In present times (hard times and destined to become increasingly so), a lot is said and written about „young people“. The matter is dealt with by a whole army of psychologists, pedagogues, sociologists, statisticians, opinion pollers, demographers, politicians, journalists and as many others as can be thought of: the army of all those who are paid to perform artifical respiration on an ideology which, though still mainstream, is backwards, asphyxial, and now in its death throes, just like the socio-economic system that produces it. They speak and write about „ill-being amongst the young“, „social isolation“ (hikikomori, they call it in Japan), and of „Gen Z“ (as if to say: „After them, the flood!“). And they shift from amazed concern for any display of violent, destructive and/or self-destructive irrationality, involving or overtaking an adolescent, to rhetorical and hypocritical enthusiasm when „young people“ seem to break out of the vicious circle of isolation and apathy to… go and vote, as happened some months ago in Italy and Hungary: the “young people’s party“ they called it – wow, there’s a nice fat packet of votes to be nurtured, and then directed towards nationalism, the defence of the Fatherland, the war effort. Always in the name of Sacred Democracy of course…
Again: if a random event typical of the rule of Capital (such as two policemen killing some poor guy who’s gone out of his mind, or an entire community reacting against the destruction of a valley to build a railway line destined mainly for the transport of weapons in case of war) results in „young people“ getting angry and coming out onto the streets to throw a couple of firecrackers or, as in France at the start of October, spreading nationwide to a protest movement against objective conditions that produces something more than just „student“ protests, clashing several times with a police force that has been renowned for decades as being one of the most brutal in existence, well then the aforesaid gentlefolk become really alarmed: „young people“ become „vandals“, „casseurs“, „terrorists“, „instigated by extremists“ and so on (not to mention the most recent threat to „bourgeois law and order“ brandished at every turn: the hoodlums! best not to venture out in the evening…). And so, there we are! In Italy the eminently fascist Code (called Rocco, from its compiler) is reworked; never repealed in the supremely democratic „Republic emerging from the Resistence“, it is amplified, tweaked here and there, translated into „modern language“… briefly „better“ characterised: more potential victims (thirteeen-year-olds, beware!), new crimes (on demonstrations be careful not to let „seditious slogans“ escape you and, if they beat you, thank them and accept it lovingly, otherwise it becomes „resisting a public official“!) – two examples amongst many of the progressive and unceasing militarisation that marks the present-day society of Capital, in Italy as elsewhere.
Amidst increasingly widespread and nearby war atrocities, brutality in social and inter-personal relations, imbecility as a side effect of the drug constituted by the so-called social networks, epidemics and pandemics with their related „social control“, environmental disaster, exasperated and fanatical individualism, aggressive performance anxiety both in deeds and in words, bewilderment and loneliness, repressed and expressed anger at living and non-working conditions (all the fine gifts that are held in store for us by the society of Capital), the search for profit at all costs (whatever it takes!), competition and competitiveness – well, it might be said that life isn’t exactly a bowl of cherries. And of course those who pay the cost are the more exposed and vulnerable, with the added daily drama of a problematic survival and agonising lack of prospects for the great majority of us human beings.
But „young people“ do not exist as a social category or demographic classification: they are here today and, for obvious reasons, no longer here tomorrow. And they’re certainly not a class, marked, in a society divided into classes, by a specific collocation with its own historical objectives. They are instead a sort of formless magma, constantly transforming and on the boil, where conditions, orientations, suggestions bubble, with very different and often contrasting desires: the reality of a young proletarian, whether native or immigrant, who gets by as best is possible in any of a city’s „problem neighbourhoods“ (or, as the gentlefolk pompously put it „socially and economically disadvantaged urban areas“) is quite different from that of a young person from a petit-bourgeois family who may be studying at university. With all the consequences involved. Banal but true.
What’s more, decade by decade, successive generations have suffered the paralyzing effects of the ideological nerve gas handed out liberally by post-fascist demo-fascism and demo-Stalinism: the many faces of the counter-revolution (military/police, ideological, emergency) sucking from it the pyschological and physical energy needed to move in the direction of a future that extends beyond day-to-day survival within the more or less protected corral of the current institutions, or the hasty illusion of revolt for its own sake or the creation of a circumscribed „liberated ghetto“ (still built on the basis of exploiting others), or passive support for a pathetic and illusory ethical reformism of limited and personal dimensions; or, worse still, consuming young people’s energy in voluntary work of a Jehova’s Witnesses nature for some so-called „communist“ group that exploits them without giving them even a smattering of revolutionary preparation… Moreover, today these generations are exposed, as more or less aware victims, to insistent patriotic propaganda: whether that of their own nation or of someone else’s makes little difference. Yes, hard times.
Naturally, we are addressing the young proletarian victims of violence, massacres, constant and growing poverty, forced migration, systematic destruction, racism and daily persecution by the „forces of law and order“, and so on: they will be the ones – these young proletarians driven by the objective difficulties of survival – to form the avant-gardes of a real, worldwide movement of the fight for communism, thanks to the assiduous and essential work of the revolutionary party (political work with and in its organization).
To the other „young people“ from other classes more or less harassed and impoverished, or on the way to proletarianisation, we say that it is only by supporting this perspective with passion and with reason, that they will be able to leave behind the blind allies of solitude and anxiety, trouble and fear, false myths and facile delusions, finally turning to the path of class struggle, the revolutionary fight for communism. Because this is what it’s all about: resisting haste and the illusion of ready-made recipes, personal success as a reason for living, the visible and tangible immediate result, and returning to the fight, with the intellect and the gut, theory and practice, turning the fresh energy of youth towards an objective that is infinitely greater than the day-to-day navigation sticking close to the shore that this society in its bloody death throes wishes to force on us (and does in part) – mfor a future that is not „Smurfland“ or the country of „Daisies and windmills“, but that of a society that is at last classless.
Only by working in and for a cross-generational revolutionary party and thus contrasting sterile and sick individualism and reformism void of prospects, can the material and undeniable fact be serenely and positively acknowledged: that youth passes, but the irremedial economic and social conditions of the capitalist mode of production remain. And hatred for the latter cannot grow old: indeed, it must increase!
15/10/2026
