Dear comrades,

genuine socialism has become an urgent necessity to save humanity from the imperialist world system.

The youth of the whole world is challenged to take a stand on this situation. The question of how to organize one's life and what to use one's powers and abilities for has become a mass debate. Some fall into self-preoccupation, seek individual ways out or allow themselves to be influenced by right-wing or even fascist ideas. But there are also clear signals for the path of struggle! A wave of youth rebellion has swept across several countries in Africa and Asia in recent weeks. Worldwide, there is a great search for social alternatives. “Lenin's teachings are alive!” therefore also means winning over masses of young people for a revolutionary life choice and building a socialist youth movement.

According to Lenin, revolutionary parties around the world are faced with the task of building youth organizations that actually encompass a mass of young people and are many times larger than the revolutionary party. That is easier said than done! What do we learn from Lenin for this task? At the beginning of this block we would like to put the following points up for discussion:

1. Lenin placed great trust in the youth, encouraged them and recognized in them a driving force for socialist construction. Without the fighting unity of young and old, the working class cannot win! In all socialist countries, young people were the practical vanguard of socialist construction. In their rebellion, they also become the practical vanguard in the preparation of the international socialist revolution. But they can only play this role if they recognize the leading role of the working class and its revolutionary party and discard any petty-bourgeois claim to leadership. Young people are courageous, fearless and energetic - at the same time, they are also more easily influenced, often wavering, and still lack experience of life and struggle. The fact that today's rulers are using an entire system of petty-bourgeois thinking to manipulate young people and are waging an ideological battle for young people makes the whole thing much more complicated than it was in Lenin's time. Via the Internet alone, they reach the minds and hearts of the youth 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The MLPD has drawn the conclusion that the recruitment and education of the youth must be a school of life of the proletarian mode of thinking, with which the youth learns to cope better and better with the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking and to strengthen the proletarian mode of thinking. This requires a great deal of fighting spirit and dialectical method from us young comrades in particular, to wage a daily struggle for our own way of thinking, not to scratch the surface but to penetrate into the depths. Lenin therefore summarized the tasks of the youth associations: “The task is to learn.” (Lenin, Werke, vol. 31, p. 272).

This must begin with the children - for this reason the MLPD has given the REBELL the task of building up the children's organization Red Foxes. We realize the school of life of the proletarian way of thinking to the greatest extent at our summer camps: with training and educational work, subbotnik missions, self-organized vacations, sports, friendship and solidarity, close contact with the masses of youth in Thuringia, etc. This includes, in particular, fighting tasks: this year, for example, the summer camp contributed to anti-fascist educational work here in Thuringia against the fascists. But in our day-to-day work, this is often not yet developed in so many ways. We are fighting against a disregard for cultural work, for a culturally rich organizational life and for a close connection with the masses of young people. This concerns the whole of life: learning, working, celebrating and arguing together.

2 Lenin argued that there must be organizationally independent youth associations so that young people learn the will to act, to act independently and responsibly. However, he also opposed any form of exaggeration or uncritical attitude towards youth! ”... not only because the opportunists fear this independence, but also because of the nature of the matter. For without complete independence, the youth will not be able to develop into good socialists and prepare themselves to lead socialism forward. For the complete independence of youth organizations, but also for the full freedom of comradely criticism of their mistakes! We must not flatter the youth." (“Youth International”, Lenin, Works, vol. 23, p. 164/165). The MLPD has three fundamental interrelations with its youth organization REBELL: we work under the ideological-political leadership of the party, we work closely together in practice and the MLPD promotes the organizational independence of REBELL. The latter particularly concerns financial independence.

3 Lenin answered the question of how the working-class youth must learn. In the pamphlet “The Tasks of the Youth Associations” it says: The workers' youth “can only study communism if they link every step of their training, education and upbringing with the uninterrupted struggle of the proletarians and toilers against the old exploiting society.” The struggle of the working-class youth, the fight against fascism and militarism, is of particular importance. "In this struggle they will be educated as true communists, every step of their training, education and upbringing must be subordinated to this struggle and linked to it. The education of communist youth must not consist in giving them all kinds of edifying speeches and preaching moral rules. Education does not consist in that." (Lenin, Works, Vol. 31, p. 284). Lenin practiced this himself: He relied above all on the Communist Youth League in the electrification of socialist Russia! He set the young comrades the task of learning everything necessary for this, of not allowing themselves to be held back by any difficulties and of forming the closest possible bond with the workers and peasants. Selflessness and commitment to great tasks is something that inspires the youth. On the other hand, you cannot inspire young people if you do not trust them with anything, if you try to beguile them with social education or if you separate theory from practice. In the revolutionary youth associations, we have to overcome corrosive influences such as short-temperedness, disorganization and egoism. Today this means, in particular, doing tough, systematic small-scale work among ordinary young people and children in schools, workplaces and residential areas! Anarchist currents that want to circumvent this development of consciousness were already decisively criticized by Lenin. This also explains the great importance of the subbotnik movement, which we continue today.

4) We can also learn a great deal from Lenin as a person: he was an intellectual. He could have made a career for himself. But he decided otherwise and put his abilities entirely at the service of the liberation of humanity. He connected with the workers and peasants in the closest possible way, merging with them throughout his life. We too must ask ourselves today: what are we doing with our talents and abilities? Why should we put our skills into professions that are ultimately there to support this system? Why don't the best people go to the large companies where the international industrial proletariat is concentrated and the decisive class battles are fought? We must focus on winning over the working-class youth. In REBELL, 50% of the leadership members are young industrial workers. We are proud of this trump card! But we must also not neglect the recruitment of students, where we still have a lot to learn.

Whoever has the youth has the future - as the German communist Karl Liebknecht said! We look forward to an instructive and controversial discussion!