“We have a union orientation, not a factory orientation,” said SWP national secretary Jack Barnes in his conference summary July 12. This is a life and death question, he stated, speaking at a postconference meeting of the party’s National Committee July 14. “In our work today we aim at the transformation of the unions—the only mass defensive organizations of the working class—into instruments of revolutionary struggle.”

The growing integration of socialist workers in the vanguard of the working class over the last two years, Barnes said, has laid the basis for this turn toward making mass work in the unions universal in the SWP. The conference sessions reflected this, as delegates described progress in linking up with unionists and other workers on picket lines, in organizing drives, and on other fronts of labor resistance—and incorporating communist propaganda tasks at the plants and mines along this axis of work.

Hosted by the SWP and Young Socialists and held at Oberlin College here, the conference drew 355 people. Around 80 were delegates elected by SWP branches and organizing committees in the United States. The party’s National Committee members were fraternal delegates. Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom also sent fraternal delegates.

Meetings of socialist workers and young socialists in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) took place at the very beginning of the conference and the morning after it ended. On July 13, young people at the gathering took part in a meeting organized by the Young Socialists. Supporters of the communist movement involved in Pathfinder’s Print Project also held a number of workshops that day on the various aspects of their work in producing and distributing Pathfinder books.

Barnes and SWP leaders Joel Britton and Mary-Alice Waters gave the three main presentations at the conference, each of them followed by discussion from the delegates in plenary sessions.

The program included a series of educational classes on questions of Marxist theory and communist program, as well as movies and social events. The classes proved popular, with the classrooms and lecture halls where they were held frequently filled to capacity. Participants also took advantage of the special discounts offered by Pathfinder Press on books covering the subjects discussed in the classes and other titles, purchasing $2,500 worth of books.  
 
International crisis of capitalism
The report by Barnes was titled “The reality of world capitalist crisis today.” The SWP leader said he found much of this election year boring because of the low level of bourgeois politics. The smokescreens capitalist politicians use cover up the real questions. “Underneath this boring level, though,” he stated, “you can see that for the first time since the early part of the 20th century, capitalism in the United States is marching into a period of depression and a pattern of imperialist wars and inter-imperialist conflicts, which will transform international relations and raise the specter of nuclear war, fascism, and the combination of struggles for national liberation and workers power in a way none of us has lived through.”

Bourgeois politics in the United States seems more boring than usual every time the political system heads into a crisis, Barnes said. That was the case in the early 1850s, just prior to the founding of a brand new party, the Republican Party, which soon won the elections and presided over the government during the U.S. Civil War.

In the early 1930s, too, he stated, the country was stunned coming out of the Great Depression and both of the main capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—were saying many of the same things. Within a couple of years, mass labor battles had spread across the country against the backdrop of fascist victories in Europe and the looming clouds of another world war. That’s when the Democrats were remade from the party of the former Southern slavocracy to the self-professed “friend of labor” and purveyor of the New Deal.

“Today we are convinced that something similar is happening,” Barnes said.

The twin ruling parties of U.S. imperialism have accelerated their offensive against the rights and social wage of working people over the past decade, the SWP leader noted, in a way that will lead to new social explosions. This offensive is profoundly bipartisan, he said, regardless of the acrimonious debates politicians from both parties engage in for electoral purposes.

This marks an important change, Barnes stated, the first signs of which came during the 1992 election campaign of William Clinton. Until Clinton’s administration, the Democrats regularly differentiated their party from the Republicans by presenting themselves as the defenders of Social Security and other entitlements working people won in struggle. In fact, the twin parties’ contest over their domestic platforms provided a contrast to U.S. foreign policy, which had been consistently bipartisan since World War II. But since the mid 1990s, “we have the opposite of what defined the two-party system for decades—a bipartisan domestic policy.”

Both parties aim to dismantle the social wage won in the course of massive labor and civil rights battles, said Barnes. And this comes “just at the time it is desperately needed”—as unemployment rises and the bosses cut wages and health insurance, even before inflationary outbursts that can devastate workers’ pay. In New York, he pointed out, it costs $10 to go to a movie now. “The real costs for workers to function as human beings continue to rise.”

