Coming out of a January 22-23 National Committee leadership meeting here, several new SWP organizing committees are being established, including one in the Carolinas and another in Fresno, California. Socialist workers and Young Socialists are packing up and moving to reinforce the work of party units in coalfield communities in the Western and Eastern United States and centers of the meatpacking industry in the Midwest. Others are coming to New York City to work in Pathfinder's printshop, where books and pamphlets containing the legacy of the revolutionary workers movement are produced, as well as the Militant newsweekly and Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial.

Party members in New York, Newark, San Francisco, and Oakland are also discussing how to increase the number of branch units in each metropolitan area, organized to better orient their work to industries where socialists work, are active in trade unions, and from which they reach out to campuses and the countryside.

In the second half of the 1970s the party made a turn to get the big majority of its members into industrial union jobs. The aim of the projected moves in the New York area and Northern California, like those elsewhere in the country, is to advance what is called the party's "third campaign for the turn" since that time.

This campaign was launched by the party in mid-1998 in response to an upturn in resistance by working people in a number of urban and rural areas across the United States. Leading fighters of what can become, with larger struggles, a new proletarian movement have begun emerging in the coalfields, as well as among working people in city and countryside, most notably at first in sections of the U.S. Southeast.

Measurable progress has been made in renewing the activity of communist workers in the garment, meatpacking, and coal industries and related unions, as well as among working farmers and the rural poor. After a nearly decade-long retreat by labor, a road is being opened to strengthen the SWP's functioning as a proletarian party, lay the foundations of an increasingly competent Young Socialists movement, and demonstrate to supporters of the communist movement the immediate results of their work.

Meetings in Pittsburgh and Atlanta of socialist workers in the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) were held in early January, along with a meeting of socialists participating in the struggles of farmers.

National fraction meetings of those in the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), United Transportation Union (UTU), United Auto Workers (UAW), and International Association of Machinists (IAM) will take place February 5-6 in Los Angeles and Birmingham. Socialist workers will discuss how they can learn from the work of each of their members in those unions, as they find ways to advance the party's efforts to increase its presence among union and nonunion garment workers, packinghouse workers, and coal miners.

The Los Angeles and Birmingham meetings will discuss how to give a second wind in the opening months of this year to the campaign to sell Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, a book that presents the political views of the Socialist Workers Party as its members dealt with the complex and fast-moving changes in the international class struggle from the beginning of the 1990s to today. Since the publication of this book in March 1999, SWP members and Young Socialists have been organizing to get it into the hands of workers, farmers, and youth, including onto the shelves of retail stores and libraries where they go to find books. The recent release of the Spanish translation of the book creates new opportunities for this effort, as will advance orders for the French translation, to be published at the beginning of March.

The meetings will also launch an educational campaign—organized for youth and new acquaintances and political contacts of the communist movement—to read and study the book The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. That book offers the best available political explanation of the SWP's turn to industry and its strategic course to fight for the transformation of the unions into revolutionary instruments of struggle.  
 

'How deep the problem is'

SWP national secretary Jack Barnes opened the political report to the National Committee meeting by pointing to a letter he had read from a party leader in the Midwest. This worker, who is in the machinists union, wrote about a recent conversation with a Midwest farmer who is fighting to defend his land and is involved in the struggle against racist practices by the United States Department of Agriculture. The farmer was well along toward finishing Capitalism's World Disorder.

The letter reported that after reading the book, this farmer said he realized "he didn't understand before how deep the problem is. He is thinking about how he will tell other farmers the depth of the problem they face." He was thinking about how to explain it to others he works and fights alongside. And he was thinking about the implications—for action and organization—of the deep social crisis being prepared by the very "success" of U.S. capitalism.

Even fighters who've been through many struggles can nonetheless become frustrated over time, since it's impossible from any single experience, and as a lone individual, to come to a scientific understanding of the dynamics of the conflicting forces in class society.

"As each one of us remembers," Barnes said, "it is a great release to recognize there is a deeper problem than those directly bearing down on us and other working people. It's a great load off our shoulders to know it's possible for those we've been fighting together with to understand it and reach beyond a partial view to broader political conclusions—and thus lay the objective foundations for common proletarian organizational conclusions.

"When we meet other workers and farmers, it's liberating to know that they also face the same root problems, regardless of the variety of concrete forms." It's not just a matter of understanding, but a practical question of how to change those conditions.

