Watch David North’s lecture at the University of Michigan: “After the midterms: Results and prospects”

@realZacCorrigan12 November 2026facebook iconThe World Socialist Web Site is posting videos of the lecture David North delivered Monday at the University of Michigan, the final meeting of the five-campus tour organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). As we reported, nearly 100 people heard North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and of the Socialist Equality Party (US), assess the November 3 midterm elections.

The first video presents the final part of the lecture, in which North drew together its central conclusions. The election, he explained, registers a deepening radicalization of the working class in the United States and internationally, driven by the global crisis of capitalism, and anticipates an enormous eruption of class struggle. Against the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—which tells workers and young people to place their hopes in the Democratic Party—North insisted that the fight for socialism must be based on the working class and an internationalist strategy directed to the conquest of power. “The critical question now is the building of a revolutionary movement in the working class,” he said. “The conditions are ripe for it.”

The second video presents the full lecture. North situated the midterms within the historical context of critical turning points of modern American history, the elections of 1896, 1912, 1932 and 1980. He examined the responses of the New York Times, the Democrats and the DSA to the elections; elaborating a Marxist critique and perspective for youth and workers. In the coming days, we will post clips from the discussion that followed.

The perspective advanced in this lecture stands in direct opposition to the prevailing accounts of the election, which present the Democratic victory either as an opening for bipartisan governance or as the beginning of the party’s transformation from within. The mass radicalization now underway will not, on its own, produce the political consciousness the working class requires under conditions of economic crisis and a metastasizing world war. That consciousness must be developed through the study of history and brought into the working class by a revolutionary party armed with its lessons.

Why does David North point to the elections of 1896, 1912, 1932 and 1980 as turning points, and what do they show about how capitalist crises reshape American politics?What is the historical basis for building rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracy, and how have past workers' movements used this method?Ask more questions at SocialismAI.comThe growth of the IYSSE on the campuses, of rank-and-file committees through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), and of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) depends on this perspective reaching the workers and young people who are already searching for answers that neither the Democrats nor their pseudo-left auxiliaries can provide. The IYSSE fights to win students and young people to this perspective, to the study of Marxism and the history of the Trotskyist movement, and to the turn to the working class that the coming struggles demand.

We call on all students and young people who want to fight for socialism to fill out the form below to join the IYSSE and build a chapter at their school.

Fill out the form below, and someone from the IYSSE will contact you about getting involved: