What We Believe

We believe, in those words that echo through history, “We have nothing to lose but our chains! We have a world to win.” The Young Communist League joins all youth movements in opposition to fascism, colonialism, and the capitalist-imperialist world system, and in the struggle to build a revolutionary movement in the imperial core that is the United States of America. A better world is possible. A better world is necessary. Workers of the World, Unite!

The Young Communist League, as the youth league of the CPUSA, is a Marxist-Leninist organization. As such, we affirm, as Lenin said, “the special need to organize youth in the struggle.” Today, our future is being threatened by environmental catastrophe brought about by colonial violation of the land through big business monopolies. The dream of the youth of color today is being crushed under an oppressive and ever-violent racist system of policing that seeks to protect private property and the interests of capital at the expense of human lives. Working-class youth today are facing an increasingly blighted future, with few job prospects and a burgeoning wave of fascist reaction, brought about by decades of neoliberal austerity and imperialist war.

In such an environment, all the ever-present social contradictions of racism, sexism, ableism, and queerphobia are only heightened as the ruling class seeks to divide the young masses. We young Communists affirm the need to fight all forms of social oppression and to build unity among ourselves as working-class youth in America and around the world. We need to fight to rebuild our communities against the scourge of gentrification. To save our communities from poverty, state violence, and genocide, we must engage our communities in collective struggle.

This year, the fascist sector of the capitalist class successfully occupied the executive power of the United States federal government. They now seek to consolidate this control of the state through the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025. As a collective of working-class youth, we know through the experience of our class that fascism will only lead to mass destitution and the terroristic repression of labor unions, democratic rights, political dissidents, and marginalized communities. As a collective with Black, Indigenous, Brown, East Asian descended, immigrant, queer, disabled, neurodivergent, and working class youth, we also know that this machinery has, for centuries, already been deployed against colonized peoples, marginalized peoples, and those the reactionaries deem to be “undesirable” as a method and result of dividing the oppressed class. For us, it has always been a struggle of survival. That struggle now spreads to the rest of the working population in the fascist-occupied West.

We, as young Communists, emphasize that only an organized and revolutionary movement can begin to confront this threat of violence. We must practice political agitation in every sphere, in every one of our communities, in every area of our lives. We must lead effective resistance against police killings, against fascist violence, against the kidnappings of our neighbors, against genocide, against the elimination of the few welfare programs we have left, against every initiative the ruling capitalist class use against the growing consciousness of the working class.

The only way to win is to organize. Only through the strength and cohesion of Marxist-Leninist organization can we expand democracy and bring about a just future, a prerequisite for the survival of human life on this planet. A society organized for the many, not the few. A society ruled by the masses of people who exist in it.

Join the Fight Back. Join the YCL.