“The SEP and the Struggle Against Imperialist War,” is the first of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National
Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7,
2026. The resolution was introduced by the opening report to the congress, given by David North, national chairman of the SEP.
The SEP and the struggle against imperialist war
1.
The Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes
under conditions of escalating imperialist war, deepening economic
crisis, the turn of the ruling classes to dictatorship, and a mounting
assault on the jobs, wages and social rights of the working class. There
is no longer a question of the danger of a world war; its initial
stages have already begun. Across the world, the ruling elites are
turning to fascism and dictatorship. A concentration of wealth without
historical precedent is coupled with a global wave of inflation and the
accelerating destruction of jobs, devastating the conditions of life of
billions. But the same conditions are driving a political radicalization
and the resurgence of the class struggle internationally. It is amid
the collision of these two tendencies that the SEP must define its
tasks.
2.This Congress meets five months into the US-Israeli war
of aggression against Iran, launched in the early morning hours of
February 28. The assault began while negotiations between American and
Iranian representatives were still underway, and its opening salvo
included the assassination of Iran’s head of state. As the Socialist
Equality Party declared in its statement of March 2, “Stop the criminal
US-Israeli war against Iran!,” the assault is “a criminal act of war
waged in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and
international law”—precisely what was described at the Nuremberg trials
of Nazi leaders in 1945–46 as a “crime against peace,” the “supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
3.
Trump’s genocidal declaration of April 7 that “A whole civilization will
die tonight, never to be brought back again” will live forever in
infamy. On July 11, he threatened to “completely decimate and destroy
all areas of Iran.” These statements are themselves war crimes under
international law. The methods of extermination proclaimed openly from
the White House express the barbarism into which the capitalist system
is dragging humanity.
4. Successive “ceasefires” and memoranda of
understanding have collapsed, each breakdown followed by a new round of
escalation. Whatever agreements of a temporary character may be reached,
the war is driven by the fundamental geostrategic interests of American
imperialism: the domination of the Middle East, its natural resources,
and the strategic trade routes upon which the world economy depends.
Control of these resources—and the power to deny them to rivals—has been
the central preoccupation of American policy in the region for more
than seven decades. The war against Iran is the culmination of a
bipartisan campaign, waged under every administration since the 1979
Revolution deprived Washington of its puppet regime.
5. This
Congress endorses the analysis presented in the opening report to the
2026 International May Day Rally: 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.” The consequences have been
catastrophic for workers throughout the world. The naval blockade of
Iranian ports has convulsed world trade and energy supplies, feeding a
new surge of inflation on every continent and forcing tens of millions
into food insecurity or famine globally.
6.The assault on Iran is
one front in a general eruption of imperialist violence, aimed at a
redivision of the world. Venezuela was invaded on January 3 and its
president kidnapped. At least 221 fishermen and workers have been blown
apart in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific in the Pentagon’s illegal
strikes. Cuba is being strangled and threatened with invasion. Israel
has initiated a new war against Lebanon. And the genocide in Gaza
continues into its third year: 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
have reduced an entire society to rubble before the eyes of the world.
7.The escalating global imperialist war is directed above all against
Russia and China. There are divisions within the American ruling class
over which conflict is to be prioritized, but these are tactical
differences within a ruling class united on the essential aim. The vast
resources of Russia—its energy, minerals, and territory spanning eleven
time zones—are to be conquered and opened to imperialist exploitation.
And the central conflict of the epoch remains the long-planned war
against China, whose economic rise American imperialism regards as an
existential threat. Whatever the differences among its factions, the
American ruling class will not accept any challenge to its global
hegemony. Trump’s $1.5 trillion military budget is, in the most direct
sense, a budget for world war.
