Youth: majority on the streets - minority on the platforms

For five years our movement has besieged the summits of the rich and the powerful. From Seattle to Genoa we have been clubbed, gassed and even shot by the forces of order. We have our martyrs - most famously Carlo Giuliani, gunned down on the streets of Genoa. When George Bush threatened the invasion and occupation of Iraq we launched a huge antiwar movement with global demonstrations millions strong.

This movement, that has already seen great struggles and momentous battles, must now go forward to face new challenges. It must take to the streets again, and show through mass direct action its intent; to build a world without classes, oppression, racism, war and imperialism.

Youth must be in the forefront of those who take up this task: the task of reclaiming our world, and fighting for our future. A future that the capitalists are destroying in their ruthless search of profit. It is no wonder that young people, burning with the desire to reclaim our future, have flooded into this movement, and taken their place on the fighting, militant wing of it.

From the thousands of youth who organized to shut down the meetings of the capitalist ministers and the imperialist institutions of the G8, IMF, WTO, to the thousands upon thousands of school and college students who took strike action against the war; it is the youth that have risked injury and even their lives in conflict with the state forces that will always defend this brutal system.

Yet it is not representatives of these youth who grace the platforms of the World and European Social Forums. We are there in our thousands but only on the floor of the seminars and plenaries, listening impatiently...

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