Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA.
Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.
Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters — Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity,
Forty-five years ago today, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library — home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries — was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed police and organized thugs, dispatched from the south under the protection and direction of the United National Party government of J.R. Jayawardena. Ministers Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew — who boasted in print that the Sinhalese must rise to “protect Buddhism” — arrived in Jaffna to oversee the operation. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the library. No one was prosecuted. No minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of May 31, 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island — and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, UNP and SLFP alike, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since independence.
We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand. We gather to draw the lessons that the ruling class — of every party, of every era — has worked hardest to prevent the people of this island from drawing.
What was destroyed that night?
The books that burned were irreplaceable — Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning a people’s sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.
This was the language of Sinhala chauvinism — not a fringe ideology, but the official state ideology, entrenched in the very constitution of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the state religion. And it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies — the austerity, the open-market “liberalization,” the assault on wages and public services — that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.
The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point — a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organized Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by state institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire communities — Tamil and Sinhalese — and culminate in the final military assault of May 2009 at Mulivaikkal, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred in what the United Nations itself acknowledged as potential war crimes, while the world looked away.
Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, “Never Again”. Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. Never again a Mulivaikkal.
But “never again” cannot be a wish. It must be a program.
Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over — but the conditions that produced the war are not. The military still occupies the North and East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Mulivaikkal commemorations — the most basic act of mourning the dead — are physically disrupted by state-backed mobs and security forces. Tamil protesters are harassed by racist mobs and are arrested. A vicious social media hate campaign, coordinated and deliberate, brands every Tamil who speaks of their history, their grief, or their rights as a terrorist, an LTTE sympathizer, a separatist. Tamil writers find their books blocked by government censors under the cynical banner of “national unity.” And presiding over all of this today is the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — a party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a government of “national unity” while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.
We must say this plainly: the militarization of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive governments — from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe to Dissanayake — have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist state that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military — the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier — is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.
The moral disorientation you see in Sinhalese society today — the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism — is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies — because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor.
It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal
The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party — which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition — was once the largest workers’ party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Bandaranaike — and sealed Tamil oppression into the very constitution of the republic. Colvin R. de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a minister over the entrenchment of Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.
Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalizing this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the seventy-eight years of independence it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois parties — the TULF, the TNA and its successors — have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE’s separatist program, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist state would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and East, and incapable of addressing the root class question.
The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class — Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim — in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.
What does “Never Again” demand of us?
When we say “never again,” we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.
Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people — because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument.
Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred — because we understand that the pogrom was organized against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.
Never again a Mulivaikkal means: never again will the working class accept a “military solution” to what is a social and political problem — because we understand that the massacre of Tamil civilians served not the interests of Sinhalese workers but the interests of a military apparatus and a ruling class that then turned its guns on Sinhalese workers in austerity, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights.
The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades and the suppression of Tamil commemorations — they are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualized labor, and IMF austerity on Sinhalese workers. The same military that massacred Tamils at Mulivaikkal is the instrument of a state that imprisons striking workers and breaks trade unions. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is Capital.
What are we fighting for?
We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement — not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for:
The immediate end to military occupation of the North and East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. The right to commemorate the Tamil dead at Mulivaikkal and all sites of atrocity — without harassment, disruption, or criminalization. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into Sinhalese society — a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July through to Mulivaikkal. And above all — a socialist political program that places the resources of this island — its land, its labor, its productive capacity — under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.
The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilization. It held books that no one can recover. But it also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything — willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples — in defense of its power and profit.
We honor the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment — the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary.
A heritage was rendered ashes. But the struggle lives on!
Never again — through the unity of the working class of the North and the South!
This political report for the week of March 22–28, 2026, is compiled by theSocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
I. Imperialism and War: The Iran Catastrophe Deepens
The dominant political development of the week was the further catastrophic escalation of the US-Israeli war against Iran, now entering its fourth week. On Saturday, 22 March, President Trump posted an ultimatum on his social media platform demanding that Iran “fully open, without threat, the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours,” threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power infrastructure, beginning with its largest power plant. The WSWS characterised this as a threat of genocidal violence without precedent in the post-World War II era, comparable only to the Truman administration’s nuclear ultimatum to Japan in 1945.[1]
The scale of the threat was not rhetorical. The Damavand Combined Cycle Power Plant — Iran’s largest, located 35 kilometres from Tehran’s centre — supplies electricity to approximately ten million people. Any strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran’s sole operating commercial reactor, risks catastrophic radioactive release. The IAEA Director General has warned that even severing the facility’s power supply lines could trigger a reactor meltdown. Iran responded by declaring all US and Israeli energy infrastructure across the region as legitimate targets, with Gulf states whose populations depend on electricity-powered desalination plants facing a potential humanitarian catastrophe of their own.
By week’s end, the trajectory had moved unambiguously toward ground invasion. Trump, in an interview with the Financial Times, declared openly: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon was preparing for “weeks of ground operations,” and approximately 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were reported to be readying for deployment. The 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force — a 3,000-strong rapid-deployment brigade — was identified by the New York Times as a candidate force for seizing Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth provided the clearest statement of the administration’s actual position: “We negotiate with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran.” This cynical formulation — coupling public talk of negotiations with accelerating military preparations — exposes the character of US imperialism: diplomacy as a screen for war, with mass violence as both means and end.
In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered a further expansion of the “security zone” in the south. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since the Israeli ground assault began on 2 March. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Three journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine. Human rights documentation through Day 25 of the Iran war recorded at least 6,530 killed, including 640 confirmed civilians.
The WSWS insists that these are not individual acts of militarist excess but the systematic expression of a capitalist imperialist order in deep crisis, using war to secure control of energy resources, chokepoints and global hegemony. The Newroz 2026 statement of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi (Turkey/SEP) — issued on 22 March — placed the war in this broader framework, linking imperialist aggression against Iran, Lebanon and Gaza to the political interests of regional bourgeoisies and the strategic requirements of US world dominance. The statement called for the building of rank-and-file committees across factories, ports, mines, hospitals and schools, the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East, the closure of NATO bases including those in Türkiye, and the formation of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.[2]
II. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Spain provided the week’s starkest illustration of pseudo-left capitulation to imperialism. The PSOE-Sumar coalition — which weeks earlier had revived the “No to war” slogan associated with the 2003 anti-Iraq War mass movement — announced a €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine following a meeting between Prime Minister Sánchez and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing Spain’s total commitment to approximately €4 billion. The frigate Cristóbal Colón was simultaneously dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. A token €5 billion social subsidy package — temporary tax cuts and a symbolic rent freeze attempt — was offered as political cover.[3]
The manoeuvre was transparent. The PSOE-Sumar government made this announcement against the backdrop of an unprecedented wave of industrial action across Spain: a nationwide doctors’ strike involving more than 175,000 workers, a three-day national railway strike, airport ground handling stoppages threatening to paralyse Easter travel, regional education strikes — with Catalonia’s culminating in more than 100,000 people on the streets of Barcelona — and general strikes in the Basque Country on 17 March. The working class in struggle was answered with rearmament and tokenism.
The WSWS is unequivocal: PSOE-Sumar’s anti-war posture was never anything other than a political calculation to contain domestic opposition. Its rapid re-integration into NATO war logistics — complementing Spain’s earlier facilitation of US strikes on Iran — exposes the class interests that animate such formations. Sumar, positioned as the “left” partner of the coalition, is identified as a direct instrument of imperialism, channelling dissent into manageable parliamentary terrain while voting through military budgets and suppressing class struggle.
Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) received analogous treatment. Its call for “global people’s power” against the Iran war — superficially radical in rhetoric — was subjected to sharp political critique as pseudo-left opportunism. The FSP’s initiative, the WSWS argued, reflects a nationalist parliamentary logic that accommodates bourgeois parties and dissipates class power through appeals that refuse to break with the capitalist state. The SEP insists that genuine anti-war struggle must be grounded in proletarian internationalism and independent socialist organisation.[4]
III. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights
The Trump administration continued its domestic militarisation offensive during the week. ICE deployments to airports in force — framed publicly as immigration enforcement — were characterised by the WSWS as a deliberate erosion of democratic norms and a rehearsal for the normalisation of federal paramilitary presence in civilian public life. The SEP connects this directly to the war drive: the same oligarchic project that prosecutes imperialist war abroad constructs the police state apparatus at home.
Australia’s Labor government provided a parallel illustration of bourgeois democracy’s hollowing out. Having lost a High Court ruling on offshore detention, the Albanese government circumvented the decision by transporting former asylum seekers to Nauru. The SEP described this as demonstrating the capitalist state’s readiness to flout its own legal constraints in order to uphold racist border regimes — which serve both capitalist labour market requirements and imperialist geopolitical alliances.
Cuba’s humanitarian crisis deepened further as a nationwide blackout struck the island amid US restrictions blocking incoming Russian fuel shipments. This is imperialist economic warfare targeting working people directly, using energy denial as a weapon of coercion.
The German city of Duisburg maintained its entry ban against Mohamedou Ould Slahi — the Mauritanian — a Guantánamo survivor and author, in a measure that exemplifies the integration of state repression, anti-democratic precedent and the ongoing brutalisation of those processed through imperialist detention machinery.
IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
Class struggle intensified across multiple fronts, with the trade union bureaucracy consistently functioning as the principal obstacle to the conversion of industrial militancy into political power.
In London, more than 300 Unite members at Stagecoach’s Bow garage struck for four days (19–22 March) against punishing rosters, inadequate rest breaks and dangerous fatigue — conditions forcing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Stagecoach mounted a systematic strikebreaking operation, importing replacement drivers from other cities and billeting them in hotels. Unite responded by sabotaging the action: officials called off a coordinated strike at Lea Interchange Bus Company — a Stagecoach subsidiary a few miles away — and declared a “win” based on a three-year deal pegging future increases to CPI rather than the previously demanded RPI, while leaving victimisation of union reps unaddressed. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union simultaneously suspended rolling stoppages by 1,800 London Underground drivers for closed-door talks.[5]
The WSWS analysis is direct: the union apparatus acts not as an instrument of working-class power but as a managerial layer whose function is to contain, fragment and ultimately defeat industrial resistance. The strategic response is the formation of rank-and-file committees that link garages and sectors, set non-negotiable safety demands, coordinate unified action, and raise the demand for democratic workers’ control of public transport.
In Australia, Tasmanian teachers conducted rolling statewide strikes over real-wage cuts and deteriorating conditions — the third round of action since September 2025 — while the AEU bureaucracy deliberately staggered the action by region (northwest on Tuesday, north on Wednesday, south on Thursday) to minimise its impact and prevent coordination with the simultaneous Victorian teachers’ strike. The tactic is well-established: token industrial action that creates the appearance of struggle while preserving the bureaucracy’s role as negotiating intermediary and absorber of militancy.[6]
Spain’s strike wave — the full breadth of which crossed healthcare, transport, rail, education and the public sector — demonstrated the objective depth of class anger. The Catalan education strike, supported by 90 percent of educators and culminating in 100,000 on the streets of Barcelona, is among the most significant educational mobilisations in recent Spanish history. That this emerged simultaneously with the PSOE-Sumar government’s announcement of a billion-euro military package for Ukraine underscores the central political contradiction: the same government which presides over real wage cuts and social austerity now channels resources to militarism while deploying union bureaucracies and its pseudo-left partners to contain the resistance.
V. Economic Warfare and Global Instability
The week’s economic developments were inseparable from the war drive. The Iran conflict’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of global oil passes — continued to generate financial turbulence across Asian markets. The imperialist war is simultaneously a political project and an act of structural economic destabilisation that strikes workers internationally through energy price inflation, supply chain disruption and currency volatility.
Cuba’s energy crisis — intensified by US restrictions on Russian fuel shipments — illustrates how imperialist economic coercion operates as a form of warfare targeting entire populations. The IMF, which had previously lauded Sri Lanka as an austerity “success story,” continued to provide ideological cover for the social devastation its programmes produce. These are not disconnected crises but expressions of the same capitalist order in its period of accelerating decay.
VI. The Revolutionary Tasks
The week’s events collectively underscore the axis of ICFI/SEP political analysis: war, dictatorship, austerity and bureaucratic betrayal are not separate phenomena but interlinked expressions of the capitalist system’s terminal crisis. Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum is not an aberration but the language of a ruling class prepared to obliterate the infrastructure of a nation of 90 million people to secure strategic and economic objectives. The pseudo-left formations — PSOE-Sumar, the FSP, the trade union bureaucracies — function consistently to contain and divert the social opposition that these conditions generate.
The correct working-class response — as the WSWS insists — is the building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities, international coordination through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, political independence from all bourgeois parties, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International to provide the revolutionary socialist leadership that the objective situation demands.
This political report for the week of March 15-21, 2026, is compiled by thesocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
I. Imperialism and War: The Escalating Offensive Against Iran and the Middle East
The dominant political fact of the week was the accelerating US-Israeli war against Iran and the wider Middle East, now crossing into qualitatively new and more dangerous territory. The Trump administration formally requested over $200 billion in supplemental war funding from Congress — a figure that exceeds the peak annual cost of the Iraq war and dwarfs the entire US expenditure on arming Ukraine over three years. Defence Secretary Hegseth confirmed the figure could “move” upward. This astronomical request, on top of the existing $839 billion defence budget, is not a contingency measure but a preparation: the administration is actively deliberating ground-invasion scenarios, including the seizure of Kharg Island — the hub for 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports — and the securing of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles.[1]
Fire and plumes of smoke rises after a drone struck a fuel tank forcing the temporary suspension of flights. near Dubai International Airport, in United Arab Emirates, early Monday, March 16, 2026. [AP Photo/AP Photo]
The USS Tripoli, carrying approximately 2,200 Marines of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was confirmed steaming through the Strait of Malacca toward the Persian Gulf. Republican senators and congressmen openly called for the seizure of Kharg Island, with Senator Lindsey Graham posting: “He who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war.” US intelligence official Joe Kent resigned his post at the National Counterterrorism Center, declaring he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” and stating that Iran had posed no imminent threat — a rare fissure within the ruling apparatus that nonetheless does not alter imperialism’s strategic drive.[2]
The war has already produced mass civilian casualties and cultural devastation in Iran. US-Israeli air strikes struck museums, historical sites and cultural infrastructure alongside residential areas, with Iran’s Red Crescent reporting at least 47,000 residential units destroyed. The bombing of Iran’s cultural heritage is not incidental but structural: a deliberate strategy to break social cohesion and erase national memory in order to facilitate imperial domination.
Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon opened a new and bloody front in this expanding war. Israel moved from intensive air and artillery strikes to a large-scale ground operation across southern Lebanon, with plans — confirmed by Axios — to seize the entire area south of the Litani River. Senior Israeli officials stated openly: “We are going to do what we did in Gaza.” In Lebanon, over 960 people had been killed and at least 2,400 wounded since Israel launched its assault on 2 March, including at least 110 children. The invasion is not a “border security” action but a planned occupation modelled on the genocidal campaign in Gaza, conducted under the full military and political umbrella of Washington.[3]
European powers moved to deepen their complicity. EU governments circulated conditions for participation in operations tied to the Iran war, including “freedom of navigation” missions in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran formally warned the UK that allowing US bombers to use RAF Fairford and other British bases constituted direct participation in aggression. Germany and Canada’s prime ministers attended a massive NATO Arctic exercise explicitly preparing for confrontation with Russia, demonstrating that the drive toward generalised war is not confined to the Middle East.
India’s alignment with the imperialist aggression was also exposed: New Delhi co-sponsored UN language condemning Iran’s defensive responses while refusing to condemn US-Israeli aggression, tightening military and economic ties that reflect India’s own geostrategic ambitions within the imperialist world order.
The WSWS placed the war in its broadest context: military spending on this scale will be paid for through the destruction of social programmes. Within 24 hours of the $200 billion request being confirmed, the Postmaster General warned Congress that the USPS would run out of cash within a year. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” had already imposed $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over a decade, $536 billion to Medicare, and $186 billion to food assistance — the largest cut to food aid in US history. War and social devastation are two arms of a single class offensive.[4]
II. The Rising Class Struggle and the Treachery of the Union Bureaucracy
The week was marked by a powerful upsurge of working-class resistance in the United States and internationally — and by the systematic efforts of trade-union bureaucracies to contain, isolate, and betray these struggles.
The JBS meatpacking strike at Greeley, Colorado entered its third day and remained the focal point of the WSWS’s class-struggle coverage. Approximately 3,800 workers — the overwhelming majority immigrants, speaking over 50 languages — struck the largest beef plant in the US in the largest meatpacking stoppage since the Hormel strike of 1985–86. Workers walked out over poverty wages (starting at $23 an hour), murderous line speeds, dangerous chemical exposures, inadequate PPE, abusive supervision, and housing abuses affecting Haitian workers lured to the plant through TikTok advertisements. As one worker stated: “We cannot continue to be worked like slaves.”[5]
The WSWS documented the central contradiction in the strike: the enormous militant energy of the rank and file, constrained and threatened by the UFCW bureaucracy. UFCW Local 7 had already signalled it would limit the strike to two weeks; the national UFCW had deliberately kept Greeley outside the 2025 national JBS contract to isolate these workers. The company moved immediately to divert cattle to its Cactus, Texas plant, with UFCW Local 540 in Cactus offering no solidarity. The IWA-RFC issued a perspective calling on workers to form independent rank-and-file strike committees, appeal to workers at every JBS facility, and build international solidarity against this Brazilian-owned multinational whose ultimate masters are BlackRock, Vanguard, and the global financial oligarchy.[6]
BP locked out approximately 900 workers at its Whiting, Indiana refinery after workers voted 98.3 percent against the company’s “last, best and final” offer. The proposed contract would have cut hourly wages by $8–$10, eliminated 100 union positions, introduced AI with no job protections, and closed the environmental department. BP moved to operate the refinery with temporary and contract workers — a dangerous provocation in a facility surrounded by residential neighbourhoods on the shore of the world’s largest freshwater body. The WSWS called for national and international solidarity and warned that the USW apparatus would seek to impose concessions.
The UAW bureaucracy’s role as “management’s enforcer” at Columbia University was exposed when Region 9A officials threatened the student workers’ local with “receivership” if it did not narrow its demands, particularly those tied to campus democratic rights. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman condemned the apparatus’s conduct directly, calling it subordination of worker militancy to managerial and state imperatives.
The betrayal of the Kaiser Permanente strike was confirmed and deepened. The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy had abruptly ended the 31,000-worker walkout in California and Hawaii without a contract, without a tentative agreement, and without a membership vote. A partial “settlement” cut workers’ wage demands from nearly 30 percent to 21.5 percent over four years — barely keeping pace with inflation — and secured no retroactive pay. Workers at Kaiser subsequently staged a 25,000-strong one-day sympathy strike in defence of mental healthcare. The WSWS called for a decisive “No” vote on the sellout and the formation of rank-and-file committees at every Kaiser facility.[7]
The UAW–University of California tentative agreement was similarly denounced: weak raises, preserved no-strike clauses, and a deal rushed through without adequate membership review for 48,000 UC academic workers. The WSWS called for a “No” vote and independent rank-and-file committees.
In Los Angeles, UTLA and SEIU announced a possible April 14 LAUSD strike, with thousands of educators rallying against layoffs, understaffing, and the war on Iran. The WSWS drew the sharpest lessons from the San Francisco teachers’ betrayal, where the union bureaucracy, acting hand in glove with the Democratic Party, shut down a powerful four-day strike on the district’s terms — and within days, preliminary layoff notices were issued.[8]
Other labour flashpoints included: 6,000 DHL Express Teamsters voting overwhelmingly to authorise strike action; the RMT bureaucracy calling off planned driver strikes on the London Underground without a settlement; American Axle workers speaking out against UAW betrayals ahead of contract talks; a Ford worker, Gregory Knopf, killed at the Sharonville Transmission Plant when a press machine activated during maintenance; and Australian educators at the University of Newcastle striking over real pay cuts, with a pivotal Victorian educator strike set for 24 March.
The overall pattern confirms the WSWS analysis: the trade-union bureaucracies function not as instruments of workers’ struggle but as institutional stabilisers of capitalist rule, working systematically to isolate strikes, suppress rank-and-file initiative, and subordinate workers to management and the state.
III. Austerity, Social Catastrophe and the Crisis of Capitalism
The war has not interrupted but intensified the social catastrophe capitalism imposes on the working class. The US Federal Reserve, gripped by uncertainty as the war drives oil prices upward and disrupts supply chains, admitted that its forecasts were unreliable. Fed officials were simultaneously discussing rate cuts and potential hikes — a paralysis that reveals capitalism’s inability to reconcile competing imperatives. The social costs will, as always, be borne by workers through inflation, unemployment, and austerity.[9]
Los Angeles registered six homeless deaths per day — a direct structural product of the commodification of housing and healthcare. Michigan was struck by the worst tornadoes since 1980, killing four, exposing how decades of austerity have hollowed out public infrastructure and emergency preparedness. A meningitis outbreak in the UK, linked to chronic underfunding of public health services, claimed multiple fatalities. In Australia, the central bank raised interest rates again amid recession warnings, punishing workers for inflation. Portugal’s celebrated 2025 economic “miracle” was exposed as a bourgeois construction: corporate profits rose while wages stagnated and public services deteriorated.
These are not isolated incidents but expressions of a single, systemic reality: capitalism generates wealth for the few by imposing social catastrophe on the many.
IV. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights
The assault on democratic rights accelerated in multiple forms during the week. In North Texas, activists were convicted under sweeping “material support for terrorism” statutes for political solidarity activities — a landmark case criminalising dissent. Amazon workers were locked out of a warehouse during a tornado warning, footage showing managers denying shelter; the company prioritised property over lives.
In Australia, Queensland police arrested two protesters for displaying the slogan “from the river to the sea” under new LNP “hate speech” legislation. In Germany, cultural censorship intensified: municipal authorities moved to exclude left-wing bookshops from fairs, and the culture minister cancelled presentation of the Booksellers’ Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair under political pressure.
