A torrent of chaos and decomposition is sweeping the world, and has laid low the crumbling walls of one of world capitalism's main bastions.

The recent collapse of the Eastern bloc is, along with the historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the 60's, the most important event since World War II.

Since we wrote the article ‘Are we reliving a crash like 1929?', the media has already changed its tone, no longer playing down the extreme gravity of the present economic crisis or its similarities with 1929. But it is important to put all the current talk about ‘the end of capitalism' into a clear perspective.

A century ago we heard much the same message. In 1898 Ivan Bloch published The War of the Future in St Petersburg. He said that war was bound to become obsolete, as it was too costly, too murderous and so complicated that it was impossible to win. However, such views did not stand uncorrected. In 1901, in exile in Siberia, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky had a more accurate view of what capitalism was, and what it had in store.

Fifteen years ago, in 1989, the 'Soviet' imperialist bloc fell apart. This event, which was basically the fruit of the world economic crisis of capitalism, was to have immediate and extremely important repercussions on the life of this social system. The working class should recall that at that moment the leaders of the world bourgeoisie promised us a new epoch of peace and stability: the collapse of Stalinism would mean the end of barbarism. The bloody evolution of the real world would soon show exactly the opposite. Right from the start of the 1990s, barbarism more and more became a permanent fact of life, generalising itself across the planet, from the weakest parts of the capitalist system to the most advanced industrialised countries. The new epoch we saw was actually one in which capitalism entered into the final phase of its decline - the phase of decomposition. In place of an imperialist conflict which had been contained inside the iron corset of the competition between the US and Russian blocs, a new military logic came to the fore, a logic in which each capitalist country would defend its interests outside of any stable alliance under the rule of a dominant imperialism - the result being an accelerating slide into chaos.

Presentation to the Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Countries

The recent events in countries under Stalinist regimes, the confrontations between Party bosses and repression in China, the nationalist explosions and workers' struggles in the USSR, the constitution of a government led by Solidarnosc in Poland, are events of great historical importance. They reveal Stalinism's historic crisis, its entry into a period of acute convulsions. In this sense, they demand that we reaffirm and update our analysis of these regimes' nature and, of the perspectives for their evolution.