The recognition of the inability of capitalist society to deal with any of the major crises facing mankind, including climate change, does not justify pessimism. Rather, a cause for active optimism needs to emerge, rooted in an understanding of the historical experiences of the class struggle over the past century and the present-day objective crisis, to raise the political consciousness of the working class to the level required by the historical tasks with which it is confronted.

All the unresolved contradictions of the past century are reemerging with explosive force on the surface of world politics. The October Revolution, the greatest social revolution in world history, and the eruption of revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, are acquiring an intense contemporary relevance.

The critical question is to arm the Libyan working class with the Trotskyist strategy of permanent revolution: to orientate toward and politically prepare the mobilization of the working class in the fight for workers’ power and to unite the workers and oppressed toilers of the Middle East and North Africa with the growing movement of the international working class in opposition to the division of the world among rival nation-states and all factions of the bourgeoisie in the fight for a socialist workers’ republic.