The publication by Mehring Books of Sounding the
Alarm: Socialism Against War by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman
David North is extremely prescient. The election of a fascist as president will
be a trigger point for a massive escalation of the attacks on the working
class.
As Joseph Kishore points out, “Trump’s reelection
signifies the violent realignment of American politics with its underlying
social reality: a society dominated by staggering inequality and ruled by a
capitalist oligarchy. This realignment is expressed not only in Trump’s
appointments but in the Democratic Party’s swift accommodation to—and even
embrace of—the incoming regime. Trump is assembling a government that
epitomizes the naked rule of the rich. Each appointment reflects two overriding
criteria: personal loyalty to Trump and an unwavering commitment to a program
of war, repression and social counterrevolution.”
This new book contains the speeches delivered at the
International Committee of the Fourth International’s Online May Day
celebrations from 2014 to 2024. In the foreword, King’s College historian
Thomas Mackaman writes, “This volume consists principally of the speeches with
which David North has opened the May Day rallies of the past ten years. Also
included are essays related to the May Day events written by North. This
compilation merits careful study for those who wish to understand the causes of
imperialist war and how to fight it. The central theme of North’s speeches is
that the struggle against militarism and war must be revolutionary, i.e., only
through the overthrow of capitalism by the working class in a world socialist
revolution can the drive toward catastrophe be stopped. There is no other way.”[1]
North’s use of the Marxist method is an antidote the the rubbish that has come
from writers and historians over the last twenty years. The sharpest expression
of this reaction came from the pen of Francis Fukuyama, whose essay entitled
“The End of History?” was published in the journal The National Interest. He wrote:
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing
of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.[2]
North replies, “ Fukuyama’s analysis combined
bourgeois political triumphalism with extreme philosophical pessimism. It might
have been appropriate for the publisher to insert in every copy of Fukuyama’s
book a prescription for Prozac. If the existing capitalist reality was, for all
intents and purposes, as good as it could get, mankind’s future was very bleak.
But how realistic was Fukuyama’s hypothesis? Though he claimed to draw
inspiration from Hegel, Fukuyama’s grasp of dialectics was extremely limited.
The claim that history had ended could make sense only if it could be
demonstrated that capitalism had somehow solved and overcome the internal and
systemic contradictions that generated conflict and crisis.”[3]
The speeches in this volume are not just a testament to
the power of the Marxist method but give us a perspective and a guide to fight.
The book deserves the widest readership.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/25/vmei-s25.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/01/unfi-a01.html
