242. Since the Gulf War of 1990-1991, US imperialism has been in an almost uninterrupted state of war. The American ruling class responded to the dissolution of the USSR, the main obstacle to its drive for global domination, with an eruption of escalating militarism. This was based on the understanding that the long-standing relative decline of American capitalism in the world economy could be offset through the use of its unrivaled military power. However, the fundamental contradictions of capitalism—between the world economy and the nation-state system, and between social production and private property—which led to two world wars in the twentieth century, remained unresolved.

243. The ICFI categorically rejected the claims of a new era of global peace and prosperity, which the post-Soviet Russian capitalist oligarchy also embraced. In its 1991 May Day Manifesto titled “Oppose Imperialist War and Colonialism!” it declared:

This ongoing and de facto partition of Iraq signals the start of a new division of the world by the imperialists. The colonies of yesterday are again to be subjugated. The conquests and annexations which, according to the opportunist apologists of imperialism, belonged to a bygone era are once again on the order of the day. …

There is no way to prevent a Third World War except through a victorious international proletarian revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. All other proposals for preventing war—from calls for nuclear “nonproliferation” treaties and proposals for disarmament to pacifist appeals to the bourgeoisie, conscientious objection and prayer vigils—are little more than exercises in cynicism or self-deception.^[1]

244. The accuracy of this assessment has been dramatically vindicated by the experience of the past 35 years. The 1991 Gulf War was followed by unbridled aggression by the US and NATO imperialist powers in the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. The breakup of Yugoslavia between imperialist-backed reactionary national factions was followed by the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 was followed by the onslaught on Libya and the war for regime change in Syria in 2011. The aggression of Israel and Saudi Arabia, the critical US allies in the Middle East, against the Palestinians and Yemenis respectively, escalated, while preparations for war against Iran, Russia and China continued.

245. The far-right coup in Ukraine in February 2014, orchestrated by the US and Germany, marked a critical turning point in the US-NATO war drive against Russia. In its July 2014 statement, “Socialism and the Fight Against Imperialist War,” the ICFI put the struggle against war at the center of its political activity, warning of the danger of a new world war arising from the unresolved contradictions of the capitalist system. It explained:

This finds its most acute expression in the drive of US imperialism to dominate the Eurasian landmass, above all those areas from which it was excluded for decades by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. In the west, the US, in league with Germany, has orchestrated a fascist-led coup to bring Ukraine under its control. But its ambitions do not stop there. The ultimate objective is to dismember the Russian Federation, reducing it to a series of semi-colonies to open the way for the plunder of its vast natural resources. In the east, the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia is aimed at encircling China and transforming it into a semi-colony.^[2]

246. While the ICFI responded to the escalating imperialist war by deepening the struggle within the working class for the program of world socialist revolution, numerous middle-class political tendencies emerged as open defenders of the capitalist state and war. This was essentially due to the unprecedented growth of social inequality in the imperialist centers and around the world in the preceding decades, under conditions of repression of the class struggle with the help of the trade unions and an unbridled capitalist social counterrevolution. As David North explained in his opening report to the 2012 SEP (US) National Congress:

The past quarter-century has been characterized by the extreme polarization of society, within the United States and internationally. Of course, the attention of economists and sociologists has been focused primarily on the staggering concentration of extreme wealth in the richest 1 percent of the population. But, as the main congress resolution points out, during the last few decades, a significant section of the upper-middle class has acquired access to substantial wealth. This affluent layer does not have anything like the wealth of the richest 1 to 5 percent. But, relative to the working class, it is doing very well. This process has led, over time, to the deepening material, ideological and political alienation of this relatively affluent social stratum, which forms the basis of the petty-bourgeois left, from the working class.

