LAST Sunday’s News Line Anniversary meeting, which greeted the Young Socialists’ March for Jobs and Free Education, was a historic moment in the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the struggle for Marxist leadership in the working class.
The young marchers, who spoke and led the rally, reflected the undeniable fact that the future of working class youth and students is indissolubly bound up with the socialist revolution.
We are proud of them as part of the developing leadership of the socialist revolution.
The Young Socialists are representatives of an entire generation of youth that recognises that there is no future for it and the working class under capitalism.
Capitalism today is in its death agony as the contradictions within it tear it apart as we are witnessing in Ireland.
There, the contradictions between the requirements of international capitalism and its bankers and the nation state are producing a situation where the government is usurped by these forces who intend to drive the Irish working class and whole sections of the middle class into the ground in order to try to save the capitalist European Union.
Ireland is just one small step in front of Britain and the rest of the world capitalist economies, each of which is in acute crisis and can only survive through the destruction of the productive forces, including their major constituent the working class.
Youth are at the sharp end of this crisis. They have seen that there is no prospect of jobs, affordable housing or even education under this system.
What the march from Manchester to London, over 200 gruelling miles, and the rally on Sunday proved, above all, is the enormous appetite amongst young people for revolutionary Marxism.
This was no protest march, begging for crumbs from the capitalist table. All the Young Socialists speakers at the rally demonstrated their understanding and grasp of Marxist theory and the necessity of the socialist revolution for the transformation of society and the advancement of humanity.
From this understanding of necessity they proved that they were able to subordinate themselves to the requirements of building a revolutionary leadership within the working class, to building the Young Socialists and Workers Revolutionary Party, transforming them into the mass party of workers and youth.
The march, and its huge impact within the working class in every city and town they passed through, was only possible because of this revolutionary determination and theoretical strength.
They won not just passive support wherever they went. They really galvanised workers through their leadership. Workers, housewives and young people identified immediately with the demands for a general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a workers government.
They proved decisively that the working class is ready, willing and indeed eager for a war on capitalism, and that they will not sit back and accept pauperisation as a price for keeping this rotten, corrupt and decaying capitalist system going.
In the founding document of the Fourth International, the Transitional Programme, Leon Trotsky demanded that the revolutionary movement turn to youth.
Youth are untainted by the past; they have not lived for years with the betrayals of the Labourites and trade union bureaucrats.
Youth will not accept such traitors have the right to lead workers, and they will be instrumental in removing them and through their leadership inspiring the older generation of workers to take up the struggle to overthrow capitalism and advance humanity to socialism.
The Young Socialists’ march has provided us with the beginnings of the unshakeable foundation for building the WRP into the party to lead the socialist revolution.