The Socialist Equality Party and the Queen’s University chapter of the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) are holding a meeting in Kingston, Ontario on Thursday, March 24 to discuss the extraordinary events that have convulsed North Africa and the Middle East since December. (Full meeting details can be found below.)
The popular uprisings that toppled US-backed dictators in Egypt and Tunisia and sparked like movements across the Arab world constitute an historic shift of global importance. After a long period of political reaction that arose following the defeat of the last wave of international revolutionary struggles (1968-75), the working class is returning to the political arena determined to fight for its democratic and social aspirations.
The Egyptian Revolution is rooted in world processes—processes that are shaping every country: the globalization of capitalist production and the growth in the social power of the world working class, the phenomenal growth in social inequality and economic insecurity, the transformation of the trade unions and the social-democratic and other ostensible left parties into mechanisms for imposing capitalist austerity, the alienation of workers and young people from the ossified and reactionary political establishment, the long decline of American imperialism, and the breakdown of the world economic order unleashed by the financial crisis of 2008.
In Canada, as in the United States and Europe, these processes are impelling workers to struggle against the big-business drive to impose the capitalist crisis on working people through job and wage cuts and the dismantling of public services and against the capitalist elite’s increasing use of authoritarian methods of rule.
The revolutionary movements in North Africa and the Middle East raise the fundamental question of the struggle for workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of society. But that can only be accomplished through the building of a revolutionary party of the international working class animated by Permanent Revolution—the strategy developed by Leon Trotsky that guided the Russian Revolution of 1917, as well as the subsequent struggle against its Stalinist degeneration.
We call on all workers and young people galvanized by the revolutionary events in North Africa and the Middle East and seeking a means to fight against capitalism and imperialist war and for social equality to attend our public meeting at Queen’s University in Kingston, Thursday, March 24. The main speaker will be Keith Jones, national secretary of the SEP (Canada) and a member of the WSWS International Editorial Board.
Kingston, Ontario
Thursday, March 24, 7 p.m.
Room 505, Queen’s University Centre
Queen’s University
284 Earl St.