The rulers’ drive to strip legal protections from immigrants, and other calculated moves to divide the working class, began in earnest under Clinton’s two terms, said Barnes. “So too did the steps to establish a North American command of the U.S. armed forces and the attacks on rights codified in the Bush administration’s Patriot Act.”

Barnes noted that the capitalist politicians’ calls for a leaner government are nothing but hot air. Since World War II the government bureaucracy has steadily become more and more bloated, whatever the stated aims of the given ruling party. Under the latest administration of President George Bush, in fact, this expansion has continued. An article in the July 18 right-wing National Review, titled “Bush’s bigger, fatter welfare state,” and other similar recent reports in the media confirm that.

Rightist demagogues rail against this development, Barnes noted. They hark back to the “good old” years of cheap government—that is, the decades before the end of World War II. It was in the mid-1940s that Washington became the uncontested top world power, emerging as the unambiguous victor from the interimperialist slaughter and establishing permanent, massive armed forces and a monstrous state apparatus—a structure typical of an imperialist colossus.

Under today’s conditions, Socialist Workers candidates must present clear slogans of struggle against the bipartisan capitalist attacks, said Barnes. They include demands for jobs for all, a massive program of public works, a sliding scale of hours and wages to spread the available work around and protect the incomes of working people, and other demands to oppose the bosses’ offensive and unify the working class and its allies on the land.

“No communist movement can grow or get heft if it does not organize to defend the most fundamental interests of working people,” said the SWP leader. Socialists aim to increase the self-confidence and consciousness of the working class—“the class that is the source of all creativity.”

In addition to defense of workers’ and farmers’ economic interests, he said, working-class candidates “call for all U.S. troops to be brought home now.” They demand full rights of freedom of speech and association for the citizen-soldiers who make up the imperialist armed forces. Above all, Barnes said, socialists campaign for independent working-class political action. They should make a point of asking workers to financially support their election campaigns.  
 
Shift to right has gone too far
The offensive against working people’s rights has a “cumulative side” to it, said Barnes. “The rulers continually probe how much to soften us up for further assaults.” However, he said, some in ruling circles realize they have gone too far for their own political good . This is what recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action, gay rights, and the right to privacy, among others, signify (see “U.S. high court rulings register rulers’ foreboding of effects of shift to right in politics” and “Supreme Court rulings advance gay rights”.)

This was a “set of astounding decisions,” Barnes said. They register a shift to the left in bourgeois politics. “I say nothing about the longevity of this shift, or its shallowness, but it’s a development that we must note of and take into account.” This is different from the ruling-class measures in the early years of the Clinton administration, which had a rightward bias.

Since World War II, the main role of the Supreme Court has been to anticipate the longer-term consequences of the course the ruling class is following, “to prevent the bourgeoisie from pushing beyond what the relationship of forces will allow,” the SWP leader said. The rulers have assigned this task to one of their most undemocratic institutions, a body made up in its majority of unelected, largely reactionary men who are justices for life. Its composition—whether the greater part of its members have been appointed by Republican administrations, as is the case now, or Democrats—has no bearing in its decisions. “The Supreme Court doesn’t have to use demagogy,” Barnes said. Bourgeois politicians are pompous, snake oil salesmen who usually look backwards. “The Supreme Court looks ahead.”

In the name of the Republican Party, and with substantial support from the Democrats, the ruling class was heading toward starting a fight it could not sustain, Barnes said. It will take a civil war to dismantle affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose abortion, and other such basic gains. “This is the best reading of the relationship of forces we’ve gotten from the bourgeoisie since the so-called Gingrich revolution,” Barnes stated. He was referring to former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newton Gingrich who in 1994 put forward the “Contract with America”—a series of budget cuts and assaults on basic rights that the ruling class had to abandon.

Among the developments that changed the class relationship of forces in favor of working people was the movement for Black freedom and its interrelationship with the fight against the Vietnam War, said Barnes. Black soldiers, in particular, were affected by these social changes. Rebelling against the racism of the white officer corps, and less and less convinced that the subjugation of Vietnam was a goal worth dying for, these soldiers helped make the imperialist army a less effective killing machine.

