The Blind Alley of World Capitalism and the Resulting Opportunities for Revolution

A global overview written on behalf of the Freedom Socialist Party National Committee, discussed and adopted by the November 2002 FSP Convention



by Andrea Bauer

I. Overview

One planet under U.S. imperialism: that is world reality today. Using an economic battering ram known as neoliberalism, the only superpower left standing has turned the globe into a war-torn feeding trough for banks and megabusinesses.
Inevitably, the bosses went too far, as they always do.
In the more well-off countries, working and oppressed people face stagnating wages, massive job insecurity, and the destruction of welfare programs and social services; in the poorer countries, they suffer increased starvation, an explosion of war refugees, and heightened trafficking in women's bodies. The natural environment, meanwhile, is deteriorating profoundly, literally from pole to pole.
These desperate conditions provoked a backlash against corporate globalization that exploded into popular consciousness with the "Battle of Seattle" against the World Trade Organization in 1999. Leading up to that landmark event were a concentrated anti-sweatshop campaign on campuses; thousands of labor protests and strikes around the world against privatization and International Monetary Fund austerity programs; and the dramatic 1994 uprising by the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico, against the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Already before September 11, 2001, the ruling classes were cracking down on the anti-corporate movement — most brutally in July of that year in Genoa, where rampaging police murdered activist Carlo Giuliani. The terrible events of 9/11, however, gave capitalist overseers the pretext they sorely needed to implement some of the most draconian measures of repression seen in the history of bourgeois democracy.
In the U.S., an unprecedented intensification of power in the executive branch of government and its police agencies is accompanying the rollback of civil liberties. After rounding up more than 1,200 Muslims and Arabs in its post-9/11 witchhunt, the Bush administration is defying the federal judiciary when judges question the Justice Department's right to withhold information about those incarcerated.
At the same time, Congress has more and more abdicated its authority as a check on the president. The decades-long, incremental rightward thrust of the government apparatus has quickened into a qualitative change in how the U.S. masters rule: presidential fiat is replacing the much vaunted institution of "checks and balances."
Meanwhile, economic shock waves — recession, near-daily exposés of Wall Street corruption, Fortune 500 bankruptcies, stock market plunges — are forcing Czar Bush and his cohorts on the defensive, as they scramble to contain the damage. Around the world, the political and economic scene is just as turbulent.
Periods such as these always bring with them their fair share of opportunities for workers to intervene to resolve the social clashes and problems in their own favor. But lacking is the thoughtful, principled, committed leadership that any mass effort requires to succeed.
What Leon Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution in 1938 remains truer than ever: "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."
One consequence of the vacuum of leadership — and of the determined suppression of the socialist message by the bosses — is that few people, especially in the U.S., are aware of Marxist ideas as the key to grasping the predicaments of our times and finding a way out.
Two tasks are preeminent for the Freedom Socialist Party at this time: to be the educators the working class needs, and to make our own party grow in political strength and numbers. Hearteningly, the combination of deepening capitalist crisis and rising workingclass combativeness makes the soil for our efforts fertile as never before. With the outcome for humanity in the balance, we can and we will make a difference.

II. Imperialism from Lenin's Time to Ours

To analyze the world today means looking first and foremost at the role of the U.S., and that means understanding imperialism. Studying V.I. Lenin's definition of imperialism grounds us in an appreciation of the basic characteristics of capitalism in our time — of which "neoliberalism," or "corporate globalization," is this season's manifestation.
Most commonly, people probably think of imperialism as the exploitation and subordination of one nation by another. It's certainly that, but it's more, too. Imperialism is one historical stage of capitalism — specifically, its most developed and final phase. Imperialism is capitalism in the period of its decay.
In his book Imperialism — the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin identifies "five essential features" that distinguish imperialism in the economic sphere, as quoted below:
"1) [T]he concentration of production and capital developed in such a high stage that it created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this 'finance capital,' of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from the export of commodities; 4) the formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among themselves; 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed."
Politically, Lenin says, the features of imperialism are increased national oppression and "reaction all along the line."
Lenin based his explication of imperialism, written in 1916, in large part on trends that were then just emerging. It is a remarkably farsighted description of the world we read about in our own daily papers — from the domination of Microsoft in the computer industry and Bill Gates' consequent status as the richest person on earth, to the chokehold of the World Bank and IMF over Third World countries, to the statelessness of the Palestinians and the brutality of the Israeli state against them, to the rise of the noxious religious right in the U.S.

How Imperialism Develops and What It Means

Imperialism emerged when the characteristic features of capitalism, through a logical course of development, became transformed into their opposites. Writes Lenin:
"Free competition is the fundamental attribute of capitalism, and of commodity production generally. Monopoly is exactly the opposite of free competition; but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our very eyes, creating large-scale industry, finally leading to such a concentration of production and capital that monopoly has been and is the result: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks manipulating thousands of millions. At the same time monopoly, which has grown out of free competition, does not abolish the latter, but exists over it and alongside of it, and thereby gives rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, friction and conflicts."
The concentration of capital has a profound effect on the banks, which evolve from being "modest intermediaries" between producers into "powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small business men and also a large part of the means of production and of the sources of raw materials of the given country and in a number of countries."
Capitalism at the imperialist point in its career is decaying and parasitical. Many of the richest capitalists earn their profits from lending and speculation; as Lenin says, they are people "who take no part whatever in production, whose profession is idleness." What could be more leechlike than the fabulous wealth accrued by CEOs who boosted their corporations' standings by the simple expedient of calling losses profits?
Imperialism is an era of almost unimaginable extremes of wealth and poverty. In The Third International After Lenin, Trotsky explains why. Built into capitalism as a general system are two opposite tendencies.
On the one hand, because of its inherent drive to spread and take over everywhere, it "equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries." On the other hand, it does this through "anarchistic methods which constantly ... set one country against another, and one branch of industry against another, developing some parts of world economy while hampering and throwing back the development of others."
Continues Trotsky, "Imperialism, thanks to the universality, penetrability, and mobility and the breakneck speed of the formation of finance capital as the driving force of imperialism, lends vigor to both these tendencies."
Think, for example, of how an overheated rush of foreign investment and lending lifted up the economies of Thailand and the other "Asian tigers" — only to throw them into chaos and ruin a few short years later, when sluggish global markets couldn't absorb their exports.
Or consider that the Gross Domestic Product of the seven wealthiest nations — in order, the U.S., Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada — is 66.7 percent of world GDP, while their combined populations make up only 11.5 percent of the world's people. The U.S., with 4.7 percent of global population, accounts for 31.5 percent of global GDP. And the current downturn is hurting the poorer countries the worst; the growth rates for the economies of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia collectively fell by more than three percent in 2001 over the year before. The nations that are most dependent on U.S. markets for their exports experienced the biggest declines.
The sharp inequalities of end-stage capitalism are also reflected in the existence of a labor aristocracy — high-paid workers in the most developed nations who are prone to identify with the bosses of their own country rather than the workers of others.
Bribed in a myriad of ways out of the super-profits of the imperialists, Lenin says, "they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism." What union activist today has not butted heads more than once with these "bourgeoisified workers"?
Finally, imperialism is a constant invitation to war. This is an inevitable consequence of the complete division of the world among the big capitalist countries, with the result that the only way for one imperialist to gain new spheres of influence is to take them from another.

