The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.3           January 22, 1996 
 
 
'Stop NATO War Drive, Emulate Cuban Road'
Socialists Organize Campaign To Defend Yugoslav Workers State  

BY STEVE CLARK
Some 560 workers and young people from across North America participated over the New Year's weekend in four regional socialist educational conferences, centered on the theme, "Organize a Working-Class Campaign to Oppose the Imperialist War Drive against Yugoslavia." The gatherings, held in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Seattle December 30-January 1, were sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists.

"During this conference we will be celebrating the 37th anniversary of the Cuban revolution," said Argiris Malapanis in the opening talk in Seattle. "The purpose of this gathering is to further the recruitment to the communist movement of the dangerous men and women - dangerous to the powers that be - who want to follow the Cuban road, to take power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and advance the fight for a socialist world."

The events succeeded in advancing this aim. In all, some 15 people asked to join the Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialists, or the Communist League in Canada during the conferences.

The gatherings were a chance to report the political conclusions, and organize to seize the opportunities, decided on by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party at a four-day meeting in New York December 9- 12. Leaders of communist leagues in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom participated in that SWP leadership meeting, as did supporters of the communist movement from France and Iceland.

In addition to discussing the working-class campaign against the NATO war drive at the four public conferences, the SWP is organizing meetings of groups of its members, called national fractions, who belong to one of seven industrial unions: the International Association of Machinists; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers; United Auto Workers; Union of Nee-dletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; United Food and Commercial Workers; United Steel Workers of America; and United Transportation Union.

As communist workers learned during the U.S.-organized assault against Iraq in 1990-91, under the intensifying pressures of an imperialist war drive, there is no more important arena in which to campaign against the capitalists' rapacious goals and antilabor course than among co-workers on the job, at plant gates, and elsewhere in the working class and unions. That provides the only proletarian political foundation from which to participate along with other workers in any picket lines, speakouts, or other protests that begin to be organized, on however small a scale initially, if the war drive intensifies.

The lessons of that earlier campaign are contained in talks by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, published under the title "Opening Guns of World War III" in issue no. 7 of the Marxist magazine New International. Classes at several of the regional gatherings reviewed these experiences and lessons.

Explaining the stakes in fighting Washington's war drive will be at the center of activity of the Young Socialists too, as they work over the next few months to build their first national conference, to be held in Minneapolis over the Easter weekend, April 6-7.

The regional conferences also marked the public launching of the single largest effort by the communist movement decided by the December National Committee meeting: to increase the sales of revolutionary books and pamphlets by $100,000 in 1996. Workers and youth will be organizing to expand and regularize the hours of bookstores where communist literature can be bought in more than 30 cities around the world; upgrade the appearance of and political attention to those bookstores; increase the sales of books and pamphlets off SWP and Young Socialists literature tables at political events, on street corners in working-class neighborhoods, and on campuses; and organize to get revolutionary titles onto the shelves of more commercial bookstores.

Not only is such a sales effort necessary to meet a growing political need for revolutionary literature by workers and youth, SWP leaders explained at the four conferences. It is also a precondition to financially sustaining a publishing program that makes it possible for these political weapons to be produced, kept in print, upgraded, and circulated as widely as possible among fighters the world over.

Center of politics is in Europe

Each of the conferences opened with keynote talks on "Fight NATO's War Drive: Emulate the Cuban Revolution!" The talks were presented by members of the SWP National Committee: Naomi Craine in Atlanta, Thabo Ntweng in Boston, Chris Hoeppner in Detroit, and Argiris Malapanis in Seattle. They were based on the political perspectives discussed and adopted at the party leadership meeting earlier in December.

As Malapanis explained at the Seattle conference, the unfolding of the war in Yugoslavia over the past five years - in the continent of Europe - registers an important shift in the international class struggle. "The center of world politics is in Europe today," he said. "Right now, under the banner of the `peace of Dayton,' NATO is actually engaged in a war drive against Yugoslavia, with the goal of overthrowing the workers state established through a workers and peasants revolution in 1945 and reimposing capitalist social relations in that country."

