The Youth Are the Vanguard
By Scott Williams posted on December 23, 2020
A talk given at a “Young Communists Speak: Why Join a Revolutionary Party?” webinar sponsored by Workers World Party on Dec. 10.
We are gathered here today to talk about the crisis facing young workers and the intense radicalization of younger generations here in the heart of the empire.
It is clear that young people today carry the entire weight of a collapsing capitalist system on their backs.
By every measure, young people are doing much worse than their parents’ generations.
One of the ways we see this every day is the war on young people’s mental health, which, by every statistic, has drastically deteriorated. We’ve seen skyrocketing suicide rates. Rates of depression are 20 times greater than they were in our grandparents’ time. (tinyurl.com/y7l4lgvk)
A woman waits in line at Catholic Charities Spanish Catholic Center parking lot in Washington July 15, 2020, to pick up free food supplies. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington has served hundreds of thousands of meals to people in need across all of its food programs. (CNS photo/Chaz Muth)
The Croton-Cortlandt Food Pantry, hosted at Holy Name of Mary Church in Croton, N.Y., had adapted its distribution scheme to match the times. In the days before the coronavirus, the pantry’s offerings were laid out like a small neighborhood grocery; its weekly clients were free to pick out the food items they wanted.
From the deck of their tanker, Captain Samig Nabiyev and his crew could see the smoke and fire rising over the Port of Beirut, 900 meters away. When the flaming warehouse exploded, the force of the blast knocked Nabiyev flat on his back. “I thought I was finished,” said the 43-year-old Nabiyev, who’s worked on ships for almost 20 years. “We were all afraid for our lives.” Nabiyev and the 11 other crew members weren’t supposed to be in Beirut on Aug. 4, the day of the disaster that killed around 200 people and wounded more than 6,000. Like the tons of ammonium nitrate that had eventually exploded in the port, they too had been abandoned by the owner of their ship, left to the discretion of local officials and insurers. No one on Nabiyev’s crew was hurt, but as they learned more about the explosion in the weeks to come, they recognized the same industry practices that had left them stranded for months.
COVID-19 Fuels Abandonment of Ships – and Their Cargoes and Crews By K. Oanh Ha and Bruce Stanley | December 18, 2020
From the deck of their tanker, Captain Samig Nabiyev and his crew could see the smoke and fire rising over the Port of Beirut, 900 meters away. When the flaming warehouse exploded, the force of the blast knocked Nabiyev flat on his back.
“I thought I was finished,” said the 43-year-old Nabiyev, who’s worked on ships for almost 20 years. “We were all afraid for our lives.”
Nabiyev and the 11 other crew members weren’t supposed to be in Beirut on Aug. 4, the day of the disaster that killed around 200 people and wounded more than 6,000. Like the tons of ammonium nitrate that had eventually exploded in the port, they too had been abandoned by the owner of their ship, left to the discretion of local officials and insurers. No one on Nabiyev’s crew was hurt, but as they learned more about the explosion in the weeks to
What Happens When Tycoons Abandon Their Giant Cargo Ships By K Oanh Ha and Bruce Stanley | December 18, 2020
From the deck of their tanker, Captain Samig Nabiyev and his crew could see the smoke and fire rising over the Port of Beirut, 900 meters away. When the flaming warehouse exploded, the force of the blast knocked Nabiyev flat on his back.
“I thought I was finished,” said the 43-year-old Nabiyev, who’s worked on ships for almost 20 years. “We were all afraid for our lives.”
Nabiyev and the 11 other crew members weren’t supposed to be in Beirut on Aug. 4, the day of the disaster that killed around 200 people and wounded more than 6,000. Like the tons of ammonium nitrate that had eventually exploded in the port, they too had been abandoned by the owner of their ship, left to the discretion of local officials and insurers. No one on Nabiyev’s crew was hurt, but as they learned more about the explosion in the weeks to come, they