In the last few years following the collapse of the totalitarian Stalinist regimes of East Europe and the USSR we have witnessed an unraveling of the post-World War II equilibrium based on a division of the world between imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies. Parallel to that, the economic hegemony of the United States, which had served as the cornerstone of the world capitalist system, has fatally eroded and the interimperialist rivalries have burst forth to the forefront of world politics.
At the end of XX-th century the insoluble contradictions of capitalism are reasserting themselves: firstly, the contradiction between the globalization of the world economy and the system of individual nation-states; secondly, the conflict between, on the one hand, the need for a democratic plan to manage the natural resources of Earth and to develop the social resources of humanity, and, on the other hand, the system of private property with its cruel, market driven laws.
These contradictions are now pushing mankind into a convulsive era of wars and revolutions. The advanced capitalist economies are lurching from recessions to "jobless recoveries". The less developed countries and continents are sliding back to colonialism and barbarism, and we see the spread of social destruction, economic collapse and imperialist plunder in Africa, Asia, Latin America and now also in East Europe.
We shall examine the Marxist analysis of the factors shaping our world and see how to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.
The United States today: an epidemic of corporate downsizing, layoffs and unemployment, slide in the living standards of the working class, homelessness and disease, crisis in healthcare and education, criminalization of poverty and an epidemic of crime. The budget crisis and the fake battle between Clinton and the Republicans is just a cover for a further right wing shift in the program of the ruling class: workhouses and orphanages for the "deserving poor", jails for the "undeserving".
The collapse of the nationally isolated "socialist" economies of East Europe and the USSR is not leading to a system of stable and prospering democracies. Instead, the whole gigantic landmass from Central Europe to the Pacific is being plunged into a nightmare of ethnic, religious, national conflicts as these societies are driven to barbaric, third-world existence. In the Third World, the false perspective of a rational or "third" road of development has collapsed as these "independent" states succumb to the increased pressures of resurgent colonialism.
The half-century bubble of worldwide economic expansion, based on American hegemony and on the unprecedented expansion of credit, has burst. As the world competition intensifies, the capitalist nation-states fight for survival by driving down the living standards of the working class within their borders while they compete against their rivals on the global battlefield for preferential access to raw materials, cheap labor and markets.
72 years ago the Left Opposition under the leadership of Leon Trotsky began a fight against the reactionary perspective of "socialism in one country" and the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union and the international workers' movement. We shall review the history of the labor movement in the XX-th century and the struggle of the Fourth International for Marxism against the various fake pretenders.
Wednesdays, 6 PM, room 8-105, on the Infinite Corridor
Class sponsored by F. Kreisel, 253-8625