"We mark the progress the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists have made, as we organize, structure, and transform the institutions of growing numbers of branches of the communist movement through participating more effectively in the resistance of working people. Out of these experiences, both the SWP and YS are becoming more proletarian, more disciplined, and better fighting organizations.

"Today," Barnes continued, "we also celebrate a very important aspect of this process of proletarianization--the expanding work of Pathfinder Press, registered in the political interest Pathfinder books met with at the Havana International Book Fair. It is one example of how the books meet a need felt by fighting workers, farmers, and youth here and around the world. They know they have to change the world."

The March 26 meeting here was one of three held last month, each of them billed as a "Reportback from Havana Book Fair: Building the Communist Movement." Two hundred people attended the March 5 event in New York, and more than 100 took part in San Francisco on March 12.

The meetings featured major presentations by SWP leaders Mary-Alice Waters and Jack Barnes. Waters, who is president of Pathfinder Press, reported for the Militant and worked with a team of Pathfinder supporters who represented the publishing house at the Havana Book Fair. Barnes, the party's national secretary, is the author of Capitalism's World Disorder and the Changing Face of U.S. Politics, two books whose content was central to the meetings.

Young Socialists leader Samantha Kern and Linda Jenness, a party supporter who is a volunteer in the Pathfinder Reprint Project, also spoke. Both had been part of the international team of socialist workers and youth who brought with them to Havana their experiences as participants in the resistance of working people in a number of countries. Other members of this international team were on the platform at one or another of the meetings, along with Pathfinder's Spanish-, French-, and Farsi-language editors, and organizers of the party's Capital Fund effort.  
 

Working-class resistance

The political streams that converged at the meetings flowed out of the working-class resistance and broader protest actions taking place on the front lines of the class struggle in every region of the United States. This stepped-up pace of resistance was apparent over the three weeks in March that spanned the meetings. In actions from Tallahassee, Florida, to Mansfield, Ohio, to Tillery, North Carolina, and Bronx, New York, tens of thousands of toilers responded to the bankers' and bosses' drive to try to grind more profits out of the labor of working people in town and country, and to weaken hard-won political gains.

Workers and youth in Chicago, for example, drove in fresh from a 4,000-strong demonstration in Mansfield of steelworkers and their supporters to back the fight of locked-out workers at AK Steel. Others had just returned from the March 21 Rally for Rural America in Washington, D.C., or local actions by farmers facing ruin as falling commodity prices leave them increasingly vulnerable to the squeeze by the banks and competition from giant corporations. The road warriors set up an impromptu photo display of those actions at the entrance of the meeting.

Socialists from Miami and elsewhere in the Southeast who came to the New York meeting were deeply involved in building protests defending affirmative action in Florida and headed straight from that gathering to the March 7 mobilization in Tallahassee, the state capital, to march with other youth or in union contingents.

Several participants in the New York event had just returned from Cuba as part of a farmers delegation, and many others in attendance had organized meetings and fund-raising activities to make the trip possible. Participants from New York City itself were involved in the labor struggles spreading throughout the city, as well as in the increasingly explosive protests against police brutality that have marked the class struggle in the five boroughs.

Leading up to the San Francisco gathering, socialists on the West Coast had walked the picket lines with US Airways workers. Members of the new SWP branch organizing committee and Young Socialists unit in Fresno had joined with dairy farmers discussing how to combat the collapse in prices they receive from big processors and distributors. Socialists had joined young people campaigning against attacks on democratic rights advanced in the guise of the "Youth Crime Initiative" in the state.

Barnes noted that for the first time in many years, the Pathfinder supporters and party and YS members who participated in the book fair in Cuba this year did so at the same time that socialists were working in coal mines and building a fraction in the United Mine Workers of America in coal regions around the United States.

First-hand knowledge of the harsh conditions on the job and the resistance of coal miners--knowledge made possible by the work of branches of the party and YS chapters functioning in mining areas--had an impact on the three meetings, as well as on the work of the team at the book fair.

The attendance by so many workers and young fighters set the tone of the celebrations, which was both serious and hospitable. The participation of a sizable number of veteran working-class political activists who are Black was an additional expression of the growing resistance and polarization that mark the class struggle in the United States today, and of the increased political attraction to a communist party.

Organizers of the three meetings prepared displays featuring current union struggles, farmers actions, and other protests. Photos showed socialists selling and promoting Pathfinder titles and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial across the country at picket lines and demonstrations, at plant gates and campuses, and in working-class communities.  
 

Structuring a workers party

Members of virtually every branch of the SWP and every chapter of the Young Socialists participated in the three meetings, as well as a number of socialist workers and youth from Canada.