The Germ of the New within the Old

As a system, capitalism is at war with itself. It is part of its nature to spur technological progress and increase human productivity.
But it does this so successfully that the fruits of these advances grow beyond the ability of a capitalist framework — private ownership, national boundaries, satisfactory profits for at least a section of the capitalists — to contain them. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explain in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, "The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."
Driven on by their competition with each other, the capitalists churn out goods and services at a frenzied tempo, with no common plan, all the while trying to find new ways to reduce labor costs. More commodities are created than they can unload profitably, and the result is a crisis of overproduction — a situation of "too much" material wealth unimaginable in any form of society before the advent of capitalism. Businesses lay off workers, everybody stops spending, and the economy goes into recession. Want becomes the child of plenty.
In its final phase of imperialism, the contradictions of capitalism are stretched to the breaking point. Because of the comprehensive socialization of production — the complete interlinking and interdependence of every part of the global economy — every disturbing tendency is intensified and every problem magnified.
But this socialization of production that reaches new heights with imperialism, and ultimately forces capitalism onto the ropes, lays an excellent foundation for socialism — a system where production will be based on planning and human needs, and abundance will not be a problem!
This is the good news about imperialism — the reason Lenin calls it "the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher system."

The Myth of Free Trade in the Era of Monopoly

It is easy to see in many ways how Lenin's description of imperialism describes life as we know it under neoliberalism: globalization, the power of the banks, the constant threat of war, the immense gap between rich and poor, the parasitism of the speculators and outright swindlers.
But what about the eclipsing of free competition by monopoly? How can that be true of neoliberalism, whose rallying cry is "free trade"?
Essentially, the notion that neoliberalism has anything to do with free trade or open competition is the biggest attempted con job of our times.
Waves of slowdowns in the world economy beginning in the early 1970s meant that the exploiters had to adopt an aggressive strategy to fuel growth and guarantee their profits. That strategy involved beating down every protectionist measure in the developing countries, transferring wealth from public hands to capitalist pockets through privatization everywhere, and doing away with hard-won safeguards for labor and the environment internationally.
What more convenient slogan under which to commit these crimes than "free trade"?
Certainly, a large part of the goal was to step up world trade. But given the economic playing field already in existence, including control of the IMF, World Bank, etc. by the imperialists and above all the U.S., free competition was impossible. Growth in international trading could only exacerbate global inequality, and it did.
For example, while the most advanced countries forced open the markets of poorer nations, they hung on to many of their own trade barriers and protectionist subsidies. According to a July 2002 report of the United Nations Development Program, this double standard costs the least developed countries more in lost exports than the $56 billion they receive in aid every year.
Despite all the double-dealing and intensified exploitation, it took only two decades for neoliberalism to run out of steam. The god of neoliberalism, world trade, actually shrunk by one percent in 2001 — and in the less developed nations, by 2.7 percent.
Far from being a rising economic tide to lift all boats, as advertised, neoliberalism proved to be an anxious bid to avert mass shipwreck.

The Speculative Bubble Bursts
But the shipwreck is definitely coming.

