BY GREG McCARTAN
SAN FRANCISCO - "We are seeing an accelerated drive by
Washington to establish a nationalist and patriotic atmosphere
in the United States today," said Jack Barnes at a rally here
reporting on the decisions of the 40th Constitutional
Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, held here April 1-3.
Barnes is the party's national secretary.
President William Clinton is "continuing in the tradition begun with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s of liberal Democratic administrations taking the lead in war preparations." The assaults in the Balkans are carried out on the pretext of "saving the world from instability brought about by peoples referred to in racial or tribal terms," he said.
These war moves are "combined with the beginnings of a campaign to justify the armed forces taking on policing functions against working people at home," the SWP leader said. "The Clinton administration has proposed establishing, for the first time in peacetime, a North American military command, explicitly targeting domestic supporters of `terrorists' sponsored by `rogue states' around the world. They are carrying out military exercises in cities across the country, including right across the bay in Oakland - `Operation Urban Warrior.'
"They are determined to start taking back the space the working class has to practice politics." But in order to do so, Barnes said, "they have to take on and defeat the working class in the United States, which they will not be able to do without major class battles." The communist movement "doesn't promise victory. It offers each of us the opportunity to fight. It offers us the possibility to build the only kind of organization in which workers can open the road to transforming the world, and in the process transform ourselves."
The central focus of the three-day convention was recruiting to and building the Socialist Workers Party through deepening participation in the fight against imperialist war, and in the strikes, protests, and other actions of workers and farmers resisting the employers' offensive. Growing layers of workers, farmers, and youth are open to drawing socialist conclusions and joining a communist organization.
Convention delegates discussed and adopted three documents submitted to the party membership by the SWP National Committee. These were the preface to the new book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, by Jack Barnes; "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," the opening chapter of Capitalism's World Disorder; and the new preface to The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, first published in the Spanish-language translation of that book, El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos.
These documents were available to the party membership in an internal Discussion Bulletin. Discussions were organized in party branches on these and other documents. The three documents were also published in the Militant, and party branches organized a parallel preconvention discussion with a number of interested workers, farmers, and young socialists.
There were 42 delegates and 26 alternate delegates elected from branches and a state convention in Illinois. There were 47 fraternal delegates, including members of the National Committee, a delegation from the leadership of the Young Socialists, and from communist leagues in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Seventy of the delegates work in factories and mills and belong to industrial unions; 10 were members of the YS.
Delegates and guests left the convention on a footing to build broad participation in an active workers conference in Ohio, August 5-8. As members of the SWP and Young Socialists participate in struggles and carry out political campaigns over the next four months, they will be alert to the opportunities to bring as many fighting workers, farmers, and youth as possible with them to this summer gathering to exchange experiences, extend active solidarity, and discuss books and pamphlets recording the lessons of working-class struggles in many parts of the world and over many decades.
Election of National Committee
The convention elected a somewhat smaller leadership
committee, its National Committee, that included a number of
younger workers who are shouldering responsibilities in party
branches, in national industrial trade union fractions, and in
the printshop that produces the Militant and revolutionary
books and pamphlets.
The Young Socialists held a meeting of its National Committee, as well as a meeting for the substantial number of young workers and students in attendance.
Convention guests included workers and young people interested in joining the SWP or Young Socialists. Other unionists and farmers attended who have met party members in struggles and have come to see the convention decisions as having a bearing on what they do in the coming months.
The party also invited supporters from Utah who are helping socialist workers expand relations with coal miners in that part of the country.
Reports on convention resolutions
Nan Bailey, a party leader from Seattle, opened the
convention and welcomed guests to the meeting.
Convention reports included "Championing Our Expanding Support Movement and Turning Toward Recruitment," presented by Mary-Alice Waters; "Stand Up, Act, Fight, and be Counted: The Class-Struggle Vanguard in Formation," presented by Joel Britton; a political report by Jack Barnes; and "Continuity and Homogeneity: Building the World Communist Movement," presented by Michel Dubois.
In light of the escalating U.S.-led assault on Yugoslavia, delegates changed the agenda to include a report and discussion on "The Working-Class Response to Washington's Campaign to Dismember Yugoslavia," presented by Argiris Malapanis. The report explained why communists are campaigning in opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and in support of the fight for national self-determination by Albanians living in Kosova.
Nearly 400 people attended the convention, and for 37 people it was their first such gathering.
Convention delegates and guests belong to a number of unions, including 33 in the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE); 32 in the International Association of Machinists (IAM); 27 in the United Transportation Union (UTU); 26 in the United Steelworkers of America (USWA); 27 in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW); and 13 in the United Auto Workers (UAW).
