Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The publication of “The Socialist”, the monthly digital magazine of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), represents a politically significant development in the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement in South Asia. It marks a conscious assertion of the international revolutionary perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and a decisive break from the nationalist and opportunist practices that have undermined the development of the Trotskyist movement in Sri Lanka.
The central task confronting the SLLA is to struggle for the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of the global fight waged by the ICFI. The launching of thesocialist.lk on March 11, 2023, was an initial step in developing a consistent Marxist analysis of political, economic, and cultural developments, and in educating workers and youth in the principles and program of world socialist revolution. Following the split in the SEP-Left in July 2024 and the expulsion of the nationalist faction that had abandoned the defense of Trotskyist principles and socialist internationalism, thesocialist.lk became the theoretical organ of the SLLA. The subsequent establishment of The Socialist magazine in October 2025 represents the further political and theoretical evolution of this work. As a development beyond the website, the magazine provides a structured, monthly forum for elaborating the perspectives of the ICFI, extending their reach among the urban working class, rural youth, and oppressed masses. It signifies not merely the continuation but the deepening of the fight to build revolutionary socialist leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia, inseparably linked to the international struggle of the ICFI for world socialist revolution.
The Socialist is not simply a new publication. It represents the crystallization of an internationalist Marxist orientation rooted in the recognition that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka and South Asia must be grounded in the global revolutionary strategy elaborated by the ICFI. It is the conscious effort of the SLLA to reestablish the Trotskyist political line—based on the historical lessons of the struggle against Pabloism and all forms of nationalist opportunism—and to intervene in the class struggle with theoretical clarity, class independence, and revolutionary optimism.
Historical Continuity: From the WSWS to The Socialist
The launching of The Socialist is historically and politically connected to the founding of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) by the ICFI in February 1998. As David North explained at the time, the WSWS was not merely a new publication but the product of profound theoretical and political clarification that emerged from the ICFI’s struggle against the opportunism of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain.
The WSWS arose from the recognition that the globalization of capitalist production—the integration of the world economy into a single productive system—had rendered all nationally limited political programs reactionary and obsolete. The epoch of globalized capitalism required the building of a world party of socialist revolution, unified by a single international perspective and program, capable of leading the struggles of workers across all national boundaries. The traditional forms of printed party press, limited by the constraints of national distribution, were inadequate to this new historical stage. The Internet, as the most advanced means of global communication, provided the ICFI with a powerful instrument to reach, educate, and politically unify the international working class.
The decision of the SLLA to launch The Socialist as a digital magazine continues and extends this internationalist orientation. It expresses the determination to utilize the most advanced forms of communication to bring Marxist theory, historical analysis, and revolutionary strategy to the broadest layers of workers and youth—particularly those isolated from political education by material deprivation, linguistic barriers, and the decades-long betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism, and trade union bureaucracies.
The Political Meaning of the Digital Form
The digital PDF (portable document format) or other e-book format of The Socialist is not merely a technical convenience but corresponds to profound social and technological transformations. It is rooted in an understanding of the objective changes in the material conditions of communication and the class struggle.
Over the past decade, the spread of mobile Internet technology and smartphones has reached deep into Sri Lankan and South Asian society. Even in remote rural areas, millions—including working-class mothers, students, and rural youth—regularly access and share digital documents through WhatsApp and other social media platforms. Educational materials, government documents, newspapers and instant news are increasingly circulated in digital form. This represents not simply technological change but a transformation in the means by which information and ideas are disseminated and consciousness is formed.
This development provides the material foundation for the SLLA to bring the program of the ICFI directly to workers, rural youth, and the oppressed masses. The Socialist can be read and shared instantly by thousands, overcoming barriers of geography, poverty, workplace restrictions, and the limitations of traditional print distribution networks and high costs. It creates the possibility for the revolutionary program of the international working class to reach social layers that have been politically dominated for decades by bourgeois nationalism, Stalinist and Maoist parties, trade union bureaucracies, and communalist politics.
However, it must be emphasized that technology itself is not politically neutral, until it remains under the control of the bourgeoisie. The spread of digital communication is a product of capitalist development—an expression of the extraordinary productive forces created by human labor under capitalism. But these same forces, which hold immense progressive potential, remain imprisoned within the capitalist system, serving its interests. The revolutionary use of technology requires conscious political directions based on Marxist theory and the fight for the independent interests of the working class.
In this regard, The Socialist bears immense political significance: it harnesses modern technology under the guidance of the Trotskyist program to educate and mobilize the working class and oppressed masses for the socialist transformation of society. In doing so, it directly advances the SLLA’s central strategic task—the building of the Socialist Equality Party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership—by forging a conscious revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural youth, peasantry, and oppressed middle-class layers1 under the leadership of the proletariat.
The Crisis of Leadership and the Failure of the RCL/SEP
The launching of The Socialist must be situated within the historical experience of the the Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) —above all, their failure to build a genuinely mass revolutionary party rooted in the working class and capable of winning the rural youth and oppressed masses to the revolutionary socialist program of the international working class. This historical deficit, rooted in political retreats and opportunist adaptations, underscores the decisive importance of The Socialist as an instrument for reestablishing the Marxist foundations of the movement and preparing a new generation for the tasks of revolutionary leadership.
During the critical period of 1987–1990—marked by mass youth upheaval in the South, civil war in the North and East, and state terror —the RCL confronted a decisive test. Despite formally defending the international program of the ICFI, the party failed to develop the necessary political and organizational strategy to reach and win over the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil— and oppressed layers to the Trotskyist program.
