This Saturday socialists from all over France and other countries including Germany, the Spanish State, Russia, the United States, Algeria, and more rallied at the Charenton Space in Paris. People lined up around the corner to enter and organizers opened up an overflow room to ensure everyone could watch the rally. In addition to the 2,000 people who attended in person, there were another 2000 individual connections virtually from across the world. Organized by Révolution Permanent — the sister organization of Left Voice and our international organization, the Trotskyist Fraction — the meeting attracted hundreds of people from Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Mulhouse, Rennes, Nantes, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Lyon, and more. Workers, young people, students, women, LGBTQ+ folks, and immigrants arrived in buses full of energy and combativeness. People were excited to gather and share their rage, but also to share their ideas, experiences, and program against the growing international Far Right and war.
The genocide in Palestine was on the minds of all those in attendence and they expressed it with emotion every time the room was overwhelmed by the chant that has spread all around the world: “Free Palestine!” Young people from all over the world wore the keffiyeh and others waved the Kanaky flag, representing the struggle against French imperialism.
Workers from different industries were there: teachers, railroad workers, healthcare workers, airport workers, and more. Folks in attendance, including members of left organizations like La France Insoumise and Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, are part of the struggles of the French working class and the student movement, but on Saturday, they got together to protest and to rally in the name of internationalism, in the name of the international working class that, as folks attending chanted, is one and has no borders.
At a time when the ruling classes are rearming and promising even more violent attacks against the working class and the oppressed, and while the Far Right is gaining strength internationally, MC Daniela Cobet — a leader of Révolution Permanente — began the rally by recalling the importance of defending internationalism in the current moment.
The first speaker, Ariane Anemoyanis, a member of the student group Le Poing Levé that organizes hundreds of students from universities all over France, opened the rally with a strong speech centered on the tenacious and brave student movement that arose internationally last year in the face of the genocide in Gaza. She expressed solidarity with the Jeune Garde organization in France — a student group that is being persecuted by the state — and Mahmoud Khalil in the United States. Ariane told the audience: “Young people owe nothing to a country [France] that forces a quarter of students to live on food banks and keeps 80 percent of us below the poverty line.”
She explained how Le Poing Levé seeks to reconnect with a tradition of anti-militarist and anti-war tradition rooted in the French youth movement since WWI. After her speech, she called to the stage Choli and Natalia, two students from Spain who are being targeted and persecuted for organizing a meeting at the university against the presence of the Far Right.
After thundering applause, Julia Wallace from the United States, an anti-racist activist and member of Left Voice in Los Angeles, spoke about the growing resistance against Trump and the brutal attacks put forward by Trump, the Far Right, and the Republicans against immigrants, workers, trans folks, and the student movement. Julia highlighted the danger of the resistance to Trump being co-opted by the Democratic Party and the importance of building an independent, working-class, revolutionary organization that can, in the tradition of the Black liberation movement, link the struggle against racism and the struggle against capitalism.
Sasha Yaropolskaya — member of Bread and Roses and RP in France, trans activist, and Russian exile — spoke next. She told the audience with emotion: “Russian children are taught to hate Ukrainians. Nationalism and chauvinism make it possible to orchestrate horrific massacres and send soldiers to their deaths on the front lines.“ She also emphasized that the ”liberation of the Ukrainian people from Putin cannot come from the hands of Western imperialists” and highlighted the importance of revolutionary internationalism.
Against the backdrop of capitalist crisis and tendencies toward war, internationalism is key, because the “hundreds of billions of euros spent on militarization that will be paid by massive attacks on workers,” as was emphasized by speaker Inés Heider. Inés ran as a candidate in the German federal elections this year and is an activist with the Revolutionary Internationalist Organization (RIO). She concluded her speech with the observation that those who today justify rearmament in the name of “Europe’s democratic values” are the same people who align themselves with the xenophobic and authoritarian demands of the Far Right: “It is because of them that the AfD is the leading party in the polls.”
