What follows is the text of a speech given by Fiona Sim (co-founder of the Black Liberation Alliance and member of the Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee) at our recent bilateral webinar with Renmin University of China, held on 26 February 2026.
Fiona describes the economic, political and ideological conditions faced by young people in the West in the present era: a brutal neoliberalism, characterised by rising poverty, inequality and alienation; witnessing devastating wars and seemingly inevitable climate collapse; and being fed relentless propaganda fomenting “a culture of nihilism and pessimism”.
In academia, ruling class ideology prevails and seeks to either ignore Marxism or to paint it as some sort of failed experiment. Certainly young people are “protected” from the fact that “there is another world possible and it is being built now – by China, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, Laos, and many more entering their own revolutionary processes” that people can take inspiration from. And yet objective reality is increasingly radicalising young people; increasingly they understand that they “can organise, unite, and work together to resolve the contradictions and build a socialist alternative”.
The young generation are rejecting the right-wing and neoliberal ideologies that shamelessly capitulate to the reactionary rhetoric of the far-right. In Venezuela, we have seen how young people formed the biggest demographic that voted for Maduro. In Britain, young people started encampments in support of Palestine and continue to turn out in their tens, if not hundreds of thousands to protest the fascists on the streets as well as the government’s war mongering policies in lieu of the “cost of living crisis” and plummeting employment rates. In China, we see how Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has shown the proof is in the proverbial pudding and the young people are drawn to the hope it brings, with 74 million young people as proud members of the Communist Youth League.
Fiona concludes:
Right now the contradictions of imperialism are at their sharpest. Presidents like Donald Trump expose the barefaced brutality of US hegemony and the capitalist system is leaving millions in destitution and despondence. The conditions could not be more ripe for revolution. To get there, the young people must be prepared. The young generation must be encouraged to study the revolutionary histories and ongoing resistance movements of the world because in a world so rife with despair, Marxism-Leninism remains humanity’s hope for the future.
For young people, there is a lot of reason to be nihilistic about the future and the current state of the world. We have inherited a world that is heating up. With the global average temperature rise predicted to climb permanently above 1.5°C, a mass extinction event of thousands of species grows more likely by the day. In recent decades, millions have died in the wars and genocides in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, and so on. Millions more around the world have died from the sanctions regime of the United States government whether by Democrat or Republican. Many young people have been permanently displaced from their homelands as a result.
The young people are the next generation, but will this next generation be the last of humanity? What will be left for the generations to come?
In the West, these are the logical questions for a generation that has been conditioned to believe that the everyday person has no influence on the systems of a society or the governance of the world. The neoliberal philosophy has poisoned the human psyche, presenting Capital as a god and capitalists as its angels. The proletariat make offerings of commodities to the bourgeois gods while driven to fight among themselves for the scraps that fall off the table. Here the idea of “meritocracy” takes root.
In such a system, working class young people become cogs in the capitalist machine–taught to worship brands and TikTok trends while being forced into minimum-wage jobs that keep them trapped in poverty, living at the behest of slum-like landlords and lining the pockets of CEOs of privatised infrastructure (whether that be water, rail, or energy). This form of alienation is a means of crushing revolutionary spirit: separating the individual from the collective, from the community, from the vanguard. At its core, as Mao says in Combat Liberalism, liberalism is “a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension.” This is demonstrated in its highest form under neoliberalism.
Even the leader of the Catholic Church Pope Francis identified in the early years of the Covid pandemic that neoliberalism is a dogma that is “causing the human family to fall apart”. Dogma is most dangerous in the way that it convinces the masses that there is no future. That another world is not possible.
That is why the scientific method is needed to provide a framework to counter the unscientific, the immaterial, the unconscionable. This propaganda is instilling a culture of nihilism and pessimism in our youth in the young generation. But we all know that there is another world possible and it is being built now – by China, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, Laos, and many more entering their own revolutionary processes.
In this vein, Marxism must be decoupled from the counterinsurgent disinformation campaign that has many young people convinced that Marxism is merely the sheltered Eurocentric dogma of privileged white men. It would be ludicrous to apply this logic to other fields of science. We do not consider Newton’s law of gravitation nor Einstein’s theory of relativity to be any less astute because of their founder’s backgrounds.
Yet, it’s this misinformed idea of Marxism that is spread in our liberal universities which are rife with post-modernist and post-structuralist thought, encouraging individualist thought and disparaging Marxist framework. In the West, Britain being no exception, Marxist professors are not held with esteem by academia. They are rather seen as objects of curiosity and bemusement rather than serious scholars of theory.
The capitalist class would rather convince the working class that the Marxist philosophy is futile and niche rather than allow it to flourish and bring about their overthrow.
