Participants had two things to celebrate, said Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International and one of the speakers. In addition to officially launching the construction project, she said, “We have come to celebrate what is represented by these four titles—many months of labor by volunteers in the Pathfinder Printing Project.” She was referring to four new Pathfinder books scheduled for publication in January. Blow-ups of the covers of these books hung above the stage. They were Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 by Armando Hart, in both English- and Spanish-language editions; Rebelión Teamster, the first edition in Spanish of Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs; and Leur Trotsky et le nôtre by Jack Barnes—the first French-language edition of Their Trotsky and Ours.

Waters and Jack Barnes, the Socialist Workers Party national secretary, were the featured speakers. Martín Koppel, organizer of the executive committee of the New York SWP, and Arrin Hawkins of the New York Young Socialists co-chaired the event.

The first speaker, SWP National Committee member Norton Sandler, told the meeting that voluntary construction teams would rapidly turn the space into the flagship Pathfinder bookshop in the United States. The address—307 West 36th Street, 10th Floor North, New York, NY 10018—would be listed on the data page of each Pathfinder book that comes off the press, he said, just as 47 The Cut, the address of the publisher’s London distributor, has appeared in every Pathfinder book since 1972.

Pathfinder supporters in the United Kingdom organized their own Red Weekend and public meeting in mid-November to spruce up the London bookshop and celebrate its 15th anniversary, said Pete Connors of the Communist League (CL) in the United Kingdom. Extended shop hours have already helped increase off-the-street traffic and sales.

Volunteers fill orders on the premises for customers in Africa and much of Europe, and deliver books to buyers within London, Connors said. Just in the last week an outlet in Italy used Pathfinder’s web site to order about $900 worth of books.  
 
New CL branch in Scotland
Connors announced the formation of a new CL branch in Edinburgh, Scotland. “We’ll be opening a new bookstore and Militant Labour Forum hall there,” he said. “This step is a product of a couple of years work reaching out to farmers and workers in Scotland.” Socialist workers have also seen firsthand how Scottish national pride and desire for self-determination are “living elements in the class struggle,” Connors said.

Bill Schmitt of the Twin Cities Young Socialists said that during a recent political visit to the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Sweden, he had joined CL members at the 100,000-strong demonstration in London November 20, held to protest the visit of U.S. president George Bush. “The ‘Stop Bush’ line of the organizers did nothing to advance the fight against British imperialism, which is a key player in the assault on Iraq,” he said. By contrast, CL members carried a banner that put the heat on London. It read: “British troops out of Iraq, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Sierra Leone.” The banner drew interest from many, but also criticism from a wider range of protesters, Schmitt said, who agreed with the “troops out of Iraq” part but argued that “‘We’ can’t leave the Balkans or Ireland.”

Schmitt and other speakers said that this banner was likely the only anti-imperialist banner in that London demonstration. Despite their “antiwar” pronouncements, the main organizers of the action are in fact part of the imperialist war party by calling actions with a British nationalist tone.

In her presentation, Waters noted that production of the four new Pathfinder titles, from formatting to indexing, had been undertaken by volunteers in the Pathfinder Printing Project—one side of the expanding responsibilities undertaken by supporters of the communist movement. All four will be part of Pathfinder’s booth at the Havana International Book Fair in February.

Armando Hart’s Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 will fill an important place in Pathfinder’s growing arsenal of books by leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Waters said. “This part of the publishing program began with the production in the mid-1990s of the Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara and Che’s Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58.”

Through this series of books, Cuban revolutionary leaders speak in their own words, from those who started out as anti-Batista army officers within the military to the women fighters in the Rebel Army. These accounts help to fill in the picture of how the Cuban Revolution was actually made, she said.

A feature of Aldabonazo is the rich trove of primary sources it contains, said Waters—including letters, articles, and statements by revolutionary leaders. Along with Hart’s narrative, they show the complexities of the struggle in the cities, and its place in the anti-Batista struggle alongside the Rebel Army, which was built in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.

The revolutionary leadership team around Fidel Castro was constructed in the Sierra, said Waters, and the struggle for a proletarian party went through the Sierra as well. But the Sierra would have been wiped out in a week without the work of the cadres in the cities.  
 
Collapse of EU negotiations a ‘fiasco’
“We heard some very big news today,” said Jack Barnes in the gathering’s main presentation, referring to Saddam Hussein’s capture by imperialist forces the previous day. “But the most important story of the day was the fiasco of the European Union’s effort to agree to a new constitution.” The collapse of the EU summit in Brussels amid deep divisions among the member states shows that the term “Europe” is a myth in any political sense, he said.

By contrast, Barnes said, “Old Europe” and “New Europe,” the terms used by U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “do have functional meaning.” They reflect real political alignments. New Europe includes the governments that Washington includes in its “coalition of the willing.” Old Europe is the bloc of imperialist powers led by Paris and Berlin, which includes most of the original members of the Common Market, the EU’s forerunner.

The crisis of the European Union, said Barnes, “was not prepared by the U.S. government but by the French and German imperialists themselves.” Their approach to weaker European countries, from Spain to Poland, as “subordinate vassals” laid the basis for the latter to line up on Washington’s side, “the biggest power, which won’t squeeze them so directly.”

In the past, the French and German governments pushed aggressively for rules codified in the 1996 Stability and Growth Pact that put more pressure on weaker capitalist countries in the EU. Then, as capitalist depression conditions deepened, Paris and Berlin violated these regulations themselves and used their weight to brush off sanctions after arrogantly insisting that less powerful countries had to abide by the very same rules.