At the same time, Malapanis said, the slaughter in Yugoslavia launched several years ago by rival bureaucratic gangs, who draped themselves in nationalist garb, was from the outset also a proxy war for the competing imperialist powers - a product of the intensifying conflict between the capitalist rulers in Bonn, Paris, London, and Washington.

This intensifying interimperialist conflict, SWP leaders explained at the conferences, is and will remain the most powerful single motor force in a world increasingly marked by deflationary pressures on the rulers' profit rates and narrowing access to markets. The result of such conflicts is sharpening class polarization; assaults on the rights, living standards, and job conditions of working people; the growth of rightist and fascist movements; and ultimately the launching of a world war. The working class has already lived through such conditions twice before in the 20th century, and paid a heavy blood price each time.

In discussing these political facts, participants in the New Year's conferences frequently referred to the article "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War," based on several 1994 talks by Jack Barnes, featured in issue no. 10 of New International (as well as in its sister publications in French, Spanish, and Swedish).

The world's leading capitalist powers are battling among themselves for position in the feeding chain of imperialism, Barnes explained in his opening political report to the SWP National Committee meeting in early December. Those capitalist classes highest up in imperialism's feeding chain have the greatest access to ways to buffer the resistance by working people that begins to erupt as class tensions increase.

That's why the U.S. capitalists, in seeking to bolster their competitive position, still have greater flexibility, the SWP leader explained. They are not yet pressed to launch the kinds of direct confrontations that sparked nationwide strikes and massive demonstrations by rail workers and other workers and youth in France in late 1995. The U.S. rulers keep reaching in that direction, nonetheless, and, as they do, begin getting a response.

The NATO war drive against Yugoslavia marks another step by the U.S. ruling class in strengthening its position vis- a-vis its rivals in Europe and Asia. As Barnes explained, "Another historic step is being taken in the process, begun in the first quarter of the 20th century, of the United States of America becoming the premier `European' imperial power."

This process began at the conclusion of the first interimperialist slaughter of 1914-18. And the U.S. capitalist rulers consolidated their position by emerging from World War II as the unrivaled military and economic victor over both their enemy capitalist competitors in Germany, Japan, and Italy, and their allied capitalist competitors in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

In Seattle, Malapanis called attention to the decision by Paris, announced December 5, to rejoin the NATO military chain of command, from which it had withdrawn in 1966 in a conflict with Washington. As a result of this new move, French officers in Yugoslavia are now serving under the direction of the U.S.-dominated NATO command structure, including a U.S. chief of operations.

This recognition by Paris of Washington's hegemony was necessary for the French rulers to continue pursuing a bargain with Bonn to drain surplus value from their common capitalist rivals in London, Madrid, Rome, and elsewhere in Europe. An intensifying battle is under way as to who is going to be in the top tier of capitalist classes in Europe. Who is economically strong enough, and who has pushed back past gains of the working class enough, to be in the top tier dominated by German capital and its national currency, the mark? Will the rulers in France (and their national currency, the franc) be pushed out of the "mark ring" into the second tier? Is British capital strong enough to remain in that second ring, and can the Italian rulers fight their way in? And how can those in the top tiers keep Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece at the bottom - and even start drawing Turkey into a "common market," to rake off still more of the surplus value produced by the toilers there?

Mounting conflict over this chain of domination is at the heart of politics in capitalist Europe, not the "common currency" talked about so much in the daily press. Amid depression conditions - in which average unemployment in the European Union has been stuck at some 11 percent during an upturn in the business cycle, and at 15-20 percent or more in Belgium, Spain, and elsewhere - other struggles like those in France are sure to come.

Aim is to overturn workers state

Among the liveliest discussions throughout the four weekend gatherings was why Washington and its rival capitalist rulers in NATO are launching a war drive against Yugoslavia. Why are they sending an occupation army of some 60,000 troops - 20,000 of them U.S. troops, backed up by some 12,000 other U.S. soldiers nearby in the region?

The war drive, the SWP leaders explained in the opening talks, is the first massive use of armed forces by the imperialist rulers on the soil of a workers state since the Korean War.

