BY MICHEL PRAIRIE

MONTREAL - Pathfinder has announced the upcoming release of a new French-language edition of the Action Program to Face the Economic Crisis. This 64-page pamphlet will have the same contents as the English- and Spanish-language editions by Pathfinder, with an attractive new color cover and interior design.

The Action Program presents a perspective that can unite working people internationally around a common struggle to defend themselves against the ravages of the capitalist depression. It outlines a perspective of an international fight by the labor movement to demand a shorter workweek with no cut in pay in order to create jobs; for affirmative action measures against discrimination on the job and elsewhere; and for the cancellation of the third world debt that bleeds workers and peasants dry in countries exploited by imperialism.

The program was issued in response to the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1987. This near meltdown of one of the world's largest financial markets spread overnight to stock markets around the world, announcing the coming of an economic depression similar to the one that ravaged working people in the 1930s.

Since this pamphlet was first published by Pathfinder in 1988, millions have fought back-from workers and farmers in Brazil who are standing together to demand agrarian reform, jobs, and better working conditions, to workers and youth in France who mobilized last December against the austerity policies of the Alain Juppé government.

Immigrant workers in many countries have been in the forefront of this resistance, such as those who recently protested the beating of two Mexican workers by the police in southern California. African-Americans and Chicanos in the United States are also standing up for equal rights. At the same time, Irish, Quebecois, Chechen, and Palestinian fighters stand firm in their battles for national liberation.

Since its publication, the Action Program was translated from English into Spanish, Icelandic, Swedish, and French. Thousands of copies have been sold around the world-at factories, mines, universities, colleges, and on street corners. The pamphlet has also been sold at protest actions organized by farmers and mobilizations to defend abortion clinics; as well as at demonstration against unemployment, police brutality, racism, and war.

The demands explained in the program have been an important part of several socialist election campaigns around the world, like the one currently led in the United States by the Socialist Workers Party candidates for president and vice-president, James Harris and Laura Garza.

An initial French-language translation of the Action Program was published in 1988 and 1989 in the Montreal-based magazine Lutte Ouvriere. It was then reproduced in various forms in Quebec and in France. The new Pathfinder edition in French has been prepared for printing by a team of volunteer workers and students from Montreal, Paris, and Toronto, who scanned, reviewed, checked and rechecked the translations, and corrected the final text.

This addition to the French-language arsenal of the world communist movement will provide an opportunity to socialist workers to increase the overall sales of the Action Program in each of the languages in which it has been published, as part of the campaign to increase sales of Pathfinder titles to co- workers, strikers, and other fighting workers and youth.

Orders for bundles of the Action Program can be placed at the July 6-9 Active Workers and International Socialist Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, or by writing to Pathfinder, 410 West Street, New York, NY, 10014.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home