This speech was delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to open the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Comrades, workers, youth, friends and supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International gathered today across every continent: We open this May Day rally with a declaration of solidarity with all those who today stand in the front lines of resistance against imperialist violence and capitalist reaction.

We denounce, in the name of the international working class, the imperialist war of aggression being waged by the United States and Israel, with the support of all the other imperialist powers, against Iran. There can be no ambivalence about the position of the working class on this war: It unconditionally upholds the right of the Iranian people to defend their country against the terrorist onslaught that was launched on February 28, 2026. This is a war that violates every principle of international law. It is a crime against peace, which was defined at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders in 1945-46 as the supreme international crime. 

On April 7 Trump declared in a written statement: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” These words will live forever in infamy. This horrific threat was the most politically obscene expression of the brutality with which this war has been conducted by the United States and its Israeli-Zionist attack dogs. 

Since the start of the war, more than 13,000 targets in Iran have been struck. At least 3,375 Iranians have been killed, including 376 children. The number of injured exceeds 26,000. 

The bombing of Iranian cities, the assassination of its scientists and political leaders and their families, the killing of children, the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure and the plunging of an entire region into war are the deliberate acts of imperialist powers seeking to impose their domination through mass murder. 

We denounce, with the same force, the ongoing genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza and on the people of Lebanon. The crimes being committed by the Israeli state, with the full backing and active participation of the United States and the European powers—the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools, water systems and housing, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war—constitute atrocities that irrefutably establish the historically reactionary character of the ethno-nationalist Zionist project.

We also honor today the memory of the unnamed victims murdered in the waters off the coast of Latin America—the more than 180 fishermen and workers—blown apart on their small boats by US missiles in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific in what the Pentagon cynically calls “preemptive strikes” against drug trafficking. The victims have no names in the imperialist press. Their families have received no apology, no compensation, no acknowledgment that they ever lived. But they were workers trying to feed their families, slaughtered by the most powerful military on earth in pursuit of a campaign of terror against the peoples of Latin America. 

We denounce the blockade of Cuba, the deliberate strangulation of an entire people through fuel cutoffs and sanctions. Even after two-thirds of a century, the US ruling class has never reconciled itself to the Cuban revolution. Between 1959 and 1960, the Castro regime expropriated some $1.8 billion in US corporate assets. In the same stroke, the revolution dismantled the mob empire that flourished under the dictatorship of Batista. 

The casinos were shuttered, the hotels nationalized, the gangsters jailed or expelled, and an estimated $100 million in Mafia investments wiped off the books overnight. Worst of all, the revolutionary regime had the audacity to shut down the brothels that catered to rich American tourists, military personnel, corporate executives and US congressmen. US imperialism has never forgiven the Cuban people for this insolence, for this unpardonable infringement on imperialist privilege.

We denounce the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, seized in a bombing campaign in Caracas on January 3 and handed over to the CIA and the corporate plunderers of Chevron and Shell—a naked act of imperialist piracy. These crimes embody the lawlessness that now prevails in the world. The “rules-based international order” of which the imperialist powers speak so piously has been revealed as a gigantic fraud. The only law that operates is the law of force, wielded by a capitalist oligarchy that recognizes no constraint, no border, no constitution, no court and no human life as standing in the way of its interests.

We extend, on this May Day, our solidarity to all workers who are today the victims of class war persecution—to those who have been arrested, blacklisted, fired, deported, framed up and imprisoned for the crime of resisting exploitation, opposing war or defending the democratic rights of the working class.

We send our greetings to our comrade, Bogdan Syrotiuk, the young Ukrainian Trotskyist leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, who has been imprisoned for more than two years by the Zelensky regime for his courageous opposition to the NATO-instigated war and his defense of the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers. The claim by Ukrainian state prosecutors that Bogdan is a supporter of the Russian invasion has been comprehensively exposed by his legal defense. The statements by Bogdan posted in the World Socialist Web Site refute the charges against him. He is as uncompromising an opponent of the capitalist Putin regime as he is of Zelensky’s pro-imperialist puppet government. We call on the working class to fight for Bogdan’s freedom.

