The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.38           November 3, 1997 
 
 
'Our Task Is To Organize And Fight Now'
Chicago conference celebrates 1917 Russian revolution and Che Guevara  

BY NAOMI CRAINE
CHICAGO - More than 100 people turned out here October 18 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara's combat in Bolivia. The Saturday afternoon educational conference on "The Coming American Revolution" featured talks by Mary-Alice Waters, the president of Pathfinder Press, and Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. It was also a celebration of the books published by Pathfinder Press, and a benefit for the $125,000 Pathfinder Fund.

The meeting was sponsored by the Pathfinder bookstores in Chicago and Des Moines, Iowa, and by the Young Socialists. It was cochaired by YS leader Verónica Poses and Joe Swanson, a member of the United Auto Workers from Des Moines. The event was held at Decima Musa restaurant in the mostly Mexican community of Pilsen.

Several participants learned about the celebration at political activities in Chicago over the previous 10 days. These included an October 8 demonstration of 200 people, most of them young, against the U.S. embargo on Cuba, as well as an action in defense of immigrant rights held here October 12, which drew more than 800 people from around the region.

Trade unionists and students from throughout the Midwest and as far as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama, attended the celebration. Two packinghouse workers from Perry, Iowa, were attending their first socialist conference. Bob Peters, a veteran of the 1994 - 95 Bridgestone/Firestone strike, also attended from Iowa. Now a member of the Communications Workers of America, Peters said he wanted to hear the speakers after reading issue no. 10 of New International, which includes "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War" by Jack Barnes and "Defending Cuba, Defending Cuba's Socialist Revolution" by Mary-Alice Waters.

Melissa Kaplan, 22, came with a carload from Birmingham, Alabama. She has been active in the fight for women's rights on campus. Kaplan said the conference gave her a "broader perspective and a more clear picture of what the party stands for."

Hiryu Abdu, a student who came to the meeting from Evansville, Indiana, said he gained respect for the Cuban revolution from his experiences in Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution in that country. He said, "I first made contact with Cubans in Ethiopia, who helped both militarily and medically in the war" to push back the 1978 invasion by the government of Somalia, which was instigated by Washington.

Paul Cornish, 23, is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) who recently joined the Young Socialists in Atlanta. He was in Chicago for a meeting of socialist workers who are members of UNITE, which coincided with the educational conference.

Che and the imperialist reality
The first speaker was Mary-Alice Waters, who had just returned from a three-week reporting trip to Cuba. While there she spoke on "Che Guevara and the Imperialist Reality" at a conference on Guevara sponsored by Tricontinental magazine. Waters also attended a conference on the legacy of the Argentine-born revolutionary at the University of Havana, and reported for the Militant on the fifth congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. Immediately after the event in Chicago, she and Barnes left for Havana to attend an international workshop commemorating Guevara, titled "Socialism Towards the 21st Century."

Waters opened her remarks by pointing to how U.S. president William Clinton was greeted by workers when he arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the previous day. In what is a tradition among working people throughout Latin America, he was met by thousands of demonstrators carrying a huge banner that read "Fuera Clinton" (Clinton go home). He got a similar reception on earlier stops in Venezuela and Brazil.

"The world in which Che Guevara was born and fought, the imperialist reality that made him a communist, remains the same," Waters said. Nothing fundamental has changed since the Cuban revolutionary war in 1956-58 and the combat led by Guevara in Bolivia 10 years later. As the protests in Latin America showed, the gap continues to widen between the wealth of a tiny minority and the declining living and job conditions of the toiling majority.

The world imperialist system is relatively weaker and more vulnerable today than it was 30 years ago, Waters said. This was a point of contention at the Havana conference on Guevara's legacy where she spoke in September. Some participants argued that imperialism is stronger than ever. The course carried out by Che and the Cuban leadership in the 1960s to advance the fight against U.S. imperialist domination and for socialism is no longer possible in today's world, these conference participants argued.

That is the opposite of the lesson being drawn in Cuba during the events this month to inter the remains of Guevara and several of his co-combatants, which were unearthed in Bolivia earlier this year. The big-business press, Waters said, falsely portrays these events as hero worship. Meanwhile, many of these same voices in the capitalist media express dismay at the "hard line" of the October 8 - 10 congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, where delegates held a broad-ranging discussion on how to move forward today on a socialist course.

In fact, Waters said, the commemorations this month were a solemn celebration and affirmation by millions of working people in Cuba of what Guevara and his fellow combatants had fought for - their internationalism and conviction that the fight for socialism is the only road forward for humanity. That was the message of the Cuban party congress as well, she said.

