Fight for Socialist Revolution!

On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth

The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY), youth section of the Internationalist Group, was founded in 2017 by young activists radicalized by the clash between illusions of “hope and change” under liberal Democrat Barack Obama and the harsh reality of unending racist oppression exemplified by the murders, during his eight-year presidency, of Trayvon Martin (2012), Michael Brown and Eric Garner (2014), Sandra Brown and Freddie Gray (2015), Philando Castile (2016) and so many others – a list that continues today under his former vice president Joe Biden.

A key source of RIY’s growth over the years – reflected in the pages of Revolution – has been its consistent struggle against illusions that opportunist “leftists” pushed in capitalist politicians from Obama and his then-VP Joe Biden to Democratic (Party) Socialists of America idols Bernie Sanders and “AOC.” Based on the internationalist, proletarian and revolutionary program of Trotskyism, the genuine Marxism of our time, RIY works to win a new generation to the fight for international socialist revolution.¹ Recruitment of a new layer of young members over the past school year is reflected in materials, edited for publication and printed below, in which several of them describe why they joined RIY. These underscore the potential for further expansion as those determined to fight effectively against capitalist oppression face the challenges of the coming period. (To find out more about RIY, write to:revinternationalistyouth@gmail.com)

Anna

I grew up in a Christian household in Mississippi. My father was a staunch conservative with traditionalist beliefs about a woman’s place in the home. From a young age, I was taught not to question this so-called “natural order” of the world. I was not to pay attention to the inequality and poverty that surrounded us, it was all according to god’s plan and who was I to question his divine wisdom or wonder if things could be different? But as I got older, I couldn’t help but give in to the mortal sin of critical thinking.

As I watched the lives of family members be destroyed by opioid addiction, I began to silently question why god would plan such devastation. (Much later I learned that this was actually a result of the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to gain billions, a prime example of the capitalist class valuing profit over human life.)

My senior year of high school, I received a scholarship to a private university in New York City. I was ecstatic. In my mind, the city was a haven of liberal acceptance, where there would be none of the racism, misogyny or homophobia so prevalent in my home state. The university was made up largely of white East Coast liberals. To my surprise, many of them had the same biases as the conservatives I grew up with, beneath a cloak of faux-progressivism. Sure, their parents had voted for Obama, but it didn’t stop them from making racist statements behind closed doors. When I called them out on it, they were appalled, with one saying, “I can’t be racist, I’m a liberal.” They cared about misogyny and homophobia, but primarily the kinds that directly affected them and those of similar backgrounds.

This became apparent when telling people where I grew up. I bought into their belief that my upbringing was something less than theirs. But over time their attitudes were more and more grating, and I came to realize that the structural oppression so blatant in the Deep South exists throughout the country in many different forms, some more subtle and underhanded than others, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power.

I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party, but my break really came after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The court decision meant that many of the women I grew up with would be left without access to legal abortion. I went to a march in Union Square, trying to find some solace, desperate to do anything I could to help. But it was filled with people holding signs with pictures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and shouting “This is why we vote blue!” I was appalled. Why were they using this devastating news as an excuse to side with the Democratic Party despite this happening under a Democratic president? What was the point of protesting if they didn’t seem to care about the lives of the women who were most vulnerable, who deserve this right regardless of where they live?

I became interested in socialism. [Having transferred to CUNY,] I attended a club fair where I was thrilled to come across a socialist group that was putting forward a program for revolution and actively participating in workers’ struggles: the Internationalist Club. I was given the opportunity to learn and to take part in the organizing.

Not long after that, I was asked to give a speech at a protest against the repression of pro-Palestinian voices² Since then, I’ve attended demonstrations and union rallies, and participated in struggles that the CUNY Internationalist Clubs have waged, like the struggle against the attempted ban of the showing at Hunter College of Israelism, a film critical of Israel.³ Gathering over a thousand signatures, we helped lead the campaign that made the administration back down, a present-day precedent for resisting McCarthyite censorship on the campuses.

Doing this work has given my life a sense of purpose. Viewing the world through a dialectical materialist lens is a gratifying antithesis to the absolutist religious thinking that troubled me as a child. For the longest time, I felt so sinful for questioning “god, the father” and the way the world is structured. RIY has given me the opportunity to work towards a better world, free from the chains of capitalism and the forms of oppression it produces.

Dante

Prior to encountering RIY I had always been staunchly apolitical. I intentionally avoided educating myself in any way on political matters out of disdain for bourgeois American politics, and the misbelief that Marxism was for wealthy college students who just wanted to stimulate their intellects.