At the time of the 1997 meltdown that began in Asia and spread to Russia and Latin America, the capitalist hope was that a sturdy U.S. economy would steady the world scene. Now it is obvious that the roaring U.S. economy of the late 1990s, that "great and powerful wizard," was a creation largely of smoke and mirrors.
In the past couple decades, the financial sector, which includes banking, insurance, and stocks and bonds, came to represent a much greater share of the U.S. economy. With the field of production overcrowded, capitalists who wanted to use their money to make more money turned to lending and speculation.
But profits can be spun out of thin air only so long before the bubble bursts — and the bigger the bubble, the harder the fall.
A darkly funny article by Larry Elliott, economics editor of the UK Guardian, tells how some cheerleaders for capitalism in the heady days of 1999 predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average would climb as high as 36,000. Instead, of course, the stock market began heading downward in the year 2000. In a slow-motion crash of huge proportions, the market by August 2002 had lost $8 trillion in value from its peak in March 2000 — the largest implosion of assets in history.
"The underlying problem," Elliott writes, "is that since the mid-1990s, share prices are up by 200% but corporate profits — as measured by sober government statisticians rather than dodgy auditors — have risen by 40%."
Writing in the Freedom Socialist, Megan Cornish explains: "The value of shares is supposed to reflect the expected future earnings of a company. But during the late 1990s, the stock exchange expanded in a gigantic speculative bubble; the prices of stocks spiked far above the profits being accrued. Some internet companies ended up with stocks valued in the tens of billions of dollars — without having yet shown a penny in profits!"
The market mania of the late '90s was bound to end in bust. And this time's slump directly affects unprecedented numbers of workers and middle-class people who invested their retirement savings in the market, either by choice or through group pension plans. Commentators are now predicting that most people in the U.S. will have to keep working into their seventies.
Meanwhile, the CEOs of the companies whose stock shares tanked are making out like the bandits they are.
Just two examples of many: Rick Thoman walked away from an 89 percent drop in the value of Xerox stock and job cuts of 5,200 with a $4.8 million package plus $800,000 in annual retirement pay; John Roth of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications-equipment giant, watched his company shed 30,000 employees and 90 percent of its stock-market value before he left with a bonus of $3.3 million and a $585,000 yearly pension.
As the headlines of summer 2002 rotated between stock market plunges and Wall Street scandals, mainstream talking heads tried to temper the bad news by insisting that the economy was picking up — and even by floating the idea that the recession in 2001 hadn't actually happened!
A report by the government's own Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released at the end of July, however, showed that the recession was in fact deeper and longer than had been reported. Moreover, the "recovery" in the first half of 2002 was weaker than had been thought.
The BEA dropped its real bombshell, though, with revised data for the years 1999-2001 that support the idea that the "New Economy" boom of the late 1990s was largely a mirage.
According to its dot-com boosters, a New Economy brought into existence by information technology innovation was going to permit high, recession-proof rates of profits, growth, and employment without provoking inflation. The BEA analysis, however, found that although productivity did rise in the second half of the 1990s, corporate profits were six percent lower from 1999 to 2001 than previously believed. And rather than rising until a peak in 2000, profits topped out three years earlier, in 1997, and have been falling unevenly since then.
Other reports in late July and August of 2002 helped to draw a black frame around the economic picture, showing an escalation in unemployment plus weaker-than-expected GDP and corporate earnings — all pointing to a slide back into recession.
Consumer confidence also dropped sharply in the summer. This is important because the United States relies increasingly on spending by consumers (as opposed to business), which accounts today for two thirds of all economic activity. Through their purchases of everything from homes and autos and healthcare to lattes and impulse items at the checkout counter, U.S. buyers fuel not only the domestic economy, but the world economy.
The reasons for the drop in confidence aren't mysterious. Only steep levels of debt have made it possible for working people to survive personally and to keep the economy afloat. They don't have savings. With their financial situations already precarious, daily bulletins about job cuts and Wall Street corruption are bound to call forth a gloomy mood. Sales of certain more expensive consumer goods are falling, and so is popular approval of Bush's handling of the economy — down from 72 percent in October 2001 to 52 percent in July 2002.
Bush, meanwhile, has been doing the best job that he can for big business. He won passage in May 2001 of a $1.35 trillion tax cut over 11 years, at the expense of health and welfare programs and human services at both the federal and the state level. He handed the major airlines a bailout of $15 billion after 9/11. And he delivered $42 billion more in tax breaks in March 2002 with the bipartisan "economic stimulus" package, passed by Congress almost unanimously. Corporate taxes now stand at their second-lowest level in 60 years.
In sum, Bush and the Congress invited big business in to loot the treasury before the whole system collapses.
Nevertheless, as scandals in the style of Enron and WorldCom proliferated and the stock market continued to tank, Bush was required to adopt the stance of corporate-fraud buster. This was a particularly ill-fitting pose since both he and his vice president had been leading figures in energy companies now under scrutiny for cooking the books during their tenures — Bush as a director on the Harken board and Dick Cheney as CEO of Halliburton.
Trying to project the same macho, Wild-West-sheriff image against evildoing in the penthouse offices that he had against terrorism, Bush with much fanfare signed a reform bill into law at the end of July 2002. The new legislation is so tough on corporate malfeasance that it actually makes defrauding investors a crime. Imagine that!
While Bush postures, the global economy sinks.
When the U.S. went into recession in 2001, the amount it imported from the rest of the world fell drastically, to traumatic effect. Now, all of the world's powerhouses (the U.S., Europe, Japan) are experiencing slowdowns or recession at once, which means that no one of them can come to the rescue of the whole. Meanwhile, Russia's economy continues to sink to the level of the Third World, and the troubles of the Third World become more extreme.
Japan is experiencing its third recession in a decade, with its economy registering the worst 10-year performance of any large industrial country since World War II. Its stock market, like those in Europe, is being buffeted by the plunges in the U.S. market.
In Britain, the stock-market worth of telecommunications companies has fallen by three trillion pounds from the industry's peak. This is three times the annual output of Britain's economy, or 3,000 pounds for every phone owner around the globe.
In South America, after IMF austerity programs and foreign exploitation bankrupted Argentina in 2001, the IMF turned its back on the country, causing the biggest debt default in history. But when the turmoil spread and collapse threatened Brazil, the region's largest economy, the IMF stepped in with a $30 billion bailout for Brazil in August 2002.
In Africa, too, IMF intervention has created hopelessly high levels of national debt, and poverty is relentless. Economic growth is slow in some countries, barely keeping pace with population growth, and nonexistent in others. In Zimbabwe, output fell in 2001 by 7.5 percent.
On the global stage, all of the elements of the perfect storm, a global depression, are in place. Nobody can predict exactly when the shipwreck will happen, but the capitalist world economy is living on borrowed time.

Capitalist Trade
Antagonisms to the Fore

The world's imperialist countries are both antagonists and collaborators; they compete with each other, but they also enter into trading agreements or blocs with one another, and they often cooperate in the exploitation of poorer nations. The current economic crisis will bring out the antagonistic side of their relations ever more acutely.
In a prescient article written in 1925, "The 'Pacifist' Imperialism of the USA," Trotsky describes the position and aims of the U.S. following World War I:
"American capitalism is seeking world domination; it wants to establish an American imperialist autocracy over our planet.... This means that Europe will be permitted to rise again, but within limits set in advance, with certain restrictions of the world market allotted to it.... If we wish to give a clear and precise answer to the question of what American imperialism wants, we must say: It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations."
The basic situation is the same today. The U.S. ruling class guards its standing in the world fiercely; "We're Number Two" is not a slogan it can get behind. At the same time, none of its competitors are resigned to being "on rations." Trade relations among the capitalists are never truly peaceful, and today, with the economy contracting, tensions are sharpening.
The U.S. is absorbing so much of what the world produces, and so much investment capital, that it is running an astronomical trade deficit — approaching one-half trillion dollars' worth in the first half of 2002. With the U.S. in recession and Bush again running up huge columns of red ink in the federal budget, the chronic problem of the trade deficit becomes an unsustainable one. That means that the U.S. must increase its exports and decrease imports.
In May 2002, Bush signed protectionist legislation approving subsidies for agribusiness of $182.28 billion over the next 10 years, increasing the amount of corporate welfare going to agriculture by 70 percent. Despite the fact that officials of the European Union and Japan strongly objected to this move, the U.S. then proceeded to significantly raise steel tariffs.
Leaders of the EU, for their part, have vowed to do whatever is necessary to make Europe the world's most competitive economy.
On the trade scene, the capitalist claws are coming out.

III. Escalating Executive Power in the U.S.

Accompanying the economic crisis is a roiling political crisis.
As George Novack writes in Democracy and Revolution, capitalist democracy depends for its survival on a reasonable number of working people believing "that the social system offers broad possibilities of progress and is measurably moving ahead."
In our time, that belief is eroding fast, and the system is losing legitimacy. The past few years have been ones of intense protest — including a healthy dose of consciously anticapitalist protest — all around the world.
The other prop upon which bourgeois democracy depends is repression — and the less faith the masses have in the system, the more repression is required.
The events of 9/11 gave Bush the excuse to put into play a wide array of repressive measures — some that previous administrations had tried to implement, and others they could only have dreamed of. Under the guise of a war against terrorism, Bush is conducting a war against democratic rights — with the nearly unconditional cooperation of Congress, the business media, and the top echelons of the labor bureaucracy. "Antiterrorism" has become the paranoid rallying cry for war and reaction that "anticommunism" was for most of the century before.
At the same time, the president who stole his office with the help of a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court is expanding the authority of the state, especially its executive branch, as never before.