"The big-business media won't tell you about the socialist revolution in Yugoslavia and what it accomplished," said Chris Hoeppner in Detroit. "They won't tell you how workers and peasants of all national origins and beliefs in Yugoslavia organized to throw off German imperialist occupation during World War II, and in the process launched a powerful social revolution." The toilers took political power out of the hands of the landlords and capitalists. By the end of the 1940s they had carried out a radical land reform and expropriated the bourgeoisie's factories, warehouses, and banks. They had established a workers state.

At the opening of the 1990s, the Stalinist regime and Communist Party that dominated the Yugoslav worker state began to crumble, as was happening in the workers states in the Soviet Union and across eastern and central Europe as well. In Yugoslavia, members of the petty-bourgeois social layer that dominated the state apparatus organized along nationalist lines, scrambling to grab turf to consolidate their own parasitic access to wealth produced by the toilers. These rival gangs of Stalinist bureaucrats and wannabe capitalists - first and foremost those based in Serbia and Croatia - launched a bloody war of "ethnic cleansing" in 1991 in an effort to accomplish these goals.

At the December SWP leadership meeting, national secretary Barnes explained that the imperialist ruling classes watched the bloodbath unfold, waiting to see if the Yugoslav workers state could be ripped apart and overturned in the process. At the same time, each of these capitalist powers actively pursued their own interests in the region, fueling the slaughter.

"The German ruling class was initially the most aggressive in pressing this course," Barnes said, encouraging forces within the bureaucracy in Croatia to proclaim independence from Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and the major city in Serbia. "The French were somewhat slower, but gave de facto support to Belgrade, in a bloc with the Yeltsin regime in Russia. The English capitalists hunted for a policy of national interest but could never unite around one.

"And Wall Street and Washington adopted the slogan `Let it bleed' for a while, gradually bringing to bear arms shipments and sporadic air power to increase their leverage in the conflict and block the aims of their European rivals."

As the keynote speakers at the conferences explained, however, the effort by imperialism to use an indirect agency among privileged social layers within the workers state to restore capitalism failed in Yugoslavia, as it has in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The disintegration of the former Stalinist apparatuses has accelerated economic and social dislocation, as well as sharp conflicts within the petty-bourgeois caste. But neither in Yugoslavia nor elsewhere have the crisis-ridden regimes of these deformed workers states succeeded in creating the necessary conditions to restore capitalist social relations: the establishment of a capitalist ruling class and accompanying system of bourgeois values; stable legal and contractual relations; and dominance of privately owned industrial, banking, financial, and commercial capital.

The current war drive, the socialist leaders explained, is the imperialists' effort to exploit the situation that has developed in Yugoslavia since 1991 to use direct force and violence to overturn a workers state - something they have not attempted in Europe since the Axis powers' failure to crush the Soviet Union during World War II. That is what Washington and its capitalist rivals will be driven to try once again in the Soviet Union and eastern European workers states as openings arise.

As elsewhere, it is the working class in Yugoslavia, of the various nationalities, that remains the obstacle to overturning the conquests of the socialist revolution. In face of the murderous assault on the Muslim population of Bosnia by terror gangs backed by self-proclaimed governments in Serbia and Croatia, communist workers support the Bosnians' right to national self- determination, Malapanis explained in Seattle. But the fight against national oppression in Yugoslavia today, as throughout this century, has not taken the form of the fight for independence.

"Despite years of `ethnic cleansing' by armed terror squads loyal to regimes based in Belgrade and Zagreb," Hoeppner explained in Detroit, "millions of working people in Yugoslavia have not given up on the unity they've conquered. And they don't accept the social conditions that inevitably come with capitalism. Millions of workers and farmers still see themselves as Yugoslavs, whatever their national backgrounds may be."

So, Washington and its collaborating imperialist powers will not have an easy time accomplishing what they have set out to do in Yugoslavia, even with armed forces on the ground.

"It's wrong to leap to talking about the `former Yugoslavia' right now," Barnes said at the SWP National Committee meeting. "If it were clearly and truly the `former Yugoslavia,' then they wouldn't need to send 60,000 troops there in the next several weeks. They could achieve their aim in a much more leisurely way. But that's exactly one of the things they've failed to do."

Discussion on Yugoslavia and the communist understanding of the workers states continued throughout the sessions and free time at the conferences. In Atlanta some 15 Young Socialists and other youth met with Naomi Craine and other party leaders during a meal break to hash out these questions some more.

