The six are: Workers' Rights vs. the Secret Police by Larry Seigle; Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom by Nelson Blackstock; My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky; Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58 by Ernesto Che Guevara; Sandinistas Speak: Speeches, Writings, and Interviews with Leaders of Nicaragua's Revolution; and Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture by Leon Trotsky.

The first four have been chosen as Pathfinder's Books of the Month for November and will be available to members of the Pathfinder Readers Club at a 25 percent discount. All six will be available to Pathfinder bookstores at a 60 percent discount.

Workers' Rights vs. the Secret Police will be of special interest to all those opposed to the government's attacks on workers' rights--an offensive that is escalating today under the name of "fighting terrorism."

Seigle traces such attacks on workers' rights to some of the initial forms of working-class resistance more than 150 years ago. "The use of secret police, informers, agents provocateurs, frame-ups, disruption efforts...are not incidental to capitalist rule," Seigle writes. "They are permanent, basic, and essential...and flow from the need of the employing class to defend their rule from the vast majority, the working class."

Seigle reviews many well-known cases of the use of secret police agencies and other attacks against the working class by capitalist governments, from the use of the czar's secret police, the Okhrana, against the Bolsheviks and Russian workers organizations, to the trial and imprisonment of 18 leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters union and Socialist Workers Party under the Smith "Gag" Act at the opening of World War II.  
 
Rulers' drive to war and secret police
The organization of the modern secret police was part of the rulers' preparation for World War II, writes Seigle. "As the U.S. capitalists got ready for war against their rivals abroad, they also prepared their offensive against the working class and against Blacks and Chicanos at home. Their aims were to silence all opponents of the war drive, to channel all motion toward a labor party back into the two capitalist parties, and to make working people accept the necessity of sacrifice."

Seigle details the lawsuit brought by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance against the FBI, CIA, and other secret police agencies in 1973. As a result of the impact of the Black and anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, a small communist organization--rooted in a long tradition of defending workers' rights--could take such a bold initiative.

One of the most important points the socialists made during the suit was to connect attacks on the rights of workers at home with imperialist attacks abroad. "You can't have a government that carries out a foreign policy that tramples on human rights and human values, commits unspeakable acts of violence and even genocide, overturns elected governments, subverts democracy--you can't have a government that does all that abroad and doesn't do essentially the same thing at home," Seigle says.

Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom prints some of the files the FBI was forced to make public during the SWP lawsuit. These revelations helped expose the Counterintelligence Program, or "Cointelpro," a decades-long campaign of spying, harassment, and disruption of workers, Black, antiwar, and socialist groups.

My Life is the autobiography of Leon Trotsky, a central leader along with V.I. Lenin of the October 1917 Russian revolution and the head of the Soviet Red Army. In reviewing his life, Trotsky recounts the impact of World War I, the first world imperialist slaughter, on the workers movement.

Trotsky was living in exile in Vienna, Austria, on the eve of the war and was able to observe the patriotic fever whipped up by the bourgeois governments with help from the majority of leaders of the major socialist parties across Europe. But he also saw the uncontrollable forces the imperialist warmakers were setting into motion.

"War at first strengthens the state power which, in the chaos engendered by war, appears to be the only firm support--and then undermines it," said Trotsky. "The mobilization and declaration of war have veritably swept off the face of the earth all the national and social contradictions in the country. But this is only a political delay, a sort of political moratorium. The notes have been extended to a new date, but they will have to be paid." Events bore out Trotsky's analysis. Before World War I ended, the workers and peasants of Russia made a revolution against the czar and then in October 1917, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin, against the capitalists and landlords. For the first time in history the toilers seized state political power. Their first act was to take Russia out of the war. In the months to come, revolutionary crises swept across Germany and much of Central Europe, as well.

In Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-1958 Ernesto Che Guevara tells the story of how the war against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship transformed the men and women of the Rebel Army and the July 26 Movement into a force capable of leading the workers and peasants in a revolutionary struggle for power and mobilizing them to depose not only the hated dictator, but to overthrow capitalist property relations as a whole, and take on the task of building a socialist society.  
 
 
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