The political process that we are examining is not merely the outcome of theoretical inconsistencies. Spurred on by its own increasingly substantial material affluence, the petty-bourgeois left’s long-standing skepticism in the revolutionary capacities of the working class has acquired new and distinct socioeconomic and political characteristics. As its economic interests become increasingly focused on achieving a more favorable distribution of wealth and privileges within the top 10 percent of society, and as it becomes ever more openly integrated into the political structures sanctioned by the ruling establishment, the affluent left’s hostility to the struggles of the working class can no longer be concealed with empty pseudo-socialist phrase-mongering.^[3]

247. In 2015, the ICFI identified the specific characteristics of these political tendencies, of which there are numerous types in the imperialist countries and in the rest of the world, which essentially reject the revolutionary role of the working class:

The pseudo-left denotes political parties, organizations and theoretical/ideological tendencies, which utilize populist slogans and democratic phrases to promote the socioeconomic interests of privileged and affluent strata of the middle class. …

The pseudo-left is anti-Marxist. It rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism and philosophical irrationalism associated with existentialism, the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism.

The pseudo-left is anti-socialist, opposes class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of revolution in the progressive transformation of society. It counterposes supra-class populism to the independent political organization and mass mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system. The economic program of the pseudo-left is, in its essentials, pro-capitalist and nationalistic.

The pseudo-left promotes “identity politics,” fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, the higher-paying professions, the trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favorable distribution of wealth among the richest 10 percent of the population. The pseudo-left seeks greater access to, rather than the destruction of, social privilege.

In the imperialist centers of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of “human rights” to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.^[4]

248. The ruling class of Turkey, which functioned as a NATO outpost against the USSR before 1991, became a critical regional supporter of imperialist aggression in the post-Soviet period. The concepts of “Turkic World from the Adriatic Sea to the Great Wall of China” and “Neo-Ottomanism,” which became more dominant during the Erdoğan era, expressed the Turkish bourgeoisie’s aspiration to increase its influence in the Central Asian republics and the countries of the former Ottoman Empire in cooperation with the US imperialism. In pursuit of its reactionary interests, the Turkish ruling class has been complicit in every step from the 1990-91 Gulf War to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Serbia in 1999, the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the fomenting of imperialist-backed wars of regime change in Libya and Syria in the midst of the revolutionary working class uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. However, the failure of the Erdoğan government to adapt to all the zigzags of its imperialist allies, and the signs of rapprochement with Moscow and Beijing within the framework of its policy of maneuvering between the US on the one side and Russia and China on the other side, led to a failed NATO-backed military coup attempt on July 15, 2016. After defeating the coup attempt amid mass protests, Erdoğan used it to escalate his efforts to build an authoritarian police state and suppress political opposition. Since then, Ankara has repeatedly proved that it is essentially subordinate to and in the service of NATO imperialism, even as it pursues a policy of “mediation” between the US and Russia.

249. Throughout the Erdoğan era, which began in November 2002, there has been a gradual strengthening of an authoritarian regime accompanied by various discourses of “democratization.” The drive for dictatorship is rooted in the deepening crisis of global capitalism and the interests of the ruling class. It expressed the response of the bourgeoisie, whose internal political crisis and conflict deepened with the growing social inequality, especially after the Wall Street crash in 2008, and the deepening neo-colonialist imperialist war in the Middle East. This whole period proved that no faction of the Turkish bourgeoisie constitutes an alternative to the alliance with imperialism and the turn towards militarism and dictatorship. On the contrary, they are an organic part of it. The constitutional referendum of 2010, the coup attempt of 2016 and the constitutional referendum of 2017 were critical milestones in the construction of an authoritarian presidential regime in Turkey. The wave of arrests and dismissals that had previously targeted mainly elected Kurdish politicians were extended to the CHP, the traditional Kemalist bourgeois party that founded the Turkish Republic, in 2025. This marked a new stage in the construction of this regime.

250. The gradual weakening of the Kemalist military-civil bureaucracy’s dominance over the state apparatus and the construction of an authoritarian regime subordinate to Erdoğan are interconnected developments. Erdoğan’s growing conflict after 2013 with his former ally, the Gülen movement—culminating in the July 15 coup attempt—can only be understood within the framework of international dynamics, above all the imperialist war in the Middle East that also drew Turkey into its vortex. As Halil Çelik explained on the first anniversary of the coup attempt:

After a honeymoon that marked roughly the first decade of the 2000s, the [imperialist] powers that had supported all previous military coups in Turkey were drawn into a deepening conflict with Ankara. At the heart of it was the war for regime change in Syria. While the AKP government insisted on using Islamist proxy forces in the regime change war to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the United States and its European allies turned to Kurdish nationalists, fueling Ankara’s fears of the creation of an independent Kurdish state.

