This crisis is global

Across the world we are witnessing the nightmare of a rising extreme right — reactionary forces, especially the US, use statepower to reassert imperial dominance over resources, particularly in the Global South. We see the grip of militarism, border violence, repression, racism, patriarchy, and xenophobia tighten. We see the powerful act with impunity, trampling international law and enabling mass murder and genocide. The machinery of empire once again seeks to discipline those who resist, and to punish those who demand freedom. The ruling classes everywhere offer humanity nothing but deepening inequality, ecological devastation, war, repression, and despair. And they repeat a sickening message to the working class and poor, that we must all make sacrifices, and that we must all be patient! The ecological destruction we see every day is not an accident. It is the direct outcome of a system built on extraction, plunder and profit; a system that treats nature as a commodity to be bought and sold, and communities as disposable as the plastic they poison us with. Climate change is no longer a distant threat: it is already reshaping daily life with drought, floods, extreme heat, hunger, rising food prices, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. It is the poor, the working class, rural communities and women who are hit first and hardest. The wealthy remain secure with their private water, private electricity, and private protection. Capitalism is driving the planet toward catastrophe. The elites offer us ‘solutions’ with carbon markets, greenwashing, and privatised transitions. But these are designed to protect profits, not people. We cannot allow the climate crisis to be used as another excuse to impose austerity, to deepen inequality, and to expand corporate control and greed over energy, land and resources. The

fight against climate change is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

The future is not theirs

Even in the midst of collapse, we find reasons for real hope. It doesn’t come from the empty promises of politicians, or the illusion that the system can be ‘fixed’ for our benefit. It comes from the only force capable of transforming society: the organised power of poor and working people — the working classes.

Hope lives on:

• In workers organising on the shopfloor and in communities, building unions and worker committees that defend dignity and fight exploitation.

• In women organising against violence and patriarchal domination, and in the feminist struggles that insist that liberation must be total.

• In movements that defend land, housing, public services and the right to life itself.

• In struggles for climate justice and against ecological destruction: communities resisting pollution, land grabs, water theft, destructive mining, and the privatisation of energy.

• In the demand for a publicly owned, socially controlled energy system that provides affordable clean power, decent work, and a just transition that leaves no worker and no community behind.

• In international solidarity, especially with the Palestinian and Sudanese people facing genocide, and all those facing occupation, racial oppression and dispossession.

The role of the youth

The youth are not simply ‘the future’. They are the decisive force of the present. They are the generation living on the sharpest edge of the capitalist crisis, with mass unemployment, the collapse of

education, permanent insecurity, police violence, and the rising threat of climate breakdown. Youth are also among the most militant and imaginative fighters for justice in our society. Their leadership is indispensable if we are to break out of the mess we are in.As we move toward the 50th anniversary of the June 1976 youth uprising, we honour the courage of the students who rose up against apartheid’s brutality and humiliation, who confronted the armed state with determination, and who inspired a new wave of struggle across the country. June 1976 was a declaration that the youth will not accept oppression as their destiny. In 2026, that spirit must be renewed, not as memory alone, but as a living commitment to organisation and struggle. Today’s youth may face a different regime, but the same system of exploitation and ruthless dispossession. We call on young people everywhere to build the organisations, study groups, youth formations and movements that can sustain struggle; to reject the poison of xenophobia and division; to defend democracy from below; and to forge alliances with workers and communities in a common fight against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and ecological destruction. As Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto “The proletarians have nothing to lose but

their chains. They have a world to win”.

Local government elections

The coming year will also be especially challenging because it will be shaped by the build-up to the local government elections. Already, and increasingly in the months ahead, we will see hundreds of parties, both old and new, flooding communities with promises, slogans and lies. They will claim that a change of faces, a reshuffling of councils, or a different coalition will end the suffering endured by the majority. Yet most of these parties accept the same system that produces this suffering: a system based on profit, privatisation, corruption, exploitation and the abandonment of the working class. Elections will be used to divert anger into empty competition, to divide communities, and to weaken organised resistance. We must be clear: no ballot paper will substitute for mass organisation and struggle from below. Real power is built notevery few years at the polls, but every day in the workplaces, streets, schools and communities where people fight collectively for their lives. The system will not change into something better by itself. It can degenerate into barbarism: rule by force, hate, scapegoating, and authoritarianism. The extreme right grows precisely where working-class organisation is weakened, where communities are isolated, and where people are convinced that nothing can change. When people lose hope!