This failure was not primarily a question of tactical errors or insufficient resources. It flowed from a deeper pragmatic adaptation to the framework of national politics and a fundamental skepticism regarding the revolutionary capacity of the working class and rural masses of Sri Lanka and South Asia as a region of backward countries—a retreat from Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution back toward the very Menshevik conceptions against which that theory had been elaborated. The practice of the party leadership revealed an effective abandonment of the perspective that the working class in a backward, belated capitalist country such as Sri Lanka could lead the democratic and socialist revolution, replacing it with a passive expectation that socialist revolution must first triumph in the advanced capitalist centers before the workers of Sri Lanka, India or Bangladesh, for instance, could seize power—a regression to the pre-1905 schema that Trotsky had decisively refuted through his analysis of combined and uneven development under imperialism.
The theory of Permanent Revolution, verified by the experiences of the Russian Revolution and subsequent struggles in colonial and semi-colonial countries, establishes that in countries of belated capitalist development, the democratic and national tasks historically associated with bourgeois revolutions cannot be achieved under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie in such countries arrives on the historical stage too late, bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and terrified of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class and peasantry. Only the working class, leading the rural poor and oppressed masses, and linking the struggle for democratic rights to the fight for socialism on an international scale, can resolve the fundamental problems facing society.
The RCL’s failure to orient systematically toward the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil—flowed from an unprincipled adaptation to the nationalist political climate dominated by petty-bourgeois movements such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the South and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)2 in the North. The JVP, combining Sinhala chauvinism with violent hostility toward the working class, was able to build a mass base among disoriented and radicalized rural Sinhala youth precisely because the RCL had no sustained orientation or presence in these layers3. From 19834 onward, Sri Lankan politics and the class struggle—both in the North and South—were increasingly dominated and mediated by the unresolved Tamil national question, which the bourgeoisie exploited to divide the working class, militarize society, and suppress independent proletarian struggle. In the North and East, the RCL’s initial sympathizing with the LTTE— under the opportunist patronage of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which pressured sections of the ICFI to adapt to bourgeois-nationalist movements—constituted a political betrayal of the Tamil youth. By endorsing the LTTE’s claim to represent a ‘liberation movement’ for national self-determination of Tamils, and supporting a separate Tamil Eelam, the RCL ceded the leadership of oppressed Tamil youth to a petty-bourgeois-nationalist organization, which fought for a bourgeois program. The WRP’s uncritical support for the LTTE prevented any examination by the RCL of the politics of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups and thus helped to strengthen their influence among Tamil youth. Consequently, these political positions led to RCL’s failure to win Tamil youth of the North over to the revolutionary party, and, on the other hand, to earn the wrath of Sinhala rural youth of the South, who joined the JVP. In the early-1990s, the SEP leadership misleadingly claimed the ICFI’s rejection to support separatism—a 180-degree turn from the pre-1986 position—as an abandonment of the defence of the right of nations to ‘self-determination’, thus effectively refusing the essential content of this democratic right of the oppressed Tamil people. This further entrenched the loss of confidence of the Tamil youth, the poor and working people toward the SEP as a revolutionary party that could lead them to solve the national question.
This dual failure—its inability to penetrate the rural Sinhala youth and its capitulation to Tamil bourgeois nationalism—left the RCL unable to politically combat either the JVP or the LTTE, allowing both movements to fill the vacuum created by the RCL’s withdrawal from its revolutionary tasks. The consequences were bloody, and irrevocable. From the early 1990s onward, this crisis deepened, with SEP’s limited interventions—concentrated narrowly on the urban sections of the working class—being largely inadequate to gather a mass base in the working class. The traumatic legacy of JVP fascism and state terror, the massive global impact of the capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the protracted civil war that the bourgeoisie used to polarize the working class on communal lines, the rise of postmodern and anti-Marxist currents in academia that disoriented a generation of youth, the emergence and increasing influence of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left tendencies, and the consolidation of bourgeois nationalist and racialist parties over the rural masses and oppressed middle classes through electoral and parliamentary manoevers—all of these processes further isolated and demoralized the SEP leadership, leading to a lack of political confidence in the possibility of winning the working class and the oppressed middle-class youth to the program of Marxism, thereby accelerating its drift away from the mass movement of the working class and the oppressed5.
Historical legacy of petty-bourgeois radicalism and its pressure within the FI
This retreat of the RCL—and later the SEP—must be analyzed within the broader world-historical process that prepared the ground for revisionism within the Fourth International (FI) itself.
From the third decade of the twentieth century onward, the international working class suffered a series of catastrophic defeats arising from the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism: the Social Democratic betrayal of August 1914, which drowned the German November Revolution of 1918-1919 in blood; the failure of the German revolution in 1923; the defeat of the British General Strike in 1926; the catastrophic betrayal of the Chinese Revolution in 1927; and above all, the coming to power of Hitler in January 1933—a defeat that signified the definitive transformation of Stalinism into a counterrevolutionary force and necessitated the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
The post-World War II period witnessed the temporary restabilization of world capitalism through agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, the Marshall Plan, and the Bretton Woods system, which vastly expanded the field of operation for bourgeois nationalist movements and petty-bourgeois radical tendencies throughout the colonial world. Mao Zedong’s victory in China in 1949, achieved through peasant-based forces rather than the urban proletariat; the waves of decolonization bringing to power figures such as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah; the Cuban Revolution of 1959, where Castro’s guerrilla movement nationalized industry without a Trotskyist party or the conscious mobilization of the working class; the Vietnamese defeat of French and American imperialism under Stalinist leadership; and the proliferation of guerrilla movements throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia—all commanded enormous authority among radicalized workers, youth, and intellectuals, creating the illusion that socialism could be achieved through non-proletarian forces and rendering the Fourth International’s patient work of building revolutionary parties apparently sectarian and obsolete.
It was precisely this political climate that generated revisionist pressures within the Fourth International, culminating in Pabloism, which, as David North explains in The Heritage We Defend, represented “liquidationism all down the line”—the repudiation of the hegemony of the proletariat and the reduction of the Fourth International to a pressure group within Stalinist, Social Democratic, and bourgeois nationalist organizations, proclaiming that these forces would be compelled by objective circumstances to play a revolutionary role. The 1953 split led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) under James P. Cannon’s leadership in defense of orthodox Trotskyism.
