The following is the introduction to Their Trotsky and Ours, which will be published by Pathfinder in July. Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
To this day I have a vivid memory of looking out at the 1,000 people gathered in the auditorium at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago on New Year’s Eve 1982–83. It was the second evening of a socialist educational conference held in conjunction with the twenty-second national convention of the Young Socialist Alliance. I had entitled a talk I had been asked to give "Their Trotsky and Ours," but the meeting that night was not about Leon Trotsky. It was about the members of the Socialist Workers Party, young socialists, co-workers, and party supporters--what they had accomplished, who they had become, in the midst of momentous world events they had responded to over the past half decade. It was about the coming American revolution.

Some four years earlier, at the beginning of 1978, the Socialist Workers Party had made a political turn to get the overwhelming majority of our cadres and leaders into the industrial working class and unions. We were shaking off residual forms of what Farrell Dobbs called the "semisectarian existence" imposed on us since the retreat of the working class at the end of the 1940s and the ensuing postwar expansion of finance capital. We had begun rebuilding organized units of party members in the industrial unions--nationwide trade union fractions. Communist political work in the labor movement was being carried out by women and men most of whom had been won to the revolutionary party over the previous two decades as young socialists actively engaged in battles for Black and Chicano rights, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the defense and distribution of the ideas of Malcolm X, struggles for women’s liberation, and the defense of the Cuban Revolution. Above all, they were determined to emulate the intransigence and esprit de corps of those who made the Cuban Revolution. These were the people who formed the big majority of those present in the auditorium. They enjoyed proletarian politics; they looked forward to enjoying class combat.

The SWP and YSA were deeply involved at the time in getting out the truth about the advancing popular revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua, and defending the workers and farmers governments in those countries against Washington’s economic sabotage, CIA operations, and military aggression. Fewer than three years before, in 1979, these regimes had come to power through revolutionary struggles, and with those victories, prospects for extending the socialist revolution in the Americas--opened some two decades earlier with the triumph in Cuba--had been utterly transformed. The liberation struggle in El Salvador had gotten a powerful boost from the Nicaraguan victory. Half a world away, the "Peacock Throne" of the shah of Iran--U.S. imperialism’s strongest bastion in the Arab/Persian Gulf--had also been toppled by a mass popular insurrection at the opening of 1979. The historic victory of the Vietnamese people over Washington’s murderous war was still part of our common experience, and our fight to get the U.S. troops out was still fresh in our minds. Freedom forces in southern Africa, with the aid of a powerful contingent of volunteers from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, were making new advances.

Socialist workers in the United States were deeply involved in the fights of working people against the employers’ giveback demands. We were campaigning inside and outside the unions, and among workers, farmers, and youth, to mobilize solidarity with working people and their revolutionary battles in Central America and the Caribbean, and were taking co-workers to these countries to see for themselves. The Militant and Perspectiva Mundial had become the most reliable sources of accurate information on these revolutions, and the party was making special efforts to sell these periodicals on the job and in front of factory gates and mine portals. Pathfinder Press was expanding publication of writings and speeches by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, as well as the words of leaders of the workers and farmers government in Nicaragua and of Maurice Bishop in Grenada (and soon, with the Burkina Faso revolution in western Africa, the words of its outstanding leader Thomas Sankara).

The Socialist Workers Party was becoming more proletarian in composition--in daily life--as well as in program. The unfolding revolutions in Central America and the Caribbean were underlining for us once again how, with working-class leadership, the toilers can use a workers and farmers government to advance toward the expropriation of the exploiters and oppressors, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we lived through these revolutionary struggles day by day, we were becoming better equipped to draw clarity and strength from our communist political heritage. We could see and understand more richly and act with greater confidence on the continuity of our program and strategy, a program and strategy going back to the origins of the modern communist workers movement in 1847–48, when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first shouldered leadership responsibilities in a revolutionary workers organization. We were hungry to better arm ourselves with the programmatic and strategic conquests of the Communist International, established sixty years earlier under the leadership of Lenin and the victorious Bolshevik party.