Many of those present--both of younger and older generations--took the opportunity to "catch up" with each other. Over the previous eight months--and in an accelerated way over the last five--the SWP had established seven new branches and branch organizing committees. Many longtime socialist workers, along with YS members, have picked up and moved in recent months. Barnes noted that the number was nearing 50 since the fall of 1999.

These moves are expanding the geographic reach of the communist movement and integrating the party more fully along the initial lines of resistance by vanguard militants among workers and farmers. There are now party units in more localities and smaller cities--distant from major metropolitan areas--that are centers of basic industries, and that are and will be the scene of struggles by working people against the bosses' profit-driven intensification of labor, lengthening of the workday, and assault against other conditions on and off the job. These regions are also an arena of political struggles--often called "culture wars" today--as the capitalist social crisis accelerates class polarization.

The meeting in New York celebrated the first steps to establish three new branches in the city and a fourth in Newark, in order to advance building fractions of socialists in the garment and meatpacking industries especially, and to win recruits to the communist movement among workers there.

SWP and YS members had also moved out of New York City to help set up a branch organizing committee in Charlotte, North Carolina, a center of the textile industry in the South, and to reinforce the work of branches in Miami, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. In California, the party and YS are stronger following the move by several members to Fresno to continue their work and to organize a branch and YS chapter in that big agricultural and industrial center. Several other socialists were on their way from the Bay Area to Detroit and Pittsburgh.

As part of these recent advances, Young Socialists have taken new steps to build a communist youth organization along a proletarian course, joining in struggles of workers and farmers and political protest actions and debates among students and other young people. The participation of a strong component of youth interested in the socialist movement--who listened intently to the presentations, joined informal discussion, purchased large quantities of books on special sale, and often left to march the next day or two at a working-class protest somewhere--marked the three gatherings.

New members joined the Young Socialists as a result of the work at the each of the meetings. "This week the Young Socialists took in five new members, and four more have asked to join," YS leader Samantha Kern announced at the Chicago meeting.

Workers who had met party members on the job also participated in the gatherings in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.

Each event included a very substantial buffet and refreshments prepared by party supporters, creating a relaxed atmosphere that encouraged informal discussion before and after the meeting. At each celebration, local Young Socialists chapters aggressively, but good-naturedly, organized fund-raising raffles, as well.

At the end of March, four socialist workers were on their way to the print shop in New York that produces Pathfinder books and pamphlets, as well as the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and New International. The New York meeting itself was infused with the energy and step-by-step accomplishments of the print shop workers in increasing their political organization, productivity, and ability to keep the legacy of the working-class movement contained in Pathfinder titles in print.

Members and supporters of the party alike are engaged in an international effort to keep these publications available to a growing number of workers who use them as tools to advance the fight. In the process, the entire communist movement is internalizing an understanding of the important political leverage revolutionary-minded workers gain from having a production apparatus that can turn out the books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines working people the world over are looking for and need--that they have to have--as they come into sharpening conflict with the exploiting classes.

The concentration of party supporters at each meeting reflected their growing numbers nationwide and their more effective organized involvement in the work to make possible the production of Pathfinder books. The pace of new supporters volunteering for the Pathfinder Reprint Project picked up markedly between the New York and Chicago meetings.  
 

Secondhand books a big hit

Alongside the tables offering a wide range of full-priced Pathfinder books, a special sale of secondhand and shopworn titles was held at all three meetings. Many young people took ample advantage of this opportunity. A number of workers who traveled to participate in the meetings also stocked up on these titles.

At the New York meeting, a big part of the stock came from a library accumulated by the former New York branch. That sale was such a success that the Young Socialists organized similar efforts at the San Francisco and Chicago events, loading tables with books donated by supporters of the socialist movement, as well as SWP branches, which culled duplicates from their libraries.

Especially large and valuable contributions came from the personal libraries of Paul Montauk and Helene Millington, two longtime cadres of the SWP who died in recent years. Another sizable donation came from Jeanne Lawrence, a party supporter in Chicago.

These special sales were such a success that by the end of the last of the three meetings, it was clear they will become an organized feature of major events of the communist movement from now on--with party supporters across the country culling their libraries for old printings, duplicates, and other political titles to contribute to the effort.

For between 50 cents and $2 a book, young people were able to give their personal libraries of working-class titles a priceless jump start. Works by the founders of the modern communist movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and by Russian revolutionary leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky were snapped up. Titles by James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs, leaders of the Socialist Workers Party for many decades, were also very popular.

Improving on the sales in New York and San Francisco, where many young people struggled with armloads of books as they walked away from the tables, the Young Socialists in Chicago provided shopping bags and cartons for customers, which participants took advantage of to increase their purchases.