In addition to encouraging these fighters to read the issues of New International previously cited, the SWP leaders pointed them to classic revolutionary works such as The Revolution Betrayed and In Defense of Marxism by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, as well as to several Education for Socialists bulletins on the post-World War II social revolutions and workers and farmers governments by Joseph Hansen and Jack Barnes.

Campaign against war drive

The most important task facing socialist workers and youth is to campaign against the imperialist war drive, the speakers at the four regional conferences explained.

"This must be a working-class campaign," said Craine, speaking in Atlanta. "Everything we've been doing day in and day out to build the communist movement and its proletarian institutions - its branches and its industrial union fractions - becomes more important than ever when the imperialists launch a war drive," she said.

"By campaigning against Washington's war drive," Barnes explained at the December party leadership meeting, "we're not predicting how or when an actual shooting war might be launched by the imperialists in Yugoslavia. Our obligation as workers is to campaign as effectively and energetically as we can against the accelerating imperialist war drive. We can't wait for a war to begin before we start organizing as a working-class organization to fight it."

Throughout this century, the keynote speakers explained at the New Year's conferences, communists have had to confront denial among broad layers of fellow workers as the capitalist rulers crank up a war drive and militarization campaign.

The socialist leaders explained that the U.S. rulers understand that a war will only become "popular" in this country, including in the working class, after the shooting starts and some clear-cut "enemies" are targeted by Washington and its propagandists. That "enemy" will be whichever force, or forces, respond to U.S. firepower and begin killing American GIs.

It's a pacifist illusion, conference speakers emphasized, to think that when body bags start being flown back to the United States, that's when an antiwar movement begins; to the contrary, that's when the war fever begins. That's when the petty-bourgeois pacifists begin dividing and retreating, with the majority rallying behind the war.

That's what the history of the 20th century teaches; there have been no exceptions. It takes time and experience before antiwar attitudes and activity begin in the working class and among the soldiers themselves. And how communist workers and youth use that time to campaign against the war, as part of the working class and its class institutions, can make a decisive difference.

President Bill Clinton publicly announced in a nationally televised address at the end of November how he intends to become a popular war president, Barnes pointed out at the SWP leadership meeting.

Clinton said that U.S. troops would be "heavily armed and thoroughly trained.... Anyone - anyone - who takes on our troops will suffer the consequences," Clinton stressed. "We will fight fire with fire, and then some." And then some, count on it.

Whether Washington's propaganda targets of the moment are "Islamic fundamentalists" in Bosnia, Serbians, or Croatians, Clinton's television message accurately stated the U.S. ruler's intentions: anyone who seeks to resist their domination will pay the consequences. And that will be the pretext for further steps to deepen the drive toward war.

Emulate the Cuban revolution

Speakers at the regional conferences explained that workers and youth who recognize the need to emulate the socialist revolution in Cuba are in the best position to organize effectively to fight the imperialist war drive against Yugoslavia. They understand that only in Cuba today are workers and farmers consciously organizing, guided by a communist leadership, to combat imperialist domination and defend their workers state.

Above all, as Thabo Ntweng pointed out in Boston, the most revolutionary-minded workers and youth in Cuba are proletarian internationalists. They remain committed to doing what they can, whenever the chance presents itself, to advance the struggle for national liberation and socialism around the world.

Ntweng pointed to an interview with Cuban brigadier general Harry Villegas that had recently appeared in the Militant. Villegas is a veteran of multiple internationalist aid missions to Angola between 1975 and 1990 - during which he took part in the historic defeat of South Africa's invading forces at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. That victory opened the road to the fall of the apartheid regime a few years later and the establishment of South Africa's first nonracial government under the leadership of the African National Congress. Using the nom de guerre "Pombo," Villegas had also fought under the command of Ernesto Che Guevara in the Rebel Army in Cuba in 1957-58, in the Congo in 1965, and then in the mountains of Bolivia in 1966 and 1967.

The Militant interviewers noted that with the onset of serious economic difficulties in Cuba over the last half decade, some Cubans began to express the view that the resources that went to help Angola would have been better utilized at home. They asked Villegas for his opinion.

