David North, Chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (United States), will deliver lectures via video conferences titled “Where is America headed? The American volcano and the global tsunami” at two universities in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, this week. These will be North’s first lectures at universities in Turkey.

At the invitation of Social Democracy clubs and sponsored by Mehring Yayıncılık, North will speak at Bilkent University on February 17 and at Middle East Technical University (METU) on February 19. Both events will start at 6 p.m. We urge our readers in Ankara to register here to attend the public lecture at METU.

North will address the crisis in the US, which is the most intense expression of the crisis of the global capitalist system, from a historical and international perspective. The events will be a further elaboration of his lectures given in Berlin and London last November.

As the Trump administration enters its second year, America is witnessing a crisis unprecedented in its history. On the 250th anniversary of the 1776 American Revolution, the United States has reached a critical threshold of the collapse of democratic forms of rule and the transition to dictatorship. As North recently noted in the Foreword to his new book, Where is America Going? (Wohin Geht Amerika?), “The Trump administration represents a decisive breakdown of bourgeois democratic traditions and an ever more overt transition to dictatorship.”

However, as North underlines, “this signifies a vast escalation of open class conflict and the transition to social revolution.” In the US, marked by massive social inequality and class division, there is a growing social opposition among the working class and youth against the capitalist oligarchy represented by Trump. While millions across the country participated in the “No Kings” protests held twice last year, more than 100,000 people marched in Minneapolis on January 23 against ICE’s terror regime.

The intensification of class struggles in the US is accompanied by the global explosion of American imperialist aggression: the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump’s threats to annex Canada and Greenland, and increasing preparations for war against Iran. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1934, “History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”

As workers and youth in Turkey, the Middle East, and the rest of the world become increasingly aware of the global significance and consequences of what is happening in the United States, any analysis that fails to take the American working class into account in the development and resolution of the crisis has no validity. North will present a revolutionary socialist perspective at his lectures, giving political expression to the decisive social force of the international working class.

Turkey provided refuge to Trotsky during the stormy years of 1929-1933. Since 2023, North has been the major speaker at events held on Prinkipo (Büyükada) to commemorate the historical and contemporary significance of the years this great Russian revolutionary spent on the island. These events are hosted by the Adalar Municipality and sponsored by Mehring Yayıncılık.

As a revolutionary journalist, historian, and political leader within the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), whose activities span 55 years, North has written extensively on Marxist theory, the history of the socialist movement, the geopolitics of US imperialism, and the strategy and program of contemporary fight for socialism.

Among his works published in Turkish by Mehring Yayıncılık are The Heritage We Defend – A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International; In Defense of Leon Trotsky; The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century; The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide; Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.

North’s lectures will address fundamental political, historical, and theoretical issues related to where the United States and the world are headed, offering a socialist response to the question of what is to be done. We invite our readers in Ankara to register here to attend the event at METU, which will be open to the public.