YESTERDAY huge masses of youth marched on the House of Commons, which was deciding to bring in tuition fees of £9,000 a year, turning higher education into a commodity which only the very rich can afford, and destroying the university system that has been built up in the UK since the Welfare State was launched in 1948.
The masses of students and school youth repeatedly pushed their way through police lines as they made their way to parliament square, where quaking LibDem MPs were debating whether to just abstain or to vote against, to try to save their political skins.
The LibDems will never rise again from the debacle of their own making, when they decided to become part of a reactionary anti-working class coalition.
The Labourites, meanwhile, are overjoyed for the moment, that the Tories and not themselves are bringing in £9,000 fees. They prepared the way for these when in 1998 they began the destruction of free state education, bringing in fees and abolishing the grant system.
The reaction of the House of Commons to this massive mobilisation of youth was to carry on debating the measure and vote for it.
The class lines have now been drawn. The ruling class is determined to make the working class, the middle class and the youth pay the full bill for the capitalist crisis, and its parliament will bring in all of the measures that the ruling class deems to be necessary to carry out this job.
Yesterday, the parliament, and the parliamentary system of bourgeois democracy (democracy for the ruling class – dictatorship for the working class), rejected the 100,000 youth that marched to it, asking it to think again about tuition fees and about the savage cuts policies.
Parliament turned its back on the youth, and the youth, while it may march on parliament again, will not do so in the same spirit as yesterday. They will march to bring down parliament and the bourgeois system in a socialist revolution.
The youth of this country and of Europe are now being forced by the crisis to embrace the revolutionary policy of Marxism.
Youth now must turn to the only class that has the power to bring down governments and overthrow the capitalist system – the working class, organised in trade unions, the only really revolutionary class in capitalist society.
Turning towards the working class does not mean turning towards the trade union bureaucracy.
The TUC leaders function is to defend capitalism by holding back the working class from carrying out its historic task, the overthrow of the capitalist order of society.
The way forward for youth is to build up the revolutionary party, the Trotskyist movement of the WRP in the UK, and the Fourth International throughout the world.
In Britain the youth will lead the fight to drive the trade union bureaucrats out of the leadership of the unions, as part of the the organisation of a general strike to bring down the coalition and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
The capitalist crisis can only be resolved by a socialist revolution that expropriates the bankers and the capitalists, bringing in a planned socialist economy that will be based on free education for all and jobs for all, so that everybody makes their contribution to the development of society, and exploitation and parasitism are consigned to exhibits in museums.
From yesterday’s massive march to parliament the youth will turn to Trotskyism and the struggle for the world socialist revolution.
Forward to the general strike!
Bring down the coalition! Bring in a workers government!
Jobs and education for all, not the few!