"Whether we're farmers, or wage workers, or young people repelled by the brutalities of capitalism, we can come to the understanding that there is no way out of the crises produced by capitalism without turning toward the proletariat and its historic line of march, toward the alliance of the toiling classes that can make possible a massive social revolution in the United States and worldwide," the SWP leader said.

What a working farmer explained after reading Capitalism's World Disorder helps us see that the march of nearly 50,000 people in Columbia, South Carolina, on January 17 demanding removal of the slavocracy's battle flag—what became almost a century after the Civil War the racists' and rightists' banner of hatred against desegregation—from atop the statehouse, and the struggle of dockworkers in Charleston that erupted several days later, are not isolated events. They are aspects of a rise in resistance in recent years by UMWA miners and UAW-organized Caterpillar workers in the Midwest, agricultural workers in the lettuce and strawberry fields of California, and others.

Among working farmers, too, there are growing actions. On February 1, dairy farmers in five states—from Wisconsin to New York—organized rallies to protest collapsing prices from the distributors to whom they sell their milk. And a March 21 Rally for Rural America has been called for Washington, D.C., and is being widely publicized and built by working farmers.

These fights are a response by working people—sometimes completely unexpected in their size, or the sharpness of the conflict—to manifestations of oppression, brutality, and assaults on social justice by the propertied classes that have built up over time and become more and more intolerable.

A slowly growing number of individual working people come to recognize that no particular form of that oppression is itself the root of the problem. It is the capitalist system—born as the most productive, dynamic, and first global social system in human history, based on the exploitation of free labor, of wage slaves, and intensifying the cruel superexploitation of forms of bonded labor—that perpetuates the myriad forms of social oppression it inherits from previous periods of class society.

Those forms of oppression—that seek to pit men against women, to pit workers with white skin against the descendents of chattel slaves—are produced and reproduced by the lawful workings of capital.

Fascism, often portrayed by apologists for capitalism as an aberration, is in fact the inevitable product of a form of social relations whose ruling propertied families, in times of deepening crisis, resort to the organization of storm troopers to defend their power in face of revolutionary challenges by workers and farmers. From Austria, to Columbia, South Carolina, to Patrick Buchanan's web site, the seeds, slogans, and symbols of such reactionary movements can be seen.  
 

A weakening system

U.S. imperialism, despite its enormous wealth, paper billionaires, and military might, Barnes said, "is a weakening system, not a strengthening system" today.

That's why a number of prominent bourgeois figures—from conservative Republican federal judge Richard Posner, to Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan—reacted so strongly to the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton last year. They are concerned about the growth of factionalism and its destabilizing, "disuniting," consequences for their class.

"Do not doubt that [impeachment] could bring radical instability to American government," Moynihan warned on the Senate floor. And Posner, in a recent book on the impeachment, "concludes that the country is much more fragile than we might hope," emphasizes a New York Times reviewer.

This is different from the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s, Barnes explained, when President Richard Nixon was forced to resign from office. There, the impeachment proceedings became part of the ruling-class effort to clean up the disarray coming out of Washington's defeat in Vietnam. They reestablished the credibility of the imperial presidency for a time, and launched the initial assaults on the working class with the first tremors of the world capitalist crisis in 1974-75.

In assessing our class enemy, Barnes said, it is important for the workers movement to note a historic break from the relatively stable patterns and civil tone of bourgeois politics since the consolidation of U.S. imperialism as the dominant world capitalist power coming out of World War II.

A bipartisan foreign policy was hammered out during the postwar Democratic administration of Harry Truman, and consensus was established within U.S. ruling circles that the tone and outward civility of relations between and within the two bourgeois parties should be kept within bounds.

Foreign policy initiative was the prerogative of the White House, with the president speaking for the interests of the wealthy U.S. rulers; disputes were largely kept behind closed doors. Both the Democratic and Republican party majorities differentiated themselves before the electorate largely over domestic policy.

This was a sign of the relative strength of U.S. imperialism for several decades. Now, each move made by one wing of the capitalist rulers against another, as they seek to do what they think is needed to advance their class interests, weakens them as a ruling class.

Well before the Clinton impeachment crisis, the SWP leader pointed out, the communist movement began calling attention to the increasing coarseness and "pornographication" of bourgeois politics in the rhetoric of the incipient fascist demagogue Patrick Buchanan and bonapartist figures such as Ross Perot, as well as within the two major parties themselves. That tendency has accelerated and spread.

