In the meeting room, which volunteers had transformed from the production floor of a web press department, boxes of Pathfinder books were neatly stacked and shrink-wrapped on wooden skids, ready to be shipped to their new distribution center in Atlanta. Above the platform hung the enlarged, colorful covers of three new books being released by the publishing house: the Spanish edition of Malcolm X Talks to Young People; October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba; and the French edition of The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-1938: Report of a Participant.

Coming out of the weekend, said Barnes, an organized, confident, and systematic effort over time by the communist movement will not only double, but increase by five or six times, the yearly sales of Pathfinder books. This increase in sales is not only a political question, he said, but also one with big financial stakes.

The celebration took place in the middle of two days of volunteer labor to transform the Pathfinder Building, where revolutionary books and pamphlets, along with the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, are produced. Another "red weekend" was to take place seven days later in Atlanta to set up the distribution center and deploy the books in readiness for sales and shipping.  
 
Floor-by-floor transformation
Many who attended the meeting had put in a full day of hard work clearing out equipment that is no longer needed by Pathfinder’s printshop or the editorial departments of the publishing house and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. Tools, supplies, and machines still needed for those operations were gathered together, repairs made to the building, and every floor cleaned from top to bottom.

The volunteers’ single biggest accomplishment was their success in sweeping clean and closing up the basement of the building, where for several decades an extensive workshop and shelves of supplies had been located.

Earlier in the day a large crew had cleaned up the entire first floor where the printshop had until recently run a four-unit web press.

The success of the weekend helped the leadership of the project to recognize a few remaining tasks that needed to be done to bring home the project. On Monday and Tuesday members of the party and Young Socialists in New York and New Jersey mobilized for two additional evenings of work. They were joined by several volunteers from out of town who stayed over to help out.

By the time they were done, the Red Weekend crews had, for the first time, set up the editorial offices of Pathfinder, the Militant, and Perspectiva Mundial with the small amount of supplies and equipment they need. The equipment and paper used by the printshop was organized in the area the shop now uses.

Such steps forward were the reason the weekend was a "turning point" in a series of volunteer efforts over the past nine months, Barnes noted. The effort had brought closer the day when a branch of the party in New York can host the apparatus of the communist movement, and the party leadership that works in the editorial offices and party national office can more effectively function as leaders of their branches in the city.

The participants in the weekend--socialist workers, young socialists, organized supporters of the communist movement, and young people new to revolutionary politics--came from cities across the United States and Canada.

The transformation of the floors of the building, said Barnes, was "part of finding out through our labor what we need" in the way of any new equipment for the printshop. Only by carrying out the weekly mobilization to fold the Militant newspaper, for example and getting better at it each week--a task made necessary by the decommissioning of the web press--can decisions be made about what, and whether, equipment should be purchased to cut down labor time.

As the communist movement becomes more and more integrated into the resistance of working people, Pathfinder’s books in different languages cease being simply books; rather, Barnes said, they become a means to finding fighters all over the world. They are tools that tie together communists of different languages and experiences and help to open the fight for the political, social, and economic homogenization of the toilers worldwide. Those who fight, no matter where and in what conditions, can share the same understanding of what they have been bequeathed--not to have and to hold, but to use as part of building a working-class leadership.

Communists carry out politics and march along a narrow margin within the political space carved out by working people in struggle, said the SWP leader. Within that space communist workers have yet to find the limits of what they can accomplish by talking socialism on the job, reaching out to struggles, and expanding the circulation of revolutionary literature.

Although there is almost unlimited space for vanguard workers to function along these lines within the unions today, he said, at the same time there is little union democracy; the integration of the unions into the capitalist state continues apace.

Communist workers can help working people who are fighting to appreciate the scope and social importance of what they are doing, and the example they are setting for others.  
 
Communist propaganda work
The party, Barnes emphasized, is reconquering the use of election campaigns as platforms for speaking out boldly and drawing fighters into common activity. More candidates and their supporters are stepping up on soap boxes to be seen speaking for communism, he noted. In so doing, the party is taking another step along the lines of working-class resistance that it was not able to take for a decade or more.

Martín Koppel, the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of New York, spoke after Barnes’s introductory remarks. The election campaign, Koppel said, involves talking socialism on the job and on street corners to workers. "This is a recruitment campaign against imperialism and its war drive and the consequences of capitalist depression, and it goes well beyond the elections in November," he said. "Our campaign tables attract young people, and candidates and supporters work the crowd. All you need is a bullhorn, milk crate--our version of the ‘soap box’--and books. Never leave the hall without them."

The New York socialist candidates’ activities, he reported, have included a visit to a union picket line at the shipping docks in Brooklyn where members of the International Longshoremen’s Association are on strike. Another member of the socialist slate, Paul Pedersen, the candidate for the 12th Congressional District, campaigned in front of the meatpacking plant where he works.

Socialist workers are making plans to go to Washington, D.C., to join supporters of mayoral candidate Sam Manuel in soapboxing, Koppel said.

To the applause of the meeting, Manuel, another panelist, reported that he and his supporters had just brought home a drive to collect more than 6,000 signatures to put the party on the ballot in the city. He noted the warm response to the campaign and the keen interest in his call for a workers and farmers government.

"Winning ballot status is an important victory for the party," he said. "It helps defend the party’s legality in face of a hostile capitalist state. It is one of the fronts in the fight for workers’ rights, and it enhances our ability to reach out to workers and youth."  
 
Responding to opportunities
What the volunteers were accomplishing during the weekend, said Socialist Workers Party leader Mary-Alice Waters, will help the movement "have the kind of printshop and publishing apparatus we need to respond as a campaign party to opportunities within the resistance of working people and youth. And this is at a time when the politics we are presenting is getting a broader hearing."

The previous day a crew of eight volunteers had packed and shipped out 70 boxes of Pathfinder books to customers across the United States. This was an example, Waters said, of how supporters of the party will be able to organize the distribution center in Atlanta, in contrast to the practice of one or two people on the Pathfinder staff trying to fulfill a mountain of orders.

Waters noted the possibilities of increasing sales of revolutionary titles in a way that "we have not done for years." The interest in the books can been seen among working people in coal mines, textile mills, meatpacking and garment plants, and other industries. The thirst among workers behind bars for revolutionary literature, especially by Black inmates requesting titles on the struggles of African-Americans in the United States, is another sign of this interest, she said. "There is no reason why we cannot double or triple Pathfinder sales," she emphasized. In response to these ongoing openings, Waters continued, party supporters who have kept Pathfinder books in print through the Pathfinder Reprint Project are now taking on sales of the books and pamphlets to commercial outlets, libraries, and college campuses. Supporters of the communist movement have set a goal of 200 sales visits by October 15, using October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba by Tomás Diez as their lead title. They are also working to make the pathfinderpress.com web site more accessible to those who use it, including readers whose first language is Spanish or French.

member Seth Dellinger, who was seated on the platform, will be joining international sales teams at the Fete de l’Humanité, an annual political and cultural fair in Paris sponsored by the French Communist Party, and at the book fair in Gothenburg, Sweden, the largest in Scandinavia. Another team is headed to a festival in Madrid.

Pointing to the hanging book cover of The History of American Trotskyism, Waters said that the book describes the response of the party to the initial signs of social and political struggles that were beginning to erupt in the early 1930s--a response that prepared the communist movement for the giant class battles of 1934–37. Such initial signs can be seen today, she said.

Of Pathfinder’s Spanish-language titles, none has been greeted with more interest in Latin America over the years than Habla Malcolm X, noted Waters. Introducing Malcolm X habla a la Juventud, whose cover was also suspended above the platform, she said that this title is the product of ongoing collaboration between Pathfinder and Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba. Pathfinder is publishing a new, expanded English edition at the same time.

The new book is the fruit of collaboration that had previously produced Che Guevara Talks to Young People. After the publication of that title, Pathfinder discussed with young communists in Cuba the prospects for producing other books of similar character. "We discovered that the things we need politically for our work here are the same things they need in Cuba," said Waters. The book is set to be printed before the book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, scheduled in November. Cuba is the country of honor at the fair this year.

Drawing participants’ attention to the third of the three covers, Waters reviewed the work of the past several months in preparing the manuscript, photos, maps, and other material for October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba. Author Tomás Diez worked closely with the book’s editors on technical questions, including the compilation of a map showing accurately the placement of Soviet missiles and warheads in Cuba at the time. This is the first map providing such information that has ever been published, she said.