We send our solidarity to the imprisoned leaders of the working class in Türkiye. We demand the immediate release of Mehmet Türkmen, chairman of the United Textile, Weaving and Leather Workers’ Union (BİRTEK-SEN), arrested in mid-March and now facing prison and a political ban for the “crime” of telling workers the truth about the collusion of corporations, the state and the union bureaucracy. We send our greetings to Başaran Aksu, the courageous leader of the Independent Mining Workers’ Union (Bağımsız Maden-İş) and organizing coordinator of Umut-Sen, who led the historic march of the Doruk mine workers from Eskişehir to Ankara and has been arrested repeatedly in the recent period. We enthusiastically welcome the news that the miners’ demands have been won.

But the struggles continue. We demand the release of Esra Işık, the young woman leader defending the forests and the villagers’ livelihoods against the plundering by mining corporations, and of all class war prisoners held by the Erdoğan regime. Their arrests are part of a deliberate offensive by the Turkish ruling class against a re-emerging independent workers’ movement, an offensive that has intensified as Türkiye is drawn ever closer into the imperialist war against Iran. 

In the United States, there is no letup in the persecution of immigrants. We declare our solidarity with Hayam El Gamal and her five children, who as we speak are being subjected to a campaign of collective punishment by the Trump administration. In open defiance of numerous court orders, the Trump administration continues its efforts to deport them. The persecution of this family, who have committed no crime, is meant as a warning to the entire working class: that no constitutional protection, no court order, no democratic right will be allowed to stand in the way of the police state methods now being prepared against all working people in the United States, citizens and non-citizens alike.

We therefore demand the immediate and unconditional release of every immigrant worker, every student, every man, woman and child who has been seized in the ICE dragnet and is now being held in the network of concentration camps that has been constructed across the United States. We say: Shut down North Lake. Shut down Dilley. Shut down Folkston, Otay Mesa, Krome, “Alligator Alcatraz” and every facility where human beings are held without charge, without trial and without hope. The fight to free the detained is the fight to defend the democratic rights of the entire working class.

Finally, we renew today our condolences to the families of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, gunned down by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. Their deaths will not be forgotten. They will not have died in vain.

Opposition to imperialist war, the unyielding defense of democratic rights and the fight against all forms of class oppression animate our celebration of May Day. This is the spirit in which we open today’s rally.

However, the celebration of May Day must not be limited to declarations of international solidarity. It must also be the occasion for an objective analysis of the present world situation, for it is on the basis of such an analysis that the strategy of the working class is formulated. This task acquires the greatest urgency today, as this May Day is being held in the midst of a critical stage in the crisis of the world capitalist system.

The war on Iran and the culmination of a 35-year period

The war on Iran marks the culmination of a distinct 35-year period of history that began with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. 

The war against Iran cannot be understood as a discrete episode nor as the policy of a particular president, nor merely as the product of the Israel lobby. The Israeli regime and its lobbyists in the United States have, of course, been agitating for war against Iran for decades. But the narrative now circulating on both the antisemitic and nationalist “America First” right and sections of the middle class pseudo-left—that the war has been imposed on an otherwise reluctant American foreign policy establishment by AIPAC, Netanyahu and the Israeli state—is entirely false and serves as an apology for American imperialism. It implies that if it were not for Israel, the foreign policy of the United States would be bursting with benevolence. 

This absurd narrative directs the anti-war movement away from the struggle against American imperialism—the main counterrevolutionary force of the world—toward compromise with it. It implies that nothing more is required than to remove the influence of the Zionists. 

This political fairy tale collapses on the barest examination of the historical record. First, the US ruling class does not need advice, let alone prodding, from anyone on how and when to employ murderous violence. It is the world’s unequaled expert in the organization of mass violence, with a bloody record that dates back to the Philippine genocide in the first decade of the 20th century, the brutal efforts to suppress the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, repeated invasions of Central and South America, the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, the killing of 3 million Koreans between 1950 and 1953 and an equal number of Vietnamese between 1961 and 1973. And then there are all the wars that have been waged in the Middle East during the last 30 years. 