The wealthy families who run the United States, and the Democratic and Republican politicians who represent them, more openly and harshly conflict with each other over foreign policy today. As a recent example, Barnes pointed to statements by a range of capitalist politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, taking their distance from, and often stridently condemning, the announcement by the Clinton administration of its intention to return Elián González to his father in Cuba.

The SWP leader also noted the denunciatory speech by Sen. Jesse Helms before the United Nations Security Council. Organizing a senior U.S. senator to give a speech before an international body so sharply divergent from official administration policy—and so insulting to every other government represented there—"would have been unthinkable during the Truman or subsequent administrations," Barnes said.  
 

Confederate battle flag

The recent debate over whether the battle flag of the Confederate army should fly over the South Carolina statehouse was intended to be kept within ruling circles. But other class forces got involved, reflecting the sharpening political polarization in the United States and growing resistance of working people in that region.

Some 6,000 rightists had marched in a racist rally in Columbia on January 8, and that same week two leading Republican presidential candidates made statements about the "stars and bars" that bent sharply to its reactionary defenders. All this was resoundedly answered on January 17 by an outpouring of nearly 50,000 marchers, drowning in numbers alone the rightist rally, demanding that the flag be taken down and that the state recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday.

The dispute is not over conflicting assessments of the Civil War, Barnes said. The Confederate battle flag was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s as a banner of reaction by defenders of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement. It was the standard of the racist foes of the mass proletarian movement for Black civil rights that first swept the South and then spread across the United States.

At the Columbia march a number of demonstrators carried homemade signs portraying the battle flag with an equal sign next to a noose, a whip, and a burning cross—symbolic of the mass lynch terror used to impose and consolidate Jim Crow over the decades following defeat of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction in 1877.

The action in Columbia "signals a new level of class combat rising in the South and elsewhere in this country," Barnes stated. Working-class forces "scored even a tactical victory with the size of the march alone. It announced a beginning of the effort to smash a counterrevolution against the historic conquests of the civil rights movement, and the unionization gains and expansion of social security that accompanied it."  
 

'Fear of freedom'

By and large, such tactical victories for working people are still infrequent. What's new is that out of such fights today—including those that conclude in stalemates and defeats—there are numbers of vanguard workers who emerge not beaten down or embittered, but who keep reaching out for other working people in struggle; who want to get to know each other and each other's fights; and who are open to broader political perspectives, especially those that have the courage and clarity of the radical analysis presented by communist workers and youth. Militants are hungry for books such as Capitalism's World Disorder; they want to consider these ideas, and discuss them with others they meet in struggle.

These kinds of fights are spreading, Barnes said. Communist workers need to become more timely in joining in these struggles and catching up to their broader implications. Socialists can present a working-class explanation of social conflicts that helps fighters unravel the political rationalizations for exploitation and oppression by rightist and other bourgeois politicians. They need to maximize their striking power. And they can recruit to the communist movement, especially to its youth organization.

Given these openings, the main current practical obstacle before socialist workers is "the fear of freedom," Barnes said. "It is now more possible than anytime for almost two decades to organize the party—where we have units, on our jobs, how every one of the party's institutions functions—through mass work. But if we cling to the methods of functioning that have willy-nilly become habitual, almost casual, over nearly a decade of retreat by our class, we'll fail."

In the speeches collected in Pathfinder Press's just released Che Guevara Talks to Young People, the Argentine-born revolutionary explains how a leadership capable of organizing workers and peasants to make a revolution was built in Cuba in the 1950s. The Rebel Army had to gauge their moves and use their time effectively. They learned from the peasants, won their political confidence, and in turn convinced vanguard fighters they could defeat the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista—defeat its army—guns in hand.

The leadership of the Rebel Army cadres knew what the forces of the military dictatorship were up to, and what their own forces could accomplish at a given place and time with their limited stock of arms and ammunition.

Through disciplined work and careful planning, they grew in their capacity to carry out attacks and advance their political goals without unnecessarily wasting the energies and lives of their cadre.

"In the end," Barnes said, "this made the difference between there being a mighty socialist revolution in Cuba, or just a rumor some guys had been fighting up in the hills in the '50s but had probably been wiped out."

The possibility to fight more effectively is now opening for communist workers in the United States as well, and the party must get the most out of every move it makes.

