“The sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius”: An Organizational and Cultural History of The Young Communist League of Canada, 1922-1934

Abstract

Young people gravitated in large numbers to the Communist movement in Canada and around the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Much like the youth of today, they did so with many specific issues in mind – education, health and recreation, trade unionism, peace, gender equality, cultural autonomy – that distinguished their Communism from left movements of the past. To an extent that the existing historiography is only beginning to register, they were not passive recipients of a party line designed in Moscow and implemented in Toronto, but active shapers of their own versions of leftism, one that at times brought them into direct conflict with their party elders. To a surprising extent, because they could counterbalance the demands of the leaders of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) with the sometimes-conflicting perspectives of the Comintern and the Young Communist International (YCI), they enjoyed substantial room to manoeuvre within a movement falsely reputed to be an authoritarian monolith. “To be educated and educators in turn” – Lenin’s dialectical description of the position of young people in the party – captured much about what some young people found empowering about their experience with the Young Communist League (YCL). Although rarely recognized as such, their activism made the 1920s and early 1930s a rival of the more renowned 1960s and 1970s as years of a dynamic, paradigm-challenging youth movement. By examining the work of the Young Communist League of Canada, working above all with the new sources made available with the opening of the Comintern’s archive, new insights can be attained on how the Canadian left was both supported by, and challenged by, Communist youth.