Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. An Assessment of the Decade of Socialist Revolution and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party 

The opening report to the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), given by David North, the national chairman of the SEP. The congress was held from August 2 to August 7, 2026. 

 Here is an outline of the report provided with the assistance of Socialism AI:

A historical turning point

• The Ninth Congress convenes at the intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization. The aura of American invincibility, built on three and a half decades of "shock and awe," has been shattered.
• Trump is the political instrument of the corporate-financial oligarchy — a financial aristocracy that has amassed wealth on a scale unequaled in history and is irreconcilably hostile to democratic forms of rule. The degeneracy of the ruling class finds expression in a president who resembles a Scorsese character.
• The Iran war enjoyed bipartisan support. The Democratic Party welcomed the initial bombing. The strategy summed up in the Wall Street Journal's "Force Works" has been blown to pieces.
• The Iran debacle will send shock waves through the entire political system, exposing the rottenness of the two-party system, corporate media, corrupted academy, bureaucratic unions, identity-obsessed pseudo-left, and intellectually degraded culture.
• The convergence of military defeat, social radicalization, and political crisis is the outcome of contradictions of American and world capitalism, foreseen by the Trotskyist movement.

I. The Decade of Socialist Revolution

• The 2020 New Year's statement, "The decade of socialist revolution begins," characterized the objective situation and its trajectory; it did not issue a schedule of insurrections. Its critics merely point at a calendar and ignore what the document actually contains.
• John Kelly's The Twilight of World Trotskyism* exemplifies the bankruptcy of neo-Stalinism and petty-bourgeois academic politics. What he derides as "doctrinairism" is the defense of the historical continuity of Marxism, the theoretical foundation of scientific prognosis. His book proclaimed the twilight of Trotskyism on the very eve of the greatest crisis of world capitalism since 1945.
• The "slogans and policies" Kelly dismisses — Trotsky on the breakdown of national economies into a world economy (1915), Lenin on imperialism and political reaction (1916), Trotsky on US hegemony operating more ruthlessly in crisis (1928), on permanent revolution (1930), and on the necessity of breaking with national defense from the standpoint of international proletarian revolution (1934) — remain the essential foundations of revolutionary strategy.
• Kelly's alternative — "social reform" within the parameters of capitalism — has been refuted by events. Those parameters are austerity, dictatorship, and war. The Latin America he celebrated is now presided over by a Fujimori, a Pinochetist, Milei, and a US-installed government in Caracas. The social democratic parties he offered as models are rearming Europe and dismantling the welfare state.
• The twilight has fallen not on the Fourth International but on the illusions of those who wrote its obituary.
• Every fundamental tendency identified in the 2020 Perspective — imperialist militarism, economic crisis, collapse of bourgeois democracy and turn to authoritarian rule, the contradiction between technology and the profit system, obscene wealth concentration, and working-class radicalization — has developed with a scope and velocity that have outrun the statement's own formulations.

II. The Metastasis of the Third World War

• The third world war is not a future threat but a presently unfolding reality — a metastatic process spreading globally, colonizing new regions, fusing previously separate conflicts, and subordinating economic life to military requirements.
• This analysis is now confirmed by bourgeois organs like the Financial Times, whose chief foreign affairs commentator concedes current conflicts "already meet a few" of the defining criteria of the two world wars.
• The genocide in Gaza, the war against Iran, and the expanding Ukraine conflict are interconnected fronts of a global war. NATO is directing drone attacks deep inside Russian territory without concealment. The probability of Russian counterattack on NATO countries increases by the day.
• The historic struggle of the epoch is between global imperialist war and world revolution — between imperialism's drive to organize and subjugate the earth and the international working class's effort to overthrow the social order that produces imperialist redivision.

