The ICFI and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties are advancing this initiative to begin and develop a global counteroffensive of the working class against the homicidal policies of the governments controlled by the capitalist ruling class, which are responsible for the worldwide catastrophe.

The response of governments to the coronavirus pandemic—their lack of preparation, staggering incompetence, and blatant indifference to the lives of working people—is seen all over the world as the product of the subordination of human needs to capitalist profits and the accumulation of personal wealth.

The experience of the past months has presented the real face of capitalism—a system that constitutes the greatest threat to mankind.

US efforts to scapegoat China, backed by allies such as Australia, are a crude attempt to deflect attention from its own criminal negligence, amid mounting opposition in the working class.

The corporate media is glorifying New Zealand as an example of a supposedly humane response to the pandemic, in contrast to the Trump administration and governments in Britain, Brazil and elsewhere.

The capitalist system failed from the pandemic’s outset to identify or treat hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “herd immunity” policy has cost the lives of tens of thousands in the UK, with the government lying about the real death rate, and doing nothing to prevent the spread of infection.

The working class now faces a struggle on two fronts: the war against COVID-19, and the class war.

With its criminal back-to-work campaign, the German government is accepting the deaths of millions of workers in order to secure the profits of the rich and continue the bonanza in the financial markets.

All those political tendencies and individuals who refused to defend Assange—and who joined in the slander campaign against him—have blood on their hands.

The pandemic exposes not only the bankruptcy of the Middle Eastern bourgeoisies, but the true face of imperialism.

For all of the vapid talk about us all being in it together, the US ruling class views the pandemic as an instrument of war.

Brazil is rapidly emerging as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, as workers engage in wildcat strikes and protests around the country and beyond.

Canada was entirely unprepared for the pandemic, with the “health” of the financial markets regarded as far more important than that of the health care system.

Canada was entirely unprepared for the pandemic, with the “health” of the financial markets regarded as far more important than that of the health care system.

The ruling elite’s efforts to enforce a return to work—and impose a massive restructuring of class relations to pay for the bailout of Wall Street—will encounter enormous opposition from the working class.

On Saturday, May 4, 2019, the ICFI held its sixth annual online May Day Rally. It heard speeches on different aspects of the world crisis of capitalism and the struggles of the international working class from 12 leading members of the world party and its sections and sympathizing organizations around the world.

On May 4, one hundred years ago, thousands of students took to the streets in Beijing to protest against the outcome of the Versailles Peace Conference, which handed Shandong Province to Japan. The treaty ending World War I also maintained the colonial-style unequal treaties that subordinated China to the imperialist powers.

One of the great traditions of the international socialist workers movement on May Day is to extend our solidarity and support to all class war prisoners, and to pledge to redouble our efforts to secure their freedom.

We are celebrating, for this day of the international working class, the global resurgence of the class struggle now shaking all of Europe. In France, the “yellow vests” have protested for nearly six months now against the austerity, militarism and police repression of Emmanuel Macron.

This May Day takes place under extraordinary conditions. While the ruling class is promoting authoritarian and even fascistic forces, the working class is being radicalized and entering into struggle.

The horrifying March 15 terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, in which 51 people, including young children, were killed and dozens more injured, was the product of the systematic promotion of right-wing extremism internationally. The gunman, Brenton Tarrant, was not a disturbed “lone wolf,” as depicted by police, politicians and the media.

The fate of Julian Assange, as far as the world’s ruling elites are concerned, is presently being decided in Britain. The full might of the UK’s state apparatus is deployed against the WikiLeaks founder to ensure that he is extradited to the United States and silenced forever.

A notable change one can encounter, in the new wave of working-class struggles around the world, is the growing tendency for workers to break out of the trade union straitjacket and take independent initiatives to control the fate of their struggles.

Central to the perspective and revolutionary strategy of the International Committee of the Fourth International is the recognition that the same systemic global capitalist breakdown that is impelling the imperialist powers to aggression and war is fueling social revolution.

One hundred years ago, the great American socialist and revolutionary Eugene Debs was thrown into a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia for denouncing the imperialists’ bloody effort to re-divide the world in World War One.

The struggle against war and reaction is posed with the greatest urgency by the mounting threat of a direct US military intervention in Venezuela.

The future lies in socialism. The ruling class is itself terrified of the social convulsions to come, of “some sort of revolution,” as hedge fund manager Raymond Dalio put it.

Opening the ICFI’s International Online Rally 2018, David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), spoke on the historical significance of Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, 200 years after his birth.

Wije Dias, general secretary of the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, and a veteran Trotskyist of more than 50 years standing, spoke from Colombo to the ICFI’s International Online May Day Rally. 

The following speech was delivered to the May Day rally by Peter Schwarz, Secretary of the International Committee of the Fourth International for the past 32 years, and a leading member of the German section of the ICFI.

The following speech was delivered to the ICFI’s International Online Rally by Johannes Stern, a leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, the German section of the ICFI, and the World Socialist Web Site editorial board in Germany.

The following speech was delivered to the ICFI’s May Day 2018 International Online Rally by Jerry White, labor editor of the World Socialist Web Site.

The following speech was delivered by Andre Damon, a leader of the Socialist Equality Party in the US.

The following speech was delivered to the ICFI’s May Day 2018 International Online Rally by Genevieve Leigh, a leading member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in the US.

The following speech was delivered to the ICFI’s May Day 2018 International Online Rally by Nick Beams, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in Australia.

The following speech was delivered to the ICFI’s May Day 2018 International Online Rally by James Cogan, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia).

The following speech was delivered by Chris Marsden, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, for the past 20 years.

Julie Hyland, assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, delivered the following speech to the ICFI’s Online May Day Rally. She has been a leading member of the IC for more than 30 years.

The following speech was delivered to the International Committee of the Fourth International’s May Day 2018 International Online Rally by Alex Lantier, leader of the French section of the ICFI, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste, (PES) founded in November 2016. 

The resurgence of the class struggle that is shaking political and social relations on a global scale is finding particularly sharp expression within Latin America, the most socially unequal continent on the planet.

This speech was delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to open the 2017 International May Day Online Rally, held on April 30.

The region is caught up in the whirlpool of geo-political tensions produced by the drive towards another imperialist war, amid rising class struggle.

The historic crisis of the global capitalist system is now producing the very conditions that led to the economic conflicts of the 1930s and the eruption of war in 1939.

The PES' campaign for an active boycott of the election is the revolutionary alternative to the impotent parliamentary maneuvers proposed by Mélenchon.

The rising tide of national chauvinist poison is a damning expression of the bankruptcy of the nation state system to which capitalism is tied.

The Maruti Suzuki workers have been framed-up and sentenced to life imprisonment through a conspiracy between the company, the police, the courts and India’s main parties.

The threats against North Korea are part of a broader confrontation with China, which the US regards as the chief obstacle to its global hegemony.

In order to wage new imperialist wars and commit fresh crimes, history must be rewritten, and the criminal role of German imperialism minimised and denied.

Europe is bristling with social tensions, as the danger of war between Europe and the United States, and within Europe itself, is growing.

The Trump administration, the rule of the oligarchy in naked form, is setting the pace for the turn by all capitalist governments to policies of extreme reaction.

With trade and military war comes the attack on wages, working conditions and the destruction of essential services.

The overall impact of Castroism, and, even more decisively, that of the revisionist tendencies which promoted it, was to hold back the socialist revolution.