World Socialist Web Site's David North to speak in Wellington on Sunday
David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site editorial board and a leading member of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, will speak at a public meeting in Wellington on
Sunday, December 9, at 3:00pm. The meeting is being organised by the International Youth and Students for Social
Equality.
Rutherford House, Lecture Theatre 3
Victoria University of Wellington Pipitea Campus
Bunny Street, near the Railway Station
Tickets are $7 waged or $5 for students/unemployed
North will deliver his lecture: “Eighty Years of the Fourth International (1938-2018): The class struggle, revolution
and socialism in the 21st century." He has already spoken at successful meetings in Sydney, Melbourne, several cities
across the United States and Sri Lanka.
At this week's meeting in Sydney, attended by 120 people, North explained the striking parallels between the 1930s, when
Trotsky established the Fourth International, and the new period of revolutionary upsurge by the international working
class today, underscored by the mass “Yellow Vest” protests and industrial strikes in France.
He emphasised that an examination of the present situation confronting the working class necessarily involved an
examination of the history out of which the present emerged.
Amid the Great Depression of the 1930s and the looming prospect of another world war, Trotsky had established the Fourth
International to fight to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership produced by the devastating betrayal of the
international working class by Stalinism and the social democratic parties, which had permitted the installation of the
fascist regime in Germany in 1933.
Today, North explained, the problems that Trotsky addressed in an earlier stage of the current epoch, which he analysed
as the “death agony of capitalism,” remained “profoundly relevant to the world in which we live.” Once again, humanity
faced the danger of war and fascism.
We urge students, workers and readers of wsws.org to attend this important meeting on Sunday.