Nick Davies, Southampton Socialist Students

I attended Global Justice Youth’s annual event We Rise 2025 at the University of Sussex in February. They had reached out to invite Socialist Students, so I attended from our group in Southampton. Over 100 attend the event, split into a number of panels and workshops, covering a range of global issues.

The opening plenary entitled “Capitalism in a World on Fire: Oil, climate change and neoliberal power”, with great contributions on the failures of neoliberalism for working-class people, the insidious effects of the political lobbying of fossil fuel capital and on the origins and aims of the horrific genocide in Gaza. I made a contribution praising the fact that the discussion drew direct links between the capitalist system and these crises.

However, the discussion was lacking a clear solution, so I posed the ideas of a socialist green transition based on public ownership of industry, with production planned to meet the needs of ordinary people and the environment.

After lunch there was a talk on ‘Trump, Reform and the global rise of the Far Right’. The panel discussed how capitalist politicians use rhetoric that blames immigration, rather than the policies of capitalist governments cutting public services, for ruining our lives.

One young attendee asked how to make this point to the wider masses, in opposition to the billionaire-owned media diverting blame away from the capitalist elite.

There was an organisation discussion, detailing Global Youth Justice’s campaigning including around issues such as fossil fuel legislation and protesting UK-Israel trade deals.

Whilst this was interesting and positive, the workshop lacked a clear push to link them together to form a coherent and concrete political programme that can begin to tackle the global crises of capitalism.

The final panel was titled “Another world is possible”, which provided a nice summary of the day as well as some revolutionary optimism. However, despite the use of the statistic that 47% of young people think “the entire way of our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”; the final contributions were restricted by a lack of clear political directive to engage and win over the working class, which is the force that can bring about change internationally.

Overall I thought it was a very good event, with young people starting to draw socialist conclusions based on their experience of the crisis of global capitalism that is staring us right in the face.