The SWP in 1980 had launched a leadership school where twice a year some dozen members of the National Committee leading the turn to industry took six months away from other party responsibilities to study the political writings of Marx and Engels--and, as a bonus, to study Spanish as well. Over the year prior to the Chicago meeting that New Year’s Eve, each party branch had begun organizing schools in which every member, young socialist, and candidate for membership in the area participated in systematic study of the political works of Lenin, including the Comintern reports and resolutions that between 1919 and 1922 he and Leon Trotsky more than anyone else had shaped. In a sense, the night was a graduation exercise for all of us across every generation in the party who had together systematically worked our way through the first term in the Lenin schools.

These schools had helped us understand the twin foundations of Bolshevism: a communist, world program and a proletarian cadre. Following Lenin’s death in early 1924, Leon Trotsky had led the fight in the world communist movement to continue the Bolshevik course in face of the assault on it by a growing, privileged bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union.

"In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e. of world economy and world politics," Trotsky had written in his 1928 criticism of Stalin’s increasingly nationalist and class-collaborationist course, "not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country.... An international communist program is in no case the sum total of national programs or an amalgam of their common features. The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa."

"Their Trotsky and Ours" is a reaffirmation of that truth. And it was a registration of what the cadres of the Socialist Workers Party were accomplishing as our lives became more marked by involvement in struggles by working people in mines, mills, factories, and fields across the United States, and by our deepening collaboration and exchange of experiences and ideas with revolutionists elsewhere in the Americas and worldwide. At the same time, it was a salute to the veteran combatants in the party, those who had been won to communism during the labor battles and working-class social movements of the 1930s and had taught us to act, and live, as proletarian revolutionists.

A few months later, in the spring of 1983, Mary-Alice Waters and I drove with Farrell Dobbs, the party’s national secretary from 1953 to 1972, down to King City, a small town in California’s Salinas Valley, to get away from the pressures of daily responsibilities in order to work with him in putting the finishing touches on the second volume of the series of books he was in the midst of writing, Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S. We also wanted to get his political suggestions for editing "Their Trotsky and Ours" for publication in the new magazine of Marxist politics and theory, New International. These were the last two major political projects Farrell was able to work on before his death in October of that year.

As we were out walking one evening, Farrell told us he wouldn’t have been able to write that second volume of Revolutionary Continuity with anything approaching the same life and concreteness if he hadn’t simultaneously been reading the Lenin selections that party branches around the country were using in their schools. Rereading Lenin was like a "refreshing shower," he said. That volume of Revolutionary Continuity tells the story of the birth of the communist movement in the United States during the first years of the Soviet workers and peasants republic and of the Communist International.

Farrell looked at the changes our movement was going through at the beginning of the 1980s in the same way as he did the historic events he was writing about, that is, from the standpoint of forging the leadership of communist workers parties competent to lead the toilers to victory. As he wrote in the preface to that second volume of Revolutionary Continuity, "the efforts by the Marxist wing of the workers’ movement to gather the cadres of a proletarian revolutionary party needed to lead the fight to end capitalist rule, establish a workers and farmers government, and open the road to a socialist order" are decisive. Farrell dedicated the book "To the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party," "To the men and women of the New Jewel Movement of Grenada and the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua," and "To the heroic combatants of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front" of El Salvador.

Another irreplaceable contribution to "Their Trotsky and Ours" was made by veteran party leader Joseph Hansen. Joe completed the introduction to his book Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution as we were generalizing the turn to industry in the spring of 1978. He died in January 1979, a few months before the victories in Grenada and Nicaragua. The contributions he had made for several decades, however, as part of the central leadership of the party and world communist movement--on the key programmatic question at the heart of "Their Trotsky and Ours," the nature of a workers and farmers government and its relation to the toilers’ fight to overturn capitalist social relations and establish a workers state--provided the political tools we needed to understand and respond to those revolutions and join forces with them as communist partisans.