Adam Larsen, a high school student from Des Moines, Iowa, filled up a large cardboard box with the secondhand books he paid $40 for in Chicago. "Worth about $300" without the price cuts, he said.

Fidel Maldonado, who came with a co-worker from a meatpacking plant in Minnesota, proudly displayed the Spanish-language books he had purchased. They ranged from La evolución de la mujer (Woman's Evolution) by Evelyn Reed, to Socialismo y el hombre en Cuba by Che Guevara, to La Guerra Social en Chicago by the nineteenth-century leader of the fight for Cuban national independence, José Martí.

Maldonado had been a farmer in his native Mexico before coming to the United States. While working as an agricultural laborer near Homestead, Florida, a number of years ago, he bought a copy of the Spanish-language socialist monthly Perspectiva Mundial from a member of a socialist sales team. He met the party again when he moved to the Midwest, and starting reading some Pathfinder titles. Before then, he said, he had never come across political books "worth the trouble to read."  
 

Pathfinder at Havana Book Fair

"I salute everyone here who was behind the success of the Pathfinder team at the Havana Book Fair," said Barnes, at the Chicago meeting after he was introduced by Luis Rivera, a leader of the Young Socialists in the city. Barnes chaired the meetings in all three cities.

A record 200,000 people converged on the historic San Carlos de la Cabaña fortress on the Havana harbor for this now annual book fair. Working people who participated responded to Pathfinder's titles with keen interest. Pathfinder's catalog of more than 350 titles contains writings and speeches that generalize the lessons of struggles of the modern working-class movement over the last century and a half.

Barnes listed the team that represented Pathfinder at the fair, with team members coming from Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Barnes noted the involvement of Young Socialists members from four countries, whose participation strengthened the entire effort.

Samantha Kern, the organizer of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists, was the first speaker at each of the three meetings. "Today the YS is celebrating the political changes in working-class politics, and advances by the communist movement, that have made it possible for us to move our national office from San Francisco to New York City," Kern told the Chicago gathering.

This step both registers and is part of a recent political strengthening of the party in the New York area, Kern said. The four new branches in New York and northern New Jersey are converging in action, as well as in size and structure, with other party units across the country, putting themselves on a political footing to respond to the rise in working-class struggles there. As a result, having its national office in New York increases the ability of the Young Socialists leadership to draw on the experiences of YS members in that city as part of the organization's National Executive Committee.

Kern and NEC member Jason Alessio moved from San Francisco to New York to help establish the new YS office. The third member of the former NEC has moved to Fresno to help build the new party branch and YS chapter there.

The new National Executive Committee in New York includes a worker in the garment industry, a college freshman, two workers in the Pathfinder print shop, and Kern, who currently functions full-time as a leader of the YS.

Kern remarked on the nonstop political discussions she was a part of during the Havana book fair. "It was inspiring to see the interest in these books among new generations of revolutionaries in Cuba," she said.

The liberating impact of reading the communist legacy is often a lasting one. A Cuban student leader told Kern he had met members of the Young Socialists in France during a wave of student and labor mobilizations there in 1996. Like him, the YS members were invited guests at a congress of the Movement of Young Communists in France. A Young Socialist who is today a coal miner introduced him to the monthly Perspectiva Mundial, Kern said, and "he has been an avid reader of the magazine and Pathfinder ever since."

After the fair, team members visited schools and factories both in and outside Havana, finding the same intense interest in the books and the activities of communists in the United States and other imperialist countries. Kern reported that at a teachers college in Havana, a class of English-language students "planned to start a Pathfinder Readers Club--a weekly discussion group based on Pathfinder books."

"This year," reported Kern, "the Young Socialists will join others from the United States and delegations from countries throughout the Americas to the Twelfth Congress of the Latin America and Caribbean Students Continental Organization, to be held in Havana April 1--5. [See article page 1.] A number of people we met at the fair ordered books for Young Socialists members to bring, including George Novack's Democracy and Revolution, Malcolm X Speaks, and The Leninist Strategy of Party Building by Joseph Hansen."

"The newly published Che Guevara Talks to Young People will be a central part of the discussion at the congress, and will be available to all participants," she said.

Three months ago the Pathfinder Reprint Project involved 135 supporters of the communist movement, said Jack Barnes in introducing Linda Jenness, a volunteer in that effort. With encouragement by socialist workers, almost 60 more have volunteered since then. "We will be over 200 soon!" said Barnes.

As one example, just two months earlier only three party supporters in Chicago had been Pathfinder reprint project volunteers. At a meeting in late January, the party's National Committee launched a campaign to expand the numbers of party supporters and to encourage more of them to sign up as reprint project volunteers. Today in Chicago there are some 15 volunteers for the project.