III. 1991 and the Genesis of the Present War

• The present conflict has been in development since 1990–91, not 2022 or 2014. The dissolution of the USSR by the Stalinist bureaucracy was greeted as the final victory over 1917. The "End of History" was the declaration that the specter of socialism had been exorcised.
• Imperialism's response was an attempt to recreate the world as if the October Revolution had never occurred — the "New World Order" under American hegemony.
• Two strategic motivations followed:
  1. Redivision of the former Soviet space: codified in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, executed through five NATO expansions, the destruction of Yugoslavia, serial color revolutions, and the 2014 Kiev coup, culminating in the drive to break up the Russian Federation.
  2. Removal of the Soviet counterweight globally: the Gulf War (1990–91) opened the era of "forever wars" — Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and now Iran — a single protracted campaign to liquidate every obstacle erected by twentieth-century revolutionary and anti-colonial upheavals.
• The war against Iran is both the culmination of this 35-year trajectory and its historical reckoning. Planned as the crowning operation, it has become a major strategic setback. The conviction that a Pax Americana could be imposed through unrestrained military power stands exposed as a delusion. But the debacle will produce not retreat but further and more desperate escalation against Russia and China.
• The escalating conflict with China belongs to the same historical complex. China's developmental capacity is the direct inheritance of the 1949 Revolution. The CCP's nationalism is fundamentally reactionary; "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is a contradiction in terms. Without social revolution in China, economic development leads inexorably to catastrophic war with the US.
• Imperialist leaders no longer conceal their conviction that war against China and Russia is inevitable. Merz, Starmer, and Macron publicly prepare their populations for war. The regional powers, like Türkiye, are drawn ever deeper into the vortex. The third world war is a description of the present.

IV. The Economic Base

• Federal debt: $39.5 trillion (up ~$12 trillion, or over 40%, since 2020), with a new trillion added roughly every five months. Projected to surpass $53 trillion by 2035.
• Interest payments: Nearly $1 trillion in 2025, projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035 — now exceeding the military budget, a classic symptom of imperial fiscal decay.
• Trade deficit: $901.5 billion (2025), impervious to tariffs. The largest goods deficit is now with the EU ($218.8 billion), exceeding those with China and Mexico.
• Deficits: $1.7–1.9 trillion have become the permanent peacetime norm. Cumulative deficits of $22.7 trillion projected over the coming decade.
• Gold: More than doubled since 2020 to ~$4,080/oz — "an unambiguous verdict by the world market on the dollar." Central bank purchases express de-dollarization materially.
• Dollar decline: Share of global reserves at lowest since 1995 (56.9%). The 2022 freezing of Russian assets proved a watershed.
• Oligarchic wealth: Richest 1% hold 31.7% of US national wealth — the highest ever recorded. Top 10% hold over 68%; bottom half barely 2.5%. Billionaire wealth up 81% since 2020 to a record $18.3 trillion. The Trump cabinet, with combined wealth exceeding $7 billion, is the richest in American history. Marx's characterization of the state as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie has acquired almost literal exactitude.
• Fictitious capital and augmented intelligence: The speculative mania around AI objectively undermines the value system by expelling living labor — the sole source of surplus value — from production on an unprecedented scale, driving the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
• Under these conditions, the ruling class turns to war as the classical capitalist resolution of overproduction and overaccumulation.
• Europe's transition to a war economy is most advanced: Germany's largest-ever rearmament budget, suspension of the constitutional debt brake, conscription preparations, NATO's 5% GDP target. The July–August Foreign Affairs asks "Who Will Win the Next War?" — the ruling class has internalized world war as its working assumption.

