On the eve of last week’s midterm elections, about 75 people gathered in UC Berkeley’s Genetics and Plant Biology Building to hear David North deliver a lecture titled “Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War and the World Socialist Revolution.” The Monday event was organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). Many in the audience stayed well after the lecture ended to continue the discussion and to buy literature.
North chairs the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), and is national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the United States. He has been active since 1971 in the Trotskyist movement, which traces its origins to Leon Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism in the Soviet Union. He is the author of numerous books on the history of socialism, including “The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century,” and the editor of the recent collection “Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy.” The Berkeley lecture was the fourth stop on a five-campus tour that earlier took him to Wayne State, Michigan State, and George Mason universities.
North opened with the US-Israeli war against Iran, which, he said, the Trump administration is preparing to resume once the votes are counted, and on which both parties had remained almost entirely silent during the campaign. The administration has told Gulf governments to prepare for renewed strikes with target lists that include power plants and oil refineries, he said, citing reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
Destroying the electrical system of a country of 90 million people, North argued, would wreck its water treatment, sanitation and hospitals, as the bombing of Iraq did in 1991, and would amount to a conflict of “genocidal dimensions.” Addressing the students in the room, he said, “The question that you must ask yourselves is what are we going to do to stop it from happening?”
North then turned to the artificial intelligence boom, a subject close to home for many Berkeley students. The hundreds of billions of dollars that tech giants are pouring into data centers, he argued, have created a speculative bubble that is already beginning to burst. Yet North rejected the idea that the technology itself is “artificial.” It is built, he said, from the accumulated knowledge of humanity, what Marx called the “general intellect,” now owned by a handful of corporations and used to eliminate jobs and generate military targets. “The question posed by AI is not whether it should exist. That has been answered by its discovery and development. The question is who owns it, who decides what it is used for and who bears the consequences,” he said.
The same crisis, North argued, is driving young people and workers into struggle. He described the wave of protests that began with high school blockades in France in September and has since spread to Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Serbia, and Germany. He placed special emphasis on October 30, when dock and port workers at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions went on strike under the slogan “Dockers do not work for war.”
“The capacity of the international working class to halt the war machine was shown in practice, on five continents, on the same day, by workers who had never met,” North said.
What remains unresolved, North said, is the question of political leadership. He criticized the academic theories, influential since the 1980s, that dismissed the working class as the agent of social change, and argued that these theories underlie the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose new national program makes no mention of the war against Iran. He called for workers to build rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracies and coordinated across national borders, and urged the students in attendance to join the IYSSE.
The IYSSE is the student and youth organization of the ICFI, with chapters at universities in the United States and internationally. It argues that war, social inequality, and the turn toward authoritarian rule are rooted in the capitalist system, and that they can be ended only by the working class taking political power and building a socialist society. The group places particular emphasis on studying the history of the socialist movement, above all Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism, as a guide to the struggles of today. In recent weeks, IYSSE members in Germany have spoken at mass youth protests against war and conscription.
Students interested in the IYSSE at Berkeley can get in touch at wsws.org/iysse.