To set the historical record straight, Israel itself is a creation of the United States, which has armed and funded it for 78 years. It has functioned as a militarized outpost of American imperialism in the Middle East.

Moreover, US imperialism has never reconciled itself to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah’s puppet regime, placed in power by the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup. 

Iran has been named among the top adversaries in every U.S. National Security Strategy statement since 2006. It has been the object of covert operations, regime sanctions, assassinations and military threats under the administrations of Clinton, Bush, Obama, the first Trump term, Biden and now the second Trump administration. The war on Iran is the culmination of the bipartisan policy of American imperialism, pursued for more than three decades.

But in the most fundamental sense, imperialist war is not the mere product of subjective decisions, evil influences and bad policies. Rather, it is the outcome and expression of the two essential objective contradictions of the capitalist system itself: first, between private ownership of the productive forces and the social character of production; and, second, the contradiction between the global character of economic production and the nation-state system within which political power and capital accumulation continue to be organized. The globalization of production over the past five decades has integrated the labor of workers on every continent into a single planetary process, bound together by supply chains, financial flows and information networks of unprecedented density. 

The entire course of economic and political development over the past 35 years has substantiated this Marxist analysis of the dynamic of the global crisis.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was proclaimed by the American ruling class as a historic triumph of capitalism. The so-called “failure of socialism,” it claimed, cleared the way for the restoration of the capitalist world as it was before the socialist October Revolution. All that had occurred in the aftermath of the revolution—the upsurge of the international working class, the monumental global movement of the oppressed masses against imperialism, and the social advances that were won in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949—was to be reversed.

However, this nightmarish perspective was based on a false appraisal of the causes of the dissolution of the USSR and its global significance. What had failed in the Soviet Union was not socialism but the Stalinist regime of anti-socialist nationalism, which was a repudiation of the Marxian internationalism that had inspired the October Revolution. The Stalinist program of “socialism in one country,” which detached the building of socialism in the USSR from the international struggle of the working class against global capitalism, had proven economically and politically bankrupt. 

Basing itself on Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International clearly foresaw the consequences of the nationalist policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. It stated in 1987, four years before the dissolution of the USSR:

The shortage of technology and continuing contradictions between industry and agriculture can only be resolved through access to the world market. There are only two roads to the integration of the Soviet Union into that market—that of Gorbachev leading towards capitalist restoration and that of the world socialist revolution.

Gorbachev took the first road. The dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 was the consummation of that betrayal: The Stalinist bureaucracy, having begun as the gravediggers of the October Revolution, ended as the most venal and rapacious faction of the new Russian oligarchy, led today by Putin.

For American imperialism, the same underlying contradiction produced a different response, but one no more a matter of free choice than the Stalinist collapse had been. Confronted with the irreversible erosion of its economic supremacy—the rise of Japanese and German industrial competitors, the emergence of China as a powerful economic and industrial force, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing, the mounting burden of trade and budget deficits—American capitalism could not recover its position through economic means. The only instrument it still possessed in overwhelming preponderance was military force. 

The following three decades of militarism shattered Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and other countries. While costing millions of lives, destroying entire societies and creating the greatest refugee crisis since World War II, these wars ended in debacles and failed to reverse US imperialism’s fortunes. 

American bombs and missiles wreaked havoc throughout the world. But proceeding alongside the military operations of American imperialism was the growth of the crisis of American and world capitalism. The imperialist rampage has been accompanied by a series of ever more profound financial crises: the Mexican peso crisis of 1994, the Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian default and Long-Term Capital Management collapse of 1998, the dot-com crash of 2000, the 2008 global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010–12, the 2020 pandemic shock and the accumulating signs of a dollar-system crisis since 2022. 

The most visible and ominous manifestation of the US-centered global crisis is the staggering growth of the national debt. It stood at roughly $5.8 trillion in 2001. It is now approaching $40 trillion. An even more historically and economically significant manifestation of the crisis of US capitalism is the price of gold. At the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, which established the status of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the value of an ounce of gold was set at $35. 

