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 online attendees from 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, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, the bosses’ attacks, and all forms of exploitation and oppression.
The event featured speeches by comrades in the Trotskyist Fraction 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 tear capitalism 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 consists of groups in 14 countries across the world; it organizes an international network of socialist periodicals that publish in seven different languages.
Below we republish the speech by our comrade Sasha Yaropolskaya. Sasha is a trans activist, writer, and militant with Du Pain et des Roses and Révolution Permanente in France. Originally from Russia, she has become a prominent voice on the French revolutionary Left, advocating a socialist feminism that is internationalist, anti-imperialist, and rooted in class struggle. As a leading member of Du Pain et des Roses — the French section of the international socialist feminist network founded by Andrea D’Atri — Sasha works to build a movement that connects the fight against gender oppression with the broader struggle against capitalism. She has been on the frontlines of resisting the Far Right’s attacks on trans people, and she has consistently linked these attacks to the racism, sexism, and class exploitation that sustain them.
Read More Here: “Over 2,000 Socialists From France and Other Countries Rallied in Paris Against Militarism, War, and Genocide”
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Good evening, everyone. I’m glad to be here, but I’m sorry, I’m going to start my speech with some bad news. This is probably my last speech at a Révolution Permanente meeting. Yes, all good things must come to an end, and I’m sure you’re wondering why. But the reason is very simple.
Right now, you’re turning on the TV, and no matter what, you’re being prepared for war with Russia. All you see is Putin, planes, Rafale, guns, Caesar, Putin. And just imagine for a second. Let’s do a thought experiment. You’re a far-left organization already called Révolution Permanente. You’re already targeted by repression, and on top of that, you have the audacity to have a Russian spokesperson. I mean, it’s a bit much. We’ve got to put a stop to this.
Last year — it’s a completely true story — the Macronist press, the newspaper Le Franc Tireur, accused me of being a Russian agent. At that moment, I said to myself, “Wow, if it’s true, then the FSB is the most woke, the most progressive secret service in the world.” I mean, Putin incarcerates queer people. In three years, since the start of the war in Ukraine, he’s abolished all trans and LGBTQ+ rights. But they decided to make an exception for me. They said, “OK, we’ll send her to France to make anti-war propaganda. Ideological destabilization, that’s what hybrid war is all about.” In fact, it’s the Kremlin’s best-kept secret. The Americans have a new generation of drones. And we have trans secret agents.
Look, beyond the jokes, we’re touching on a very serious issue. Does belonging to a nation mean supporting our government’s policies? I immigrated to France seven years ago, and there are two reasons why I left Russia. First, the murders of LGBTQ+ people. Second, and more importantly, compulsory military service. This was before the start of the war in Ukraine, but militarization was already everywhere. Putin had just annexed Crimea, and the nation rallied around him.
Since I’ve been away, things have developed at a breakneck speed. Children are now being taught to hold automatic rifles as early as middle school. They’re taught patriotism, love of the blue, white, and red flag, and hatred of Lenin, because it was Lenin who gave Ukraine self-determination. Above all, they teach children to hate Ukrainians. They are taught to hate them today so they can kill them tomorrow in senseless battles, village by village, kilometer by kilometer, for territories completely devastated in eastern Ukraine.
Nationalism and chauvinism, as they are nurtured from childhood, creating a mass of soldiers — hundreds of thousands — whom you can send to willingly die in trench butchery. Lenin said at the time that Russia was a prison for the people, and he was right. Just look at who is sent to the front line. Yes, there are Russians, but there are also, and above all, Tatars, Buryats, and Bashkirs. As a Russian, I’m fighting the chauvinism I grew up with, which allowed Russia to forcibly take the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Urals. Fighting this chauvinism is my political duty.
Today, the government is proposing a terrible deal for Russian workers. Listen up: military contracts with huge salaries, millions of rubles, in exchange for Ukrainian blood. Obviously, it’s a trap. Most of those who sign will die almost immediately, and it’s their families who receive what’s known as “coffin money.” Hundreds of thousands of families for whom the only hope of escaping misery is “coffin money” — for their brothers, for their husbands, for their fathers killed at the front. Putin redistributes crumbs in exchange for Ukrainian blood, but only after stealing and plundering all of Russia’s natural resources — after redistributing gas, oil, minerals, industry, transport, et cetera, among his oligarch friends.