Vladimir Lenin giving a speech in Moscow, Leon Trotsky is in the background (1920)
Although the International Committee waged a principled and historically vindicated struggle against Pabloite liquidationism, defending the theoretical and programmatic foundations of Trotskyism and insisting on the necessity of building independent revolutionary parties of the working class, individual sections within the ICFI— the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, which capitulated to Pabloism a decade later, reunifying with the Pabloites in 1963 on the basis of glorifying Castroism and thereby repudiating the entire historical and theoretical conception of socialist revolution developed by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) and subsequently the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, notwithstanding the political leaps forward achieved by the ICFI in a relentless and principled struggle against the betrayals of the opportunist leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Britain in late 1980s—proved vulnerable over time to the nationalist pressures and to the national consciousness of the working class and the petty-bourgeoisie, and resorted to practical adaptations to the existing political framework dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. This vulnerability manifested itself in RCL/SEP not through explicit programmatic revisionism—the party claimed to formally uphold the theory of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program—but rather through a growing disjuncture between the revolutionary principles embodied in official documents and the party’s concrete political practice and orientation.
The SEP leadership profoundly distorted the essential lessons drawn by the International Committee from its protracted struggle against the Workers Revolutionary Party’s national-opportunist degeneration. That struggle established that the political independence of the working class—the foundational principle of revolutionary Marxism reaffirmed through the battles against Pabloite liquidationism—demands the systematic construction of the revolutionary party as the conscious political leadership of the proletariat through active intervention in the class struggle, not the dissolution of that party into Stalinist, social democratic, or bourgeois nationalist formations. The WRP’s betrayal consisted precisely in the liquidation of independent revolutionary perspectives into adaptation to alien class forces: it subordinated sections of the Fourth International to bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East and repudiated the theory of Permanent Revolution as the strategic foundation for building Trotskyist parties in the colonial and semi-colonial world. The SEP leadership, however, inverted the meaning of political independence. Where the WRP liquidated the party through opportunist alliances with non-proletarian forces, the SEP isolated the party from the working class and oppressed masses through sectarian abstention from the concrete work of party-building. They transformed political independence from a perspective demanding bold leadership in workers’ struggles—requiring systematic struggle to establish the party’s authority among workers, rural youth, plantation laborers, and the urban oppressed middle class through theoretical education combined with practical initiative in the class struggle—into a rationalization for passive propagandism divorced from systematic revolutionary work.
This gap between programmatic orthodoxy and revolutionary practice expressed itself in a retreat from the uncompromising struggle against Sinhala chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and bureaucratic trade unionism within the workers’ movement; a failure to build the party as a genuine mass organization rooted in the factories, plantations, working-class neighborhoods, and among the radicalized rural and unemployed youth of both North and South; and an abandonment of the systematic application of the Transitional Program to the concrete conditions facing the Sri Lankan proletariat and oppressed masses. This sectarian deviation—manifesting as passive commentary upon events rather than fighting for active leadership within them—represented an opportunist adaptation to the immense pressure exerted by decades of bourgeois nationalist hegemony over the Sri Lankan masses and the apparent authority of the petty-bourgeois radical movements and trade unions. The distorted lessons rationalized the party’s retreat from its historical responsibility to forge the political alliance of the Sinhalese and Tamil working class and rural poor under the banner of international socialism, thereby abandoning the struggle to establish the political independence of the Sri Lankan proletariat from the influence of all variants of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, and preparing the conditions for the party’s transformation into a propaganda circle incapable of leading the revolutionary struggles of the working class and oppressed rural toilers.
The Inverse form of National Opportunism of the RCL/SEP
The retreat from systematic work to build a mass revolutionary party among the rural youth and oppressed masses expressed, at its core, skepticism about the validity and applicability of the theory of Permanent Revolution to the conditions of Sri Lanka and South Asia. This erosion of perspective led not merely to tactical errors but to a profound strategic regression. In place of an active struggle to forge the political unity of the working class with the oppressed rural and middle layers under a single internationalist program, the leadership lapsed into passive propagandism—issuing programmatically orthodox statements in a ritualistic manner that substituted abstract formulations for concrete revolutionary practice—and thereby revealed a fundamentally sectarian character, divorcing Marxist theory and positions from its necessary embodiment in systematic intervention in the class struggle. The opportunist leadership which abandoned theoretical principles in practice, exposed its sectarian character by hiding behind theoretical orthodoxy, while refusing to engage in the concrete work of building the party among the masses.
Such a retreat constituted and opened the door to opportunist adaptations to the political environment dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces—a tendency that can be referred to as the inverse form6 of national opportunism, a type of passive opportunism peculiar to the leadership of a revolutionary party of a country of belated capitalist development. In practice, it meant yielding the initiative to the very revisionist and nationalist tendencies—shaped by decades of Stalinist, Maoist, Pabloite, and petty-bourgeois radical betrayals—that had disoriented and fragmented the revolutionary movement internationally. By abandoning a determined and irreconcilable struggle to apply the theory of Permanent Revolution to the concrete conditions of Sri Lanka, the SEP leadership steadily isolated itself from the working class and the oppressed masses, forfeiting their political confidence and, thereby perpetuating its own stagnation and compounding its political degeneration and internal putrefaction.
The SEP’s inadequate intervention in working-class struggles— in the backdrop of growing intensification of class struggles in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of an international phenomenon—flowed from its retreat from systematic struggle to build independent revolutionary organization in the factories, plantations, and workplaces. The trade union bureaucracy—controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that subordinate workers to nationalist politics—functions as the organizational instrument through which the nationalist political climate dominates the working class. The SEP’s historical failure to build revolutionary alternatives—independent rank-and-file action committees— in the workplaces meant workers remained under the ideological and organizational stranglehold of these bureaucratic apparatuses, which systematically block unified, independent class action and reinforce reformist illusions and ethnic divisions. This is a further manifestation of inverse opportunism: not adaptation to the bureaucracy through collaboration, but accommodation to its dominance through the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work among the workers themselves.
