it is not a separate organisation from the PCRF but is autonomous on an organisational level, under the political control of its Party. There were two main reasons for this special status. Firstly, in order to strengthen a new Party for the working class in France, it is necessary to train a new generation of militants to become Marxist-Leninist cadres within the PCRF. In order to foster this cadre formation, participation in Party work directly allows for autonomy and understanding of one's mistakes, as well as ongoing guidance from the Party for a proper ideological and political understanding of the role of a Party cadre. 

Secondly, there are still many youth organisations in France, both within and outside the MJCF (Mouvement de la Jeunesse Communiste de France), and one of the UJC's tasks is to unite them under this new Leninist party, the PCRF. In order to carry out this work in the best possible conditions, involving public debates, bilateral meetings and sometimes even joint actions, it is essential that the young activists of the UJC conceive it in a Party spirit. Indeed, building a separate youth organisation would do nothing to promote understanding of the PCRF's stage of development, the need to build the Party as its main political task, both in its internal organisation and in its political work with other youth organisations. 

It is in these particular conditions that the PCRF works within the popular youth movement, whose central tasks are unity and ideological clarity around Marxism-Leninism as a world view, as well as political apprenticeship through practice. 

UJC activists learn to work on national commissions in liaison with Party commissions, for propaganda and ideological training, for example. This organisational autonomy under political leadership allows flexibility and initiative for young activists, while providing a clear and consistent framework for the unity and organisation of future cadres. In a similar way, UJC activists also work directly in the form of cells, places of study and companies, in conjunction with the party federations when these have been set up.

One of the cornerstones of the PCRF's work is therefore ideological work, especially in the conditions of development of a Leninist party in France. In this sense, the UJC has a team dedicated to the ideological training of all militants. This team promotes ideological training by several means. The UJC is also working on the creation of a Marxist-Leninist training guide, as it exists in many sister organisations and parties. It therefore constitutes a daily training tool that all comrades should study and which we can use on a day-to-day basis in the event of ideological problems or debates. In the same sense, the next Party Congress in June 2025 has the task of discussing and drawing up a small Lexicon of words that help the working class understand the Party's communist policy.

Still with a view to ideological training, the Party and the UJC are setting up face-to-face local work sessions in certain localities. This is a time for comrades to get together and read our working guide or articles from Intervention Communiste (Communist Intervention), the PCRF's journal, all based on local struggles during discussion sessions. This means that ideological tools can be put into practice and understood in an ever-stronger way, within a privileged practical framework.

Another important way of organising our young people is to create ‘red fronts’ in our federations. Red fronts are structured around the militant members of a federation who organise frontline work towards social democracy. By creating links with mass associations such as Palestinian organisations or trade unions, we can put our revolutionary line into practice. The aim is to work with these organisations to run joint campaigns set up by the PCRF proposing lines of struggle that target capitalism and help people understand that we have to get rid of it because it is the cause of all our suffering. For example, a wide-ranging campaign on the struggle for peace and its link with anti-imperialism is being used to support the university occupations in 2024 for Palestine. The red fronts also organise processions of independent demonstrators openly opposed to social democracy. To this extent, the red fronts are a form of struggle that fits in with our class-on-class tactics and allows, with the help of party activists and cadres, an understanding of the specificity of a communist party in the face of social-democratic parties in practice, with the help of party material and its slogans based on the masses' own experience.  

They aim to create a link between struggles, but they can only be more effective if cell work exists alongside the struggles in question. These ‘red fronts’, as opposed to the social-democratic electoral fronts, also functioned by linking these flexible tactical fronts to the party's enterprise cells, thereby enabling young militants to assimilate the centrality of the working class, the only class capable of solving the problems of young people. 

The cell is structured in a place of work or study and is one of the forms of temporary struggle that we promote in our party and its youth. A cell is created when at least two comrades organise themselves for the struggle in a place of work, study or living, even if it's different from their own, where the comrades launch a party implantation. More specifically for young people, a cell can, for example, organise itself in a university or a CFA (a training centre for apprentice workers in France), leading struggles there for the students. In this way, direct democracy is put to the test in concrete ways, beyond the ballot box, and is by its very nature opposed to social democracy from a tactical perspective linked to the strategic question. 

The problems of young people are in many ways linked to the problems of the working class and popular strata. Consequently, young people cannot fight off the attacks of capital on their own, but only in a common struggle with the working class and popular strata against the dictatorship of the monopolies. Communists firmly oppose bourgeois propaganda that speaks of a ‘generational conflict’. It is not the elderly who live at the expense of the young, or vice versa. It is Capital that lives at the expense of youth, the working class and the popular strata. Young people do not have special interests detached from the rest of the working class. Today, young people are facing another imperialist war in Europe and can play a crucial role in the peoples' struggle against imperialist wars and their causes. Young people are unique in that they have their whole future ahead of them and aspire to take charge of their own affairs. They have a particular appetite for democratic rights and struggles. 

Under imperialism, the contradiction between the formal, limited democracy of the capitalists and the aspirations of young people and workers to democracy for themselves, the aspiration to manage their daily lives and their future at all levels, is growing. This disenfranchisement of democratic rights, of which young people and workers are victims from school to university, from the company to the State, via the municipality, means that communists have the task of ensuring that struggles for democratic rights and freedoms are based on strong aspirations for participation and transparency in public affairs. From this point of view, communists have the dual mission and responsibility of defending, developing and consolidating all forms of direct democracy at grassroots level (councils, committees, etc.), and also of using these same aspirations as a starting point to show that bourgeois democracy is democracy for the owners of capital, the negation of democracy for young people and workers. Many young people are outside the collective and social organisation of work, or at best partially so. This naturally favours petty bourgeois tendencies such as idealism, overestimation of the ideological struggle alone, pedagogism, conscientious objection and anarcho-syndicalism. 

But with their Communist Party and the organisations of the workers' or people's movement, young people begin to gain an organised and disciplined behaviour in their workplaces, at university, at school and in the streets. Young people thus gain the impetus and the possibility of giving new strength to the working class struggle for the improvement of their immediate social situation, and for a society liberated from exploitation, for socialism-communism.