8.American imperialism is the most
disruptive force on the planet. In its drive to reverse its decline, it
is breaking up all the relationships and institutions of the postwar
order that it once constructed. The United States bullies and extorts
its nominal allies, wages tariff war against their economies, demands
the annexation of Greenland (the territory of a NATO member, Denmark)
and threatens to reduce Canada to the “fifty-first state.” Trotsky’s
warning of 1928 assumes staggering relevance and acuity: “In the period
of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more
completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.
The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from her
difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless
of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, or
Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or through war.”
Six years later, Trotsky foresaw that history was bringing mankind “face
to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”
9.The European imperialist powers are not bystanders but full
participants. The NATO powers are engaged in a de facto war against
Russia in Ukraine, escalating toward direct confrontation between
nuclear-armed states, and are rearming at the fastest pace since the
early 1950s, demanding that a new generation be prepared to fight and
die as in the two world wars of the last century. German imperialism
once again stands at the head of this drive, adopting war laws that
create the framework for conscription and the subordination of civilian
life to war production, while Finland has repealed its ban on nuclear
weapons, opening its 1,300-kilometer border with Russia to NATO nuclear
deployment.
10.The eruption of the present war was foreseen by
the International Committee of the Fourth International, whose
statements over the past 35 years have a prophetic character. In its
manifesto of May Day 1991, “Oppose Imperialist War and Colonialism!,”
issued in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and as the Stalinist
bureaucracy completed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ICFI
warned that the plunder of the former colonial countries was being
resumed. Already in August 1990, on the eve of the first war against
Iraq, the ICFI had explained: “It marks the beginning of a new
imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means
the end of the postcolonial era… In its brutal assault against Iraq,
imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of
unrestrained domination of the backward countries that existed prior to
World War II.”
11.Everything that has followed—the unending wars
in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine—has
confirmed this analysis. As David North wrote in the preface to A Quarter Century of War
(2016): “The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied
as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US
drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in
the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component
elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States
with Russia and China.”
12.Every one of these wars intensified,
rather than resolved, the crisis of American imperialism. As North wrote
in March 2003, at the outset of the invasion of Iraq: “American
imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world.
It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle
East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to
its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting
resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal
contradictions of American society.” Iran will prove no different.
13.Thirty-five years of unending war have failed to reverse the economic
decline of American capitalism. The US trade deficit stands at record
levels—$1.2 trillion in goods in a single year—and total US government
debt is approaching $40 trillion, sustained only by the world’s
continued willingness to hold dollars. The position of the dollar as the
world reserve currency, which allows the United States to command the
resources of the planet in exchange for paper, has entered into open
crisis. But American imperialism will not accept a diminution of its
world position. Confronted with the failure of each war, it responds not
with retreat but with ever greater escalation, up to and including
nuclear war, which would threaten the destruction of human life on the
planet.
14.The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in
the working class and based on a socialist and internationalist program.
This Congress reaffirms the principles established in the ICFI’s
February 2016 statement, Socialism and the Fight Against War:
the struggle against war “must be based on the working class, the great
revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive
elements in the population”; the new antiwar movement “must be
anti-capitalist and socialist,” must be “completely and unequivocally
independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations
of the capitalist class,” and “must, above all, be international,
mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global
struggle against imperialism.”
15.At its root, imperialist war is
the outcome and expression of the two essential objective
contradictions of the capitalist system itself: first, between private
ownership of the means of production 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
eruption of imperialist war and the eruption of the international class
struggle are products of a single crisis, and the war now underway is
preparing revolutionary explosions.
16.The SEP opposes every act
of imperialist aggression, and it does so independently of and in
opposition to the existing states. It upholds the right of the Iranian
people and other targets of aggression to defend themselves against the
imperialist onslaught. It rejects the designation of Russia and China as
imperialist powers—a designation employed by pseudo-left political
tendencies to legitimize the foreign policy objectives vis-a-vis the
principal targets of US war plans. But the SEP’s principled positions
have nothing in common with support for, let alone the attribution of a
progressive character to, the Moscow and Beijing regimes.
