This statement, published in 1998, is a comprehensive reply to the US-based Spartacist League and other organizations who claimed that the global integration of capitalist production—globalization—was simply a myth invented by the capitalist class.

The statement exposes the class basis of Spartacist’s claims that the technical revolution in computers, communications and transportation over the previous two decades had not fundamentally changed the structure of world capitalism. The Spartacist League maintained that the economic and political power of the nation-state remained undiminished. On this basis, it claimed that organizations based on a national perspective, including the trade unions and the national movements, provided the only viable perspective for the working class.

The book evaluates the bitter historical experiences of the working class with the trade unions and national liberation movements and with Stalinism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and China. It also relates the nationalist perspective of the Spartacist League to the group’s origins in the 1960s and its subsequent political evolution.