Repression Comes Down while Power Flows Up

The actions of the White House, Congress, and police agencies immediately following 9/11 — specifically, the passage of the Patriot Act and the mass detentions of Arab and Muslim immigrants — set the tone for all that was to come.
Bush's Patriot Act, approved overwhelmingly by Congress in October 2001, is a 350-page attack on civil liberties that are the inheritance of centuries of struggle by the common people.
The act effectively does away with the right to privacy while giving the FBI, CIA, INS and other police agencies sweeping new authority. Creating a loosely defined new crime of "domestic terrorism," it allows the government to label groups as "terrorist" without proof or procedural safeguards, criminalize previously protected political activity and speech, impose heavy penalties for civil disobedience and militant mass protests, and conduct more widely ranging surveillance on U.S. residents.
By allowing for the indefinite incarceration of noncitizens not charged with a crime, the act set up a "legal" framework for the despicable use of preventive detention à la South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel. Bush and the Justice Department of Attorney General John Ashcroft later claimed the right to treat citizen "enemy combatants" and "material witnesses" in the same way.
At the time the Patriot Act became law, nearly a thousand immigrants already had been rounded up and detained. The government refused to release most of their names and denied many of them access to lawyers and family. With the creation of this group of los desaparecidos, the disappeared, the U.S. became a police state for some.
Through executive orders, Bush also instituted special, secret military courts to try foreigners accused of terrorism and continued to officially expand the state's ability to hold people without charging them.
Leftists, including the FSP, warned that the ultimate targets of these repressive measures would be radicals and labor militants. In the following months, as the raids continued on a smaller scale, it became clear that some immigrants active on behalf of such causes as Palestinian rights were in fact being singled out.
So, too, was at least one radical attorney, Lynne Stewart, who represents a client appealing a conviction for terrorism. Her arrest in April 2002, based on secret monitoring of her conversations with her client and designed to have a chilling effect on the legal community, signaled an assault on the constitutional right of attorney-client privilege — an inconvenient obstacle in the erection of a police state.
The first seven months of 2002 saw one threatening development after another, each one primed to strip away the rights of ordinary people and concentrate more power with the president, his appointees, the military, and police and spy agencies.
These events included a revelation that Bush had put together a secret shadow government, with no representation from the legislative or judicial branches, hidden away somewhere on the East Coast; a refocusing of the FBI on preventing terrorism, paired with a loosening of restrictions placed on the agency; Bush's plan to create a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which would be the biggest reorganization of government since the 1940s and would widen the president's ability to exempt some government workers from federal labor rules; a proposal by the Justice Department to force tens of thousands of Muslims and Middle Easterners who are in the U.S. on visas to register with the government and be fingerprinted; an initiative by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to weaken congressional oversight of the Pentagon; a plan to give the military more latitude to act as a law-and-order force on the streets of the U.S.; and the birth of TIPS, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, a program that Ashcroft hopes will make spies and finks of millions of letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers whose jobs bring them into contact with the public.
If the 1980s and '90s were a time of the transfer of huge amounts of wealth from the public sphere to the private, from workers and the poor to the rich, then now is a time of an enormous transfer of rights, of power, from the people to the state — and from the other branches of government to the executive.

Government of the Saber

The erosion of the democratic component of bourgeois democracy is not a new phenomenon — in fact, it is a feature of imperialism. In Democracy and Revolution, George Novack explains how the reaction fostered by monopoly capitalism plays out in changing governmental forms.
"A representative democracy is alien to the economic tendencies of corporate capitalism. The advent of monopoly rule not only halts the extension of new freedoms but also brings about the contraction of already acquired rights of the people. Imperialism accentuates the contradiction, which existed from the first, between the coexistence of the power, profiteering and property of the capitalist rulers and political democracy. It inescapably fosters antidemocratic forces and trends because the heightened centralization of command, required by the operations of big business in both production and political life, conflicts with the dispersion of power among the voters and parties on which the parliamentary system rests."
Also gaining strength is the "tendency to augment the executive power of the heads of the capitalist state at the expense of the prerogatives of parliamentary bodies," Novack writes. "This is an irrepressible outgrowth of the overwhelming influence exerted upon the government by big business."
Novack notes that in 1969, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in criticizing the way the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House was waging the Vietnam War, warned that the U.S. was "already a long way toward becoming an elective dictatorship."
Novack here chooses an interesting example, because what was happening in this period was not just the intensification of executive power as it "normally" occurs over time, but a special sharpening due to specific events at the time. Our FSP founders, who were the Kirk-Kaye tendency within the Socialist Workers Party, identified this sharpening as mounting Bonapartism.
If fascism might be described as capitalism's form of government of last resort when wracked by crisis, then Bonapartism could be described as its form of next-to-last resort. Defining this phenomenon in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky says: "Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes — in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged."
In The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, writing of the German situation in 1932, he elaborates:
"The threat of civil war creates a need in the ruling class for an arbiter and commander, for a Caesar. That precisely is the function of Bonapartism.
"Every regime claims to stand above classes, safeguarding the interests of the whole. But the effects of social forces cannot be so easily determined as those in the field of mechanics. The government itself is made of flesh and bone. It is bound up with certain classes and their interests. In peaceful times a democratic parliament seems to be the best instrument for reconciling conflicting forces. But when fundamental forces veer off at 180-degree angles, pulling in opposite directions, then the opening for a Bonapartist dictatorship appears."
Does the U.S. stand at the doorstep of a civil war, as Germany did at the time Trotsky was writing? No. But the 50,000 unionists, students, anarchists, environmentalists, feminists, and radicals of all colors who took to the Seattle streets in 1999, determined to shut down the WTO and end corporate rule, constituted a wake-up call that the capitalists couldn't ignore. All of a sudden, full-fledged revolt in the advanced capitalist countries — right in the USA! — became possible to imagine. It was a "Visualize revolution" moment.
Being the world's leading imperialist, moreover, means that the U.S. has to be concerned not only with the level of protest at home, but with the political weather everywhere. And internationally, not only have street carnivals against corporate globalization attracted tens and hundreds of thousands of people, but in many places strikes and militant labor actions have featured in the battle against neoliberalism as well. General strikes have brought the economic activity of whole countries to a halt, and rage over exploitation has toppled governments.
Also setting the stage for a Bonapartist-type solution were the economic crisis and the serious political weaknesses besetting the U.S. ruling class internally, which made it vulnerable regardless of the immediate degree of resistance it was encountering. The years of the Clinton administration had been a circus of scandal on the one hand and gridlock between the two major parties on the other — crowned at the end by a presidential contest that was openly farcical and showed the electoral system to be undemocratic at its foundation.
With the attacks of 9/11, Bush had a ready-made opportunity to appear to rise above the "petty" interests of parties and classes and be the representative of the nation as a whole. He has used that opportunity to begin implementing a program of repression that any military dictator would recognize.
Just as was true during the turmoil of the Vietnam War and explosive civil rights movement, today is a time of mounting Bonapartism in the state. The face the U.S. government has turned now to its own people and to the world is qualitatively different from the one it wore before September 2001.

