On May 24, socialists and activists from across France and other countries including Germany, the Spanish State, Russia, the United States, Algeria, and more rallied at the Charenton Space in Paris to attend an internationalist rally against imperialist militarism, the international Far Right, and the genocide in Gaza. In addition to the 2,000 people who attended in person, there were another 2,000 individual connections virtually around the world. 

Organized by Révolution Permanente — the sister organization of Left Voice and our international organization, the Trotskyist Fraction — the event was a collective shout of defiance against rearmament and austerity in an epoch of imperialist crisis. But it was also a call to organize internationally from below — for students, workers, and leftists to unite against the capitalist class in our own independent organizations and to join our struggles against genocide, the attacks of the bosses, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and all forms of exploitation and oppression.

The event featured speeches by comrades in the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International who are part of the worker and student movements all over the world, who struggle side-by-side with a strategy and program to use the power of the working class from below to fight to tear capitalist up from its roots and build a socialist society organized according to social need, not profit. Speakers came from France, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Germany, and the Spanish State. The TF-FI is formed of groups in fourteen countries across the world; it organizes the international network of socialist publications that publishes in seven different languages.

Below we republish the intervention of our comrade Anasse Kazib. Anasse is a French railway worker and revolutionary militant facing felony charges for his solidarity with Palestine — a case echoing the repression now being wielded against figures like Mahmoud Khalil and Grant Miner. Kazib’s case has drawn widespread condemnation from the French and international Left. Over 1,000 intellectuals, artists, and activists — including Angela Davis, Ilan Pappé, and Silvia Federici — have signed open letters demanding the charges be dropped. His trial is set for June 18. Kazib is a founding member and spokesperson for Révolution Permanente, having emerged as a prominent voice during the 2018 railway strikes opposing the liberalization of the rail sector. In 2022 he launched a groundbreaking campaign for the French presidency, becoming the first railway worker and the first candidate of North African descent to seek the office in the Fifth Republic. Although his candidacy was blocked by France’s undemocratic sponsorship requirements, his campaign galvanized thousands of workers and youth seeking a revolutionary alternative to both the neoliberal center and the Far Right.

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Before I start, I didn’t want to do anything very original, but I really wanted to salute this exceptional event. I’ve been sitting in the front row, so I can’t really see the room. And the hall is very impressive. Congratulations to all the activists at Révolution Permanente, who have made this revolutionary act possible, who for weeks have been leafleting, calling, et cetera, organizing buses from Toulouse, Bordeaux, et cetera, to make this event possible. I think we’ll be taking stock of the event and discussing it further in the days to come.

But I don’t know of any political organization, especially on the Left, which, outside of any class struggle, outside of any election, holds meetings in two different halls, where there are over 2,000 people, young people, live workers’ delegations, live, being watched in over 15 countries around the world. Even now I’m receiving messages on Instagram from comrades watching this meeting in Mexico, in Argentina, in Chile.

And I’d also like to thank all of you here for your patience and the energy you’re giving the meeting right now. Well, comrades, I have the difficult task of bringing this meeting to a close. I’ve been preparing my speech for a few days now, and I was thinking, damn, I’ve got two challenges. The first is to get this place jumping, even after all these top-quality speeches, after Myriam Bregman — make some noise for Myriam. That’s not easy under normal circumstances, but trying to follow the one who told Javier Milei live at a presidential debate in Argentina, that he wasn’t a lion, as he likes to call himself, but a little kitten of the economic system — that’s a difficult task.

OK, I said I had two challenges, but in reality I have three, because it’s 9:30 and we’re hungry. The second challenge, folks, is that I have to intervene at the same time that Paris Saint-Germain is playing the Coupe de France final. I said at the Stade de France, for those who asked.

