Below are excerpts from “Capitalism’s long hot winter has begun,” the title article in New International no. 12. It addresses two questions, the reasons behind the deepening crisis of the U.S.-led imperialist world “order” today and the need to build the core of a mass revolutionary party in the U.S. Copyright © 2005 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
If you simply add up figures on economic output, arms budgets, and conventional and strategic weaponry, then U.S. imperialism is the strongest power in world history, towering above its closest rivals on every front. But that’s a snapshot lifted out of time as well as political and economic context and direction of development. The course we’ve been describing here is that of an imperialist power that is weakening vis-à-vis its ability to stabilize a world in which the lives of hundreds of millions of restive toilers in semicolonial countries are marked by the increasing turmoil, want, and disease produced by the world capitalist system itself. An imperialist power less and less able to handle the political challenges it cannot but create, because it is a power that cannot stabilize the global capitalist economy, the effects of which keep coming down on workers and farmers worldwide. A power that must bear a disproportionate load in policing the planet for imperialism in one crisis of its own making after another, from the Balkans to every corner of the semicolonial world. One that has not achieved its goals in a single major war since 1945. One that now, after supposedly winning the Cold War “without firing a shot,” is no longer exempt from attacks on its home soil.
An imperialist power in its heyday is able to bend regimes to its will. To order “allies” to turn to. To crush resistance by toilers in the colonial world. It has the economic reserves to stabilize its international currency and state finances. That is not the situation of U.S. imperialism today, however, and has been less and less so since the mid-1970s. Instead, the moves we are witnessing are part of the decline of the world’s final empire, which today faces the political and military consequences of its imperialist course at the same time it is entering its greatest economic crisis since the 1930s.
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A mass revolutionary party is forged in the heat of great social crises, political upheavals, and wars. Such turmoil unfolds unevenly and extends, with ebbs and flows, over substantial time. But the core of a proletarian party — seasoned in mass work, knowledgeable and disciplined in working-class politics, with cadres spread across several generations — is built before such giant class battles and revolutionary explosions erupt. Such a party cannot be built from scratch once decisive class confrontations posing which class shall rule have begun. That is the lesson Lenin and the Bolsheviks taught us in practice.