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 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 Ariane Anemoyanis, who is a member of the student group Le Poing Levé that organizes hundreds of students from universities all over France.

Read More Here: “Over 2,000 Socialists From France and Other Countries Rallied in Paris Against Militarism, War, and Genocide”

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[crowd chants “guerre a la guerre,” (war on war)]

Did you know that while you’re chanting “war on war,” there are people racking their brains trying to figure out how to send us to the army? There’s a German general who said recently that the question is whether we have people who are ready to go to war, ready to go to the ends of the earth to defend their convictions and our value system. We need a certain percentage of very strong, resistant people, who are prepared to kill, and, if necessary, to die. We need to find them. He said these words. 

It shows the ambition of the ruling classes for our generation. But me, when I see the students who have travelled hours to get here from Le Mirail, Rennes 2, Bordeaux, Aix-Marseille, Strasbourg, Montpellier — not to mention our comrades who have come from further afield, from Madrid, Berlin, and Zaragoza — I tell myself that the strong, resistant youth they are looking for does exist, and is right in front of me. These forces want to use their strength — our strength — to achieve the exact opposite of what the German general wants, as well as Macron, Trump, and Meloni. And that, for the bourgeoisie, is a huge problem. 

Because throughout Europe, the war in Ukraine is being used as a pretext to keep young people in line. Seventy years after World War II, Germany is coordinating with France, Poland, and Belgium to enlist hundreds of thousands of young people in the name of continental security. And in France, the entire political class is in favor of it: The Far Right proposes that we take courses on defense starting from the age of eleven. Macron would like the reserve army to become the new student job, while the Socialist Party and the Greens totally support the arms race. 

And the problem is that even those who defend peace and say they’re opposed to the war economy, like La France Insoumise (LFI), are also in favor of enlisting young people in the name of the Republic. For Mélenchon, the problem with the SNU is that it doesn’t go far enough, that it’s a summer camp. Their program is a compulsory nine-month conscription to teach us how to handle weapons, raise the flag, sing the “Marseillaise,” and serve in the police force. They don’t talk about the realities of military service; they mobilize the imagination of the French Revolution rather than that of the trenches of 1914-18. 

But it all comes down to the same thing. Even LFI says young people need to be prepared to serve France. Mélenchon calls it “the tax of time in the service of the fatherland.” So we say it clearly, we owe nothing to a homeland that forces one in four students to live on food banks, to a homeland that keeps 80 percent of us below the poverty line, to a homeland that deports Kanak independence fighters, that represses in Martinique, and attacks the right to land in Mayotte, that mutilates the Yellow Vests. We owe nothing to a homeland that mutilates Yellow Vests, that harasses in the neighborhoods and kills Nahelbut and Zyed, Bouna and Adama. These are young people who were killed by the French state. 

So, in the face of this, we’re taking on the role of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist youth. We’ve chosen our side, and we’re not the first to make that choice. In 1913, when the regime wanted to extend the length of military service to three years to swell the ranks of the army, the revolutionary socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist youths organized mass demonstrations under the slogan, “shoot down the army and launch mutinies in the barracks.” The conscripts sang the Internationale in front of the officers. They circulated petitions against reform, and attended anti-war rallies in military dress. They even called for desertion. In all, by August 1914, hundreds of thousands of young people were mobilized to oppose the coming slaughter. 

And here we are, a century later, at Le Poing Levé, working to rebuild this tradition of internationalism. That’s why we’ve joined the War on War Coalition, along with dozens of other organizations and collectives, to build an immediate bloc against militarism and imperialism. That’s a very important and ambitious task. 

But we’re not starting from scratch. Tens of thousands of students mobilized on campuses around the world, all over the world, against the genocide in Gaza and against the complicity of imperialism. With the call of the Columbia students, the student movement reemerged as a central player on the international stage. And each time, the response was brutal. 

Europe is greatly exaggerating its opposition to Trump in the name of democracy and freedom. But in reality, between administrative prosecutions, trials, deportations, and laws criminalizing any criticism of Israel, we are witnessing a coordinated policy of repression by all Western regimes. But me, I’m honored to be part of a generation of high school and university students who are so determined to put an end to colonial barbarism that they’re ready to face up to state violence, smiling proudly at the cameras when they’re arrested and making a V for victory sign on the way to the police station. 

I’m thinking in particular of Mahmoud Khalil, imprisoned in the jails of Trump, and the students expelled from Germany. I’m thinking in particular of Liu Lijun, who was deported to China from the United States. But I’m also thinking of the high school students in Strasbourg, who were raided last week, the ten students at Sciences Po, who were expelled from their school. I’m thinking of Luiggi, a fellow student who received a six-month suspended sentence and 140 hours of community service for occupying a lecture hall at the Sorbonne. 