A few years ago — why am I talking to you about Paris Saint-Germain, folks? Because a few years ago, on a match night, you could never have brought me to a political event. I was, like many people, in a very passive state, far from politics, far from struggles, far from the will to think about the world, how to fight, how to organize. I thought that all these things didn’t depend on us, and even less on me. We think this passivity is subjective, but I realized that the objective of power is to take us away from all these issues, to tell us to go on worrying about your routine, go and vote, but for the rest of the time, leave politics alone.

Often, even friends have said, “Oh, no, no, no, I’m not political.” As if it were an evil, as if considering the future, that which belongs to future generations, and thinking about how to face it collectively, was something to avoid like the plague. And if I could understand and learn so much about our history, our class, the capitalist system, and the urgent need to quit this passivity, it’s thanks to my comrades at Révolution Permanente, who took the time to convince me.

And I think that’s one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given in my life. Because yes, friends, it’s a gift, a precious gift in a world where everything pushes us to individualism, to suffering alone, to have comrades who invite you to organize alongside them for a different future, free from oppression and exploitation.

So I hope that my intervention will also be a gift to you. For the Anasse that I was 10 years ago, who would never have thought of being a spokesperson for a revolutionary organization speaking at a meeting of over 2,000 people? You know, friends, I’m what they call a child of the ’80s. We’d been sold the end of history, the end of states, neoliberal globalization as the unsurpassable future. We were told that we had the chance to live in the least worst of systems, which would bring peace to the world and guarantee us certain rights. For the workers, in reality, that’s saying social regression, increasing precarity, unemployment, and factory closures.

Since I joined the workforce in 2007, I’ve already seen four pension reforms. Since 2007, I’ve seen my retirement age rise from 60 to 64. Today, globalization is breaking down, and the most monstrous phenomena of the past are coming back with a vengeance: Trump and his trade war, the war in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine, tensions between India and Pakistan, the race to militarize, the hunt for Muslims and foreigners, and the rise of the Far Right. We are only at the beginning of a process that is fraught with danger.

Because when capitalism is in deep crisis, when new powers come to claim their share of the cake, rivalries between states end up being settled by force of arms. World War III, my friends, is not yet upon us. Fascism has not yet triumphed, and it can be stopped. But the situation is accelerating. What is being expressed through all these phenomena is the return of warlike, authoritarian, economic nationalism, whether driven by the center-Left, the Right, or the extreme Right. Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister of the United Kingdom, friend of the Socialist Party, Friedrich Merz, former BlackRock and new German chancellor, and Macron. They all have the same obsessions, the same agenda — to wage war on immigrants and prepare for war altogether.

This policy, my friends, paves the way for the Far Right, whose program it borrows when it isn’t directly recruiting ministers from this current, like Bruno Retailleau, who — keep booing him for three seconds. Retailleau, who’s launching a new Islamophobic offensive, just a few weeks after the racist, Islamophobic murder of Aboubakar Cissé. In 2017, when Macron came to power, there were eight deputies from the National Rally. Eight years later, there are 126 National Rally deputies. That, my friends, is not a roadblock, it’s a highway. It’s not just that they’re reactionaries, it’s that they’re determined to brutally defend the interests of their states and corporations against their rivals, against their populations, and against the minorities they scapegoat.

All these leaders have one thing in common: their unconditional support for a year-and-a-half-long genocide. When a strategic ally like Israel is attacked, when their interests are endangered, there is no longer any international law. Indeed, the only right recognized by capitalist states is the right to crush all those who challenge their domination. And that’s why they also trample on the most elementary democratic rights by hunting down political opponents, banning demonstrations, and seeking to criminalize all those who speak out against the established order. Yesterday, it was trade unionists against pensions, or young people from working-class neighborhoods, for the death of Nahel Merzouk. Today, it’s supporters of Palestine, and tomorrow it’ll be all those who oppose their patriotic rhetoric and their wars.