The Theoretical and Political Foundations of the SLLA
The SLLA was formed precisely to overcome this legacy of nationalist opportunism and political passivity. Its work is based on a return to the fundamental principles of Trotskyism—the theory of Permanent Revolution, proletarian internationalism, and the necessity of building the independent revolutionary party of the working class.
Central to this work is the understanding that the socialist revolution in Sri Lanka cannot be completed within a national framework. The Sri Lankan economy, like all economies in the epoch of imperialism, is integrated into the world capitalist system. The crises confronting workers and oppressed masses—economic collapse, social inequality, authoritarian rule—are manifestations of the global crisis of capitalism. Their resolution requires the international unity of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.
This means that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka is inseparable from the struggles of workers in India, throughout South Asia, and internationally. It requires breaking the working class from all forms of nationalism—Sinhala, Tamil, or any other communal identity—and uniting workers across ethnic, religious, and national lines on the basis of common class interests.
It also requires forging a revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural poor, agricultural workers, impoverished peasants, and oppressed middle-class layers. This is not a question of tailoring the socialist program to accommodate the prejudices or limited outlook of these layers, but of systematically explaining how their fundamental interests can only be achieved through socialist revolution led by the working class.
The rural masses in Sri Lanka and South Asia face deepening immiseration—landlessness, indebtedness, destruction of traditional livelihoods, and rural unemployment. These are not isolated “rural problems” but expressions of the crisis of world capitalism and the subordination of agriculture to the profit interests of agribusiness monopolies and imperialism. The solution lies not in nationalist or populist programs of land reform or rural development within capitalism, but in the socialist reorganization of agriculture as part of a rationally planned economy under workers’ control.
Similarly, educated youth from rural and small-town backgrounds—products of the expansion of public education who confront unemployment, poverty wages, and social dead-ends—represent a potentially revolutionary force. The recent Gen-Z protest movements testified to their revolutionary potential. Without the intervention of a revolutionary party armed with Marxist theory, this discontent and radicalism is channeled into reactionary nationalist, religious fundamentalist, or fascistic movements, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.
The SLLA’s orientation to these layers is not based on romantic glorification of the peasantry or petty-bourgeoisie—the hallmark of Maoist, populist, and Pabloite revisionism. It is based on sober Marxist analysis: these layers, objectively ruined by capitalism and incapable of independent political action, can play a progressive historical role only under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party, fighting for a socialist program.
The Socialist as an Instrument of Revolutionary Education
The Socialist is a central instrument in this political reorientation. By systematically disseminating the perspectives of the ICFI, historical analyses of past struggles, and Marxist analysis of contemporary political and economic developments, it aims to educate a new generation of revolutionary cadre and raise the political consciousness of broader layers of workers and youth.
The magazine’s digital format ensures that this material reaches precisely those layers the RCL and SEP failed to reach systematically—rural youth, oppressed middle-class layers, and workers isolated from traditional centers of political organization. Through The Socialist and theSocialist.lk the SLLA works to:
Clarify the class nature of the economic and social crises confronting the masses and expose the bankruptcy of all nationalist, populist, and reformist solutions;
Educate workers and youth in the historical lessons of the struggle for Trotskyism—particularly the fight against Pabloism and the defense of the theory of Permanent Revolution;
Analyze contemporary political developments, mainly of Sri Lanka and other countries of South Asia, from the standpoint of the interests of the international working class;
Counter the influence of bourgeois, Stalinist, and petty-bourgeois pseudo-left ideologies;
Build political bridges between the revolutionary party (SEP) and the broader masses of the oppressed classes.
This is not propaganda in the abstract sense, divorced from the living class struggle. It is education combined with revolutionary intervention—the development of Marxist consciousness as an essential component of building the revolutionary party and preparing the working class for the seizure of power.
Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Revolutionary Education
The rapid development of Internet technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—more accurately understood as augmented intelligence— presents both opportunities and challenges for the revolutionary movement. AI systems—products of collective human labor and scientific knowledge accumulated over generations—express the enormous productive capacities developed under capitalism. However, like all productive forces under capitalism, in the hands of the capitalist class, they exist in contradiction with the social relations of private property and are employed primarily for profit extraction, automate jobs to increase unemployment and drive down wages, conduct mass surveillance, and generate sophisticated propaganda. The tech monopolies that control AI development guard their systems as private property, extracting enormous profits while workers who produce the data and perform the labor that makes AI possible are driven into poverty.
For the revolutionary movement, advances in AI technology have opened a new epoch in revolutionary education, translation, archiving, international communication, and organization. These tools make possible the rapid translation of ICFI documents into multiple languages, support deep historical research and rigorous analysis, and vastly expand the capacity to disseminate Marxist literature to workers and youth across the globe.
However, the use of AI technology must be under the conscious direction and intervention of the revolutionary party, guided by Marxist theory, not subordinated to the logic of capitalist technology companies or based on techno-utopian illusions. The decisive factor is not the technology itself but the political program and class perspective that guides its use.
The SLLA’s use of digital publication for The Socialist is thus part of a broader Marxist approach: utilizing advanced productive forces developed by human labor to advance the consciousness and organization of the working class for the revolutionary transformation of society.
It is on this perspective that the SLLA welcomes the launch of “Socialism AI,” the artificial-intelligence platform developed by the ICFI as a decisive and enormous advance in the political education and intellectual arming of the international working class7.
Building the World Party: Internationalism in Practice
The Socialist must be understood as part of the world press of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Its initial publication in Sinhala is another important step in building the revolutionary press that transcends national and linguistic divisions. Future editions in Tamil and English will extend its reach throughout South Asia, strengthening the political unity of the working class across ethnic and national lines.