"Cuba's aid to Angola was not only worthwhile," he replied, "but if we were capable of doing it again, we would do so."

It is that political consciousness and unflinching determination among a broad layer of Cuban working people and youth, Ntweng told conference participants, that means the revolution is still alive today and remains a weighty factor in any advance of the world class struggle.

"The Cuban working people have shown the only way to put an end to imperialist war - by taking power out of the hands of the capitalist war-makers," said Hoeppner in Detroit.

Hoeppner and other speakers at the regional gatherings urged participants to buy and read Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War - 1956-58. The first complete edition of the book in English will be available from Pathfinder in February. Some 150 advance orders of the book were purchased at the New Year's conferences.

Displays of photographs from the Episodes at each conference highlighted the main lesson of the book, and of the Cuban revolution itself: that in the course of organizing to transform political and social conditions along revolutionary lines, workers and farmers have the capacity to begin transforming themselves into disciplined and self-acting makers of history as well.

Workers resist bipartisan assault

By the time of the New Year's conferences, the initial sniping by many Republican politicians at Clinton administration policy was on the wane, and a bipartisan consensus was growing in support of the dispatch of U.S. troops to Yugoslavia.

At the same time, the Democratic administration and Republican majority in Congress were shadowboxing over the 1996 federal budget. Clinton, who pledged during his 1992 campaign to "end welfare as we know it," proclaimed himself the defender of working people, while pushing the entire framework of proposed assaults on health and other social benefits to the right.

In going after entitlements won by labor and the oppressed over decades of struggle, the keynote speakers explained, politicians in both parties are coarsening their rhetoric, aiming to push back attitudes of social solidarity among working people. By targeting immigrants and those they brand as "welfare cheats," the White House and congressional leadership embolden ultrarightists such as Patrick Buchanan. What's more, liberal commentators and spokespersons for the union bureaucracy are more openly embracing Buchanan's chauvinist claims that lowering trade barriers along the Rio Grande and Washington's "bailout of Mexico" are costing "American workers" their jobs.

The employers and their governments in the imperialist countries, however, have not been able to stanch resistance by working people to growing assaults on their rights and living standards. Speakers pointed to examples from the picket lines and mass protests in France, to the striking workers who stood up against union busting by Caterpillar; from unionists employed by Boeing who pushed back company efforts to begin gutting their medical benefits, to workers for Kmart in North Carolina who are fighting for a union contract. Conference participants also pointed to the young rebels fighting against the death penalty and to stop the execution of Mumia Abu- Jamal, as well as for women's equality and against attacks on the right to abortion.

In Detroit and Boston, workers who have been on strike for six months against the Detroit News and Free Press made presentations and set up tables with literature about their fight and to raise needed funds.

Both the capitalists and trade union officialdom have been misjudging the fighting mood of workers more and more often, Ntweng explained at the Boston conference. They are surprised when workers vote down contracts union officials thought they had "sold" to the membership. Union workers remain on the defensive when they enter into struggles, Ntweng said. And strikes often don't end in victories, since the union bureaucracy blocks the kind of class solidarity that is both possible and necessary.

What's most important right now about these skirmishes, Ntweng emphasized, is that workers keep on resisting. Strikes are less about this or that particular demand or grievance than they are about workers' assertion of their dignity as human beings, as producers. In face of repeated failures of the officialdom's class-collaborationist perspectives, workers are increasingly asserting in practice that "We are the union."

Many similar points apply to the Million Man March in October 1995.

"We must not ascribe the reasons for the large turnout for the march to its leadership, to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan," Barnes explained at the SWP National Committee meeting in December. "It simply underlined once against the overwhelmingly proletarian character of the oppressed Black nationality in this country, the centrality of the fight against white racism and for Black freedom in the coming American revolution, and the disproportionate weight workers from the Black nationality have in the political vanguard of the working class and labor movement."

Barnes pointed out that in the weeks leading up to the Million Man March, much of the big-business press and many bourgeois commentators, including right-wingers, began to make positive noises about the action. They lent some credence to the talk by Farrakhan and other leaders about its message of "family values" and "atonement."

