Date/Time: 2025-11-22 14:13:15
London
(This is
an AI-generated summary of the above lecture using Plaud Note)
This lecture by David North interrogates the trajectory of
the United States amid an accelerating political and constitutional crisis,
situating it within a global breakdown of capitalist democracy and the rise of
oligarchic rule. Framing the decisive question “Where is America going?” in
both objective (material forces, economic relations) and subjective (mass
consciousness and response) terms, North adopts Trotsky’s historical method of
posing strategic questions during periods of acute class conflict. He characterises
the U.S. situation as “going to hell in a handbasket,” highlighting the rapid
tempo of destabilisation, including Donald Trump’s denunciations of Democratic
legislators as “treasonous” and calls for capital punishment after they urged
the military to refuse illegal orders violating constitutional oaths. He notes
the intersection of political leadership with U.S. intelligence agencies,
underscoring the contested nature of civil-military relations and the legality
of such relations.
Expanding beyond immediate developments, North argues that
the apparent authoritarian reconfiguration of American governance after the
2024 election reflects a terminal crisis of global capitalism, driven by
extreme inequality, financialization, fictitious capital, debt expansion, and
erosion of the dollar’s credibility. He employs historical analogies (France
before 1789, Chile 1973, U.S. slavery-era measures) to depict oligarchic
aggression and spectacle—billionaire-dominated policymaking, symbolic restorations
of reactionary iconography, and conspicuous consumption within state
institutions—as symptoms of direct oligarchic rule. Internationally, he traces
parallels with Britain under Keir Starmer and other governments, arguing that
similar structural pressures produce convergent authoritarian trajectories.
The lecture critiques reliance on moral appeals absent a
scientific socialist program centred on the working class, contending that war,
militarisation, and genocide are ruling-class countermeasures to capitalist
contradictions. North analyses the Marxist foundations of value and surplus
value, rising constant-to-variable capital ratios, and the falling rate of
profit; he contends that AI-driven automation intensifies these contradictions
by displacing living labour—the source of surplus value—while delivering
uneven, limited productivity gains. He rejects reliance on rival capitalist
states (China and Russia), emphasising internationalist working-class unity
(including between Russian and Ukrainian workers) against imperialism and
national chauvinism.
North advances a strategic orientation built on transitional
demands—expropriation of capitalists, factory committees, nationalisation under
democratic control—and the necessity of a vanguard party to develop socialist
consciousness. He underscores the degeneration of bourgeois leadership and the
crisis of revolutionary leadership, asserting that U.S. mass sentiment trends
left despite betrayals by the pseudo-left. In practice, he calls for organising
rank-and-file committees, restoring Marxism’s authority through education on
20th-century revolutions and betrayals, and deploying new tools such as
“Socialism AI”—an application trained on the WSWS archive and Marxist
literature—to scale outreach, provide programmatic clarity, and assist in
organising working-class struggles. The event concludes with a call to join the
Socialist Equality Party and to build an internationally coordinated movement
capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions through conscious action.