The fundamental principle remains that stated by Trotsky in ‘Open Letter for the Fourth International: To All Revolutionary Working-Class Organizations and Groups’ (1935): “Under all conditions, especially during a revolution, it is impermissible to turn one’s back upon the toilers for the sake of a bloc with the bourgeoisie. It is impossible to expect and demand that the duped and disillusioned masses will fly to take up arms upon the belated call of a party in which they have lost confidence. The proletarian revolution is not improvised by the orders of a bankrupt leadership. The revolution must be prepared through incessant and irreconcilable class struggle, which gains for the leadership the unshakable confidence of the party, fuses the vanguard with the entire class, and transforms the proletariat into the leader of all the exploited in the city and countryside.”
This means, in accordance with the theory of Permanent Revolution and its application to the conditions prevailing in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia:
Recognizing that in countries of belated capitalist development such as Sri Lanka, the bourgeoisie has demonstrated its absolute incapacity to resolve the fundamental democratic tasks—the national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, and the establishment of genuine social and democratic rights. Only the working class, leading the oppressed rural masses, can achieve these historically necessary transformations, which must inevitably grow over into the socialist revolution.
Rejecting categorically all conceptions of intermediate stages between bourgeois rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Between the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe regime and workers’ power, between the bankrupt programs of the JVP, Front Line Socialist Party (FSP) and pseudo-left, and the revolutionary Marxist program of the ICFI, there exists no middle ground. The alliance of the working class with the peasantry, the rural toilers and the oppressed middle-classes can be realized only through irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national bourgeoisie and all forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism.
Exposing the reactionary and historically exhausted character of all nationalist ideologies—Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and every variety of communalism and identity politics—as programmes that subordinate the working class to rival factions of the capitalist class and imperialism, thereby blocking the path to the resolution of both the democratic and socialist tasks.
Understanding that the democratic demands of the masses—for national equality, land reform, an end to autocratic rule, and social justice—cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. In the epoch of capitalist decay, democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs but stem directly from one another. The slogans for the democratic aspirations of the masses, must be indissolubly connected to the struggle for workers’ power and the expropriation of capitalist property.
Forging the unity of Sri Lankan workers with Indian workers and the working class throughout South Asia and internationally, on the basis of a common revolutionary program. The tasks confronting the Sri Lankan working class—from resisting IMF austerity to defending democratic rights—are inseparable from the struggles of workers across the region against their own exploiters and the global system of imperialism.
Building the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) and the sections of the ICFI throughout South Asia as genuine mass revolutionary parties—rooted in the working class, leading the rural masses and oppressed middle classes, armed with the programme of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Programme—capable of leading the coming revolutionary struggles to victory under conditions of deepening imperialist crisis and intensifying class struggle.
The tens of thousands of youth who have recently demonstrated through the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka and similar mass movements in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere their readiness to challenge corrupt regimes must be won to an understanding that their democratic and social aspirations can be realized only through the socialist revolution led by the working class. This requires the patient development of socialist consciousness through systematic political education, theoretical clarification, and the building of revolutionary organization—not capitulation to spontaneism, petty-bourgeois radicalism, or the illusion that the masses can achieve their aims without overthrowing capitalism and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
A Return to Permanent Revolution
The launching of The Socialist marks a conscious political correction of the nationalist deviations that undermined the work of the RCL and SEP. It expresses renewed confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class and oppressed masses in these countries, based not on wishful thinking but on Marxist analysis of the objective crisis of world capitalism and the necessity of socialist revolution. The fight against the inverse form of national opportunism requires not simply an organizational turn to intense daily work in the class struggle, but first and foremost a definite and conscious return to the programme of permanent revolution and the principles upon which the Fourth International was founded.
By employing digital technology to overcome barriers between urban and rural, between different linguistic communities, between the working class and oppressed middle-class layers, the SLLA works to realize in practice the Marxist conception that socialist revolution is an international process uniting all oppressed layers under the leadership of the proletariat and its revolutionary party.
The Socialist, along with theSocialist.lk website, thus stands as both a theoretical and practical instrument in the fight to build the ICFI sections in South Asia, educate a new generation of Trotskyist cadre, and prepare the working class for the revolutionary struggles that will decide the future of humanity. It reaffirms the living continuity of Trotskyism in the twenty-first century and represents a decisive step forward in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia.
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ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, A letter from David North to Keerthi Balasuriya, 25 September 1987. ↩︎
“The LSSP’s degeneration had profound political consequences. By abandoning the struggle to unify workers on a socialist perspective, the LSSP left the working class and oppressed masses with no alternative to communalist politics and directly contributed to the rise of racially-based organisations—petty bourgeois formations such as the LTTE and the Sinhala chauvinist JVP in the south.” Wije Dias, ‘The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka replies to a supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, WSWS (29 September 2000) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/09/ltte-s29.html ↩︎
ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, Contribution by David North at RCL Congress, 6-9 November 1990. ↩︎
The state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom took place at the end of July 1983, which triggered the intensification of racist civil war that lasted till May 2009. ↩︎
A forthcoming series of essays by the SLLA will illustrate these historical truths in greater detal. ↩︎
This retreat into adaptation to the national political climate, in place of building independent revolutionary leadership of the masses, constitutes an inverse form of opportunism because this peculiar tendency manifests specifically in revolutionary leadership of backward countries—countries of belated capitalist development where the bourgeoisie, arriving late to the historical stage under imperialist domination, proves organically incapable of resolving the democratic tasks (national independence, agrarian revolution, democratic rights, resolution of national oppression) that it accomplished in classical bourgeois revolutions. Sri Lanka exemplifies such a backward country in Trotsky’s theoretical sense: capitalist development occurred under colonial subjugation and continues under neo-colonial subordination to imperialism and the world market; the national bourgeoisie, tied to imperialism and terrified of the masses, cannot resolve the Tamil national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, or establish genuine democracy and independence. These unresolved democratic questions consequently dominate the political terrain, creating conditions where, as Trotsky demonstrated, democratic and socialist tasks interpenetrate rather than separating into historical stages. Under these specific conditions—exemplified throughout South Asia—inverse opportunism emerges as a systematic pattern: the revolutionary party retreats from building systematic organization among radicalized rural youth (allowing the JVP and LTTE to dominate); retreats from systematic intervention in working-class struggles (leaving workers under the stranglehold of trade union bureaucracies controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that enforce ethnic divisions and reformist illusions); and oscillates between opportunist adaptation to petty-bourgeois nationalist movements and sectarian isolation from the democratic struggles of the masses. In each manifestation, the common thread is the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work to build independent proletarian leadership—a retreat that accommodates the nationalist political climate not through active collaboration with opportunist forces, but through organizational passivity that allows bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies to dominate the working class and oppressed masses. National opportunism is the abandonment of proletarian, international strategy in favour of alliances and political reliance upon bourgeois, petty‑bourgeois or nationalist forces inside a given country or region. In the case of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Healy, Banda and later Slaughter, degeneration into this took concrete form as a consistent substitution of proletarian independence by collaboration with bourgeois regimes, nationalists and even reactionary state actors. ↩︎
In order to enhance Socialism AI with the complete historical record of the political work of the RCL/SEP, the SLLA proposes to feed the system with digital copies of the complete volumes of Kamkaru Mawatha, the propaganda newspaper of the RCL/SEP published from 1972 to 1998 . ↩︎
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.
