The Militant (logo) 
    Vol.64/No.15                 April 17, 2000 
 
 
Pathfinder sets new Spanish publishing plans  
 
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
Pathfinder Press is launching an effort to translate three new books into Spanish over the coming year, beginning with The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Participant by James P. Cannon. The other two are The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, also by Cannon, and Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs.

A team of volunteers from around the United States and other countries will be carrying out the work. Volunteers are needed now.

The first to be translated, The History of American Trotskyism, will be serialized month by month in Perspectiva Mundial. The book's preface, by Jack Barnes, has appeared in the new April issue of the Spanish-language socialist magazine.

Producing these books in Spanish will help meet a need that has become more and more pressing, as workers in the United States who have immigrated from Latin America get increasingly involved in the working-class resistance to the employers, government, and cops that is developing today. These political weapons are necessary to recruit and train a growing cadre of the communist movement, both in the United States and internationally, whose first language is Spanish. They help answer the question many radicalizing workers and youth ask communists: who are you and where do you come from?

All three are basic works that recount formative stages in the fight to build a communist party of workers in this country, an effort rooted in the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik party.

This expansion of Pathfinder's Spanish-language arsenal follows the lead of communist workers in Canada and elsewhere who are organizing volunteers to translate three basics of Marxism into French over the next year: The History of American Trotskyism, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, and In Defense of Marxism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.

The History of American Trotskyism comprises a series of 12 public talks that Cannon gave in 1942 in New York. One of the founding leaders of the Communist Party of the United States after the Russian Revolution, and subsequently of the Socialist Workers Party, Cannon recounts the effort to build a proletarian party here.

The firsthand account begins in 1928, when he and other cadres were expelled from the Communist Party for supporting the fight led by Trotsky to continue the communist course of V.I. Lenin. Cannon takes the story up to New Year's 1938, when the communist organization in the United States took the name Socialist Workers Party.

As Cannon states in his first talk, "Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International."

The Struggle for a Proletarian Party is a handbook on building a Leninist party. It documents an internal political struggle within the Socialist Workers Party, following the outbreak of World War II, to maintain a proletarian course against a petty-bourgeois minority that buckled under the imperialist war pressures and rapidly abandoned Marxism.

In Teamster Rebellion Dobbs tells the story of the 1934 Teamsters battles in Minneapolis waged by thousands of workers, who helped build a fighting industrial union movement in the Midwest. Dobbs, who emerged from the ranks as part of the class-struggle leadership of the strikes, was national secretary of the SWP from 1953 to 1972, and was four times the party's presidential candidate.

The book, part of a four-volume series on the Midwest Teamsters organizing drive in the 1930s, graphically illustrates the kind of proletarian party that is needed to lead a mass fight against the employers and their system, a fight that must ultimately take on the political power of the capitalist minority and replace it with a workers and farmers government.  
 
 
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