I viewed this as a form of protest, believing that, as a worker, I would live and die in vain under the boot of capitalism. For me, there was no other way about it. I felt that capitalism, in its festering decay, only stood to benefit a small few while the rest, myself included, would simply accept the fate dealt to them. This was the life I had come to know, as I both witnessed and experienced this firsthand. My father, having worked as a colorist in film for decades, had his employment made obsolete by the industry’s digitization, with his specialized skill-set rendered useless by the profit system. In the years following, his life became plagued by illness and alcoholism, the march of “progress” had trampled him.

At 18, I started working in ornamental plaster with toxic materials at a wage of $15 an hour. Four years later I was making $3.50 more, poisoning myself at a rate which didn’t even match inflation. Though, without a Marxist lens or knowing what Marxism truly meant, these were merely the bleak facts of life. As a result, I was left hopeless and disillusioned by what I believed to be a society on a fixed course toward total collapse.

This outlook was changed when I intersected members of RIY and the Internationalist Clubs. I attended a handful of meetings on and off at first, and was surprised by members’ level of political knowledge. Over the course of the following summer, I became more consistently involved in activities, meetings and demonstrations. In this process I was able to contextualize the program I had been learning about through the education programs they organized.

Seeing the importance of the RIY’s program and its discipline, I was eager to deepen my understanding, which occurred through my participation in the club and particularly in preparations for the debate with the ICL.⁴ In this, I was able to see the stark contrast between a genuine Trotskyist organization and a formerly revolutionary group in its decline. Attending the debate was a pivotal moment for me. Meeting experienced comrades from other locals and sections made me immensely proud to be part of our international tendency, the League for the Fourth International, and solidified my desire to fight for a socialist revolution.

Lucy

My first window into politics was through the Women’s Empowerment Club at my high school. It began as a place for students to vent about their experiences of sexism and misogyny. This quickly became an exercise in identity politics. We were told the problem was that white individuals did not “check their privilege,” or sacrifice enough of it, or educate themselves enough about it. But this framework seemed like we could never achieve lasting trust among those interested in ending oppression for good. Gloomily waiting to vote, I had trouble believing any candidate could alleviate the issues my classmates talked about.

I felt driven to go to as many events put on by different organizations as I could, desperate to find a group that would connect the many issues of oppression I saw in the world into one coherent struggle. My senior year history teacher offered me my first glimpse at what’s behind this by teaching about capitalism. I came to identify myself as anti-capitalist, but continued on the same path of organizing when I entered college a year later.

I thought I found an answer in the United Panther Movement, which later became the Panther Solidarity Organization, a Maoist group that carried out “serve the people” programs during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with the food and PPE (personal protective equipment) supplies, we handed out our “ten-point program,” taking inspiration from the Black Panthers’ program of the sixties. Yet despite us being alleged communists, the program mentioned nothing of socialism, concealing its aims to appear like anyone among the “masses” interested in things like free healthcare and ending homelessness.

In an attempt to resist falling into charity work alone, we decided to conduct “social investigation” in a housing project in Harlem, with our group focusing on the “lumpenproletariat” as the revolutionary base it would organize. We asked people what they thought about the recent explosive protest movement against the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to learn what programs we could develop to engage those most activated. Yet after months, our group hadn’t built much power I could notice. Each “campaign” of food distribution or social investigation fizzled out. I still felt confused about how we could eradicate these horrific conditions for good.

After college, I returned to New York to find that my partner had joined the Internationalist Club. He invited me to protests and introduced me to club members who stood out to me in their knowledge of communist history and convictions about their group’s positions and tactics. They were proud socialists, not afraid to explain what that meant or what it would take to get there. The February 2023 “Mumia’s Freedom Is Labor’s Cause” teach-in won me over in a lasting way⁵ Seeing workers organizations from the Bay Area and Portland, Oregon to South Africa and Brazil take part in actions to demand the release of the foremost class-war prisoner in the U.S. helped me understand how the workers struggle is integrally connected to the fight for black liberation. Workers’ unique power to halt capitalist production and transport became clear to me as key to the proletariat’s revolutionary position. Everything in my political heart said “Yes!” to this, which piqued my interest in RIY.

Through closer study, I found out more about the Internationalist Group/Revolutionary Internationalist Youth’s history of class struggle and program to unite the workers of all nations under one fight to do away with racism, the nuclear family’s oppression and the endless imperialist wars bred by capitalism. In joining RIY, I believe that I will become the best communist I can be, through serious political study and action.

Max

My life was thrown on a collision course in 2020. Before that tumultuous year, I had recognized flaws in U.S. society but assumed they could be resolved through voting and calling “my” representatives. The events of that year exposed these hopes as illusions, that reform could not bring us to a just society, that only socialist revolution can do that.