Infinite War

In answer to the economic and political crisis it must somehow manage, the U.S. capitalist class partners repression at home with aggression abroad.
The terrorist attacks gave Bush the green light to declare a war without any geographical boundaries, without an end point, a war infinitely expandable. Just as the war at home does, the war abroad allows him to target the "troublemakers" and those who stand in the way of imperialist "progress." His objective seems to be to topple and replace every government unfriendly to the U.S., starting with those countries vital to the oil industry.
Bush and his clique promoted the horrendously devastating and murderous war against Afghanistan as a war in everybody's interest, including the Afghanis themselves. Similarly, the looming all-out war against Iraq is advertised not only as a mission to secure the U.S. against terrorism, but to free Iraqis from the grip of a terrible dictator.
Other spokespersons for Uncle Sam, however, are more upfront about the military role of the U.S. An example comes from Stephen Peter Rosen, professor of national security and military affairs and a former Defense Department staffer, in a Harvard magazine article called "The Future of War and the American Military":
"The United States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around the world. Our military spending exceeds that of the next six or seven powers combined, and we have a monopoly on many advanced and not so advanced military technologies. We, and only we, form and lead military coalitions into war. We use our military dominance to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries...
"Planning for imperial wars is different than planning for conventional wars. In dealing with the Soviet Union ... small wars could not be allowed to escalate... Imperial wars to restore order are not so restrained. The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly as possible for psychological impact — to demonstrate that the empire cannot be challenged with impunity.... Now we are in the business of bringing down hostile governments and creating governments favorable to us."
Any talk by U.S. presidents of moral or humanitarian motives for war is the sheerest hypocrisy. The point of capitalist war is to protect and broaden capitalist interests, period. And in a downturn, war guarantees a certain amount of activity in the economy and obscenely large profits for a sector of big business. War is capitalism's down-and-dirty ace in the hole.
But war also invites protest on a massive scale. This is already happening in response to the threatened all-out assault against Iraq which is bringing together peace activists and anti-corporate globalization forces. Huge numbers of those in the streets recognize that this is a war designed to protect the profits of big business, above all those of the U.S. ruling class. And what this class fears most is a mass movement that has drawn the conclusion that the only way to end war is to create socialism.

IV. The U.S. Revolution and the People Who Will Make It

Precisely because U.S. imperialism dominates the world, revolution in the United States is absolutely central to international liberation from class exploitation and its ugly offshoots such as sexism, racism, and imperialist war.
All around the globe, workers, peasants, and young people are resisting both the Yankee empire and homegrown exploiters, often laying their lives on the line.
Revolution is on the agenda in Argentina. The people of Venezuela defend their elected president against a coup attempt engineered by big business. Mass uprising in Peru defeats plans to privatize electricity; El Salvadoran doctors and medical workers strike against the privatization of healthcare.
Palestinians, against all odds, maintain their intifada. Demonstrators in the Middle East take to the streets against warmaking by Israel and the U.S., while Jewish reservists refuse to fight in the occupied territories. As China's Communist Party leaders make nice with world capitalism, Chinese workers strike against layoffs and pension cutbacks. Female villagers in Nigeria occupy a ChevronTexaco plant and take hostages to demand jobs and electricity. Afghan women insist on a role in government. Twenty million workers in India walk out in protest against the IMF and World Bank.
Australians mobilize against government attacks on refugees and labor unions. In Canada, First Nations people and unionists hold huge protests against the slashing of social programs. Steel workers in Britain strike over pensions. General strikes shake Greece, Spain, Italy. Students in Spain and elsewhere organize massive rallies against rising tuition and blows to public education.
And in one remaining country, Cuba, a nation of resisters against corporate ruination of the planet clearly raises the alternative: socialism. Despite the embargo, despite pressure from Bush, despite the likelihood that the island will be targeted in one way or another by the U.S. "antiterror" campaign, Cuba's people are continuing to defend their revolution.
In the U.S., too, there are labor actions and protests of tens of thousands of people for global justice, even after 9/11. But by and large, serious class struggle rarely happens, because sellout labor lieutenants of capital hold it back.
If the resistance of our brave sisters and brothers around the world is ever to result in real and lasting victory, that has got to change. Class consciousness is going to have to become as American as jazz or rap, and revolution is going to have to happen here.
For a century, every country that steps onto the road of revolution, every serious insurrection internationally, has been subject to U.S. threats, blackmail, sabotage, embargo, blockade, harassment, bribery, cooptation, coercion, slander, sniping, spying, infiltration, intrigue, and active military counterrevolution. But there exists one battalion of people who are potentially stronger than the U.S. capitalists, who have the power to get the U.S. ruling class off the backs of the rest of the world: the U.S. working class. Revolution in the U.S. is necessary — and it is inevitable.

