Preface to the Third Edition, 2002
A "new pattern is being woven in struggle as working people emerge from a period of retreat," author Jack Barnes pointed out in a December 1998 talk at the closing session of a conference in Los Angeles, California, jointly sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. Working people are resisting the consequences of capitalist "globalization"--the rulers' "grandiloquent term that displays their imperial arrogance while it masks their brutal assaults on human dignity the world over." This new pattern is made up of numerous--and initially unconnected--proletarian vanguard acts, he noted. Their result is an emerging vanguard "whose ranks increase with every single worker or farmer who reaches out to others with the hand of solidarity and offers to fight together."

Under the title "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," that talk is the opening chapter of this book's companion volume, Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, also by Jack Barnes. The chapter bridges the two books. The political course it lays out was discussed and adopted by the SWP's April 1999 convention in San Francisco, California.

Reading Capitalism's World Disorder together with this new edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics will help readers see the class dynamics and political shifts that underlie this volume and make it even more valuable and irreplaceable as a handbook for revolutionary working-class organizers.

Mary-Alice Waters April 2002
 

The political changes that have marked the class struggle in the United States in the short time since the first printing of the Spanish translation appeared in 1997 make the publication of this new, corrected translation even more important. The evidence continues to mount that the working class in the United States and other imperialist countries except Japan is emerging from the political retreat that followed the short but intense and brutal imperial assault on the people of Iraq in 1990–91. The outcome of that war was politically demoralizing to toilers the world over, and even more so to the soldiers and people in Iraq itself, since the bombardment and invasion went largely uncontested by the Iraqi regime, allowing the U.S. imperialist rulers to pay little price for their slaughter.

Today signs of renewed defensive action are everywhere--strike actions and resistance against employer threats, lockouts, callousness, and thievery, reflecting the tenacity of the embattled ranks; a noticeable growth in the confidence and determination of workers who are women; an increased weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers; an upswing in the Puerto Rican independence movement; more actions in defense of immigrants' rights; a revival of aspects of the Chicano movement; more insistent responses to rampant police brutality and racist discrimination; youth attracted to the example of workers' and farmers' struggles, willing to link their energy and social protest initiatives to the class forces that can construct a livable future for all humanity.

These vanguard currents and individuals, as well as new layers of workers and farmers, are meeting each other in the course of this resistance, hungry for solidarity and unity in struggle, hungry to march shoulder to shoulder, as together we strengthen and learn from each other's fights against the effects of wage slavery and debt slavery. Through the actions we are involved in, we learn to know and trust each other. We find ways to communicate, even if we don't yet know each other's languages well. We read and discuss explanations for and alternatives to the devastating future working people increasingly anticipate the capitalist system has in store for us all. More and more we become confident that as sizable sections of the massive working class in the United States go into action--as growing numbers of workers become conscious of themselves as a social class that can be an independent political force--this class will have the capacity to unite the toilers in the struggle to establish a workers and farmers government capable of leading humanity out of capitalism's profound social crisis.

The greatest obstacle we face to the realization of this liberating and revolutionary perspective is that working people who are fighting underestimate what we are actually accomplishing and what we are capable of. We don't yet recognize ourselves as the true bearers of culture into the new millennium. But these are things we will learn, together, in the course of battles that are coming.

The work embodied in this corrected translation of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos--a collective effort of many dedicated militants--would not have been possible without the economic, social, and political changes that have marked the closing years of the twentieth century. Obstacles have been eliminated that earlier would have made much more difficult, if not impossible, the kind of international collaboration that went into catching imprecise or misleading translations that marred the first printing.

The intensifying imperialist exploitation of Central and South America and the Caribbean has forced millions of workers and peasants whose first language is Spanish to leave their homes and head for the United States in search of jobs and income to sustain their families, and often to escape brutal repression. Hundreds of copies of the first printing of the book have been sold to Spanish-speaking workers not only throughout Latin America but even more so in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere in the imperialist world. The mix of workers from more than a dozen countries of the Americas reading, studying, and discussing the book and calling attention to different words or phrases that were confusing to them, that didn't seem to capture well enough the concepts originally presented in English, or that oversimplified the original, helped the editors of the Spanish edition revise a number of the original translations.

The most important is the word worker-bolshevik, a political designation that originated in admiration among the fighting toilers of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and was used not infrequently by Lenin. In the first Spanish translation of this book, worker-bolshevik was not translated as a noun--a name designating a communist cadre whose integrity and discipline, organizational functioning, class political habits and training, and milieu are proletarian to the core. Instead, it was translated as two separate words--a noun and an adjective, a bolshevik worker (a worker who belongs to a bolshevik party). The complexity and class sharpness of the Russian and English original, the fundamental political character of the individual worker-bolshevik, was lost.

A reader in Cuba helped correct the translation of another of the words central to the politics of the book--the word turn, as used in the phrases turn to industry and the building of a turn party. As explained in the pages that follow, the expression turn party describes both a party that has made the turn to industry like the one the Socialist Workers Party carried out in the late 1970s as well as one whose rhythm of work, norms of behavior, and political milieu are determined by the fact that the majority of its membership and leadership are workers who are, or who are organizing to move deeper into the proletariat as they become members of industrial trade unions. The expression is largely synonymous with proletarian party, as used historically by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. The best presentation of what a turn party is, what it does, and its continuity through generations back to the 1919 founding of communism in the United States, is found in Section III of the present book, "Building a Party of Socialist Workers."

In the previous printing, turn was translated by the Spanish word giro; here it is translated by the word viraje, which more clearly indicates a change of direction, as opposed to the connotation carried by giro--revolving, turning round and round.

