This article is based on the talk Flounders made during Workers World Party’s May 18 national meeting in New York City addressing the topics, “The decline of imperialism, the global class struggle today, the changing working class and the tasks of the party.”

For comrade Sam Marcy, the founder of Workers World Party, his deepest concern was that workers here in the U.S. should always show solidarity with the working class in the oppressed and developing nations under attack by U.S. imperialism. He was determined that a communist party in the center of imperialism see the whole world in terms of class, that we act as partisans of the working class. 

That is why we are named Workers World Party.

Imperialist war is capitalism’s chief weapon capable of breaking class consciousness. It takes constant vigilance for the working class in the imperialist center to avoid being pulled in by social chauvinism, racism and war propaganda. 

Sam Marcy wrote and spoke, again and again, on the importance of our party confronting imperialist war and showing full solidarity with countries facing U.S. attack, even if our numbers at the beginning are small and the action is a picket line or a street meeting. 

He pushed us to build coalitions, especially to pull in organizations of the oppressed, workers’ groups and community groups, to get resolutions from union locals. He stressed that we always look to the grassroots. If, however, we were unable to find partners, acting alone was usually preferable to doing nothing.

Workers World Party exists as a combat organization inside the working class in the U.S. to challenge this relentless war drive. 

The same social democratic forces who applauded the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 and heralded it as a new era of peace also celebrated the horrific setback in the Syrian Arab Republic in December 2024.

However, within Workers World Party there was no confusion on these imperialist offensives. Workers World Party said no! This is colonial reconquest.

Imperialism is the main enemy. Working class propaganda must always be directed against imperialism. 

Like the Bolsheviks in Russia during World War I, we are for the defeat of our own ruling class, the defeat of this monstrous war machine. 

There are no neutrals in WWP. 

Our role, our tasks

Tell no lies! Claim no easy victories!

It would be presumptuous to assert we have a whole game plan for the coming period. We have a revolutionary, working-class orientation that will help us to hold together during a stormy, chaotic time here in the imperialist center.

Building a revolutionary political party is always an unfinished project. The class struggle is continually changing. New struggles and new social issues arise. What must remain consistent is the political orientation. 

Discover the interests of the workers and that of the bosses. Find out the needs of the most oppressed and support them. Defend whoever is under immediate attack.

We want to recruit into the party the militants who are on the front line — the activists who identify with our class around the world and who have some confidence that they can and must pull workers here toward defending new layers of our class here and our class around the world. 

We need those who are inclusive and see a role for themselves in linking issues and making a positive contribution. We need builders and organizers.

How can we be part of the workers’ movement here, refuse to be cut off and yet challenge the trade union misleadership and compromisers? 

We need to encourage within the party and recruit into WWP the most impassioned anti-imperialist activists who are not fearful of expressing solidarity with the Axis of Resistance and who embrace new areas of resistance that will unfold. 

We especially want to draw in the activists who are attempting to raise revolutionary and anti-imperialist politics within their own communities, unions and campuses and connect it to concrete community issues. 

Why can’t imperialism reindustrialize?

U.S. imperialism is in an irreversible downward death spiral. 

As Marxists we can explain the basis for this crisis and why we are sure that the “reindustrialization” Trump promises will never take place. 

It is beyond the capacity of capitalism today.

The U.S. has already lost its industrial and economic dominance, and the dollar is no longer the unchallenged currency in international trade. Now far simpler forms of military technology have opened new opportunities for resistance.

Locally manufactured military technology in the hands of the resistance in the Global South is challenging the imperialist superpower and its global allies. Consider missiles, drones of Ansar Allah in Yemen and the weapons built in the tunnels of Gaza.

The imperialist system based on genocide, plunder, piracy, theft of land and labor and enslavement is based on eliminating all competition. 

Imperialist hegemony depends on predatory trade and production relations, the world division of labor, control of modern technology, the control of world banking and, for the U.S., the central role of the dollar. All that guaranteed western hegemony is gone — or being severely challenged. 

Now a fundamental change is underway. 

Today’s global economy takes a far higher level of planning. Individual billionaires and giant multinational corporations competing with each other are no match for organized cooperative national planning. It takes a socialist state to do this.

The capitalist class today faces the end of its era of global domination. 

Defending socialist China today

The People’s Republic of China’s stunning level of technological and scientific development has changed everything. China has the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP), a measure of economic productivity and standard of living between countries.

Workers World Party’s strongest political contribution is to explain its defense of China in terms of China being a socialist country. Using terms like multipolar, rising power and competing power fail to explain why China has increased influence and why it is such a fundamental threat to world imperialism.

In China, all the most profitable and essential industries are owned nationally, by the whole people, and operate under the guiding hand of a massive workers’ party, a communist party over 100 million strong. 

This socialist, planned structure allowed China to emerge from being a poor and weak, if populous, country into the powerhouse of today. Planning production nationally, rather than aiming to increase individual billionaire profit, is a far higher form of social and economic organization. 

We have followed China and its incredible accomplishments since the world changing revolution of 1949 led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This must be a continuing focus. 

As a workers’ party in the center of imperialism, we are profoundly interested in this process. It is part of defending our class, the working class.