by JOSEPH KISHORE
On Saturday, May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International held the 2019 International Online May Day Rally, the sixth annual online May Day Rally held by the ICFI, the world Trotskyist movement. The rally heard speeches on different aspects of the world crisis of capitalism and the struggles of the international working class from 12 leading members of the world party and its sections and sympathizing organizations around the world.
On successive days, the World Socialist Web Site is publishing the texts of the speeches delivered at the rally. Below is the speech delivered by Joseph Kishore, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (US). Last week, the WSWS published the opening report to the rally, given by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
This has been a very important and, as with the other May Day Online Rallies held by the International Committee of the Fourth International, a world event. We have had participants today from Australia, France, the United States, Britain, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Peru, the Netherlands, Turkey, Poland, Costa Rica, and many more. There is even one listener who wrote in to say that he was participating from 30,000 feet in the air, above the United States.
The reports that have been delivered today provide a powerful foundation for the construction of a mass socialist movement in the international working class.
The future lies in socialism. The ruling class is itself terrified of the social convulsions to come, of “some sort of revolution,” as hedge fund manager Raymond Dalio put it. The speeches today have reviewed the response of the ruling class in the effort to preserve its social system: the promotion of the far-right, the resurrection of fascism, the turn to authoritarian forms of rule, the attack on democratic rights—including the persecution and victimization of Julian Assange.
The speeches have also explained, however, that there exists a powerful social force that is charting a different way forward—the international working class. They have reviewed some of the most significant struggles, in France, Algeria, China, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Israel, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, New Zealand, Sudan, Mexico, and of course the United States.
There is growing interest in socialism. Not since the 1930s has there been such widespread revulsion among masses of people directed against the entire social and economic system.
These two processes are driven by powerful objective forces. At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, long anticipated by the Trotskyist movement, the ideologists of capitalism proclaimed the end of history. Within the milieu of “left” and pseudo-left academia, which had been oriented to Stalinism, the transformation of the bureaucratic apparatus into a new oligarchy was seized as an occasion to abandon any commitment to the transformation of social relations, let alone Marxism.
The common conception was that the collapse of the USSR signified the triumph of capitalism. The great problems that plagued mankind in the 20th century were supposedly behind us.
How false these theories have turned out to be!
Instead of a revival of democracy, we have a revival of fascism. Instead of an era of peace, we have had a quarter century of unending war. Instead of social and economic progress, we have had social and economic decay and crisis.
And of course, here in the United States we have Trump.
The Trump administration is not an “aberrant moment in time,” as former Vice President and newly-announced presidential candidate Joe Biden put it. In the Trump administration, to paraphrase Trotsky, “capitalist society is puking up its undigested barbarism.”
All the crimes of the American ruling class have burst into the open. More than one million people killed in the “war on terror;” torture, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, assassination. In the economic realm, endless financial speculation, the growth of social inequality to unimaginable levels; a society in which three individuals have more wealth than the bottom half of the population, or 160 million people.
And what of the Democratic Party? They are another manifestation of the same disease. They have chosen to base their opposition to Trump on the most right-wing foundation possible. The reactionary narrative associated with Joseph McCarthy and the period of American anti-communism has been resurrected in the form of the Democratic Party-CIA anti-Russia campaign. “Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated” by Russia. So declares Hillary Clinton.
The election was not corrupted according to Mrs. Clinton by corporate money. Democracy was not assaulted by the CIA, the FBI, the NSA. Her concern is not that fascists are in the military. No, it is all the dastardly Russians! A very self-serving narrative, to say the least.
The right-wing character of the opposition of this party of Wall Street and the CIA is summed up in its attitude toward Julian Assange.
The Democrats and their allies in the media have not only condoned the persecution of this courageous journalist, they have led the charge against WikiLeaks, which is blamed for leaking Democratic Party emails that exposed Clinton’s corrupt relations with Wall Street banks.
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