By Emiliano Canek
How do we highlight the exploitation of labor, educate the masses, and reach out to proletarian youth eager to join our ranks? We need to build a newspaper that educates, organizes, and connects youth with our Communist movement.
As capitalism persists globally, the need for a newspaper for communist youth is clear. Such a newspaper trains youth to become leaders who challenge bourgeois dominance, raises awareness of capitalism’s impact, and lays the groundwork for collective action by connecting workers nationwide, organizing the masses, and spreading ideas. As young workers connect and become more informed, their participation in political life increases, leading to greater analysis. As Communist ranks grow, committed youth will inspire their peers and reveal capitalism’s contradictions, mobilizing broader segments of the youth to join the struggle.
Through the process, the League of Young Communists USA grows stronger and more effective. We will be able to bring greater numbers of disciplined cadres to the vanguard of proletarian youth. As time passes, we sharpen our skills, gain more experience and political maturity. Eventually, by the time we enter and further involve ourselves in the Party of Communists USA, we have proven ourselves to be capable, dedicated, professional revolutionaries that will be the next leaders of tomorrow.
To lead the youth, our newspaper must inform, mobilize, and raise proletarian consciousness, drawing young people into the struggle. Youth’s unique position in the United States requires them to become architects of the tools needed to dismantle capitalism. Despite technological advancement, capitalist societies are in decline. Thus, creating instability throughout the world. Climate change is evident by each summer becoming hotter and winters becoming more unpredictable. Wages have plummeted while the cost of living has gone up. Wars of aggression have broken out like wildfires. Capitalism proves to be more and more unsustainable. At the moment, while bourgeois institutions seem to remain strong, we must be ready to lead young people into a future of peace and socialism. Our youth newspaper will build such a movement.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya once wrote in Pravda, “The future belongs to those who have the support of the working class youth.” The League of Young Communists USA must engage with young people, educating them about their role in class society, the institutions that promote bourgeois ideals, and the importance of challenging those ideals.
Today, political disillusionment is rising among youth in the United States. This growing disillusionment is reflected in recent surveys. For example, in the 2025 spring edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, 85% of young people say that the country is going in the wrong direction. The poll also highlights eroding support for the Democrats, which has dropped from 42% to 23%. Additionally, only 19% of young people trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Fewer than one in three express any trust in major institutions such as Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court, with trust levels at about 18%, 23%, and 29%, respectively.
Continuing this trend, in the 2025 fall edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, 87% say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. In the same poll, results show that trust in American democracy is eroding, with 64% of young people saying democracy in the United States has already failed or is in trouble.
Beyond political concerns, many young people are encountering financial difficulties and social challenges. According to the spring 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, 32% of young people report they are barely getting by, and 10% say they are struggling to make ends meet. Nearly one-third of young people are still looking for a sense of belonging or have none—issues that have persisted since the COVID pandemic.
Additionally, National Public Radio reports that home and rental prices have outpaced wages, making it increasingly difficult to buy homes and delaying first-time home ownership. Additionally, Generation Z and Millennials face higher rates of student loan and mortgage debt.
In short, the system is failing young people. But why must we organize youth, and why are they essential in the struggle against capitalism?
To understand why the youth are crucial to the struggle against capitalism, we must first understand how capitalism itself functions. The operations of Capitalism consists of the accumulation of capital through profit and reinvestment, the exploitation of the minds and muscles of workers via the appropriation of their surplus-value (value created by workers in excess of their own labor costs), and the private ownership of the means of production (the instruments of production and the subjects of labor). Moreover, workers under capitalism do not enter a voluntary relationship to sell their labor-power (their minds and muscles). Instead, direct methods such as criminalization and police harassment of the homeless and poor, as well as indirect methods like lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, force workers to sell their labor-power as a means to survive. Furthermore, because the right to work is not guaranteed, workers are forced into competing against each other, leading to alienation from their labor and among themselves. Workers do not own the means of production (like machinery, tools, factories) or the raw materials, nor the products of their labor (like produced commodities). Under the economic system called capitalism, workers are not creative agents but in effect wage-slaves.
Following this brief explanation of the functions of capitalism, the youth are the next generation of humanity who are assuming the use of the instruments of production, the production of the subjects of labor, and the further development of the productive forces, but remain subjugated to the current relations of production of capitalist society. They build upon future labor and advancements of previous generations and will themselves advance further.
However, they will be kept under control by bourgeois institutions that condition the masses to accept their livelihoods being dictated by a turbulent socioeconomic system and its capitalist overseers. Ultimately, these processes and this system are maintained by institutions that invent reality and reproduce bourgeois ideals. Fundamentally, they serve capitalism and harm working people. Functionally, they pacify the aspirations of the masses, the working class, their revolutionary nature, and their youth.