In the 1960s Joe had helped blaze a trail for the SWP leadership in understanding the political dynamics of the workers and farmers governments that came to power during post-World War II revolutions, especially in Yugoslavia, China, Algeria, and Cuba. He concluded that these transitional regimes are "the first form of government that can be expected to appear as the result of a successful anticapitalist revolution." This had been true of the initial Soviet government established under Bolshevik leadership in Russia in October 1917. Similar regimes had emerged after World War II with the revolutions in Yugoslavia and China, despite their Stalinist leaderships. (Because of the massive weight of the peasantry in the Chinese revolution, Joe considered it the biggest theoretical challenge of all, and it took him longer--to 1969--to be satisfied that its dynamics fit the workers and farmers government analysis.) The popular revolutionary governments established in Cuba in 1959 under the leadership of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, and in Algeria in 1962 under the forces in the National Liberation Front led by Ahmed Ben Bella, confirmed the pattern.

All these governments, notwithstanding differences in the class structure and in the caliber of leadership in each country, did serve as "the first form of government . . . to appear as the result of a successful anticapitalist revolution." They were an antechamber to the dictatorship of the proletariat--that is, they provided a bridge to the overturn of capitalist social relations by the toilers and consolidation of a workers state, an instrument with which to advance that goal. But history also taught us, Joe stressed--and the case of Algeria demonstrated--that this outcome is not settled by the initial revolutionary victory itself. It is far from automatic, very far. The central communist leadership task in such a government is to mobilize and raise the political consciousness of an increasingly weighty fighting alliance of workers and farmers, responding to and leading the initiatives of the toilers as they deepen the inroads into the privileges and prerogatives of property in the hands of the landlords and capitalists.

In coming to these conclusions, which were incorporated in reports and resolutions adopted by the Socialist Workers Party, Joe kept reaching for the lessons of the fight for power, and the exercise of power, that had been drawn by the Communist International in Lenin’s time. Neither Joe nor Farrell had been old enough to be politically active during the early years of the Russian Revolution. But each of them had been a young party member in the mid-1930s when our movement concluded, following Trotsky’s initiative, that Hitler’s uncontested rise to power demonstrated that it was no longer possible to reform the Stalin-led Comintern and instead turned our efforts to build a new revolutionary international. The German Communist Party had let the working class go down to defeat without a fight, refusing to campaign for a united front with the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions to take on the national socialists’ goon squads in combat. On top of that, the Comintern and its parties were already so politically corrupted that there was no rebellion in their ranks against the disastrous course that led to the greatest defeat of the twentieth century.

Both Joe and Farrell had been trained by Trotsky to understand that the new world movement that had to be built needed no new program and strategy. Pull together the reports and resolutions hammered out in struggle by the Bolshevik leadership of the Comintern, under Lenin’s political guidance, Trotsky told his secretariat in exile in 1933. That’s our program.

James P. Cannon--a founding leader of the SWP who had been a pioneer of American communism and a delegate to congresses of the Communist International--opened his book The History of American Trotskyism: 1928–38--Report of a Participant with precisely that point: "We have no new revelation: Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian Revolution and in the early days of the Communist International."

Our movement has not referred to itself as Trotskyist for many years. The reasons are explained in this book. But to this day we still have "no new revelation." In fact, less so than ever. Since the 1970s, as we have deepened our proletarianization, concretized our understanding of workers and farmers governments, and solidarized with the proletarian internationalist course of the leadership of the Cuban Revolution, we too have turned back to the political record and conquests of Bolshevism and the Communist International in Lenin’s time. "Their Trotsky and Ours" is a product of that political course.