This webinar was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 21 October 2025.
Nazism, big business and the working class: Historical experience and political lessons
On October 16, 2025, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) hosted a webinar examining the historical relationship between Nazism, big business and the working class—a discussion with urgent contemporary relevance.
The discussion was chaired by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. He was joined by three distinguished historians: David Abraham, professor emeritus of law at the University of Miami and author of The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis; Jacques Pauwels, Canadian historian and author of Big Business and Hitler; and Mario Kessler, senior fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany, whose scholarship focuses on the German Communist Party and European labor movements.
The webinar opened with North recounting the vicious academic campaign that destroyed Abraham’s career as a historian in the 1980s. After publishing his Marxist analysis of how conflicts within German capitalism facilitated Hitler’s rise, Abraham faced attacks from conservative historians Gerald Feldman and Henry Ashby Turner, who accused him of fraud. Abraham explained that the attack stemmed from “ideological animus, personal pique, and intellectual know-nothingism.”
In the discussion, Jacques Pauwels attacked the claim that Hitler’s rise was accidental or unconnected to capitalist interests. “Hitler’s so-called capture of power was merely a transfer or surrender of power,” he stated. “Without the financial and other support of industry and finance, in other words, big business, the rest of the German power elite, Hitler could never have risen to supremacy.” Pauwels described fascism as “the stick of capitalism, not to be used at all times, but certainly always ready behind the door.”
Mario Kessler addressed Hitler’s mobilization of the middle classes while preventing their left-wing radicalization toward socialism. He noted that the Nazi Party “never succeeded in making consistent inroads into the working class” and “never achieved an absolute majority of the votes” in any Weimar election. Hitler’s function was to “collect the votes of the unemployed people, the resentment of all who considered themselves losers of what was called the system.” Kessler stressed that “before Hitler and the German fascists could annihilate the Jews, they had to destroy the German and European labor movement.”
Pauwels demolished the myth that Hitler improved workers’ living conditions, documenting how “the German workers’ real wages fell dramatically under Nazi rule while corporate profits soared.” He revealed that work accidents and illnesses increased from 930,000 cases in 1933 to 2.2 million in 1939, calling Nazi policy “a high profit, low wage kind of policy.” The first concentration camp at Dachau was established not primarily for Jews but because “regular prisons were full of political prisoners, mostly social democrats and communists.”
The discussion then turned to contemporary parallels. North drew explicit connections between Weimar’s collapse and America’s current trajectory under the fascistic Trump administration, noting gold’s rise from $35 per ounce in 1971 to over $4,000 today as an “objective indication of a real crisis of the American economic system.” Abraham described the emerging alliance of “old right-wingers in the fossil fuel industry” with “anarcho-libertarians” from Silicon Valley, noting that Peter Thiel recently gave lectures invoking Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist, while identifying workers, leftists, minorities, and environmentalists as civilization’s “blockage,” which Abraham described as “a kind of new Judeo-Bolsheviks.”
North posed a critical question: “Do objective conditions create the possibility for a revolutionary orientation? Is fascism inevitable?” He argued that the same contradictions driving reaction also create revolutionary potential, citing how World War I produced both catastrophe and the October Revolution.
Christoph Vandreier, chairman of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei in Germany, addressed the rehabilitation of Hitler and the Nazis within German academia. He described how historian Jörg Baberowski declared in Der Spiegel that “Hitler was not cruel” and “was not a psychopath,” claiming the Holocaust “was not essentially different from shootings during the civil war in Russia.” Vandreier noted that “Baberowski was supported by almost the entire academia in Germany” and that such positions “are part of the mainstream” today, coinciding with Germany’s trillion-euro rearmament program.
The historians agreed that the struggle against historical falsification is inseparable from political struggle. Pauwels emphasized that “history is subversive” and that “the powers that be don’t really want us to know how we got into this trouble.” Abraham noted a modest revival of political economy studies after decades in which “the right captured Washington, the left captured the English department.”
North concluded by emphasizing the persistence of the same fundamental contradictions: “We are not only talking about the past, but we’re really discussing the present. The same issues, the same social forces are present today.” He predicted an “explosive turn by the working class and the most advanced sections of young people and workers toward Marxism, which is the only theoretical framework for which one can understand objective reality and on that basis build a revolutionary movement.”
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 16 October 2025.
