Report given by Sharmain Siddiqui and Naomi Martinez on behalf of the Young Communist League USA at the occasion of the United Democratic Youth Organization (EDON) international conference. The YCL USA, along with youth from Cyprus, Greece, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, and Russia gave reports to the Central Committee of EDON.

Sharmain Siddiqui: I am a member of the Chicago Club of the Communist Party USA. I am a Pakistani-American Muslim and a proud daughter of immigrants. My father has been a taxi cab driver in America for 30 years, and I have grown up around labor and workers’ struggles. I was radicalized in my early teen years doing Palestine BDS work. Today, I am a medical student and organize healthcare workers for Palestine solidarity.

Naomi Martinez: I am a member of the Los Angeles Metro club of the Communist Party. As a young person in the United States, I worked low-wage food service jobs for most of my life, moving to different apartments in new states every year, desperate to find stability in a country that so clearly does not exist to serve its working-class communities. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic in 2020 that I was radicalized, refusing to accept my conditions as the only reality. I began by organizing with Starbucks Workers United, a labor union formed by left-labor organizers in the U.S., after my experience at the Young Communist League’s Little Red Schoolhouse. Shortly after, I joined the party.

It is an honor to speak with you at this critical moment in the global struggle against imperialism. We are gathering at a moment of escalating imperialist aggression and renewed acts of militarization across the globe. From Gaza to Ukraine, we are witnessing the naked hand of U.S. and NATO imperialism pushing us closer to war.

The U.S. ruling class spends more on war than the next ten countries combined, funding death while tens of millions in our own country lack healthcare, housing, and education. Over three-quarters of a million people in the U.S. are homeless on any given night, while Lockheed Martin and Raytheon post record profits. This is not new. From the 1953 coup in Iran to the 2003 war in Iraq, the U.S. has shown that it will destroy democracy to protect capital.

A new peace movement

As U.S. imperialism continues its relentless wars in the endless pursuit of capital, a new peace movement has surged up to resist the genocide of Palestinians. Our movement is led by Muslims and Arab Americans, alongside students and workers who are all standing up against the genocidal war on Palestine, against NATO’s provocations in Ukraine, and against U.S. militarism that drains our own public resources while it destabilizes the rest of the world.

These struggles are not new, but they are sharpening their strategies and growing in number. When demonstrations began last October in response to Israel’s siege on Gaza, it was students and Palestinian youth who led the largest anti-war mobilization seen in decades. Encampments emerged across U.S. universities, many at elite institutions with deep ties to the arms industry.

These students continued to protest in the face of arrest and expulsion. It is important to note that these student movements are not separate from the working class. These students — much like myself — are the children of workers, immigrants, and farmers. They are becoming radicalized not just by reading theory in the university, but by the lived contradiction of capitalism in decay.

The Trump administration has continued to respond to our growing peace movement with repression. Peace activists have been surveilled and arrested, students were beaten by police, and immigrant leaders targeted by immigration detention forces.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University in New York and a permanent resident green card holder, was detained by immigration authorities as part of the administration’s effort to crush dissent. Within 24 hours of his detainment, Mahmoud was transferred to a Louisiana detention facility more than 1,000 miles away from his home and wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Our comrades from the immigration, labor, and student movements organized to demand his release. And we won.

104 days after his detainment, Mahmoud was freed on June 21, where he immediately rejoined demonstrations in New York. By targeting immigrants, workers, and peace activists, the Trump administration has inspired the very unity they fear most.

Building bridges

Through our understanding of our shared repression, we are building bridges between struggles. We have linked student movements with labor unions. We have tied immigrant rights to anti-imperialism. Our unity is our strength.

Although Trump presents himself as a peace candidate, we must be clear: Donald Trump is not a candidate of peace. Under his presidency, civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes increased 330%. He withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and, in 2020, illegally assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, bringing us to the brink of regional war. He is the co-architect of the current Israeli campaign against Iran and Palestine, alongside Netanyahu. This is not peace, this is premeditated imperialist violence.

As Marxist-Leninists, we know that war is not just a moral issue, but a class issue. Imperialism is not a policy error, but the highest stage of capitalism. Peace will not come from moral appeals to the ruling class; it will come from class struggle and from building a multinational working-class movement with the capacity to govern.

AKEL and EDON have long modeled this struggle. Your call to close the British bases in Cyprus — also used by Israel and other NATO countries — and your deep roots in labor are examples we learn from as workers in America are drawn into militarism through starvation wages, the lack of a social safety net, and aggressive recruiting into the U.S. army, beginning with children as young as 12 years old.

War is a disaster for the working class.

We know that war is a disaster for the working class. Never has the need for a strong peace movement been more pressing. Historically, CPUSA was a part of campaigns to ban the bomb and nuclear weapons, and opposed the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. We draw on this long history of working for peace to continue to find unity and build a multiracial, multi-issue mass coalition against war.

Our movements are connected. When we fight for Palestinian liberation, when we oppose war on Iran, when we demand an end to NATO aggression, we fight together.

Let us continue to build a peace movement rooted in clarity and discipline. We hope to train new comrades from the student movement and connect their anger to socialist organization.

Let us fight to free all political prisoners — from the jails of U.S. immigration detention to the cells of settler-colonial regimes.

And let us never forget: the fight for peace is the fight for socialism.

Long live the global struggle for peace and liberation.

Thank you!

Images: CPUSA and YCL members and other youth delegates at the EDON festival’s International City in Cyprus. (Lisa Armstrong / People’s World); A Brown University Gaza solidarity encampment (progressive.org)