BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS

Nearly 500 industrial workers, students, and others took part in four regional educational conferences in Atlanta, Peoria, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. November 29-December 1. The gatherings were sponsored by the Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party.

Participants celebrated the accomplishments of the five-month-long YS recruitment drive and discussed what steps to take to consolidate the growth of the Young Socialists into functioning chapters of a proletarian youth organization. Seven youth joined the Young Socialists at the conferences, bringing to 70 the number of new members of the YS. Many of the new recruits, who include a small but significant number of industrial workers, participated in the regional meetings.

The main reports to the conferences explained why spreading communist ideas on the job, at plant gates, picket lines, door-to-door in working-class communities, campuses, and elsewhere is the axis of work by the SWP and the Young Socialists. Participants discussed the necessity and opportunities for reconquering proletarian habits and methods of functioning in the party today, which slipped during the retreat of the labor movement in the last decade and a half. These are a precondition to taking maximum advantage of increased openings to build a communist party based among industrial workers and their unions as the class struggle sharpens today.

Socialist workers at the meetings also launched a $280,000 capital fund to finance long-term improvements in the printing plant and editorial facilities of the communist movement in New York, where Pathfinder books and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial are produced.

Nearly 100 of those who attended were 26 years or younger. The Atlanta regional conference had the highest percentage of youth and people attending a socialist gathering for the first time. Of the 80 people registered at that conference, 26 were in their teens and early 20s. Four young people joined the YS at the Atlanta meeting, two at the San Francisco event, and one in Peoria. In Washington, D.C., two dozen participants came from Canada, Greece, Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom - the majority from Toronto and Montreal. A young steelworker from Toronto who went to the Washington event asked to join the Young Socialists in Canada. Three YS members asked to join the Socialist Workers Party.

More than 200 of those who attended the four conferences were industrial workers and members of trade unions. About 50 were students. Many were active in local Cuba coalitions. Those attending had also been involved in fights against police brutality, for abortion rights, and defending immigrant rights.

Participants at the four conferences bought some 200 books and pamphlets worth $2,052. The top three sellers were the newly released A Packinghouse Worker's Fight For Justice: The Mark Curtis Story with 55 copies sold; Changing Face of U.S. Politics:Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions with 14 copies sold; and Politics of Chicano Liberation with 9 copies sold.

The gatherings were built on the theme "The changing face of U.S. politics: Charting the working-class road to socialist revolution." In addition to the feature presentations, the events included classes, socials, "Meet the Young Socialists" get-togethers, and book sales. Volatility of stock market
"If you have been following the business dailies you will notice that the stock market has been skyrocketing in the last several months," said Jack Willey in the opening presentation at the Washington, D.C. conference. The talk was titled, "Resisting the bipartisan offensive on the working class; Organizing the gravediggers of capitalism." Willey is the organizer of the YS National Executive Committee, formerly the steering committee. He is also a member of the SWP's National Trade Union Committee.

The main presentations at the four conferences were given by leaders of the SWP and YS, drawing from the party's National Trade Union Committee and National Committee, and the Young Socialists National Committee.

Recent articles in the big-business press have pointed to the volatility of the stock market, Willey said. "If you were [Federal Reserve] chairman Alan Greenspan wouldn't you be worried about the soaring stock market?" began an article in the front page of the November 25 Wall Street Journal. That day the Dow Jones industrial average exceeded 6,500, an all-time record. "A rising stock market is usually reassuring," the Journal said, "but one that rises a lot faster than economic fundamentals warrant is vulnerable to sudden decline."

The article continued, "Suggestions that Mr. Greenspan will raise interest rates, primarily to push down stock prices, are misguided. The last time the fed deliberately tried that was in the late 1920s. The result wasn't pretty. It's very hard to surgically prick a balloon. You may let out a lot more air than you bargained for."

Four days after the conferences, Greenspan gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He said, in reference to the stock market, that "irrational exuberance has unusually escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade." The next morning, stock market prices in Europe and Asia tumbled two to four percent and the Dow Jones experienced its largest slide since this summer.

When events such as these unfold, the communist movement has invaluable political weapons to turn to, Willey said in his talk. He pointed to "What the 1987 stock market crash foretold," a resolution adopted by the 1988 convention of the Socialist Workers Party and published in the Marxist magazine New International no. 10.