The night before the convention, party members who are rail workers and members of the United Transportation Union held a national fraction meeting here in San Francisco. They discussed how rail workers can chart a fighting course in the midst of a campaign by the officialdoms of the UTU and Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers to win support for a union-weakening merger of the UTU and BLE.
Participants spanned generations of experience in the class struggle and communist movement. Sixteen were between the ages of 14 and 19; six had been in the communist movement for more than 45 years. Participation of revolutionary fighters abroad was notable, with 74 people from nine countries present.
Recruitment to the party
"The future of humanity depends on the development of a
communist leadership in the United States," said Mary-Alice
Waters at the opening of her report. "This is said with the
humility of revolutionary fighters who know we occupy only a
stretch of the trench, but a vital stretch. We know where the
capitalist class is headed, but we don't intend to let them get
there. They have to battle their way through workers, farmers,
and others fighting oppression and exploitation first."
Waters said that recruitment is the most practical challenge to building the SWP today. There are greater recruitment possibilities now than at any other time in the last 20 years to win new members to the SWP and Young Socialists, she said.
Party branches and fractions can begin to meet these opportunities by integrating themselves into the struggles by a growing vanguard of workers and farmers.
By shifting the center of gravity of weekly activity to participation in such mass work, Waters said, party members can transform their branches through recruitment.
The potential to recruit to the movement is directly connected with the explosion of support for the party, Waters said. Party supporters are "nudging the party, offering more and more to help, which has made a difference in alerting the party to the openings and seeing ways forward in our work we didn't think were possible before."
This has been especially crucial in the continued production of Pathfinder books, which contain the written legacy of the workers movement. Last year party supporters took the initiative to get every Pathfinder title in computer form.
"They have produced 25 titles so far," Waters reported, demonstrating one aspect of the "qualitative expansion in enthusiasm and initiative by party supporters."
Given the new growth in the number and breadth of work by supporters, "the active supporters formation of the party has been transcended, incorporated into something much greater as we work together to discover whatever will be the new forms," Waters said. A key challenge before the leadership of every branch is to work with the larger number of supporters on a consistent basis.
Selling `Capitalism's World Disorder'
Joel Britton opened his report pointing out that
Capitalism's World Disorder "is the book to be seen with among
co-workers and working people in struggle." Reading and
discussing the book will "help many vanguard workers stand up,
fight, and be counted," he said.
The stakes are getting higher in many fights today. They last longer and "have amazing staying power," he said. The new book from Pathfinder speaks to the experiences of workers and farmers in these struggles, helps deepen their education in class politics, and opens the door to other social and political struggles here and around the world.
Britton pointed to the USWA strikers at RMI Titanium in Niles, Ohio, "who have not been deterred or intimidated by the fact that U.S. marshals have been added to the local police force."
As these strikes go on, he said, a feature of the struggles becomes the "reinforcing of strikers meeting each other; of fighters from different struggles reaching out, determined not to let others go down to defeat."
At the strike by UAW members at Tazewell Machine Works in Pekin, Illinois, "management has denounced the UAW as being a communist and a Bolshevik union," Britton said. "Some workers want to find out what this is all about, and are checking out the Militant and Pathfinder books."
"The road to a successful active workers conference in August will be our deepening involvement, led by members of the trade union fractions and YS, in all strike solidarity and farmer protests and other social struggles," Britton said. "We do this with full knowledge that what we do can make a difference: helping fighters meet each other and organizing effective solidarity through our union fractions and branches.
"In the course of these struggles," Britton said, "we meet fighters who genuinely welcome the Militant newsweekly. And we have a powerful new weapon, Capitalism's World Disorder, that will be used by those in struggle today."
Class traditions
Michel Dubois presented a report on the preface to El rostro
cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos, which will be
added to the next printing of the Changing Face of U.S.
Politics. In order to forge a politically homogeneous cadre,
"all of us - no matter what our first language - need to use
same political language," he said.
Dubois reviewed what may seem like a number of questions of translation of terms from English into French and Spanish, such as `worker-bolshevik.' But in reality, as the preface notes, these are questions of "political culture, history, and habits of political thought - in other words, class traditions."