Working closely with the leadership of the party, a handful of SWP supporters initiated the project a little over two years ago. It involves a major effort to keep Pathfinder's entire list of books and pamphlets in print and available to militants, using digital technology that allows each book to be produced at substantially lower costs.

The volunteers take each Pathfinder book and pamphlet and convert it into digital files. Each title requires hundreds of hours of labor--from scanning, to proofreading, to formatting, to indexing, to graphic design. Once that work is done, the files can be rapidly and more economically turned into books by the Pathfinder print shop, using a computer-to-plate printing process.

The supporters of the communist movement "are simply transforming our ability to produce the political weapons" that these books represent, said Barnes. From the moment the reprint project began, the question was posed: "Can the print shop keep up with them?" A sizable backlog of titles waiting to be printed has built up in recent months. Now the print shop leadership has prepared a schedule of dedicated press and bindery time to produce three books a week for the next five months. The assigned schedule was displayed on a table in the meeting hall--a very popular table.

The shop workers hit their marks in March. At the Chicago meeting, Barnes picked up, one by one, the eight books that had been printed since the meeting in New York just three weeks earlier--Capitalism's World Disorder in French; two titles by James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party; a new edition of Che Guevara Speaks, with much-improved and more complete translations, and Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs (both featuring striking new covers); The Politics of Chicano Liberation; Black Music, White Business by Frank Kofsky; and Malcolm X Talks to Young People. In addition, the shop also reprinted several Education for Socialists bulletins.

In the same period, the print shop workers put through a near record $350,000 in non-Pathfinder printing work that is crucial to maintaining the shop and its ability to produce books workers and farmers need.

At the Chicago meeting, several volunteers staffed an informational table on the reprint project, where they signed up new participants and demonstrated the computer database through which the work is organized.

"Participating in the Havana Book Fair as part of an international team was truly an inspiration," said Linda Jenness, who traveled to Cuba as a reporter for newspapers in Chicago.

Pathfinder has been present at every biannual fair in Havana since the second one in 1986, she said. "Many who have seen our stand at previous fairs came looking for our table and looking for us. Having visited once, people came back for more discussions. People sat in our stall and read what they couldn't afford to buy."

One young woman seized on Problems of Women's Liberation, and Woman's Evolution, two titles by Evelyn Reed. She was studying the question of the origin of women's oppression. Some of her classmates had told her that she must be a "frustrated woman" to pick that topic for her thesis.

"'I am a frustrated woman,"' she told Jenness. "'I'm frustrated because until I came across your booth I couldn't find materialist books on this subject!'" She was overjoyed to find Pathfinder's rich arsenal of titles that began meeting her needs.

"We were not outsiders," said Jenness of the volunteers who staffed the Pathfinder booth. Amid the swirling political discussions around the Pathfinder stall, she said, "I felt at home. But I was also struck by a sobering thought. What if 70 percent of Pathfinder titles were not there? Think of the scope, the breadth of what we would have been missing!

"The Pathfinder Reprint Project is crucial. But the only way to increase its momentum is to get more volunteers." During her visit to Cuba Jenness worked with two volunteer proofreaders in Havana who are part of the project.

Jenness said the respect Pathfinder's titles have gained in Cuba, and the close working relationship it has built up with publishers and other comrades there, is founded on the publishing house's record of "complete integrity and honesty."

She also urged Militant readers to continue to contribute generously to the Books for Cuba fund that helps finance Pathfinder book donations to libraries and other institutions there.  
 

Che Guevara and criterion of quality

"'To produce with quality signifies respect for the people,'" said Mary-Alice Waters in her feature presentation, citing one of the banners of the Ministry of Industry in the early years of the Cuban revolutionary government, when that ministry was headed by Ernesto Che Guevara. "And Che was famous for another thing he insisted on, that 'beauty is not something at odds with the revolution,'" she added.

A commander of the Rebel Army in the fight against the Batista dictatorship, Guevara took on important governmental posts after the triumph in 1959, and helped to define the socialist and internationalist course of the revolution in his speeches, writings, and actions.

"Quality and beauty are class questions," said Waters. They were important to Che because a socialist revolution fundamentally is concerned with the "quality of life for--and generated by--working people." Che debated those who thought that production tallies were everything, and that concern for the quality of consumer products was a capitalist vice. Such an ultraleft condition was known in Cuba as the "measles," said Waters, because people with measles "break out red all over." Che's attitude contrasted with the approach of petty bourgeois bureaucrats, "who couldn't have cared less about the day-to-day problems faced by working people," she said.

