In the final scene of the Academy Award winning film Oppenheimer, the physicist recalls a conversation with Albert Einstein, in which they considered the possibility that their theoretical work has started a chain reaction that “might destroy the entire world.” And Oppenheimer, horrified by the looming danger of a nuclear war, says to Einstein: “I believe we did.”

The film then concludes with images of intercontinental ballistic missiles and of nuclear explosions engulfing the planet.

Robert Oppenheimer’s terrifying vision now threatens to become a reality. Nearly eighty years after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the imperialist pyromaniacs in Washington, D.C. and their allies in Europe are recklessly escalating the conflict with Russia, declaring that they won’t be restrained by the threat of a nuclear conflagration. 

And while the Biden administration and its NATO allies play Russian Roulette with nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they are supporting with money and weapons Israel’s genocidal “Final Solution” of the so-called “problem” of Palestinian resistance to 75 years of Zionist oppression. More than 30,000 Gazans have been murdered by the military forces of Israel. At least two-thirds of the victims are women and children. 

The genocide in Gaza and NATO’s relentless escalation toward a nuclear Third World War are only the most brutal manifestations of the descent of the capitalist system into barbarism. The defining characteristics of present-day capitalism and its ruling class are insatiable greed, brutality and criminal indifference to the fate of humanity and the future of the planet. Nothing will be allowed to get in the way of corporate profits and the accumulation of personal wealth. 

Refusing to implement well-known and effective public health measures to stop the spread of COVID because they would cut into profit margins, capitalist governments have accepted the death of over 28 million people globally, with more than one million of those victims in the United States. The Biden administration speaks of COVID only in the past tense, as if the pandemic can be stopped simply by ignoring it. But the virus is not ignoring us. Millions of people are afflicted with Long COVID, and thousands continue to die of the infection every week.

This descent into barbarism is incompatible with democracy. Fascist tendencies are surging in every capitalist country. Would-be Hitlers believe that their hour is approaching. Donald Trump is the grotesque manifestation in the United States of this global process.

Biden claims that his re-election in November is necessary to save democracy. But if tottering Biden is all that stands between democracy and fascism, then democracy is on its last legs. In any case, the central objective of the Biden administration, the escalation of war with Russia and the intensification of the confrontation with China, requires the militarization of society—that is, the imposition of savage austerity and dictatorial forms of rule.

Nothing can stop the descent into social and political barbarism except the development of a global mass movement of the working class against capitalism, on the basis of an international socialist program.

In this historic process, upon which the future of humanity depends, the World Socialist Web Site—the online voice of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party in the United States—is playing a critical role. 

The WSWS is the only publication that strives to arm the working class, as it enters into struggle against capitalism, with a genuine socialist perspective. 

The WSWS tells the truth to the working class. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It cannot be pressured to adopt more reasonable and humane policies. The profit system will not compromise with the working class. Therefore, the working class cannot compromise with capitalism.

In the months ahead, the capitalist media will spout its lies, create distractions, spread propaganda, and do all that it can to justify imperialist war and genocidal crimes. 

The corporate-controlled media, with unlimited resources, will claim that there is no alternative to Biden and Trump. It will minimize reports on third-party candidates, and certainly will seek to suppress all information relating to the presidential campaign of Joseph Kishore, the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party. The Democratic Party’s national committee, according to reports in the press, is planning to wage what it calls “all-out war” against third party candidates.

The war they are planning includes systematic and ruthless efforts to stop the raising of necessary finances by third-party candidates.

A former Democratic Party senator who is playing a central role in the attack on third-party candidates has stated that the Biden campaign “is going to spend a boatload of money” to suppress opposition from outside the institutionalized two-party corporate dictatorship. 

We expect that the World Socialist Web Site will be a target—as it has been for years—of the efforts of the government and corporations to suppress political opposition. We are used to fighting censorship.

But in this election year, when so much is at stake, the support of the readers of the World Socialist Web Site is more critical than ever. The indispensable and unequaled analysis of the WSWS must continue. Our writers must be able to cover and write on world and domestic events. The WSWS must be able to continue mobilizing mass opposition to the Gaza holocaust, the escalating bloodbath in Ukraine and the ongoing social devastation of the pandemic.

The WSWS must be in a position to provide leadership to the struggles of the working class, expose the treachery of the trade union bureaucracies and assist in the development of the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank and File Committees.

Notwithstanding the oppressive restrictions imposed by the two capitalist parties and corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site must provide analysis, from a socialist perspective, of the 2024 campaign. It must expose the reactionary agendas of Trump and Biden, and make sure that the campaign of Joe Kishore, and other third-party candidates blocked out by the capitalist media, receives appropriate journalistic coverage.

That is why I am asking you to make a substantial donation today to the World Socialist Web Site. Nothing, absolutely nothing, of importance can be achieved without struggle and sacrifice. And what can be more important than putting an end to capitalism, saving the world from barbarism and securing the future of mankind.

Therefore, I urge you to go to wsws.org/donate and make the largest contribution possible.

Thank you.