Contribution of the Workers Party of Ireland

Teleconference of the European Communist Action
“On the work of the ECA parties within the youth”

28th September 2024

Contribution of the Workers Party of Ireland

“The basic clay of our work is the youth; we place our hope in it and prepare it to take the banner from our hands.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Poverty, precarious employment and homelessness are among the issues most concerning young people in Ireland. Around 200,000 children live in households that are experiencing poverty. Capitalism exploits the desires and identities of young people in pursuit of profit. Imperialism with its warmongering and genocide presents a constant threat to the future of young people and their right to a secure and peaceful future. The predatory capitalist system, based as it is on inequality and exploitation, poses an alarming danger to the future of the planet. The monopolies, through their control of the mass media and their manipulation of social media, has commercialised education, sport and culture and attempts to divert young people from the pursuit of progressive social values towards individualism and consumption.

The time has come for young people to stand up against the oppressive capitalist system that profits from endless imperialist wars, environmental destruction, social discrimination and the exploitation of the working class.

Comrade V.I. Lenin in his speech to the Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League stated: “… I must say 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 … Only by radically remoulding the teaching, organisation and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society. That is why we must deal in detail with the question of what we should teach the youth and how the youth should learn if it really wants to justify the name of communist youth, and how it should be trained so as to be able to complete and consummate what we have started.”

The workers and communist parties in the capitalist countries can draw lessons from the words of Lenin in evaluating the tasks of our parties in relation to the youth of today. It is the task of our parties to organise, educate, train, rouse and mobilise the entire younger generation, to imbue them with communist ideals and to actively assist them in their struggles.

If the bourgeois narrative continues to be regarded as the only ideological space for the youth, young people will be left systematically marginalised and open to exploitation. It is the task of our parties to engage with young people in the educational institutions, the
workplace and in communities where they live.

Young people are facing an increasingly desolate future under capitalism which can provide no answers. Political apathy is a product of the socio-economic conditions created by capitalism designed to discourage the youth from understanding and challenging the system and by commodifying youth trends and lifestyles through the dominant bourgeois ideology disseminated through social institutions, affecting the attitudes, behaviours, and values among young people.

The education system, for example, reflects the dominant ideology of the society in which it is based. The class nature of the education system and the significant disparity that exists between the educational attainments of those with wealth and those young people from working class backgrounds is reflected in the performance and retention rates of children at first and second level and the social patterns that exist in relation to access, participation and retention rates at third level.

Additionally, in Ireland the education systems, North and South, developed largely under the management of the churches and religious bodies which had extensive control over who could enrol in their schools as well as control over the nature of the school curriculum.

These institutions are critical tools in the maintenance of a class-based society while on the other hand social, economic and cultural factors, which reflect the power structures in our societies dictate the parameters of our education system.

It remains a vital part of the work of the communist and workers parties to assist the youth of our respective countries effect democratic changes to the education system in terms of access, content and control as part of the process of radicalising young people for transformative revolutionary change of the social system.

It is an urgent task to challenge the manner through which the education system serves the interests of a powerful elite; to demand the democratisation of education; to challenge the ideological attacks on the concept of universal education being provided by the state; to challenge the privatisation of education through the subsidization by the state of private fee paying schools, the growth of private-profit cramming schools, the burgeoning private third level sector and the privatisation of research; to challenge the undemocratic control of education by the churches and to challenge the efforts that are being made to turn secure employment in the education sector into insecure, precarious work.

Young people in particular have been thrown to the wolves in housing, facing a situation where not only can they not afford to buy a house, even renting accommodation is becoming unreachable for many, with average rents in Dublin significantly over €2,000 a
month.

The student movement in Ireland, which was radical and militant in the past, has become blunted and limited in its aspirations. Despite this many young people are engaged in social and political protest either in organised protest groups or trade unions on domestic and international issues such as climate change and imperialist war. Tens of thousands of young people have been active in the ongoing protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. To open the road to socialism we need to convince young people to transform the politics of protest into the politics of class - we need to reassert the centrality of class struggle to the struggles of young people against tuition fees, accommodation costs and precarious work, etc.

In Ireland, our Party is actively engaged with the reconstruction of our revolutionary youth organisation – Workers Party Youth (Ireland). To that end we have appointed a member of the leadership of Workers Party Youth to our Central Executive Committee. We encourage the development of comradely relations with fellow revolutionary youth organisations internationally and, in particular with the youth organisations of the parties participating in European Communist Action.

WPY actively engages in Party work, participating in the day-to-day struggles of the working class, working in the trade unions, student unions and local communities, fighting for workers’ unity, utilising every opportunity to raise class consciousness and the need to build a socialist future.

Given the dominance of bourgeois ideology, the deceptive delusions offered by social democracy and indeed the opportunist trends within some parts of the communist movement, it is vital for the communist and workers parties participating in the ECA to provide guidance, ideological coherence and clarity in the theoretical development of the youth organisations.

Political education, ideological training and theoretical engagement on a concrete and regular basis is essential on an ongoing process as new themes and issues emerge.

It is our duty to introduce and win young people to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism; to mobilise their enthusiasm and energy; to highlight the reality that capitalism cannot deliver; to explain that this society is the product of a particular set of economic and social circumstances, circumstances which can be changed through collective action; to underline that class is the fundamental factor determining our experience of society; to demonstrate that capitalism is an exploitative and oppressive economic system which sees the minority appropriating for themselves the wealth produced by the majority of the population – a system which must be abolished; to outline the historic experiences in the construction of socialism beginning with the Great October Socialist Revolution; to expose and condemn the anti-communist narrative expounded by the European Union, the bourgeois states and others and to declare that it is only through the working-class assuming ownership of the means of production and establishing workers’ power that the system of capitalist exploitation can be overturned and a new era of human history inaugurated, an era of genuine freedom and liberation for all in a socialist- communist society.