That price prevailed until the Nixon administration repudiated the Bretton Woods system in 1971. This set into motion a relentless rise in the price of gold, which during the last year has assumed an explosive character. The price of an ounce of gold now stands at approximately $4,600. In other words, the value of the dollar relative to gold, which has functioned for several thousand years as a measure of value, has declined by more than 99 percent in just over a half century. 

This is the framework within which the 35 years from 1991 to 2026 must be understood. They constitute a single historical process: the attempt by American capitalism to overcome, through the application of military violence, a contradiction that it could not overcome by economic means. The wars are component parts of a continuous trajectory, driven by the same unresolved contradiction between the world economy and the nation-state system that produced the two world wars of the 20th century.

War abroad and dictatorship at home

But the war against Iran is not only another episode in a long series of military operations. The repercussions of this war impart to this conflict an explicitly global character, specifically, a global war waged by the imperialist powers against the international working class. Since April 13, the United States Navy has blockaded Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf. The consequences are now being felt by billions of people who had no part in starting this war.

The most serious impact of the war is on food security in the developing world. The blockade will result in the deepening of the famines already underway in Gaza and Sudan, the movement of additional countries from crisis into emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity, and excess mortality concentrated among children and the elderly across many countries over the next 12 to 18 months.

These consequences are the direct result of decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem. The people who will pay for these decisions, with hunger and with their lives, are farmers in East Africa, families in South Asia and children in countries that had no part in the original conflict.

The war against Iran has exposed not only the predatory aims of American imperialism abroad but the social and political reality of the regime that prosecutes it at home. Trump is the product, personification and culmination of a protracted process—economic, social and political—rooted in the breakdown of American capitalism and the putrefaction of its ruling class.

The political structure of the United States is being brought into alignment with its social foundation: the domination of society by a tiny oligarchy that controls staggering wealth and regards all legal, democratic and moral restraints as intolerable impediments to its interests. The rise of Trump is the expression of this reality.

The war against Iran is being financed through a frontal assault on the social rights of the working class. Trump’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget requests roughly $1.5 trillion for “defense”—the highest military spending level in modern American history and a massive escalation of preparations not only for the war against Iran but for global war against China and Russia. This is, in the most direct sense, a budget for world war.

And how is this to be paid for? Trump himself has answered with brutal frankness. Social programs, he declared, must be sacrificed because “we’re fighting wars,” and he insisted: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare. … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education, housing and every minimal social protection won by the working class over the past century are to be looted to fund militarism, the enrichment of the oligarchy and the repressive apparatus of the state.

What is taking place in the United States is not simply a national political crisis. It is a convulsion of world-historical significance. The United States, the former stabilizer of world capitalism, has become the greatest source of global instability. The breakdown of democratic forms in the United States, the turn to open gangsterism in politics, the subordination of all social life to the interests of the oligarchy, and the drive to redivide the world through military violence express the crisis of the entire capitalist order in its most concentrated and explosive form. 

The same underlying processes are evident in every major capitalist country. The crisis of capitalism is international, and so, too, is the turn toward dictatorship and war. The European ruling class is rapidly and shamelessly shedding its hypocritical pacifist phrase-mongering, reviving its long traditions of imperialist militarism, and proclaiming that the working class and youth must be prepared to fight and die as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did in the two world wars of the last century. This is not mere rhetoric. The European NATO powers are already engaged in a de facto war against Russia. Ukraine has been transformed into NATO’s East European equivalent of Israel.

In its analysis of the historical experiences of the last century, the International Committee has stressed that the same contradictions that produced World War I in 1914 resulted in socialist revolution in Russia in 1917. The same historical dynamic is at work today. The global crisis of capitalism that underlies the eruption of imperialist violence is also preparing the explosion of revolutionary struggle by the international working class.

The second half of the decade of socialist revolution

At the start of the 2020s, the World Socialist Web Site anticipated the emergence of a renewal of a revolutionary movement of the international working class. We are now past the midpoint of the decade. The International Committee is convinced that the objective development of the global crisis is substantiating this perspective. 

The first five years of the decade were dominated by an intensifying drive of the ruling elites towards political reaction. This was not a series of accidents or the work of isolated demagogues but the systemic response of a global oligarchy unable to resolve the deepening crisis of capitalism through democratic means. The COVID-19 pandemic, in which governments subordinated millions of lives to the demands of corporate profit, exposed the irreconcilable opposition between the social interests of the working class and the financial interests of the ruling few. 