Capitalism's Gravediggers

These are brash words to use in talking about a class regarded by many leftists around the world as hopelessly conservative, privileged, arrogant, and ignorant — so benighted as to be "endowed with a new, hyphenated name — the backward-American proletariat," as Clara Fraser writes in "On the Dialectics of U.S. 'Backwardness.'"
Taking the real measure of U.S. workers, however, is not that simple, as the title of Fraser's essay suggests. A large section of the class has been corrupted by the deadening influence of the "super-crumbs" that fall from the imperialist table. But that's just the beginning of the story.
The truth is always concrete. The question of revolution in the U.S. comes down to the question of who will lead it. And the answer is, those who need it the most.
In Imperialism, as noted above, Lenin discusses how this stage of capitalism means a sharp division between the rich and poor nations of the world, a division that allows the wealthy nations to buy off a layer of their working classes. But, at the same time, Lenin foresees the impetus that this inequality will give to struggles for national liberation in the colonized countries. Super-exploitation, he says, will lead to super-resistance.
What has become even more evident since Lenin's time is that this stratification of the proletariat across the world stage is replicated on each national stage. And all over the globe, wherever one looks, there is one group that is always paid the least (or not at all), worked the hardest, burdened with the most responsibility for the next generation of humanity, and subjected to the most disrespect and abuse: women.
As Fraser says in the article "Thelma and Louise 'R' Us" in Revolution, She Wrote: "If we must use a yardstick and measure afflictions to discern who are the most affronted people in the U.S. or internationally — and I know that people hate these comparative-agony calculations — the mathematical answer is overwhelming."
In Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels brilliantly explains the role that the subjugation of women as an entire sex played in the consolidation of the rise of the private-property system. Most Marxists following after him also recognized woman as "the first human being to come into bondage" (August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism).
But what largely remained to be discovered was the consequence of women's special historical place in class society — that is, their destiny to lead in transforming that society.
One of the first exhilarating instances of this came on International Women's Day in 1917. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describes how Petrograd seamstresses determined that the time was right for taking to the streets, even against the advice of local labor leaders.
The revolution was "begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations," Trotsky says, "the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat — the women textile workers."
In the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, World War II was a watershed moment for women and for people of color, tearing down gender and race barriers in the workforce and the military, raising expectations, and preparing the ground for the dynamic race liberation and feminist movements that were to come. For Marxists who cared to see, the answer to the question of "who will lead the U.S. working class" was coming clearer, like a photograph slowly developing in its chemical bath.
In the early 1950s, a group of Black, Chicano, and white women and men within the Socialist Workers Party put forward a theory that came to be known as revolutionary integration, a materialist analysis of the position of African Americans in the U.S. and a manifesto for Black leadership in the working class as a whole. Overlapping with this political tendency was a group of SWPers who were evolving ideas about the relationship of women to revolution that they called socialist feminism. When the entire Seattle branch of the SWP left that organization to launch the Freedom Socialist Party, they did so on the programmatic foundations of these two breakthrough theories.
Guided by Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, these thinkers posited that the most oppressed of the working class are fated to provide radical leadership for the class as a whole because racism and sexism, like war, cannot be eradicated under the capitalist system. A steady stream of high profits depends entirely on unpaid female labor in the home, the super-exploitation of women and people of color as workers, and the political, legal, and cultural oppression that justifies and reinforces this super-exploitation.
Their concepts are borne out in life. The evidence is the militancy and persistence of those who are oppressed, on the basis of sex or race or nationality or sexuality or age or physical capabilities or anything else, in fighting for equality, justice, freedom, and dignity through social change. Think, for example, of the revolution-within-the-revolution role played by Iranian women in 1978-79.
Today, the issues of the specially and multiply oppressed dramatically remain the cutting edge of the class war.
Immigrants and refugees have internationalized the work forces of countries like the U.S. and Australia and often light a militant spark in the labor movement, both because of their consciousness of imperialism's effects in the world and the disparate treatment they receive in their new countries. Today's assault on civil liberties makes their vanguard role within the class even more clear. This attack, which will without a doubt zoom in on labor and the Left if it is not stopped, is coming to life as a racist campaign whose first targets in the U.S. are Arabs and immigrants of color, many of them residents of longstanding. In Australia, the victims have primarily been asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Women and children are first and most severely affected by rollbacks due to the economic crisis, like the dismantling of welfare, and by war, famine, and political upheaval. Eighty percent of the world's refugees are women and children, and women under the age of 25 also make up 80 percent of the workforce in neoliberalism's maquiladoras and "free enterprise" zones.
These are the conditions that turn those who are worst served by capitalism into its strongest and most passionate antagonists. Whenever a well-paid labor bureaucrat says "Stop" and a woman or immigrant or queer or teenaged worker says "Go," the force that will propel the U.S. revolution, and the world revolution with it, can be seen. There the dialectics of imperialism are at work.

V. Historic Role of a Leninist Party and Current FSP Tasks

In Marxist parlance, material conditions, such as the economy, are objective factors. The consciousness and temper of the masses of people is a subjective factor. And just as it's impossible to predict exactly what problem in an overstressed economy is going to cause it to hit bottom, or when, the final blow that will cause working people to say basta, and when it will fall, is even more inscrutable.
But this we know: The vanguard party can play a role in bringing that day closer, and the party needs to be ready for it when it comes.
What this means for the FSP's orientation in the next few years is providing education and more education; initiating and participating in united fronts to resist war and repression; seeking out left cothinkers, especially internationally, and continuing to urge the U.S. Left to work together on crucial issues of workingclass self-defense; consistent intervention in the labor arena, joining with rank-and-file militants to push the movement to adopt an internationalist, fighting program and agitating for a break with the labor misleaders who roll over for carnage abroad and cutbacks at home; and expanding the membership of the party to reflect more accurately the whole working class and especially its most oppressed sectors.