This class criterion guides the editors, designers, print shop workers, and other volunteers who produce the books in Pathfinder's catalog, she noted. The standards of accuracy and attractive presentation that characterize many of these publications require "proletarian habits of discipline" that have to be learned.

"We all know that it is the content of these books that is indispensable to revolutionary-minded fighters. Without these lessons of the modern working-class movement our struggles will be much more difficult and costly. But today we are also paying tribute to all those who made possible the quality and beauty for which these books are more and more known and appreciated by vanguard fighters throughout the world," said Waters.

Much of the material that eventually finds its way into Pathfinder publications first appears in the pages of the socialist periodicals the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, which are "published in the interests of working people," as they declare on their mastheads. That description fits Pathfinder too.

In addition to El desorden mundial del capitalismo, the Spanish-language translation of Capitalism's World Disorder and the featured title at the Pathfinder booth, public meetings at the book fair launched two of the newest titles in Pathfinder's catalog. One introduced Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces and its Spanish-language counterpart Haciendo historia, published by Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Another launched the English- and Spanish-language versions of Che Guevara Talks to Young People. Leaders of Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba, worked with Pathfinder to prepare the nine speeches collected in the book.

At the launch of Making History and Haciendo historia, said Waters, Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Política held up copies of both books side by side, showing with pride how favorably the Spanish edition printed in Cuba compared with the English-language version printed in the United States.

The publication and launching of Che Guevara Talks to Young People represented a similar level of international collaboration, Waters noted. Pathfinder and Editora Abril made a breakthrough with this collection of Guevara's speeches, working together by exchanging files electronically and producing under very tight deadlines.

Blowups of the covers of these books were displayed at the celebrations in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, along with the new French translation of Capitalism's World Disorder [see accompanying article]; the new Swedish-language translation of the issue of New International headlined "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War"; the new Farsi translation of "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics" by Jack Barnes; and the covers of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and both its French- and Spanish-language translations.

Waters noted that Pathfinder's contributions of books to libraries and other institutions in Cuba has had a cumulative impact over the years. She commented on the large number of librarians who visited the stand to express their appreciation and to expand their collections. Among them was the librarian from the information center of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, which contains a growing number of Pathfinder titles, supplemented during each book fair.

Hearing of the library's plans to mount a special display of the publishing house's donation, the Pathfinder team left for them one of the photo panels used at the book fair, depicting how socialist workers and YS members use the books at protest actions, plant gates, strikes, and other locations in the United States and around the world.  
 

Imperialism lost the Cold War

"What comes together in Havana at the book fair," said Waters, "is the place of the Pathfinder arsenal in the international class struggle." The Pathfinder team is always composed of socialist workers and Young Socialists members who are participants in the class struggle in their countries. The fact that they are deeply involved in union and social struggles, and in building a proletarian party and youth organization as part of the working class, makes a striking impact in discussions with working people and young leaders in Cuba.

"We bring the books themselves--the record of defeats and victories, and the generalizations of lessons of struggles available nowhere else," Waters explained. "Our class has earned those lessons through decades of battles, and we inherit the obligation to pass them on--fully, accurately, and with love."

But we also bring our own experiences "as proletarian fighters. And we find a mutual thirst for political clarity."

As much as books like Making History and Che Guevara Talks to Young People are appreciated in Cuba, Waters noted, the most sought-after titles are those in which the Socialist Workers Party and its cothinkers present a communist perspective on the central questions in the world class struggle. Among the books that drew the greatest enthusiasm and interest, she said, were El desorden mundial del capitalismo, as well as the Spanish translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics (El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos).

There was also lots of interest in and discussion of the most recent issue of the Marxist magazine New International, headlined "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," which is also available in the Spanish Nueva Internacional. Even among revolutionaries in Cuba who respect Pathfinder and the communists who help promote it, New International's analysis of the decline and fall of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union seemed far from convincing 10 years ago. This has been changing, said Waters.

While some bought that issue of Nueva Internacional to try to figure out how anybody could defend such a world view, others went out of their way to express their agreement. "It is a problem for the imperialists that they lost the prop on which they relied in the Soviet Union," noted a participant in the launching of Che Guevara Talks to Young People. And some of the most astute capitalist political leaders, like Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, and Henry Kissinger held a similar view, he said.

"One young person, after reading the first 100 pages of Changing Face of U.S. Politics, came back the next day and asked: 'How can Jack Barnes describe everything in such clear class terms?'" said Waters. "The answer--that these books are not the work of an individual alone, but draw on the cumulative experience of a working-class party over decades--made a lot of sense to him."