Communists can win a wider hearing for our explanation that the biggest lie of all by the bosses is when they speak of "we"—"we" in this company, "we" Americans, versus "they" in a competing company, or in another country. But the only "we" are the exploited and oppressed here and around the world—working people, small farmers, youth. "They" are the superrich minority who profit from and defend the capitalist system.  
 

The assault on science

In times of mounting social crisis, Barnes said, the rulers seek to blunt rising class consciousness, among other ways, by promoting religious and other antiscientific notions that fetishize existing class relations and obfuscate an understanding of the development of human society and the modern class struggle.

The teleological attack on Darwinian evolution is moving from the fringes on the right wing into the pages of established bourgeois magazines from within the ranks of its "supporters." Popular physics promotes notions that everything in the universe since the Big Bang has had a purpose: the emergence of human life.

Whatever form the mystification takes, the goal is the same: to drum into working people and youth that things act on us, rather than being the makers of our own destiny; that we are the objects, not the subjects of history. Since everything ends up with us, with human beings, we are told, there must be a plan; there must be a creator to whose goals we should submit.

The later it becomes in the evolution of capitalist society and the rise of fighting proletarian movements, the more damaging are the political consequences of such religious and obscurantist ideas. The more they keep reemerging to underpin not only rightist and fascist movements, but imperialist conservatism itself.

But the Church and church institutions as pillars of bourgeois society are much weaker today than it has ever been. Barnes called attention to the recent difficulties of the Catholic Church hierarchy in recruiting young women to be nuns. The median age of nuns in the United States, one order reports, is now 68.

Communist workers hold ourselves to the same standard as we do fellow working people: how we conduct ourselves in the class struggle. We don't campaign around or lecture fighters about religious views they may hold. But we recognize that anything that obscures an objective understanding of the laws of class society is the bitter enemy of the proletariat's ability to organize itself on a mass scale, forge a communist party, and make a revolution.

Barnes concluded that Farrell Dobbs, for two decades the national secretary of the SWP, presented the real alternative to reliance on faith in the dedication to Teamster Rebellion, the first book in Dobbs's four-volume series on the strikes and organizing drives that helped pave the way for the industrial union movement in the Upper Midwest in the 1930s; as a battle-tested cadre of General Drivers Local 574 in Minneapolis, Dobbs became a central leader of those campaigns.

As working people go through battles together as part of a fighting social movement such as that, their attitudes toward each other, and what they are capable of, are profoundly transformed. Barnes quoted Dobbs's dedication: "To the men and women who gave me unshakable confidence in the working class, the rank and file of General Drivers Local 574."  
 

North American command

The U.S. rulers are accelerating their moves to use their military might, and strategic nuclear power, to defend their class interests around the world.

Just in the past month, Barnes noted, the U.S. government put into place a North American command of the U.S. armed forces, a proposal floated by the Clinton administration more than a year ago. To deflect attention from the fact that for the first time a command structure is openly being established to conduct military operations against residents of the United States, the Pentagon adopted what the New York Times called "a less evocative phrase"—the Joint Task Force Civil Support.

But this new "task force" will be able to call on nearly all military units based in the United States, as well as the FBI and other police agencies, to combat whatever the rulers, at any given time, choose to label "terrorism" on U.S. soil.

Rationalizing its course on grounds of "terrorist threats" by so-called "rogue" nations and groups, the Clinton administration is simultaneously pushing forward to test and lay the groundwork to deploy an antiballistic missile shield that will strengthen Washington's nuclear first-strike capacity. Here, the Democratic White House has made progress where the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations were temporarily stymied.

Barnes also pointed to recent Central Intelligence Agency claims that the government of Iran is now capable of developing a nuclear bomb.

"This 'revelation' will also be used to justify closer scrutiny of Iranians and others from the Middle East living in the United States," Barnes said. Just as Washington, whipping up a scare campaign around spying by the government of China, has framed up a physicist of Taiwanese birth living and working in the Southwest.

"Each of these steps aims to restrict political space for working people in order to justify curtailment of democratic rights," Barnes said. The rulers also aim to slow down the tendency of politicizing workers to see themselves more and more as citizens of the world—to reach out to working people in other countries, to travel and get to know them, to invite them to come here and meet with fellow militants.

Barnes cited growing efforts to get people in this country to accept longer waits and more intrusions in order just to get on an airplane. "They try to wear you down to accept dogs and cops being brought on the plane, or being herded down the jetway back to the concourse, to investigate 'terrorist threats'. And they try to get airport workers to accept dogs and cops on the ramps and by the cargo bins."