So when I say that Russian workers won’t be free until Ukrainian workers are free, it’s not just a moral decoration, it’s not just a Marxist maxim. No, it’s an objective truth, because Russian expansionism is a mirage that prevents workers from seeing that their real enemy isn’t in Odessa, isn’t in Kyiv, and isn’t on the other side of the trench. No, it’s in Moscow, and it’s giving orders from the Kremlin.
But once we’ve said that, we need to talk about liberating the Ukrainian people. Can it come from the hands of Western imperialists? The same imperialists — France, the UK, and Germany — who tell us they are defending Ukraine, who tell us to stand for democracy and for human rights, they tell us they oppose the massacre of children, the bombing of hospitals and schools in Mariupol and Kharkiv. But they don’t support us when it comes to Rafah, Khan Yunis, or the Gaza Strip. They are destroying the Palestinians and using the Ukrainians. Behind their humanist rhetoric, they want to plunder Ukraine and take its rare earth minerals.
I’m not just talking about Trump. No, it’s also Sébastien Lecornu, the French defense minister, who says it straight: “Our arms manufacturers need resources, and it’s Ukraine that can provide them.” Tearing Russian workers away from their government’s chauvinism is just as urgent as understanding that Ukrainian self-determination will not be achieved through NATO’s toxic support.
Because beyond the question of resources, it is Western imperialism that has pushed the Ukrainian government to lower the age of military conscription several times over, in order to continue the war. For me, I’d like you to take a second — just a second — and look at the people sitting next to you, your neighbors who are sitting or standing in your row. Now imagine that tomorrow — no, not even tomorrow — that today, when we leave this meeting, they are forcibly loaded onto a bus, taken to the front lines, their heads shaved, put in military uniforms, given a rifle, and sent into the trenches to die immediately from a mine or a drone. That’s the reality of the war in Ukraine behind the humanist rhetoric. This is the reality of what’s happening on the Ukrainian front.
I grew up in the mountains of the Caucasus, and every day, when I woke up and walked to school, I saw the snow-covered coastline of Elbrus. Myriam Bregman spent her childhood in a small village in the Buenos Aires region. Inès, in an industrial region in Rhône. Anasse, in the suburbs of Sarcelles. Julia, in Los Angeles. Elsa and Ariane, in France. Daniela, in Brazil. We don’t come from the same country, and until a few years ago, we didn’t even speak the same language. But our paths have been linked by politics. Ever since I immigrated, I’ve been shaped politically by your class struggle, by the Yellow Vests, by the Committee for Adama, by militant trans activists who came to France from Latin America, by sans-papiers [undocumented migrants] who crossed the Mediterranean from Africa, and by railway workers and refiners who showed me the strength of the working class in stopping production and transport with the strike — probably the most beautiful word I’ve learned since I arrived here.
This is where I understood what internationalism really means: by taking part in your struggles, which have become my own. It’s by understanding that your victories are our victories and that your defeats will always have consequences for us too. And it’s here, too, that I’ve understood, after much soul searching, what the only progressive way out of the war in Ukraine would be. I’m not talking about the peace that will eventually be negotiated by Trump and Putin, which will be an imperialist peace — a peace with annexations, a peace of plunder, a peace that will establish the total vassalization of Ukraine.
No, the only way to end this conflict is a joint mobilization of Russian workers against Putin and of Ukrainian workers against Zelenskyy and NATO. That’s the only way to achieve real self-determination for Ukraine and for all the peoples of the region. The only possible response to the war in Ukraine is an internationalist response.
When the war in Ukraine began, I, as a Russian, felt a terrible helplessness, a terrifying sense of emptiness. There are moments when the fate of humanity is at stake, and you, as an individual, feel crushed by history. It’s this emptiness that women and LGBTQ+ people felt when faced with the revocation of abortion rights in the United States. It’s what trans people around the world are feeling in the face of the rise of the Far Right. It’s what tens of millions of people are feeling in the face of genocide in Palestine.
