We are building a network of rank-and-file committees of workers in key industries and workplaces to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives, and prepare for a political general strike.

In every workplace where nonessential production is being carried out, emergency action committees must enforce an immediate shutdown. This fight involves entire industries and all sections of the working class, in confrontation with the capitalist class and its state. The fight to implement emergency measures to stop the pandemic raises the question of political power: who shall control society, the capitalist ruling elite or the working class?

At this event, leading members of the SEP in the US, Germany and UK spoke on the national and global significance of the rise of fascism in America, its social and political origins, and the necessary strategy for the working class to fight back.

The working class must respond with a general strike to attempts by ultra-right mobs, instigated by the political criminal Donald Trump and his Republican Party accomplices in the Senate and Congress, to threaten the lives of elected representatives and seize government buildings and other strategic sites, whether in Washington DC or in state capitals throughout the country.

This resolution was adopted unanimously by the membership of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States at its Sixth National Congress, which was held online from July 19 to July 24, 2020.

The irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist class and the working class finds its most obscene expression in the correlation between the number of dead, unemployed and impoverished, and, on the other side of the ledger, the explosive rise of share values on Wall Street.

This is the opening report delivered by David North to the 2020 International May Day Online Rally held by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International on May 2. North is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the US.

The characteristic of every great crisis is that it lays bare the contradictions that have accumulated and been suppressed for decades. All that is backward, anachronistic, corrupt, and, in the most profoundly objective sense, absurd and even irrational in the economic organization, social structure, political leadership and dominant ideology of the existing society is brutally and comprehensively exposed. The pandemic is such a crisis.

This work, first published in 1998, evaluates the bitter historical experiences of the working class with the trade unions and national liberation movements, and with Stalinism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and China.

This lecture by David North examines the causes for the betrayals of the trade unions in their hostility to the class struggle and socialism, and reviews the historical conflict between the trade unions and revolutionary Marxism. It was re-published in the 2014 book, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished 20th Century.