Washington is preparing to hold more and more of the world hostage militarily—through operations such as its unrelenting air assaults against Iraq, and its wars and military occupations in Bosnia and Kosova. But the U.S. rulers are operating under a great illusion—the great hope, in reality—that they can wage the wars necessary to defend their class interests without beginning to face the reality of body bags coming home.

Meanwhile, nationalist right-wingers such as Patrick Buchanan press a different course to reassert U.S. imperialism's world military power. The way will be cleared for more effective military action abroad, Buchanan says, when "America" is strong at home—that is, when more devastating blows have first been dealt to labor and its toiling allies.

Discounting a very brief, eight-month recession in 1990-91, U.S. capitalism has been in a period of expansion for some 18 years. But it has been a weak expansion, with a low rate of growth, particularly in the 1990s.

A striking feature of the U.S. capitalist economy, Barnes said, is the fact that a substantial percentage of the profits of major U.S. corporations—sometimes "to an alarming extent," in the words of a recent article in the Financial Times of London—comes not from sales of goods and services, but from increased paper values of stock held by their financial departments. Two-thirds of Microsoft's latest 30 percent increase in earnings, for example, was accounted for by its stock holdings in other companies. And when Microsoft (or other major U.S. corporations) buys up another company, the stock of that business usually shoots up, increasing the paper profits of Microsoft.

The speculative tendency dramatized by the 1994-95 default on municipal bonds by Orange County in California—pouring revenues into a ballooning bubble of debt and other paper values—is becoming a fact of internal dynamics for more and more large U.S. corporations.

Investors Business Daily recently sounded an alarm on the takeover of Time Warner by America Online. AOL was valued at $156 billion on the stock market, the financial daily pointed out, but its real assets were only a small fraction of that. AOL put up its own stock as payment for the deal announced January 10, but its share prices then dropped by nearly 20 percent over the next three weeks.

All these tendencies can be held off for a time, but not without a new period of rapid growth—something denied imperialism without massive new assaults on working people. In fact, what puts its stamp on U.S. capitalism today—and a terrible squeeze on wage workers and independent commodity producers such as farmers and fishermen—is the low rate of growth of production, the low rate of expansion of industrial capacity.

The U.S. economy right now is marked not by deflation, Barnes said, but by a low-grade inflation, a slow rise in the general price level. This can change sharply, however, when the giant asset bubble bursts, resulting in a banking crisis, plunging industrial production, and a deflationary collapse of employment.

Small farmers and other independent commodity producers face ruin because they can't recover their costs, since they operate under monopoly pricing conditions at both ends of the production process. They are gouged for seed, fertilizer, fuel, grain, and other inputs, and then must sell the products of their labor at below production costs to giant capitalist distributors.

Trading terms only shift to their favor in a period of a strong, long-term cyclical upturn in the world capitalist economy—conditions that have eluded small farmers for the better part of a decade.

The social relations perpetuated by capitalism continually push working farmers toward the proletarian condition—owning free and clear neither the land they work nor the equipment they use, existing as debt slaves at the sufferance of the banks and lending institutions. With only a slow expansion, the edge farmers may get one year is taken away through devastating price swings—as well as the longer-term encroachment of forms of monopoly-dominated "contract farming" in the countryside—the next.

The SWP National Committee also discussed the rebellion by workers, peasants, and indigenous people in Ecuador that had peaked in the wee hours of the morning before the NC meeting opened.

In Quito, the capital city, and in Guayaquil, the largest port and industrial center, labor organizations, peasant groups, neighborhood organizations, soldiers, and students came together and declared a popular government—a "Parliament of the People." Their actions demonstrated the tendency toward "soviets"—popular councils—inherent in any deep mass uprising.  
 

'Emerging' markets?

Barnes said that the social explosion in Ecuador, where production had been contracting for several years, should be a reminder that it's inaccurate to say there's no economic development in the so-called developing nations of the semicolonial world. The degree of development is sharply different from one Third World country to the next, and among continents and regions as well. But in some of these countries—Iran, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and elsewhere—there is extensive industrial and commercial development.

Moreover, this capitalist development brings with it all the social inequities, brutalities, and dislocations that are inherent to that dog-eat-dog system—and superimposes them, as a necessary means of its own perpetuation, on the various concrete forms of precapitalist oppression that mark each of these nations.