Importance of Bolshevik revolution
The October 1917 revolution led by the Bolshevik party in Russia was the most important event in this century, said Jack Barnes in his talk. It was the first practical example that the working class can take power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and open the struggle for socialism.

The most important outcome of the October revolution was that a new kind of professional revolutionist - the worker- bolshevik - was forged in the process. The Bolsheviks built the first party in history whose membership and leadership were composed in their big majority of worker-bolsheviks. Ever since, Barnes said, that has been the kind of party communists the world over have worked to emulate.

Celebrating the 80th anniversary of the October revolution and 30th anniversary of Che's combat in Bolivia, are part of celebrating the coming American revolution, Barnes said. The example of the victorious workers and farmers in Russia and Cuba poses the possibility and necessity of revolutions elsewhere in the world. Revolutionists in the United States - the world's mightiest and most brutal imperialist power - have a special obligation in that regard.

There are fewer obstacles today than at any time since the mid-1920s for fighting workers and youth to find the road to revolution instead of the road of accommodation with imperialism carried out by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union in the years after Lenin's death.

Barnes pointed to the essential place of books for communist workers and youth in applying the continuity of revolutionary struggle, and the greater political leverage of those books in today's world. Che Guevara, like other communist leaders, continually organized to read and study with others. Joe Swanson appealed to those present to contribute to the $125,000 Pathfinder fund. Participants gave more than $1,500 at the meeting itself, and pledged an additional $1,000. Many also took advantage of the literature sale there to stock up. Sales included six copies of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics - Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, as well as four Militant subscriptions.

Imperialism is more vulnerable
Barnes noted that the imperialist system is more vulnerable to shocks and explosive breakdowns today. The economic crisis in Mexico at the end of 1994 is a harbinger of what is coming, he said. Who benefited from the "recovery" in Mexico trumpeted by the Clinton administration? Not the Mexican workers and peasants, who are worse off today. And Mexican banks and industries are being bought up by U.S. and other imperialist interests.

An even larger economic disaster is unfolding in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries of Southeast Asia, Barnes said. Wall Street forced massive, unsustainable loans on the capitalists in these countries, and now the local and foreign exploiters are attempting to make working people pay the consequences.

The imperialist regimes themselves are in the midst of a deflationary crisis. In Japan economic growth remains stagnant. Unemployment is at double-digit highs throughout much of Europe. In Germany the economic gap is widening between west and east, as social conditions for all workers slide. In the United States, the economic upturn of the mid- 1990s has been the weakest since World War II.

There is no way for the capitalist rulers to resolve the crisis they face short of battles with the working class. The Teamsters strike at UPS in August and the beginnings of labor resistance to the bosses' austerity drives across Europe are important signs of class battles to come, Barnes noted. He pointed to a few examples of the reactionary ways the employing class tries to prepare the ground politically for such conflicts, including stepping up executions and the use of subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Semitism.

An indication of the kinds of forces the bosses will try to unleash against the working class could be seen in the recent strike by workers at Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, who were fighting to push back the two-tier wage scale that had been imposed on them. Workers on the picket lines described how outraged middle-class commuters yelled abuse and threw things at the strikers. Those attending the Chicago conference were given copies of a letter Barnes had received from a trade unionist in the Bay Area during the strike. The letter described the "calculated hysteria of the ruling-class-orchestrated campaign against these unionists and the petty-bourgeois venom that accompanied it. The mass psychology of fascism reared its head an inch above the sand." It noted the "similarities between the emotive wellsprings of anti - BART-worker venom and pro-Lady Di hysteria."

Task is to organize, prepare, and fight
In closing his talk, Barnes referred to greetings sent on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee to the recent congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, copies of which were available to participants. The party congress and Guevara commemorations in Cuba not only remind "us all of the course that Fidel has fought for from the beginning," the message said, but also foreshadow "the battles that will decide the fate of the 21st century.

"New generations of revolutionary toilers - including those inside the most brutal and mighty imperialist power in history, the United States of America - will draw strength from the example of these heroic fighters and the lessons we have learned from the men and women who made the Cuban revolution possible and changed the course of history in our time.

"The reality that will mark the century on whose threshold we stand is that of the growing historic weakness of U.S. imperialism - faced as it is around the world with ever increasing numbers of gravediggers of its own creation, and diminishing political barriers to unity in struggle amongst them.

"As that truth breaks through the surface of imperialist wealth and arrogance," the message said, the example of the combatants in Bolivia and Cuba "and of the worker-bolsheviks who established and defended the first socialist victory in our century will be emulated.

"Our task is to organize, prepare, and fight - now."

Tom Alter, member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1149, and Amanda Ulman, member of United Auto Workers Local 270, from Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this article.

 
 
 
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