At the time the talk was given and first published, it was treated as a sensation, a virtual scandal, by the leaders of most of the organizations in the world that called themselves Trotskyists, a number of whom sent emissaries to the gathering with concealed tape recorders. The majority leadership of the Fourth International, with which the Socialist Workers Party was then fraternally associated, was among them. But in fact it was a tempest in a tea cup. None of those who voiced the greatest outrage were actually interested in the political and strategic questions addressed in these pages. They had long before turned away from the struggle for a proletarian party. They rejected the perspective of the fight for workers and farmers governments. None ever attempted to answer the arguments raised here. Over the next several years the programmatic positions and organizational methods of most of the groups in the Fourth International bore less and less connection to the Marxist and Bolshevik foundations on which our world movement had been launched a half century earlier--and on which the SWP and its sister communist leagues in a number of countries stood. Well before the end of the 1980s we had gone our separate ways--they, deeper into the centrist swamp of middle-class radical politics, and we, toward building proletarian parties and advancing the prospects of a new communist international.

As the turn to industry expanded the day-by-day life and work of SWP members with broader and more geographically diverse layers of working people across the United States, we also took a new look at the centrality of the worker-farmer alliance to revolutionary prospects in this country. In 1967 the party had dropped "farmers" from the "workers and farmers government" slogan. But the deepening involvement of party cadres in the 1970s and early 1980s in struggles of working people in town and country--our experiences, as unionists, with farmers--convinced us that this had been an error. We recognized that farmers would have substantial political weight in building any mass revolutionary movement in the United States, and that the class political alliance captured in the workers and farmers government slogan concretized a political course necessary for any victorious proletarian revolution here. At our 1984 convention, the SWP voted to amend Article II of the party constitution to read: "The purpose of the party shall be to educate and organize the working class in order to establish a workers and farmers government, which will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism."
 

As this twentieth anniversary edition is being produced, together with new Spanish and French translations of it, "Their Trotsky and Ours" is one of the readings that is being studied and discussed in socialist summer schools organized in cities across the United States and internationally. Young socialists and others are participating alongside communist veterans of the turn to industry and party cadres from several generations. The purpose of the school, as explained in its syllabus, "is not just to read or reread a book or an article, but rather to approach these works through the lens of experiences the party and YS are living through today in the United States and internationally and the unfolding opportunities we can take advantage of."

It is those experiences and opportunities, in fact, that seemed to push us toward this new edition of "Their Trotsky and Ours."

When an imperialist power goes to war, all organizations that claim to speak for the interests of the working class are put to the test. Those without a communist program and proletarian composition are whipsawed by the patriotic pressures of bourgeois public opinion, either succumbing to them politically, or even beginning to shatter under the blows.

In early 1991 the U.S. government waged a brutal war against the people of Iraq, in which as many as two hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed during six weeks of daily bombing and missile attacks and a one-hundred-hour invasion. The outcome of that murderous war was politically demoralizing to workers and farmers the world over, even more so to those in Iraq itself, since the Iraqi regime, following its indefensible invasion of Kuwait, organized virtually no resistance against Washington’s final assault. The U.S. rulers did not succeed in imposing an imperialist protectorate in Iraq in order to compensate for the loss of the shah’s regime in Iran twelve years earlier--their goal in the war--but at the same time they paid little price for their uncontested bloodletting.

Because of the roots the Socialist Workers Party and other Communist Leagues had put down through the turn to the industrial working class and unions for more than a decade, the cadres of our organizations passed the test of the Gulf War, confidently moving more deeply into our class in the midst of the conflict to carry out a working-class campaign against imperialism and its war.

Since the closing years of the 1990s there has been a rise in resistance among vanguard workers and farmers in the United States. Other imperialist countries, with the exception still of Japan, have been marked by a similar shift. It took us a while to recognize the small beginnings of these changes, adjust to them, and start acting on the new opportunities. The pressing need to do so was the central question before a joint conference of the party and Young Socialists held in Los Angeles in December 1998. In the summary talk to that gathering on behalf of the SWP leadership, I pointed to the political importance for building our movement of these initially unconnected openings among vanguard working people in various industries and regions. That talk was published a few months later, under the title "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," as the opening chapter of the book Capitalism’s World Disorder.