While some "developing countries" are developing, however, no "emerging market"—not a single country anywhere in semicolonial Asia, Africa, or Latin America—has emerged as an imperialist power. By the closing years of the 19th century, the workings of capitalist exploitation had divided the world into two great camps: a handful of oppressor nations in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia and the Pacific, and the oppressed nations encompassing the great majority of humanity and land mass of the earth. That division remains intact and unchanged to this day.

"The absence of a single exception is a stunning confirmation," Barnes said, "of the assessment made by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin some 85 years ago in his pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

But if there were no capitalist development in the semicolonial world, then the proletarian forces and other toilers we see coming together in struggle in countries such as Ecuador would be far weaker—and revolutionary prospects would be few and much less likely of success. In fact, however, a modern working class and tendencies to cooperation among toilers "develops" simultaneously.

As it did a century or more earlier in other parts of the world, capitalism is producing its own gravediggers in these countries—a growing urban proletariat, with its allied wage and debt slaves (and often substantial remnants of bonded labor) on the land.  
 

Rights and gains under fire

Barnes pointed to the lines along which the federal and state governments continue to push against the hard-won democratic rights and social gains of working people.

Growing numbers are incarcerated each year—1.8 million in local, state, and federal jails and prisons in 1999, up from around a quarter million only 20 years earlier. More and more states are putting children and teenagers on trial as adults, and many more Black and Latino youth than those who are white—twice as many in some states—face this situation. Prison authorities are making widespread use of lockdowns in a heinous attempt to break the spirit, to warp the souls, of thousands. Inmates are being hired out more as cheap labor to corporations.

In face of such measures, Barnes said it's good to be reminded of the rebellion by inmates at New York's Attica state prison in 1971. He was referring to recent media coverage of a proposed settlement with inmates beaten and wounded in the government assault, during which more than 30 prisoners were killed.

"We can again see the working people who are the subjects of revolution, not just objects of brutality," Barnes said. "We can see the scope of the fighting alliance of workers and farmers that will be forged in revolutionary struggle to uproot this final, brutal class system from the face of the earth."

Ever-expanding government-organized gambling is pervasive, Barnes pointed out. It not only constitutes the most regressive form of taxation on working people, but signals the broad rot of bourgeois norms and the desperation of layers of the population.

The rulers are slowly but surely chopping away at democratic rights through a series of Supreme Court rulings based on the protection of "states' rights." A recent example is the court's decision to review whether or not individual states are bound by federal protections of the rights of handicapped people.

Far from being a sign of strength of the U.S. ruling class and their government institutions, such assaults add to their fragility.

During the 1996 debate on the Clinton administration bill to "end welfare as we know it"—adopted that year with broad bipartisan support—Democratic Senator Moynihan cautioned that the law "is not 'welfare reform,' it is 'welfare repeal.' It is the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930s....

"This legislation breaks the social contract of the 1930s. We would care for the elderly, the unemployed, the dependent children. Drop the latter," he warned, "watch the others fall."

Referring to the legislative provision cutting off welfare recipients altogether after five years, Moynihan said millions now faced falling off a "five-year cliff."

Even during what the U.S. rulers celebrate as the longest economic expansion in history, Barnes said, the official poverty rate never once dropped below 12 percent after 1982, as it had in previous upturns. Until the last few years of the 1990s, real wages were still lower for the average worker in the United States than they had been in 1973, and the income of the bottom 20 percent of wage earners fell by 6 percent over the past 20 years. Most workers are on the job for longer hours, and face speedup and much more dangerous conditions.

So, what will happen in the event of a sharp downturn in the capitalist business cycle? What will be the social and political consequences for the stability of the capitalist system? Those are the questions—there's not even a twinge of human solidarity—that sometimes cause the Moynihans to break out in a cold sweat.  
 

Fighters reach out

The lines of resistance among working people that communist workers are following today are a product of the workings of capitalism itself. This resistance is not yet generalized among proletarian layers in either city or countryside across the United States, but fights continue to spread.

The large mobilization in Columbia, South Carolina, and then the dockworkers struggle in Charleston a few days later, seemed to many class-conscious workers in other parts of the country to come out of nowhere; they seemed unexpected. But not because such eruptions are exceptional or anomalous in themselves; they aren't. The fact that other working people, in other parts of the country, are taken by surprise is the product of the still undeveloped connections among vanguard militants of a social movement just beginning to find its legs.