After paying tribute to the Palestinians killed over the past year and a half, Elsa Marcel, a lawyer and activist with Révolution Permanente, recalled the responsibility of the European imperialist powers in the genocide in Gaza, particularly through the repression of supporters of Palestine. She then explained the revolutionary strategy and perspective that the Trotskyist Fraction has been putting forward:
The end of colonization will come through a revolution led by the Palestinian people in alliance with the workers and oppressed of the region, in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. This struggle will be against imperialism and its stranglehold on the region, against the government’s complicity with Israel, but it must also reach out to Israeli workers and youth who are willing to break with Zionism.
Elsa then brought up the tradition of Palestinian revolutionaries such as Jabra Nicola in calling for a “free, secular, and socialist Palestine on all its historic territory.” She concluded her speech stating that, as a lawyer who is inspired by the tradition of defending political prisoners that has been embraced by the labor and anti-colonial movements,, she will defend Anasse Kazib, who is being persecuted by the French state for a tweet in solidarity with Palestine. After her speech, hundreds in the room raised signs with Anasse’s face demanding for him to be acquitted . After her speech, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Lebanese communist imprisoned for more than 40 years, addressed the meeting through a letter read aloud on stage in a moment that brought to tears some of the participants.
Myriam Bregman — a leading figure in the Socialist Workers’ Party (PTS) and the Workers’ Left Front – Unity (FIT-U), former national congressperson, and presidential candidate in Argentina — opened her speech expressing her solidarity with Anasse Kazib and she recounted how the labor movement has a tradition of solidarity that “transcended borders.” Bregman explained how the Argentinian Left, workers, retirees, and students are fighting far-right president Javier Milei’s austerity plans mandated by the IMF and made a call to the Trotskyist Fraction and the international Left to launch an international campaign against the austerity imposed on her country and all Latin America by imperialist powers, primarily the United States.
She also explained how a far-right president like Javier Milei got to power thanks to the disaster left behind by the center-left parties in Argentina connected to Peronism; they caused deep dissatisfaction within the working class and presented a lack of alternatives — playing a role similar to that of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the United States. She also said, as someone who has been fighting in both Congress and the streets for years that, There is no electoral alchemy that avoids the struggle, that avoids the revolutionary organization, that avoids fighting in the streets, or talking to hundreds of comrades to tell them that we have to organize and that we have to give a common fight.” She concluded saying that “In the face of the reactionary international and those who are preparing for warmongering, we need an international of the working class and oppressed.”
The last person to speak was Anasse Kazib, who spoke at length about the meaning of internationalism today, evoking the international character of the working class and the way in which the poison of nationalism affects the Left and the labor movement. Regarding the support for protectionism and militarism that the French Socialist Party has been putting forward and the politics of the Left in France, he emphasized:
We cannot defend peace and at the same time assert that the priority is to defend ‘the security of our own borders on five continents,’ as Mélenchon sometimes declares. Because, comrades, that ultimately means siding with French imperialism and the remnants of its colonial empire. (…) Internationalism is either proletarian or it is not. It is solidarity between workers, between oppressed peoples, not a diplomatic orientation. No capitalist state will be an ally for peace at a time when ALL are preparing to defend their interests with arms in hand. Any concession to chauvinism, to the idea that the interests of the French must be defended first, to the idea that the problems of the working class can be solved by attacking foreign countries, is a mortal danger.” He said that “If the bosses don’t like students linking up with workers, workers organizing together in the same factory or in national strikes, imagine what they think of the idea of workers coordinating internationally.
To conclude his speech, the railway worker evoked moving memories of his father and grandfather, before addressing the room with a vibrant call to organize to “defend the perspective of a world without wars, without borders, without exploitation.” Anasse’s speech was particularly powerful in the call he made for everyone to see politics — and revolutionary politics in particular — as something to engage in every day, collectively, as the way to radically change our future and our children’s future.
This internationalist meeting, followed online in 14 countries, is a demonstration of what the revolutionary socialist Left can do with great internationalist determination. Reaching thousands of workers and young people with a clear message of class independence in both the national politics of each of the countries where the TF is present, as well as in the international arena, where we cannot align ourselves with the enemies of our enemies (other capitalist powers). Instead we must fight to organize the powerful international working class and the oppressed, which is the social force that can stop the Far Right, Militarism, and Genocide.