Europe & America: Two Speeches on Imperialism

Speaking in the mid-1920s, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky explains the political and military consequences of the emergence of the United States as imperialism's dominant economic and financial power following World War I. He describes the sharpening contradictions between Washington and its rivals in Europe, and the life-or-death stakes for the working class in combating capital's drive toward new global crises and imperialist wars that will draw in Asia and the colonial world as well.

Today, at the opening of the 21st century, mounting competition and conflicts between U.S. finance capital and its imperialist rivals remain central to the class struggles worldwide. As does Trotsky's call on working people in the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere to wage revolutionary struggles for power and "lay the foundations for the Federation of Socialist Peoples of the whole earth."