In the political report, summaries, and a presentation to the closing rally, Jack Barnes reported on a number of central questions posed in the documents before the convention. This included the assessment that the center of world politics today is shifting from capitalist Europe to the United States. Barnes pointed to the growing dependence of the imperialist ruling classes of Europe and Asia on U.S. imperialism as the engine of economic progress amid deflationary pressures throughout most of the capitalist world, as well as their dependence on the political wisdom and military capacity and competence of Washington. He pointed to the planned deployment of a U.S. theater missile defense system to surround China, opening the possibilities to threaten that workers state with a nuclear first strike.
U.S. imperialism is the last empire of the last period of the imperialist epoch, Barnes pointed out. No rising, junior imperialist power stands behind it to buffer the worldwide impact of its decline, as was the case with U.S. imperialism as the British Empire retreated earlier in this century. The stability of the international capitalist system is increasingly mortgaged to that of Wall Street and Washington.
Following up on Britton's report on the U.S. labor movement, Barnes pointed out that not only are many strikes lasting longer today, but the leading cadres in these battles remain on their two feet even in the face of stalemates or setbacks and begin to reach out to bring solidarity, and the lessons of their own fights, to other embattled workers and farmers.
Rather than internalizing frustration, more workers are starting to find ways to do something to fight back, he said. This change in mass psychology is the most important element in the sea change in working-class politics central to the documents before the convention.
Barnes reported what a USWA member at the Newport News, Virginia, shipyard had recently told supporters of the Militant from Washington, D.C. - "We'll be looking for you to be there when we go on strike" in early April. That kind of determination to reach out for support and solidarity "is the banner of the class-struggle vanguard in becoming in factories, mines, and mills," Barnes said. It is a vanguard that will also be open more and more to go to actions protesting police brutality and other social protests, as well as to other countries to link up with fellow workers and co-fighters.
Communists join unconditionally in these struggles, handling themselves in such a way as to help strengthen the fight through active solidarity and competent functioning on picket lines and other combat situations. Communist workers come to these fights not with tactical prescriptions and advice, but as co-fighters.
At the same time, as union battles and other fights continue, workers bump up against the limitations of trade union tactics and struggles, and seek to find ways, as Malcolm X once put it, to "broaden their scope." They begin looking for political solutions in the interests of workers and farmers. Recognition of the need to become part of a revolutionary working-class organization such as the SWP can't evolve out of those struggles, he said, but takes a leap in political consciousness. Under these conditions, the "value, weight, and importance of working-class tradition starts to increase" for fighters in order to gain a generalized understanding of the dynamics of world politics. More workers will pick up a book such as Capitalism's World Disorder and start working through it seriously, he said.
Barnes pointed to the conclusion of Farrell Dobbs - the central leader of the battles that transformed the Teamsters union in the upper Midwest in the 1930s into a fighting social movement, and who served as the national secretary of the SWP in the 1950s and 1960s - at the end of his four-book series on the Teamsters struggles. The final sentence of the "Afterword" to the last volume states: "As the Teamster story demonstrates, the principal lesson for labor militants to derive from [this] experience is not that, under an adverse relationship of forces, the workers can be overcome; but that, with proper leadership, they can overcome."
Being a worker-bolshevik is about who you are and who you can become, Barnes said. The October 1917 revolution in Russia produced a new type of person who saw themselves as a fighting part of an international class and a cadre party. Worker- bolsheviks became convinced in practice that we can do the opposite of what we're taught by teachers, preachers, and officials: we can forge a revolutionary army and together change the world. This, he said, is the road to building a disciplined party with a voluntary membership. A party of individual, imaginative, and self-acting cadre.
Protests against killing of Diallo
Paco Sánchez spoke about protests against the police
killing of Amadou Diallo. He pointed out how union members,
workers, and others who recognize that they too could be the
victims of racist police violence are joining the protests on a
regular basis.
Al Duncan said the fight against the cop killing of Diallo was bringing back to the fore the case of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant brutally tortured by New York City police. "Within this struggle," Duncan said, "we can find those who want to fight against every aspect of this system."
James Harris, a member of UNITE from Atlanta, described how the visit of two Cuban youth leaders to universities in the city helped lead the party to young people interested in socialism. The party branch there has been involved with farmers fighting for land and against the U.S. government's discriminatory practices against farmers who are Black. The two revolutionary youth met a number of these farmers and exchanged experiences with them.
After that meeting, one of the Georgia farmers proposed organizing another event to celebrate their new relationship with the SWP. Arlene Rubinstein, a member of the IAM in Atlanta, described the openings they have to advance recruitment to the movement, pointing to a recent crowded Militant Labor Forum on the farm struggle attended by farmers, workers, and youth.