Waters reported that many who visited the Pathfinder booth at the fair were interested in books by Leon Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed, and were overjoyed to find titles like Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution in the Russian original. The fact that the writings of the Russian revolutionary leader are slandered as counterrevolutionary by the Stalinist movement internationally, often influenced people's attitudes in Cuba about reading his works. But this has changed substantially over the last decade, as has the interest shown in Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and other Marxists.  
 

Keen interest in U.S. class struggle

Many Cubans were "very interested to hear us explain what is happening in the United States--to hear about the 50,000-strong mobilization to demand that the battle flag of the slavocracy flying atop the capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, be removed--the biggest demonstration ever in the South--and to hear about the battle on the Charleston docks one week later, as longshoremen defended themselves against scab labor and a police riot."

The socialists from the United States described actions by working farmers to stave off banks and government agencies forcing the producers into bankruptcy and loss of their land. After Cuban television and newspapers reported the visit to Cuba by a group of farmers from Georgia, Florida, and New Jersey, which took place concurrent with the book fair, "many people started asking us about them," said Waters. "We discussed what is happening politically and economically in the United States. How working farmers throughout the country are being forced to new levels of struggle by the policies of the government. How they are being forced to consider new explanations for the perfidy of that government. How all this is broadening their scope in considering allies.

"We talked to many in Cuba about the way the bosses continue unremittingly to increase the exploitation of workers here--including the vicious lengthening of the workday and intensification of labor in many branches of production. We explained what workers in the coal mines, in meatpacking, in garment, and elsewhere are experiencing as part of their class. One miner I know recently worked for 47 days straight before he got a day off--47 days straight! People in Cuba expressed utter amazement to hear of the conditions of work here," said Waters.

The Pathfinder president and other speakers said the displays at the book fair of photographs of socialists campaigning vigorously with their literature helped them explain that working people have conquered the use of a significant measure of democratic rights, and political space, to discuss politics.

"Cubans would thank us after these extensive political discussions and say, 'We don't get this kind of information, this picture brought by conscious working people in the United States, from anyone else,'" said Waters.

Many wanted to discuss the clashes outside the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle last December. The Cuban media covered the large demonstrations there, and the brutal attacks against them by teargas-firing cops. So, many people thought the demonstrations must have been progressive.

Communists explained that the protest leaders called for the defense of U.S. imperialist "sovereignty" and targeted foreign governments like that of the workers state in China. For more than a century, the U.S. rulers have always tried to march under seemingly progressive banners, Waters explained. Under the pretense of defending the environment, or the rights of workers in Third World countries, Washington advances its imperial interests, and the Seattle demonstrations provided backing for exactly that course. Working people need to act in common, across borders and against the imperialist powers, she said.  
 

Support return of Elián González

"The most frequent discussions we found ourselves involved in were about Elián González," said Waters. This six-year-old boy is still being kept in Miami more than four months after he was picked up in the waters off Florida, one of three survivors of an ill-fated attempt to reach the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has ruled he should be returned to his father in Cuba. Some of the boy's relatives in Miami, who oppose the Cuban revolution, are appealing this decision in the courts.

"There is an exceptional unanimity of feeling on this question in Cuba," Waters said. "Indignation at the sight of Elián wrapped in a Yankee flag is near universal," she added, referring to photographs that have been published worldwide. "More and more Cubans have come to see this cruelty for what it is--one more battle in the 40-year war by the U.S. rulers to crush the Cuban revolution. But at the same time there is great confusion. Many people asked us, 'Why doesn't the U.S. government carry out its decision?' Is the 'Miami Mafia'--the name given reactionary groups of Cuban émigrés who oppose the revolution--really that strong?' Some accuse the Clinton administration of 'cowardice.'"

"We spent a lot of time explaining to those who asked our views on this struggle how class political conflict within the United States is being played out around the case of Elián González," Waters said. An INS ruling is not the same thing as a decision by the Clinton administration, much less the U.S. government, the socialists explained. And there are real divisions within the U.S. ruling class.

"We pointed out that the political center of the problem is Washington, not Miami," Waters remarked. The "Miami Mafia" is largely a creation of the U.S. rulers that they use to support the policies they have decided on. The day it no longer serves the rulers' interests, the "Miami Mafia" will be left high and dry.

U.S. president Clinton has played his hand well from the perspective of the class interests he defends. He carefully emphasizes support for the "professionalism and integrity" of the INS, not the ruling on Elián itself, and expresses confidence that the right decision will eventually be reached because in the United States the rule of law prevails--implying, of course, that there is no rule of law in Cuba.

