1/ David North: "No serious history can proceed through patriotic mythmaking. The American Revolution was, to define the event in appropriate historical and socio-economic terms, a bourgeois democratic revolution." -World Socialist Web Site

Is AI itself the problem? Or Capitalism? "... Modern bourgeois society ... has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. ..." www.wsws.org/en/special/l...

Andre Damon: "The power of the financial oligarchy cannot be broken through tinkering around the edges. The only viable program is expropriation. The wealth of Musk and his fellow oligarchs must be seized and made the common property of society." www.wsws.org/en/articles/...

1/ Tom Hall: "AI itself is not the problem. The critical question is who controls this technology. It must be freed from the shackles of private ownership. The development and training of AI systems is social labor in the fullest sense of the word, and its benefits must be available to all." WSWS

Karl Marx (1850): "Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one."

1/ David North: "imperialist war is not the mere product of subjective decisions, evil influences and bad policies. Rather, it is the outcome and expression of the two essential objective contradictions of the capitalist system itself: first, between private ownership of the productive forces and

1/ Tom Mackaman's 'World Socialist Web Site' article "April 1776: When America opened its ports to the world" represents his welcome return to a historical materialist interpretation of the American Revolution. He explains the April 6, 1776, declaration by the Continental Congress that the ports

1/ Joe Kishore, World Socialist Web Site: "In the 18th century, the struggle against monarchy was bound up with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the creation of the democratic republic. In the 21st century, the defense and extension of democracy require the expropriation of the financial oligarchy

David North: "No solution to the crisis of American capitalism will emerge from the existing institutions and framework of bourgeois politics. It can and will develop only outside of and in uncompromising opposition to the existing political framework and the capitalist economic order it defends."

David North: "The liberation of science and technology from the stranglehold of private capitalist ownership is a critical task of the socialist revolution."-WSWS

David North: "The working class needs a program and party to connect its democratic aspirations to the understanding that genuine democracy is incompatible with the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy and can only be secured through the socialist transformation of society." -WSWS

David North: The age of national democratic revolutions belongs to the now distant past. The present historic epoch is that of world socialist revolution. The barrier between the instinctive militancy of American workers and the immense theoretical and political heritage of Marxism must be overcome.

Lenin (1919): "One of the most democratic republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of billionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America."

Lenin (1919) on "the prejudice of bourgeois liberty" in the United States: "in reality, as long as there is private property, your state, even if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers."

"The cause [of the current economic crisis] is structural and systemic: the irreconcilable contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the increasingly social character of the process of production itself." David North, World Socialist Web Site

" The emergence of transnational production networks, global supply chains spanning dozens of countries, and instantaneous worldwide communication has rendered the nation-state a fetter on the rational development of the productive forces." --David North, World Socialist Web Site

"The solution to every major social problem confronting humanity [requires] the expropriation of the billionaires, the dismantling of their control over the economy and the abolition of the capitalist system itself." Andre Damon, WSWS

"Property divides the whole world into parties and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere. When the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must, then this enmity in all lands must cease." Gerrard Winstanley, cited by Christopher Hill in 'The English Revolution 1640'

1/ Engels on the philosophical ideas, the 'kingdom of reason', that inspired and prepared the French Revolution: "superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know today that

1/ Marx: 'Critique of the Gotha Program' It is "in general a mistake to make a fuss about distribution. Any distribution whatever is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves," which is a "feature of the mode of production itself."

Marx (1859): " One cannot judge a period of [revolutionary] transformation by its consciousness, but this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the [property] relations of production."

1/ Tom Scripps on X: 'The sole feasible programme of climate action is the expropriation of the super-rich through world socialist revolution. In Marx’s words in Volume Three of Capital, written 160 years ago, the freedom represented by socialism: "can only consist in socialised man, the associated

1/ Engels: "We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of [antagonistic] classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose."

Once the barrier of capitalist private property is abolished, a socialist economic plan on a world basis will establish the conditions necessary to provide cooperative humanity with economic abundance: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. That's socialist equality.

