The demonstrations against the WTO, World Bank, and IMF at Seattle and Washington in the last few months are signs that the capitalist system is not “the end of history”. But high profile though these demonstrations have been they also show how difficult the road to revolution is.

In the first place, inspiring though it might be, it will not be by demonstrating alone that we will halt capitalism. That still has to be done at the point where its profits are produced. And here it is only the working class who produce the profits who can do this by acting collectively. Only by paralysing the system of production will we bring it down.

But another obstacle facing the working class was clear at Washington. Workers in the union part of the demonstration were not only herded away from the various more-or-less reformists demanding that the World Bank etc. become more democratic. They were also treated to anti-Chinese xenophobia by the union leaders of the SEIU public sector union who demanded that China be banned from the WTO since it was “cheap Chinese labour which was taking US jobs”. This is similar to the reactionary nationalism that workers in Britain have been subjected to over the Rover closure.

The obscenity of the capitalist system which demands that half the world goes hungry to keep profits up and labour costs down around the planet gradually may have begun to sink home. However it is one thing to be “anti-capitalist”. It is quite another to understand what the alternative is. Capitalism reformed is still capitalism. The same problems of exploitation, starvation and imperialist war would always reassert themselves. History doesn’t offer a thousand and one solutions. The only alternative to capitalism is a society where production is for need, not for profit; where money, war and national frontiers have all been abolished. It is the same society envisioned by Karl Marx 150 years ago. But to get to communism workers have to embrace the communist programme and create their own class organisations. This is the meaning of the May Day statement we are printing in this international edition of Aurora.