“What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold,” a 1988 resolution of the Socialist Workers Party, explains that the stock market crash of 1987 exposed the vulnerability of the capitalist world to the pile of debt whose worldwide buildup had accelerated since the early 1970s. It points out that new regulation of the financial system can not prevent another crash; that the banking system can not be protected from the consequences of a financial collapse as decades’ worth of credit balloons deflate; and that a worldwide depression is inevitable in the years ahead. This issue also features “Imperialism's March Toward Fascism and War,” which follows these developments into the mid-1990s.

The social devastation and financial panic now engulfing the world, the coarsening of politics, the cop brutality, the restrictions on workers' rights, the relentless acts of imperialist aggression—all are products not of something gone wrong with capitalism but of its lawful workings. Yet the future can be changed by the united struggle of workers and farmers increasingly conscious of their power to transform the world.

"To think that a socialist revolution in the U.S. is not possible, you would have to believe not only that the ruling families of the imperialist countries and their economic wizards have found a way to ‘manage’ capitalism. You would also have to close your eyes to the spreading imperialist wars, civil wars, and economic, financial, and social crises we are in the midst of."
—Mary-Alice Waters
Caracas, Venezuela, November 2007

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 had a worldwide political impact, including on working people and youth in the imperialist heartland. As the mass, proletarian-based struggle for Black rights was already advancing in the U.S., the social transformation fought for and won by the Cuban toilers set an example that socialist revolution is not only necessary—it can be made and defended. Second edition with a new foreword by Mary-Alice Waters.

So long as the profit system prevails, there is no exit from the economic “blind alley” in which capitalism worldwide finds itself, wrote Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1938. Trotsky presents a political program for working people to defend themselves against the devastating conditions of economic depression and political instability of the 1930s. The interlinked immediate, democratic, and transitional demands begin from the conditions of capitalist society today but lead immediately to the limits of capitalism itself. The Transitional Program remains an irreplaceable component of a fighting guide for workers today.

Contrary to the hopes of the propertied rulers of North America and Europe, the collapse of regimes and parties across Eastern Europe and in the USSR that claimed to be Communist did not usher in a new epoch of stability and prosperity anywhere in the world. Issue no. 11 of the Marxist magazine New International analyzes these failed expectations of the capitalists and their spokespeople. It explains why the historic odds in favor of the working class have increased, not diminished, at the opening of the 21st century.

Why is all recorded history “the history of class struggles”? Why is the capitalist state “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”? Why does capital’s need of a constantly expanding market “chase the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”? These questions remain as vital today as they were a century and a half ago.

“I trust that this pamphlet will help the reader to understand the fundamental economic question, that of the economic essence of imperialism,” Lenin wrote in 1917. “For unless this is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.”