The recent Friends of Socialist China delegation to China contributed to a parallel session of the Dialogue on Exchanges and Mutual Learning Among Civilisations, organised by Schwarzman Scholars of Tsinghua University, on the theme of Youth power in dialogue among civilisations.
Creighton Ward, a member of Qiao Collective and of Friends of Socialist China’s US committee, gave the following brief presentation focused on the deteriorating economic, social and political conditions faced by young people in the US, and highlighting all that oppressed and working class communities in the West can learn from Socialist China.
Thank you to the hosts and organizers of this event, I am honored to join you as a representative of Friends of Socialist China and the Qiao Collective. Thank you for your interest in a youth perspective and for convening this dialogue.
The majority of youth in the US, including myself, face a variety of challenges even in the rich imperial core: crumbling infrastructure, the gutting of the administrative state, austerity, the evaporation of pandemic welfare programs and regressive health policies that openly embrace eugenics, skyrocketing rent and food prices, the deregulation of agencies tasked with monitoring food safety and infectious disease.
We are dealing with a social atmosphere of climate nihilism, social atomization to the highest degree, depoliticization, and counterinsurgency.
The imperialist reorganization underway in the second Trump administration has been accompanied by the rapid degradation in quality of life for workers, brazenly genocidal moves domestically and abroad, and a pivot away from the US’ proxy wars in Palestine and Ukraine in preparation for war with China. We should not underestimate the degree of ideological defeat instilled in the western left, or its problems of racial chauvinism and anticommunism.
Yet despite the bleak conditions that youth are confronted with, it is obvious that there have been significant shifts in the global balance of power against US hegemony. We are fortunate to live in a time when the second-largest political party in the world is an experienced and highly capable communist party, and I find myself thinking frequently about how much worse off we would all be if China had not taken the socialist path.
China provides a powerful counterexample to the moral rot and immiseration of the capitalist imperial core. We have much to learn from its antipoverty measures, commitment to building ecological civilization, and autonomous development. Its successes reflect the historical agency of labor in the world’s largest socialist state and the necessity of socialism to restore ecologically harmonious social and economic relations. The Chinese experience demystifies the fact that mass communist politics are the only thing capable of responding to the contradictions of our time.
In the introduction to The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, Danish communist Torkil Lauesen said,
“To see the struggle for socialism as a long process of global transformation since the mid-nineteenth century is also somehow comforting on a psychological level for an old man. The struggle and suffering of millions of communists and socialists for the past two hundred years have not been in vain…to be part of this process–a tiny cogwheel in the machinery of transformation–and give it a little push in the right direction seems to be ‘the meaning of life.’”
I hope that my generation and those to come find the necessary courage to accept our place in an intergenerational struggle for peace and ecological society.
