Leaders of Palika presented their perspectives on the fight against French imperialism.

Revolutionaries from New Zealand, Canada, and the United States were invited to contribute to the exchange of views. They were members of a Militant reporting team that was in New Caledonia for the best part of a week starting September 3. The visit had resulted from political collaboration leading up to and during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Algeria, held in August 2001.

The socialists’ remarks helped to spark interest in the Pathfinder literature that they had brought with them.

In discussing the need to build a worldwide movement to fight imperialism, the socialists recommended a number of titles--along with the Militant newspaper--to help uncover the "hidden" revolutionary history and battles of the working class.

Pathfinder is dedicated, they said, to presenting the lessons of current political struggles and developments, as well as those learned through the sweat and blood of fighters from battles in the past.

Through the books of the revolutionary workers movement, they emphasized, a new generation can benefit from these experiences and not have to reinvent the wheel each time the working class faces pressing social, economic and political questions.

The presentations generated a good deal of discussion. Participants asked about the experiences of revolutionaries functioning in the unions in the imperialist nations; the role played by immigrant workers in the labor movement of those countries; the fight to cancel the Third World debt; and the role of Paris’s imperialist rivals in the Pacific, especially Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

The discussion continued around the literature table that the socialist reporting team had been invited to set up. Participants pored over the recently expanded range of French-language books produced by the revolutionary publishing house. They bought five copies of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism, and three of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, both by Jack Barnes, and five copies of Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Burkina Faso revolutionary Thomas Sankara. Participants also purchased three copies of Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada, and two of The History of American Trotskyism, along with 11 copies of the Marxist magazine Nouvelle Internationale, and a wide range of other titles. All told the participants in the seminar purchased some 60 titles.  
 
 
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