Vol. 72/No. 27      July 7, 2008

The gathering takes place as the worldwide social and financial crisis of capitalism deepens. Working people are bearing the brunt of the crisis with widening wars, raging inflation and growing unemployment, and so-called “natural” disasters that become social catastrophes.

Workers will be joined by students at the conference to discuss the emerging resistance to the employer offensive against working people and the importance of building proletarian parties that can chart a course toward replacing capitalist rule.

SWP national secretary Jack Barnes will open the conference Thursday afternoon, July 10, with a talk on the world political situation.

A selection of classes on the political themes of the conference will start Thursday morning.

Friday morning a panel of workers and youth deeply involved in the working-class struggle will kick off discussion on the battles for workers’ and immigrants’ rights unfolding in the Upper Midwest.

At Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, workers beat back a company attempt to decertify their union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, last January. Then they fought for and won a new contract.

This fight lays the basis for strengthening unionization throughout the region. The panel will also take up the interrelationship of struggles by meat packers and resistance to the massive immigration raids in Iowa, Minnesota, and other parts of the Midwest.

There will be classes on “Fraction-Building Jobs Work and Skills Training” Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These workshops will discuss how communist workers can effectively participate in union fights as they concentrate their forces in the meatpacking and garment industries where the bosses’ offensive has been among the sharpest. This is part and parcel of being able to more effectively join the resistance and fight side-by-side with fellow vanguard workers.

Socialist workers need to improve their skills so they are better able to get and hold jobs in these key industries. The workshops will also include lessons on meat cutting and sewing, complete with knives, steels, and sewing machines, so that workers with more experience can help those with less.

Friday evening Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the magazine New International and a member of the SWP National Committee, will give a talk on Cuba and the coming American revolution.

Four classes are scheduled on “The World Capitalist Crisis Today: Consequences and Prospects for the Working Class,” centered around the main themes of New International number 14. Omari Musa and Martín Koppel will present the classes on “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X,” in English and Spanish; Alyson Kennedy and Ben O’Shaughnessy on “The 1990s Bipartisan Convergence in an Accelerating Assault on the Working Class”; Olga Rodríguez and Arthur Mitropoulos on the “Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis”; and Gerald Symington and Ben Joyce on “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class.”

Two classes on the “Inevitability of Revolutionary Workers’ Struggles in the United States” will take place. One, by Frank Forrestal and Seth Galinsky, will focus on the newly reissued book Teamster Power, which draws out the lessons of three hard-fought strikes in 1934 that extended union power to cities throughout the Upper Midwest. The book has also been published in Spanish for the first time ever and the class will be given in English and in Spanish.

The second class, also presented in English and Spanish, will focus on the new Pathfinder pamphlet Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? presented by Róger Calero and Sara Lobman.

Steve Clark and Angelica Vandersteen will lead a class on “China’s 450-Million-Strong Working Class and Coming Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Alliance: A Proletarian, Not a Nationalist View of the Chinese Revolution.”

On Sunday, June 13, there will be meetings for the volunteers of the Printing Project and the Young Socialists, as well as the final skills and jobs workshops.

Anyone interested in participating can contact socialist workers in the directory on page 8.  
 
 
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