The conflict in Syria, after his NATO imperialist allies openly supported the military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, accelerated Erdoğan’s alienation from the NATO and the EU. As a strategically important NATO member, Ankara’s increasing rapprochement with Russia and China reduced the chances of “persuading” Erdogan and brought to the fore the calculation of getting rid of him.

In sum, the July 15 coup attempt was not simply the result of a power struggle between two leaders within the ruling party (Fethullah Gülen and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), but of a shift in the foreign policy axis of Ankara, an important member of NATO.^[5]

251. After defeating the coup attempt, Erdoğan used it to establish an authoritarian presidential regime and suppress any opposition. He declared a state of emergency lasting two years and pushed through a referendum on a constitutional amendment giving the president sweeping powers. As the Toplumsal Eşitlik Grubu noted in its statement on the 2017 constitutional referendum:

Erdogan’s attempts to establish himself as a dictator are not a product of his personal authoritarian tendencies, but of the desperate crisis of the Turkish capitalist regime. Over the last five years, the US-led imperialist war for regime change in Syria has expanded into an all-out regional war that triggered a civil war in Turkey’s Kurdish areas and Islamist terror bombings across Turkey. Ultimately, Erdogan himself ended up on a list of Middle East heads of state targeted for murder by imperialism, a list that has included the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Erdogan’s proposed constitutional amendment shows that even the trappings of democracy in Turkey are no longer compatible with the militarist and dictatorial drive of the ruling class. As he moves to escalate Turkey’s military intervention in Syria and block the secession of majority-Kurdish regions of Turkey into a potential imperialist-backed Kurdish state, he can no longer tolerate internal political opposition. He must seek powers to crush opposition from rival sections of the bourgeoisie and from emerging opposition in the working class.^[6]

252. The statement noted that this situation is not unique to Turkey, stating:

The drive to militarism and attacks on democratic rights are rooted in the deepening political and economic crisis of world capitalism. Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, capitalist governments around the world have imposed austerity policies and concentrated vast wealth in the hands of few. …

Extreme social inequality and militarism pave the way for the abandonment of democratic forms of rule by the capitalist class in every country, including in the imperialist powers of America and Europe, where the ruling class has a long history of parliamentary rule. …

The world saw the initial stages of a revolutionary counteroffensive of the international working class six years ago, in 2011, when mass revolutionary struggles of the working class toppled US-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt.

Erdogan’s attempt to seize dictatorial powers flows from the war drive with which the imperialist powers responded to the Egyptian Revolution.^[7]

253. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011 marked the first upsurge of class struggles triggered by the 2008 global economic crisis and the beginning of a new revolutionary era. In a Perspective on February 1, 2011, entitled “The Egyptian Revolution,” David North wrote:

The Egyptian revolution is dealing a devastating blow to the pro-capitalist triumphalism that followed the Soviet bureaucracy’s liquidation of the USSR in 1991. The class struggle, socialism and Marxism were declared irrelevant in the modern world. “History”—as in “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)—had ended. Henceforth, the only revolutions conceivable to the media were those that were “color-coded” in advance, politically scripted by the US State Department, and then implemented by the affluent pro-capitalist sections of society.

This complacent and reactionary scenario has been exploded in Tunisia and Egypt. History has returned with a vengeance. What is presently unfolding in Cairo and throughout Egypt is revolution, the real thing. “The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events,” wrote Leon Trotsky, the foremost specialist on the subject. This definition of revolution applies completely to what is now happening in Egypt.^[8]

254. However, the decisive issue was the solution of the question of revolutionary leadership within the working class. Under conditions in which the working class, lacking such a leadership, was unable to take political power, the imperialist-backed ruling class launched a violent offensive, culminating in the military coup in 2013, which ensured the victory of the counterrevolution. This bitter experience once again proved the correctness of the lesson that it is not enough to anticipate the revolutionary struggles that will inevitably break out. The crucial task is to build a revolutionary leadership within the working class before these struggles break out. This task falls to the International Committee of the Fourth International, which represents the political legacy of the October Revolution of 1917 and the Trotskyist movement.