This new Spanish-language edition also corrects the translation of the word worker. Unlike in English, in Spanish there are two terms for worker: trabajador, which includes industrial workers as well as all others whose livelihood largely depends on selling their labor power in return for a wage; and obrero, which generally means only factory or industrial worker. In this corrected printing trabajador is generally used to translate the English worker, except where the context is clearly referring specifically and solely to industrial workers. The first Spanish edition had generally used obrero, a translation that narrowed and distorted the class forces referred to in the reports and resolutions adopted by SWP conventions and leadership bodies that make up the contents of this book.

This correction breaks from a tendency, in fact a petty-bourgeois prejudice prevalent in much of the left in Latin America and Europe, to view the working class narrowly as those industrial workers already organized in trade unions, especially better-paid, "skilled" workers, rather than, as in the Bolshevik tradition, the working class as a whole--industrial and nonindustrial, employed and unemployed, in the city and the countryside.

Numerous other words and phrases have also been reviewed and the translation made more politically accurate, as well as more transparent--more usable.

Time and political resources have gone into preparing this corrected translation. The effort contributes to forging a more homogeneous political cadre in which workers whose first language is Spanish can be confident that what they are reading is the same thing fellow workers whose first language is English have read--and, above all, that it furnishes the same guide to action and guide to the selection of leadership, as they work together to apply it in practice in the mass movement.

As anyone who has ever had experience interpreting from one language to another knows, translating clearly and precisely is a challenge. The obstacle, however, is not primarily linguistic. It lies in the variations in politics, history, and habits of political thought from one country to another--in other words, class traditions.

Spanish grammar itself (or that of French, to take another example of a language into which revolutionary socialists have translated The Changing Face of U.S. Politics) does not have an ahistorical, antimaterialist, antidialectical, nonproletarian bent substantially different from English. But the political history and traditions of the U.S. working-class movement, including the Socialist Workers Party, have created a different legacy that does have a very real bearing on political vocabulary and unclouded, even if rough-hewn, class terminology.

The English-language political vocabulary of the communist movement in the United States has been established in the struggle of the Socialist Workers Party to speak in clear class terms to working people and to peel away the counterrevolutionary obfuscations of the Stalinist and social democratic forces, as well as to eliminate various centrist pretensions and adaptations. The United States is the only country where, due to historical factors beyond any party's control (such as the fact that the United States escaped the physical destruction World War II wreaked upon the working class in Europe), communist continuity has been organizationally unbroken and comparatively strong for the last eighty years, numbers notwithstanding. The relative weakness of the organized communist movement throughout Latin America and Europe over that same time period means that the Spanish political terminology of our movement, like the French, has also tended to adapt to the political culture of the Popular Front "left," as mediated through the "far left" fashions in those countries.

There was an opportunity to break the mold of Stalinism, centrism, and social democracy between the early 1960s and the end of the 1970s. A small political vanguard, attracted to communism, emerged in many countries under the impact of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the worldwide impact of the Black struggle in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and popular proletarian explosions that reached prerevolutionary dimensions in France, Portugal, and Spain, as well as across the Southern Cone of Latin America, and then in Central America. But these currents and organizations failed to proletarianize themselves or systematically colonize the industrial unions. Without a working-class foundation and political practice, they began to disintegrate politically under the impact of the retreat of the labor movement and blows dealt by the capitalist rulers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Without being rooted in the broad proletariat, the "far left" was increasingly vulnerable to the nostrums accepted and promoted by the radical milieus of middle-class professionals and academics, union functionaries, and skilled workers in which they lived, worked, socialized, and practiced politics.

Another historical factor--which may at first seem contradictory--is important. The powerful ups and downs in the class struggle in Europe and Latin America, as compared to the United States, mean the political traditions of the workers movement are in fact stronger there, even if the proletarian vanguard has never been able to carve out a stable nucleus with decades-long communist continuity. So the political language that "sounds right" to workers in these countries, even those newly recruited to the communist movement, is much more heavily weighed down with Stalinist, social democratic, and centrist political content, embodied in a vocabulary that blurs class clarity and distorts historical honesty. It means that workers won to the communist movement in these countries often have more to unlearn than newly radicalized workers elsewhere--just to be able to express dialectical contradictions, materialist concepts, and, above all, revolutionary class-struggle content.

The accentuated unevenness and contradictory social combinations that mark the final historical days of the imperialist epoch are felt in many ways.

Given the growing social weight of Spanish-speaking workers, including within the imperialist countries of North America, and the fact that they compose a significant and increasing proportion of the cadre and leadership of communist parties in those countries, clarity and accuracy in translation between English and Spanish especially become a crucial part of the fight for the political homogeneity and revolutionary centralism necessary to forge a proletarian leadership powerful enough and broad enough to lead the toilers through storm and victory.

It is in that spirit that this second edition of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos is published. While the translation changes affect only a small percentage of the words and phrases in these pages, readers of the earlier edition will find that this reads like a new book. And we hope they will purchase it as readily as the new readers together with whom they will be discussing and using it as a common guide to work in the mass movement.

For the work that made possible this new translation, we express special appreciation and thanks to editors Martín Koppel and Luis Madrid, as well as to Michel Prairie, whose parallel effort on the French-language Le visage changeant de la politique aux Etats-Unis, and whose systematic questioning of the author spotlighted not only translation problems that needed correction but many of the underlying political challenges that are then better addressed. The result, in short, is a better weapon for the fighting proletariat.

Mary-Alice Waters
February 1999  
 
 
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