Imperialism digs its own grave –
Socialist revolution will triumph
(Unsigned front page article)
Workers World, Vol. 4 No. 8
April 27, 1962
The destiny of this planet will not be decided by a handful of Pentagon madmen who have their finger on the H-Bomb button. No! No! No! The human species has labored too long and arduously over millions and millions of years to come to such a capricious and inglorious end.
Marxism, one of the most brilliant intellectual achievements of all times, shows that it is not a handful of madmen that determine the historic fate of great nations and continents, but the great social classes of contemporary society.
The U.S. nuclear tests that have been unleashed on humanity are not an accident. They are the inevitable, historical product of a capitalist class in its period of irreversible decline. It can no longer maintain itself.
A young ruling class, which feels it has its future ahead, would have been more prone to make concessions and to rely on its inner social strength to beat back the engulfing tide of world revolution. But capitalism long ago exhausted its inner social resources. Whatever was historically progressive in it has become a reactionary obstruction to the further development of the human race.
Once upon a time, in the distant ancient past, princes, lords, kings and generals were the only ones who moved on the stage of history. The great mass of the people slept the sleep of centuries. They didn’t truly live, but only existed to labor submissively for the master class. It was the epoch of the ruling class. It was their day.
The capitalist epoch, and particularly its most modern imperialist phase, has irretrievably thrust upon the arena, the billionfold mass of humanity. No force on earth can now dislodge it. With its brawny tenacious hands, that stretch from China to Cuba to the Congo to North Carolina and Atlanta – they will not let go.
Not all the prayers of the bourgeois priests; not all the opium dispensed from the press, pulpit and TV can long hold them in ideological bondage when their lives and the planet they have in their hands is at stake.
Let the pessimists weep and wail. Let those who believe in God stake their hopes on prayer and incantation. Let those who believe in the triumph of reason address themselves to the master class – not the oppressed and exploited.
For us, the broad course of history points to the inevitable triumph of the popular masses over that tiny segment of society – the decadent possessing class.
Of all the wonders that the bourgeoisie has produced in science and technology – its greatest creation and most permanent contribution to the development of the human race is the revolutionary working class and oppressed peoples of imperialism. Now is their day.
It is they who will abolish the old order of society and rebuild it along truly rational and human socialist lines.
Last updated: 11 May 2026