Italy’s Meloni government advanced judicial “reforms” — the Nordio Reform — to separate the careers of judges and prosecutors and weaken checks on executive power. The WSWS identified this not as a “technical” adjustment but as a political preparation for state suppression of mass opposition to war and austerity. Trump’s CDL Final Rule stripped approximately 200,000 immigrant truck drivers of commercial licences — a direct attack on immigrant labour designed to discipline and destabilise worker organisation.
ICE expanded its terror: hundreds of immigrants were illegally detained in Michigan; a Haitian asylum seeker died in Pittsburgh following ICE detention; ICE raids in Vermont and Kansas continued with expanded detention infrastructure.
These measures are not aberrations but the logical expression of a capitalist ruling class preparing to crush the mass opposition it knows is coming.
V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and the Defence of Trotskyism
The WSWS devoted significant coverage to exposing the political role of pseudo-left and reformist formations in disorienting the working class at a moment of acute historical crisis.
Kshama Sawant was profiled and critiqued: bold socialist rhetoric combined with repeated accommodation to municipal politics and reformist outcomes that leave capitalist power structures intact. The Australian Greens’ posturing against the Iran war was exposed as performing contained dissent within parliamentary channels, providing no genuine opposition to imperialist aggression. Canada’s NDP and affiliated unions similarly offered rhetorical opposition while remaining subordinated to the framework of the capitalist state. Spanish trade unions watered down anti-war positions to avoid antagonising the PSOE government.
The Morenoite rebrand as the Permanent Revolution Current was dissected as a revisionist manoeuvre: new branding masking continuity with nationalist and opportunist politics that dilute genuine Trotskyism and derail working-class revolutionary leadership.
The London meeting of the SEP (UK)— marking the 40th anniversary of the struggle that led to the expulsion of the Workers Revolutionary Party from the ICFI — was a centrepiece of the week’s political coverage. Addressed by David North, Chris Marsden, and Peter Schwarz, the meeting reaffirmed that the 1985–86 split was a decisive defence of Trotskyism against the petty-bourgeois, nationalist, and opportunist degeneration embodied by the Healy-Slaughter-Banda leadership. The speakers drew the direct connection between the historical struggle against revisionism and the present tasks: as the ICFI argued then and reiterated in London, the survival of revolutionary leadership requires uncompromising defence of the theory of Permanent Revolution, proletarian internationalism, and programmatic clarity. David North warned that the imperialist drive toward war — in the Middle East and beyond — aims to abolish the political gains of the 20th century and can only be answered by the international, politically independent working class.[10]
The week’s events confirm the ICFI’s perspective: the objective crisis of capitalism is driving the working class toward mass resistance. The decisive question is the construction of revolutionary leadership — the building of rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus, their international coordination, and the development of mass socialist parties capable of transforming class struggle into a conscious political offensive for workers’ power.
Reposted below is the Perspective published on the World Socialist Web Site on 24 November 2025.
David North delivered his lecture in Berlin and London on November 18 and 22, 2025 respectively.
At two major public meetings held over the past week—in Berlin on November 18 and London on November 22—David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, delivered lectures examining the global crisis of capitalism and the Trump administration’s drive to dictatorship. The text of his London lecture is presented here in full.
North used both events to announce the upcoming launch of Socialism AI, a groundbreaking tool to assist workers and youth in the development of socialist consciousness.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Leon Trotsky chose to pose a question as the title for several of his greatest essays on then unfolding political events. The most famous of these essays were “Where is Britain Going?” written in 1925, just one year before the eruption of the historic General Strike, “Towards Socialism or Capitalism?” also written in 1925, which dealt with critical issues related to the economic policies of the new Soviet state, and “Whither France?” written in 1934 as the country was entering into a period of intense class conflict.
Tonight’s lecture poses the question, “Where is America Going?” I think that most people, if asked, would respond rather quickly, “To hell.” And, if only meant metaphorically, the answer would be justified.
There is another similar phrase, “Going to hell in a hand basket”—denoting a crisis situation that is careening rapidly and uncontrollably toward disaster—that describes the US situation.
A challenge that I have confronted as I prepared this lecture is keeping apace with the speed of the political crisis.
On Thursday, Donald Trump posted a series of denunciations of Democratic Party senators and congressmen, accusing them of treason and calling for them to be punished “by death.” His statements were made in response to a video in which the Democratic legislators called on the military to “refuse illegal orders” that would compel them to violate their oath to respect and uphold the Constitution.
Many of the Democrats who posted the video have longstanding connections to US intelligence agencies, and so it must be assumed that their warning is based on high-level information about Trump’s plans to use the military to overthrow the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.
The video directly addressed the military:
We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military but that trust is at risk. …
This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Right now, the threats coming to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.
This is the sort of language that is used by besieged civilian politicians in the midst of a military coup d’etat. The legislators’ video, and Trump’s reply confirm that what is now taking place is an historically unprecedented breakdown of American democracy, of which the grotesque figure of Donald Trump is only a surface manifestation. To understand the crisis—its causes and consequences—it is necessary to penetrate beneath the surface, and examine its deeper economic and social roots.
Only by undertaking this deeper analysis, and linking Trump to the social milieu from which he emerged, the class interests that he represents, the crisis of the capitalist system, the massive contradictions of American society and the global challenges confronting US imperialism can one explain why the government of the United States has been placed by its ruling elite in the hands of a sociopathic criminal.
There is a justly celebrated passage in Marx’s 1850 account of The Class Struggles in France in which he described the bourgeois elite that ruled the country during the reign of Louis Philippe. Marx wrote:
Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.
If Marx were alive, he might write the following about the present regime in the United States:
The Wall Street Oligarchy and its corporate allies pervert the law, stack the government, and shape public opinion through a corrupt media that distorts and conceals social reality. Criminal swindling, thinly disguised graft, and wild obsession with personal wealth infect every layer of the elite, from the White House, the Congress, judiciary, and corporate boardrooms to the prestigious citadels of academia. The accumulation of billions is derived not from production, but from speculation, the manipulation of debt, the plundering of social resources, and the impoverishment of the mass of the population.
The Oligarchy’s insatiable greed and lust for self-gratification collides not only with bourgeois law but also the most basic moral precepts. From the White House and the Mar-a-Lago brothel to mega-million-dollar estates, perverse and predatory appetites reign unchecked: billionaires and high placed politicians welcome the services of child sex traffickers like Epstein, deriving pleasure from the raw exploitation of the helpless. In these circles, money, depravity, and violence are inseparable.
Trump’s “art of the deal” is the modus operandi of the capitalist class, encompassing every form of corporate and government criminality: amassing profits from the sale of aircraft and missiles used in the genocidal assault on Gaza, the murder of unidentified fishermen in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, the illegal deployment of military forces in US cities, and the seizure and deportation by ICE agents of immigrants, in violation of all legal rights, from the United States.
The financial-corporate Oligarchy, in its business operations and orgies, is nothing but a super-Mafia at the summit of capitalist society, flaunting crime and perversion while ordinary people pay the cost in misery and blood.
Following the second election of Trump in November 2024, exactly one year ago, the World Socialist Web Site warned that his repeated threats to rule as a dictator were not merely an expression of his desire to emulate his personal hero, Adolf Hitler. Rather, these threats anticipated the restructuring of American politics based on its real class structure. The massive concentration of wealth in an infinitesimal fraction of American society is not compatible with traditional forms of bourgeois democratic rule.