In another important contribution, the book "tells the story of the resistance inside the United States, as thousands poured into the streets," Waters said. "It helps negate the commonly spread myth that people of the United States were a non-factor in the crisis.

"This was a harbinger of what was to come a few years later," she said, with social struggles that included the rise of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam, expressed through actions such as the 1965 march on Washington.

The response by working people today to Pathfinder titles is a "good reminder about where the books and pamphlets take us and who they take us to--and what they bring hundreds of thousands of revolutionary-minded youth and working people," Waters said. "We use these books as we assemble the forces capable of fighting for the kind of world we will bring into being."  
 
More capable of finding opportunities
In 1964, during a debate at Oxford University in Britain, Malcolm X observed that "the young generation of whites, Blacks, browns, whatever else there is--you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I for one will join with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth."

Jack Barnes read this quote from Malcolm X Talks to Young People, making the point that Malcolm X was a great propagandist and simultaneously a great political organizer. Barnes encouraged all those present to read or reread the speeches in the book in order to understand the power of Malcolm and the place in history he carved out through his political ideas and initiatives.

The SWP leader described the collaboration by Malcolm X with socialist youth in conducting and bringing to print a 1965 interview for the Young Socialist newspaper, subsequently published in the YS pamphlet Malcolm X Talks to Young People. Pathfinder still sells that pamphlet today; with additions, it also became the book of the same name.

At the time of the Young Socialist interview, initial plans were under way for Malcolm to undertake a national speaking tour organized by the Young Socialist Alliance. Malcolm also wanted to put the YSA in touch with revolutionary-minded youth he had met in Africa, and collaborate in other ways to further the work of building a world revolutionary movement. Such a perspective was being posed clearly at the time by advances in the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide. Among other developments, the Cuban Revolution was deepening, and liberation movements were on the rise in Vietnam, the Congo, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, and elsewhere around the world. That collaboration was cut short by the assassination of the revolutionary leader in February 1965.

Today as well, said Barnes, communists work to build a revolutionary movement with other living, fighting forces.

The openings to join working-class resistance and link up with fellow fighters today have existed for a number of years, he said. The communist movement is becoming more capable of being part of them because of the course it set four years ago to subordinate the organizational forms of the party to finding and following the lines of resistance within the working class.

Through the experience the party has gained in the process, it becomes easier for communists today to see how propaganda work, far from becoming less important as revolutionary conditions unfold, becomes more crucial in building a working-class leadership, said Barnes. And the associated work of learning to produce books, pamphlets, and newspapers also becomes more important.

The final panelist, SWP National Committee member Jack Willey, told the meeting that in September a Militant reporting team will head to the South Pacific island of Kanaky, a country dominated by French imperialism. The Kanak people have a rich history of struggle against French colonial rule dating from the mid-nineteenth century. The team will be hosted by the Party of Kanak Liberation (PALIKA).

Communists in New Zealand began collaborating with PALIKA activists in the course of building the World Youth Festival that was held in Algiers last year. Young Socialists leaders from New Zealand worked to encourage revolutionary and liberation organizations in the region to participate in the festival as part of building an international anti-imperialist youth movement. PALIKA was one organization that decided to send a delegation.

This kind of collaboration--and similar initiatives in Latin America and Africa--would not have been possible before the collapse of the bureaucratic regime in the former Soviet Union, Willey said. Because of those events and the growing crisis of imperialist domination, the field is wide open today for genuine revolutionists to find each other and begin to put together the elements of a world communist movement, he noted.

Rebecca Williamson, a young socialist from Los Angeles, who will join socialists from Canada and New Zealand on team to Kanaky, was seated on the platform.

"Our last visit to Kanaky was in the late 1980s," Willey said. "In 1988 we had four books in French. Today we have 20. Following the French-language trail is an integral part of the struggle against imperialism."

"We’re recruiting to the festival movement and to the World Federation of Democratic Youth," Willey concluded. "There is a need for anti-imperialist forces to band together and fight together in the world today."  
 
Accelerated assault on working people
Nearly a year ago, by responding to the accelerated imperialist war drive and attacks on working people worldwide coming out of September 11, Barnes said, the SWP and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom backed into recognizing they were preparing for an imminent period of threatened financial collapse and looming capitalist depression and imperialist war.

