Organise or Starve: Youth Mobilisation Key to Overcoming Poverty, Unemployment and Inequality

Mbuso Ngubane

This Youth Day, we must speak the truth without the varnish of liberal sentiment. The truth is this: South African youth are under siege. They are not free. They live under the dictatorship of hunger, unemployment, crime, and hopelessness. This is not a democracy for the working class. It is a capitalist nightmare, run by the same comprador elite who inherited the whip from the apartheid bosses, and now wield it in the name of profit.

The Young Lions of 1976 rose against Bantu Education and the racist capitalist state. They had no illusions. They understood that the struggle for education could not be separated from the fight for freedom and dignity. Today, our youth face a different, but no less brutal enemy: neoliberalism, austerity, and a corrupt ruling class that has sold out the dreams of liberation.

We must remember that the youth who marched in Soweto in 1976 were not just reacting to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. They were rejecting a system designed to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water — cheap labour for white capital. The apartheid bosses, like the ANC’s current neo-liberal government, feared nothing more than a politically educated and organised youth.

Steve Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” That is why we must centre political education. Without it, the youth are led like lambs into the slaughterhouse of TikTok distraction, and fake entrepreneurship, and are dying for sneakers and status. The revolution must begin in the mind, and move into action.

The youth of today must not be reduced to hashtags and handouts. You must organise. You must take power into your own hands. The capitalist system has nothing to offer you but casualised labour, surveillance, poverty, and mental collapse. The gig economy is not freedom — it is wage slavery without the dignity of a contract.

We must return to the principle Lenin taught us: "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement." That means building youth structures rooted in class struggle. NUMSA’s youth structures are not built on empty slogans but on political education, shop-floor militancy, and international solidarity. We must build unity among the unemployed, the precarious, the students, and the exploited.

In Cuba, the youth were not bystanders in the revolution. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were in their twenties when they picked up arms and overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Today, because of that struggle, Cuban youth have universal education, healthcare, and a future not dictated by private profit.

In Burkina Faso, the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara placed young people at the heart of nation-building. He trained them in agro-ecology, literacy, and defence. He built schools and clinics. He fought against corruption, privilege, and the domination of international finance. He said: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.”

And today, in the same country, young Captain Ibrahim Traoré has become a symbol of defiance against the old order. Whether his government can remain on a revolutionary path is not guaranteed. But what is clear is this: young people in Burkina Faso have rejected the old elite and are demanding that their country serve the people, not foreign powers. It is a lesson for us here. We too must reject leaders who have long passed their sell-by date, men who cling to office while the country burns; men who were once comrades and have become tyrants. The revolution must be renewed by the youth or it will rot in the hands of the old.

Even in the belly of the beast, in the United States, we have seen young people rise. From the Black Panthers to today’s movements like Black Lives Matter, young people have resisted imperialism and racial capitalism. However, we must also be clear: without structure and class analysis, movements can be co-opted and destroyed.

In South Africa, the reality is stark. Youth unemployment sits above 60% for those under 25. But the capitalist state has no solution. The ANC government implements budget cuts, not jobs. They militarise communities instead of building schools. They worship private capital and destroy public institutions.

The solution is not individual hustle, nor is it waiting for handouts from ministers living in luxury. The solution is organisation. We must build revolutionary youth brigades, trained in Marxist theory, linked to working-class struggles and rooted in the community. We must revive the spirit of the Young Communist League, of COSAS in its militant days, and of youth who linked their liberation to the overthrow of capitalism.

Youth must return to the factory gates, to community halls, to classrooms and campuses with one message: We are not commodities. We will not be sacrificed so that the rich can live in Sandton while we rot in townships.

Let us begin where we are. In every township, build youth worker forums that unite students, unemployed graduates, informal workers, and young trade unionists into strong centres of education and mobilisation. Let us revive popular education rooted in Marxism and the lived reality of the working class. And teach history, economics, and revolutionary theory in the language of the oppressed. 

Let us organise cultural programmes, sports tournaments, and community defence, not as distractions, but as vehicles of resistance. Let us fight budget cuts not with silence, but with strikes. Let us forge ties with youth movements across Africa and the Global South, because our struggles are linked.

To the youth of this country: you are not the future — you are the present. And if you do not rise now, you will be buried beneath the rubble of this dying system. We must not merely protest. We must organise. We must not merely mourn. We must fight.

* Mbuso Ngubane Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.