The meeting focused on the response by the communist movement to the toughening resistance among workers and farmers around the country and to the increasing receptivity to revolutionary literature by many working people and youth. It served as a springboard for the campaign by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists to double the membership of the YS over the next three months.

The event launched an international campaign to sell Pathfinder's newest title, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, by Jack Barnes, which had just come off the presses. The Spanish-language edition was being readied for publication within a few days, and the French edition will be available a couple of weeks later. Giant blowups of the covers of all three editions hung at the front of the meeting room.

The event was hosted by the New York and New Jersey branches of the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists. Those attending came from cities and towns across North America. Many were actively involved in struggles by working people--from protests in the Pennsylvania coalfields against hazardous fuel spills; to strike action by garment workers in California, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; to the anti-foreclosure fights of working farmers--as well as demonstrations against cop killings of workers in New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere.

A number of young people and workers from around the country who had only recently met members of the communist movement also took part in the event. Among them were a construction worker in New Jersey who has long been active in rural struggles in Oaxaca, Mexico; a student in Erie, Pennsylvania; and two West African-born workers in New York.

Many took advantage of the reception before and after the program, which featured both a large display of Pathfinder literature as well as a generous spread of food, to discuss politics and exchange experiences.

The event was held in conjunction with a three-day meeting of the SWP's National Committee. Over the coming weeks, socialist workers in the meatpacking, garment and textile, and coal mining industries will each hold national meetings, as will the party's Farm Work Committee. A June 14-16 international Active Workers Conference to be held in Ohio will draw on these meetings and take up the themes discussed at the New York event.  
 
Colorado experiences not unusual
The speakers program began with Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee and the author of the preface to Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. She opened her talk by describing some recent experiences of socialist workers in the Colorado coalfields.

Several weeks earlier, Waters said, a socialist miner sold a Militant subscription to a college student on campus. The student showed the Militant to her grandmother, who subscribed to the paper after seeing its coverage of the fight for government compensation by uranium miners. The student's grandmother, whose husband had died of cancer after years of work in the uranium mines, called the Militant business office and suggested contacting a number of people she knew who might be interested in the socialist paper.

Following this advice, a team of socialist workers traveled to the area and spent the weekend talking with several women, all of whose lives had been affected by the mine bosses' deadly profit drive and the government's cover-up of the hazardous working conditions endemic in the mines. The women have been fighting to force the government to pay compensation.

"The conclusion some of them drew from these experiences was that 'we must get rid of this government,'" said Waters. The supporters of the Militant used the socialist paper to point to an answer to the question, "And replace it with what?" They described how through their collective action working people can overturn capitalism and establish a government of workers and farmers.

The three bought subscriptions and a number of Pathfinder pamphlets. They took some subscription blanks for others who might be interested.

After describing similar experiences of socialists meeting interested miners, meat packers, and students in the region, Waters asked, "Is there something unusual in Colorado? Not a thing. This is happening everywhere in the United States. All we have to do is to find this resistance and follow its development."

The 60 percent jump in sales of Pathfinder books in the first four months of 2001, compared with the same period a year ago, are part of the same phenomenon, she said. They register both the receptivity to communist literature and the efforts by socialist workers to find those who are engaged in struggle.

She paid tribute to the work of the voluntary sales representatives who have promoted Pathfinder's titles to bookstores around the country. Some $9,000 worth of sales in the last four months can be directly traced to this work, she said.  
 
Movement campaign to double YS size
Waters explained the joint decision by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists to campaign through the end of August to double the size of the revolutionary youth organization. This effort is "a deliberate decision to focus our attention on the real opportunities before us, in which the results all depend on what we do," she said.

This campaign, Waters stressed, will succeed only if it involves not just the Young Socialists but the whole communist movement. "Reaching the goal means a broad effort to double the number of candidates for party membership, to double the quality of the Militant Labor Forums, to double the reach of our literature, to double the reach of our regional sales teams, to double the outreach of our election campaigns, and to double the public exposure and face of the Young Socialists and Socialist Workers Party."

