Twenty years ago the powerful repressive Stalinist police states fell one after another under the pressure of mass upsurges. The collapse of Stalinism was a dramatic event and a turning point in world history. But in retrospect it will be seen as only the prelude to something even more dramatic: the death agony of world capitalism.

A few months ago, Telegraph.co.uk, the online version of the well-known British daily newspaper, ran an article entitled “Male Sex Drive ‘To Blame for World’s Conflicts’.” A team of evolutionary scientists, led by a Prof. Mark Van Vugt, claimed to have found the ever-elusive root cause of all war: males!

May Day is the only event that transcends all divisions of religion, race, nationality or any other prejudice of the past amongst human beings. It is commemorated in all continents.

In this Workers' International League pamphlet, Tom Trottier examines the history and background to the LGBT movement. He explains the link to Capitalism and class society. He also looks at its history in the United States, the advances made during the Russian Revolution (and the effect of the Stalinist counter-revolution) as well as the modern history of the movent.

The crisis of capitalism is accompanied by a crisis of bourgeois thought: philosophy, economics, morality – all are in a state of ferment. In place of the earlier optimism that stated confidently that capitalism had solved all its problems, there is an all-pervading mood of gloom. Not so long ago, Gordon Brown confidently proclaimed “the end of boom and bust”. After the crash of 2008 he was forced to eat his words.

Alan Woods in his new introduction the UK edition of the “Four Marxist Classics” (The Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The State and Revolution, and The Transitional Program in a single volume) looks at the stage the class struggle is passing through internationally, from Greece to Spain, from Egypt to Wisconsin. He stresses that, “In order to succeed it is necessary to take the movement to a higher level. This can only be done by linking it firmly to the movement of the workers in the factories and the trade unions.” The book will soon be available in the UK.