This volume of lectures and essays, published on the World Socialist Web Site from 2015 to 2026, is an unequaled analysis of the social and political conditions that transformed Donald Trump from a real estate huckster and casino con-artist into the US president — events that were analyzed in real time.
For 35 years, the American ruling class has conducted its imperialist foreign policy with a sense of impunity, after all restraints were removed by the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. “Force works,” they concluded.
Donald Trump and his henchmen, backed by the oligarchy that placed him in power, aim to overcome the decline of American capitalism through force, wreaking destruction on countries as readily as they rip up the social fabric and rights of American workers.
In a society governed by billionaires, corporate predators, military-intelligence operatives and political swindlers, and which has now entered the opening stages of a world war, the criminal and anti-democratic methods of imperialism are deployed at home as abroad. No official opposition from either ruling party is mounted when the US incinerates Iranian schools and cities, when Israel buries Palestinian children under rubble, when Venezuelan leaders are illegally seized along with the country’s oilfields or when police execute the poor in American streets.
But the conflict between the criminal oligarchy and the moral consciousness of the masses is assuming an increasingly explosive character, intensified by the escalation of the class struggle. The 250-year-old legacy of the American revolution and the Civil War that abolished slavery – their democratic impulses, opposition to cruelty and injustice and hatred for official lies and brutality – remain deeply rooted tradition among workers and young people.
Today, it is the struggle for socialism by the international working class is not merely politically necessary. It is the indispensable expression of all that is humane, decent, and emancipatory in modern civilization. The survival of humanity depends upon its victory.