17.The
Putin regime is the political instrument of the capitalist oligarchy
that arose out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the USSR
and its plunder of state property—the bureaucracy that, as the 2026 May
Day opening report stated, “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.” It combines military
escalation with appeals for accommodation with the imperialist powers,
while its Great Russian nationalism divides the Russian from the
Ukrainian working class. The Beijing regime, for its part, presides in
the name of “socialism” over the restoration of capitalism and the
exploitation of the largest working class in the world, which it fears
far more than it fears imperialism.
18.The SEP likewise rejects
the theory of “multipolarity” advanced by academic and pseudo-left
theorists, according to which the “unipolar” hegemony of American
imperialism can be replaced by a consortium of capitalist states
presiding harmoniously over a more peaceful division of global
resources. The contradiction between the global economy and the
capitalist nation-state system leads not to a negotiated equilibrium but
to war. Underlying the theory of “multipolarity” is opposition to a
struggle against capitalism, the attempt to balance between conflicting
capitalist states rather than to mobilize the working class against them
all.
19.The fight against imperialist war must therefore be bound up with an international and class strategy. As Trotsky wrote in War and the Fourth International,
we “follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle.” From
this standpoint, the most important consequence of the war is the
intensification of social tensions within the United States and every
imperialist country. As the party foresaw in 2003, the war is
intensifying all the internal contradictions of American society—and it
is out of these contradictions that the force capable of stopping the
war is emerging.
20. Imperialist war is, at the same time, a war
against the working class. The resources demanded by world war cannot be
extracted from society without the virtual enslavement of its
population: the destruction of social programs, the driving down of
wages, the militarization of labor and the erection of dictatorship to
suppress the resistance these measures provoke. War is the foreign
policy of the oligarchy, and the oligarchy makes the working class pay
for it—in declining living standards, in the evisceration of democratic
rights, and in blood. The fight against dictatorship and the fight
against war is one fight, against one enemy.
21.The Socialist Equality Party does not advance an “antiwar policy” as something
separate and apart from the fight against the capitalist system. Its
strategy has nothing in common with the protest movements that appeal to
the conscience of imperialist governments, or with popular fronts that
subordinate the working class to one or another faction of the
bourgeoisie. The fight against war is a fight for the political
independence of the working class. It is the most concentrated
expression of the struggle of the party to build a revolutionary
movement of the working class.
22.There is no peace to be
negotiated within the imperialist system, and no faction of the ruling
class—Democratic or Republican, European or American—to which an appeal
against war can be directed. The war will be ended not by the diplomats
of imperialism but by the international working class, the only social
force with the power and the objective interest to stop it.
23.The SEP demands the immediate and unconditional cessation of all US and
Israeli military operations against Iran and the lifting of the naval
blockade; the end of the genocide in Gaza; the withdrawal of all US
forces from the Middle East and Latin America and the release of Nicolás
Maduro; the end of the blockade of Cuba; the ending of the war against
Russia; and the dismantling of the machinery of world war being
assembled against China. It opposes all moves to reintroduce the draft,
institute automatic registration for the Selective Service, and dragoon
American youth to kill and be killed in the wars of American
imperialism.
24.The Socialist Equality Party also renews its
demand for the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk in
Ukraine. Seized by the Ukrainian secret service in April 2024, he faces
charges of “treason” for his socialist and antiwar activity, which
could bring between fifteen years and life. The Zelensky regime has
refused to release him even after a forensic report by a leading
Ukrainian criminologist exposed the case as a political frame-up. His
persecution lays bare the real character of the regime: not a defender
of democracy, as the imperialist powers proclaim, but a police state
that outlaws all socialist and internationalist opposition to the war.
25.Not one of these demands can be realized through appeals to the
existing governments. They constitute a program of struggle, the fight
for which leads the working class into direct conflict with the
capitalist state and poses the question of power.
