22 June 2026
The following is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Meeting of Internationalist Forces in Paris on 15 May 2026 during the opening session on youth and the practical interventions of revolutionaries. Our main submission to the conference is available here: Inter-Imperialist Rivalry & the Tasks of Proletarian Socialists.
I’m a supporter of the International Bolshevik Tendency in Wellington, New Zealand, where I’m best known for organizing against laws that attack trans people, and in our united-front work against imperialist war and education job cuts. We have attempted to help connect protest and campus-based movements with unionized workers. The IBT in New Zealand has a youth and student organization, the Bolshevik Club, through which we introduce young people to revolutionary politics.
All of the contributions to this meeting have identified an obvious problem. Young people are increasingly politically polarized because capitalism offers them little beyond war, precarity, debt and repression. The collapse of a global liberal-democratic consensus, the erosion of the material basis for the bourgeois family and the end of widespread ownership of assets have compromised one vision of the adult life youth in the imperialist countries were promised, without providing an alternative. In the neocolonial world—in countries like Kenya, Indonesia and Nepal—the lack of opportunities and repression youth face are far worse, and youth-led movements have engaged in dramatic uprisings, threatening governments but not the underlying order they oversee. The conditions exist for further widespread radicalization, but the revolutionary left remains too weak, isolated and distant from the organized working class to intervene effectively.
This youth question cannot be solved by engaging in more activism, even more militant activism. Youth are not a class. Students are not a class. Youth are a cross-class layer, but the activism native to their movements tends towards a petty-bourgeois liberal politics which does not serve to prepare them for working-class organization at all. Activism, even brave, radical coordinated activism, is not a strategy for power.
I think many of us know young activists caught in a cycle. Especially around Palestine or climate issues, a layer of youth has learned that to be serious means being in a state of permanent emergency: sharing every horror, attending every protest or snap action and pushing through exhaustion because anything less feels like a betrayal. This courage and drive is very real, and puts much of the official labor movement to shame. But destroying yourself physically, emotionally or socially for a cause is no use to anyone. These bright flames burn out long before they can learn where effort can be most usefully spent, or how to preserve themselves for future struggles, including the much less glamorous and more consistent work needed to build a party.
The left often offers young activists no way beyond this cycle, and instead feeds it with more protests, more spectacles, more escalation. It is easy for a small organized group to become a big fish in a small pond, either dominating the politics of a small city or, in the metropoles, dominating particular campaigns or issues. Once you know all the activists, chair all the meetings and write the leaflets, you can mistake that for having real social weight.
This is not an argument against protests, occupations or direct action. They are deeply necessary. The problem is when actionism becomes a substitute for strategy. The left needs to win politicized youth away from closed activist subcultures and towards the much wider scope of work needed to build a party—not away from action itself, which remains a key part of doing exactly that.
Winning youth to a working-class approach is easier said than done, for working-class politics has been captured by bureaucratic, economistic labor-aristocratic layers who are allergic to most practical political work. We cannot appear to youth as simply the left wing of this conservatizing anti-practice layer; we can only win them to a working-class politics if our theory and class orientation are presented alongside concrete proposals for practical steps forward.
This is where a communist program comes in. Some of the better contributions today have emphasized this, but what do we mean by program? Is it just taking youth anger and attaching a more militant slogan or two to it? No demand, no matter how militant, is revolutionary in isolation. Even many demands, pitched at the same level of consciousness and mobilization, are no improvement. We must fight in each struggle for a transitional program stretching all the way from immediate grievances to an independent working class with a party of its own, able to actually challenge the capitalist order and the injustices it generates.
Take conscription of youth, now a live issue in Germany as mentioned by several comrades. Indeed across Europe the idea of military discipline for youth is becoming increasingly normalized in order to prepare for a looming confrontation with Russia. Left to business-as-usual activism, the issue will remain mired in a pacifism and generational politics that will be rather easy for the European ruling class to ignore. It will not automatically lead to links with organized workers and from there to the kind of industrial action that could seriously threaten the European imperialists. A transitional approach to opposing the introduction or expansion of conscription would demand: no military recruiters in schools; no military research in universities; no cuts for the sake of war budgets. The unions must fight militarization; workers need a party and must strike against the outbreak of war, while conscripted soldiers must organize against their officers.
The ICL’s contribution to this meeting extends their exchange with Mike Macnair of the CPGB on whether to actively encourage young comrades to take up proletarian work. They are right that any revolutionary organization that hopes to grow and take a leading role in class struggle must recruit, train and develop proletarian militants. Maintaining a presence in the proletariat is not a secondary sociological issue, nor is it the same thing as workerism or the old folly of dramatic turns to industry. But neither a change in class position nor maintaining a proletarian-majority organization produces better consciousness. That comes through live struggle, political clarification and contact with an adequate program, and this frequently occurs outside the workplace.
So we need neither actionism nor a turn to the workplaces alone. We need tactical flexibility that will allow us to build organizations that can intervene wherever openings appear across different class layers and in different struggles. The best workplace militants may first appear on campuses or campaigns against special oppression; and some of the best fighters against oppression may be found on the jobsite. The arena is not sacred: the test is whether our work exposes us to new people and real problems. And does it help new communists see the link between democratic and economic demands, between the working class and the oppressed, and ultimately between the fight for a workers’ party and every serious movement among workers and the oppressed.
Practice at united-front work is essential. We fight alongside broader layers without compromising our program. In a school strike we should seek links with teachers and unions. In a Palestine campaign we should demand labor action. We cannot simply dissolve ourselves into youth activism nor abstain and merely analyse and propagandize. We intervene, clarify, recruit and train, helping the best militants connect their immediate struggles to the wider and longer-term fight to politicize the unions, gather the social weight necessary to influence the class-struggle and to fight for a revolutionary party. Youth can ignite struggles. A transitional program can give them direction. But only the working class has the power to carry them through. Our task is to connect these elements.