OBERLIN, Ohio-- "This conference was it for deciding to join the Young Socialists. I got a chance to really see how it operated--it was detailed, structured, enthusiastic, and driven. I want to be part of it."

Angela Abernathy, from St. Paul, Minnesota, was one of four attending the Active Workers Conference here who asked to join the Young Socialists. Some 450 people attended the conference, held July 27-29 at Oberlin College, including members of the Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialists, and communist leagues in several countries, together with supporters of the communist movement and other working people engaged in struggle around the country.

The growing labor and farm struggles in this country, and the building and structuring of the communist movement through participation in these fights, were the focus of the feature talks, panel sessions, classes, and other discussions at the Active Workers Conference. They found a keen audience among the more than 20 people at their first such gathering.

Many had already been involved in working-class and social protest actions, and often had first met communist workers and Young Socialists--and had begun to read the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books--through such activity.

Moses Williams, who works as an X-ray technician at a Newark hospital, helped lead a successful effort to organize his workplace into the Service Employees International Union. As a longtime unionist, he has become an avid reader of Pathfinder books. "The ruling class doesn't have a good sense of history," he said. "They're taking us back to the conditions even before the Depression, when we came close to revolution here."

Sharon Russ, a 39-year-old worker from St. Petersburg, Florida, met Socialist Workers vice-presidential candidate Margaret Trowe and campaign supporters at the conference of the National Organization for Women, held in Miami in early July. She described joining a demonstration in Tallahassee, Florida, in March in which thousands of students, workers, farmers, and others condemned the efforts by the administration of Gov. John Ellis Bush to undercut affirmative action programs.  
 
Example of Cuban revolution
Ronald Orelien, a young hotel worker and Haitian immigrant living in Miami, was struck by the relentless profit drive of the U.S. bosses. "The bourgeoisie is putting their foot on the neck of the workers," he said. Orelien also follows the class struggle in Haiti closely. "I am critical of the government there," he said. "I compare it with what happened in Cuba, where within a few years everyone knew how to read and write through a literacy campaign. Haiti still has a population that is 85 percent illiterate," he said. "Only one person in 10 has a job. We need a total revolution to change the system and the state."

Pedro Rubén Jiménez listened closely to the presentations by representatives of the Cuban revolution at the conference. "The Cuban comrades who addressed the conference provide a motivation to follow the Cuban road," he commented. Jiménez, 26, is originally from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, where he has been active in an organization of peasants, teachers, and other working people.

"I've learned about the strike by laundry workers in Chicago," he said, referring to the union battle at the Five Star Laundry in that city.

Jiménez himself works at an industrial laundry in Rome, Georgia. "And the resistance by our fellow workers in the tire industry is very important," he added. Two representatives of striking workers at Titan Tire in Natchez, Mississippi, attended the conference. Jiménez returned to Georgia eager to study books such as Capitalism's World Disorder that explain a course for building a revolutionary movement through today's class battles.  
 
Building a trust among workers
Arnar Sigurdsson, 17, a member of the Young Socialists in Iceland, said, "The first working-class struggle that I felt like I was in the middle of was the bus drivers' strike in Reykjavik." Some 160 drivers in the capital of Iceland walked off the job in June, protesting their work conditions, defending their union, and demanding an across-the-board wage increase.

"By going to their picket lines I have begun to understand the importance of steadily building a political trust and relationship with other workers as we do our political work as communists," he said.

Sigurdsson added that he appreciates the importance of having an international communist movement. "As a small group in Iceland, we are able to function as communists because there is the Pathfinder printshop and the Socialist Workers Party here. We can't function without that. It broadens our horizons."