Washington’s expanding use of its military power is tearing apart the entire relationship between Europe and America that was shaped by the Cold War, Barnes said. Throughout that period, Washington’s military policy was built around its standoff with the massive armed forces of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Stalinist regimes and the privileged social layers on which they rested served as transmission belts for imperialism’s interests and capitalist values into the workers states, the semicolonial countries, and parts of the imperialist world. This arrangement took place under the banner of “peaceful coexistence,” invented by Moscow to justify its class-collaborationist course.

The service that Moscow offered as the misleader and often as assassin of revolutionary struggles gave it value in the imperialists’ eyes. With the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, Barnes said, the Russian rulers are as eager as ever to wheel and deal with Washington, “but no one listens to Moscow anymore, the transmission belt is shattered.” U.S. imperialism now has to confront working people in the workers states and throughout the world directly.

It took the U.S. rulers a decade to absorb and begin acting on this reality, the SWP leader noted.  
 
Iraq contracts, interimperialist conflicts
Barnes described in detail the memo by U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, made public December 9, through which Washington first announced its policy of shutting out French, German, Russian, and other companies from the $18.6 billion worth of contracts that the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq are going to award for the reconstruction of the country. (See “U.S. gov’t bars ‘old Europe’ from lucrative contracts” in last week’s issue.)

Washington’s “coalition of the willing” is not about Iraq, Barnes said. “It’s a permanent wartime coalition,” he stated, through which the U.S. rulers aim to remake the world in their image by force, country after country, in order to extend the life of their empire. It’s a practical and pragmatic coalition that Washington will use to go after its main capitalist competitors and others in the world. It is being supplemented with the construction of new “missile defense” programs, Barnes said, aimed at putting a moat around Washington and its allies, while using the U.S. military to go after the holders and potential holders of “weapons of mass destruction.” With the advance of technology, such weapons are increasingly within the grasp of a range of governments, including those in the semicolonial world.

The U.S. rulers are also pushing to transform the Atlantic imperialist military alliance, NATO, into taking a world role and shouldering more of the burden of imperialist military aggression, said Barnes. They aim to restructure the forces under NATO’s command along the lines of the transformation underway in the U.S. military, he pointed out. U.S. military bases in Europe, which encompassed virtual cities modeled on those in America, are on the way out. These bases are being replaced by command centers located closer to areas of battle—such as the Balkans, Middle East, and central Asia—and are manned by smaller, more agile units with more lethal firepower, built around Special Operations troops that can move within days to any theater of conflict.

Building a military alliance, however, is not the same as resolving conflicts between imperialist powers, Barnes said. To the contrary, these can be expected to intensify as world capitalism marches deeper into depression. What the U.S. rulers are carrying out will decide the entire dynamic of the conflict, he said.

This includes the real prospect of using the military to stabilize and take control of the United States at a time of a great crisis, Barnes noted. He pointed to an interview with Thomas Franks in the December issue of Cigar Aficionado. Franks, now retired, is the former head of the U.S. Central Command who commanded the U.S. invasion forces in Afghanistan and then Iraq. “What’s the worst thing that can happen in our country?” Franks asked in the interview. “The potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the western world—it may be in the United States of America—that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country.”

That’s what’s behind the establishment of the Northern Command, Barnes said, the first time in U.S. history that Washington has structured its military openly to act on the domestic front. Within the workers movement, Barnes said, Washington’s current course will create new opportunities to recarve revolutionary leadership in many countries around the world that can lead working people to put an end once and for all to the imperialist system, its plunder, and its wars.  
 
Milestone of Rebelión Teamster
“This is what Teamster Rebellion is good in preparing us for,” the SWP leader said—“the kind of battles and political preparation it will take for the working class to develop the leadership it deserves to end the rule of the bosses.”

In Rebelión Teamster, the Spanish-language edition of the first of the four Teamster books (see www.pathfinderpress.com), Farrell Dobbs describes the fight in the 1930s to build and defend the Teamsters union across the Midwest.

After referring in detail to several pictures in the book’s powerful photo signature, which was included in a complimentary program given to all those who attended the meeting, Barnes suggested that Dobbs’s dedications in each of the books would in themselves make for a rich educational for revolutionary-minded workers and youth.

The dedication for Teamster Rebellion reads: “To the men and women who gave me unshakable confidence in the working class, the rank and file of General Drivers Local 574.” Teamster Power is dedicated “To the main army of the over-the-road campaign, the rank-and-file Teamsters of Omaha and Sioux City,” and Teamster Politics “To the members of Local 544’s union defense guard.” The dedication in the last of the series, Teamster Bureaucracy, reads: “To the Trotskyist militants of General Drivers Union Local 544 and to the comrades of the Socialist Workers Party who so loyally backed them in a time of great need.”

The revolutionary program of the working-class movement that is renewed and brought to life in books such as these, said Barnes, is the congealed blood of the historic struggles of the working class in its line of march towards conquering political power. “What we are celebrating today,” he said, “is not just producing and selling these books to working people but acting with the confidence that these political weapons will be more and more used in today’s struggles, and that the workers involved will get a lot more out of reading them.”

Barnes pointed to the striking Co-Op miners in Utah, and those around the world organizing solidarity with their struggle for union recognition, as examples of this potential.

The SWP leader finished his presentation by encouraging participants to volunteer for the work crews that will undertake construction of the new Pathfinder bookstore and distribution center. He appealed for contributions to the one-off $150,000 fund launched at the meeting to finance the project. Pledges and contributions totaled $97,000 by the end of the meeting—an amount that had risen to almost $103,000 by December 20.  
 
 
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