Mobilizing the Radical Energy of the Class

An important part of the education we need to do is about the vanguard party itself. Why is the Bolshevik party necessary?
In discussing the relationship between the people and the party in making revolution, Trotsky says that the actions of the masses are fundamental, but still the party is irreplaceable.
In History of the Russian Revolution, he writes: "[P]arties and leaders ... constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam."
The Leninist party leads. It analyzes, looks ahead to the future, remembers the lessons of the past, and patiently explains, all the while promoting socialism. It is a training ground, creating a new generation of leaders to follow the old. It is the best champion of the struggles for democratic reforms that point out the need for revolutionary change — transitional demands. It keeps the faith when radical periods recede, social movements ebb, and repression is unleashed. It challenges the working class to reject crippling prejudices and backward illusions — sexism, racism, homophobia, national chauvinism, faith in the Democratic Party.
Most of all, it is a combat organization, geared for defending workers in immediate situations of sharp class conflict and ultimately for seizing state power.
What the Bolshevik party cannot do is make revolution happen! In the absence of godlike powers, what is most crucial to the party is a correct program.
In 1938, with fascism on the rise around the world, Trotsky had a lot to say on this question in a discussion about the draft program for the founding conference of the Fourth International. The discussion, called "The Political Backwardness of the American Workers" in the book The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, most definitely deserves to be read, or reread, in its entirety. But this is the gist of Trotsky's argument:
"[W]e must ask ourselves if the program should be adapted to the mentality of the workers or to the present objective economic and social conditions of the country. This is the most important question.
"... The program must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers .... It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness. That is why we must express in our program the whole acuteness of the social crises of the capitalist society, including in the first line the United States. We cannot postpone or modify objective circumstances which don't depend upon us. We cannot guarantee that the masses will solve the crisis; but we must express the situation as it is, and that is the task of the program.
"... And when we appear with our program before the working class, we cannot give any guarantees that they will accept our program. We cannot take responsibility for this ... we can only take the responsibility for ourselves.
"We must tell the workers the truth; then we will win the best elements .... [E]ven in the worst case, if the working class doesn't sufficiently mobilize its mind and its strength at present for the socialist revolution — even in the worst case, if this working class falls as a victim to fascism, the best elements will say, 'We were warned by this party; it was a good party.' And a great tradition will remain in the working class."
Because the pressures on the vanguard party are immense, it is helpful to realize what is on our shoulders and what is not. To have a program that explains the real conditions of class society at a given time and shows the way forward, and to take that program to working people and argue for it: this the FSP has shown we can do!
The pressures on the vanguard party don't come only from our class enemies, unfortunately. Thanks to relentless anticommunist propaganda from the ruling strata and the false identification of Leninism with Stalinism, working people, even people who may be otherwise sympathetic to socialist ideas, sometimes meet the idea of the vanguard party with distrust. And in the movements today, we are competing for hearts and minds with a newly energized anarchist current, which is often hostile to the vanguard party both on principle and in practice.
As a historical movement and philosophy, anarchism considers the state to be the great evil afflicting humanity, not class exploitation.
Socialists, on the other hand, recognize that the state is a vehicle for the rule of one class over another, but ask, whose interests are being served? The capitalist minority or the workingclass majority? Marxists anticipate the eventual withering away of the state, but believe that workers can't do away with it until they have first taken control of it and suppressed the inevitable attempts at capitalist sabotage and counterrevolution.
Because anarchism opposes any form of organized authority that impinges on individual autonomy, it of course opposes the vanguard party, which is a highly disciplined body operating by majority rule. But in confronting the most powerful enemy in history, namely the capitalists of today with the U.S. ruling class at their head, every bit of organization and discipline can only help!
As James P. Cannon writes in The Revolutionary Party, "The Leninist party proved indispensable in Russia, where the belated bourgeoisie was a feeble social and political force. It will be a million times more necessary in America, the home of the strongest, richest, and most ruthless exploiting class .... It is impossible to stumble into a successful revolution in the United States."
Yet socialists are sympathetic to the anarchist emphasis on individual freedom, Cannon especially. In a 1955 letter to Myra Tanner Weiss in The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon acknowledges the falseness of anarchist theory, but defends the anarchist spirit as part of the makeup of the party.
Says Cannon: "The revolutionary party represents a dialectical unity of opposites. In one sense it is, in effect, the fusion of the rebel instincts of individuals with the intellectual recognition that their rebellion can be effective only when they are combined and united into a single striking force which only a disciplined organization can supply."
The FSP is such an organization. And because of the seriousness of the times, we can expect more people to be interested in joining a group with serious goals and methods. Our strongest focus in the current period should be on recruiting.
The surest guarantee that the Leninist party will well represent the entire class, in all its variety, is to have the full rainbow of colors, and ages, and every other demographic particularity represented in the membership. New folks bring with them their own experiences as workers and students. These generate new ideas, new approaches to projects and problems, new talents, and even new mistakes — which we need in order to avoid hardening of the political and organizational arteries. Thinking creatively about how to welcome and encourage the participation of new members should be at the top of all our lists.

Strengthening Revolutionary Leadership

Given the economic crisis, imperialist wars, and growing abandonment of bourgeois democracy that define this period, the burning necessity for the whole world is radical leadership.
It's our job as the Bolshevik party to tell the truth, even when it's hard to hear — and the truth is that much of what passes for social-issue and labor activism these days is nothing but wheel-spinning, or worse. Reformist strategies, like pacifist opposition to war and "fair trade" campaigns as the answer to imperialist economy, are easy to embrace, but they take the exploited people of the globe exactly nowhere. They're time-tested failures.
Our most important task, therefore, is to do everything we can, wherever we can, to develop revolutionary leadership.
That dictates the following priorities for us, integrated with recruitment: 1) education about socialism, with election campaigns and publishing at the top of the "how to implement" list; 2) legal, political, and physical defense of the working class against the encroaching police state; 3) creating and joining united fronts; 4) looking for and building relationships with likeminded leftists, alert for regroupment possibilities; and 5) raising the level of inclusiveness, effectiveness, and cooperation within the antiwar and anti-corporate movements by making concrete proposals for democratic decision-making and clear points of unity, and by setting a high standard ourselves for functioning with mutual respect.
In our intervention in the movements, we want to keep those goals in mind. Here is where we should put our emphasis:

1. Women and young people
Women are at the forefront of fighting the ravages of capitalism from Argentina to Nigeria because they suffer the most from war and assaults on the standard of living.
In the U.S., welfare has been a slender lifeline holding many of the poorest families together. Now that lifeline is disappearing while federal, state, and local budget cuts are threatening everything from public education to drug-abuse programs and services for battered women.
Many organizers in the feminist movement, just as in other activist spheres, were coopted by careers in the social-services industry — first in the government-supported antipoverty programs of the late 1960s and the 1970s and later in the array of NGO-type nonprofits operating today. Because of this, almost nobody is doing grassroots political organizing to defend working and poor women who desperately need federally funded childcare, housing, healthcare, etc. The "reform" leadership of the AFL-CIO is of little use, meanwhile, having disbanded their women's department.
To build the militancy of women in this country, the FSP can assist our sister organization, Radical Women, in taking up the abandoned banner of feminist community organizing.
In The Transitional Program, Trotsky praises the "fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit" of youth, and we agree. Students and young workers feel passionately about their world and its injustices. To be treated as cannon fodder for Texaco in the Iraqi desert, a hip market to soak up the excesses of capitalist production at the mall, cheap labor to be exploited on the job while denied the basic rights older workers took for granted back in their day — this is not what they expected or hoped for.
Young people want to understand this mess, and more than that, they want to fight to change it.
Often young people have an excellent understanding of the system's failings. What they may be looking for, and what we can provide, are ideas about what to do about it, including how to overcome the U.S. culture of super-individualism, narcissism, cutthroat competition, sexism, racism, and commitment phobia that makes it so hard to see the new world in the old.
And like any good educator does, we need to spend time listening, helping our teen and twenty-something comrades and friends find their own voices, their own convictions, and their own identities. The party's responsibility is to train young radical leaders to speak and act for themselves.
As Trotsky urged, let's turn to the woman worker and open the road to the youth!