Today, working people around the world are in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, he said, as depression conditions begin to take hold and the imperialists carry out a series of wars as they try to salvage their system of domination. As the breakdowns spread, millions more will learn that the capitalist crisis is a world phenomenon, and that there is nowhere or way to hide from it.

Neither the working class nor the ruling class can jump over the stages each has to go through before they face off in a decisive showdown, he said. Through guerrilla struggles and larger-scale combat, the working class will mature and become political, gaining revolutionary experience and stripping through every "solution" short of a battle for power. For its part, the billionaire ruling class will exhaust every variant of less violent and extreme forms of defending its class domination. Over the coming years and decades, communists will be part of the resistance of workers and farmers, bringing a clear understanding of the current stage of the class struggle and its place in the line of march toward the contest for political power.  
 
Politics of economics
As worker-bolsheviks study and gain a deeper understanding of the politics of economics, they can follow the shakiness of the massive debt structure, and the continued slip of the U.S. dollar and its domination of world currency.

The most important economic development in South America today is the elections in Brazil, in which Workers Party lead Lula de la Silva is leading the polls in the presidential race. Such an outcome has unnerved the imperialists exploiters. They fear, despite assurances by de la Silva to the contrary, that the new government won’t continue the "economic discipline" that has ensured the unending flow of massive debt payments by the Brazilian government to the world’s largest banks.

"Economics is totally intertwined with politics," Barnes explained. "Politics is a form of economic change. The simple election of the president of Brazil is more important to the world economy than the Argentine economic crisis or the situation in Mexico. Capitalists and international bankers are deciding whether to threaten to go on strike if the wrong candidate is elected in Brazil."

Barnes said Washington’s war drive against Iraq is not about building together a new imperialist coalition. He urged the audience to read New International no. 7, featuring the article "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq." The book explains that the 1990–91 U.S.-led war against Iraq accelerated the rivalry between Washington and other imperialist powers and increased the likelihood of sharpening conflicts among them.

The U.S. rulers "want a couple of allies that will allow them to take the next steps in which they won’t have to negotiate the results," he explained. "In the next war the imperialist rulers will fight among themselves over the results."

He pointed to Washington’s attempt to reestablish direct domination over the source of oil. "We shouldn’t have the idea that the configuration of states in the Middle East is forever: none are stable, established, or guaranteed." A new war in the Arab Persian Gulf will change the relationship between Washington and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Arab countries. Even the existence of Saudi Arabia is no more real than before it was created by the imperialists, who drew some lines on a map to establish boundaries of the country.

What the communist movement is preparing is not to build a movement to oppose a particular war, Barnes said, but years of work to oppose the continuing imperialist wars and war threats. This preparation includes a fall and winter school to study V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in coordination with rapid publication and study of two new issues of the Marxist magazine New International that will take up these broad world-historic questions.  
 
‘Excited and ready to go’
Linda Joyce, a volunteer from Atlanta who participated in the New York red weekend, helped organize the shipping pallets for the truck. "We loaded 1,225 boxes, parts for storage shelves, and assorted materials on skids weighing an estimated total of 36,000 pounds," she said. After arriving in Atlanta she called to inform the Militant that "we signed a lease for a warehouse in a light industrial park. So far 50 people are lined up to help set up the distribution center next weekend. We’re excited and ready to go."

One of the participants in the red weekend was 20-year-old Jessica Delmar from Los Angeles who recently joined the YS. She said the weekend work and discussion helped her see "why the printshop was so important" and why the changes being made in the apparatus were so central to the discussions at the party’s convention this past July. She helped with some of the heavy lifting needed and noted that "nobody discriminated against anyone" in the work. For example, women and men were asked to perform heavy tasks if they were able.

Sonja Swanson, a 16-year-old high school student from Tampa, Florida, was part of the human chain that transferred the books from the second floor onto shipping pallets. "I also helped to disassemble the shelves, mop the floors, and wash the walls," she added. "It was amazing to see the amount of dedication people have to come together to accomplish a task."

The YS member said that when she gets back to Tampa she intends to participate in clubs at her school as a way to talk to more people about politics and win support for the socialist election campaign in the state. I’m leaving here with more motivation, which was very high to begin with. We have 11 or 12 people from Tampa going to Atlanta next week to participate in the red weekend," she said proudly.  
 
 
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