This article is based on the talk Grevatt 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.”

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote: “The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Workers World Party still believes that. Moreover, we believe it to be essential. Absolutely necessary is the Marxist understanding that, first, the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class is inherently antagonistic; second, that it is inevitable and necessary that the working class and oppressed peoples bring about the downfall of the capitalist mode of production, which is based on the exploitation of labor by capital.

We welcome any and all struggles against the extreme right program of Trump, Musk and their cohorts. But any rhetoric against the billionaires or the “oligarchs” without an orientation to actually getting rid of them is just empty rhetoric. As long as they exist as a class, all of the ills associated with them will exist. And it will get worse under this stage of capitalist decline. As our party’s First Secretary Larry Holmes said in his pre-conference document: “This requires us to clarify that our struggle against the billionaire class is a struggle to end the capitalist system.”

Anyone who professes to be a leader of the working class, including labor union leaders, must possess this understanding. Otherwise they are not leaders but misleaders. Without this understanding even the most militant and sincere union leaders — they are few in number — can only achieve so much, and they, along with the members of their unions, will find themselves in a constant battle. They will constantly be fighting with the owners of the means of production just to hold onto what they already won previously.

The ruling class understood the danger to itself posed by a class conscious leadership of the unions. The 1947 Taft Hartley Act banned Communist Party members from holding union office. Social democratic union leaders did the capitalists’ bidding when they purged communists and socialists and expelled 11 left-led unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Organized labor was left ideologically hamstrung after the red purges of the McCarthy era.

The current stripe of class collaborationist union leaders is absolutely incapable of making any meaningful strides on behalf of the working class.

In the past, material conditions allowed the capitalists to grant concessions to labor in the interest of class peace. But those days are over. The ruling class is out for blood. The only way the bourgeoisie can compensate itself for the worldwide decline of imperialism is by squeezing the workers — here and in other countries — to the max.

To quote Comrade Holmes again: “The wealth that U.S. imperialism can no longer extract from robbing the world has forced the ruling class to make up the difference by deepening the exploitation and oppression of the workers at home. … The situation in the U.S., and the inextricably connected world situation, will catalyze the workers and set them on a new course, an independent course, a class struggle course.”

Class struggle isn’t just the right course, it is our only option.

But class struggle isn’t limited to struggles over economic or workplace issues. First and foremost, class struggle is about uniting our class in the fight against racism and national oppression, along with fighting against misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia and all the special oppressions that impact wide swathes of humanity. It means fighting imperialist war and superexploitation all over the world, which yield mega profits for the superrich.

Class struggle means solidarity with migrant workers. It means saying no to racist police brutality. Class struggle means supporting incarcerated workers — free them all! And it means supporting the Palestinian resistance!

Fascism is a form of capitalist rule. Imperialism is a stage of capitalism. To defeat fascism and imperialism, we must defeat capitalism.

A revolutionary party must be armed with a Marxist-Leninist theoretical foundation. The bourgeoisie has created its own grave diggers. But the proletariat will not bury the bourgeoisie until it understands that ending capitalism is its historic task. It won’t happen without a revolutionary party. That was one of Lenin’s key contributions to the advancement of Marxism — the need for a vanguard party.

On the one hand, we have to unite with other forces in a united front against fascism and imperialism. But at the same time, we need to build Workers World Party.

We need to build a party guided by the belief that the victory of workers and oppressed people is inevitable. We need to build a party guided by revolutionary optimism.

Build a workers’ world!