The political structure of the United States is being brought into alignment with its class structure. The most basic feature of American society is its staggering level of social inequality. Any serious discussion of the American reality that avoids this issue is as intellectually worthless and politically fraudulent as a discussion of the politics of ancient Rome that failed to mention slavery. The term oligarchy is not employed as a rhetorical flourish. It is an appropriate description of the concentration of massive wealth and power in the United States.
On November 3, the humanitarian organization Oxfam published a report titled “Unequal: The Rise of a New American Oligarchy and the Agenda We Need.” Among its key findings are:
The wealthiest 0.1 percent in the US own 12.6 percent of assets and 24 percent of the stock market.
Between 1989 and 2022, a US household at the 99th percentile gained 101 times more wealth than the median household and 987 times more wealth than a household at the 20th percentile.
Over 40 percent of the US population—including 48.9 percent of children—are considered poor or low income.
The Oxfam report states:
In the past year alone, the 10 richest billionaires got $698 billion dollars richer. Since 2020, their inflation adjusted wealth is up 526%. The richest 0.0001% [1 in a million] control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of US history defined by extreme inequality. … The richest 1% own half of the stock market [49.9%], while the bottom half of the US owns just 1% of the stock market.
The report exposes the claim that the great mass of working class Americans participate in the country’s wealth. It writes:
Despite notions of the U.S. as an exceptionally prosperous society, international comparisons illustrate a different reality. Looking at the 10 largest OECD economies, the U.S. has the highest rate of relative poverty, the second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy.
These poor outcomes may seem surprising but are consistent with the country’s outlier status on social policy. Within that same group of peer countries, the U.S. is dead last in generosity of unemployment benefits, second-to-last in public spending for families with children, seventh out of 10 in public social spending overall, and number one for working hours needed to exit poverty. Of the 10 largest OECD economies, the U.S. tax and transfer system ranks second-to-last in reducing inequality.
The extreme concentration of wealth is inseparable from oligarchic political power. Trump’s cabinet and top appointees possess a collective net worth exceeding $60 billion. This administration’s wealth dwarfs all predecessors. Sixteen of Trump’s twenty-five wealthiest appointees rank among the 813 billionaires in a nation of 341 million people—placing them in the top 0.0001 percent. This is not symbolic representation. It is direct rule by the oligarchy.
It is a characteristic of every ruling class that as it heads for extinction it becomes increasingly aggressive. The more irrational its system becomes, the more violent the efforts to legitimize it. A parallel for this can be found in the decades preceding the French Revolution. As the nobility sought to reassert lost privileges and defend threatened prerogatives, it became ever more extreme and intransigent in its methods. The aristocratic offensive of the 1760s through 1789 was not a defensive reaction but an aggressive attempt to reverse the historical erosion of feudal privilege. And as the aristocracy sensed its ultimate doom, its desperation manifested itself in ever more violent assertions of arbitrary power. This process came to a head with the eruption of revolution in July 1789.
In the decades preceding the Second American Revolution of 1861-65, the slaveowners of the South sought to illegalize and stamp out every form of opposition to slavery. In a manner similar to the operations of ICE agents today against immigrants, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 empowered federal agents to seize runaway slaves who had fled to the North and return them to their masters. In 1857, the Supreme Court, controlled by the slave power, declared that slaves were merely property and were not protected by the laws that applied to citizens and human beings.
Finally, refusing to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the tyrants of the South began an insurrection against the United States in April 1861. The Confederate States of America proclaimed slavery as the foundation of civilization. A bloody civil war, which cost more than 700,000 lives, was required to suppress the rebellion and abolish slavery.
A similar process of political reaction and historical retrogression is underway today in the United States. The display of oligarchic power has become increasingly brazen, hostile to the forms of democratic legitimacy that have provided capitalist rule with at least a veneer of popular consent. Glorifying the legacy of slavery, Trump has ordered that the statues of Confederate military leaders, which had been removed from public places and military bases, be reassembled. The old battle cry of pro-Confederate racists, “The South shall rise again,” has become the policy of the US government.
Consider the spectacle staged in early September at the White House: virtually the entire leadership of the technology oligarchy, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple, Sam Altman of Open AI, Sergei Brin of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and other billionaires and corporate executives, paraded through the presidential residence, their presence signifying the complete subordination of formal governmental authority to financial and corporate power. This was not a private meeting. It was a public coronation. The president of the United States functions as the most vulgar representative of a parasitic oligarchy. And then, not long after, an even more extraordinary spectacle: Trump and scores of billionaires and corporate executives dined at Windsor Castle with the King of England.
To give an indication of the levels of wealth they embody, the combined personal worth of two dozen of the richest at the table was $274 billion. The average figure per person of $11.4 billion is over 67,000 times the wealth of the median British person. Between them, they represented companies with a market capitalization of $17.7 trillion, more than the combined value of every publicly listed company incorporated in the UK.
The royal family is poor by the standards of its guests, holding barely a third of a percent of the personal wealth of these two dozen people. But what it brings to the table is a long history of inherited privilege, a tradition of centuries of rule and luxury, which the new financial and corporate aristocracy finds deeply attractive.
Meanwhile, on American soil, Trump is constructing a monument to oligarchic power that surpasses all historical precedent. The entire Executive Residence of the White House, the central building that houses the president and serves as the primary ceremonial space, comprises approximately 55,000 square feet. Trump’s new ballroom, financed by billionaire donors and major corporations, will span 90,000 square feet—nearly double the size of the White House itself. The White House is being turned into a palace. This is the construction of a Versailles on the Potomac, a brazen assertion of oligarchic supremacy. The old residence is also being refurbished. Trump has proudly posted photos of a redecorated bathroom that was once used by Lincoln. It now features a gold toilet seat, upon which Trump can plant his posterior while he ponders and plans new crimes.
Taken as a whole, the actions of the Trump administration are an attempt to impose archaic forms of rule—hierarchical, authoritarian, explicitly anti-democratic—upon a modern mass society characterized by vast productive capacity, advanced technology, instantaneous global communications and the organizational potential of billions of workers integrated into the world economy. This anachronism, the fusion of ancient forms of despotic oligarchy with the technological and productive apparatus of a world economy, creates contradictions of extraordinary intensity.
The unfolding counterrevolution in politics is, inevitably, justified by a counterrevolution in thought.
The “Dark Enlightenment,” with its explicit invocation of a corporate-based monarchy, is an attempt to provide philosophical justification for this reversion to despotism dressed in the language of contemporary technological rationality. Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and patron of Vice President JD Vance and countless other fascistic politicians, wrote in 2009: “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Another leading “philosopher” of the Dark Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin, has proposed that government be structured as a corporation, with a CEO-monarch wielding absolute authority.
Are we witnessing merely the disgusting and irrational actions of manic individuals driven by unlimited greed and hunger for power? Or is there a deeper, objective basis for these phenomena rooted in the inner laws of capitalist accumulation?
A correct answer to this question is essential because a critique of capitalism based on moral outrage, however justified that outrage may be, cannot provide the foundation for a revolutionary struggle against it. There have been innumerable mass demonstrations against the Gaza genocide, but what has been totally absent from these demonstrations is a realistic political perspective and program based on a scientific understanding of the relationship between the genocide and the existing capitalist-imperialist system. In the absence of such an analysis, the protests became an appeal to the imperialist governments and corporations, the sponsors and defenders of Israel, to withdraw their support for genocide.
An article published on November 12 in the Wall Street Journal exposes the futility of such appeals. Titled “The Gaza War Has Been Big Business for U.S. Companies,” it reports:
The conflict built an unprecedented arms pipeline from the U.S. to Israel that continues to flow, generating substantial business for big U.S. companies—including Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Caterpillar.