The possibilities before the communist movement could be seen at the annual Tehran book fair in mid-May, said Waters. Volunteers staffing a Pathfinder booth at the fair reported a big response to their books.

This interest in revolutionary literature was heightened by the visit to Iran of Cuban president Fidel Castro at that time. The team reported much deeper discussions on the Cuban Revolution than at previous fairs--including with people who said they were supporters of Islam and did not consider themselves communists.

The Cuban leader's visit was a significant political event, Waters noted. In remarks to 700 enthusiastic students at the University of Tehran, Castro congratulated the Iranian people on their 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah, and explained that "the shah of U.S. imperialism" will also be overthrown.  
 
Strengthening of Cuban Revolution
Castro's visit registers the strengthening of the Cuban Revolution today, explained Waters. Other examples confirm this, she said--from the Cuban leadership's insistence that the Panamanian government extradite a CIA-trained anti-Cuba terrorist--a demand that has won support among many youth and others in Panama--to Revolutionary Armed Forces minister Raúl Castro's explanation that the Cuban people today are armed, organized, and prepared in their millions to defend their revolution against any U.S. attack. Castro's point was underscored by the sea of green at the opening of the Cuban trade union congress in late April, when the 1,600 union delegates showed up in their volunteer militia uniforms.

Maggie Trowe, farm work director of the SWP and a Militant staff writer, who had attended the congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) in Havana, also spoke. The work of the Socialist Workers Party and the YS in defense of the Cuban Revolution, she said, is part of "winning young people and workers and farmers to becoming part of a revolutionary communist movement that can follow the Cuban road and take power here in the United States."

Several other socialist workers and Young Socialists who had been part of the U.S. delegation to the CTC congress or to a conference in May on organic agriculture were also on the speakers platform.

Jacob Perasso, a member of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists, reinforced the points made by Waters about the campaign to double the size of the Young Socialists, describing experiences that show how a joint movement effort can succeed. Where Young Socialists and SWP members have begun to establish a regular, consistent presence in a workers district, they have attracted young people interested in joining the YS. In the New York Garment District, for example, he said, dozens of revolutionary-minded young people and workers have purchased Pathfinder books at literature tables, attended Militant Labor Forums, or participated in classes over the past year.

Everyone in the audience, "and I mean everyone," Perasso stressed, can be part of this recruitment campaign.

He appealed to young people attending the meeting. "If you find yourself in agreement with what is said here, you should join the Young Socialists. YS members will be staffing the Pathfinder book tables here tonight and are available for further discussion." One young woman took up Perasso's challenge immediately following the meeting by asking to join the youth organization. Several other youth expressed interest.

Less than three weeks before the meeting, the volunteers in the Pathfinder Reprint Project had exceeded their goal of converting 50 percent of Pathfinder's books and pamphlets to electronic form by May Day. Tom Tomasko, a member of the project's steering committee based in San Francisco, celebrated the milestone in his remarks to the New York meeting.

The 200-plus supporters of the communist movement play a key part in "keeping in print the ideas that are going to change the world," he said.

In addition to digitizing existing titles, the volunteers have taken on responsibilities for new Pathfinder titles, including "quality checks, and formatting and proofreading new books after the editing is done."

They are now shouldering a new task that will take advantage of the possibilities to sell Pathfinder books through Internet booksellers. They will prepare reproductions of the covers and back page text on Pathfinder titles that will appear on the booksellers' web pages. "This will enhance the professional and attractive manner in which we present our books on line," said Tomasko.  
 
CPUSA shedding banner of Leninism
SWP national secretary Jack Barnes was the concluding speaker at the May 20 meeting.

Barnes reported that the communist movement here will increasingly be responsible for keeping in print and distributing the basic works of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party--which led workers and farmers to power in Russia in October 1917--and of the Communist International in its early years.

Pamphlets by Lenin such as What Is To Be Done? and To The Rural Poor are essential tools for workers and farmers seeking to build a land and labor alliance and a proletarian party. Both works were defining documents for the Bolshevik Party, as its cadre and leaders differentiated themselves from the centrist political formations active in the working class in Russia--groups that were revolutionary in words but that in practice rejected the perspective of leading working people in a revolutionary fight for power.