Because to impose militarization, you have to militarize minds and suppress all dissenting voices. Tomorrow, friends, we’ll be told that someone needs to be locked up because they’re against the fatherland. They need to be locked up because they’re trying to dissuade young people from taking up arms for France. And this propaganda has already begun, on all television stations, with reactionary politicians and French army generals parading on TV to convince us to work until 67 and pay for rearmament.

For example, Alain Minc, Macron’s shadowy friend and adviser, has several ideas. Let’s take a poll to see if you like Minc’s ideas. OK? You haven’t heard the ideas yet. So, Minc has a first idea. It’s to take money directly from your savings accounts and pay you back later. Are any of you up for it? Well, you may not like the idea, but Alain’s got resources. Alain’s second idea is to double the income tax and likewise to try to pay you back later. So, basically, if you pay 1,500 euros in income tax in 2025, you’ll pay 3,000, and maybe he’ll pay you back. Anyone for it? Well, you’re obviously not very patriotic in this room.

So, friends, they have other techniques. To convince people like you, they take care to gift-wrap their speeches in a different pattern. Defense of peace, defense of peace. If we buy tens of billions of fighter jets, tanks, long-range missiles, drones, guns, it’s for peace. We’ll work longer for peace, we’ll take your savings for peace. And tomorrow, we’ll wage war for peace. Today, many people think it’s possible to get away with it, to dodge it. A lot of people say, “I’m not going to fight their war anyway.” But I don’t think anyone in this room wants to go and fight.

Today, the rejection of war is even an obstacle for the imperialist powers who would like to move ahead more quickly with their plans. A historian once said that war is never self-evident, even for the most powerful states. You have to convince, mobilize, give meaning to violence. But we must not underestimate the extent to which events and policy pressures can accelerate. Folks, this is how states rush us to war.

In this respect, the example of the First World War is more than illuminating. Listen carefully to this anecdote, which is a true historical anecdote. On July 23, 1914, Le Petit Journal, a major daily newspaper of the day, ran the headline “La paix est encore possible” [Peace is still possible]. Europe holds its breath but refuses war. Five days later, friends, the First World War began. Five days before, peace is still possible, and Europe refuses war. On July 29 and 30, 1914, the Bureau of the Second International met in Brussels to reaffirm its opposition to war. And again, five days later, the German Social Democratic Party, the main party of the Second International, voted for war credits. If we are not profoundly internationalist today, we will be nationalist tomorrow, willingly or unwillingly. That’s the factual and darker side.

But history teaches us something else: every time capitalists have led us into war, they’ve also paved the way for revolutionary uprisings. They don’t teach us that in school. And the teachers in this room won’t contradict me, but it was these processes that stopped the First World War: the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution. And I would like to pay tribute to the German mutineers of Kiel, who, on November 3, 1918, refused their General Staff’s suicide offensive against British ships, triggering the German Revolution and organizing themselves in workers’ councils.

And that, my friends, is why we’re not pessimists, because we’re convinced of one thing: that it is possible to prepare to organize and change the trajectory of things. That the working class and youth have that power. The working class is exploited by the same international capitalist groups. I’m a railway worker in the Bourget marshaling yard. Every day, we pass trains carrying goods produced by proletarians from the four corners of the world. They and we make the world go round. And we must fight together. It seems to us borderline normal to see international leaders collaborating. But we never ask. We never do. How can we fight effectively against Le Pen without being in touch with the activists who are organizing against the Far Right around the world, and who have so much to teach us about how to hope to confront war, put an end to genocide, put an end to barbarism? If we only care about our own country?

The activists you have heard tonight are not just comrades who have come to talk about the situation in their own countries. As you can see, they are militants of our internationalist organization, the Trotskyist Fraction. Which discusses, organizes, and coordinates daily to strike together, with a common strategy. You’ve seen the German comrades here, as well as those from Argentina and the United States, but we are also present in Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, Uruguay, Spain, Chile, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru.

