We are living through a turning point, during which historical world changes are taking place in the development or regression of human civilisation and human society on a global scale. A characteristic feature of recent decades has been the rise and spread of powerful economic crises in hitherto flourishing capitalist societies of the so-called ‘first world’, with the immediate consequences being the violent and sudden collapse of the standard of living of the majority of society and the widening of the gap between a numerically small but economically powerful and parasitic elite and the world of labour which witnessed the disappearance of centuries worth of labour and social conquests in very short time.
The very phenomenon of economic crises was founded on a not-so-obvious but nevertheless clear and deliberate lie: that the ‘crises’ were not crises but a temporary, functional ‘anomaly’ of the capitalist system that would be corrected and restored. Reality proved that the economic crises introduced a new permanent situation, a new inhuman reality for the majority not only of the existing population but, more importantly, for the still unborn generations that will come in the future and that whenever and wherever they are born, will already from their very first breaths ‘owe’ exorbitant amounts per capita and per ‘piece’ and who will spend their entire lives ‘managing’ an unmanageable debt which they did not cause themselves.
In the other regions of the world, where the world’s predatory capital draws the borders of the what it calls ‘Third World’, in these dependent countries whose peoples have been overexploited for decades or even centuries, with the youth being the first victims, the much more intractable problems of survival and subsistence, which the latter are confronted with, tend to assume frightening proportions.
The crisis in the fiscal and economic sphere seems to be coming full circle. The escalation of the conflict of interests on a global scale is leading to a challenge to the neo-colonial domination of the strongest imperialist powers. Humanity is now being pushed into the most heated and homicidal phase of securing and actualizing the monopoly of capital: the phase of real war, the military conflict and involvement of more and more states which were, until recently, privileged under the hegemony of the USA against the rising rival pole formed by anti-imperialist-anti-colonialist countries and rising powers which are either socialist or draw their economic and military power from the legacies of the early socialist revolutions of the 20th century (see the ‘Socialist Revolution’; People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Russia).
In this imminent and inevitable confrontation between the decadent Western monocracy and the advancing bloc of socialist and anti-imperialist forces, the new generations, the young people of the societies that the Western hegemony maintains under its control and influence, will be brutally and without any hesitation or second thought, turned into cannon fodder by the ruling regime. We are already seeing this happening in Ukraine with the hundreds of thousands of disposable people who in no time are filling the vast new graveyards scattered around the country.
Countless young people, most of them forcibly conscripted, literally beaten and kidnapped from the street or from their homes, are being sent to their deaths at the same time as their somewhat more ‘privileged’ peers of the ‘allied’ states are (for now) suffering economic death and the burial of their very future by the wholesale seizure of their economic resources and their being sent as ‘aid’ to modern-day neo-Nazism by CEOs of supranational organizations who were not elected by anyone and of course are not accountable to anyone. And this generalized attack with the youth as its victims is not limited in a specific locality; we have new outbreaks that are ever more violent and bloody, ever more destructive every day, with the most recent example being the genocidal situation in occupied Palestine and the mass extermination of thousands of children and civilians by the zionist occupation regime.
In western societies that are increasingly openly revealing their deeply reactionary core, the youth are seen as ‘dangerous material’ that needs to be treated before it can be released into the Euro-Atlantic ‘progressive’ environment. The innate rebellious spirit and the tendency to question and oppose the status quo are the first elements to be targeted by the ‘reform’ imposed by the framework of the dominant ‘principles and values’.
Young people are not only not allowed to have any experiential contact and awareness of the social and labour acquisitions that their parents probably anticipated, but they should be ‘educated’ in such a way that any reference to vital social, labour and personal rights reflexively provokes aversion, to be perceived as something dead, obsolete, even as a criminal remnant from the ‘illiberal’ past. What is sought is full acceptance of further rapid impoverishment, subjugation, migration, unemployment, job insecurity, existential anguish, addictions, consumer substitutes and manufactured ‘identities’, and familiarity with death itself on the battlefields and/or with the use of weapons of mass destruction in escalating war. In contrast, unbridled capital and the elevation of the market and insatiable profit to supreme status, as somehow the prevailing religion, is the absolute and non-negotiable goal.
According to neoliberal ‘orthodoxy’, young men and women must hate progress and collectivity. It demands this without allowing young people to even begin to grasp and define these concepts; they must become automatons, unable to articulate any progressive theoretical elaboration. This includes any reference to the historical achievements of socialism and Marxist science that propelled the whole of humanity to historical heights in the not so distant past. Nowadays, alienation is reduced to a charisma, a professional qualification, a sign of good taste, a passport to racial superiority, even if it ultimately leads to self-dissolution and individual and social death. In short, the young person must be young in body and congenitally dead in spirit, an absolutely expendable vassal-guarantor of the perpetuation and escalation of the regime of exploitation.
But conditions are changing rapidly. Imperialist domination seems to be tottering and heading for its first defeat in the 21st century, which until recently seemed unthinkable. The pan-Euro-Atlanticist empire seems to be stripped of the metaphysical cloak it had created for itself. The awe of the ‘invincible’ is beginning to fade. But it would be a mistake to underestimate its immense power, which may be diminishing at the material level but which remains almost intact in another, much more important and decisive field. It is the ideological field of domination, the planetary dispersion and the consolidation of the so-called western culture over generations, which are already nurtured transcendently from the moment of their birth until the moment of their physical death, incessantly and most importantly subconsciously by the dominant ideology of capital which, as a perfectly thought out and regulated ‘production line’, turns human subjects into unwilling, alienated, consumptive and passive beings unable to grasp and understand their own biological core, let alone their social core. A being that is subjected to the assaults of postmodern ‘self-definition or self-identification’ already from childhood, forced to ‘choose an identity’ from a supermarket shelf where the multitude of ‘social constructions’ and ‘identities’ available for sale dominate in a great variety, qualities and versions for every preference and budget.
The progressive youth of the whole world must awaken and choose the path of life with perspective, the difficult but beautiful path of rising up in a collective liberation struggle with dignity, against all oppression and manipulation, a struggle that it must carry out together with all the forces of anti-imperialism and socialism as a dynamic part of the World Anti-imperialist Platform. The youth must crush the deformation that is being forcibly imposed on them as ‘normality’ by coordinating all anti-imperialist anti-colonialist and antifascist forces in a militant front in every country and internationally. A necessary precondition for this is the activation and action on every front of the progressive, pioneering sections of labour, such as scientists and intellectuals, as well as the guidance of the youth in the direction of the recognition and rejection of divisive ideologies and doctrines channelled by the regime of imperialism as well as the toxic influence of the opportunism and revisionism of our times which manipulates us by playing with the heroic historical symbols of past struggles and with a peculiar use of phraseology, which, while appearing revolutionary, in practice leads to a renunciation of any struggle today.
In our camp, young men and women are not expendable raw materials for the prosperity of parasitism. For us, the young are tomorrow’s leaders of progress, the continuators of the species and civilization of future humanity. Everything belongs to them, and it is imperative that they take centre stage. It becomes imperative to use the valuable legacies of the early socialist revolutions and to evolve, enrich and transform them in terms of their contemporary implications, to take advantage of the enormous technological possibilities of our time. Particular tasks lie ahead of young people who are inspired by and carry the ideals of socialism and communism: to play a pioneering role of consistency and selflessness in the anti-imperialist struggle of every peoples on a world scale. In this spirit we call for a struggle able to mobilise the youth.
Athens 19 November