While the ruling class and its officer corps is no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome, which resulted from Washington’s defeat by the Vietnamese people, the class memory of the 1960s and the Black struggle is there, Barnes said. Barnes pointed to the friend-of-the-court brief backing affirmative action that top retired military officers submitted to the Supreme Court. These generals were in fact telling the ruling class, Barnes noted, “You can’t have the same kind of war at home that prevented us from winning the war in Vietnam.”  
 
Sea change in working-class politics
These rulings reflect the reality that, in spite of setbacks, working people have not been dealt crushing blows on these social questions. As such, Barnes said, the Supreme Court decisions are a “vindication of the ‘Sea Change.’”

The SWP leader was referring to “A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics,” the opening chapter of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. In that December 1998 speech in Los Angeles, which was subsequently printed in this Pathfinder book, Barnes presented the conclusions of the SWP national leadership that the retreat of the labor movement through the 1990s had bottomed out, and that in the new struggles that had begun to unfold, “what happens…has less and less connection to earlier defeats.”

Since then, socialist workers have organized to respond to the new openings by extending their geographic reach through organizing committees and by rebuilding fractions in the meatpacking, garment and textile, and coal-mining industries—where the assaults by the bosses have been deepgoing and the resulting labor resistance tenacious.

Contrary to the view expressed in a recent Militant editorial, said Barnes, there is no “uptick in labor resistance” at the present time. “We shouldn’t confuse changes in the broader class struggle with changes in ourselves,” he said. In the last year socialist workers have taken important steps forward, becoming more integrated into the working-class vanguard leading these struggles and knowledgeable about the labor resistance. But these struggles are not new. “We simply lifted the blinders off our eyes.”

The communist movement is building today on the same political trajectory outlined in the “Sea Change.” Whatever the outcome of any particular fight, Barnes said, socialists are guided by the Communist Manifesto, in which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in 1848 that “the real fruit” of such guerrilla battles “lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.”  
 
Economic problems and the war drive
The drive to more imperialist wars like the assault on Iraq is framed by the deep economic crisis of capitalism, Barnes said. Tax cuts for the wealthy and other measures to stimulate growth work well enough in a long-term period of expansion, he said. But in a period of decline like the one we’re in, sooner or later “what can go wrong will go wrong.” When the bubbles of the stock markets and housing prices burst, he said, working people will be threatened by both deflation—the contraction of credit and economic activity—and inflation—a monetary phenomenon that results in the rapid loss in buying power of workers’ wages.

All these developments are confirmation that U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War, he said. This loss—which meant that Washington could no longer rely on Moscow or other Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe to put the brakes on revolutionary struggles—gave the U.S. rulers no choice but to adopt the aggressive military strategy that was evident in the recent invasion of Iraq.

The adjustment was not immediate, said Barnes. In the 1990-91 Gulf War, Washington and London employed massed armor bearing close resemblance to the units that had defeated their German counterparts decades earlier in World War II.

Following that Kuwait war, the rulers confronted anew “how to use the military strength of the United States,” Barnes stated. The new strategy emphasizes high-tech weaponry—including new generations of nuclear arms now under development—and smaller and more mobile forces. It also assigns a central role to elite Special Forces.

The rulers continue to target Iran and north Korea, he noted—particularly their capacity to strike back with missiles that have an expanding range. The “weapons of mass destruction” have been expanded to include “quiet diesel submarines” and anything else that threatens the imperialist monopoly of strategic or even tactical military hardware.

At the same time, the U.S. imperialists are pressing ahead with the occupation of Iraq. The course this represents has won a clear majority among the U.S. ruling class, said Barnes. Whatever the tactical criticisms offered by the administration’s liberal critics, they offer no significant opposition or alternative road.  
 
Long-term trends favor working class
“The leadership of the Socialist Workers Party is convinced that long-term trends are in favor of workers and farmers,” said Barnes in concluding his report.

“The rise of secularism and the decline of religion—the refusal of growing sections of humanity to rely on dogma and authority—especially in the West, is the first such trend,” he said. “This is one of the great guarantees of the possibilities for revolution and reorganizing society along rational lines.”

Despite calls from the right to include a mention of Christianity as an alleged part of Europe’s “heritage” in the new European Union constitution, said Barnes, the final draft contained no mention of religion. “Godless in Brussels” read one despairing headline in the right-wing National Review.

