Based on Will Lehman’s campaign, 5% of Americans want the Fourth International in power. This seems promising, but remember that 30% of German men and 20% of Russian men died in World War II alone. This leaves out WWI and the famines and depressions of the inter-war years or the reduced birth rates produced by the economic collapse of that period. A new world war would threaten all the political progress made by the Fourth International, as seen by the exponential growth of the readership of the website over the last 25 years. It is imperative to fight for the Fourth International to rise to power before a world war grants emergency powers to the world’s worst imperialists and corporate executives. These would openly or semi-openly exterminate all worker opposition to middle class corporate puppet-tyrants in the ownership and executive board of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee.

The average American earns $1.7 million in a lifetime, borrows $1 million, and pays about $200 thousand in interest. They die with about $60 thousand in debt. This excludes the underclass who do not have access to credit, the right to vote, or many other of the post-war compromise benefits given to the median worker. The underclass serves as an example for the rest of the workers, like a whipped slave.

In any case, the US has shown increasing signs that it may default on its debt, as seen most clearly from the downgrading of US Treasury bonds and the widespread support for the new BRICS currency. Such a default would cut off credit to many average workers who often fall behind on payments due to economic dislocation produced by machine technology, globalization, and recession. Once deprived of easy access to capital, the American consumer, who the world depends on to import their products, will see their privileged access to credit removed in larger numbers, their homes taken, and their very existence challenged by the drive for profit.

These workers should act now in anticipation of a new recession, which the Fed will need to create to control inflation. Their political awakening depends dialectically on their freeing themselves and on the Fourth International making contact with them as they come into struggle with the economic system and the state. To the extent that the corporations can keep middle-class executives in positions of authority over the Fourth International to limit its interactions with the workers, to limit its political success in local elections, to that same extent the politically active among the workers will need to organize to retake the power within the Fourth International through a workers-only executive board, central committee, and political committee. This can be accomplished by converting the private SEP-WSWS corporation, based on petty-bourgeois class privilege, into a non-profit corporation based on equal rights for all members and a million dollar net worth cap (adjusted for PPP into all other national sections) for the non-profit’s executive board. As Marx and Engels argued, the socialist revolution is the emancipation of the working class by the working class itself. In this spirit, they recused themselves when offered executive positions in the First International, something the petty-bourgeois corporate puppet-tyrants of the Nanobureaucracy will, sooner or later, be forced to accept as the proper course of action.