The resolution was adopted by the 1990 national convention of the Socialist Workers Party. A decade later, a surging general political strike precipitated the crumbling of the Slobodan Milosevic regime in the Yugoslav workers state. The resolution is published in New International no. The excerpting was done by the Militant, not the author.
Footnotes are in the original.
Given these realities, Washington was restricted during the Cold War to using its military power to attempt to contain any extension of the revolutionary overturn of imperialist domination and capitalist property relations. Its strategic effort to weaken the Soviet and Eastern European workers states became one of applying pressure on the bureaucratic castes to police the working class, squelch all political initiatives, and keep working people isolated from the struggles of workers and peasants around the world, with all the depoliticizing and demoralizing consequences that flow from such a separation. For imperialism this was an unavoidable interlude, preparing for the day when the workers states would be sufficiently weakened by Stalinist policies that demoralized the working class to make possible their destruction in a direct imperialist assault. Instead, what has culminated in 1989 and 1990 is an accelerating and irreversible crisis of the Stalinist parties and parasitic petty-bourgeois castes on which they are based, whose counterrevolutionary policies have been weakening the degenerated or deformed workers states for decades. The workers states and their proletarian property foundations have proven stronger than the castes.