"Blaming Black folks for their own problems - that seemed just fine to these reactionaries," Barnes said. "But then the march occurred, and they saw hundreds of thousands of Black workers on the streets of Washington. And suddenly all the `family values' and `self-blame' gibberish seemed beside the point. They saw a massive outpouring of Afro-Americans, a massive working-class mobilization. And their class instincts told them they hated what they saw."

Classes on the struggle for Black liberation in the United States were held at each of the four conferences.

Reports from France, Quebec

The talks "Reportback from Revolt in France and the Fight for Quebec Independence" were a highlight of the conferences. These were presented by members of the Communist League and Young Socialists in Canada who had recently been to France as part of communist sales teams: Al Cappe in Detroit, Carlos Catala'n in Boston, Guy Tremblay in Seattle, and Michel Prairie in Atlanta.

These reports provided vivid, firsthand accounts of the strikes and demonstrations by workers and students against the French government's austerity plan, including its assault on retirement plans for rail workers and other public employees. The talks described the political openness team members found to the communist ideas in Nouvelle Internationale. Selling that Marxist magazine was the axis of their activity in France.

At the Boston conference, Catala'n, a Young Socialist from Montreal, recounted discussions by team members with rail and factory workers; with young soldiers in France being mobilized to go to Bosnia; and with students and youth. He described prisoners waving to demonstrators from their cells in Paris as the workers marched by. He also described the efforts by the government in Paris to divide and disorient the working class and labor movement by whipping up an anti-immigrant campaign and French national chauvinism around questions ranging from trade policy to the war in Yugoslavia.

The talks in the four cities described the mobilizations in Quebec this fall in support of a "yes" vote in the referendum on Quebec sovereignty and the mass support among workers and youth of the oppressed Quebecois nation for independence from Canada. These mobilizations, the speakers explained, were the most important manifestation of the class struggle in North America in recent years. Their political thrust and character pointed beyond defensive struggles and limited demands, posing the question of state power.

The political scope of this upsurge in Quebec, said Prairie at the Atlanta conference, and the profoundly destabilizing challenge it posed to the imperialist state in Canada, underlined a political conquest of the modern communist movement. Wherever there are nations at this stage in history that are oppressed by imperialism and have a distinct geographical configuration, communist workers and youth are in favor of independence.

Dangerous men and women

Each of the conferences concluded with talks on "Building the Communist Movement Today: Recruiting Dangerous Men and Women." These presentations initiated discussion on the tasks before the communist movement, in light of the political questions discussed throughout the weekend. The talks were presented by SWP leaders James Harris in Atlanta, Angel Lariscy in Boston, Marti'n Koppel in Detroit, and Maggie Trowe in Seattle.

The description of fighters who can be won to the communist movement as "dangerous men and women" originated with a phrase used by veteran Black rights fighter Edna Griffin in explaining how it was that Mark Curtis, a socialist and union activist, came to be framed up and railroaded to prison seven years ago by Iowa authorities. Curtis was tried and convicted on false charges of attempted rape and burglary in 1988. Given the character of the charges leveled against him, some people asked, what could possibly be behind Curtis's insistence he had been framed? Why should anyone believe him?

At a defense rally just before the opening of Curtis's trial, Griffin presented her answer. The authorities who arrested Curtis, she pointed out, knew he was actively involved in struggles by working people in the Des Moines area, including right then in a fight to defend immigrant co-workers at the Swift packinghouse who were picked up in an immigration raid just days before his arrest. For the powers that be in Iowa, Griffin said, that made Mark Curtis a dangerous man.

Griffin's estimate was confirmed by what the cops told Curtis as they beat him bloody the night he was arrested. They called him a "Mexican lover, just like you love those coloreds."

In November 1995, after holding Curtis in prison well beyond the average time served in Iowa for the sexual assault charge on which he was convicted, state authorities granted him parole.

This was a victory that had been earned by Curtis and those around the world who had joined his defense effort and demanded his release over the past seven years. During that period, Iowa authorities failed in their efforts to break Curtis. He remained actively engaged in politics and continued to talk socialism and carry out political activity behind prison walls. This fall, state officials came to the conclusion they would pay too high a price to continue their prejudicial course of denying Curtis parole.