Sales of U.S. weapons to Israel have surged since October 2023, with Washington approving more than $32 billion in armaments, ammunition and other equipment to the Israeli military over that time, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of State Department disclosures.
Moral outrage provides no effective direction for political actions. Rather, the failure of moral appeals to the ruling class generally leads to disappointment, pessimism and demoralization. Moreover, and no less fatal to a genuinely revolutionary perspective, it leads to a vast exaggeration of the power of the ruling elites. The contradictions that are embedded in the capitalist system and which create the conditions for a revolutionary explosion are not seen. And, the greatest error of all, the central role of the working class in the struggle against capitalism is ignored and even rejected.
The crimes and brutalities of the ruling class are not simply symptoms of bad character; they reflect the desperate struggles of a system to overcome its internal contradictions. The violence of oligarchy, the brazenness of its power-grabs, the descent into authoritarianism—all of these express the terminal crisis of the capitalist mode of production itself.
In recent years, the word “financialization” has come into common usage as a description of an essential change in the structure of the US and world capitalist economy. It denotes the ever more extreme detachment of the generation of profits and wealth from the process of production. Corporations realize a large portion of their profits through financial transactions—trading securities, lending and all manner of speculative investments. The principal features of financialization include the growth of banks and institutional investors relative to the real productive economy; the proliferation of complex financial instruments (derivatives, securitized loans, etc.) and the vast expansion of credit and debt.
Inseparably connected with the process of financialization is the massive growth of fictitious capital, that is, claims on future wealth out of proportion to, or independent of, the current productive economy. A share of stock is a claim on future profits that have not yet, and may never be, realized in production. Between 2000 and 2020, for every one dollar of net new investment in the real economy, about four dollars in financial liabilities were created. Thus, the process of financialization and the growth of fictitious capital creates, over time, an economy that more and more resembles a Ponzi scheme, where investors rely on continually rising asset values. Little attention is paid to whether the stock market valuation of a company assets bears any relation to the real earnings, based on the production and sales of goods and services.
Systemically, this has created a world of illusory wealth. The total Gross Domestic Product of the United States is estimated to be around $30 trillion-$30.5 trillion. But the total market capitalization of US-listed companies reached approximately $69 trillion-$71 trillion by October of this year. The total value of all publicly traded US stocks is, therefore, more than double—220 percent—the size of annual US economic output.
This is a historical reversal of the relationship of the stock market to the US economy. In 1971, total market capitalization equaled approximately 80 percent of the GDP, about a quarter of what it is today. This means that over the last 50 years, the value of financial assets has grown much faster than the underlying production of goods and services. Financial wealth and speculative capital have become untethered from the real economy.
This unsustainable relationship between the nominal value of the market is not only economically unsustainable, or, to use the famous phrase of Alan Greenspan, a sign of “irrational exuberance.” It is a manifestation of the historical decline of US capitalism.
In fact, when examined in its historical context, the year 1971 marked a fundamental watershed in the economic trajectory of American capitalism.
In August 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold at the rate of $35 per ounce, which had been established at the Bretton Woods economic conference of 1944 and which had served as the foundation of the post-World War II restabilization and growth of the world capitalist economy. The basis of dollar-gold convertibility was the overwhelming productive power and dominant role of American capitalism. The huge balance of trade and payments surpluses of the US underlay its pledge to redeem dollars held by foreign countries with gold.
But in the course of the 1950s and 1960s, as Europe and Japan rebuilt their war-shattered economies, the dominance of the United States steadily declined. As its trade surpluses steadily shrank, its commitment to dollar-gold convertibility became increasingly unviable. Fearing a run on the dollar and the depletion of its gold reserves, Nixon repudiated the agreements reached at Bretton Woods in 1944.
This decision generated global economic shock waves. The price of oil, measured in dollars, quadrupled. The dollar underwent a massive devaluation, a process which has continued for the last half century.
The rise of gold from $35/oz in 1971 to over $4,000 represents a de facto, objective measure of the long-term collapse in the real value of the US dollar. The more than hundredfold increase is therefore not an expression of gold becoming intrinsically “more valuable,” but of the dollar losing purchasing power and credibility.
If one takes gold as a proxy for the general price level over decades, a hundredfold increase implies a comparable erosion—roughly 99 percent—of the dollar’s real value. Few other indicators so starkly capture the cumulative effect of inflation, monetary expansion and persistent debt monetization since the end of the Bretton Woods system.
As a measure of its global economic position, the end of dollar-gold convertibility was a manifestation of crisis. However, a consequence of this decision was the removal of economically rational restraints on the accumulation of debts and deficits. The United States could cover its debts and deficits by printing dollars.
Since 1971, the US has financed deficits through expanding credit and, in recent decades, through unprecedented quantitative easing. The explosive rise in federal debt (from $400 billion in 1971 to $38 trillion today) underscores the degree to which the dollar is sustained not by convertibility but by global demand for dollar assets—a demand now under visible strain.
The gold price functions as an international referendum on the credibility of US monetary policy. A rise from $35 to $4,000 reflects broad, long-term hedging against dollar debasement. The decline in the dollar’s share of global reserves, the diversification into gold by central banks, and the growth of non-dollar trade arrangements all align with this trend.
Such a dramatic revaluation signifies not merely inflation, but a historic disintegration of the dollar’s value foundation. It expresses the same underlying contradictions—permanent trade deficits, deindustrialization, debt dependence, financialization—that now drive the broader decline of US hegemony.
The decline of the dollar is not only a monetary phenomenon. Over the past five decades, the erosion of US economic and geopolitical hegemony has assumed a cumulative, systemic character. The most visible index is the collapse of the country’s external financial position. Since the early 1990s, the United States has recorded uninterrupted and ever-widening trade deficits; the annual goods deficit, roughly $100 billion in 1990, now exceeds $1 trillion. This chronic imbalance expresses the hollowing-out of the country’s industrial base and its reliance on global financial inflows to sustain consumption and asset bubbles. The US Net International Investment Position—positive as late as the early 1980s—has plunged to more than $18 trillion, the largest debtor position in world history.
The United States is drowning in debt. Fifty years ago, in 1975, in the aftermath of the collapse of Bretton Woods and at the outset of the financialization process, the national debt stood at $533 billion. By 1985 it had tripled to $1.8 trillion. In 2005 the national debt was $7.9 trillion. Following the bailout of Wall Street by the Federal Reserve Bank in response to the crash of 2008, the national debt exploded. By 2015 it had reached $18.1 trillion. In 2020, following yet another bailout of Wall Street, the debt reached $27 trillion. As of 2025, the national debt stands at $38 trillion.
In the space of a half century, the national debt has grown by approximately 6,000 percent. During the same period, the GDP grew by only 1,321 percent. This means that the national debt has grown five times more than the total market value of all final goods and services produced by the United States.
To take a shorter time frame, in the space of a quarter century, from 2000 to 2025, the GDP grew approximately 187 percent while the national debt grew 566 percent.
Now let us examine the rise in personal debt. In 1975, personal debt totaled $500 billion. As of the third quarter of 2025, the total size of all forms of personal debt, which includes mortgages, credit card debt, auto loans, student loans and home equity lines of credit, stands at $18.59 trillion! This is a 36-fold increase.
