The re-emergence of mass politics in the heart of the beast is radicalizing millions around the world.
Some are drawing parallels with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Some are drawing parallels with the explosion of anti-capitalist protests of the 1930s.
An anti-capitalist mood came to the surface in Seattle on November 30, and that mood is not about to disappear.
Think back to those historic parallels. In each case, mass movements in the United States ignited massive popular resistance to capitalism around the world.
In the 1930s, Canadian workers had suffered defeat after defeat.
But three great rank and file revolts in the US in 1934 put mass politics back on the agenda. These strikes laid the basis for the sit-down wave which built the great industrial unions in that country. And inspired by our sisters and brothers to the south, workers here took up the torch and struck to organize heavy industry.
The pattern was the same in the 1960s and 1970s.
The radicalization of that era was world-wide. But it began in the American south, where heroic struggles against segregation showed that a mass fightback was possible.
The civil rights movement became the black power movement. Both laid the basis for the explosion of anti-Vietnam war sentiment. This in turn inspired the women's liberation movement and the lesbian and gay liberation movement, not just in the US but around the world.
That is the first lesson of the Battle in Seattle. Its impact will go far beyond the borders of the US.
But the second lesson from those earlier rounds of struggle is the desperate urgency to build large socialist organizations with clear politics.
We saw in Seattle how incredibly organized their side is. They have the media, the courts, the cops. They have the legal right to use violence against our right to protest.
In the 1930s, thousands of militants saw the same brutality, and concluded that a mass socialist party was necessary. More than one million people went through the Communist Party of the US in the 1930s and the 1940s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, militants drew the same conclusions. They joined far left groups by the thousands.
But tragically, in both cases, the organizations they joined had deep flaws in their politics.
They identified socialism with the Stalinist regimes in either Russia or China.
And this proved fatal when those regimes were exposed as repressive and corrupt.
We face the same challenges now.
We cannot win against corporate capitalism without a massive, organized party rooted in all the struggles and willing to unite all the opposition to the corporations.
We need not make the mistakes made in past generations. Stalinism is dead. The way is clear for an organization that bases itself on the real ideas of socialism from below of Karl Marx.
We can build such a party.
It is desperately urgent that we do so. They have money, police, the courts and the media.
We have numbers. If those numbers are organized into a single fist, we can stop them and build a new world based on human need, not corporate greed.
Build the struggles. Join the socialists.