We’re not just looking to build a party in France that’s concerned solely with national issues. We want to build an organization that is concerned with the fate of all humanity, that seeks to build an alternative on an international scale to the barbarism of the capitalist system. And it’s important to stress this, because this, my friends, is not the norm. Nationalism also infects the Left and the workers’ movement. And if we don’t denounce it today, it will carry even more weight tomorrow.

Because yes, imperialism needs a right wing, but it also needs a left wing to move forward. I’m going to read you some recent quotes from the French Left, so that you can get to the bottom of the problem. Investing in defense means investing in the defense of our ideals. I’m not going to be like, “Find out who it is,” et cetera, but I’ll tell you what I think. It sounds like Macron, but it’s the Socialist Party saying it. Well, they’re almost first cousins. “The European Union must assert itself as a military force.” But who said that? François Fillon? Bruno Retailleau? No, folks, it’s Europe Ecologie les Verts. It is crazy. It’s stuff you don’t hear. These sectors, which yesterday supported Israel’s right to defend itself, now want to show that they will champion France’s “right to defend” itself too. And their role is to convince you of this.

But it doesn’t stop there. Even France Insoumise, with whom we have often shared the denunciation of genocide in Palestine, explains through the voice of one of its deputies, a member of the Defense Committee: “We’re not against France and Europe rearming.” The problem is, where will it go? Excuse me, where are these 40 billion euros going to go? To the United States. Basically, militarism is fine, but only if you buy Rafales and not F35s. And this is the kind of rhetoric that the Left is spreading all over the world.

In Germany, as Inès’s Die Linke, the new hope of the European Left, voted for war credits a few weeks after the elections. This creates hope for the Germans. Nationalism.

It affects labor organizations too. In the United States, after the historic strikes of combative unionists, UAW, they chose to support the tariffs of Trump, tariffs that are largely used by the world’s bosses to announce layoff plans. A few months ago, the head of this union explained that Trump was a strikebreaker. Now he supports him and the government’s economic program. The same government that expels Palestinian students and sends foreigners to El Salvador’s prisons. In its trade war, hoping to pick up a few crumbs, as Julia explained earlier.

In France, you may have missed it, but the leadership of CGT, the comrades, there are comrades from CGT here, comrades from CGT. Because unfortunately, that’s what union bureaucracy is all about: valuable militant activists on the ground, working day in, day out to improve their working conditions and pay. But union organizations are also people at the top who use this position, who use the hours and hours that Hassan, Christian, the Neo comrades and the RATP comrades put in on the ground, to use this balance of power to try and position themselves as protectors of France’s interests.

And so, the management of CGT announced its first victory since the defeat of the pensions. What’s it all about? What is it? Well, it’s about setting up a crisis unit to discuss how to fight back against the Trump trade war, and to propose their own protectionist measures. And that’s it. So that’s the victory claimed by Sophie Binet.

And you see the problem, we’ve got trade unionists on both sides, Trump, on the French side, who, instead of uniting, instead of calling for workers’ unity, line up behind their own bourgeoisie to confront each other. And I say it here as a spokesman for Révolution Permanente, but also as a trade unionist with SUD-Rail for 10 years, these speeches only work against our social group. It serves to divert workers’ anger instead of putting them in fighting order to combat austerity plans and their own bourgeoisie. We can never accept an alliance with the bosses against the workers of the world. No capitalist state, comrade, will be an ally for peace at a time when everyone is preparing to defend their interests, weapons in hand. Any concession to chauvinism, to the idea that we should defend the interests of the French first, to the idea that the problems of the working class can be solved by attacking foreign countries, is a mortal danger. Just as they seek to divide us, between hired and temporary workers, subcontractors and principals, French and immigrant workers, the bosses would like us to fight only for the interests of French workers, that is, in reality, for their own interests, in the face of their competitors.