The second trend is “the scope and size of the place of the fight for women’s rights,” said Barnes. This has a world character, as “women and their supporters take positions on the basis of what has been shown to be possible elsewhere. The Internet and television are immensely helpful in this respect.”

The third progressive development, Barnes said, is the increasing opposition to the exploiters’ use of the death penalty and torture to defend their rule. One indication of this trend is the recent denials by the U.S. government that it has used torture at its prison camp in Guantánamo—Cuban territory occupied despite the wishes of the Cuban people.

A number of delegates spoke to the fight for women’s rights and its key place in the struggle to transform the unions into class-struggle organizations.

Alyson Kennedy, a coal miner in Utah, said that her male co-workers had backed her up when the boss had attempted to fire her on a blatantly discriminatory basis. With their support, she kept the job.

Janet Edwards, a meat packer and delegate from the Communist League in New Zealand, told of a woman in India who recently rebelled against her husband-to-be’s violent insistence that her family increase her dowry. Hundreds of women rushed to the New Delhi home of the 21-year-old to offer congratulations after she had the man arrested under anti-dowry laws.

The Marxist explanation of the origins of women’s oppression and the place of the fight for women’s rights in the socialist revolution was the subject of a class titled “Communism and the Struggle Against Women’s Oppression.” Topics covered by other classes included “The 1931-39 Spanish Revolution and Civil War”; “Marx and Engels on the United States”; and “V.I. Lenin on Imperialism.”

Delegates took up other questions in the discussion. Susan Lamont of Birmingham, Alabama, noted that ex-prisoners and other anti-discrimination fighters continue to resist the state’s denial of their voting rights, after Governor Robert Reilly vetoed a bill that would have allowed some to vote.  
 
Trade union work
Joel Britton gave the second report, entitled, “Joining forces with militant workers in labor and farm struggles and building the communist movement.” He described developments in the labor movement ranging from a recent strike by meat packers in Hunts Point, New York, for union recognition, to the growing number of Mexican immigrants working in the coal mines in Utah.

While there has been no qualitative increase in the number of union-organizing drives or other working-class struggles in the United States, said Britton, there are important opportunities for communists in the unions to link up with others to strengthen the unions as fighting instruments of the working class.

Hollander Home Fashions in Chicago was one example, he said. There, UNITE-organized workers circulated a petition to demand that a union meeting be called in the run-up to contract negotiations. When no meeting was called they decided to don red T-shirts for a day in a show of union pride.

“It is important for socialist workers to function through our unions in building solidarity” with the 480 members of UFCW Local 538 who have been on strike against Tyson Foods in Wisconsin, for nearly four months, said Britton. Members of the Local’s Truth Squad participated in a June 26 program to protest government threats to deport Róger Calero, held at a UFCW hall in Omaha, Nebraska. Squad members have gone to other packinghouses in the Midwest to build support for the union’s fight against Tyson’s union-busting demands.

While building solidarity with this struggle through their unions as the number one task, socialist workers have discussed with fellow fighters at Tyson their disagreement with a union petitioning campaign that attacks Tyson for hiring “people with criminal records,” said Britton. Such arguments play into the hands of the rulers in their drive to criminalize the working class, he said, and “threaten the solidarity that is needed to defeat company attacks on wages, conditions, and dignity on the job.”

Since the U.S. government is the largest jailer in the world, said Britton, with some 2 million behind bars, it’s common in any workplace to meet workers who have had run-ins with capitalist “justice”—including in the course of the class struggle, like those at Tyson. Many workers rightly support campaigns to expunge previous convictions from the records of working people, he noted. These campaigns are often driven by ex-prisoners, especially African-Americans.

For the first time in some years all three industrial fractions of the communist movement reached their goals for selling subscriptions to the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial in the spring circulation drive, said Britton. They will build on this success with a renewal drive in the summer and a fall circulation campaign.

While the unions continue to weaken, Britton said, they remain the main defensive organizations of the working class encompassing millions. In addition, more and more workers in the last half decade turn to the unions as the main instruments to defend their livelihoods and rights.