The big majority of working people in the United States believe Elián should have been returned to his father in Cuba the day he was rescued from the sea. So the INS and the forces Clinton represents are trying to use this case to improve the image of the immigration cops among workers, to give la migra--as the INS is known--a more "human face."

"Some Cubans wondered why there have been no large demonstrations in the United States supporting the INS ruling to send Elián home," Waters noted. "We explained to them that 'la migra' is the largest federal police force in the country, and is detested by class-conscious working people for its brutal enforcement of the bosses' policies--raiding factories in search of undocumented workers, dividing families, and denying education, food, and health care to the children of immigrants.

"We explained why it is not in the interests of working people in the United States that the INS strengthen its prerogative to issue administrative rulings that cannot be challenged in the courts," noted Waters. "That is what the U.S. rulers have been trying to establish in law since Clinton signed the immigration reform bill in 1996, and they hope to advance this reactionary course one more step under cover of the case of Elián González, whose return the majority of Americans know is just.

So the most class-conscious workers oppose the game being played by Clinton and the INS, at the same time they detest the government's callous use of an innocent child to advance its class goals and demand that Elián be reunited with his father and his homeland.

"We kept explaining that in the imperial United States, a powerful, 'decisive' executive branch is not something in the interests of working people. Far from being progressive, it is our great historic enemy, worldwide. It doesn't matter whether or not Clinton is a coward. The problem is that individuals like him, with his character structure, are astute defenders of the imperialist rulers they serve.

"Some people argued with us that we were wrong," Waters noted. They thought the reason Elián is still in Miami is that this is a presidential election year, so the money and votes from the reactionary Cuban émigrés living in Florida are determining government policy.

Many others had a different response.

"'What you have to say is so important for our perspectives,' said a professor at the University of Havana after a discussion of these points," Waters reported. She went on: "I even found myself starting to think that Clinton is a good guy, though I know better. Imagine the confusion my students--who haven't lived through the same political experiences--must be facing!"

"People were especially interested to hear about the 'other Miami,'" said Waters, pointing to the truckers who slowed freight to a trickle in the port of Miami in early February, and the tens of thousands who protested on March 7 in Tallahassee to defend affirmative action programs in the state of Florida.  
 

On to Tehran!

A theme of each meeting was looking forward to more possibilities to reach out with communist books to workers and youth in the front lines of struggle around the world. The next international effort along these lines is the annual book fair in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The fair, one of the gains of the popular revolution of 1979, will be held in May. In the past it has attracted up to 2 million visitors. A team has represented Pathfinder at this huge book fair for the last eight consecutive years.

"On to Tehran!" said Waters, in concluding her presentation.  
 

Che's speech recalled

In his remarks to the three meetings, Barnes also discussed the place of Pathfinder books in the world class struggle. He emphasized how the communist movement in the United States is responding to the kind of political changes that Waters and others who attended and reported on the book fair in Havana had described.

Barnes said he vividly recalled being present when Guevara presented the first talk printed in Che Guevara Talks to Young People, delivered at the opening session of the First Latin America Youth Congress on July 28, 1960. Thousands of revolutionary-minded youth traveled to Cuba in the first years of the revolution. Many were as ignorant as he when they arrived, Barnes said. "And many were won to a communist course by the example of Cuba, by what workers and peasants there did, and by the kind of leadership we discovered there.

"On my right, in the audience that night was a young anarcho-syndicalist from Detroit who spoke more and more like a communist the longer he stayed in Cuba," recalled Barnes. "On my left was a young member of the Communist Party in the United States. He had been arguing with me for days, trying to explain why 'this is not a socialist revolution,'" said Barnes.

That night, for the first time, a central leader of the revolution publicly explained that Cuba's working people were indeed on a socialist course. "What I am saying to you, young people from throughout the Americas who are diligent and eager to learn, is that if today we are putting into practice what is called Marxism, it is because we discovered it here," Guevara told the audience at the youth congress.  
 

An 'uneven' publishing program

Barnes noted the political changes that make "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" ring true to growing numbers of revolutionaries in Cuba today. There is "an accelerating openness to discussing these questions among those who are fighting to defend the revolution," he said.

The New International issue was published almost a decade after the major articles in it had been written and adopted by the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes described how Pathfinder's publishing program is necessarily "uneven," like the development of the class struggle. In the wake of the Gulf War, in which Washington carried out a devastating assault on the Iraqi people only to fail in its goal of putting in place a compliant government in Baghdad, "a new edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics was published." This incorporated "new material, including an excerpt from the New International entitled 'The Opening Guns of World War III.'"

The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, first published in 1981, centers on the party's turn in the late 1970s to root the big majority of the membership and leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in the industrial working class and unions, after a long period in which such an effort had not been possible. The opening of the new, 1994 edition centered, above all, on the test of the leaders of the turn in face of the imperialist war and Washington's horrible, culminating "turkey shoot," in which it slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians alike on the road to Basra.

