Among those attending the event, titled, "Imperialist War in Afghanistan, Resistance among Working People in Iceland, and Building the Communist Movement," were young people who had recently met the Young Socialists, workers from several key industries in the country, and other supporters of the Militant and Pathfinder Press.

"There are very good reasons why we want to found a communist league," said Ögmundur Jónsson, who works at a fishnet factory here. "The imperialists are trying as hard as they can to justify the bloody assault on Afghanistan--an assault they have promised to bring to other countries as well. At the same time they are deepening their attacks on the rights and living standards of working people in this country."

Pointing to the potential of the working class to resist, organize, and mount revolutionary struggles, Jónsson, said that around the world "there are increasing skirmishes by broad layers of the population" who are standing up to fight against the increasingly harsh reality of life under capitalism.

Jónsson is a member of the Young Socialists who has helped lead the formation of the Communist League Organizing Committee here. Over the past nine months he and other members of the Young Socialists in Iceland--seeing the wars, economic depression, and assaults on workers' rights that imperialism has in store for humanity--took a number of initiatives in international politics and in Iceland that posed the need to form a proletarian party.

These included building a delegation to the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students in Algeria, an event that demonstrated the possibilities for rebuilding a world communist movement as part of anti-imperialist struggles around the world; participating in internationalist projects to distribute Pathfinder books, such as at the Havana book fair earlier in the year; and participating in communist conferences in Sweden and the United States.  
 
Strikes and solidarity
During the same time workers in Iceland have voted down a number of contracts with the bosses. At an aluminum factory near here, union members rejected a contract because the bosses demanded inclusion of a clause that would increase individual pay incentives. In another city, workers at communal day-care centers went on strike, turning down a contract negotiated by the officials of their union three times. They continue to be supported by the overwhelming majority of the parents.

Last spring, workers on trawlers and other fishing vessels waged a hard-fought two-month strike. They had been without a contract for most of the last decade. In addition, nurses' aides walked off the job recently, another example of this resistance. An important aspect of these struggles is the extensive support they have received from other working people.

Jónsson said meeting these workers, talking politics with them, and introducing them to the Militant, helped members of the Young Socialists see that the "greatest obstacle to the capitalists' hopes of increasing exploitation of working people and to establish puppet regimes in oppressed countries such as Afghanistan is the resistance of the working class around the world."

As YS members began to relate to working-class struggles in Iceland, several decided to get jobs in basic industry as part of orienting to the working class and building a communist current within the trade unions here.

Out of these developments, several generations of communist workers and young socialists met for two days prior to the public event. They decided to join their forces and, over the next several months, work together and discuss programmatic documents in order to lay the basis for the formation of a communist league.  
 
Acceleration of class struggle
Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International magazine and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, was the keynote speaker at the public meeting.

"When the imperialists go to war the class struggle in no way diminishes," she said. "Instead, it accelerates. The pace of politics internationally picks up, along the lines that have been prepared long before the war began." Washington's growing tendency to use military force abroad to try to salvage the decline of world capitalism, and the U.S. rulers' assault on workers' rights, the social wage, and the unions are two of the long-term trends that have speeded up since the launching of the imperialist war drive September 11. Establishing a military foothold in the oil-rich region of Central Asia, made up of republics of the former Soviet Union, has been a goal of U.S. imperialism for some time, she said.

Waters described U.S. president George Bush's speech to the United Nations General Assembly November 10, in which he ticked off "obligations" to Washington that are "binding on every nation with a place in this chamber." Those who don't heed, he said, "will know the consequences."

The revolutionary government of Cuba, which in a statement issued October 8 called the war on Afghanistan a "war of the former colonizers versus the formerly colonized," irked Washington by not going along with its charade at the United Nations, Waters noted. Washington's ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, singled out Cuba, saying its representative made "a pretty outlandish statement, and totally unwarranted under the circumstances."

In the speech, Cuban foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque denounced the United States for waging an "ineffective, unjustifiable bombing campaign" that has "targeted children, the civilian population, and International Red Cross hospitals and facilities" in Afghanistan. Negroponte said representatives of Iraq "made a pretty negative statement of their own, but even theirs was not as strident and vitriolic as the Cuban statement."

Waters took on an argument by one columnist in a big-business paper who said the world situation could be defined as a "post-imperialist chaos" marked by "defensive imperialism." Far from inexplicable chaos, she said, the wars, synchronized economic downturn in the major imperialist countries, and assaults on workers' rights, are examples of how capitalism works.

