Let's Read 'The Young Comrade,' The Crazy '20s Magazine For Baby Communists

As we've noted previously, after World War I, capitalist countries were so concerned that covert communists would corrupt their children that national security services had special surveillance on the Boy Scouts. But they shouldn't have bothered. Instead of turning these state-sponsored youth indoctrination camps Red from the inside, America's young socialists simply made their own youth groups. 

Of these, the raddest had to be the Young Workers League of America, thanks to its kids' magazine The Young Comrade, the Tiger Beat of Trotskyism -- complete with cute pictures of socialist heartthrobs like Friedrich Engels and Karl "Marxy" Marx.  

While the Young Workers League of America was open to all "children of the proletariat" aged 14 to 30, its youth publication was aimed at even younger Reds (or "Pioneers"), typically aged 9 to 13. And in the spirit of socialist equality, it was these eleven-year-old Leninists who were responsible for the content of The Young Comrade, providing articles, poems, and cartoons. Like the adventures of Johnny Red, who promoted the magazine's sale of socialist songbooks.

But precisely what kind of bourgeois establishment did these tiny commies fight against? Rich kids, corrupt priests, but most of all, the purveyors of capitalist propaganda (and maths): teachers.

And the pee wee Pioneers did not play around. These young socialists wrote with the anger and the zeal of grizzled October Revolutionaries. Over the publication's six-year lifespan from 1924 to 1930, it contained junior-written articles with such titles as "Why Miners Should Strike, by Martha Stone, Age 13. Or "Sufferings of the Workers," by Albert Derzsak, age 12. Or "Why We Hate The Capitalist" by Rose Plotkin, age nine. 

The entire archive of The Young Comrade can be found here in full to suit your tween radicalization needs. And if anyone ever complains that the Antifa, Rose twitter, Stalin bae youth of today is way too hardcore about its anti-capitalism, why not read them this poem by little Steve Meshechek calling for a 1% genocide a hundred years ago:

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Top Image: Young Workers League of America