255. In 2013, the International Committee stressed that the Egyptian experience had once again confirmed Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, explaining:

• There is no country in the world, least of all the oppressed ex-colonial countries, where any section of the capitalist class or its political representatives has a progressive role to play.

• The fundamental revolutionary force in all countries is the working class, which alone can fight without compromise to implement and defend a democratic program. The fight for democracy merges with the revolutionary struggle for socialism and workers’ power.

• The struggle in any country must be guided by an international strategy. For the Egyptian workers, revolution can be victorious only to the extent that it draws the working class of the entire Middle East, including the Israeli proletariat, into a common struggle against regional ruling elites and their puppet masters in the United States and Europe.[9]

256. Drawing attention to the connection between the suppression of the Egyptian Revolution and the imperialist-backed wars for regime change in Libya and Syria, the ICFI warned:

Imperialism will stop at nothing to impose its will on the masses of the Middle East. The bloody wars launched in Libya and Syria in the aftermath of the outbreak of revolution in Egypt are a warning. The alternatives are either socialist revolution or a new carve-up of the Middle East by the imperialist powers and the enslavement of the working class.

The implementation of a socialist strategy is inconceivable without the formation in the Middle East and internationally of new Marxist working class parties based on the Trotskyist perspective of Permanent Revolution.^[10]

257. In May-June 2013, amid the mass demonstrations of the working class in Egypt and the struggle for regime change in Syria, Turkey witnessed mass protests involving millions of people in almost every city in the country. The “Gezi Park protests” began against plans to turn Gezi Park in Taksim Square, a historic site of opposition to NATO and its allied governments in Turkey, into a shopping mall. The protests soon became the focal point of a broader discontent with the AKP’s authoritarian policies and growing social inequality. However, the Gezi Park protests were a heterogeneous movement, mobilizing layers of youth and workers as well as the urban upper middle class. Taksim Solidarity, which brought together some 80 middle class associations and petty bourgeois parties, played an important role in suppressing the movement by meeting with Erdoğan during the protests, preventing the protesters from turning to a broader working class movement and dominating with the perspective of reaching an agreement with Erdoğan.

258. The Toplumsal Eşitlik Grubu, in collaboration with the ICFI, exposed this class-collaborationist policy of the middle-class organizations and explained the need for an independent political intervention and the mass mobilization of the working class on the basis of an international socialist perspective.

259. Bill Van Auken’s Perspective article, “Turkey at the crossroads,” distributed in Taksim Square at the height of the protests, predicted a deepening of the imperialist war in the Middle East and aggression against Iran, Russia and China, and raised the central question that remains relevant today:

Turkey stands at a crossroads. Turkish workers coming into struggle are confronted with a stark choice. Will they be drawn ever more directly into bloody sectarian-based wars promoted by imperialism in pursuit of strategic and profit interests, wars that have the potential of erupting into a global conflagration involving Iran, the US, Russia, China and other powers?

Or will the working class advance its own socialist solution through an independent revolutionary struggle, drawing the masses of rural poor and oppressed behind it, against imperialism and all sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, both Islamist and secularist?^[11]

260. In its New Year Statement for 2020, “The decade of socialist revolution begins,” the World Socialist Web Site declared:

The arrival of the New Year marks the beginning of a decade of intensifying class struggle and world socialist revolution.

In the future, when learned historians write about the upheavals of the twenty-first century, they will enumerate all the “obvious” signs that existed, as the 2020s began, of the revolutionary storm that was soon to sweep across the globe. The scholars—with a vast array of facts, documents, charts, web site and social media postings, and other forms of valuable digitalized information at their disposal—will describe the 2010s as a period characterized by an intractable economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.