It is imperialism, not terrorism, that is the question of the 21st century, Waters said. And it is the working class that can lead to victory not only workers and farmers, but big sections of the middle class who will respond to the leadership given by working people in the struggle for a new society.

Waters concluded by explaining a passage in a forthcoming Pathfinder book by Victor Dreke, a combatant in the Rebel Army that led workers and peasants in a revolution to topple the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1959, and who remains an active leader of the Cuban Revolution today. Dreke's father, who was not a supporter of the Batista dictatorship but wanted his son to stay out of trouble, encouraged him not to get involved in anything, especially not any political organization, because "the rich folks will stay on top." Dreke explained this was a common view, "until the victory of the revolution. Fortunately, I didn't listen. I'm a revolutionary because I didn't listen to my dad."

Given the world developments and the direction imperialism seeks to take humanity, "Now is the time to really get involved" in building a revolutionary proletarian party, Waters said.  
 
Iceland's rulers back Washington
"Iceland is not a small and peaceful country far away from everything," panelist Sigurlaug Gunnlaugsdóttir, a member of the Communist League Organizing Committee, told the meeting. "We can quote Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, to verify that. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the defense agreement between the United States and Iceland last spring, he said in a message that Iceland was 'amongst the most resolute supporters of the air raid on Kosova, who helped bestir others to keep their intentions.'

"The Icelandic rulers have independent interests around the world," she said, "and they aggressively push for 'their share' of the profits." Gunnlaugsdóttir said Icelandic capitalists who own fishing vessels and fishing rights pay extremely low wages to crews made up of workers from both Iceland and other countries.

"It was not in September or even this year, that we came to the conclusion that capitalism was rotten," said Gunnlaugsdóttir. "It is the struggles of working people in Iceland and the determination of workers to defend their unions that helps make possible the building of a Communist League today."

Gunnlaugsdóttir reported at the public meeting that part of the work to launch the Communist League will be to produce the first issue of New International in Icelandic. The organizing committee is reviewing key articles and documents in New International, among others, to provide the political foundation of the program of the new party. The magazine, which carries articles on Marxist politics and theory, "contains some fundamental documents that we intend to vote on, and we invite all those who are interested to study them with us," she said.

Other speakers on the panel were Jonathan Silberman, a leader of the Communist League in the United Kingdom; Jacob Perasso, a member of the Young Socialist National Executive Committee in the United States; and Kristoffer Schultz, a leader of the Young Socialists in Sweden.

In his presentation Schultz said that the Swedish ruling class was also attacking workers' rights under the pretext of fighting terrorism. "The Swedish ruling class wants to be in on the imperialist war. It tries to portray its intervention as 'sweet capitalism,' by sending personnel to build a hospital in Afghanistan," he said.

Perasso, pointing to roundups and jailing of working people by the United States government, moves to institute military tribunals, and testing the waters for use of sedition laws, explained that the U.S. rulers are running into some resistance to the curtailing of workers' rights.  
 
Opportunities to recruit to movement
The imperialist war, the resistance to the rulers' drive against workers and farmers at home, and the growing economic crisis are giving the Young Socialists "the biggest opportunity for recruiting to our movement in several years," Perasso said. Membership in the YS is growing in a number of countries, a product of the work communists are doing, including putting up book tables on a weekly basis in workers' districts and on college campuses, and becoming a part of workers' struggles.

In the discussion, a young man said that in talking with co-workers about the war, "they say it will benefit the Afghans in the long run, even though I argue how brutal it is. How would you explain that it is not so?"

"It is important to point to the real history of imperialism and the fact that the imperialists have never done anything to benefit the people in Afghanistan," Mary-Alice Waters said in response. "Everything they ever do is to the benefit of their own interests. In 1979, the U.S. government started sending money and war supplies to various groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the regime that was supported by the Soviet Union. Afterwards, Washington left a war-torn Afghanistan in devastated condition. In order to answer questions such as your co-workers asked, we must address the question of imperialism, not just this particular war."

Jonathan Silberman noted that social progress for working people in Afghanistan "will come out of the struggles of farmers and workers there against imperialism and capitalist exploitation, or it will not happen. We don't look at people in Afghanistan as the 'poorest people in the world,' but as fighters, which they have proven themselves to be for many decades."

Over the weekend, socialist workers and members of the Young Socialists put up book tables at high schools and in front of a supermarket in the main shopping street in Reykjavík. A high school student purchased a subscription to the Militant and many more students stopped for discussions about the imperialist war on Afghanistan and about workers' struggles all over the world. Some participants in the weekend meetings also participated in a public meeting hosted by the Campaign Against Military Bases on the situation in the Middle East.  
 
 
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