The eruption of war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, the bombing of Iran, the kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela, and the threats against Mexico, Greenland, Panama and Cuba have revealed that the imperialist powers, led by the United States, are responding to the crisis through a violent redivision of the world. 

Within the imperialist centers, this drive abroad has been inseparable from a turn toward authoritarian rule at home: the return of Trump and the open construction of a presidential dictatorship in the United States; the rise of Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, and far-right governments across Europe; the systematic dismantling of democratic rights, the militarization of the police, the persecution of immigrants and the criminalization of dissent. Meanwhile, global billionaire wealth surged to $18.3 trillion in 2025, even as mass layoffs, AI-driven destruction of jobs, inflation and the dismantling of social programs intensify the assault on the conditions of life for billions of workers.

It is undeniable that the first half of the decade has witnessed an eruption of capitalist reaction and imperialist militarism. World war is not a future threat but a presently unfolding reality. But the same contradictions of the capitalist system that are manifesting themselves in war and repression have also provoked the eruption of global class struggle. 

The second half of the decade is being increasingly characterized by the eruption of the countervailing tendency of social struggle on an international scale. In 1845, Marx wrote: “With the thoroughness of the historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will therefore increase.” In an initial confirmation of this insight, masses of working people are being drawn into social and political struggle.

There have been 458 strikes across just eight European countries in the first quarter of 2026 alone, including five general strikes at the national or regional level. This represents a measurable acceleration over comparable periods in 2025. The first quarter of 2026 has already produced national general strikes in Belgium (March 12) and Italy (March 9), regional general strikes in Spain’s Andalusia and Basque Country (March 8 and 17), a general strike in Northern Cyprus, and a national general strike in Argentina in February—a density of general strike actions in a single quarter that exceeds 2025’s already considerable pace. Approximately 1.7 million state employees went on strike in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

On objective indices—number of strikes, size of mobilizations, geographic distribution, sectoral spread, duration, strike authorization margins and frequency of confrontation with state forces—the early months of 2026 represent a clear and measurable escalation of class conflict beyond 2025 levels.

There have been mass anti-ICE demonstrations drawing millions in the United States, including 8 million in the March 28 “No Kings” mobilization. There have been strikes by 42,000 University of California workers and 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers. 

These struggles are an objective expression of an international working class entering into struggle against the conditions imposed by the same crisis that drives the oligarchy toward fascism and war. These struggles are unfolding across every continent and every major sector of the economy, simultaneously and increasingly in direct conflict not only with employers and governments but with the trade union bureaucracies that function as an anti-strike corporate police force.

The decisive question of the present period is which of these two tendencies will prevail. The ruling class has answered the deepening crisis of its system with fascism and war, the militarization of society, the abrogation of democratic rights, the assault on immigrants and political dissidents, and the preparation of conflicts that carry within them the threat of nuclear catastrophe. The working class is answering with the only force capable of stopping this trajectory toward disaster—the mobilization of its own collective social power. The outcome is not predetermined. It will be settled by the struggles now underway and by the political consciousness, organization and leadership that the working class develops in the course of these struggles. 

What can be stated with certainty is that the period of relative social equilibrium has ended. The objective conditions identified at the start of the decade—the breakdown of the post-war capitalist order, the impossibility of continuing the old methods of rule, the necessity of either revolutionary transformation or descent into barbarism—have not only been confirmed but have intensified. The first months of 2026 mark the point at which the resistance of the working class has emerged as a global force, contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a scale that places the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace, dictatorship or democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the historical agenda.

Build the Fourth International!

The demoralized cynics and skeptics of the middle class pseudo-left will dismiss this perspective as fantasy. Groveling before the ruling class, they are staunch believers in the invincibility and permanence of capitalism. Their attitude to the working class is a mixture of fear and contempt. 

But the revolutionary perspective of the Trotskyist movement, led by the International Committee of the Fourth International, is grounded in the most realistic appraisal of objective economic and social processes operating on a global scale.