They will note that by the beginning of the third decade of the century, history had arrived at precisely the situation foreseen theoretically by Karl Marx: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”^[12]

261. This soon proved not to be a rhetorical exaggeration, but an extremely powerful Marxist assessment. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which is still ongoing, was a “trigger event” with global consequences. Ultimately, the refusal of governments throughout the world to take the necessary public health measures to avoid disrupting the capitalist process of profit and wealth accumulation led to the preventable deaths of tens of millions of people and the debilitation of countless others. Only the ICFI has, from the outset, advanced and consistently defended a global eradication program based on the mobilization of the international working class to stop the pandemic.

262. The pandemic catastrophe, which rapidly engulfed the global population, was followed in February 2022 by the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, long fomented by the US-NATO powers. This conflict, which from the outset was a proxy war against Russia, whose vast territories the US-NATO aimed to plunder, brought all of humanity to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. Rejecting the imperialist explanations for the outbreak of the war and the reactionary response of the Putin regime, the ICFI issued a statement, “Oppose the Putin government’s invasion of Ukraine and US-NATO warmongering! For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!” The only way forward was explained as follows:

The danger of a catastrophe can only be averted by the action of the working class, within the US and throughout the world, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.

A fundamental principle of this program is the rejection of the defense of the “national state,” a historically obsolete political structure, the existence of which is in contradiction to the dominance of world economy and the global interdependence of the productive forces.^[13]

263. On October 7, 2023, the US and Israel responded to the Palestinian uprising against the Zionist regime’s unbridled oppression and occupation in the open-air prison of Gaza by implementing their long-prepared plans for genocide and war. The ICFI declared that the imperialist-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon and Iran are the Middle East front of an unfolding global war. The US drive for total domination of the Middle East is part of its war against Russia and preparations for war against China.

264. The ICFI has responded to the genocide in Gaza, which has become the new epicenter of imperialist barbarism, by developing the struggle to build a socialist, mass anti-war movement within the working class and youth internationally. Lectures given by David North around the world have explained the material roots of this historic catastrophe and how to put an end to it. Speaking in London on November 18, 2023, North stated:

It [the genocide] testifies not only to the utterly reactionary character of Zionism, but to the far-advanced political, social, intellectual and moral putrefaction of a capitalist system that is rooted in the national state system. Herein lies the broader significance of the intransigent solidarity of all imperialist powers with the Israeli state. There are, of course, pragmatic geopolitical interests that determine the support of the United States and its NATO allies for Israel’s war against the Palestinian people.

But underlying this united front against the Palestinians is the recognition that their democratic aspirations, which require the dissolution of the existing Israeli state and the creation of a new bi-national federation, threaten not only the interests of imperialism in the Middle East, but the entire historically obsolete state structure of imperialist geopolitics and capitalist rule.

Neither the oppression of the Palestinian people nor, for that matter, the historic and still very real issue of antisemitism can be solved within the framework of the capitalist system and its nation state.^[14]

265. The collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism are another of the sharpest manifestations of the crisis of world capitalism. This crisis finds its most intense expression in the United States, the country of two great democratic revolutions, where bourgeois democracy has one foot in the grave. As stated in the resolution “The 2024 US elections and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party” adopted at the SEP (US) Eighth National Congress in August 2024:

The fundamental objective causes of the turn of the ruling class toward fascism and dictatorship are: 1) the escalating global imperialist war; and 2) the extreme growth of social inequality. …

The Socialist Equality Party rejects the claim that the growth of the extreme right can be countered by supporting the Democratic Party. Even if Trump is defeated in the November election—and fails to carry out another coup d’état—the objective economic and social contradictions of American imperialism drive the ruling elites, with or without Trump, to dictatorship. Trumpism is a symptom of a systemic crisis that cannot be resolved democratically within the framework of capitalism.^[15]

266. The SEP (US) declared that Trump’s second term in power represents a realignment of the American political superstructure in accordance with the real social relations that exist in the country. The empowerment of the far-right and fascist movements by the ruling class and its turn towards authoritarian regimes is a global phenomenon: Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany and others.

267. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party played a decisive role in the election of this fascist demagogue, who attempted a coup on January 6, 2021 to abolish the Constitution:

Trump owes his political triumph to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, whose fixation with the identity politics of the affluent middle class, arrogant indifference to the devastating impact of inflation on workers’ living standards, and unrelenting support for war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza prepared the ground for the election debacle.[16]

268. The authoritarian regime consolidated in Turkey under Erdoğan’s leadership since 2002 is part of this global process. The bourgeoisie and political establishment, with their deep-rooted tradition of authoritarian rule, have steadily shifted to the right in the aftermath of the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Caught in the imperialist wars that erupted around Turkey and drew the country into their vortex, and confronted with conditions of profound social inequality in which an ever larger and more powerful working class has emerged, they have built a police state that has eliminated fundamental democratic rights. Over the past decades, the integration of the Turkish economy into the processes of capitalist globalization has led to enormous transformations in class relations. The vast majority of Turkey's population now lives in cities and works as wage laborers. Turkey is one of Europe’s most unequal countries in terms of income and wealth and is deeply divided by intense class antagonisms. The ruling class sits atop a social powder keg ready to explode. The growing militancy and radicalization of the working class has manifested in an increasing number of wildcat strikes in recent years. The construction of an authoritarian regime primarily targets the working class.

269. The mass protest movement sparked by the arrest and detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and a presidential candidate for the CHP, in March 2025, revealed widespread popular opposition to the authoritarian regime. Despite the bourgeois right-wing character of the CHP, which steered the movement behind itself and brought it to a close, these protests—animated by the defense of democratic rights, anger at social inequality, and opposition to the unending imperialist war—demonstrated the urgency of developing a revolutionary political perspective and leadership, the decisive issue. This is the fundamental issue.

270. The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, which opposes political witch hunts and defends democratic rights on principle, categorically rejects the middle class pseudo-left claims that the Erdoğan government can only be opposed by supporting the bourgeois opposition parties. In reality, regardless of their tactical conflicts, all the parties of the capitalist establishment agree on the issues that the ruling class considers to be the most important: loyalty to NATO imperialism and hostility toward the working class and socialism. The reactionary character and impasse of bourgeois nationalism, whatever the bitter disagreements, ultimately drives it to accomodation within itself and with imperialism. As the March 28, 2025 statement, “The crisis in Turkey and the struggle for revolutionary leadership” noted:

The CHP is a bourgeois nationalist party that is aligned with the same imperialist powers that collaborate with the Erdoğan government and has proved once again that it is incapable of defending democratic rights. In order to calm down the fears of the Turkish bourgeoisie of a revolution, the CHP sought to reassure the imperialist powers and get their support by declaring that it is a “NATO party.” Numerous Stalinist and Pabloite political tendencies have also fulfilled their role of preventing the development of a revolutionary socialist alternative by completely subordinating the mass movement to the leadership and politics of the CHP.

The spinelessness and political capitulation of the CHP as a bourgeois party is part of a global phenomenon. As Leon Trotsky, who co-led the October Revolution of 1917 with Vladimir Lenin and founded the Fourth International in 1938, explained in his theory of permanent revolution, no faction of the bourgeoisie in the world in the present epoch can consistently defend democracy, social equality and an anti-imperialist policy. These tasks fall to the working class, which creates social wealth and pays the price of imperialist war. The task of establishing workers’ power and implementing socialist policies is not a national but an international one, and can be accomplished only through the victory of the socialist revolution on a global scale.^[17]

271. The same crisis that produces imperialist war and authoritarian regimes also creates the impetus for social revolution. Amid the unprecedented scale and continuity of global protests against the genocide in Gaza, the first phases of a working class offensive against capitalism have been witnessed in Turkey and internationally. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the first half of the 2020s, the WSWS’ 2025 New Year Statement explained:

The past five years have been dominated by the response of the ruling class to the capitalist crisis. The next five years will be dominated by an explosive eruption of the class struggle, which is already under way. Workers throughout the world confront an escalating global war; an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, along with the emergence of new pathogens like H5N1 bird flu and mpox; a coordinated assault on basic democratic rights and a massive increase in exploitation and social want.