Following discussion on Britton’s report, a panel of supporters of the communist movement described the increased responsibilities they have shouldered in the preparation, printing, and sales of Pathfinder books. Many conference-goers said that before hearing these presentations they had not appreciated the scope of the tasks undertaken by the supporters movement.  
 
50 years since assault on Moncada
On July 26, millions in Cuba will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks by revolutionary forces led by Fidel Castro, said Mary-Alice Waters in her report titled, “Cuba’s vanguard place in the proletariat’s line of march toward power.” They will be joined by more than 250 students and other youth from the United States in the July 24-31 Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange.

The attack on Moncada “embodied in its conception, composition, and execution the popular revolutionary course that the Cuban leaders have followed consistently since that time,” Waters said. “It was neither a putchist action, as the Stalinist leaders in Cuba labeled it at the time, nor an act of individual terrorism.” On its heels came the broad distribution of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, outlining the radical democratic program of the July 26 Movement; the successful campaign to win amnesty for the revolutionaries held in Batista’s prisons; the regroupment of the revolutionary forces in Mexico; their return to Cuba and launching of the revolutionary war; and the triumph of the rebel forces over the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Along this course, Waters said, the Cuban rebels developed a program for land reform, literacy, and workers’ rights that they began to implement in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Above all, they built a revolutionary army able and willing to take power.

“Nothing has been more stable” in U.S. foreign policy through nine administrations than Washington’s determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, said Waters. She noted that those who state that the policies of the current Bush administration represent “the worst danger” ever faced by Cuba exaggerate at best.

Castro has pointed to U.S. government hostility many times over the past four decades, she said. In December 1988, for example, he told a rally of a half million people that in the eyes of the U.S. rulers the revolution stands guilty of not just “wounding the empire’s pride but also of causing a great injury to its imperial interests.

“As long as the empire exists,” he said, “we will never be able to lower our guard, to neglect our defense.”

Cuba faced more immediate threats during the 1961 U.S.-organized invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs, and the October 1962 “missile” crisis, Waters pointed out. Moreover, she said, former president William Clinton’s special advisor on Cuba, Richard Nuccio, told Business Week in 1999 that three years earlier the Democratic administration had also weighed a military attack.

Nuccio explained that in the days after Cuban fighter jets shot down two planes piloted by counterrevolutionaries who were flying over Cuban airspace in 1996, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Clinton a memo on the “options for attacking Cuban air force units and defense structures.”

“If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had said we can do it quick and cheap, I think the president would have done it,” Nuccio stated.

But the Clinton administration came up against the same reality that stayed Kennedy’s hand 36 years earlier, said Waters: there is no way to attack Cuba without taking major blows. As the chiefs of staff acknowledged at that time, any invading forces would face massive military resistance from the Cuban army, militias, and armed citizens, and would suffer a politically untenable level of casualties in a matter of days.

In 1999—the same year as Nuccio’s interview—a blue-ribbon “Task Force on U.S.-Cuba Relations” released a report defending Washington’s course, she said. Co-chaired by former secretary of state William Rogers, the task force disputed any notion that U.S. “policy over the last four decades has been a failure.” In reality, it said, that policy, “including the embargo, has enjoyed real, though not total, success [since] the dominant goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba during the Cold War was to prevent the advance of Cuban-supported communism in this hemisphere.” The document concluded by stating that “Cuban communism is dead as a potent political force” in Latin America.

Such wishful thinking notwithstanding, Washington has no alternative but to maintain its course of aggression against Cuba, Waters said, precisely because of what it fears will develop in the Americas and elsewhere under the impact of the spreading depression.  
 
Revolutionary gains by women
“Nothing captures more sharply the proletarian character of the revolution than the advances made by women in Cuba,” Waters stated. From their integration into the workforce, to the provision of socialized medicine, to the attainment of abortion rights, Cuban women have accomplished “in less than 30 years what it took women 150 years to achieve in the imperialist countries.”

During a recent visit to the United States, Carolina Aguilar, a leader of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), told Waters that “women had to fight every step of the way for these gains, but with the backing of the revolution’s central political leadership.”

