As imperialist wars and the planet heat up, students are being kidnapped from their schools, banned from using their gender’s bathrooms on their campuses, and brutalized for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. It is time for joint working-class and student mass struggle to fight back against the right wing and build a better world.

The Right-Wing Assault On Students

Trump’s executive orders have threatened to withdraw federal funding from schools that promoted DEI or had pro-Palestine activity on campus. These attacks, which will have devastating consequences for working-class students, rely heavily on the culture war he has been drumming up for years, which scapegoats immigrants and transgender people. Trump has used this political momentum to attack immigrant students, revoking visas and detaining campus activists for weeks on end, and to ban trans youth from sports, making them even more vulnerable.

University administrations have capitulated in varying degrees to the Trump administration in order to secure their funding and keep the board of trustees (and their increasing number of corporate donors) happy. Universities have deleted webpages relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion, amended their nondiscrimination policies, and even dismantled entire departments relating to DEI. Many working-class students are losing vital scholarships that allow them to go to college in the first place because of attacks on DEI. University of Pennsylvania promised to restrict the participation of trans students in college athletics, and apologized for allowing trans swimmer Lia Thomas to compete in 2022, revoking her school records and opening the door for more attacks on trans athletes.

Rising Costs & Declining Rewards

The value and dependability of a college education has gone down significantly, but tuition has reached record highs. Students are graduating into a crumbling capitalist system. When students leave school, they face an obscenely high cost of living and a depressing job market—and all this while facing the impending doom of climate catastrophe. Young people desperately searching for work are then saddled with crushing student debt. There is more than $1.8 trillion racked up in student debt in the US across over 42 million borrowers.

And even though students are taking out more loans than ever, the increasing cost of living and tuition has made it nearly impossible to get through school and meet your everyday needs. With a dismal job market, youth unemployment has continued to rise—many graduates find it hard to even get entry-level positions paying substandard wages. A college degree simply no longer guarantees you a better, or even similar, living standard to your parents.

It is clear that something must change—but how? Despite the capitalist hellscape we will graduate into, socialists think a better world is possible.

Are You Ready To Fight?

There is more than enough for all of us to go around—food, housing, jobs, and healthcare. But it’s because of capitalism that we face hunger, homelessness, and unemployment. We’re fighting for a socialist society that doesn’t rely on the profit motive to create and distribute resources or services. Instead, all of our production, and the labor that goes into it, would be organized based on human need and the common good. 

Socialists dedicate ourselves to building an international mass working-class movement capable of challenging, and eventually ending, the power of the capitalists—beginning with struggles for our immediate needs, but ultimately understanding that we cannot win our liberation within the confines of capitalism.

Students play a crucial role in building mass movements and linking up with working-class struggle, as they did during the Vietnam War. Some of the largest protests in history against the war were led by students in the US, who most vocally took up this struggle, and then were, critically, joined by young workers.

The actions from both students and young workers in the anti-war movement put massive political pressure on the establishment. This was how they were able to gain the right to vote for 18-year-olds, an important gain for young people in the ‘70s. The war made it abundantly clear that if they were old enough to fight in the ruling class’s wars, they were certainly old enough to vote in their elections.

The struggle for socialism right now means young people need to help build a working-class movement to fight back against the right wing and Trump’s billionaire, imperialist agenda. Students, by linking up with the power and organization of the working class, can successfully fight against Trump’s deportations and the genocide in Gaza, as well as win important demands, like affordable housing for all. The working class holds the power to fundamentally change society if they are organized, because workers create profits and keep the world running with their labor. 

Being a socialist means organizing in our schools and our workplaces. To stay afloat in today’s cost-of-living crisis, more and more of us students have already begun our lives as workers. Talk to your co-workers about organizing in the workplace. Plan meetings to lead walkouts with your classmates. Rally at your TA’s picket line! But, as socialists, we do all this as part of a larger task of building a movement that knows it can shut down the system and build a new one: an explicitly socialist society where workers are democratically in charge. Join the socialist movement to fight for a future free of poverty, war, oppression, and climate catastrophe!