Young Communist League

Catalogue record

Notes

CP/YCL. Communist women, in contrast to their Labour Party counterparts, were often resistant to the idea of separate women's groups. Younger adherents, on the other hand, had what was technically a fully autonomous vehicle for their aspirations in the shape of the Young Communist League (YCL). Traditionally the YCL was considered, if at all, merely as a disciplined detachment of the adult movement. Recently, however, Mike Waite has used the League to illuminate the intergenerational tensions to which communism was as prone as any other movement.42 Waite's own working materials, including questionnaire responses, can be found in the archives at CP/HIST. But there are also extensive YCL files dating mainly from the mid-1930s, including minutes, congress proceedings and vast amounts of printed propaganda. The YCL was always as much a cultural and social organisation as a political movement and, alongside materials from local branches and broader youth campaigns, there are files relating to cultural and sporting activities. An ironical sidelight on generational changes is the existence both of files from the 1930s on the ILP Guild of Youth, inside which communists were then busily disruptive, and of disciplinary files from the 1960s recording the infiltration of the YCL itself by Trotskyists. Though records of the YCL survive into the 1980s, by this time it was a shadow of its former self.