26.This
Congress resolves to fight for the unity of the workers of all countries
against imperialism; to connect the fight against war with the
developing strike movement of the international working class and the
fight for its political independence; and to build the international
antiwar movement of the working class on the program of world socialist
revolution. More than a century ago, amid the slaughter of the First
World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned that humanity confronted the
alternative: socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is no longer a warning
but a present reality. Whether it consumes civilization, or is
overthrown by the international working class, will be decided by the
resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This Congress
therefore resolves, above all, to build the Socialist Equality Party and
the International Committee of the Fourth International as the
revolutionary leadership of the working class—the party through which
the fight against imperialist war becomes the world socialist
revolution.
The
summer of 2026 has proven to be the hottest on record in Western
Europe. According to measurements by the European Union’s (EU)
Copernicus Climate Change Service, June and July were the hottest since
temperature records began.
The longer the AI-fuelled stock market boom continues, the more new
and risky schemes are developed to try to sustain it. The AI boom has
already seen the growth of circular financing in which companies provide
money to others to enable them to buy their products.
Now a new
mechanism is being developed. Earlier this week, the leading chipmaking
firm Nvidia, the biggest company in the world by market value at more
than $5 trillion, announced that it had reached an understanding with
some of Wall Street’s biggest names to provide financing for purchase of
its AI chips.
*****
Wall Street has developed a complex system of credit and debt
arrangements based on assets such as cars, housing, buildings and income
streams. But this system has assumed that the underlying asset will
retain at least some of its value over time. But the value of computer
chips is notoriously volatile—a chip can be top of the range at one
point and then rapidly become obsolescent at another as a superior or
cheaper product is developed.
*****
To organize the operation, the big Wall Street funds will seek money
from pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds,
tying them into any possible failure.
The proposed agreement is
illustrative of the dynamic of the AI-based financial bubble. Nvidia’s
motivations are clear: it is a way of lessening the circularity of its
present financial arrangements, though it will still be on the hook for
25 percent of any losses.
But what of the involvement of major
Wall Street firms and their boosting of the scheme? It is an expression
of the need to preserve the value of their existing investments—running
into hundreds of billions of dollars—by ensuring that the boom
continues.
In other words, not to back the development of ever
more exotic and risky financial mechanisms risks bursting the entire
bubble. But such a process—sometimes likened to riding a bicycle where
forward momentum must continue to stop it falling over—cannot continue
indefinitely.
The
considerable legal package approved by the German cabinet on Wednesday
massively expands the powers of the domestic and foreign intelligence
agencies — and erases the line between them and the police established
after the defeat of the Nazis.
Alongside
people with disabilities and their families, the Labor government’s
gutting of the National Disability Insurance Scheme will have a
devastating impact on teachers and education support staff in
Australia’s already crisis-ridden public schools.
The
escalating war between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia increasingly
targets economic infrastructure in the Black Sea region, a critical area
for global food supplies.
The Odyssey moviegoers in the US are a mixed demographic,
drawing people of all ages. However, it has notably attracted a younger
baseline than typical “blockbusters,” with roughly 55 percent of the
audience falling under the age of 35.
What accounts for the wave of interest?
In
the broadest sense, life-and-death themes embodied in a classic,
treated seriously and generously, have encountered a sizeable global
viewing public clearly starved for challenging material.
There is a double significance to this. In the first place, The Odyssey,
with its strengths and weaknesses, focuses on the horrors of war, the
foul role of a usurping and cruel aristocracy, and the need to treat
strangers, guests–immigrants–with hospitality and kindness.
And, not a secondary matter, Nolan’s effort depicts the immense
difficulties and struggles facing those who oppose all that. The
resonance should be clear. People are going to the film in part because
it corresponds to how they increasingly feel about the world and about
America in particular–and the need to make immense sacrifices in a big
cause.