Through much of the decade that followed that war, the organized labor movement was mired in a retreat. The big political events of that time are captured in Capitalism's World Disorder, explained Barnes. But while the main speeches and reports that became chapters in the book were published in party bulletins that--after discussion and adoption by a convention--were publicly sold and distributed, the book that brought them all together was not published until political developments made it possible to write the first chapter, entitled "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," and the introduction to the book by Waters.  
 

Retreat of 1990s well behind us

The opening chapter was based on a talk Barnes gave at the closing session of a movement conference in Los Angeles in late 1998 held in conjunction with the Young Socialists national convention. In that conference summary, Barnes noted that the retreat of the labor movement that lasted through much of the 1990s was behind us, that a sea change had already occurred in working-class politics, marking a shift in the "mass psychology" of the working class. A new pattern of struggle was emerging, marked by growing self-confidence and solidarity among clusters of vanguard workers and farmers surprised to discover they are not alone. Events in the class struggle quickly confirmed that view.

The book has had an impact on many who have bought and read it. Barnes quoted the reaction of one working farmer, a seasoned fighter in Oklahoma, who said that until he started reading it, "he had no idea how big the problem he and his fellow farmers faced really was. But that was not the key. The key is the fact that he was not dejected," said Barnes. "Instead, he was relieved to deepen his understanding of this reality. And he looked forward to talking about these ideas to his people, and finding broader layers who want to fight.

"This is the real value of these books," said Barnes, emphasizing the importance of using both The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and Capitalism's World Disorder together.

Throughout the period that is recorded in Capitalism's World Disorder, said Barnes, "we had to hold back from acting on the logic of politics. In a period of retreat the logic of politics can take a long time to be translated into action. Contradictions can be analyzed accurately, but you don't know how long it will be before a struggle to resolve them begins.

"Now it is different," he said. "We are acting on the logic of what has already happened, the change that has already occurred, the resistance that is already there. We act on it before we see all its manifestations--knowing we will find the lines of working-class resistance, if not immediate victories.

"So, now we can do the opposite of what we had to do throughout most of the 1990s."

Several months before the December 1998 conference in Los Angeles, communists had taken initial steps to reorient to the resistance as it developed, and to work together with individuals and groups who were being politically steeled by that resistance.

At an Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh in July 1998, socialists discussed how to begin "Structuring party branches and union fractions through mass work"--as the main banner at the meeting read. "We didn't have any plan for how to do this or how it would unfold," Barnes said. "We started to follow the natural lines of resistance among working people and kept true to our pledge. Like our comrades in Cuba, we weren't afraid of the class struggle, with all its unpredictable twists and turns. We fused our fighting energies with those of other workers resisting the capitalist assault."

As socialist workers have acted along these lines, they have begun to reshape and reorganize their party, a combat organization of the working class, said Barnes. "This now affects every single geographical unit of the party, every trade union fraction, and every member of the party," he said, noting a key component of the transformation of the party is the further proletarianization of the composition and political work of the organization.

SWP branch organizing committees of socialists have been established in St. Louis, southern Illinois, Wyoming, southern Minnesota, North Carolina, eastern Pennsylvania, and Fresno. A number of socialists have gained jobs in coal mines, and have begun to nationally organize their work as part of a current of miners that is fighting to build and strengthen the United Mine Workers of America.

Other socialist workers are extending fractions in the garment and textile industries and in meatpacking. At the same time, socialists working together in the steel, auto, transportation, and other industries seek to transform their functioning as competent trade union militants and as respected communist workers on the job.

In the single biggest step taken to date, the cadre of the party in New York and New Jersey have reorganized to build branches and industrial fractions along the same lines as the branch organizing committees, which have made progress both in linking up with union and other working-class resistance and in functioning with the norms, habits of discipline, and responsiveness of a proletarian organization.

This is significant because a big part of the membership and leadership of the party is concentrated in this region, many of them working in the print shop or shouldering other national assignments, Barnes noted at the New York meeting. The future of the branches, the Young Socialists, and the print shop are bound up together, he said.

"We are celebrating a convergence," said Barnes. "A convergence of communist workers with party supporters who want to see the books in print and in use, and with young fighters who are drawn to the possibility of a fighting labor movement, and a real organization of young communists run by young communists."

That convergence, moreover, is born of the political changes that have already affected us all and have opened the road. And judging by the young people who staggered away from the secondhand sales tables with their arms laden with stacks of Marxist classics, the direction is even clearer.  
 
 
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