Submitted by sep on January 11
The World Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is in solidarity with and accepts the political authority of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. The principles of the SEP incorporate the essential experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century and the corresponding struggle waged by Marxists for the program of world socialist revolution. The socialist revolution, which signifies the forcible entrance of the masses into conscious political struggle, portends the greatest and most progressive transformation of the form of man's social organization in world history – the ending of society based on classes and, therefore, of the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. A transformation so immense is the work of an entire historical epoch. The principles of the SEP are derived from and necessarily reference the experiences of this epoch, which opened with the eruption of World War I in 1914, followed shortly thereafter by the conquest of state power by the Russian working class in the 1917 October Revolution.
Submitted by sep on January 11
The Principled Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
1. The program of the SEP is of a principled, not of a conjunctural and pragmatic character. It is based on an analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and an assimilation of the strategic revolutionary experiences of the working class and the international socialist movement. The world economic and political system is, in its fundamental characteristics, imperialist. Despite the advances in technology, the growth of the productive forces, and the expansion of capitalist production relations throughout the globe, the world capitalist system is beset by the same insoluble contradictions that produced the 20th century horrors of two world wars, fascism, a virtually endless series of regional military conflicts and innumerable brutal political dictatorships.
Submitted by sep on January 11
The following document was adopted by the First National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held August 11-15, 2010 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A pdf version of this program is available for download here.
For information on how to join the Socialist Equality Party, click here.
Submitted by sep on January 11
We are publishing here the lecture given by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, at the University of Leipzig on March 16. North, who has published extensively on the history of the socialist movement, is the author of In Defense of Leon Trotsky, a defense of historical truth and the legacy of Trotsky against the falsifications in the 2009 biography of Trotsky by the British author Robert Service and other similarly tendentious Trotsky biographies published in recent years.
North spoke at the conclusion of the Leipzig book fair, where Mehring Publishers released the German edition of In Defense of Leon Trotsky. (For a report on the meeting, see: “Leipzig meeting on Leon Trotsky and the defense of historical truth: 300 hear David North critique Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky”). The lecture was delivered in German. For access to the German version, click here.
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