The same globalization of production that has driven the contradictions of the existing order has produced—as an objective, structural fact—the largest international working class in human history. The figure must be grasped concretely. Since 1980, the development of the world’s productive forces has increased the size of the working class by over 2 billion people. For the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure that rises by the millions every week. 

More than 500 cities now have populations exceeding 1 million, accounting for roughly a quarter of humanity; at least 31 of them are megacities of more than 10 million people, and an estimated 90 percent of world trade flows through a few dozen of these centers. An estimated 1 billion African workers are expected to enter the global labor force in the decades ahead. The billions of workers who have moved from the backward countryside of India, China, Latin America and Africa into the globalized circuits of production have, as the WSWS has characterized it, “leapt forward centuries in a single lifetime.” 

Objective social and economic processes are generating revolutionary struggles. The daily deterioration of living standards, the staggering scale of social inequality, the grotesque corruption and crimes of the ruling class are provoking the indignation and anger of the masses. But this anger must be developed into a politically conscious and internationally unified struggle against capitalism. 

And this brings to the fore the central problem of this historical epoch: the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class. The grip of the old and reactionary instruments of capitalist rule—the existing capitalist parties, the trade union bureaucracies, the bourgeois nationalist organizations, the innumerable petty-bourgeois groupings—must be broken. The political independence of the working class from all the agencies of the ruling class must be established. 

This requires the building of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement led by the International Committee. Concentrated in its program is a vast body of revolutionary experience spanning a century of struggle. 

We acknowledge that the sections of the International Committee are not yet mass parties. But this is not a fault but the expression of the long period of political reaction during which the old social democratic, Stalinist, labor and trade union bureaucracies were able to suppress the class struggle. 

But as Trotsky stated, “The laws of history are more powerful than the bureaucratic apparatus.” The intensification of capitalist crisis is radicalizing the masses; and this will create the conditions for an immense growth of the Trotskyist movement.

In May 1940, in the Manifesto of the Fourth International written by Trotsky just three months before his assassination by a Stalinist agent, the incomparable strategist of world socialist revolution explained:

In history, war has not infrequently been the mother of revolution precisely because it rocks superannuated regimes to their foundation, weakens the ruling class, and hastens the growth of revolutionary indignation among the oppressed masses.

Such a situation is emerging. The very fact that the American ruling class has placed a gangster in the White House and entrusted the management of its affairs to the underworld is irrefutable proof of its historical bankruptcy.

In the face of the greatest obstacles, the International Committee of the Fourth International has worked tirelessly to prepare the advanced sections of the working class for the present crisis. We have created the World Socialist Web Site, which has for the last 28 years served as an incomparable instrument of political analysis and strategic orientation. It has waged an unrelenting struggle to preserve the heritage of Marxism and the historical continuity of the struggle for socialism. 

The parties affiliated with the International Committee have spearheaded the fight against the pro-imperialist and corporatist labor bureaucracies through the development of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Its purpose is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them and to transfer power to the factory, shop floor and workplace committees.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), guided by the ICFI, educates the younger generation as Marxists, provides a revolutionary alternative to the demoralizing policies of protest politics and directs their energies toward the struggles of the working class.

The ICFI has developed Socialism AI, which was launched on the World Socialist Web Site in December 2025. While the ruling class utilizes AI for the purpose of enriching itself, impoverishing workers and intensifying exploitation, the International Committee is utilizing the vast potential of this technology to advance and accelerate the struggle for socialism.

All the different elements of the work of the International Committee are directed to the goal of building the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution that will defeat capitalist barbarism and secure the future of humanity. This party will be built by the workers, the youth and the socialist intellectuals who draw the necessary conclusions from the experiences of this epoch and take their place in its ranks. To the workers fighting ICE, to the strikers on the picket lines, to the students opposing genocide on the campuses, to the millions in the streets of every continent: The question now posed is not whether to fight but how to fight and under what banner. 

Our answer to these questions is this: The road forward is the conscious and organized struggle of the international working class for power. The banner is that of the Fourth International. We say: Build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country. Take up the fight for socialism. Forward to the world socialist revolution!