The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.45           December 14, 1998 
 
 
New Platesetter Will Reduce Labor, Facilitate Political Timeliness In Pathfinder Printshop  

BY STEVE CLARK
"Let the imperialists do what they will! They will never force Cuba to surrender and they cannot keep Latin America in submission indefinitely," said Cuban president Fidel Castro in a Dec. 21, 1989, speech, the day after the bloody U.S. government invasion of Panama.

Castro's speech is included in the pamphlet, Panama: The Truth about the U.S. Invasion, scheduled to be the first title reprinted using the Pathfinder printshop's new Agfa Galileo platesetter, which was delivered November 21. The pamphlet was originally edited and printed in just a few days over the New Year's weekend in 1990, as part of an emergency campaign by socialist workers and youth demanding "U.S. Hands Off Panama!"

Pathfinder's new state-of-the art equipment will now make it possible for the printshop to produce revolutionary pamphlets and books with an even more rapid turnaround - and with higher quality, less labor, and lower costs. Producing new Pathfinder titles and keeping in print its 350 existing publications necessitates a smaller printshop, one the communist movement is financially capable of sustaining.

"More than in hackneyed phrases of international law, more than in discredited international institutions, we believe in the peoples and in their courage," said Castro in the 1989 talk. "We believe in the ability of man to continue marching on the path of progress, on the path of independence, on the path of genuine freedom and dignity!"

Those same attitudes of proletarian consciousness and discipline are at the heart of the revolutionary transformation of producing Pathfinder books and pamphlets. Since the beginning of this year, some 140 volunteers in cities across North America and around the world have taken on the task of preparing Pathfinder's entire political arsenal of revolutionary books and pamphlets for reprint. They are scanning, proofreading, and formatting the text of each of these titles, and readying the covers and graphics for the presses as well.

The Panama pamphlet is one of the volunteers' most recent jobs. Over the past week, they also completed The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes and Che Guevara et la lutte pour le socialisme aujourd'hui (Che Guevara and the fight for socialism today), a French-language pamphlet by Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International.

From computer to plate
"What the volunteers send to us in the printshop is a CD-ROM with the entire book in electronic form, ready to go into production," explained David Rosenfeld, a press operator responsible for organizing to bring the new computer-to-plate equipment on line in December.

"Right now, we take that disk and go directly to film," he said. "That alone lets us bypass hours of work we used to spend just a few months ago on camera work and stripping up large flats by hand to make plates.

"But with the Galileo, we will eliminate film altogether, at another big savings in labor," he said. "We will go directly from the computer disk the volunteers send in to the printing plate we put on the presses."

Members and supporters of the communist movement from across the United States and Canada mobilized at the Pathfinder Building in New York City over the November 20-22 weekend, when the platesetter was delivered, to help build the environmentally controlled room where it is currently being installed. They also did renovation work and painting in the second-floor sales office and production areas of the shop. Since then, volunteers from Cleveland, Newark, New York, Syracuse, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have helped complete some of the unfinished tasks.

"During the Thanksgiving week and the week afterwards," Rosenfeld said, "technicians employed by Agfa, the manufacturer of the Galileo, have been working with us to get the platesetter up and running.

"From December 2 through December 4, we'll have a trainer in here for three solid days showing several of us not only how to operate the platesetting equipment itself, but also how to use the software package - called Apogee - that substantially reduces the skill level of going from computer to plate. Then the three of us will begin training others who work on the presses or in the bindery.

"Over the past two weeks," he added, "we've also decided on the proofing equipment we need so that Pathfinder and the shop's other customers can confidently review and sign off on the accuracy and quality of our work - before we make the plates." Among other reasons proofing is so important, he explained, is that production costs rapidly become unsustainable in the shop unless workers there can hold the remake of faulty plates to below 5 percent of all those produced.

"We're still quite a ways from reaching that necessary level right now," Rosenfeld said. "But doing so rapidly is a precondition for the survival of the printshop. Just like the effort we are now in the middle of, to reverse several months of a steep decline in sales of commercial printing we need to keep the shop a financially viable operation."

Capital Fund
The Galileo platesetter is a $350,000 piece of equipment. Since early October, supporters of the communist movement have contributed $215,000 to a capital fund to make possible the purchase of this machinery; $135,000 more is needed between now and the turn of the year to complete the payment.

Overall, the fund is seeking to raise $550,000 - not only to finance the platesetter, but also to pay off $200,000 in outstanding loans on the printshop's web press and two sheetfed presses. That will free the shop once and for all of the bankers' lien on equipment essential to the production of the Militant, the Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books and pamphlets.

Since the report in last week's Militant, contributors have swelled the fund by $13,000. Of that total, $2,800 was raised at a November 29 meeting in Detroit to honor the life and political contributions of Helene Millington, a member of the Socialist Workers Party for more than two decades who died in October at age 86. Other donations came from supporters in Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Altogether, $100,000 of the total raised so far has come from three individuals, with the remainder from some seventy contributions ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. Veterans of the communist movement for many years are joining with younger members and supporters in making this effort a success. Many have turned over employer bonuses in full to the capital fund. Other contributors have come into substantial amounts of capital as a result of bequests, accident settlements, or other windfalls.

Meetings are being organized in many cities to discuss how supporters of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists can help these organizations respond most effectively to the political openings before them as a result of an upturn in defensive struggles by workers and farmers in the United States and other imperialist countries. These events, and other aspects of the fund, are being organized by a committee of Nan Bailey (Seattle), Sam Manuel (Washington, D.C.), Dave Prince (New York), Norton Sandler (San Francisco), Maggie Trowe (Des Moines), and Jack Willey (Chicago). This week, Frank Forrestal (Pittsburgh) also joined the committee.

All of them will be in Los Angeles over the December 4-6 weekend for the socialist conference being held in conjunction with the third national Young Socialists convention there. This will be the next big opportunity to increase contributions to the fund.

To find out how you can make a contribution, write: Capital Fund Committee, 410 West Street, New York, NY 10014.

 
 
 
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