Two weeks ago, David North, chairperson of the international editorial board, made an appeal in which he explained that the crisis of capitalism is no longer a matter of political speculation but the daily reality of the international working class. Every event since has confirmed his words.
One is particularly significant. On June 12, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, the product of a social order organized from top to bottom to funnel the wealth created by billions of working people into the hands of a tiny financial aristocracy. A single individual now controls a fortune larger than the economies of most countries on earth.
This is the face of the oligarchy that rules America and the world. The United States now has 935 billionaires, whose fortunes have swelled by some $1.5 trillion in the first year of Trump’s second term in office alone. At the opposite pole, the bottom half of American households own barely 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth.
This oligarchy does not merely own the wealth. It owns the means through which that wealth is defended. It controls the print and broadcast media, the social media platforms, and the machinery of the state itself. The drive toward dictatorship, the breakdown of democracy of which Trump is the most grotesque expression, flows directly from this concentration of wealth.
And it is not confined to one party or one country. The entire political establishment—Democrats no less than Republicans, the governments of Europe rearming for war, the same regimes presiding over the Gaza genocide and the war against Iran—functions as the political defender of capitalist wealth and of imperialist violence. The official “opposition” exists to channel mass anger back into the safe confines of the system it serves.
This is what makes the World Socialist Web Site entirely unique. There is no other publication on earth doing what it does. It does not merely analyze the crisis from the sidelines. The WSWS is engaged in the construction, within a developing class struggle, of a revolutionary political leadership for the working class.
That work requires resources. We must expand our staff and our coverage, develop our use of technology, and build the WSWS into a still more powerful instrument of the class struggle—as our recent introduction of Socialism AI demonstrates is possible. The oligarchy commands trillions. Our movement is built on the contributions of working people who understand what is at stake.
So I ask you: make the largest donation you can today. And do not stop there—sign up for a regular monthly contribution so that the resources of the WSWS rest on a firm and ongoing foundation.
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