The Growing Radicalization of Students and Youth Globally

The past decade has witnessed a sharp increase in political activity and radicalization among students and young workers across the globe. This phenomenon is not episodic; it is a reflection of the deep crisis of global capitalism. Young people have grown up amid endless wars, environmental destruction, economic precocity, and social inequality. The promises of education, employment, and social mobility have collapsed. Instead, they face a world where the wealth of the few expands as millions live in uncertainty and poverty.

From the student strikes in Chile and Colombia demanding free education, to the mass uprisings in France, the United States, and the Middle East, youth are refusing to remain passive in the face of capitalist decay. These movements often begin around democratic or social demands against tuition hikes, corruption, or police violence but quickly expose the limits of reform within the capitalist framework. What we are witnessing is a new generation discovering, through struggle, that the system itself must be overturned.

For us, the radicalization of youth is a vital component of revolutionary transformation. Students bring energy, creativity, and moral courage, but their movements need political direction and organizational grounding within the working class. The Permanent Revolutionary Congress must not stand as a mere observer of these developments. It must act as an organizer, educator, and unifier of these emerging forces.

Tasks for the Organization

Build a Revolutionary Student Network: Establish cells and committees in schools, colleges, and universities to discuss socialist ideas, organize campaigns, and link students’ demands to workers’ struggles.

Marxist Political Education: Conduct regular study circles on Trotskyism, permanent revolution, and class struggle, using ISL and PRC materials to build ideological clarity.

International Solidarity Campaigns: Coordinate solidarity actions with student and youth movements globally, particularly in Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe, under the banner of international socialism.

Fight Against Repression: Create defense committees for students and activists facing arrests, expulsions, or state persecution, uniting with trade unions and human rights defenders.

Youth in the Party: Integrate young comrades into every level of party work—agitational, theoretical, and organizational—ensuring the party remains youthful, dynamic, and revolutionary in spirit.

Through these tasks, the PRC will transform youthful rebellion into disciplined revolutionary organization. The goal is not simply to protest against the world as it is, but to prepare a generation capable of leading the struggle to change it.

The Role of African Youth in Recent Protests and Anti-Imperialist Struggles

Across Africa, young people have become the driving force behind political and social upheavals. Their struggles have shaken the foundations of regimes that serve imperialist and capitalist interests. In Nigeria, the #EndSARS movement challenged police brutality and the state’s violent apparatus. In Kenya, youth have led demonstrations against exploitative taxation and corruption. In Sudan and Senegal, students and workers united to confront dictatorship and economic collapse. In South Africa, youth have been central to movements demanding decolonized education and social justice.

These uprisings reveal two truths: first, that Africa’s youth possess immense revolutionary potential; and second, that without revolutionary leadership, their energy risks being dissipated or co-opted. The bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois opposition exploit these movements for electoral gain, while imperialist NGOs divert their anger into safe reformism. To prevent this, a revolutionary party must consciously intervene to link immediate demands to the struggle for workers’ power and socialism.

The Permanent Revolutionary Congress must understand African youth as not just the future of revolution, but its living engine. Their courage, energy, and defiance must be organized, disciplined, and armed with Marxist consciousness.

Tasks for the Organization:

Formation of Youth and Student Brigades: Build PRC Youth Brigades dedicated to organizing in campuses, informal settlements, and workplaces—connecting economic and political struggles.

Political Intervention in Mass Movements: Where youth protests emerge, PRC cadres must participate, raise transitional slogans, and link the struggle to the program of permanent revolution.

Support for Workers and Peasant Struggles: Unite youth organizations with labor unions, digital platform workers, and peasant associations, demonstrating that youth liberation depends on the liberation of the working class.

Anti-Imperialist Education: Expose the role of imperialist powers, foreign corporations, and local elites in Africa’s underdevelopment, fostering revolutionary internationalism.

Build a Continental Youth Front: Collaborate with socialist youth organizations across Africa, guided by the International Socialist League, to coordinate solidarity and joint campaigns against repression, inequality, and imperialism.

By carrying out these tasks, the PRC will transform the scattered protests and uprisings into a conscious, organized force capable of confronting the capitalist state and imperialism. The energy of Africa’s youth must be directed toward the seizure of power by the working class, in alliance with students, women, and oppressed communities.

Only through the method of permanent revolution where democratic and social struggles merge into the fight for socialism can the revolutionary potential of Africa’s youth become the decisive weapon for emancipation.

Internationalism and the Struggle for Permanent Revolution

The crisis of capitalism is not national but global. Its effects unemployment, war, climate collapse, and repression cross all borders. For this reason, the struggle of youth and students in Kenya, Africa, and across the world cannot succeed in isolation. Every local struggle is tied to the fate of the international working class. This understanding lies at the core of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: the victory of socialism in any country depends on the extension of the revolution internationally.

The Permanent Revolutionary Congress affirms its commitment to internationalism as both a principle and a practical strategy. The ruling class operates as a coordinated global force  multinational corporations, imperialist states, and financial institutions united in the exploitation of labor and the plunder of the Global South. To confront them, revolutionaries must act as an organized international movement.

The International Socialist League (ISL) provides the framework for this task. It unites revolutionary parties and organizations across continents around a shared program for socialist revolution. As part of this international current, the PRC pledges to strengthen its collaboration, deepen its theoretical alignment, and contribute actively to the ISL’s campaigns and actions.

Youth and students in Africa must recognize their place in this global front. Their struggles are linked to those of Palestinian youth resisting genocide, Latin American students fighting privatization, and European workers striking against austerity. Internationalism transforms solidarity from moral sympathy into coordinated political struggle.

Tasks for the Organization:

Deepen Political Ties with the ISL:
Maintain regular participation in ISL meetings, campaigns, and publications. Translate ISL materials into local languages to make internationalist ideas accessible to African youth.

International Campaigns and Solidarity:
Organize joint days of action with ISL sections on key global issues—such as support for Palestine, opposition to imperialist wars, and defense of political prisoners.

Build an African Revolutionary Bloc:
Work toward the creation of a continental network of socialist organizations under the ISL banner, linking the PRC with comrades from South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, and beyond.

International Education and Exchange:
Send young militants to ISL schools and training camps, while hosting regional seminars in East Africa on Trotskyism and revolutionary organizing.

International Propaganda and Communication:
Develop a media platform—print, digital, and social—to share analyses, coordinate campaigns, and amplify revolutionary perspectives across the Global South.

Through these initiatives, the PRC will not only act locally but think and fight globally. Our role is to contribute to the reconstruction of a revolutionary international that can coordinate mass uprisings, transform them into revolutions, and bring about the socialist reorganization of the world.

The emancipation of Africa’s youth and students cannot be won within the borders of a single nation. It will be achieved only through the victory of the international working class, united in one revolutionary movement under the banner of socialism.