By imprisoning Mahmoud, deporting Liu, and sentencing Luiggi, they want to terrorize the student movement. They want to prevent Palestine from becoming the Vietnam of the 21st century, and colleges from once again becoming a hotbed of protest against imperialism. Because their project for the university is clear: in France, when they cut budgets, it’s not just to close unprofitable courses for the bosses, it’s not just to exclude the working classes from college, but it’s also to put our knowledge at the service of the army and imperialism. 

At Paris 1, for example, at the same time that we were suffering €13 million in budget cuts, the State offered the university €500,000 to open a Cybersecurity course, in partnership with Thalès, a group that has the blood of Palestinians on its hands. So, we’re proud to say that we’re going to keep fighting to get Thalès, Safran, and Dassault out of our courses because we’re convinced that we’ll never build an open, emancipated university until we rid it of the bosses who collect public subsidies by forcing us to perfect the weapons that kill over there and maim here. What we want is a university open to the children of workers and foreigners, serving the needs of the majority. 

But that, in real terms, is a fight for a different society. And we want to fight for it alongside workers. In 2023, at a pivotal moment in the movement against pension reform, we walked off the Sorbonne, Paris 8, and Paris 3 campuses to take buses to Normandy, to prevent the police from requisitioning the refinery workers who were on the verge of paralyzing the country’s main airports. I’ve been a militant since 2018. But it was then, when I saw the panic of a government faced with 150 striking refiners, that I fully realized the strength of the working class, its ability not only to paralyze the economy, but also, potentially, to transform it according to the needs of the majority. 

But to get there we’ll have a major obstacle in our way, a very, very important adversary. We’ll also have to contend with the extreme Right. In the universities, there are fascist groupings like the Cocarde, who carry out punitive operations, even sending left-wing students to hospital. They’re violent and dangerous, but also pathetic and ridiculous. Their method is to provoke, get out of the way, and victimize themselves in the Bolloré media to beg Retailleau to dissolve us. But the worst thing is, sometimes they succeed. 

So I’d like to express our solidarity, in the name of RP and the Le Poing Levé, with the Jeune Garde (Young Guard) who are being attacked today by the regime on the orders of National Rally, for the simple reason that they are waging an anti-fascist struggle. The situation is clear. The Far Right leads the way, harmlessly organized against our side, hand-in-hand with the government. And we’re going to have to stand together. 

That’s what we tried to do in Bordeaux and Paris 1. We set up action committees with organized and unorganized students who shared a common goal: Not to give an inch to the Far Right. And it was this method that enabled us to kick them off our campuses, to unite dozens of organizations in anti-fascist rallies. We showed that it’s not about electoral alliances with the Socialist Party or through legal condemnations of Marine Le Pen that we’ll really make them back down but only when we’re on the offensive, from below and on the ground. 

But we must, we must go much further. We need to draw inspiration from the 1960s, when thousands of students and high-schoolers organized to patrol the capital and put an end to fascist attacks against Algerian independence activists. And we need to know, it’s important to know that it was in the warmth of this anti-fascist university front that the spark of May 1968 was born in the fight against the extreme Right, in the indignation at torture in Algeria, and in the alliance with the world of labor. 

But what of it? Many of us are worried about the rise of reactionary ideas, feeling disoriented in the face of militarism, helpless in the face of the barbarity of capitalism. This legacy is a precious reminder that it is precisely in such situations that the possibilities for our side are greatest. 

But if we are to seize them to the fullest, we need to get organized. This year, over 11,000 students voted for the anti-capitalist and revolutionary lists of Le Poing Levé. And I don’t know if you realize it, but it’s been decades since something like this has happened. We’ve also strengthened our foothold in several of the country’s central universities, and opened chapters in Brittany, Marseille, Bordeaux, Sciences Po, in the Eastern France region, in Lyon. We opened chapters in Brittany, Marseille, Bordeaux, Sciences Po, and in the Eastern France region, in Lyon. But that’s just the beginning. Our aim is to build revolutionary strongholds throughout the country. 

But what we’re proposing isn’t just to fight here in France. It is to join the struggles of young people in 13 other countries around the world. Because with Le Poing Levé, we’re proud to be part of the same international organization as the comrades who built the college occupations movement in Argentina against Milei, the comrades who are organizing against the militarist consensus in Germany, and the comrades who are being prosecuted by the Spanish state for organizing a rally against the arrival of the far right on their campus in Madrid. 

And it’s by building on this living, breathing Internationalism that we’ll be able, here in France, to build Le Poing Levé as a major revolutionary youth organization. But for that, we need you. So let’s get started. I invite you to join us, so that we can do as the young people before us have done. Because they understood that revolution is necessary, possible and desirable, but also that in a world of misery and suffering, fighting for everyone to be free is ultimately the beginning of freedom.