International Committee of the Fourth International
About the World Socialist Web Site

The WSWS is the online publication of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its affiliated sections in the Socialist Equality Parties around the world. It launched publication in February 1998, and has been publishing continuously for the past 25 years.

The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media.

Our website provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world’s people. As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the WSWS will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle.

We anticipate enormous battles in every country against unemployment, low wages, austerity policies and violations of democratic rights. The World Socialist Web Site insists, however, that the success of these struggles is inseparable from the growth in the influence of a socialist political movement guided by a Marxist world outlook.

The standpoint of this website is one of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system. Its aim is the establishment of world socialism. It maintains that the vehicle for this transformation is the international working class, and that in the 21st century the fate of working people, and ultimately mankind as a whole, depends upon the success of the socialist revolution.

The partisanship of the World Socialist Web Site by no means excludes objectivity or honest debate. We welcome a broad exchange of viewpoints with workers, students and intellectuals who are seeking an alternative to bourgeois politics and capitalist economics. Polemics and debate, the dialectical means by which knowledge and truth are established, are an integral component of the WSWS. Only intellectual integrity and commitment to historical truth are required of those who wish to contribute to the site.

During the course of its more than 20 years of publication, the WSWS has been the authoritative voice of international revolutionary socialism. It has served as the indispensable political and intellectual guide for workers, students and youth all over the world who are seeking to make sense of events in a time of great crisis and human suffering, and to find a genuinely progressive—and, therefore, revolutionary—alternative to a dysfunctional capitalist world that is collapsing into barbarism.

WSWS Chronology: 1998-2013

On the fifteenth anniversary of the WSWS in 2013, the International Editorial Board produced an annual chronology, selected from our archive of more than 45,000 articles up to that point, in order to offer readers a comprehensive overview of the most important events from 1998 to 2013. We urge readers to study this chronology and see how the WSWS reported and analyzed the great events, political issues, social processes and intellectual controversies of its first fifteen years.

Explore the WSWS Chronology
World events since 1998