Experience over the past year confirms that the numbers of fighters who, whatever the outcome of their own immediate struggles, want to continue fighting and reaching out to others will grow.

Time is running a little faster right now. Tendencies to fight are real, but run ahead of communication and organization. This has always been the case at an early stage in the rise of renewed working-class resistance.

The party needs to structure itself to be best able to respond in a timely way to the opportunities and obligations to struggle and discuss together with workers, farmers, and youth, and draw them toward the communist movement. It needs to help the Young Socialists become the kind of organization able to attract militants and recruit them to a revolutionary youth organization. During a retreat, when there are fewer such opportunities, a revolutionary party can also more easily withstand missing some of them, so long as it doesn't lose its communist program. "But when a shift in the class struggle makes it possible for the party to begin transforming itself and becoming blood and bone of a proletarian movement, elements of which are moving forward and toward each other, it can't recover if it lets the opportunities slip through its hands." Other currents in the workers movement will reach in, recruit, and become an obstacle to the influence of revolutionary workers and youth.

Today, the members of every SWP branch and branch organizing committee can help begin a revolution in the habits of functioning of the party, in order to become more deeply integrated in the growing layers of vanguard fighters in the country.

Every union fraction and party unit can help bring the third campaign for the turn toward a successful conclusion—increasing the numbers of sewing-machine operators in the party and strengthening their presence in UNITE; expanding the numbers of packinghouse workers and the party's activity in the UFCW; rebuilding a UMWA fraction through getting more socialist workers into coal mining jobs; and deepening the party's involvement in struggles by proletarian layers in the countryside. Along this course, collaboration with the Young Socialists to help it recruit on the campuses, in high schools, and in the factories will also be a measure of our success.

In the process, such work will more and more become the norm for party units, and the proletarian character of our activity, and of our habits of response and organization, will be reinforced.

At the weekend meeting, the SWP National Committee—along with invited participants from a number of party branches and branch organizing committees, and a leadership delegation from the Young Socialists National Executive Committee—discussed the next steps to expand the numbers and the effectiveness of the contributions by supporters of the party, as well as to work with the Young Socialists as an independent organization through centralized channels established by each organization.

To accomplish this, relations within the basic units of the party—the branches—must change. During the retreat of the past decade, branch executive committees—described in the party's constitution as bodies "elected by the membership of the branch" and "subordinate to" it—more and more in practice became the "highest body" of the unit. They often failed to function as bodies whose responsibility it was to help the membership carry out branch meeting decisions through a structure of other branch committees, institutions, and assignments—to organize sales of the communist press; to maintain a bookstore and a stock of revolutionary literature to take out to street corners, campuses, and political activity; to organize party finances; to plan a weekly program of public political forums; and so on.  
 

Continuity of union fractions

Just prior to the National Committee meeting, Barnes wrote a letter to the elected leadership committee of socialists who work in coal mines, who had held their first meeting in Pittsburgh two weeks earlier. Among other proposals, Barnes suggested they change their name from "coal miners fraction" to the United Mine Workers fraction.

At the time, all eight socialists working in coal mines were in nonunion situations. Nonetheless, Barnes said, we must always keep to the forefront "the continuity of the union fraction in mining the communist party has been working to build since our founding in this country following the victory of the October Revolution and the formation of the Communist International.

"That union orientation," he wrote, "determines the political character of the work and strategic orientation of the worker-bolsheviks who make up the fraction, regardless of how many comrades at a given time have been able to achieve our goal of getting UMWA jobs.

"As you know," Barnes added, "we face comparable situations given our progress in the UNITE and UFCW national fractions, even if the numbers and balance of comrades in union and nonunion jobs is currently different in each of the three."

Barnes also underlined the importance of the party's national Trade Union Committee (TUC) giving top priority to systematic work with the elected steering committees of the industrial union fractions. This is the only help the TUC can give the fractions in organizing as centralized national structures to carry out party policy through the channels of the industrial unions in which they function. Previously, the TUC was tending to work with the steering committee organizers on an episodic basis, rather than systematically with the steering committees as a whole.

"The corruption of reducing the Trade Union Committee's relation to the fraction steering committees to its relation to the organizers of the steering committees," Barnes wrote, "is similar to the relinquishing of the branch's powers and responsibilities to the branch executive committee. It results from the same cause—the retreat. It heads in the same direction—'streamlined' petty-bourgeois administration, replacing 'cumbersome' political centralization.

