In present conditions we could have entitled this issue simply "socialism or barbarism" because that is precisely where we are in world history. It is not a rhetorical flourish, nor an exaggeration, to say that humanity is approaching a massive social and political crisis. The events of this year have speeded that process up.

The threat of war in Kashmir may have been replaced by the threat of war against Iraq, or Iran, or anywhere else the USA identifies as a "terrorist state" but the dangers are no less. Since the explosive social mixture of religious fundamentalism threatens, in different ways, to undermine the regimes in Delhi and Islamabad the prospect of a revival of open war preparations cannot be far away. However the two nuclear powers of South Asia are not the only states which threaten the world with nuclear mayhem. Aside from increases already announced in the US 'conventional' military budget, the Pentagon has been given funds by Congress to develop "low yield" nuclear weapons to target underground bunkers (or perhaps, ex post facto, Afghan caves?). This comforting item of news has to be coupled with the Pentagon's so-called "nuclear posture review". This cites three scenarios in which the use of nuclear weapons would be justified. These are: against underground targets (or other targets immune to conventional weapons), against powers using chemical or biological warfare, and "in the event of surprising military developments". These surprises could include an "Iraqi attack on Israel", North Korea on South Korea or China on Taiwan. One justification it gives for using nuclear weapons is that they could actually reduce "collateral damage" (which translates as civilian deaths). All this not only goes against received scientific opinion but even NATO, which admits that the use of any nuclear weapons "would be absolutely catastrophic in human and environmental terms". We share this with you as an illustration of the depths of depravity to which the so-called defenders of civilisation-as-we-know-it are prepared to stoop to defend their right to exploit the planet and its denizens.

Increasingly driving this kind of thinking is the danger of total financial meltdown in the world economy. Collapsing share values alone would not represent such a threat to the capitalist system if it were not for the fact that the level of indebtedness that has already been contracted on the expectation of ever-increasing returns from speculative capital now threatens some very big players in the world economy.

Following the collapse of the so-called "tiger economies", and the more predictable crisis in the ex-USSR, the current domino effect that is passing from one South American country to another has led to wave after wave of social upheaval. Argentina is the only place where, as far as we know, the social unrest has taken an embryonically organisational form but there have been anti-privatisation riots in Peru and Paraguay, as well as violent strikes in Ecuador. Politically the state of civil war in Colombia is intensifying whilst everyone is simply awaiting the next army coup to remove the Chavez regime in Venezuela. In Bolivia the leader of the coca growers, Evo Morales, came within a few votes of winning the Presidential election only to lose the vote in the Congress as the US had already stated it would pull the plug on the country's debt if Morales were elected.

This event sums up the dilemma of the Latin American ruling classes. As the bulk of the population sinks from poverty into barbarism they cannot carry out any reform without it antagonising the lenders. Thus when Paul O' Neill, the US Treasury Secretary, stuck to his monetarist rhetoric and said Argentina would get no help from the US or the IMF it enraged the Argentine ruling class. Argentina had acted as a model for free market reforms with its dollarisation policy and now was being told to swallow the consequences. As it was, O'Neill's visit to Latin America in August 2002 saw the Bush regime once again match monetarist rhetoric with Keynesian aid. Not only was Brazil given more aid but so too was Uruguay. Once the "Switzerland of South America" with a welfare state, Uruguay has been allowed $1.5 billions in US loans in order to stave off the knock-on effects of the Argentine banking crisis. [Uruguay had lost more than 40% of its bank deposits as Argentinians who saved there drew out their money after their own accounts were frozen at home.] The bailouts to Latin American governments by the US and the IMF only underline the desperation of the economic situation. Half the population are now living below $2 a day and the bourgeoisie are already quaking over the social consequences. Given the fragmentation of the working class, the route to class consciousness will neither be easy nor even. This is why the Argentine resistance has been so significant in that we have seen the incipient development of autonomous class-wide organisations. However, as the three articles in this issue all make clear, there are a large number of dangers facing the working class. Not only are they confronted with demands to unite their struggles with the middle class in popular assemblies, but they are also faced by well-entrenched union bureaucracies and leftist parties who all have a stake in the preservation of the existing order. As well as facing police brutality, divisions in their own ranks, workers in Argentina have to deal with all kinds of schemes to resurrect the discredited, corrupt, democratic system.

What has yet to appear is a distinct revolutionary minority capable of articulating the political consciousness of what the working class needs to do if it is to remove the author of its misery - the capitalist system - once and for all. The absence of such a minority is a reflection of the limitations of the class movement hitherto. The signs of the movement being ready to move on to a new level will be both in the kinds of organisational demands the class makes and in the emergence of at least an embryo class party, whose aim will not be to form a new government but to direct the struggle along the political lines indicated by the historical experience already acquired by the world working class.

This issue of the relationship between the working class party and the wider class movement is the main polemic with the International Communist Current. As the article on Argentina states, we firmly believe this is because the ICC lacks a materialist analysis of how class consciousness develops. This in turn has led them to exaggerating the capacities of the working class in the past, when for example, they argued the 1980s were "the years of truth". We believe this over-optimism, not grounded in reality, led to a collapse of the ICC's perspectives (in itself no great sin - the problem was that the ICC has made no serious critique of either their own past or the new situation). The subsequent series of splits have not clarified anything for the revolutionary movement. As we note in our statement on the latest split, the nature of the debate has usually focussed on organisational loyalty or "defence of the organisation", including vilification of the various splitters as "parasites". Whilst maintaining the existence of revolutionary organisation is an important issue, in the way that the ICC present it there is little clarification of what this means. In the course of the formation of the world proletarian party (which after all involves a process of political clarification) there will not only be strong polemics between organisations but every organisation is bound to have internal disagreements and even splits. The ICC's condemnation of its splitters as "parasites" generates much bitterness but little clarity and risks bringing opprobrium on all political minorities of the internationalist communist left.

As we made clear in Communist Internationalist 20, the IBRP has also had its internal disagreements with sympathising elements in Los Angeles. We indicated part of the nature of the problem in that issue but since then we have decided to travel on separate paths. Since the comrades in LA issued a brief statement with the first issue of their new paper, New Internationalist, implying that they had been unfairly treated and that the Bureau was "Stalinist" [always the jibe of splitters in such cases] we are publishing the full correspondence here for everyone to judge. We did not receive replies to most of these letters and the issues we raised were not addressed. In the last few weeks before they went their own way the LAWV comrades discovered that they were, after all, descendants of the German Left, and have now gone in search of an organisational practice to conform to that position. We wish them well in their journey but unless they recognise that the principal party of the German Left, the KAPD, which started off wanting to be "hard as steel" and "clear as glass" eventually theorised its own liquidation, they will eventually join the bands of councilists who happily theorise that the working class does not need centralised political organisation. This is just the message that the bourgeoisie likes to hear so that they can carry on unopposed, bringing the planet to its knees.

For our part, despite the misunderstandings of the comrades in Los Angeles, we are not interested in stifling local political expressions of the working class. On the contrary, as more and more workers come to face economic crisis of Argentinian proportions the onus will be on those of us who are already organised to urge for the political and organisational unification of all the potentially revolutionary forces that will spring from the working class throughout the world. We are reminded every day that capitalism is global. Today, more than ever, there is no room for localism amongst would-be revolutionary organisations.