What Is To Be Done, said Barnes, is about the kind of proletarian party and cadres that are necessary for this task. In this fundamental work, Lenin explains that the ideas generalizing the working class's line of march toward political power cannot be conquered solely within the field of the struggle between workers and employers. They have to be brought from outside this arena, he insists--from "the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes."

What is necessary is a workers party that acts as the "tribune of the people," as Lenin put it, and that as part of the struggles of the people is capable of leading working people along the road to power.

To the Rural Poor explains why the exploited producers on the land need to make common cause with the revolutionary working-class movement.

Today, Barnes said, Pathfinder has an opportunity and a responsibility to take on the task of keeping the basic works of Lenin in print. It is becoming clear that no one else will do so. The political current that had originally carried out this effort, represented in this country by the Communist Party USA, has strayed further and further from any interest in doing so as it implodes politically and organizationally.

For decades the Stalinist movement, turning against Lenin's revolutionary legacy, acted as an international murder machine aimed at the working-class vanguard in every country, Barnes explained. Their worst crime and the biggest obstacle, however, was that "they did so in the name of a prostituted Marxism and Leninism."

The collapse of the bureaucratic regimes and parties that dominated the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries meant a weakening of that obstacle for the working class.

Today, this process has evolved further. The CPUSA leadership is in the process of shedding even the pretense of carrying the banner of Marxism and Leninism, said Barnes. CP leaders are declaring that Lenin was "too stiff" in the revolutionary and party-building perspectives he outlined in What Is to Be Done? The class struggle, they argue, "is not the only thread, not the only causal factor" in history. They point instead to "movements" such as the 1999 anti–World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The CP is more and more explicitly moving away from its previous organized presence among industrial workers.

As part of this process, Barnes noted, the CP, as well as many other groups on the "left," write and speak today about the evolution of capitalism in Armageddon-like terms. They say that "capitalism is self-destructing," or that "chaos reigns." But the view that capitalism is going crazy leads to appealing to some "sane" capitalists to reform it.

"But the opposite is true," Barnes said. "This is how capitalism works, not how it is not working." That is why the line of march of the working class leads toward capitalism's overthrow, and not toward its reform.  
 
Space within working class
Explaining how capitalism works is crucial in explaining and responding to the ongoing probes and assaults against the rights of working people by the U.S. rulers today, the SWP leader said.

As the capitalists deepen their assault on the social gains of workers and farmers, they meet resistance. They anticipate that will deepen, and respond by seeking to restrict legal space.

The FBI's trampling on democratic rights, for example, is not an aberration. It's how it works, Barnes explained. Recent revelations that the cop agency withheld thousands of pages of evidence from the defense for Timothy McVeigh, the rightist whose case is being used to promote the federal death penalty, illustrate the FBI's normal mode of functioning.

But while the restrictions on legal space increase, Barnes said, the space within the working class to discuss politics--something the rulers don't have direct control over--continues to open.

He noted that in the period leading up to the Russian Revolution, including when the repression was at its worst, the regime couldn't arrest Lenin when he stayed in the workers districts. That was where the Bolsheviks were based, and where the police feared to tread.

Barnes pointed to the workers in the mining communities who have responded enthusiastically to the Militant. This is who we reach for, he said--working people who want to fight, such as the miners' widows, who had been consigned by some to "victimhood."

Like Malcolm X, he said, we celebrate people awakening not to their suffering, but to their self-worth. Working people who not only experience the brutality of capitalism but resist it are also "more likely to want to open a revolutionary book, and reach out to others in struggle," he said. Those are the prospects that continue to open up for the communist movement.

The meeting was also an opportunity to raise money for the $100,000 Pathfinder Fund. James Harris, a textile worker in Atlanta and the Socialist Workers candidate for president in 2000, who chaired the May 20 event, made an appeal to the audience for contributions.

Participants contributed $5,288 and made new pledges or raised previous ones by almost $2,000.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home