But I’ve found an antidote to this impotence. We face the capitalist class on an international scale, with its states, its police, and its armies. Individual courage is no match for this machine. A local collective is just as powerless. A national organization that stays within its borders, even after initial successes, will ultimately be crushed.
But imagine a revolutionary international that enters dozens of countries simultaneously with the same strategy, the same program, the same objectives, learning from every advance and every setback. An organization welded together and shaped by its experience of class struggle, an organization of tens of thousands that marches forward with the precision and perfection of the most perfect machine that has ever existed.
Now we’re starting to talk about something that has the capacity not only to resist attacks but also to go on the offensive, which is what I choose instead of impotence. It’s to wake up every day and fight, fight, fight with determination and relentlessness, as if my life depended on it. Because it does. As if all our lives depended on it. Because they do.
A year ago, with Du Pain et des Roses [Bread & Roses], we initiated and organized in two weeks the biggest mobilization for trans rights in the history of this country. But one day of mobilization isn’t enough. It is only the first step. The Far Right wants to crush us on an international scale. I see it as a challenge, and that’s why we’re building not only the Trotskyist Fraction of the Fourth International but also the largest international feminist revolutionary organization in the world: Pan y Rosas, Du Pain et des Roses, Bread and Roses.
We are in 14 countries and three continents to fight Trump, Milei, Macron, Merz, and all those reactionary scum. Right now, speaking of reactionaries in the United States, Trump is making speeches to attack Marxists and Communists. In response, many politicians in the United States are saying, “No, no, no, don’t worry, we’re not communists, we’re just leftists.” And in France? In France, there are also those who think we should stop talking about the working class, that we should instead talk about the people, that we should stop talking about the general strike and instead talk about a citizen revolution through the ballot box.
Well, that’s the difference. We at Révolution Permanente take responsibility. Yes, we are the Far Right’s worst nightmare. Yes, we’re Marxists. Yes, we’re Trotskyists. Yes, we’re communists and revolutionaries. We’re part of the proud tradition of those who led the Paris Commune uprising, the workers and peasants who overthrew tsarism and capitalism in Russia, those who fought World War I, those who took to the barricades in May 1968, and those who fought the dictatorships of Franco, Salazar, and Pinochet.
For us, revolution isn’t just a theory, it’s not an abstract concept, it’s not something that belongs on the pages of history. No, revolution is a vital necessity today to change the course of history. It’s a goal, but it’s also a guide to action, to save humanity from catastrophe. There’s a race against time going on right now. Will we succeed in building an organization, an international, that will be up to the challenge when the time comes?
It’s a question we ask ourselves every day among activists at Révolution Permanente. And I’d like everyone in this room to ask themselves the same question. Because what’s at stake now — not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but right now — is the future of your children, the future of your closest loved ones, those you think of when you close your eyes.
So, if you want to put an end to the barbarity of capitalism, to genocides, to wars, to the extreme Right, let me tell you one thing: Join Révolution Permanente and the Trotskyist Fraction. Join Du Pain et des Roses. Join Le Poing Levé on your college campus. Join Révolution Permanente in health, in transport, and in education. Join us!
Fight alongside us and be sure of one thing: we will never give up. We will never surrender. We are going to fight until the end, until victory! I will finish my speech by paraphrasing Fred Hampton, a Black revolutionary killed by the FBI before he was only 21 years old. Hampton wasn’t a Trotskyist, but he was one of the most courageous revolutionaries of the last century, and he had no illusions about what the state is.
So I wanted to send a message to all those who repress us, to all those who persecute us, to all those who wage war against us: You can dissolve anti-fascist organizations, but you’ll never dissolve the fight against fascism. You can dissolve the organizations of the Palestinian cause, but you will never stop the movement of solidarity with Palestine. And you can try to stop revolutionaries, but you’ll never succeed in stopping the revolution.