It had become clear, we emphasized, "that no matter what the legacy--in an industry, in a union, in a region, among any segment of working people--no matter how limited the results of previous struggles, what happens now in any struggle has less and less connection to earlier defeats. Using your peripheral vision to find the fighters in the working class and among its allies becomes more and more valuable. They are often there. It’s like becoming a good point guard. Develop your peripheral vision. Teammates are there!"

In her 1999 preface to the Spanish translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, which is the record of the party’s turn to the industrial working class and unions from 1978 through the early 1990s, Mary-Alice Waters developed this point further. Together with "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," that preface was discussed in party branches and then adopted as a guide to action by the April 1999 SWP convention. The preface is now included in the new 2002 English edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, and appears in a new 2002 edition of the French translation.

The vanguard currents and individuals we keep running into among layers of workers and farmers, Waters says,

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.

As we’ve followed these lines of resistance among working people in city and countryside, we’ve also displayed the courage of our convictions, adjusting the party’s organizational forms to meet political needs. We’ve established new and smaller units of the party in areas of the country where we’ve become part of vanguard layers of coal miners, garment and textile workers, packinghouse workers, and others engaged in struggles. We’ve relocated bookstores so we can organize our political work out of workers districts in cities across the country. Where we’ve had branches for many years, we’ve used these trimmer units as models. All these steps are taking us more deeply into the union skirmishes and initial stirrings of social movements of our class and its allies that are harbingers of working-class resistance that will be mounted in face of increasingly violent capitalist assaults.

At the same time, young socialists have been meeting youth in the United States and other imperialist countries who are attracted to these proletarian struggles, as well as young people engaged in fights against imperialist oppression and exploitation from Haiti to the South Pacific islands of Kanaky (New Caledonia), from countries across the Middle East and Africa, to Venezuela and elsewhere in the Americas. The openings to win layers of these revolutionary-minded youth to communism have increased with the disintegration in the early 1990s of the world Stalinist movement, which for more than six decades, under the hijacked banner of Marxism, had organized from one continent to the next defeats of revolutions, assassinations of proletarian leaders, and demoralization and depoliticization of militants deeply immersed in struggles for national liberation and socialism.

These are the reasons, above all, why there is a need and a demand for a new edition of "Their Trotsky and Ours," which will also appear almost simultaneously in Spanish and French. These are the reasons it is being studied across the country at socialist summer schools, along with The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and James P. Cannon’s The History of American Trotskyism: 1928-38--Report of a Participant, which is being produced simultaneously with this one in a new edition--and for the first time ever in Spanish and French.
 

The text and footnotes of "Their Trotsky and Ours" have been brought in line with subsequent and improved translations and printings of some of the quoted material. As it more and more becomes the norm for many Pathfinder titles to be published simultaneously in English, Spanish, and French--for use by workers doing political work in these languages--the collective effort on the translations helps clarify and politically sharpen elements of the original as well. Further editorial work has incorporated the fruits of these labors and eliminated unnecessary obstacles to reading and understanding "Their Trotsky and Ours" today.

From the translations, to the formatting and proofreading, to the final printing of the text and covers, the publication of books such as this one would not be possible without the efforts of hundreds of volunteers around the world who are members or organized supporters of the communist movement. Without the proletarianization of the party over the past quarter century, we could not have maintained and expanded a communist publishing program and printshop that enables us to get the invaluable lessons of 150 years of working-class struggle into the hands of vanguard fighters who recognize the need for broader political perspectives in order not only to fight successfully but also to win.

Nor would we have been able to build an auxiliary organization of supporters of the communist movement worldwide that has taken in hand the digital preparation, proofreading, graphics work, and other tasks that must be accomplished in order to keep revolutionary books and pamphlets in print and to produce new ones such as this in a timely way to meet pressing political needs and opportunities.
 

Much has happened in world politics since "Their Trotsky and Ours" was first published. The mold-shattering events of the last two decades have increased both the timeliness and political urgency of the fundamental points dealt with in these pages.

