Socialist workers and youth have an obligation to intervene energetically in the political discussions that the Seattle events are stirring up. This is an opportunity to explain, in sharp opposition to petty-bourgeois misleaders of all stripes, the real character of U.S. imperialism and the danger of working people being drawn into identification with it. Far from standing above Washington and the other capitalist powers, the WTO is a tool of their exploitative policies. That is why class-conscious workers oppose the WTO, and call for its abolition.

The anti-WTO actions, cloaked in concern over "sweatshops," child labor, and environmental destruction, in reality promote protectionism and economic nationalism. They lead workers toward the America First politics of the ultraright.

Clearly taking on these questions is the only way to find those individuals who are repelled by the injustices of capitalism and are open to a scientific, Marxist view of the big class questions tied up in these events.

The Clinton government's pursuit of a first-strike nuclear missile strategy, aimed primarily against the Chinese and Russian workers states, registers the shift in imperialist policy toward greater use of military might against these countries. This shift is rooted in the failure of the capitalists to reintroduce the market system in Russia, China, and the other workers states, and thereby open up new fields for capitalist expansion. That route of temporarily arresting the decline of their system has proved to be closed.

Thomas Friedman, a senior columnist for the liberal New York Times, gave a sense of this change in a major article in a March issue of the newspaper's weekly magazine, decorated with a clenched fist colored red, white, and blue. "We Americans are … the prophets of the free market and the high priests of high tech," he wrote. But "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist … called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The rulers are acting on a conviction that greater armed strength is necessary to maintain U.S. dominance among its imperialist rivals in Japan and Europe, to defend their system of exploitation of the Third World, and to have a shot at overturning the nationalized economies in the workers states.

Socialist workers and Young Socialists will be in the streets of Seattle during the WTO meeting, selling Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is the single best source of answers to the questions posed in the debate over the WTO. It draws on experiences that the international working class vanguard has accumulated in more than 150 years of struggles. In its pages, working people will find a scientific explanation for the disorder that many sense today.

The wars and social dislocations, unemployment, the destitution that whole layers of the population have to endure, the hammer blows directed at the living conditions of the working people in the third world, the degradation of the environment — these injustices are engendered and deepened by imperialism in decline. This disorder is rooted not in the WTO or in "global corporations," but in the economic crisis of the capitalist system as a whole, which drives the bosses to greater competition with each other and to attempt to grind more profits out of the labor of the toilers around the world. The enemy is not some independent WTO, but Washington.

Capitalism's World Disorder describes the growing resistance of working people to capitalist brutality that points the way forward. It argues why the labor movement needs to break in practice and theory from the politics of pro-imperialist nationalism.

Ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan will be in Seattle seeking to recruit cadres to his incipient fascist movement. Socialist workers and Young Socialists will be there too, seeking to recruit to the internationalist, working-class program and organizations that are essential to forge a leadership for the class struggles that are coming, one that can lead the struggle to overturn capitalist rule and bring a government of workers and farmers to power.  
 
 
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