Mike Fitzsimmons, a member of UNITE from Cleveland, described the ongoing strikes by unionists in Ohio. Getting involved in the upcoming April 24 rally in Newark, Ohio, called to support locked-out workers at Kaiser Aluminum, and the upcoming contract expiration of a USWA contract in Ravenswood, West Virginia, will be part of meeting workers who will want to attend the Active Workers Conference this summer, he said.
`I stood on my feet' in struggle
Frank Forrestal, a member of the UTU and the party's farm
work director, described a protest by farmers in Florida. As an
example of the fighting determination of the farmers, Forrestal
reported what one of them said of the proposed USDA settlement:
"If I don't get one penny at least I'll know I stood up on my
feet."
Party and YS members in Des Moines, Iowa, have been active in defending immigrant rights, reported Amanda Ulman, a packinghouse worker. In "Operation Vanguard," the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is subpoenaing personnel records of workers at packinghouses in the Midwest, often leading to firings of workers. Union members at her plant participated and helped lead the protest actions, she said.
Estelle DeBates, a garment worker from Seattle, described steps socialist workers in UNITE had taken to build a nationwide fraction that functions as communists in the union. "Communist workers," she said, "can set an example to co- workers of how to collectively take up issues and act as the union in becoming, rather than falling into the trap set by the bosses and the union officials to individually negotiate wages and working conditions."
"We have been doing quite a bit of work in Chicago to bring solidarity to picket lines," said Joshua Carroll, the party's recent candidate for mayor of Chicago and a member of the USWA. "We are helping to introduce fighting workers to each other," he said, "getting books such as Capitalism's World Disorder into the hands of some of them." Carroll and other party and YS members in the city have been part of the fight against the frame-up, conviction, and imprisonment of José Solís, a Puerto Rican independence fighter, on charges of "terrorism."
Taking up the importance of clear, scientific class language in the workers movement, Paul Pederson from Newark described how much he learned from a discussion in the pages of the Militant on the role of Stalinism in the disastrous outcome of the struggles of Indonesian working people in 1965. This, and the publication by Pathfinder of the booklet Maoism vs. Bolshevism, brought home to him the crucial importance for working-class leaders of having an accurate historical understanding of the lessons of the workers movement.
Greetings to the convention
Greetings to the convention were received from the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba; from the Central
Committee of the Workers Party of Korea; and from the Movement
of Landless Rural Workers in Brazil. The convention delegates
sent return greetings and messages of solidarity to each, as
well as to José Solís.
Workshops and classes on the main political questions before the convention were held for all convention participants. The workshops, well-attended and lively exchanges of experiences and politics, were: Branch Jobs Committees: Building Fractions of Worker-Bolsheviks; Branch and Fraction Sales Campaigns for Capitalism's World Disorder and the Militant as We Step Up Mass Work; and Leading the Expanding Support Movement for the SWP.
A banquet dinner followed by the rally and a party, open to all supporters of the communist movement, provided an enthusiastic political closing to the three days of discussion and debate. The rally featured Malapanis, Waters, Britton, and Barnes each providing a summary of the reports they presented and the decisions of the convention. Chaired by SWP leaders James Harris and Verónica Poses, it kicked off the campaign by party branches to sell Capitalism's World Disorder and launched a party-building fund drive that will last through June 15. The fund will finance the expanding work of the SWP in response to growing working-class resistance and wider geographic spread of the party's work. Some $47,500 was pledged by those in attendance amid chanting, foot-stomping, and clapping.
Special guests attending the rally were Cuban youth leaders Luis Ernesto Morejón and Itamys García Villar. The two brought greetings to the event from the leadership of the Union of Young Communists of Cuba and received a prolonged standing ovation. "It is an insult to human dignity," Morejón said in his greetings, that "in a world that has achieved the highest and most impressive levels of scientific and technical development there exists deep contrasts, such as the fact that 1.3 billion people live in the most abject poverty."
Pointing to the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution, Morejón said that "in spite of almost four decades of imperialist blockade, every Cuban child in every part of the country...is guaranteed their school, their teacher, their books, their ration cards, their indispensable food, a liter of milk every day, 13 vaccinations, systematic medical attention, and above all a lot of love in words and deeds."
At the concluding rally Barnes read from a poem by Linn Hamilton, a farmer from Pennsylvania who was among the invited guests at the convention. The poem, entitled "Working Class," was published in the Militant as the first in a series of brief reviews of Capitalism's World Disorder.
"The poem gets right at the central truth of the book," Barnes noted, when it says:
"The road to World War Three,
Lies through the ranks of you and me.
To start the War of the Century,
The bosses must move you and me."