London

Less than a year old, having been refounded in June 2018, members gathered from across the capital and nearby towns for the annual general meeting of the London Young Communist League, held in the historic Marx Memorial Library where Lenin once worked in exile.

Re-elected branch chair Daoud Hamdani reflected on a year spent developing anti-imperialist international work with both the Cuba Solidarty Campaign and Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, saying this had brought them most into contact with new recruits.

“Growth has been going well, but the large size of London and its transitory nature, if anything, makes it hard to keep up with the volume of membership enquiries.

“We have been benefiting greatly from international solidarity work, and the advantage of working in the capital is that almost every nationality in the world has a community here. We have developed links especially with emigrant groups of communists from Bangladesh, Cyprus and Turkey.

“After internationalist work, our most successful activity has been our food poverty drive. What started at a national level as a YCL day of action we continued as a long term project, collecting donations of food and money outside supermarkets, labour clubs and trade union branches, then giving these donations to existing food banks or directly to the homeless, unemployed and old age pensioners on the streets via outreach stalls with hot tea and coffee.”

He continued that with the effects of savage Tory cuts and austerity becoming visible across the city it was “no longer enough just to say the right thing.

“This action has politically placed the YCL. We are one of the only socialist organisations doing this — solidarity in deed not word — and we intend to take it forward and expand it through 2019.”

Comrades stressed the advantage of being a specific youth organisation and the strength that has given them, allowing young people to relate to each other as young people, and how this would be best served by developing a socialist cultural programme.

A student talked about the developing issues with “anti-extremism” in universities that has targeted left-wing organising, but comrades were resolute that they would not be cowed and would go forward with a programme of Marxist Leninist study groups and educationals.

A guest speaker from the Communist Party reminisced that one London borough alone used to have three branches of the Communist Party, whereas now there is only one branch for the whole of North London.

Now that the communist movement is once again growing across the country and London, they stressed the importance of being active in your union and local labour movement via trades councils — letting people know that communist activists, stalwarts of the class struggle, can be relied upon once again.

The meeting ended with a confident promise to revive the classic socialist tradition of public speaking, and even some discussion that this year would see a return of communist agitators to London’s famous Speakers Corner.

Scotland

Last Saturday was a productive day for the Young Communist League in Scotland, who held their Annual General Meeting, marking another year of rapid growth. After showing solidarity with the Venezuelan government against the US-backed coup attempt, delegates from across the country met in the Glasgow offices of the Communist Party.

They discussed their experiences of a surge in membership and activity, with the Glasgow branch alone increasing in size by 320 per cent in two years, analysed how and why they have moved out of relative obscurity into becoming a respected political force in many areas of work in a short time, and raised the pressing need to maintain yet consolidate these gains.

Newly elected national organiser Michael Quinn explained: “In Scotland, our focus centres around broad community work, directly going to the working class and listening for the issues, rather than imposing abstract political concepts and slogans on regular people who just want to get by.

“We approach our work as organisers, taking the smaller issues and tying them together, broadening the wedge we fight with and exposing the common ground shared by the landlords, the bosses, the bankers and the mainstream politicians that represent them.

“We operate in tenants’ unions and we inject clear militant demands into the campaigns against universal credit based on the experience of claimants themselves

“We are the militant edge of the austerity generation and we are ever growing in numbers and confidence.”

The meeting established a Women’s Commission with the stated aim of increasing women’s representation and leadership in the socialist and labour organisations, and bringing “Marxist materialism back into the feminist movement, challenging liberal narratives on prostitution, sex and gender,” said Holly Morcos, Women’s Officer.

The desperate need for action on climate change was addressed by the creation of an environmental group, looking at the rise of campaigns like Extinction Rebellion and the Friday school strikes, “hoping to carry the carry the red flag into the green movement, clearing the way for the working class.”

“We intend to reach out to our trade union organisers and reps to ask them to relay the training and experience they have received so far,” continued Quinn.

“This means we can identify the political principles unions aren’t teaching, that were once seen in the movement at the height of the Communist Party’s industrial influence.”

Political education is central to the Scottish approach, developing the YCL as a training school rather than a political club — a hub for activists to advance their talents and experience through active class struggle, “arming young communists with the tools to build themselves up in as many fields as we can.”