Of course, we fight for the workers of this country. We are part of every national battle in this country, and are always on the front line. We are outraged by the social plans, the families thrown into precariousness. Today, me and my comrades at Bourget are on strike against job cuts in our sector. We refuse to see our jobs eliminated, add to the workload of those who remain, and above all, leave a future of cemeteries and jobs to future generations.

But I’m just as concerned for the Arcelor worker in Dunkirk, or Renault at Cléon, or the worker in Martinique who has to cope with soaring prices and repression by the French state. I’m just as concerned for the Senegalese, English, Ukrainian, or American worker. I feel 1,000 times closer to them, despite the miles, despite the borders, despite our languages, than with good French. Vincent Bolloré, who inherited the family business, passes it on to his children and helps exploit us all in France and around the world.

That’s why, comrades, we feel so strongly about the phrase defended by revolutionaries during the First World War: “The main enemy is in our own country.” And I say it too, because I know that there are some Insoumise comrades in the room, and it’s a pleasure to count you among us at this meeting too. And in recent years, we’ve often fought common battles, and we’ll continue to do so whenever necessary.

But we don’t think that justifies sweeping our disagreements under the carpet. In fact, I think it’s when the danger is greatest that we need to be able to speak frankly to each other. Because our mistakes can be very costly. We can’t defend peace, friends, because that, comrades, is to side with French imperialism and the remnants of its colonial empire. Leftists are either everything or nothing.

So, friends, I was saying, I was talking about the Sri Lankans, and you really think about how wonderful and resourceful the working class is. When the working class rises up in a country, it systematically spreads. Remember the Arab Spring, or Arab Springs, and how they spread a wave of revolt from Tunisia to Egypt, via Turkey, Spain and then France. It’s no coincidence, comrades, because our class is international. It lives under the yoke of an international capitalist system, and its crisis has international repercussions.

Imagine us consciously coordinating, that we organize ourselves between workers of all countries that my comrade Adrien Cornet, a refiner at Grandpuits, discusses not only with the Ugandan workers impacted by Total’s projects, but also with the refiners of Petrobras in Brazil. Imagine if a revolutionary organization on an international scale could count several dozen workers, ports and docks and airports in Rotterdam, Marseille, Athens, or New York. How could we immediately fight, in a coordinated way, against sending weapons to Israel?

Myriam talked about it, but as you know, recently, with the comrades of the Trotskyist Fraction, we led a solidarity campaign on the occasion of my trial and that of another comrade from Révolution Permanente, on June 18. On May 1, in Buenos Aires, more than 2,500 of them held up the placards you took out today to show their internationalist solidarity. But it was also the case in Brazil, Germany, Italy, the United States. My comrades moved heaven and earth to get support and articles in the press. The signatures of Nobel Prize winners and international intellectuals.

We want to make friends with this trial. The trial of the criminalization of support for the Palestinian people in France, but also internationally. To show that if there are so many of us being prosecuted in Paris, Berlin, or New York, it’s because Netanyahu has neither snipers nor one-ton bombs to silence all of us. So his friends are using the police and the justice system to do just that, and we won’t let them.

But that’s just one small example of what we could do. We could fight the Far Right wherever it is, wherever it’s advancing, proposing an alternative to the millions of workers who today are influenced by the Far Right after the betrayals of the Left. We could become the most formidable enemy of reactionary internationalism, pushing it back. We could fight their preparations for war in our workplaces and schools, and become the main obstacle to the plans of the imperialists and militarists in France, Germany, and the UK. We could fight the IMF. The debt it imposes on semi-colonial countries. Coordinate the mobilizations we’ve seen in recent years in Bangladesh, Kenya, Argentina, and, since then, France. Refuse to place ourselves in the camp of Christine Lagarde against that of oppressed peoples.

Just imagine, my friends, if we were coordinated on a European scale against the strategies to smash our social gains rather than endure the famous speeches that explain that it’s a European Union directive and that feed the absurd idea that the European Union would be a monster above the states, when in reality it’s a tool for coordinating the continent’s main bourgeoisies, led by France and Germany. If the bosses don’t like students joining forces with the workers, that workers organize together in the same factory or in national strikes, imagine what they think of workers coordinating internationally.