During the same period, the annual income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has stagnated. The debt of the overwhelming majority of Americans is approximately one-third of their total household wealth. The ratio of debt to household wealth is substantially greater for the bottom half of the population. Between 2020 and 2024, a total of 2.45 million Americans filed for bankruptcy. As of September, 374,000 Americans have filed for bankruptcy. By the end of the year, the total number of bankruptcies in 2025 will exceed the 2024 number.
According to the most recent figures, approximately 75 percent of Americans are living “paycheck to paycheck.” This means that they have little or no money to cover emergencies should they arise. Tens of millions of Americans live on the brink of destitution.
Dickens’ famous description of France on the eve of the French Revolution as “the best of times … the worst of times” applies to present day America, and, in fact, to the world. While most Americans are living in various degrees of economic distress, an infinitesimal fraction have a level of wealth for which there is no precedent in the modern age, or even, perhaps, in world history. The total wealth of the mega-billionaires has been so widely reported that it is not necessary to review it in this report. Suffice it to say that after the announcement of Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay packet one is not surprised to read that the personal wealth of Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle, increased by $100 billion in just one day!
However, what must be stressed is that the astronomical scale of the fortunes of the Oligarchs is inextricably linked to the financialization of the US and global economy. Their personal wealth is built upon a mountain of fictitious capital. They are the embodiment of financial parasitism, deriving wealth not from the production of real value, but through the inflation of claims on value. They owe their riches to asset price inflation, leveraging, share buybacks, mergers and acquisitions, debt securitization and derivatives and arbitrage. The legalization and success of these operations is assured by the collaboration of presidents, congressmen and congresswomen, judges and government administrators whom the Oligarchs buy and bribe.
Their wealth has a malignant and socially criminal character, as the processes and policies which sustain it require not only the impoverishment of billions of people, but also endless wars (for the control of markets and critical resources) and ecological disaster.
The statistics that I have cited, and a far longer list could be presented, are unanswerable factual demonstrations of the socially regressive, reactionary and criminal character of modern capitalism. But the question still arises: do these facts demonstrate the historical breakdown of the capitalist system? Or to put the question somewhat differently, is the rising mass opposition to capitalism only an outraged response to social inequality, or is it, in a more profound historical sense, an objective manifestation, in the sphere of politics, of a revolutionary solution to economic contradictions within the capitalist system?
The answer to this question requires that one review and work through the implications of, in the context of the present-day financialization of the US and world economy, Marx’s analysis of the value form and his discovery and explanation of the declining rate of profit. Value, as Marx explained in Volume I of Capital, is not a thing. It is, rather, a social relationship which finds expression in the process of production.
In the capitalist system, value is created by the application, or expenditure, of human labor, which is the use value of the commodity labor-power purchased by the capitalist.
Profit is derived through the purchase of labor power by the capitalist class, which in the course of its utilization produces a greater amount of value than the wage that the worker received for the sale of his labor power to the capitalist.
In his analysis of the labor process, Marx identified the two components of capital: variable capital, which is the portion of capital that a capitalist invests in wages for the purchase of labor power, and constant capital, which is all non-human inputs into the production process, including raw materials, machinery, tools and buildings required to produce a commodity.
While constant capital transfers its value to the product, the expenditure on variable capital purchases labor power, whose use value (i.e., living labor) produces new value, generating surplus value (the value created by workers in production that exceeds the value paid to them as wages), from which profit is ultimately derived.
The rate of profit is defined by Marx as the ratio of surplus value generated by variable capital to the total capital—variable and constant capital—deployed in the labor process.
As the productive forces grow, the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increases. The result is a decline in the rate of profit. This law-governed process is the source of instability and crisis inherent in the capitalist system. However, the necessary effort of the capitalist class to counteract this decline in the rate of profit is the driving force of technological innovation aimed at increasing the efficiency of labor power in producing surplus value. The countervailing factors also include expansion of trade, the acquisition of new sources of “cheap labor” and, as we have reviewed, the increasing reliance on credit and debt to artificially increase profits, even as the underlying ratio between constant and variable capital grows increasingly unfavorable.
Over the last year, Wall Street has been engaged in a frenzy of speculative investment in Artificial Intelligence and associated automation technologies. It seems to be the realization of the dream of every corporate CEO. A way of drastically lowering labor costs has been found. And, in fact, corporations, within the US and internationally, are in the process of implementing massive job cuts.
Across industries from logistics to auto manufacturing to aerospace to telecom to banking, firms are implementing massive AI systems that eliminate clerical roles, customer support, coding, financial modeling and thousands of other functions that formerly provided employment.
In the UK, major corporations have announced significant AI-driven layoffs. BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs by 2030, with approximately 10,000 positions expected to be replaced by AI and automation in customer service and network management. Aviva is eliminating 2,300 roles in insurance operations following its Direct Line acquisition. BP is cutting 6,200 jobs—15 percent of its office-based workforce—by the end of 2025, with CEO Murray Auchincloss citing AI efficiency gains as part of cost-reduction drives.
The same process is sweeping through Western Europe. In Germany, Siemens has eliminated 5,600 industrial automation jobs; Lufthansa, 4,000 administrative roles; ZF Friedrichshafen faces 7,600 to 14,000 job losses tied to automation; Telefónica is cutting 6,000 to 7,000 jobs amid AI restructuring.
And across the United States, Amazon cut 14,000 corporate roles, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs through automated hubs, Salesforce replaced 4,000 customer service workers with AI agents.
However, whatever the short term increases in profitability that are achieved by individual corporations, the net effect of the vast displacement of human labor, the source of surplus value, is an accelerated rise in the ratio of constant to variable capital, and, therefore, a systemic decline in the rate of profit.
This process intensifies to a level of unprecedented scale the basic contradiction of capitalism identified by Marx. Surplus value cannot expand at the pace necessary to sustain the accumulating constant capital. The entire system is increasingly destabilized. Devaluation of capital, through bankruptcies, liquidations, write-downs and destruction of fixed capital, is a desperate response to the crisis of profitability.
Even amid the speculative frenzy unleashed by AI, concern is being raised about the socially devastating consequences of implementing this new technology. In an article published in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs [November/December 2025], titled “The Stagnant Order,” Professor Michael Beckley writes:
Some forecasts claim that artificial intelligence will turbocharge global output by 30 percent per year, but most economists expect it will add only one percentage point to annual growth. AI excels at digital tasks, yet the toughest labor bottlenecks are in physical and social realms. Hospitals need nurses more than they need faster scans; restaurants need cooks more than ordering tablets; lawyers must persuade judges, not just parse briefs. Robots remain clumsy in real-world settings, and because machine learning is probabilistic, errors are inevitable—so humans must often stay in the loop. Reflecting these limits, roughly 80 percent of firms using generative AI reported that it had no material effect on their profits, in a McKinsey Global Survey on AI.
Even if AI keeps advancing, major productivity gains may take decades because economies must reorganize around new tools. That offers little relief for today’s economies. Global growth has slowed from four percent in the first decades of the twenty-first century to about three percent today—and to barely one percent in advanced economies. Productivity growth, which ran at three to four percent annually in the 1950s and 1960s, has fallen close to zero. Meanwhile, global debt has swollen from 200 percent of GDP 15 years ago to 250 percent today, topping 300 percent in some advanced economies.
The conclusions drawn by Professor Beckley are bleak. “The United States is becoming a rogue superpower … the phrase ‘leader of the free world’ rings hollow even to American ears.”
What looms is not a multipolar concert of great powers sharing the world, but a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the 20th century; struggling states militarizing, fragile ones collapsing, democracies rotting from within, and the supposed guarantor of order retreating into parochial self-interest.