There was total continuity between Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin and Cuban president Fidel Castro on the place of women’s liberation as an indispensable part of revolutionary strategy, Aguilar said. There had been a hiatus on this question in the communist movement in the decades between Lenin and Castro, she said, as the bureaucrats who came to power after Lenin’s death denied that the struggle for women’s liberation was an immediate necessity and claimed this would happen in passing as a by-product of the fight for socialism.

The FMC leader told Waters how incensed she and others became while attending a women’s conference in the Soviet Union in 1987, when then-Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev blamed the country’s rising social problems on women’s alleged abandonment of their family responsibilities. Women, he said, needed to return to the home. It was an attempt to disguise unemployment by driving women to become domestic servants again.

Under the impact of the collapse of Cuba’s trade relations with the USSR and Eastern European countries at the opening of the 1990s, the FMC leader said, some in Cuba had raised similarly reactionary arguments, proposing that women should help alleviate unemployment by leaving their jobs and returning to their domestic tasks. “What army are you going to use?” was the reply of FMC activists, according to Aguilar, “because you are going to need an army to drive women out of the factories and into their homes.” Following such debates, Waters said, the priority for jobs was given to heads of households, who are frequently women.

In a message to the conference, Chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., Dagoberto Rodríguez said, “We cannot share these moments with the delegates in such an important conference because the State Deparment does not authorize Cuban Officials to travel outside the Beltway.

“We would like to take advantage of this opportunity to greet all the comrades who fight against oppression and injustice, to express our respect for the work you develop, and to wish you success in the debates of the conference. At the same time, we reiterate our deepest appreciation for the permanent solidarity with Cuba, especially at this time when it is needed most.”  
 
Latin America a political volcano
Latin America is a “smoldering volcano” today, said Waters. In one indication of the explosive material accumulating, candidates have been swept into office in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela on the illusions and hopes of working people to slow down the ravages of imperialist exploitation. Washington doesn’t have confidence in these new governments’ ability to prevent revolutionary outbreaks, she said, but neither does it have an alternative at the ready.

The U.S. rulers have no plan to confront this situation in Latin America now, she said. They are focused on strengthening their domination of the Middle East and Central Asia and opening up new fields of exploitation in Africa.

It’s important to watch developments in Brazil and Mexico, in particular, she noted. Out of what is brewing in this part of the world, Waters said, the working class will go through new experiences that will mold new revolutionary cadres.

In the discussion Argiris Malapanis from New York said that “There is more potential for social explosions in Latin America than anywhere else in the world.”

Following the discussion, the three reporters presented summary remarks. The final evening featured a rally to launch a 10-week party-building fund (see link to article below). During the rally and throughout the conference socialist campaigners in Boston, Des Moines, Philadelphia, and Seattle staffed tables to sign up volunteers to help with petitioning efforts to get Socialist Workers candidates on the ballot in those cities.  
 
Capital Fund for publishing projects
The conference also launched a new round of donations to the Capital Fund, which takes in donations of $1,000 or more to finance long-term publishing plans. Enthusiastic applause greeted SWP leader Dave Prince’s announcement that $128,000 had been pledged by the end of the conference.

Prince reported that donors included Arthur Lobman, a 45-year party veteran who bequeathed $10,000 to party publishing projects. Lobman died in early July. Several meat packers contributed the “blood-money” bonuses they received at the time of recent contract signings, he said, continuing a proud tradition among the industrial fractions of the SWP and YS.

The day after the conference ended, socialist workers in the UFCW, UMWA, and UNITE concluded their meetings and elected steering committees to guide their work in these unions. The members of these steering committees then met together with other SWP leaders to assess the next steps to take coming out of this conference. The proposals from that gathering were discussed and adopted by a meeting of the SWP National Committee July 14.

At the center of the SWP leadership’s conclusions was taking rapid steps to move beyond factory work to systematic communist trade union activity everywhere socialists are building fractions, including moving to workplaces where union organizing or utilizing existing union structures to the benefit of the membership is possible. The elected leadership bodies of the SWP trade union fractions subsequently called new national fraction meetings August 2-3 to draw up plans to implement this perspective.
 

In addition to petitioning, there will be forums and other political events taking place in each city. If you can help, please contact campaign supporters at the addresses listed on page 8.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers’ struggles have impact on youth  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home