Truck drivers across the country are walking the picket lines—with the support of thousands of other Teamsters—in a battle to win a union at Overnite, the largest nonunion trucking company in the United States.

Working farmers from New England to Georgia are seeking ways to resist being forced off the land in face of dropping commodity prices and increasing foreclosures.

In Puerto Rico and throughout the United States, Puerto Rican workers and students are mobilizing to demand the U.S. military stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a bombing practice zone. This struggle is intertwined with the fight to free the Puerto Rican nation from Washington's colonial rule.

These are just a few of the struggles that point the way forward for working people today; they are battles that should be supported and joined. They are examples of the new proletarian movement that has begun to rise in the city and countryside in the United States.

Class-conscious workers are campaigning to get into the hands of those engaged in these struggles—and others seeking to resist the evils of capitalism—the political tools that point to the root of the problems working people are confronting. Socialist youth and workers are centralizing this effort around the promotion of Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. They are organizing to sell the book to workers and youth in struggle and to place it in stores and libraries where working people look for books. Issue no. 11 of the Marxist magazine New International, featuring "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," and the newly published book Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces are also recommended reading (see ads elsewhere in this issue). All three titles point to the need to build a communist movement capable of leading the fight for working people to take power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and beginning to construct a new, socialist society.

This is the road to consider for workers and young people who want to combat the injustices they see about them—from racism, to police brutality, to attacks on social welfare, to the capitalists' wanton disregard for the environment.

This road requires starting with the international interests of working people. The nationalism--albeit with a progressive gloss—of the union officials and others who are leading the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) points away from any perspective of international working-class solidarity. It plays into the America First demagogy of ultrarightists such as Patrick Buchanan. It provides a liberal, "white man's burden," veneer to Washington's drive toward justifying aggressive postures and missile buildups, especially against China and other workers states.

There is plenty of fresh evidence before us of the world disorder of capitalism. The facts confirm that the world is not entering an ascending era of global peace and prosperity but a deepening of trends towards instability and crisis. The preparations by the European and North American powers for the WTO negotiations are marked by this capitalist disorder. A number of governments are threatening to boycott the meeting, and many trade disputes remain unresolved.

Whatever the outcome of the trade round that the meeting is supposed to initiate, the imperialist powers will continue to wrestle each other over domination of the markets and labor in the Third World and over their competing interests, such as the current dispute between Washington and Paris over agricultural exports. Bodies like the WTO are imperialist tools that have meaning only when they serve these exploiting powers, including as an arena for their disputes. They have no existence independent of the nation-states that make them up—most importantly, the major capitalist powers that dominate them.

The idea that the WTO tramples on U.S. sovereignty, promoted by many of the protest leaders in Seattle, is worse than ludicrous. It ties workers behind the bandwagon of "our own" bourgeoisie, calling on unionists and other working people to support Washington in its trade conflicts with the workers states, Third World countries, and other imperialist powers.

In most imperialist countries today center-left governments—of a social democratic stripe in the case of many European Union countries, or of a liberal stripe in the United States—are in office. All are preparing for more military and other conflicts, and all try to use their "progressive" veneer to pull working people in behind this course. They don't openly declare their predatory interests. They claim to be for progressive causes—in other countries—whether the causes be labor and human rights, or environmental protection.

But the number one enemy of workers in the imperialist powers is the ruling class in our own country; in the United States workers' enemy is Washington.

Socialist workers and Young Socialists members will be campaigning for communism in Seattle during the WTO meetings. They will intervene politically in the events surrounding it, from street rallies to forums, arguing against the economic nationalism of the liberals, labor bureaucrats, and other petty-bourgeois misleaders. In doing so they will seek out those young people and workers who are open to revolutionary ideas but have stumbled into this political morass. Above all, they will seek to win such forces to join the Young Socialists, the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, and communist leagues in other countries.  
 
 
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