"Mark wasn't framed up because he or his party got too far out ahead of the rest of the working class," said Lariscy at the Boston conference. "He didn't make a tactical mistake or get involved in some adventure. No, he was part of a vanguard layer of young fighters who the rulers always go after. And they will do so as often as they can, as working-class resistance grows."

When Curtis walks out of the state penitentiary in Fort Madison in early 1996 and moves to Chicago, Lariscy said, he will keep on carrying out the communist political activity he never stopped doing in prison, only once again on much better terrain. He will be able to function as a member of a local unit of his party, begin looking for a unionized job, and help win other fighters much like himself to the communist movement.

As Barnes put it at the SWP leadership meeting earlier in December, "Mark will be the same person, doing the same things he was doing before he was framed and sent to prison." That was the one thing Curtis could promise his supporters on the eve of his trial: that regardless of the outcome, he'd keep on doing what he'd been doing. And he did.

New probe by antilabor group

SWP leaders at the regional conferences pointed out that Curtis's supporters must nonetheless remain vigilant to defend his rights. Reactionary "sexual offenders notification laws" have recently been stiffened in Illinois, as well as in many other cities and states across the United States. The December 18 arson attack on the Des Moines, Iowa, bookstore where the Mark Curtis Defense Committee organized many of its activities is a further indication of the kind of continuing attacks enemies of the workers movement will attempt to direct at Curtis and those who support his fight.

In this regard, both the opening and closing talks at the regional socialist conferences pointed to a renewed probe against the communist movement by an antilabor group known as the Workers League. This organization has been in the forefront of those campaigning to keep Mark Curtis in prison, and it has become known among packinghouse workers, coal miners, paper workers, and others in the union movement for its disruptive actions aimed at setting back working people engaged in strikes and other labor battles.

On December 6, just two weeks after Curtis's parole had been announced, an attorney for the Workers League, Daniel J. Kornstein, wrote to SWP national secretary Barnes that it had "come to the attention of our client...that Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, is publicizing meetings and other activities by the `Young Socialists.' " Kornstein continued that the Workers League had "established the Young Socialists (the `YS') as its youth organization in December 1971," and he demanded that the SWP "cease and desist from further use of the name `Young Socialists,' which serves to mislead and confuse the public."

Michael Krinsky, the SWP's attorney, replied to Kornstein on December 22. Krinsky wrote that he had reviewed the letter and found "your client's claim to be lacking for at least the following reasons:

Speakers at the conferences urged participants to purchase and read a new Education for Socialists bulletin entitled A New Probe by the Workers League against the Communist Movement: Record of an Antilabor Outfit, from the Gelfand Harassment Case to the Campaign against Mark Curtis. Altogether, 290 copies were sold over the New Year's weekend.

In addition to containing the correspondence quoted above, the bulletin reprints an article documenting this group's smear campaign launched in 1975 charging that the SWP leadership was controlled by double agents of U.S. spy agencies and Moscow's secret police. (Some 40 conference participants purchased copies of another Education for Socialists bulletin answering these smears, entitled Healy's Big Lie: The Slander Campaign against Joseph Hansen and George Novack.)

The new bulletin reprints several articles and editorials from the Militant summarizing the 10-year disruption campaign organized by the Workers League around a lawsuit filed by Alan Gelfand against the Socialist Workers Party and several SWP leaders in 1979. Gelfand petitioned the federal courts to directly intervene in the affairs of the SWP by throwing out the party's Political Committee, which he charged was FBI-dominated. This assault on the constitutional freedom of political association was aimed at tying up SWP leadership time and party financial resources.

At the close of the case in late 1989, Federal Judge Mariana Pfaelzer was forced to admit that Gelfand's case "is groundless and always was"; that the Workers League was "footing the bill for Mr. Gelfand's case"; that the court's rejection of repeated motions by the SWP's attorneys to dismiss the case had "drained the party treasury"; and that the pretrial depositions of SWP members and leaders were "abusive, harassing, and in large part [conducted] to generate material for political attacks on the SWP by the Workers League."

Nonetheless, the judge permitted this disruption effort to drag on for a decade.

