Louis Turner, a textile worker in North Carolina and leader of the Young Socialists, introduced the book by SWP leader Jack Barnes. "Don't look at this book as something that tells a good story about a moment in history," he said. "Read it and reread it as a communist and devour every word and phrase." He pointed to the profound impact the opening years of the Cuban Revolution had on a generation of young people who were won to the communist movement for life.

Dennis Richter, from the Charlotte-area organizing committee of the SWP, described the campaign this spring by socialist workers and YS members to get the book into the hands of workers and youth coming into politics today. The book, he said, shows how working people in Cuba were transformed through their revolution and points to the need to emulate that example here. Richter quoted several sections, including the point on building a proletarian party, in which Barnes writes, "What is special is never the human material, but the times we live in and our degree of preparation."

Several young people attending the class pointed to sections in the book they thought merited study and discussion.

Romina Green from New York noted the statement that "the transformation of nature by human labor, social labor, is not only the source of all wealth but the foundation for all culture." She asked if there is such a thing as an "American culture."

Rebecca Williamson, a member of the Young Socialists from Seattle, pointed to the lessons about becoming disciplined proletarian fighters. In capitalist society, Barnes says in the book, discipline is "something inflicted on us, aimed at breaking our spirit and making us submissive to the norms and values demanded by capital. But revolutionary discipline, proletarian discipline, is something that comes from within--something thinking and self-acting working people initiate and voluntarily submit to in order to advance common ends."

Michael Ellis said that the source of rightist reaction is not "backward U.S. workers," but the ruling class and the semi-hysterical middle class.  
 
Influence of the conference
The 400-mile walk by miners' widows, which was discussed at the conference and featured on one of the displays, struck a chord with Gladys Williams, a farmer from south Georgia and activist in the Peoples' Tribunal, an organization that fights police brutality and other injustices.

"I want to join the Widows' Walk," she said, "because I support what they are doing. I don't think their husbands should have worked in the mines all those years and gotten this terrible lung disease. And then they don't get any compensation."

Nineteen-year-old Rah-ed Ghuma has been part of Arab student organizations and Palestinian solidarity organizations in Baltimore. "As an Arab, I always identified with the Palestinian struggle," he said. "The struggle symbolizes the oppression of all Arabs by imperialism. I always wanted to explain the Palestinian struggle from a class perspective, not as a religious or ethnic question, in order to explain the fight to defeat Zionism. That way you cannot be accused of being anti-Semitic."

Rah-ed said that he found the remarks by Jack Barnes on Palestine helpful in clarifying a working-class point of view on the struggle of the Palestinian people. "The information about the Havana International Book Fair helped educate me more about the Cuban Revolution," he added.

Michel Watts, 26, came to the conference from Richmond, Virginia. "I learned about the Socialist Workers Party when I decided to get a subscription to Granma while visiting Cuba," he said. Granma is the paper of the Communist Party of Cuba. Subscriptions to its weekly edition can be purchased through Pathfinder Press. "A friend told me about Pathfinder and the SWP," Watts explained, "so I looked up the nearest SWP headquarters when I returned.

"Three of us stayed up until 5:00 a.m. this morning discussing the presentations," he said, referring to the panel at the Saturday evening session of the conference. "We couldn't get enough information. I was particularly interested in the points on the Palestinian struggle and the report by Mary-Alice Waters that confronted the myth that nobody in Cuba supports the revolution. I thought I was all alone until I met this movement, with all politically-minded people standing together, with a diversity of experiences, nationalities, and ages."

Jack Willey contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Atlanta conference builds communist movement
Meeting maps out YS campaign
Youth snap up Marxist classics  
 
 
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