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.

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?

We know form past experience that when you put women's issues or face issues on the back burner, they never get dealt with. So all struggles have to be dealt with simultaneously, but within an anti-capitalist framework. A monumental task, but nothing less will do.

Life as we know it is fundamentally unsatisfying. I think most folks feel this to be true. They know that a life of aimless consumption isn't much of a life. And work offers us very little satisfaction. Plus our work and consumption is destroying the environment. And this is in the rich countries. Add starvation, etc. to the mix, and you have a lot of people in the world pretty unhappy with things as they are. Modern communications make all of this known to people far and wide, and we see the fundamental unfairness of it all.

Of course we can talk about the radical potential of youth. But in the U.S. it is still the case that most youth are conservative and not very sympathetic to the working class.

Without an understanding of the issue of race and a willingness to confront it head on, the working class will not build its strength.

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.