All the fundamental problems of the 21st century—inequality, war, global warming, economic crisis, dictatorship and the return of fascism—flow from the subordination of the global economy to the private enrichment of the ruling elites.
In January 2020, the richest 2,153 people on the planet had more wealth than the bottom 4.6 billion people. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated trends of economic crisis, financial parasitism, inequality, and inter-imperialist rivalry that threaten humanity's future.
Captialism has become a barrier to the further development of humanity. As Karl Marx explained 150 years ago, with the growth of poverty and inequality, so too “grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
The WSWS seeks to unify the international working class to take power. The major international corporations and banks must be taken out of the hands of the ruling class and placed under democratic ownership to serve the interests of the broad mass of the global population.
This lecture was delivered to the Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School on July 23, 2019 by Andre Damon, regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site and leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in the US.
This is the text of the speech given by David North to open the International Online May Day Rally hosted by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS on Sunday, May 4.
Link to audio
The IMF’s “baseline scenario” is that the world economy will lose $9 trillion in 2020 and 2021, equivalent to the combined economic output of Germany and Japan.
The spread of the coronavirus has exposed the disastrous consequences of decades of the massive concentration of wealth and inequality spawned by capitalism.
The Hamilton Project, a Washington, DC policy think-tank, has published survey results that show dramatic increases in hunger in households across the US.
Latin America this week reached the grim milestones of 300,000 COVID-19 deaths and more than 8 million infections.
By the end of the year more people will die every day from hunger as a result of disruptions to the global food chain brought about by the pandemic, than from the virus itself.
A large body of research shows that young people, especially those without a college degree, are particularly vulnerable during economic downturns.
As hundreds of thousands of people died from COVID-19, global stock markets soared as the US Federal Reserve and other central banks pumped unprecedented quantities of digitally printed money into bond markets.
Over the last forty years a global assault on the wages and living standards of the working class occurred throughout the world. Today, in the United States, an average teacher makes nothing compared to corporate CEOs. This data does not include stock portfolios which has become a primary source of wealth for the top percentiles of the population.
Despite unprecedented technological advancements and a mass surplus of food, tens of millions of people around the globe experience chronic hunger. The economic and political devastation of large sections of the developing world by US imperialism and its allies has created conditions of extreme want and desperation. According to the UN, 2019 saw the highest number of global refugees in world history, 79.5 million people, as people fled from wars and poverty.