V. The Radicalization of the Working Class and the Crisis of Leadership

• Historical law: World war and social revolution are interconnected phases of a single crisis. WWI produced the 1917 revolution within three years; WWII produced the upheavals of 1943–48. The ruling class is haunted by this history.
• Total war requires total mobilization of the working class, setting into motion radicalization. The metastatic spread of imperialist war finds its dialectical antipode in the global expansion of class struggle — proceeding molecularly, beneath the surface of official politics.
• The global integration of production has been carried to its conclusion. The commodity has been stripped of national identity. There is no such thing as an American car or a German machine tool — every significant commodity is the product of a world productive process. The factory has been stretched across the planet.
• The bourgeoisie concludes that the whole world is a vital national interest to be secured by force; the working class is driven by the same transformation toward the opposite conclusion — international unity.
• Unprecedented scale: 3.5 billion global labor force, the largest social force in history. A majority of humanity now lives in cities. China's working class, around three-quarters of a billion, is the largest in history. Indian general strikes have mobilized over 200 million workers in a single day. Applying Marx and Engels from The Holy Family: the size of the mass now being drawn into action is itself the measure of the thoroughness of the historical action that impends — world socialist revolution.
• The radicalization identified by the 2020 Perspective is clearly underway: the 2018–2019 global upsurge, pandemic strike waves, French pension struggles, British strike waves, US auto/logistics/healthcare strikes, general strikes across southern Europe and South Asia, Gaza genocide protests, and three "No Kings" protests — the largest single-day demonstrations in American history — form a single ascending curve.
• North America: The class pronounced dead has re-entered struggle in every sector. Contract rejections above 90% and the Will Lehman campaign register a revolt against the bureaucracy itself. The awakening is unfolding at the very center of world imperialism.
• Africa: The youngest and fastest-growing working class on earth is emerging as a revolutionary factor of world-historical dimensions — general strikes in Nigeria, the Kenyan youth uprising, South African strike movements.
• Russia and China: Imperialist encirclement reawakens historical memory. Coming movements will be directed against imperialism and national oligarchies alike and will find their answers in the heritage defended by the Fourth International against Stalinism.
• The crisis of revolutionary leadership: Mass movements remain politically captive — channeled back into the Democratic Party, the party of war. The AFL-CIO has issued no statement on the Iran war. The UAW president invokes the "Arsenal of Democracy" myth. The bureaucracy sabotages strike votes, forces through contracts rejected by 90%+ margins, and answers rank-and-file opposition with censorship, rigged elections, and intimidation. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees was founded in 2021 to transfer power from the bureaucracies to the workers themselves.

VI. Conclusion

• At the decade's midpoint, every tendency identified in the 2020 Perspective has asserted itself with force exceeding the statement's own formulations.
• The present conflict is the third act of a drama that opened in 1914. The fight against the war is the resumption of the socialist revolution — requiring the independent political mobilization of the working class internationally.
• A perspective is an instrument of struggle. Its verification and defense are themselves moments in the resolution of the crisis of leadership, which is resolved not by objective processes alone but by the conscious building of the revolutionary party.
• The ICFI identified 2019 as the beginning of the fifth phase in the history of the Trotskyist movement — a phase of vast growth as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. The five phases: (1) 1923–1938, from the Left Opposition to the founding of the Fourth International; (2) 1938–1953, to the split with Pabloite revisionism; (3) 1953–1985/86, the struggle against Pabloism within the Fourth International; (4) 1986–2019, reestablishing the heritage of the Trotskyist movement; (5) 2019–present, the new phase of building the ICFI as the conscious political leadership of the internationalized class struggle.
• Tasks: Building the party in the working class; expanding the IWA Rank-and-File Committees as instruments of class struggle, anti-bureaucratic insurgency, and anticipatory forms of workers' power; expanding the IYSSE to educate and train cadre, especially as conscription looms; systematic education of cadre in Marxist theory and the history of the Fourth International. Socialism AI will play a critical role in this education.
• The SEP will not adapt to the DSA and other pseudo-left tendencies but will fight to win radicalized workers and youth to Trotskyism through patient explanation and intransigent criticism.
• The Ninth Congress convenes at the point where the perspective of the party and the objective movement of history visibly converge. The task is to prepare the party — politically, theoretically, and organizationally — for the revolutionary struggles this convergence makes inevitable.

