The feet of a young Briton are planted in a pair of pristine white shoes, stood in a small town called Reason. Laid out before them is a foggy crossroad.

To the left the road is wide, well-paved and unused. It winds aimlessly and confused, splitting off into many directions. There is a sound there too, but it is muted and incomprehensible.

The sounds the young person hears are of crowds; congregations of people pushing or pulling in a political direction, eager for ‘change’. Which way does he go? How does he come to make such an important decision?

Law student, Joseph Lappin says: “If someone is personally affected by a particular event in an adverse way, they may become politicised to the right or left. But, generally the economy will be the main reason for a shift in one’s political views. If people are comfortable financially they are less likely to become radicalised.”

It is the case that a large number of young people today are concerned with issues that primarily affect how much weight is in their pocket, rather than how many dead bodies are in the ground. Contending with top-up fees, rent and an active social life puts stress on every student’s mind to the point where the survival of their way of life comes under threat.  

Although these are the conditions students live in today, they may be changing. Peter McLaren of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, a socialist movement attracting more and more young people, says: “I think money will become increasingly irrelevant. If people haven’t got any money they’ll be looking for solutions that can actually provide answers to why they haven’t got any.” Although it has been the case in the past that the student is continually worried about how he or she looks, the gadgets in their hands and their private property, McLaren suggests the culture is changing: “I know that at present it is very much the Thatcherite culture, that is hard to change, which is precisely focused on the value of money and materialism and what you have. But it’s an ideal opportunity for the Left to get it back together to challenge that.”

It starts with education: ‘To learn is to change’. The Morning Star, Britain’s only socialist daily newspaper, is dedicated to this cause. Not ‘education’ in the traditional sense of the National Curriculum but instead a spreading of new ideas. “What we’ve found is that most people consider socialism, or communism, to be dead,” says writer and circulation manager, Ivan Beavis, of the Morning Star, “but that is the only viable alternative to what is going on. What we want to inform people is that a form of socialism is achievable, that the multinationals and the people who tell us it isn’t, are really only saying so because it’s not in their interests.”

But what also exists, apart from the explanation that people are not ready for it, is a view that the Left is in disarray. Without a unification of existing socialist groups, splintered because of ideological differences, the cause can never succeed in voicing a coherent message that people can neither understand nor get behind.  

As it is, the war for the minds of young people is being won on a vast plain of illusion, including television, Hollywood, computer games and, in a large number of cases, the historically championed escape from the insulated self; alcohol. Amongst young people this culture dulls the brain’s ability to understand a different concept of existence. It is with scientific thoroughness that the capitalist idea and mainstream media have exploited the individual to the point where people are now beginning to ‘wake up’. It is with a look to history, recent and not so recent, that we can see a pattern emerging.

Germany in the 1930s was a time of great upheaval opportunistically seized upon by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The economy was in ruins and the memory of a war, where vast crowds of disaffected young and old were whipped into a frothing frenzy by being told what they wanted to hear: that there will be ‘change’.

Deputy leader of the 10,000-strong and growing British National Party (BNP), Simon Darby, believes conditions are ripening. Referring to the increasing recruitment of young people, he explains: “People put up with a lot of things if you can give them money to buy electrical goods and gadgets and have a good standard of life. But when that goes I’m afraid it’s the old adage; ‘the crowd is fickle’ and indeed they are and they’ll look for something else.”  

But perhaps they are not so fickle, as student, Joseph Lappin, comments: “The BNP has been able to manipulate the working classes into believing and adopting the view that the Labour Party, the traditional party of the working classes, is unable to cater for their needs.” Even so, their planning of an upcoming rally in Liverpool has forced Everton Football Club to re-schedule one of their games because not enough Merseyside police are available to cover both events.    

Growing pains such as these were seen not as far back, in 1968 – a year of revolution and disaffection – when people were taking to the streets in protest, students and workers fighting not just for their rights and their liberty, but everyone’s. Although today’s discontent has not quite reached the cusp of direct action, during 1968 another group began to organise: the British National Front, (http://www.natfront.com/) a party currently experiencing a significant, if unsubstantial, period of success by achieving their best election results in thirty years. The party, single-issue in its approach and preoccupied with its obsession of a white Britain, is as outdated and irrelevant as the words of its leader, Tom Holmes, when he says: “The whole thing is a plot. It’s only the white people that do anything. We say race and nation. Race is the priority. Once the race is gone, that’s it.”

But people are waking up, as Darby says, but it seems more have awoken to the rise of the divisive policies of the BNP, realising a reaction must come to quell their appetite for power.

Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

But now, presented to the young person, there was a parting of the mist; a third path straight ahead. It led upward, a steep climb beset on all sides by loose and jagged rock. But thousands of familiar faces surrounded the void. They were climbing too.

Educator, linguist, philosopher and anarchist, Noam Chomsky, believes that every system you can imagine infringes on personal liberty and we agree to that infringement if we accept it as reasonable, as part of our choice of how a reasonable society should be run. He says choose your oppression.

A writer and member of the Anarchist Federation, pseudonymously known as Odessa Steps, says: “People thinking and acting for themselves, people organising without boundaries, going where they like, confronting who they want, challenging, fighting, resisting, together. This is what anarchism is, getting to a place where their laws and rules, their way of thinking, their boundaries and walls no longer have meaning and are never again allowed to stop us doing what we like and what we must. A world of freedom and co-operation.”

The young person looks again and realises: there was no Left or Right. Only Up and Down:

“There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.” – Bob Dylan, 1963