The document explains that throughout the history of capitalism, every major economic and social crisis has been signaled in the most volatile and vulnerable spot in the capitalist economy: the arena of credit and monetary relations. In their ceaseless quest for higher returns on investments, and faced with declining profit rates since the mid-1970s, the capitalists have been pouring money in paper values in the stock and bond markets rather than investing to expand capacity of industrial plants and equipment. The 1988 resolution refers to the observation by Karl Marx that under capitalism "the production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money making."

As the SWP document pointed out, Willey said, "The 1987 stock market crash was a warning sign that a creeping social crisis will become the reality for the vast majority of workers and farmers around the world... whose inevitable product will be mass political battles that will tie together as never before in human history prospects for working people in city and countryside."

The recent fit of giddiness by Wall Street investors and the rulers' fears that their frenzied speculation has made financial markets more vulnerable to another crash point to the devastating consequences for working people of world capitalism's depression conditions, the SWP leader said.

"Offering political weapons such as New International no. 10 to workers and youth today is the most valuable thing communists can do," Willey stated.

Willey and speakers at other conferences said that the capitalist class has exhausted every alternative they've tried to shore up declining profit rates and open up a new period of sustained economic growth.

The prospects for opening vast new markets for capitalist investment and trade in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes there have turned out to be nothing but illusions, said Militant editor Naomi Craine, who gave the first feature presentation in Peoria. The ceaseless economic and political instability in Russia, the recent wave of protests against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia, and the tense relations between Washington and Beijing are few of the examples pointing to this reality, Craine said.

The Clinton administration's decision to maintain the NATO occupation force in Bosnia for another 18 months shows the difficulty the imperialist powers face to overturn the non-capitalist social relations in a workers state, even with tanks and armed forces on the ground.

Since the mid-1980s, the capitalists have used code words like "downsizing" and "re-engineering" to describe the cost-cutting course forced on them through stiffening competition, noted Willey in his talk. But the combination of layoffs, speed up, chipping away at wages, and computerization has not reversed the bosses' long-term profits slide.

The only real option for the owners of capital to boost profit rates and beat their competitors today is a frontal assault on the wages, working and living conditions, and social entitlements of working people, Willey said. At the dawn of the 21st century capitalism has nothing more in store for humanity than economic depression, instability, rise of incipient fascist currents, sharp trade conflicts, and more wars. Ultimate target is industrial workers
"Our handbook, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, clearly points out what the main target of the bourgeoisie is," said Willey, referring to a section of the book by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes.

"The ultimate target of the rulers' austerity drive is the industrial workers," Barnes says, "for the same reason that the industrial workers have been at the center of our strategy since the founding of Marxism -their economic strength; their social weight; the example they set for the whole class; the power of their unions to affect the wages, conditions, and thus the entire social framework of the class struggle; their resulting potential political power vis-a-vis the enemy class; the obstacle they pose to rightist solutions by the bourgeoisie. The industrial workers are both the source of most of the rulers' surplus value and the ultimate enemy that the rulers must defeat if the entire economic and social crisis of their system is to be turned around."

The Democratic administration of William Clinton has led the bipartisan assault on the working class, said Dennis Richter, who gave the opening talk at the San Francisco conference. Richter, a rail worker and member of the United Transportation Union from Morgantown, West Virginia, is a member of the SWP's National Trade Union Committee. He pointed to the anti-immigrant legislation, Defense of Marriage Act, and the Welfare Reform Bill Clinton signed before being re-elected this year as harbingers of the second Clinton term.

"Now Democrats and Republicans are preparing a multi- faceted assault on Social Security retirement pensions as a universal entitlement," Richter said. "Their goal is to undermine working-class solidarity and reinforce the dog- eat-dog competition capitalism imposes on workers."

On the morning of December 1, as the conferences were in their final session, Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan appeared on the NBC television show "Meet the Press" to publicize his endorsement for arbitrarily lowering the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The index is used as a measure of inflation to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other federal programs and for many union contracts. A week later, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin announced his support for rigging the CPI, while a bipartisan panel appointed by Clinton declared it will soon issue a report with several options for privatizing Social Security.

Going hand-in-hand with the assault on the social wage are restrictions on democratic rights, Richter said. He pointed to the administration's "anti-crime" and "anti- terrorism" bills that have expanded use of the death penalty and pushed back freedom from illegal search and seizure.

Widespread allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct by public officials have also become a permanent feature of bourgeois politics, the SWP leader pointed out. This coarsening of politics, which reaches new heights during the election campaign, fuels resentment in the middle classes. If workers pick up on it, social solidarity among working people is undercut.

