With “The World on Fire”...
Millions of Youth March to Demand a Future

September 23, 2019 | revcom.us

 

All summer long, the words on so many lips were “the world is on fire.” This was not just poetry—destructive fires raged through the Amazon, Indonesia, and Siberia. Some were the result of climate change, and some were very directly set by individual capitalists driven to expand, and enabled by the governments that serve and protect them. With each fire, people mourned the destruction of life and felt in their bones whole hunks of the future being robbed.

On September 20, millions of youth and others, on every continent, did something about it. They left school and marched through the streets, demanding the right to a future. In the U.S., high school and middle school youth in particular poured through the streets with homemade signs and banners, hungry to act and to know. They were serious... and they were exuberant, in a newfound sense of the potential power of their generation.

Many of these youth have a basic sense of the scope and seriousness of the environmental crisis, and some have much more than that: a scientific grounding in its depth and breadth and dynamics. They are fired with the sense that the powers that be have miserably failed and that their generation must act urgently on their convictions, now. There is the anger of a high school woman who said, “You’re gonna die of old age; we’re gonna die of climate change.”

These youth want to hear about solutions—a common response to the Revolution Club was, “You have to come to my school, you have to come to my class.” People enthusiastically took up the chants put forward by the clubs on the route of marches—chants that indicted the system and called for revolution, chants that righteously proclaimed “humanity first—FUCK your borders!” For many this began, and for some it continued, a process of discovery... of learning and doing... and learning more and doing more.

The defiant stand first taken by Greta Thunberg, and then by millions this past Friday, shows part of the potential of a new generation to play a major role in changing the horrific trajectory humanity is on. There is a sense in some that the future we face will, even in the best of circumstances and with the deepest of efforts, be very, very difficult. But there is also a sense of determination to change that future.

Where this will go, nobody can say. That will be determined through struggle—struggle against the powers that be and struggle over the road forward.

It is critical that revolutionaries be part of the process of discovery and mass resistance now underway, bringing forward and struggling for a scientific understanding of the source of the problem in this system, and its solution through revolution. Like we witnessed this Friday, the openness of sections of these youth to revolution was palpable, as was their defiance and not being weighed down by “the way the world works.” New to political life, they are an important section of the social base for a mass movement for an actual revolution.

We need to be letting these youth know about the breakthroughs made by Bob Avakian: the vision of the future crystallized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America; the road forward to that future, found in the films Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution and THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America, A Better World IS Possible, A Talk by Bob Avakian; and the scientific method grounding that.

Revolutionary communists need to organize these youth into new and existing Revolution Clubs, with the 5-2-6, involve them in grappling with and working on the problems of the revolution—bringing forward what we do have, and frankly laying out and going to work with them on what we don’t yet know or have, and need to solve.

Right now a critical front of the whole struggle will be working together to help drive out the Trump/Pence fascist regime—a regime which, among other towering outrages, every day hastens and makes worse the environmental destruction ravaging the Earth. This means driving out this regime through mass, nonviolent, sustained struggle, building to millions in the street day after day—and not squandering our energies in the dead-end electoral circus now being put before us. Whether this struggle succeeds will bear heavily on the fate of humanity, on the course of revolution itself, and on whether there will even be a livable planet for this generation.

A beginning has been made. This should fill people with hope... and with determination to do what is needed to make that hope real.