Few figures have done more to derail and contain the revolutionary strivings of Kenya’s oppressed masses than Raila Odinga. His death on Wednesday ends the long political career of a man who, for more than four decades, served as a central pillar of capitalist rule and imperialist domination in Kenya. Whether as opposition leader, cabinet minister, or prime minister, Odinga played the role of political fixer, channelling mass protests against inequality, corruption, and repression into the dead end of constitutional reform and imperialist-backed “national unity” coalitions.
Born in 1945 in Maseno, western Kenya, Odinga was the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president after independence and a co-founder of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) alongside Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president. KANU struck a deal with British imperialism and ruled a de facto one-party state for over three decades.
Raila Odinga in 2012 [Photo by CSIS / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]
In the early years after political independence, Jaramogi Odinga emerged as the leading figure of KANU’s left wing. Amid mass support for socialism among workers and the rural masses, Odinga sought to secure a base, advancing a programme of state-driven capitalist economic development within the national boundaries imposed by colonialism, the seizure of European settler farms without compensation and the rapid Africanisation of the civil service and public-sector jobs, as he explained in his book Not Yet Uhuru [Not Yet Freedom] (1967). These were measures to be carried out by a capitalist government leveraging close ties with the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy, not by the working class in alliance with the rural masses.
Kenyatta crushed this opposition, banning Odinga’s attempts to launch a new party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), and placing Odinga under house arrest.
In the decades after independence, Kenya’s new elite enriched itself through vast land grabs financed by Western loans, buying up former settler estates at the expense of the rural poor while looting state resources and deepening military and economic ties with British and American imperialism that continue to this day. As with other post-colonial African independence governments, Kenya’s experience exposed the organic incapacity of Africa’s bourgeois nationalists to realise the aspirations of the African masses for freedom from foreign domination, democracy, and social justice.
Raila Odinga’s political ascent was built on his father’s legacy as the nominal left opposition to Kenyatta and his successor Daniel arap Moi. Educated in Stalinist East Germany as a mechanical engineer, he returned to a Kenya that his father had helped build to join the ranks of the new ruling class, expanding the family’s business empire in energy, construction, and media. By the time of his death, his fortune was estimated at between $1.2 and $3.3 billion, placing him among the richest 0.1 percent of Kenyans—an oligarchic layer of roughly 8,300 individuals who, according to Oxfam, own more wealth than the bottom 99.9 percent combined. This obscene inequality epitomises the class gulf between Odinga and the millions he claimed to represent.
Odinga under Moi and Kibaki
Odinga’s political career began in the 1980s after his arrest following the failed 1982 coup attempt against Moi’s regime. He spent nearly eight years in detention, during which he was beaten, denied medical care, and subjected to psychological torture that left him with lasting speech difficulties. Upon his release, he re-emerged in the 1990s as a leading figure in the bourgeois opposition to Moi’s dictatorship, the “Second Liberation” movement. Alongside Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, Odinga campaigned for the restoration of multi-party democracy, channelling growing popular anger against the regime into a struggle for limited constitutional reforms within the framework of capitalism.
Odinga’s role as leader of the opposition was boosted by what passed as the leading underground left-wing opposition to the regime, the Maoist Mwakenya. With its two-stage theory of first reinstalling capitalist democracy, postponing indefinitely the struggle for socialism, it helped funnel opposition into Odinga’s camp. It called for “all progressive democratic and patriotic political organisations, workers trade unions, peasant cooperatives, professional bodies, religious organizations, student societies, the business community, welfare and other nongovernmental interest groups to unite in a single force of action to pressure Moi to resign.” Many of its members, including future Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, became key Odinga allies.
Facing mounting unrest and pressure from Washington, long his backer but now fearful of a genuine popular uprising, Moi was forced to repeal the constitutional ban on opposition parties, paving the way for Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 1992.
By the late 1990s, Odinga had reconciled with the regime and merged his National Development Party (NDP) with Moi’s deeply unpopular KANU after contesting the 1997 elections. He went on to serve as Moi’s Minister of Energy, marking his entry into the state apparatus.
In 2002, as social opposition to Moi intensified, Odinga left Moi’s government and joined a coalition of anti-Moi bourgeois parties led by Mwai Kibaki, Moi’s former minister of finance. With Kibaki ill during the campaign, Odinga effectively led the election effort that ended Moi’s 24-year rule. However, after the victory, Kibaki sidelined him, denying Odinga and his allies the senior positions they had been promised. Given the post of Minister for Roads, Odinga soon fell out with Kibaki, whose government, like Moi’s before it, unleashed brutal police violence—including the extrajudicial killing of an estimated 8,000 mostly young men.
Out of power, Odinga continued as the main opposition figurehead, while making it clear he was virulently opposed to socialism. In his autobiography, The Flame of Freedom (2013), he recounted how, ahead of the 2007 elections:
Because of my father’s and my longstanding support for equitable distribution of national resources, I had often been accused of being left-wing anti-capitalist (the latter a strange misconception about a man who, like his father before him, had long been involved in private enterprise). It was said that, as president, I would reverse some privatisations and make radical changes to the Kenyan stock market. The latter probably also had a connection with the charge I had made that the extensive profits from illegal drug-dealing had been ploughed into the national bourse [stock market]. In mid-October, I visited the Nairobi Stock Exchange to offer assurances of my support for its continued activities.
The “Grand Coalition” with Kibaki and alliance with Kenyatta
The 2007 elections marked the peak of Odinga’s political influence and the most violent crisis of Kenya’s post-independence history. Running as the main opposition candidate against incumbent Kibaki, Odinga appeared poised for victory until widespread electoral fraud secured Kibaki a self-declared win. Odinga called for mass demonstrations, and his supporters, largely drawn from Kenya’s working-class and impoverished layers in the slums and rural areas, poured into the streets.