When the U.S. became the nation with the highest death toll in the entire global pandemic, I saw “my” representatives refuse to consider reform to make healthcare accessible while millions suffered from COVID and my family plunged into medical debt due to issues worsened by the pandemic. When the mass upheaval against racist police terror spread across the country, I saw the so-called “progressive” Democrats like New York City mayor Bill de Blasio mobilize the police to violently crush protests. When the racist, immigrant-bashing, foul-mouthed Donald Trump was replaced with Joe Biden, I saw how he went on to maintain Trump’s xenophobic policies, ban a railroad strike and turn the stripping away of the right to abortion into a campaign drive for the Democrats.

All of these developments left me upset, confused and searching for answers. I found those answers with the remarkable political clarity expressed by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs and RIY. My first interaction with the club was seeing the demand for “Free Abortion on Demand,” as a new student at a protest outside Hunter College.

It was the clear calls for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinians that solidified my interest in joining RIY. In February 2022 I was shocked to see the widespread support to and lack of questioning of the U.S. war drive against Russia in Ukraine. The Internationalists were the only group at CUNY talking about key background, including the U.S.-backed coup of 2014 in Ukraine that served as a precursor to repression of the Russian-speaking communities of Eastern Ukraine.

As the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza continues, we see calls for a ceasefire channeled into support for the Democrats as the oldest capitalist-imperialist party claims to be “seeking caution” while supplying the bombs that murder children daily. The vision for the creation of a binational Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state within a socialist federation of the Near East is characteristic of the Internationalist program: it is well-researched and links up to class struggle around the world. I am drawn to RIY because of the opportunity to develop a far-reaching understanding of history and Marxist theory while consistently fighting the class struggle.

Roser

Growing up in Mexico City, it was impossible not to notice the rampant inequality everywhere around me. My first attempt at doing something about it came in the form of volunteering. I cooked food at a soup kitchen. I helped raise money for breast cancer screenings. I built houses. I helped organize clothes drives and food drives and toy drives, and the more I did the more I felt like all my efforts were for nothing, at best putting a Band-Aid over a deep bleeding wound. I realized that even if I spent my entire life doing this people would still be hungry and sick and homeless because one would never get to the root cause of all these issues.

I come from a family that was once radical, so I read some Marx when I was younger and I always viewed communism in a positive light, even though I didn’t fully understand what it was. But I was taught that it was utopian and useless to fight for and that the best I could do was settle for seeking small changes under capitalism. In middle school I became interested in feminism and gay rights. I went to protests for the first time, I put up fliers all over my school and got into arguments with the principal over censorship and tried to start an LGBTQ club. I also started calling myself a democratic socialist (Bernie was running for president in the U.S. at that time, so democratic socialism was all the rage).

When I was 17, I moved to a Scandinavian country, one of those often idealized as a model for how society should run. Instead of the almost perfect haven that had been sold to me, I found myself in a country that legally classified the neighborhoods of “non-Western” immigrants as ghettos and made children in them get an education in Scandinavian values while stripping refugees of residency permits and forcing them into deportation centers. A country where my friends and I were often called slurs and attacked for being gay and for being immigrants. Whenever we tried to defend ourselves against these attacks, we were told we were making a “big deal” out of nothing and should just be thankful to live there. I became increasingly disgusted with the country’s racism and nationalism and, because I had been taught that this was the closest we would ever get to socialism, I became disillusioned with socialism as a whole.

By the time I moved to New York, I thought I wanted nothing to do with politics. The anger I felt at the oppression I had seen and faced had made me deeply nihilistic. I had come to the conclusion that the problems plaguing society were simply too large to ever be solved and that trying to do anything was a waste of time and energy. Then, at the beginning of my first semester, I met the Internationalist Clubs at a speak-out after the murder of Tyre Nichols. I had run into other left groups before, but had never met one that talked so openly about the need for revolution and so proudly about its politics. The speeches I heard and conversations I had that day made me feel hopeful about the future for the first time in a long time. I had never met genuine revolutionaries before, so I spent the first couple of club meetings waiting to be disappointed once again, waiting to be told you had to settle for crumbs. Instead, I saw how serious and determined everyone around me was.

Since then I have developed a deeper understanding about politics and history, why socialism has never been realized and why revolutions so often fail, not because it is utopian or unrealistic, but because of a lack of real revolutionary leadership. At rallies, pickets and marches I have seen this crisis of leadership firsthand. At the UPS “practice pickets” over the summer of 2023, I saw the potential power of the working class. Their strike would have dealt huge blows to the company and to the bourgeoisie as a whole, but then I saw the union leadership call the strike off just days before it was scheduled to start.

I now understand why my previous efforts at fighting oppression failed and have been armed with a program of international socialist revolution. I have also learned about the political heritage and history of the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, its fight for all the oppressed, its unwavering opposition to imperialism, its refusal to ever abandon the class struggle, and I am convinced that it will be the vanguard that leads the working class to victory. In joining the RIY I hope to one day become part of that vanguard. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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