This article is available in Russian

The great financial crisis has revealed the instability of the capitalist system to millions around the world.

Many workers and youth are now asking: is this really the best possible economic system?  Is there an alternative?

The alternative to capitalism is, of course, socialism. But has the experience of the 20th century, and of the collapse of the USSR, proved socialism to be impossible? Did socialism fail? Read more...

In the aftermath of February’s dramatic collapse of the Shanghai stock market, the authorities in Beijing have issued a brochure warning investors of the possible dangers involved in investment, especially in unit trusts. These managed funds have proved to be particularly popular with less experienced investors attracted by the reported combined income of 124.8 billion yuan (some £9 billion) that the funds made in the last year. According to the Asia Times, over 300,000 new accounts were opened on just one day, March 6, and this sector now accounts for very nearly 20% of total stock market values. Read more...

Available in Bahasa Indonesian
Indonesia was estimated in the 1950s to be the fifth richest country in the world in natural resources, and had long been the target of a drive by US imperialism to dominate its natural wealth and to win its rulers to become part of Washington’s worldwide anticommunist alliance. This was the era of a series of military coups to produce “regime change” in semi colonial countries such as Mossadegh was removed in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Read more...

The Fifth Congress of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), in July 2000, discussed the meaning and significance of the shift back to capitalism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR following the collapse of Stalinism in the period 1989-1991.

After a sharp debate, the delegates concluded by a clear majority that elements of the LRCI's previous analysis had proved to be "radically i false and misleading". In particular, the Congress rejected the theory advanced by the LRCI of the "moribund workers' state" - a term we used to describe a state in which capitalism had not yet been fully restored as a social system but in which a counterrevolutionary government was actively seeking to restore capitalism.

Here we print the resolution of the Fifth Congress below, edited with additional explanatory material by Richard Brenner. Read more...