The regime responded with brutal repression. Ethnic violence, stoked by both ruling factions, engulfed the country, leaving more than 1,300 people dead and over 650,000 displaced. William Ruto, now Kenya’s president but then an ally of Odinga, played a criminal role in fomenting ethnic clashes for which he was later indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Odinga, fearing that the mass opposition might break out of his control and advised by Washington, entered into a US-brokered power-sharing agreement with Kibaki in 2008, becoming prime minister in a “Grand Coalition” government. The imperialist powers hailed the deal as a model of “stability.” It was designed to preserve Kenya’s role as a key regional base for Western military and financial interests.
During his five years as prime minister (2008–2013), Odinga demonstrated his loyalty to imperialism. His government backed US-led military interventions in Somalia under the banner of the “war on terror,” and supported France’s 2011 invasion of Ivory Coast. Domestically, his administration helped push through the 2010 Constitution, drafted under US and British guidance, as a mechanism to contain mass anger and restore confidence in the capitalist order after the post-election bloodshed of 2007.
In 2013, Odinga lost to Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first president. As disillusionment with the political establishment deepened, Odinga’s role as a “progressive” alternative was shown to be a fraud. When the 2017 elections were again marred by corruption and saw the killing of over 100 protesters, he briefly postured as leading a “people’s resistance movement.” But in early 2018, he abruptly reconciled with Kenyatta in the so-called “Handshake,” presenting the pact as a step toward “national unity.”
By the time of the 2022 election, Odinga had openly transformed into capitalist political fixer par excellence. Backed by Kenyatta, Kenya’s richest man whose family owns a multi-billion-dollar business empire, he faced Ruto, a former ally who exploited popular anger with a populist “bottom-up” campaign and by presenting himself as an outsider—despite being the sitting deputy president. Ruto’s slim victory reflected widespread hostility to Kenya’s political dynasties, including Odinga.
Once elected, Ruto violently turned against the working class, as the economic crisis facing the country deepened, particularly soaring costs of living intensified by the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Ruto imposed the first round of an IMF austerity programme, sparking mass protests. Odinga once again sought to channel mass discontent. He called intermittent protests against the austerity-driven Finance Bill 2023, only to suspend them when they began to merge with broader strikes by teachers, doctors, and civil servants. Dozens of his supporters were gunned down.
Odinga and Ruto versus the Kenyan working class and youth
Just when Odinga believed he had successfully contained social unrest, the Gen-Z uprising of mid-2024 erupted against the entire Kenyan political establishment. What began as protests against President Ruto’s IMF-dictated Finance Bill 2024—imposing sweeping taxes on fuel, bread, cooking oil, and digital services—quickly developed into a nationwide rebellion against the whole post-independence capitalist order. Unlike previous mobilisations, this movement arose entirely outside Odinga’s control. On June 25, protesters stormed parliament, and in the brutal crackdown that followed more than 60 people were killed, thousands arrested, and dozens abducted.
While he publicly voiced sympathy for the protests, Odinga was privately negotiating with Ruto on how to defuse them. Soon after, he integrated his Orange Democratic Movement into Ruto’s administration to form the current “broad-based” government, providing a political cover for the regime to push ahead with its IMF austerity agenda and consolidate a police-state dictatorship. Odinga then moved to co-opt self-styled Gen Z “leaders” into the regime’s orbit.
The result was a de facto parliamentary dictatorship, lacking even a nominal opposition. It soon escalated bloody repression. Last July, as hundreds of thousands took to the streets, security forces killed 57 demonstrators and injured more than 600 in one of the worst massacres perpetrated by the Kenyan ruling class in decades.
Nothing could better expose the rottenness of Odinga than his death being used by the current Ruto regime to impose austerity and police-state measures. Barely had the ink dried on Odinga’s death certificate, with the media providing wall-to-wall obituaries hailing his democratic credentials, than Ruto decided to sign into law eight deeply authoritarian and anti-working-class bills.
These include the Privatisation Bill 2025, which allows the government to sell off state-owned enterprises without parliamentary approval; the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes (Amendment) Bill 2024, granting sweeping powers to police and intelligence agencies to monitor, censor, and shut down online platforms; and the National Police Service Commission (Amendment) Bill 2024, further expanding executive control over the security apparatus.
Other laws include the National Land Commission (Amendment) and Land (Amendment) Bills, centralizing decision-making authority in Nairobi, weakening local land protections to allow more land looting by Ruto’s entourage, while the Air Passenger Service Charge (Amendment) and Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill impose new levies.
In one of his final interviews with the Sunday Nation, Odinga drew a parallel between Kenya’s youth revolt and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, which toppled Hosni Mubarak. He recalled being “the last international leader hosted by Mubarak” before the dictator’s fall, remarking that even regimes that seem strong can collapse within weeks. Odinga’s message was a warning to the ruling elite that uncontained popular uprisings threaten the entire capitalist order.
The real lesson of Egypt, and of Kenya today, is that bourgeois “opposition” figures like Odinga, posing as champions of democracy, play the decisive role in strangling revolutionary movements and paving the way for renewed repression, austerity, and military rule. Odinga died at 80 in a private hospital for the wealthy in Koothattukulam, India, where he had been flown for specialist treatment. Like the rest of Kenya’s ruling elite, he sought medical care abroad while the country’s public health system, ravaged by decades of corruption, privatisation, and IMF-imposed austerity, lies in ruins.
Odinga’s death comes amid a new wave of social upheaval across the world, from Peru, Nepal, and Bangladesh to Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique, and Angola, driven by soaring prices, mass unemployment, IMF austerity and opposition to war and genocide. These movements express the mounting anger of workers and youth against unbearable social inequality and imperialist oppression.
Victory depends on rejecting the various representatives of a pro-capitalist opposition, which, like Odinga, fear the independent movement of the masses far more than dictatorship. The defence of democratic and social rights poses before Kenyan workers and youth the task of building a revolutionary Marxist party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), dedicated to the perspective of Permanent Revolution—the unification of the struggles of workers and the oppressed across Africa and the world for the establishment of a United Socialist States of Africa.