AI does not arrive as a savior of capitalism. Rather, it magnifies to an extraordinary degree the contradictions that already exist. The enormous mass of constant capital required for AI infrastructure confronts a vastly reduced supply of living labor to generate surplus value. This is not a contradiction that can be overcome within capitalism.
Facing this predicament, the ruling class seeks to counteract the crisis through ever more violent processes—attacks on working conditions, the evisceration of social programs, mass deportation programs, wars, genocide. The oligarchy, cornered by its own internal contradictions, lashes out with increasing desperation. The militarization of American cities, the support for fascism, the promotion of war against Russia and China—these are not rational policy choices. They are the convulsions of a dying system.
As one observes the operations of this president, his administration, and his coterie of mega-billionaire corporate sponsors and allies, it seems that one is watching a Scorsese movie. This past Monday, Trump hosted a state dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Those participating in the honoring of the Saudi ruler were an expanded list of the super-rich who attended the September White House function.
Just seven years have passed since bin Salman ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a legal permanent resident in the US and writer employed by the Washington Post. The correspondent, whose articles exposing the brutally repressive character of the regime had angered the crown prince, met a gruesome end.
On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents that he needed for his upcoming marriage. Bin Salman had sent a 15-member Saudi murder squad to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi once he was inside the consulate. After the doors had closed behind him, Khashoggi was grabbed and strangled. His body was dismembered. Turkish investigators believe that Khashoggi’s body parts were dissolved with hydrofluoric acid and disposed of. Not a trace of Khashoggi was ever found.
When asked about the role of the crown prince in Khashoggi’s murder, Trump replied, in the manner of a Mafia don, “Things happen.”
THINGS HAPPEN!
The selection of a crude gangster as president, the political equivalent of Tony Soprano, testifies to the putrefaction of the American ruling class.
In this lecture I have focused on the objective conditions and processes that have created a crisis that cannot be solved on a progressive basis other than through a socialist revolution. Moreover, the rapidly deteriorating conditions of life for the great majority of Americans is already producing a growing sentiment that an alternative to capitalism is necessary. This sentiment has found initial and politically naive expression in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, the financial citadel of world capitalism.
Of course, Mamdani has lost no time repudiating his “socialist” persona.
Since his election, Mamdani is in a pathetic “full Corbyn” mode, assuring the media and Wall Street that nothing he said during the election campaign should have been taken seriously, and going so far as to ask for an audience with Trump, and humiliating himself in the process. Yesterday, at a press conference in the Oval Office, Mamdani stood behind Trump like a well-behaved boy scout, nodding his head in approval as Trump toyed with him.
There is nothing surprising about this. Mamdani is only following the well-trod path of the aforementioned Corbyn, Iglesias of Podemos, Tsipras of Syriza, Mélenchon of La France Insoumise, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez of the DSA and countless others. The only element that distinguishes Mamdani from all his predecessors in the politics of betrayal is the speed and grotesque shamelessness of his repudiation of his “leftism.” He could not even wait until his inauguration as mayor.
On November 4, Mamdani declared upon winning the election:
After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.
It has taken Mamdani only days to make the transition from his bombastic election night demagogy to his pilgrimage to the White House. Mamdani has quickly and effortlessly become one of the “very conditions” that enable Trump to remain in power and implement his conspiracy to establish a dictatorship.
Mamdani’s self-debasement is not just an exercise in cowardice. It is the expression of the sort of vulgar pragmatic politics, typical of petty-bourgeois pseudo-leftism, that is devoid of any understanding, or even interest in understanding, the contradictions of capitalism and the tendencies that drive it to crisis, fascism and war—and the working class to revolution.
Mamdani’s treachery demonstrates again that the central issue of our time is the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
The existence of an extreme crisis does not guarantee the overthrow of capitalism. Socialism is not simply the product of the working out of objective laws. The declining rate of profit does not lead automatically to the end of the capitalist system. The deeper the crisis, the more violent and ruthless will be the efforts of the ruling class to save its system, even at the cost of the destruction of civilization.
In the final analysis, the overthrow of capitalism depends on the conscious struggle of the working class for socialism. Objective economic processes create both the necessity and conditions for the overthrow of capitalism. But the socialist revolution is the outcome of the conscious intervention of the working class in the historic process.
The history of the 20th century was dominated by revolutionary struggles. The great political lesson of those struggles was that victory requires the leadership of a Marxist political party, based on the working class and supported by democratic organs of working class power. That was the basis of the victory of the 1917 October Revolution. It was the absence of Marxist leadership, due to the betrayals of Stalinism and social democracy, that was principally responsible for the defeats suffered by the working class in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The culmination of those betrayals was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This was followed by 30 years of political confusion and disorientation. But the unresolved and insoluble contradictions of capitalism are setting into motion a new wave of revolutionary struggles. Within this process, events in the United States will play a central and decisive role. In the aftermath of the two devastating imperialist world wars of the 20th century, it was American capitalism that stabilized and rescued European and world capitalism. It will not be able to play that role in the revolutionary struggles that are now unfolding.
The former stabilizer of world capitalism has now become the greatest source of global instability. Moreover, the most politically conservative working class, supposedly immune to the appeal of socialism, in now being politically radicalized.
Where is America going? The answer to this question is: To socialism.
The conditions now exist for an extraordinary advance in the political consciousness of the working class. Paradoxically, the same technological advance that poses an immense threat to its living conditions will also prove to be a powerful weapon in the development of revolutionary consciousness.
The vast pedagogical potential of AI, combined with the revolutionary perspectives of scientific socialism, opens unprecedented possibilities. The consciousness of the working class, the understanding of the objective conditions of capitalist crisis, the clarification of the path to working class power—all of this can be spread on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.
Just as Diderot’s Encyclopedia in the 18th century became an instrument of enlightenment that contributed to the French Revolution by making knowledge available to masses of people who had been kept in ignorance, so artificial intelligence—properly developed and democratically controlled, utilized by the revolutionary Marxist-Trotskyist party and placed at the service of the working class rather than capitalist profit—can become an instrument of socialist consciousness and liberation.
The World Socialist Web Site has long recognized this potential. The ICFI has understood that the technological revolution represented by AI must be harnessed for the purposes of the working class movement. And it is with great satisfaction that I can announce that we will soon be releasing Socialism AI, a revolutionary application of artificial intelligence to the development of socialist consciousness and the organizational capacity of the international working class.
This is not a minor technical project. This is the application of the most advanced productive forces to the transformation of consciousness—to make available, instantly and globally, the theoretical resources, the historical analysis, the programmatic clarity necessary for the working class to understand its historic mission and seize power.
The world in which we live is like a sleeping volcano upon whose slopes civilization builds its monuments, establishes its institutions and organizes its daily life. For periods of time, the volcano appears dormant. But beneath the surface, immense pressures accumulate. The magma rises. The tremors intensify. And finally, the eruption comes with catastrophic force, transforming the landscape entirely.
The metaphor of the volcano captures not only the destructive but also the creative energy of this process. A volcanic eruption destroys the old terrain but also creates new land.
The eruption of class struggle in the United States will destroy the rotting structures of capitalism but will also open the possibility for a new world. From the depths of social oppression will arise a force greater than any army or corporation: the collective power of a class that produces all wealth yet owns nothing. When that force acts consciously, guided by scientific socialism and the analysis of objective reality, it will sweep away the barriers of nationality and ethnicity and unite humanity in a common struggle for liberation.
