Youth of the World Unite!
Form a youth international!
Revolution statement to the European Social Fourm, Paris 2003

From the streets of Seattle, to Genoa and Evian. From the huge anti war movement that shook the globe to the revolutionary up surge we have seen in Argentina and Bolivia. Everywhere we, the youth, have been at the fighting end of the anti capitalist movement. Our actions have shown the way forward. Despite this, we do not have our own mass organisation. We desperately need one. We need to form an anti capitalist youth international.

Some people argue that young people do not need their own organisation. That they just need to join the in with the “adult” movement. REVOLUTION rejects this. We recognise that despite consistently being on the frontlines of the anti capitalist movement young people are sidelined when it comes to making the decisions.

The fact is that under capitalism young people suffer systematic oppression. At home we are pushed about and told what to do. At school we are given a thorough training in obedience, and brain washed into accepting capitalism as a just and “natural” system. At work we are discriminated against and patronised. We are sent off to fight and die in capitalist wars and when we return those of us under 18 are told we are not old enough to vote. When we go out on the streets we are harassed by the Police and subject to “stop and search” laws, in reality legalised intimidation of the young people and other oppressed groups. So yeah, the youth of the world have much to get angry and radical about.

The Anti Capitalist movement does not exist in a bubble within which no oppression exists. Indeed, young people make up the majority of the anti capitalist movement yet are barely represented in any of the leadership positions. The platforms at this months ESF will be filled, not with the fresh young faces of a vibrant and militant movement that has risked its lives on the streets opposing the neo liberal agenda, opposing the capitalist, imperialist world order, but with the same reformists and liberal academics that have led the workers to 25 years of defeats and set backs.

The Anti Capitalist movement is also predominantly white. This must change. We need to reach out to ethnic minorities and immigrant communities and win them to anti capitalist class struggle politics. Young people are crucial in realising this because of their unique social position. Through the education system immigrant youth become assimilated faster into communities (but do of course also suffer terrible racism and discrimination). We need to join with them in combating that racism and radicalise them for the struggle ahead and in doing so win their immigrant working class communities to the fight. The anti war movement in Britain and the struggle against the fascist BNP shows that working class immigrant youth can become the militant vanguard.

All of this shows that young people have a crucial role to play in our movement. We need to go on leading the movement in taking action but we also need to get our voice heard. We need to start giving the anti capitalist movement a political direction. That’s why we need to form a mass anti capitalist youth international open to all anti capitalist youth. And we don’t just want another youth group that is dictated to by the “adult” party or organisation. We want it to have organisational and political independence, deciding its own policy, politics and priorities.

That’s why we are inviting all socialist, communist, anti capitalist and working class youth organisations and individual anti capitalist youth to an international delegate based meeting in 2004 held at a date and venue to be mutually agreed to discuss

a) immediate common actions, campaigns and mutual assistance

b) Strategy and discussion of political programme (for which we will submit our programme The Road to Revolution)

c) A common youth gathering in central Europe in the summer of 2004 or 2005.

In short we want to form an anti capitalist youth international and towards this aim we are also calling on the ESF organisers to do the following:

1. A dedicated youth space with a youth assembly (with discussion debates and decisions by voting) within this space. Not to isolate ourselves from the mass movement but to decide our own policy and take that policy to the mass movement and win them to our ideas. Young people lead the movement in action and they should have the opportunity to lead it politically too.

2. A day for the youth to discuss where we can take the movement and the issues that are effecting us.

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