Underlying these interlinked crises is an oligarchy that subordinates all of society to profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. The fight against the oligarchy is by its very nature a revolutionary task. Its wealth must be expropriated and its stranglehold over economic and political life abolished. This requires the mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, to take political power, establish democratic control over the process of production, and reorganize society on the basis of socialism—that is, on the basis of social need, not private profit.^[18]

272. This requires the building of the ICFI and the Socialist Equality Parties as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class throughout the world. This critical struggle can only be developed on the basis of the lessons of the Trotskyist movement’s century-long history of relentless political struggle against Stalinism, social democracy, bourgeois nationalism and all forms of petty-bourgeois opportunism.

273. “The growth of the mass movement of the working class imposes ever greater demands on members of the party,” David North explained in his introduction to the 2023 Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School. “Meeting these challenges requires greater attention to the education of the party membership. The most important element of this education is raising the cadres’ knowledge and understanding of the history of the Trotskyist movement.”^[19]

274. This includes the central historical events and strategic experiences and achievements of all phases of the Trotskyist movement. The first phase covered a period of 15 years, from the founding of the Left Opposition in October 1923 to the founding congress of the Fourth International in Paris in September 1938. In the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy and its nationalist perspective of socialism in one country, Trotsky laid the theoretical and political foundations for the new International, whose founding became necessary after the German catastrophe in 1933.

275. The second phase covered a further period of 15 years, from the founding of the Fourth International to the split with the Pabloite leadership of the International Secretariat and the founding of the International Committee in November 1953. In this phase, the orthodox Trotskyists defended Marxist principles against a series of petty-bourgeois tendencies that broke with Trotskyism and moved rapidly to the right. These included the Burnham-Shachtman tendency, the “Three Theses Group” and also the Pabloites—who ultimately expressed the pessimism of demoralised layers of the petty bourgeoisie and turned away from the working class and the perspective of socialist revolution.

276. The third phase involved a 33-year struggle within the International Committee, which began with the publication of James P. Cannon’s Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement. It ended with the suspension of the Workers Revolutionary Party in December 1985 and the final break with the national-opportunist renegades in February 1986. It was a period that we have described as a protracted civil war within the International Committee, characterised by a series of intense political conflicts with Pabloite tendencies both outside and inside the ICFI.

277. The fourth phase of the ICFI, from the split with the WRP to 2019, is one of the most important periods of the entire Marxist movement, which is becoming increasingly clear in retrospect. The International Committee emerged enormously strengthened from the split. The decisive victory over Pabloite opportunism formed the basis for an enormous theoretical, political and organisational advance of the ICFI. We have rightly described the theoretical and political clarification and development after the expulsion of the opportunists as the “renaissance of Trotskyism.”

278. The most important achievements of the fourth phase were summarised by David North in his report to the 2019 Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School, in which he stated:

The critical preparatory work of removing the Pabloites, rebuilding the world party on an internationalist foundation, elaborating the international strategy of the ICFI, defending the historical heritage of the Fourth International, converting the leagues of the International Committee into parties and establishing the World Socialist Web Site were the main achievements of the fourth stage.^[20]

279. On this basis, the ICFI was able to greatly expand the political influence of the International Committee and enter the fifth phase. David North has characterised this as follows:

This is the stage that will witness a vast growth of the ICFI as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. The objective processes of economic globalization, identified by the International Committee more than 30 years ago, have undergone a further colossal development. Combined with the emergence of new technologies that have revolutionized communications, these processes have internationalized the class struggle to a degree that would have been hard to imagine even 25 years ago. The revolutionary struggle of the working class will develop as an interconnected and unified world movement. The International Committee of the Fourth International will be built as the conscious political leadership of this objective socioeconomic process. It will counterpose to the capitalist politics of imperialist war the class-based strategy of world socialist revolution. This is the essential historical task of the new stage in the history of the Fourth International.^[21]

280. The central issue is to construct a revolutionary leadership to raise the consciousness of the working class to its international and historic tasks. Only a party based on the most advanced scientific theory that has drawn the necessary lessons of the previous strategic experiences of the international working class is capable of fulfilling that role. The International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections alone embody the historical heritage of contemporary Marxism—that is, of Trotskyism. It is on that basis that the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi and its sister parties of the ICFI seek to educate, mobilise and unify the international working class, confident that the most far sighted and self-sacrificing workers and youth will be won to its banner and provide the material forces for carrying out the world socialist revolution.