This is why Marxism-Leninism must be presented to the young generation not as a dogma but a science to be studied. A science that survives the test of time with a rich revolutionary history. The class struggle has been waged for over a century using the science of Marxism-Leninism to free the peoples of the global South.
From Grenada to Ghana, revolutionary leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Samora Machel have studied the observations of Marx and Lenin to liberate their countries from the oppression of the Colonisers and imperialists. This is how Kwame Nkrumah came to theorise neocolonialism as the last stage of imperialism. This seminal text contextualised the contradictions of the so-called post-colonial world of independent nation-states in Africa and beyond.
It is the beauty of dialectical and historical materialism that produces such rich revolutionary theory that is developed with each new generation, shedding new insights and resolutions. Marxism-Leninism as a science is always adapting to the material conditions and situating ideas within the ongoing social processes as documented by history. In this way, it gives rise to revolutionary optimism that can empower the young people with the knowledge that the end of capitalism is not a question of if but how and when.
And this is what the young people need to know: that we are not held hostage to a capitalist system. We can organise, unite, and work together to resolve the contradictions and build a socialist alternative.
In the imperial core, Black communist organisations like the Black Panther Party in the US – founded and led by young African-Americans in their day –emerged as a recognition of the contradictions that plagued society. They recognised Marxism-Leninism as a means of understanding the mechanics of white supremacy and racism as necessary for upholding capitalism. They formed coalitions with the most marginalised in society to self-organise against the state and took inspiration from the revolutions in China, Cuba, Algeria.
In the words of the late Marxist historian Professor Stuart Hall, “race is the modality in which class is lived” and the interconnected nature of social struggles cannot be ignored. Freedom can only come when all facets of social subjugation are challenged head on–whether that be racism, misogyny, disableism, homophobia or transphobia. They are tools of divide and conquer used in countries like Britain today where refugees from Africa and Asia are the government’s scapegoats for austerity, where the far right are hijacking this rhetoric to recruit and spread their vitriol. This strategy serves to reinforce and uphold imperialism. However, there is hope.
The young generation are rejecting the right-wing and neoliberal ideologies that shamelessly capitulate to the reactionary rhetoric of the far-right. In Venezuela, we have seen how young people formed the biggest demographic that voted for Maduro. In Britain, young people started encampments in support of Palestine and continue to turn out in their tens, if not hundreds of thousands to protest the fascists on the streets as well as the government’s war mongering policies in lieu of the “cost of living crisis” and plummeting employment rates. In China, we see how “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has shown the proof is in the proverbial pudding and the young people are drawn to the hope it brings, with 74 million young people as proud members of the Communist Youth League. Those numbers are unfathomable to us in Britain.
But in the spirit of revolutionary optimism, we must persevere with all the tools in our arsenal, no matter how limited. The Black Liberation Alliance tries to engage young people and students of the diaspora through exposing them to Black Liberation, the Black Radical Tradition, and the anti-imperialist struggles around the world.
Organisations like Friends of Socialist China, the Morning Star, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and all the anti-imperialist campaigns in Britain are all important organs to enable the dissemination and sharing of information that counters the mainstream narratives that permeate the education system. We must engage with the young people and we must prioritise outreach.
Right now the contradictions of imperialism are at their sharpest. Presidents like Donald Trump expose the barefaced brutality of US hegemony and the capitalist system is leaving millions in destitution and despondence. The conditions could not be more ripe for revolution. To get there, the young people must be prepared. The young generation must be encouraged to study the revolutionary histories and ongoing resistance movements of the world because in a world so rife with despair, Marxism-Leninism remains humanity’s hope for the future.
I often hear talk of ‘liberals’, and I always think, “Where are they?” In my understanding, Liberalism was a great movement at the end of medieval times in Europe, and gave birth to many cherished forms such as democracy. But it also birthed Capitalism, which served as the engine to finish off the feudal lords. Still, in time and in opposition to capitalism, Liberalism created Socialism, which Marx fine-tuned as Communism. So where have all the liberals gone? If they are not capitalists or socialists, they must be neoliberals, a bastardized corruption of their ancestor.
It is good for young people to learn about the advanced stage of imperialism that we are all now immersed in and what needs to be done about it. The old money owners of the American imperialist bloc respect and fear China because it represents the greatest threat so far to their continued wealth and global influence. The generational wealth and education of the original European owners of imperialism has made them more aware than most of the natural human tendency toward communism; they understand that the beginning of our human journey was instinctively communistic as a matter of survival. As a species we will either become consciously communistic again or, we are likely to perish during an almost inevitable nuclear defence of imperialism. China is the exemplar and defender of what must now be done about this rarely understood human condition.