It's important for class-conscious workers to always take the moral high ground and explain why only the working class can lead humanity out of the corruption and decay bred by the profit system.

"The recent exposures of rape and sexual harassment of female recruits by their officers in U.S. army bases illustrates the immorality of the U.S. military brass and of its masters in Washington, whose system perpetrates the degradation of women throughout society," stated Richter.

The Pentagon's record here stands in sharp contrast to that of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces - an army born out of a successful socialist revolution and in a state where workers are in power with a communist leadership, the SWP leader pointed out. The FAR's policy of prohibiting violence and harassment against women was implemented unambiguously in Angola, where tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers helped defeat the apartheid army of South Africa in the late 1980s, as well as in many other internationalist missions. Workers, youth resist
It is this kind of revolutionary example that many young people, many workers can be won to emulate in the United States today as they resist the bosses' offensive, Richter said.

Most of the speakers and many of the conference participants during discussion periods pointed to numerous examples of working-class resistance - from the 10-week- old strike by 4,500 steelworkers against Wheeling- Pittsburgh Steel in the Midwest, to protests against police brutality in Florida and Mississippi, and marches to defend affirmative action in California.

Meg Novak, a member of the National Committee of the Young Socialists and a steelworker in Peoria, Illinois, gave the second feature presentation in Washington, D.C. In her talk, she announced the just-concluded victory of the truckers in France who tied up transportation in that country for 12 days, winning a lowering of the retirement age and other demands.

Michel Dugré, a leader of the Communist League in Canada and a member of the United Steelworkers of America in Montreal, explained under discussion how the Quebecois struggle for independence is intertwined with new labor protests against austerity in that province.

"We are meeting a growing number of youth attracted to the working class and the revolutionary workers party," said Novak. "Young people who are repelled by the greed, hypocrisy, brutality, and inhumanity they see all around them; who are attracted to ideas and have political imagination. We find individuals and groupings of young people on high school and college campuses who consider themselves anticapitalist. They are getting together and discussing and going into their school libraries hoping they'll find some answers on how to fight the injustices of capitalism."

Stirrings of radicalization among youth signal broader social conflicts that are building up below, the YS leader said. Propaganda, axis of party building
Large-scale and sustained class battles are not unfolding right now in most capitalist countries, said Verónica Ponce, who gave the talk "Youth and the Communist Movement" in San Francisco.

"But the political space is wide open for the communist movement to carry out steady propaganda work in the factories and in the streets, selling the books with the history and lessons of the labor movement, explaining what is unfolding in politics around the world now and why our class needs to lead a fight to overturn the wages system."

Socialists are building a party and youth organization that put propaganda as the axis of our political work, said Ponce, a member of the YS National Executive Committee. Getting the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and, above all, New International and Pathfinder books into the hands of fellow workers, students, and others is the number-one priority of socialists as they join demonstrations, participate in political meetings, or go to work, the YS leader pointed out.

"We are recruiting to imagination and deeds," she continued. "It takes a little imagination and study of the lessons of the past for young people who radicalize to go beyond what they react against and see concretely what they are for and how to achieve it." Young people are in the front ranks of those taking to the streets to demand that killer cops be brought to justice or who are looking to take a piece out of the ultrarightists who assault abortion clinics. Many of them become interested in radical ideas and in newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets that can give them clear answers to the questions they are grappling with. A number start checking out socialist organizations, hoping to find one serious enough to join.

"That's what we have to offer," Ponce pointed out, "not frenetic activity or more interesting street actions many other radical groups specialize in."

If communists are not an overwhelmingly propaganda movement, it is easier to leap outside the existing relationship of class forces and begin chasing illusions, putting more weight on any given strike or demonstration than it can bear, and then getting disappointed when it doesn't turn into a movement.

Don't we recruit mostly to activity? was one of the first questions asked at the Peoria conference. This was discussed widely at the regional gatherings. What is to be done?
Several of the speakers drew an analogy between the strategic tasks of communists today and the propaganda work of the Bolsheviks in the years leading up to the 1917 Russian revolution.

"Lenin was ridiculed by many currents in the workers movement at the time for arguing that propaganda work for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie must be the focus of Bolshevik work," Craine said in her talk in Peoria.

