The following is an excerpted speech given by a young woman at the Brooklyn May Day March for Communism.

I am a high school student and I stand in solidarity with the international working class to eradicate this capitalist system, and eventually, fight for worldwide communism.
Capitalism is a system that gets working-class people killed. We are killed from hunger. We are killed by homelessness. We are killed by bombs, drones, and bullets. We are killed by overdose or suicide.

This is not made for me
I have been forced to grow up in a system that was not created for me. Myself and millions of my peers are the future and it is our responsibility to fight for a communist world now because our future is on the line.
Black and Latin high schoolers like me are forced to walk through metal detectors just to enter school, a long-standing culture of the racist policing of youth. The bosses have money for drones and but they underfund our schools. The Department of Education promotes the corrupt elitist specialized high schools, while kids in smaller mostly Black and Latin schools aren’t even given the necessary resources to learn. Students in my building organized a walkout for learning that doesn’t force us to be in front of a computer with no help from teachers. As a result, the computer-based learning was removed. The strength in our movement was our unity.
Unity of the working class is unstoppable, and while winning a small victory seems minimal, it not only showed the bosses that we are unafraid, but it also encourgaed those who believed that is wasn’t worth fighting.
Racist borders
I have a friend who went to a volleyball tournament out of state with her mom. While waiting at a bus stop, ICE, the immigration police, approached them, demanded ID, and detained her! My friend was born here but her mom is undocumented. Imagine how scared my friend was knowing that there was a possibility that she would never see her mother again. We live in a society that separates innocent families who are escaping the very countries the U.S.
government and their capitalist allies and foes have helped to destroy. Nothing but desperation and love for one’s children will cause a parent to make the dangerous journey across a desert, only to risk living in concentration camps or living under the threat of being snatched up like prey. These are the choices under capitalism.
Luckily, my friend knew that she could rely on the working class. She called the director of the volleyball club, who then called on coaches. They all went back to get them. They avoided a disaster at least for now. This is what millions of working people in this country and around the world have to deal with just to try and provide for their families. Politicians can’t solve this problem. It’s up to us to change the world.
Racist police
We live in a society which allows racist police to kill innocent Black men and women. We must remember that every person killed has family who loves them. For Shantel Davis, Kiki Grey, Kyam Livingston, Tyrone West, for too many other names we must continue to fight because their voices were ripped from them by these killer cops. These same cops whose job it is to scare protestors or strikers, to keep the working class in constant fear so that they don’t rebel.
 Voting doesn’t work
The bosses infect us with the wrong idea that voting the “bad bosses out” is the way to get this. This false idea that the U.S. was moving in the right direction was enforced when the first Black president was elected. Obama continued to do the dirty work of the men before him. His administration deported more people than any other president, dropped over 12,000 bombs on Syria in his presidency and did nothing to fight racism like many believed he would.
Donald Trump’s open, vicious, anti-immigrant racism is a big attack on our class. Communists reject the bosses’ fake borders, made to keep us divided. Our solidarity knows no boundaries.
We are given “socialist leaders” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an alternative. But they still want to keep the capitalism in place; the same system that was built on slavery, segregation, and war. Their main job is to fool people into thinking that we have finally found a fix. The rulers are preparing us for a future of war. The U.S. wants us to fight people as young as me in China and Russia.
Fight back
In Oakland,  Los Angeles, Chicago, West Virginia and other cities, teachers, students, and parents went on strike, demanding better learning and working conditions.
Haiti:  Tens of thousands rebelled against the government for mispending  government funds instead of using it to help lessen poverty.
India:  Over 150 million workers took part in a national general strike.
Central America: Workers marched to the border of the U.S. breaking down the illusions of borders along the way, only to be met with pepper spray, beatings and arrests. But other workers showed up in support.
Workers need communism to win
When workers come together we can overcome the elaborate plan that bosses created to oppress us. History has shown that under communist leadership, despite many weaknesses,  working-class unity benefits our class.
After the revolution in Cuba, middle class city kids were sent off into rural areas to teach literacy. Kids as young as seven taught people who had never learned to read or write. In 1962, Cuba had one of the highest numbers of literate people in the western hemisphere.
Yet, teens like me are told we shouldn’t be involved because these concepts are too complicated. Still, we continue to be exposed to racism and sexism during early childhood, we are overpoliced in schools, segregated and separated based on our academic performance; that is what we are too young for!
We want a future where children don’t have to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. That future is communism. We will not tolerate anything but the best for the international working class!