It's been a stormy week for America's CEO: a flurry of calls and meetings, a whirlwind of Tweets and press conferences, a blizzard of executive orders flying off his desk. In just a few days, Trump has set his stamp on US and world politics, economics, and relations. It was not mere hyperbole when the Marxists said that sharp and sudden changes were on the order of the day, that the process of crisis and class struggle was accelerating, that this was merely the beginning of the beginning of a new era.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. The apologists of capitalism, and their faithful echoes in the labour movement, try to comfort themselves with the thought that the collapse of the USSR signified the demise of socialism. But what failed in Russia was not socialism but a caricature of socialism. Contrary to the oft-repeated slanders, the Stalinist regime was the antithesis of the democratic regime established by the Bolsheviks in 1917.