"And it involves the same trade-off," Barnes concluded. "The branch membership and the steering committee relinquish powers and are relieved of responsibilities; they establish a silent, if occasionally sullen, codependency."  
 

Start with the party

As the party reorganizes its structure and extends its geographic spread to respond to struggles by workers in various industries and regions of the country, the size of the median party branch is becoming smaller. There is a convergence between the activity of more established party units in major cities, and the branch organizing committees of fewer than five members. The organizing committees can more easily see their own future ways of functioning—after they've recruited a couple of workers and youth—in the weekly rhythm of activity of party branches that now more often today have seven, 10, or perhaps a few more members.

As this process develops, many branches are discussing moving to smaller headquarters, more fitted to their current political needs and financial resources. In beginning to look for new facilities, Barnes said, it's important for each branch member to ask: "What kind of headquarters should we have, as the unit in this city of a centralized nationwide party, the Socialist Workers Party? How can we put the needs of the party, not one of its local units, first?"

Always begin with politics, with the class struggle, Barnes said. Think politically. Start with the party. That's the best guide to determining the criteria for what kind of headquarters and bookstore any branch currently needs and can afford.

The party's hall must be a launching pad for political work, a place where party members, Young Socialists, and contacts can come back after a sale or demonstration to discuss what happened and make plans for the next activities. A place where books and pamphlets are sold; where public forums are held; where working people and youth can have a cup of coffee, and sometimes even a meal, over a relaxed political discussion.  
 

Working with party supporters

The number of organized party supporters has increased over the past two years, Barnes pointed out, and the potential to expand those numbers remains. Most important, the party's National Committee reaffirmed at the meeting, the leverage of the contribution these supporters can make to the communist movement is greatest when they are organized to advance national party priorities and needs, not to make up somehow for the stretch of a local unit.

That's why the two central activities of party supporters are participating in the Pathfinder Reprint Project—in which some 150 volunteers are converting all of Pathfinder's books and pamphlets into digital form, so they can be kept in print and made more attractive and readable, in a more cost-effective manner—and organizing regular monthly financial contributions to the party.

The National Committee reiterated that every unit of the party should organize regular, basically monthly, meetings with supporters to initiate political discussion on what the party is doing nationally and how their efforts are helping to advance this work. Less than half of party branches reported they had been regularly holding such meetings with supporters.

The National Committee also proposed that branches give favorable consideration to inviting to the next supporters meeting anyone who a member of the branch believes should be drawn into this work. Branches should be working to involve more supporters as volunteers in the reprint project, and to maintain and expand the regular monthly financial pledges.  
 

Expanding political arsenal

The effort by the reprint project volunteers is part of the ongoing production by Pathfinder of new books and pamphlets for use by communist workers and youth in their daily political work.

As the SWP National Committee was meeting in late January, three new books were in the final stages of production. The Spanish translation of Capitalism's World Disorder—El desorden mundial del capitalismo—has just been printed, making this book available to those in the United States and throughout the Americas whose first language is Spanish.

In addition, Che Guevara Talks to Young People is now off the presses—the first time Pathfinder has virtually simultaneously produced a book in English and Spanish. And a new edition of Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces has been released, with a new preface by Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida.

All of these titles, plus the new year 2000 Pathfinder catalog, will be featured at the Pathfinder booth at the February 9-15 Havana Book Fair, an international event held in Cuba every two years. There will be special book launchings during the fair of the Spanish and English editions of Che Guevara Talks to Young People and Making History.

Casa Editora Abril, a Cuban publishing house associated with the Union of Young Communists, cooperated with Pathfinder in compiling the speeches published in Che Guevara Talks to Young People and will participate in the launching at the book fair. The Spanish edition of Making History was published by the Cuban publisher Editora Política, which will join in the book fair event for that title.  
 

Recruiting young socialists

Several participants in the January meeting of the SWP National Committee stressed the importance of party branches working with the Young Socialists in their area—whether there is a functioning YS chapter, or just one or two YS members—as a national organization that shares the party's proletarian political perspectives but is a separate organization. Formal relations between the two organizations, through their structures on a national and local level, is decisive, if the party is to help the Young Socialists recruit to its own ranks and develop cadre for the communist movement.

"There is only one reason," Barnes said, "to build a fighting proletarian political organization: that is to lead a mighty revolution to take power from the hands of the capitalist exploiters.

"That is reason enough to join the Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party."  
 
 
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