Socialism and Youth by Dr. MarxLenin P Valdes

About the Author

Dr. MarxLenin P Valdes 

Senior Lecture in Marxism, PhD in Philosophy and MSc in Social Science. Professor at the University of Havana for the last 17 years. Professor of ‘Theory and History of Marxism’ and ‘Philosophical Communication’ (among other subjects) in the Faculty of History and Philosophy, at the University of Havana. Her topics of research are related to Marxism, Hermeneutics, Communication and the Cuban Revolution. Author of international publications in different languages and one book. She is the screenwriter and the TV host at ‘Cuadrando la Caja’, a national show about the economy in Cuba. She writes for ‘Cubadebate’, the most widely read Cuban website inside and outside Cuba.

MarxLenin P Valdes

Speech at the Frst International Meeting of Theoretical Publications of Leftist Political Parties and Movements, Havana, Cuba, 10-12 February 2023

A theoretical approach to socialism, as well as to youth, is essential.  Both of these are complex concepts and capable of multiple meanings, so we need to consider them in plural, and from their interrelation, as a strategically urgent task for our mobilising work.

I do not seek to speak on behalf of young people.  Who better than they themselves – also gathered here today – to give voice to their thoughts?  Rather, I propose to discuss the theme “socialism and youth” with an interpretive and of course Marxist analysis.

Permit me, then, to share with you some ideas and themes, with the intention that they should be points of departure, rather than points of arrival, for the debate.  To do this, I start from two questions:

1. How to interpret and understand the relationship between socialism and youth?
2. What role should left-wing publications play in approaching this problem?

1. How to interpret and understand the relationship between socialism and youth?

Socialism and youth are alike.  Both are social constructs with strong historical determinations, which speak to us of transit – paths that must necessarily be traced, in the construction of that ‘other’ that both will be tomorrow – qualitatively different, preferably higher.  Therefore, both are also movement, change, contradiction, struggle, rupture, flow, complexity.

Socialism cannot be passive, or conformist, any more than youth can.  What is youth if not a revolutionary force?  Just like socialism, it is designed to transform the old world in pursuit of a new one.  Therefore, socialism needs the youth for its existence.  It needs their creative capacities, their drive and strength to conquer, their desires and willingness to act, and their energies to transform themselves and everything else.

So, saving socialism is also a way to save the youth.  Achieving this, following the path of paradoxes and challenges that must be faced, leads us to direct collision with that image of the world projected by capitalism, in which it legitimises itself as the only and best of all possible worlds.  We shall have to challenge what Fidel Castro called “the cultural invasion, destructive of our identities, a nuclear weapon of the 21^st century for the domination of the world”.  Only by saving ourselves from the barbarism that capitalism reproduces, can we save humanity; and in this great work youth is essential.

It is no coincidence that capitalism, among its multiple fronts, works constantly to distort the strength and historical mission of youth as standard-bearers of the future.  And for this task it manufactures all kinds of devices.  It ceaselessly creates material and spiritual objects with which to anchor us all in the lethargy of programmed obsolescence – but with special emphasis on youth and childhood.

And with this, it condemns us to an unbearable liquidity, where – as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto – “all that is solid melts into air”.  This condemns, in the first place, any attempt to think critically, any subversive effort that opposes capitalism.

In the midst of this problematic scenario, it becomes essential to ask ourselves: how to project and appropriate today the relationship between socialism and youth so that it remains an identity and not an antinomy, so that it is not broken up and fragmented into a relationship of hostility and opposition?

If socialism is the transition, let us ask ourselves: where does the youth want us to go?  What symbols do they identify with: those of socialism and communism, or those of capitalism?  What values define them: social justice, solidarity, internationalism, collective struggle – or competition, commodification, apathy, indifference to each other and consumerism?

Thus, the struggle between socialism and capitalism takes the form of a deep media-cultural war, in all its dimensions.  The problem of communication must take centre stage for the left, with emphasis on the active work of its publications and its media in general.

2. What role should left-wing publications play in the face of this problem?

In the first place, the role of left-wing publication is to embrace and understand the strategic importance that social communication acquires in this war.  Secondly, the role is to undertake a double simultaneous movement: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the capitalist appropriation of the current state of things; and on the other, the construction of a new hegemony of a socialist character.

Today, to exist means to be perceived by the hegemonic media. Power is held by the big bourgeois monopolies of (dis)information and (in)communication.  In this sense, through these media (but not only through them), the left has a duty to conquer networks in civil society, as a space par excellence for counter-hegemony.  Both the left and its media have a moral duty to offer a compass in struggle and endurance for our peoples.