Neither the workers and farmers government in Grenada nor the one in Nicaragua went forward to the expropriation of the capitalists and landlords and establishment of a workers state. In October 1983 the workers and farmers government in Grenada was overthrown in a coup organized by a Stalinist faction in the governing New Jewel Movement. The revolution’s central leader Maurice Bishop, along with dozens of other revolutionary leaders and Grenadian citizens, were murdered. By 1988 the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua had united around a course that sharply reversed the proletarian trajectory of the opening years of the revolution. With the defeat in Nicaragua, the revolutionary advances in nearby El Salvador eroded further and were soon reversed.

Our movement has produced, and actively campaigned to circulate, the record of the achievements of these revolutionary struggles and Marxist explanations of the lessons from their defeats. These materials can be found in the Pathfinder books Maurice Bishop Speaks and Sandinistas Speak, as well as in several issues of New International magazine: "The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop" by Steve Clark; "The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution," a collection of reports and resolutions adopted by the Socialist Workers Party; and U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War by Jack Barnes.

Despite these blows in Central America and the Caribbean, and despite enormous political and economic pressures bearing down on the Cuban Revolution over the past twelve years, millions of working people and their leadership in Cuba continue to act as proletarian internationalists. Their courage, political consciousness, class solidarity, and implacable determination continue to set a revolutionary example for workers and farmers the world over, including here in the United States. "They are communists. And that is what we are, too"--that simple statement remains as true today as when it was asserted to young socialists and others in Chicago twenty years ago.

As this book goes to press early in the summer of 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush, with broad bipartisan backing, has announced plans to take "preemptive action" against those, at home and abroad, whom the U.S. rulers brand as "terrorists" or as linked to a worldwide "axis of evil." After hundreds of noncitizens have been held without charges in U.S. jails, many for nearly a year, Washington has now begun throwing U.S. citizens into military prisons as well. They are being denied even their most basic constitutional rights to know the charges against them, to legal counsel, or to the presumption of innocence. Washington is laying the political and military groundwork for "preemptive action" against Iraq and other governments and peoples the U.S. rulers consider strong enough to develop meaningful defenses against the assaults Washington is pressing.

History has shown that small revolutionary organizations will face not only the stern test of wars and repression, but also the potentially shattering opportunities that can emerge unexpectedly--and explosively--when strikes and social struggles erupt. As that happens, communist parties not only recruit many new members. They also fuse with other workers organizations moving in the same direction and grow into mass proletarian parties contesting to lead workers and farmers to power. This assumes that well beforehand their cadres have absorbed and grown comfortable with a world communist program and strategy, are proletarian in life and work, derive deep satisfaction from--have fun--doing politics, and have forged a leadership with an acute sense of what to do next. These cadres must already be functioning as part of a disciplined proletarian party, at one with those toilers being targeted by the employers and their state. Otherwise these organizations will be disoriented and broken in face of wrenching crises and enormous opportunities alike.

Farrell Dobbs, Joe Hansen, Jim Cannon, and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party have all been firm believers in the fact that we’ll never succeed in building a proletarian combat party in the United States if we start looking around for somebody other than the ranks of our own organization to hammer out concrete tactics and a political line on the class struggle. Or, conversely, if we start trying to dictate program and tactics to revolutionary-minded working people and youth in other countries. Joe explained this course of conduct in his 1975 talk, James P. Cannon the Internationalist, an invaluable companion to "Their Trotsky and Ours."

Proletarian internationalism understood and carried out in that way--by integrating the cadres of the communist movement into the rising resistance of vanguard workers and farmers in the United States and the world over--is at the heart of "Their Trotsky and Ours." It is about building proletarian parties and a new world communist movement in which the political contributions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and more contemporary revolutionary leaders can all be taken up and put to use by militants who come from different political origins and who judge each other not on the basis of preconception or prejudice but on the basis of deeds.

It is above all about getting ready every day with fellow militants for titanic class battles that lie ahead, and continuing to transform ourselves and our organizations as we do so.