I am David North, chairperson of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site. I am asking you today to make the largest possible contribution to the WSWS.

In the past, when making an appeal for financial support, it was often necessary to convince readers of the reality and insoluble nature of crisis of the capitalist system. Our movement had to refute the media propaganda that trumpeted the end of history, the triumph of capitalism, and the death of socialism. That time is long over. 

The crisis of capitalism is not a matter of political speculation but the daily political reality experienced by the American and international working class. Each day brings fresh evidence of what Trotsky described as “the death agony of capitalism”: the Gaza genocide, the onslaught against Iran and the global escalation of imperialist violence, unsafe and deadly working conditions in factories and work places, spiraling inflation and the relentless assault on the living standards of the working class, the resurgence of fascism, and the breakdown of American democracy, of which Trump is only the most grotesque and criminal expression.

The great question posed by Lenin more than a century ago—“What is to be done?”—is again raised before the global working class. And the only honest and politically realistic answer is: Build a mass socialist movement of the working class to put an end to the capitalist system.

This is the purpose and perspective of the World Socialist Web Site. 

It is the indispensable online publication—to which working people and youth across the world now turn, each and every day, for an accurate presentation and scientific  analysis of world events. But the WSWS does not merely comment upon events. It is a weapon of the class struggle.

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. The WSWS has nothing in common with the innumerable left bloggers and commentators who proliferate like mushrooms across the platforms of social media. Confusing their own superficial and fleeting impressions for serious analysis, they offer their readers nothing more than pragmatic improvisations in place of a worked-out revolutionary strategy.

The WSWS proceeds in an entirely different manner. Its analysis is grounded in the method of Marxism and in the whole historical experience of the international workers movement. It does not seek the sort of popularity won by adapting its conclusions to the shifting moods of the moment. The WSWS bases its analysis on an objective examination of the laws underlying the crisis of the capitalist system.

The range of the WSWS is immense. It spans daily political events, critical social questions, historical issues, and problems of art and culture. Our political opponents denounce us as “sectarian” because we reject compromise and collaboration with the parties and organizations of the ruling class. The first obligation of a genuinely Marxist and revolutionary party is to tell the truth to the working class: to state what is.

The WSWS is the only publication that works consciously in the revolutionary socialist tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Fourth International.

This tradition finds its living expression in the practical work of the WSWS, which is the political instrument of the International Committee of the Fourth International. 

Through its daily work, the WSWS is building the Socialist Equality Party in the United States and its sister parties throughout the world. It has played a critical role in promoting the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees—the IWA-RFC—initiated by the Socialist Equality Party and the ICFI as a genuine insurgency of the international working class against the corporatist trade union bureaucracies that suppress and betray its struggles. And it is through the WSWS that the work of the ICFI is being expanded on every continent, broadening the influence of the revolutionary movement within the working class.

In order to meet the demands posed by the escalation of the political crisis and the class struggle, the World Socialist Web Site requires financial resources. We must increase our staff, expand our coverage of events, and develop our use of technology. 

Our recent introduction of Socialism AI is a demonstration of how this new technology can be used as a powerful instrument of revolutionary struggle against capitalism.

So we ask you: Make the largest donation possible. And do not let your support end there: sign up to make a regular monthly contribution, so that the resources of the WSWS are placed on a firm and ongoing foundation. The means exist to build this publication into a still more powerful instrument of the international working class.

While I have your attention, let me ask you to make the decision to become active in the building of the revolutionary movement. Join the Socialist Equality Party, or if you live in a country where there does not yet exist a section, start the work toward building one. The time has come to put an end to capitalism.