If you do keep the faith and continue to be radical, very bad things can and do happen to you. At the very least you will be marginalized. Same if you are poor and strike out. Prison awaits you in the USA.

With respect to teaching, I couldn't make sense of mainstream economics when I had to teach it to college students. At the same time, I could see at the school that there was a whole lot of hypocrisy. Not much real respect for the "higher learning."

You can't take the view of some of the sectarian parties that hard issues can't be confronted when dealing with workers. If you don't confront these issues, what will ever change?

Most young people are or will soon enough be workers. They can help to energize and radicalize the workers' movement. And what revolution has ever succeeded without youth?

Young people are more likely to be idealistic and think that radical change is both necessary and possible. They may not yet be stuck in the routinized and sterile life that work and age often bring, nor stuck in any kind of rigid way of thinking. They have great energy and can get things done.

We should assume that we all have a lot in common. Speak as if our views are the only sensible ones. This resonates with ordinary people, as long as we speak ordinary language and don't come across as elitists.

Capitalism is, in Mao's language, the main contradiction in the world today and so our efforts have to be focused on ending this system and making a new one.