Of course, friends, it’s a fight against the current. But history teaches us that those who went against the grain yesterday are the ones who will lead the way tomorrow. As you can see, friends, the time for passivity is over. If I stand before you, friends, it’s also for my children. We’re all concerned about the future of our kids, our little sisters, our nephews or nieces. We say to ourselves: What a mess we live in, and above all, what kind of world are we leaving them tomorrow? It’s nice to buy kids PlayStations for their birthdays, to put money aside for them, to make so many sacrifices after the fatigue of work to drop them off at dance or soccer. But what will they do with all these gifts tomorrow, if they live in a world of wars and a graveyard of jobs? If they live in a world that is three degrees hotter, the world of the climate crisis and the destruction of living beings toward which capitalism is leading us. What will we really have left to future generations?

My grandfather went to the Eastern Front during World War II, and he came back maimed because of their slaughter. My father left his family in Morocco in the hope of offering us a better future. He spent 40 years working three shifts. Our parents are heroes. They fought French imperialism, colonization, Nazism, and the bosses of this country who wanted to exploit them more than anyone else. They didn’t buy us PlayStations, but they sacrificed everything so that we could have a future that was less terrible than theirs.

And that’s why I’ve decided to fight, to take action like on June 18, for a different future, free of all these oppressions. And if I can do it, with a job and a family, I think all of us here can do it. It’s not a question of time, it’s not a question of availability, it’s a question of conviction, of being convinced, of giving your time to change things. And don’t worry, I’ll still have time to watch Paris Saint-Germain’s second half afterward.

So I want you to understand that it’s a revolutionary act to be here today, to see the immensity of the problems before us, and to understand that we’re all here, all of us, as a solution to those problems. I’m no better than you, nor are the comrades who preceded me. But if we can think and analyze the world today with a class compass, it’s because we’re organized and because we’re a revolutionary collective on an international scale, drawing on each other’s experience to prepare for the great challenges of tomorrow.

But we can move forward only if there are more and more of us, because revolutionary organizations, friends, even with a lot of will, even with the right strategy, can do nothing without numbers. Even if our enemies have enormous weaknesses like the Macrons and the Trumps of the world, and even if people are fed up with this system, they unfortunately continue to be an organized force against us, with their police, their judges, their political organizations, their billionaires, and their bourgeois media. Without opposing them with a larger, even more organized, structured force, which includes thousands of young people and workers around the world, they will continue to win.

So, my dear comrades, I address myself to all of you, for these last concluding sentences. Dear comrades, please, please, don’t leave this room as if you were leaving a concert hall, saying to yourself, “Aaah, the Révolution Permanente was really nice!” I hope you leave this room, my friends, leave this room with the deep conviction that you’re organizing alongside us, that you’re not just supporters of Révolution Permanente and the Trotskyist Faction but full-fledged militants.

I’ve got great news for you. At the end of the year, we’re going to organize a big Trotskyist Fraction conference in Brazil, with delegations from all over the world, to discuss the international situation and our experiences, to think through our tasks in the situation. If, with 500 militants, friends, we’ve managed such a meeting of over 2,000 people, imagine what we’d be capable of if everyone here, if everyone here, were to become militants of Révolution Permanente tomorrow. If, at this international conference in Brazil, we were to say that Révolution Permanente has doubled in size and has even more young people and workers in its ranks, ready to fight to change the destiny of humanity, I think we’d really start to freak out the bourgeoisie.

So, friends, I’ll just say a few words. Let’s get organized in every country, let’s get ready, let’s not be afraid to defend the perspective of a world without war, without borders, without exploitation, to intervene in every struggle with a compass, a strategy, the experience of our class on an international scale not just to defend ourselves, not just to defend ourselves, not just to fight, but to win.