An “odyssey” has come to be defined as a long wandering or voyage
usually marked by numerous changes of fortune–or an intellectual or
spiritual wandering or quest. Isn’t the depth and danger of the present
situation beginning to convince many in America and elsewhere
that there are no quick fixes, no easy solutions, that a protracted,
complex struggle lies ahead? There is some moral, intellectual
connection here to the life-conditions and challenges facing masses of
people.
*****
...With Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey,
Nolan has taken a considerable jump, contributing two substantial and
complex films about issues that matter, and doing so in an accessible
and visually imposing fashion. Equally important, their success must
inspire others to break out of the twin ruts of infinitely tedious
middle-class self-appraisal, which goes and arrives nowhere, on the one
hand, and mindless “action” films, intended to deaden all remotely human
thought and feeling, on the other.
*****
Whatever its shortcomings, this Odyssey is a genuine and
heartfelt attempt to come to terms with Homer’s work and its many
complexities and even ambiguities. Audiences are not being cheated. And
the logic of what has begun here, we suspect, is only likely to pick up
steam. Many things can become contagious, including “the classical,” the
principled and a feeling for what is enduring and authentic in life.
As
always with the Left Party: it talks left but in practice acts right!
The new contract for Berlin’s S-Bahn is being portrayed in political
circles and the media as a major step forward. Quite the opposite is the
case.
The
largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history, a returning
measles epidemic and the worst Ebola epidemic in Congolese history are
expressions of a single crisis.
Letters
of protest and petition signatures from more than 30 countries are
demanding the release of the 27-year-old socialist sentenced to 15 years
in prison for his antiwar writings.
Underlying
the instability within the National Party and the coalition government
are tensions over how overtly New Zealand should align with US-led
warmongering against China.
Fifty-one years have passed since the DINA, the Pinochet regime’s secret
police, orchestrated one of its most heinous crimes: the kidnapping,
torture and disappearance of 119 political opponents, followed by a
transnational media hoax designed to convince the world they had killed
each other abroad. The crime and its cover-up were a single operation,
planned from within the heart of the repressive apparatus, executed
across three countries, and amplified by a corporate press that served
willingly as the dictatorship’s propaganda arm.
*****
Between May 1974 and February 1975, agents of the National
Intelligence Directorate (DINA) seized 119 people from their homes, from
the streets, from their workplaces. The overwhelming majority were
members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). They were students,
social workers, textile workers, teachers, a concert pianist, a
filmmaker, a radio announcer. Nineteen were women; at least two were
pregnant at the time of their arrest.
They were taken to torture
and extermination centers, whose names are now seared into Chile’s
collective memory: Londres 38, Villa Grimaldi, José Domingo Cañas,
“Venda Sexy.” There they were interrogated under torture. Then they were
made to disappear.
The number 119 was not chosen at random. It
was a deliberate reference to 11.9—September 11—the date of the
CIA-backed coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973. It was,
as one investigating judge later observed, a “cabalistic signature” of
the DINA’s strategists, a mark intended to ensure the country would
never forget who held absolute power.
By mid-1975, international pressure was mounting. The United Nations
had taken up the case of Chile’s disappeared. Human rights organizations
were documenting the regime’s crimes. The DINA needed an answer. The
answer was Operation Colombo.
In
Puerto Rico, roughly half a million people have been cut off from
running water for 48 hours at a stretch, going three and four days a
week without service.
The
contract is the result of a strategy by the Teamsters bureaucracy, not
of fighting for what workers need, but of expanding its dues base while
establishing the same corrupt relations with management that it has at
other employers.
Despite
workers voting nearly 99 percent to strike, the SEIU moved to control
and shut down the walkout. The company returned with a worse offer, and
workers remain without a contract.
On Wednesday, drivers at Arriva North London’s Tottenham garage told the World Socialist Web Site that even when the “air-cooling” system is on, temperatures inside can reach 39 to 40 degrees Celsius [102.2 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit].
Since
Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government sold off the country's
water authorities in 1989, water and sewerage charges have risen by
around 40 percent in real terms.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