2. Labor
Never in our collective memory has the leadership of the labor movement declined so spectacularly to meet the challenges of the times. The past record of the top layer of AFL-CIO officialdom is full of treachery, especially on the international scene and when it comes to the issues and needs of women, people of color, and lower-paid workers. At present, however, they have completely sold out to war, nationalism, and business unionism.
Meanwhile, the Labor Party was stillborn in 1996, and union membership is at historically low levels; most young people have no concept of what a union is or what their rights as workers are. Clearly, something drastic has to happen if the union movement is to retain any viability at all, let alone play a role in galvanizing working people.
Is it time to raise a call for unions to break with the AFL-CIO to form a new, class-conscious labor federation and movement? The party should consider this seriously. We should research whether there are unions that might be willing to initiate such a split, and discuss the need for such a break with our union allies. Should the economy sharply worsen, or attacks on civil liberties greatly worsen, we might find a left split from the AFL-CIO coming to life very quickly.
Whatever we tackle in the labor sphere will get a boost from our highly significant activity in the union movement since Bush's election, and particularly since 9/11.
FSPers have collaborated with other leftists, members of their locals, and people at conferences and conventions to form caucuses and present resolutions opposing the war and attacks on immigrants and democratic liberties. We've worked with Palestinian activists to develop a resolution upholding Palestinian human and labor rights, El Salvadoran comrades to win the support of U.S. workers for workers internationally, and a Green Party leader to oppose redbaiting language in the AFL-CIO constitution — and these are just some examples.
We can take pride in what we're accomplishing and use it as a springboard for more ambitious efforts as we continue to press for union democracy, independence from the Democratic Party, and organizing drives among immigrants, the most radical workers.

3. People of color and immigrants
For people of color and immigrants, the police-state-in-the-making of Bush and Ashcroft intensifies the harassment and discrimination that are an everyday fact of life. We will need to be vigilant in defending the job rights and civil liberties of immigrants and organizing against cop abuse and racist scapegoating. We have already incorporated this as a priority in our union work, and labor will remain one of the best arenas in which to find co-fighters on these questions.
We must help to build resistance to the government's secretive imprisonments until those incarcerated are free, doing everything in our power to make sure that our co-activists in the labor and other movements understand that this is an issue for all of us.
It's also crucial to remember the political prisoners locked up before 9/11. The politicians may think that now is a good time to finally execute African American revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal, for instance, and we have to convince them otherwise with the force of our continued protest.
At the same time, government attacks against immigrants and people of color set the stage for an increase in white-supremacist violence, and we may need to step up our anti-Nazi organizing as well.

4. Queers
In standing together to oppose Israeli brutality in the occupied territories, Israeli and Palestinian gays have cut courageously across all the nationalist hatred — revealing again the propensity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered folk to get flagrant not only on behalf of their own rights, but the rights of others as well. This is precisely why the FSP looks to queers as a source of revolutionary commitment.
We are working well with an anti-bashing network in Chicago that shares our radical views. In 2002, we collaborated with them in building antiwar Gay Pride contingents in Chicago, Seattle, and several other cities.
The vitality of these multi-issue contingents and the new connections we are making with other queer leftists tell us a couple of things. One is that creating a left pole to oppose the entrenched leadership of the queer movement by Democratic Party hacks, who have been shamefully silent in response to the wars going on at home and abroad, may become a realistic prospect. Another is that the LGBT movement is a good home for our attempts to foster the kind of joint left work that could lead even to possibilities for regroupment.

5. The Left
The nature of the times certainly underlines the importance of our longstanding focus on encouraging the revolutionary Left to work together, both nationally and internationally. The need is urgent for radicals to combine forces against foreign aggression and domestic repression.
The Australian section of the party is blazing the way in this area with their participation in Socialist Alliance, which puts opposition to the Howard government's war activities and anti-refugee campaign front and center.
In the U.S., all of the branches have been reaching out to other left groups, and we've had some successes. Our Portland branch won the strong backing of the Oregon Socialist Party for the FSP's landmark ballot access case and collaborated with the SP from the beginning of the lawsuit through to the victorious conclusion. To cite just one other example, the San Francisco Bay Area comrades have established good working relations with other leftists through a coalition called the Town Hall Committee.
As we work with other socialists, we remain alert to possibilities for developing more formal and long-term organizational ties. The FSP aspires to become a mass party of the working class, and we know that it will take not only recruitment, but also regroupment, to get there.
Over the past few years, as we've taken advantage of opportunities to explore the international scene, we've entered into a warm relationship with revolutionary comrades in El Salvador, which we will continue to develop. We will also do our best to monitor the Fourth International (United Secretariat) for any signs of life and at the same time investigate other attempts being made to form revolutionary internationals.
Again, it helps to recognize what we can control and what we can't. The ups and downs of the world left scene are beyond our orchestration — but we can pay attention, which will allow us to intervene where we see others trying to bring to life the ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
As part of our regroupment perspective, we should make a thorough study of the international Trotskyist movement, in which comrades would investigate the various organizations through their websites and printed documents and then write up short analyses. This would provide us with an invaluable overview.
When it comes to regroupment, there's no substitute for tenacity, tenacity, tenacity!

The Road Forward

Over the next couple years, the FSP can most effectively serve the coming revolution by continuing to be a demonstration project. It's our privilege and responsibility to show that the Left can work together; that even now, working people can win victories; and that the vanguard party is the place to be in the fight for fundamental and lasting change.
It can seem like a long road from where we are now to where we're headed. But nobody can move faster than U.S. workers when aroused, and nothing is as surprising as history. Think of the majority of the poor Bolsheviks, taken off guard by the beginning of revolution in 1917 and struggling to catch up!
In the end, it comes down to this: necessity is the whip of change. As Trotsky wrote in 1917, "All of the evolution of the past, the thousands of years of human history, of class struggle, of cultural accumulations, are concentrated now in the sole problem of the proletarian revolution. There is no other answer and no other escape." ("After the July Days: What Next?")
Today, with capitalism in a blind alley, wounded and dangerous, escape is a desperate necessity. History, theory, and our own experiences give us in the FSP all the tools we need to persuade our workingclass sisters and brothers that socialism is the way out and the road forward. At this turning point for humanity, our job is simply to make the best use of these tools that we can.