This conflict [between capital and labor] can be resolved only through the expropriation of the [capitalist] oligarchy. The wealth hoarded by the billionaires must be seized and the major corporations, banks and industries placed under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.--A. Damon WSWS

The manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons of war is an expression of the irrationality of competitive capitalism and the anarchic system of capitalist nation-states. The abolition of these weapons presupposes the abolition of capitalist private property and the capitalist mode of production.

"The fight against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. The defense of democracy requires the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the transformation of the corporations and banks into public utilities under democratic workers’ control."--WSWS

Socialism is the free application of human will and intelligence in the cooperative formulation and implementation of a world-wide economic plan, unrestricted by the barriers erected by the private ownership and exploitation of the instruments, methods and materials of economic production.

The abolition of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) presupposes the abolition of capitalist private property in the conditions of economic production and the dissolution of the nation-state system.

"Politics must be adapted to the high development of the productive forces, [and] the paralyzing of these productive forces by the capitalist forms of property. The productive forces [under capitalism] cannot develop any longer." Trotsky 1938 'The Political Backwardness of American Workers'

The abolition of borders between nations and peoples presupposes the abolition of private ownership of the methods and materials employed in economic production, and the unfettered employment of human intelligence in the cooperative development and establishment of an international economic plan.

The abolition of war presupposes the abolition of private property in the means, methods, instruments and materials of economic production.

No short-term or long-term solution to the crisis that confronts humanity, the accelerating destruction of the economic productive forces of society, in military, political and economic warfare, is possible short of the world-wide abolition of capitalist private property.

Tariffs in a capitalist economy, a form of economic warfare, represent a destructive and reactionary assault by the private ownership of the conditions of economic production on the already developed productive forces of society.

1/ John Steinbeck, 'The Grapes of Wrath': "And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away."

Marx (1875): "from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of [class] society and culture, be the slave of other men, who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor."

Private property, which introduces competition into economic production, is a barrier that obstructs the progressive expansion of economically productive cooperation from the scale of the individual enterprise to the scale of a world-wide economic plan.

"Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each case, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."-Marx/Engels

The crisis of capitalism, its preparations for world war, its economic inequality, its anti-immigrant nationalism, its destruction of the environment, its ruination of education and health care, its private prisons and militarized police, is rooted in private property and the anarchy of production.

" The specter of a third socialist party, with a mass base, that advocates not merely free bus rides but also nationalizations and expropriations, haunts the corporate-financial oligarchy."--David North WSWS

The abolition of war is possible only on the basis of the world-wide abolition of private property in the conditions of economic production, which would result in the dissolution of the separate capitalist nation-states, and the international and cooperative implementation of a planned economy.

"The source of the contradiction between what is and what should be is a global economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, and the irrational division of the world into rival nation-states." Statement of Principles of the Socialist Equality Party 2008

Rosa Luxemburg (1918): "The first duty of a real workers’ government is to declare by means of a series of decrees the most important means of production to be national property and place them under the control of society."

Ulas Atesci, May Day 2025, WSWS: "No fundamental social and political problems can be solved without seizing the ill-gotten wealth and power of the capitalist class. The wealth acquired by the capitalist class through exploitation and financial profiteering must be expropriated."

Joseph Kishore, May Day 2025, WSWS: "It is impossible to fight oligarchy without breaking its power. And that means the expropriation of the billionaires—the seizure of their wealth and the socialist reorganization of society in the interests of the working class."

"What is required is not a new strategic alliance of national states arrayed against the US and Western Europe, but the abolition of the nation-state system and capitalist ownership of the means of production." David North, May Day 2025, WSWS

1/ "The essential causes of the descent into political barbarism are the same economic and social contradictions of the capitalist regime that resulted in war and fascism in the last century." David North, May Day 2025, WSWS

David North @DavidNorthWSWS The WSWS did not only analyze the economic, political and social origins and foundations of the American oligarchy. It advanced a solution to the problem: the expropriation of the Oligarchs, the end of capitalist rule and the transfer of power to the working class.