Socialist Youth Group Under Scrutiny: Immigration, Borders, and National Question

The CJS Under Examination: Class Internationalism and Family

An organization that presents itself as advocating for class internationalism and does not include the unity of Spain among its principles. That is the quickest summary of the program of the Coordinadora Juvenil Socialista (CJS), a platform linked to the MS that has set out to redefine the role of the Communist Party as a revolutionary vanguard. According to the circulating diagnosis, its cadres are driving the encampment and appear behind the demonstrations called outside of it. The positions have been reviewed point by point: immigration, borders, repatriations, sovereignty, national question, feminism, and queer doctrine. The assessment ranges from analytical interest to unqualified rejection.

What does the CJS defend on immigration and borders?

The framework is class internationalism, not migration control. The organization criticizes the approach that turns immigration into a security issue or a competition among workers, and is very harsh on the European Union's border policy and the so-called "Fortress Europe". It does not place repatriations as the axis of its migration policy: its discourse runs counter to the toughening of expulsions. Ceuta is framed in terms of imperialism, European border policy, and class conflict, with the campaign Against Fortress Europe as a reference. Spanish national sovereignty, by contrast, takes a secondary place compared to that internationalist dimension.

The most repeated objection holds that this framework serves as an alibi for not taking a stance in any concrete labor conflict. The contrast is clear: some place responsibility on capital and those who set the rules of the labor market; others respond that the problem is an ideological scheme that prevents talking about what happens at the workplace door.

The national question: why it does not defend the unity of Spain

There is no principle of unity of Spain. The national question is approached from the political independence of the working class and from the recognition of different national realities, which its critics read as an asymmetric federalism wrapped in revolutionary language, or directly as a territorial rupture that no one signs at the door of the headquarters. In between lies an uncomfortable gap: the CJS does not formulate its position as independentism or classic autonomism, and that leaves the debate unresolved.

Feminism, family, and the queer question: the most debated flank

Here the discussion gets stuck. The CJS speaks of heteropatriarchy as an ideological structure and denounces violence against women, with specific mention of that exercised by members of police forces. Its anti-fascist discourse criticizes the family model it considers violent and oppressive, a thesis that has earned it the most predictable opposition: it is difficult to sustain a class feminism, its critics argue, if at the same time the family is attacked, presented as the basic nucleus of social functioning and as an institution to be preserved.

In queer doctrine, the organization includes oppressed subjectivities within its emancipation strategy and presents LGBTQ struggles as part of that question; its recent materials place transphobia and LGBTIphobia among what they mobilize against. As to whether it politically considers a trans woman as a woman, the position is compatible with that affirmation, although there is no express pronouncement on the matter.

The analysis reaches this point and goes no further. No one has provided the data that would resolve whether this is a doctrinal rupture or a change of manual so that the same product continues to be placed in the political market. And without an express position on several of the open points, the encampment will continue its course and the demonstrations too. With what exact program, that is another matter.