2. World’s housing crisis impacts nearly half of humanity

The scale of global housing inadequacy affects around 42 percent of humanity, 3.2 billion people. This has never previously been measured.

3. Paul Klee at the Jewish Museum in New York: “Other Possible Worlds”

Klee drew inspiration from, and was claimed by, many artistic movements, but his highly individual, syncretic style is hard to classify.

4. Morenoite “balance sheet” on Greece’s Syriza: a cover for popular frontism in Argentina

The International Workers League’s review of the Syriza experience is constructed to conceal the real class character of its record.

5. The role of Chile’s “left” in Kast’s Mega-Reform: A political autopsy of a class betrayal

The Chilean “left’s” turn to the Constitutional Court is the final act in a drama whose real content is the bipartisan facilitation of a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the oligarchic clans and finance capital.

6. Hundreds dead in Colombia earthquake: Capitalism’s latest case of social mass murder

Seven weeks after the earthquakes in Venezuela, the world was confronted again with the same scenes across western Colombia: dozens of buildings collapsing, families with children fleeing falling structures, and thousands who have lost their loved ones, their homes and their belongings.

7. Trump cuts childhood vaccine schedule and turns the Justice Department on states that require shots

The order writes into national policy the schedule Kennedy’s purged advisory committee produced, and turns federal litigation and funding against the five states that still require immunization for school entry.

8. Ford brings K-9 units into Michigan Assembly, as UAW-backed surveillance regime intensifies

The UAW is helping implement a police state style atmosphere in US auto plants, with intrusive searches and zero-tolerance discipline spreading.

9. Mamdani fires Haitian workers after Trump administration revokes their legal status

In announcing the termination of Haitian municipal workers after Homeland Security stripped Temporary Protected Status from some 350,000 Haitians in the US, New York Mayor Mamdani revealed his DSA administration to be an instrument of the capitalist state.

10. Family members outraged over unbearable conditions on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln

Family members are reporting that living conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier—which had been at sea for a record 208 days—are deteriorating and becoming unbearable for 5,000 sailors and Marines deployed to the Arabian Sea in the US war against Iran.

11. Turkish parliament passes law on Kurdish PKK disarmament

The Turkish parliament passed a law on the PKK's surrender. The near-unanimity of Turkish and Kurdish parties alike expresses not a turn toward peace but the ruling elite closing ranks, as it is integrated ever more deeply into the US-led war across the Middle East.

12. Hunger strike against inhumane conditions, forced labor and torture in Ukrainian prisons

The horrific conditions in Ukrainian prisons, which resemble those in concentration camps, underscore the urgency of the fight for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk, and all other political prisoners.

13. Italy: Fire at working class housing occupation exposes Rome’s housing crisis

Meloni’s crackdown on the Spin Time Labs building is part of a coordinated “law and order“ legislative campaign designed to systematically dismantle Italy's squatter networks and prioritize private property rights.

14. US-Japan yen intervention unravelling

Half the gains in the value of the yen after joint US-Japan action were wiped out when trading began this week.

15. Australian air traffic control crisis deepens with 2 near misses at Sydney airport

The narrowly averted collisions came amid longstanding air traffic controller shortages, which are also causing frequent flight delays.

16. Australia: Albanese government prepares to ram through brutal attack on the disabled

The bipartisan assault rides roughshod over deep-seated opposition from NDIS participants and their families, disability experts, health and welfare workers and even recent warnings from the government-funded Human Rights Commission.

17. The sentencing of Bogdan Syrotiuk and the fraud of the “war for democracy” in Ukraine

Not one major Western news outlet has reported the 15-year sentence against the Ukrainian antiwar socialist.

18.  Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

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.

* Either Kelly,  an emeritus professor at Birkbeck, hasn't looked at his own book's Routledge listing that has a stale database entry showing a different author, or has noticed it can't be bothered to get it corrected. The photo shows his book with his name, the advertising copy currently incorrectly shows the author as Edgar Anstey.