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    MIT - IAP  CLASSES:   The New World DisOrder: a Marxist perspective

	In the past couple of years following the collapse of the totalitarian
Stalinist regimes of East Europe and the USSR we have witnessed an unraveling
of the post-World War II equilibrium based on a division of the world between
imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy.  At the same time the economic
hegemony of the United States, which underpinned the world capitalist system
in the past, has eroded.
	The contradictions between the globalization of the world economy and 
the individual nation-states, between the need for a world-wide plan to
manage both the natural and the social resources and the system of private 
property are now pushing our world into an era of wars and revolutions.  
While the advanced capitalist economies are sliding into a world-wide 
depression, related factors are leading to a revival of colonialism as the 
clock is rolled back to an era of destruction, plunder and conquest for 
Africa, Asia and Latin America.
	Come to learn the Marxist analysis of the factors shaping our world 
and of the need for a revolutionary leadership in the working class.

		Jan. 6, Economic and social crisis in America
	Legalized videotaped lynching, city riots and martial law, an 
epidemic of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment, homelessness and disease,
crisis in healthcare and education, a travesty of democracy as the billionaires
openly rule in Washington and Presidents conspire to flout their own laws: 
these are today's realities of life in America.

		Jan. 13, Collapse of Stalinism -- capitalist barbarism
	The goal of isolated national socialism was thoroughly anti-Marxist.  
It led to a rise of arbitrary bureaucratic dictatorships and eventually, to 
a total destruction of all the gains of the 1917 revolution.  In the Third 
World, the false perspective of a national or "third" road of development 
has collapsed as the "independent" states succumb to increased pressures of 
resurgent colonialism.

		Jan. 20, Global economic crisis
	The half-century bubble of worldwide economic expansion, based on 
American hegemony and the unprecedented expansion of credit, has burst.  
As the recession bites deeper, all the capitalist nation-states prepare to 
fight it out for survival by driving down their own workers' living 
standards and by competing for access to raw materials, cheap labor
and markets on the global battlefield.

		Jan. 27, Socialism: real and fake
	The collapse of both alternatives: of the popular Western vision 
of unending capitalist expansion and prosperity and of the reactionary 
Stalinist mirage of nationally enclosed prison "socialism" has brought 
into a sharper relief the correctness of the revolutionary Marxist program 
of uniting the world working class around the struggle for world socialism.  
Only the Trotskyist movement strived to learn the lessons of both the 
defeats and the victories of the working class.

Wednesdays, 6 PM, room 8-105 	Class sponsored by F. Kreisel, 3-8625

The opinions are my own.	Felix Kreisel (617)253-8625