The generations of yesterday had heroes, organic intellectuals; those of today have “influencers”.  Whom do contemporary young people imitate: their teachers, their politicians, their parents, or those decided by two or three mathematical algorithms?  What are the patterns of behaviour that guide the lives of children, adolescents, youth, and adults in these times, and who embodies them?  The world panorama displays a deep crisis of spirituality and of subjectivity, in the centre of which are the youngest in society.  They are the target par excellence of the banality, superficiality, mediocrity, and commodification that floods virtual networks.

For this reason, we revolutionaries, humanists and communists must articulate collectively and organically in a battle of ideas that conditions the production of emancipatory meanings.  Our identities, customs, cultures, and histories must not be annulled, but on the contrary we must emphasise our diversity and plurality. We must create the conditions for strengthening these particularities, so that our roots can resist the onslaught of capitalist industry in its desire to homogenise and standardise the human being.  We must influence a change in mentality – above all, from an early age – through honest, creative, original, intelligent content.  We must refound the idea of the attractive and its representations – or what is the same, fight against the capitalist aesthetic, fetishistic in itself, which alienates and reifies.

But we must also rethink the idea of entertainment, which forces us to rebuild the notion of leisure.  Young people demand that we should not be boring.  So, if the ways in which fun is represented have been largely produced by the capitalist colonisation of the entertainment industry, how then do we create  content that is socialist but not boring?

Do we know what today’s young people read?  What do they see?  What are their interests?  How many of our leftist publications are made by young people?  Do they participate in them?  How do they do that?  We can have texts and works of excellent quality, but until they reach young people they will not have fulfilled their raison d’être.

We need our publications, but also our radio, television, and internet programmes, to give new meanings to concepts that capitalism has taken from us and supplanted, such as: socialism, communism, democracy, freedom, Marxism, homeland, culture and so on.  We must give back to these concepts their true, sharp, subversive content; content that makes politically possible the intellectual progress of majorities, and not just that of a few isolated groups.

We have to know how to narrate what happens to the left, not in a disconnected way, but in the class struggle against the bourgeoisie.  And we have to do it with the codes of youth, to the same extent that we are building our own new codes.  But for that, it will first be necessary to build the reader on the left.  We must understand that left-wing publications are themselves guerrilla movements, standard bearers of a struggle where culture must be understood as a powerful battlefield.  We must make them platforms for people to access global dialogue and for communication to condition people as a historical-universal subject.

May the cause of socialism, for the freedom of the human being as a common goal, invite us to solidarity, connection and unity between our publications and media.  Only a solid goal can give us a purpose that is not ephemeral, but on the contrary one which has a meaning that is inscribed in time.  That goal is emancipation towards an essentially humanised society.

From the ideological apparatuses of the bourgeoisie, trivial statements, such as the slogan , “The left is weak”, are used over and again, to make a caricature of us.  This is a social, aesthetic, political and ideological construct that, like so many others, seeks to disarm any practical attempt to revolutionise reality.

And I ask you: is not our meeting here today a sufficient proof that we are not weak?  We must give a voice to the oppressed, to the wretched of the earth, to the rebels – not only via propaganda, but above all by actions which are educational, instructive and constructive of the revolutionary subject that we need.  For this there is no other way than to add, sensitise, and unite diversity towards the common cause, that is to conquer a better world.  And in this effort, the teaching from an early age of philosophy, art, and thereafter critical Marxism must occupy a central place.

From our spaces we must accompany all transformative movements that oppose capitalism.  We must restore hope, the same hope that capitalism insists on co-opting, because it needs to appear insurmountable, for which it reproduces pessimistic, depressed, hopeless individuals.

Our antidote is history, the protection of historical memory as a key to developing socialist and revolutionary consciousness in our peoples.  We must integrate ourselves, break down preconceptions, mobilise, dispute the language of the bourgeoisie, commit ourselves to the truth and to just and dignified causes, turn that into an attitude towards life, and place youth at the forefront as protagonists.

Fidel Castro said, on 4 April 1962:

“To believe in young people is to see in them, in addition to enthusiasm, capacity; in addition to energy, responsibility; in addition to youth, purity, heroism, character, will, love for the homeland and faith in the homeland!  Love for the Revolution, faith in the Revolution, self-confidence, deep conviction that youth can, that youth is capable, deep conviction that great tasks can be placed on the shoulders of youth!”[1]

Notes and References

[1] See P Ríoseco and D Reyes Rodríguez, ‘A Revolution for youth, and with them’, in Granma, 22 April 2022, online at https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2022-04-22/a-revolution-for-youth-and-with-them