Below is from the opening section of “Imperialism’s March Toward Fascism and War,” a talk by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes, addressing the objective situation and challenges facing working people today. It’s the lead article in New International no. 10. Copyright © 1994 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
Over the past seven years, some of the biggest political changes in the last half century have occurred. A new — and descending — segment in the long-term curve of capitalist development was signaled by the October 1987 crash of the world’s stock markets. A few years later the Stalinist apparatuses throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union came tumbling down, one after another. Then, a war against Iraq that Washington sought to portray as a glorious military victory ended up sharpening the conflicts of the imperialist world order. At the opening of the 1990s capitalism entered a worldwide depression for the first time since prior to World War II.
The most important political consequences of this increasingly compressed and volatile development of world capitalism, and the practical conclusions that communist workers and youth must understand in order to orient their activity, are true not just for the 1990s. They are true from now until the most fundamental economic, social, and political questions facing humanity have been settled in historic class battles between the revolutionary working-class movement and the forces seeking either to maintain or to impose capitalist rule in countries the world over.
How the working class responds in the years ahead to the political consequences of this accelerated dialectic of world capitalism will determine whether or not imperialism’s march toward fascism and war can be stopped. That, in turn, depends on the forging of a communist leadership from the ranks of the most class-conscious and self-sacrificing working-class fighters the world over. It depends, in the most immediate sense, on the efforts today by the still relatively small forces who are committed to the perspective of building mass revolutionary proletarian parties — battalions of an international communist movement — that can lead workers and their allies in winning power from the capitalist rulers, founding a workers and farmers government, and opening a socialist road away from the cataclysm into which capitalism will otherwise drag humanity.