At the SWP National Committee meeting in December, national secretary Barnes pointed out that the Workers League probe was not only this outfit's response to Mark Curtis's parole, but registered something more that class- conscious workers needed to keep their eyes on as well. Even initial stirrings of resistance by working people and youth, Barnes said, will be met by efforts on the part of government police agencies and antilabor groups of all kinds to drive a wedge between vanguard workers and youth and those in the communist movement who are fighting shoulder to shoulder alongside them.

Selling the books workers need

The talks on building the communist movement also reported the decisions of the SWP National Committee a few weeks earlier to respond to the political opportunities to sell more revolutionary books and pamphlets. The goal is to transform Pathfinder bookstores across the country and around the world into a springboard from which communist workers and youth can participate more effectively in political activity and attract fighters to the revolutionary movement. The report that was discussed and adopted by the party leadership body was presented by Mary- Alice Waters, who is also the editor of the new Pathfinder Press edition of Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

The books produced by the communist movement, Waters said, "are the accumulated lessons of 150 years of class- struggle experience by the modern working-class movement. They are a guide to forging revolutionary workers parties, made up of cadres who have the capacity and the audacity to organize working people to struggle to take power out of the hands of the exploiters, and the willingness to follow that struggle through to the end.

"Unless we start selling the books we produce much more widely, however," Waters said, "we won't be able to take advantage of the openings in front of us." The National Committee proposed a number of steps to reverse a several- year-long decline in sales and make it possible to continue producing, reprinting, and using these invaluable political weapons.

Speakers at the closing sessions of the New Year's conferences explained that the communist movement had launched a two-year effort to increase net revenues from sales of literature produced and distributed by Pathfinder Press, initially by $100,000 in 1996. That amounts to an increase in sales of some 1,500 books and pamphlets each month over the coming year.

Following the conferences, party leaders are traveling to each city where there is a branch of the SWP to discuss a battle plan to meet this goal. Only consistent work by communist workers and youth who know these books and why they are so important can result in the needed increase in sales - from Pathfinder bookstores in these cities, from the shelves of other retail outlets, at political events and campus and street-corner literature tables, and through expanding the membership of the Pathfinder Readers Club.

Sales of revolutionary books and pamphlets to co-workers on the job, at plant gates, and elsewhere is also at heart of the working-class campaign against the imperialist war drive. Among the books featured at the literature tables at each of the gatherings were The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions and The Truth about Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention.

During the discussion after the presentations on building the communist movement, socialist activists from Cleveland; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Newark, New Jersey, described trips they had made to military bases to sell the Militant and other socialist literature.

Mining communist continuity

At each conference, participants learned about a new way they and others will soon be able to have at their fingertips many of the most important articles and documents produced by the communist movement over the last 60 years.

This spring, every issue of the Marxist magazine of politics and theory produced by the communist movement in the United States over those years - currently under the name New International - will be available on several CD- ROM computer disks. A complete index of subjects and authors will also be available on the disk, and readers can get to the articles they look up in this index by a simple click of the button.

A computerized slideshow presented at each of the conferences reviewed a small sampling of the invaluable lessons communists have drawn over the decades in the pages of the magazine - lessons that are needed today more than ever, but have previously been available to only a very few.

An initial version of the CD-ROM, covering the years 1934-1956, was the most coveted prize in fund-raising raffles at each conference. The winners will receive the final product when it is available later this year.

Young Socialists conference

Members of the Young Socialists were involved in every aspect of the conferences. They presented several of the talks and classes and chaired many sessions. They organized mealtime get-togethers with young people to encourage further questions and discussion and set up tables to sign up participants for their upcoming Easter conference in Minneapolis.

Speaking at the closing conference session in Detroit, Marti'n Koppel, editor of Perspectiva Mundial, said that now is the time for communists to get out and talk to young people and working-class fighters who are looking for an alternative to the brutality, destructiveness, and insecurities of life under capitalism they see all around them.

"We should tell them," Koppel said, "that if you want to be like Mark Curtis, if you want to emulate those who made a socialist revolution in Cuba, then join the communist movement. It doesn't offer you money, a career, or a solution to your personal problems. But it offers you the only element of freedom available to a working person under capitalism - working-class politics and the opportunity to work alongside others, as political equals, in the fight for a socialist world."  
 
 
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