In the opening years of this century, communists within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party fought to build the kind of proletarian party needed to lead workers and peasants to a revolutionary seizure of power. This struggle led to a split in the party in 1903 between the Bolsheviks and the reformist Mensheviks. The pamphlet What Is to Be Done? by V.I. Lenin was published as part of the polemic the Bolsheviks led.

"Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labor power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich," Lenin wrote in that pamphlet.

"We must take up actively the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness," Lenin argued. "The question arises, what should that political education consist in?... It is not enough to explain to the workers that they are politically oppressed." Revolutionary social-democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities, the Bolshevik leader said, but it subordinates that "to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism."

Classes on the history of the Russian revolution were among the most popular at the conferences.

Discussion on the place of propaganda in party- building work was not confined to the conference sessions but spilled over into the classes and the informal get- togethers during breaks.

At a class at the Atlanta conference on "Black Liberation and Socialism," Gale Shangold, a garment worker and member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees in Los Angeles, explained how socialist workers play an essential role in the fight for affirmative action.

"We don't just join demonstrations," stated Shangold, who is also a member of the SWP's National Trade Union Committee. She read from a leaflet produced by liberal forces in California that was distributed at mobilizations protesting the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in that state. The flyer, produced by the Metropolitan Alliance, sought support by arguing that it's a myth that affirmative action promotes quotas. "We say affirmative action is a weapon for working people against the bosses only if it's enforced with quotas," Shangold said. "We join in, argue a communist political line, and sell books like The Changing Face that has the best explanation of the class character of the battle for affirmative action."

Young Socialists members from the newly formed YS chapters in Athens, Georgia; McAllen, Texas; Fresno, California; and Spokane, Washington, attended the conferences in Atlanta and San Francisco. There are no party branches or Pathfinder bookstores in those cities. By the end of the conferences, YSers in these groups who hadn't already done so decided to put in orders for Pathfinder books and bundles of the Militant.

Salm Kolis, a member of the United Auto Workers who assembles cars at the Ford plant in Atlanta, is a leader of the SWP in that city. She said in an interview that consistent propaganda work by the party branches in the South during the election campaign and in the month preceding the conference, led to the success of the regional gathering there. "Instead of plowing new territory all the time we focused doggedly everywhere in the region we had some contacts," she stated.

As Brock Satter, a YS National Committee member who gave the talk in Atlanta on building the Young Socialists, put it, "Following through to discuss communist politics with those who buy our books and show some interest is the true trail to recruitment." Build proletarian youth organization
Speaking at the Washington, D.C., conference, Novak pointed to The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon, a founder of the communist movement in the United States and of the SWP. "This book is the real founding document of our party," she said. It is a manual of Leninist party organization. It documents a political struggle in the late 1930s with a petty-bourgeois current in the SWP, during which Cannon and other party leaders defended the political and organizational principles of Marxism. The debate unfolded as Washington prepared to drag working people into the slaughter of World War II.

The Struggle for a Proletarian Party served as the handbook for the young fighters who founded the Young Socialist Alliance in the heat of the battles to overthrow racist Jim Crow segregation and defend the victorious socialist revolution in Cuba in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Novak said. The YSA was the predecessor of the Young Socialists.

"In the same way, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics is our handbook today," she stated. Novak announced that Pathfinder plans to publish a Spanish-language edition of the book by June 1. This will be a big help in building the communist movement in Des Moines, Iowa, and other areas with increasing numbers of Latino workers, especially in meatpacking, she said. It will also boost party-building in Texas, California, Illinois, and other states where a rising militancy by Chicanos and Mexicans is increasingly marking politics.

Later in the program, Michel Prairie, editor of Nouvelle Internationale, said that a large team of volunteers in Quebec, France, and the United States are translating Changing Face into French. The French-language edition will be published in October.

These steps are necessary to build a proletarian youth organization and communist workers party today, Novak said. She pointed out that a number of industrial workers in factories where party members work have joined the Young Socialists over the last few months - in Atlanta, Des Moines, and Washington, D.C. This has led the party and the Young Socialists to decide forming joint industrial union fractions in plants where two or more members of the two organizations work together. Novak said this would be one of the steps the YS National Committee would discuss at its upcoming meeting a week after the conferences (see article on front page). Communist work in the unions
As part of this process, the party has to reconquer the proletarian methods of functioning and forms of organization outlined in Changing Face, said Sam Manuel who gave the last major presentation in Peoria. Many branches of the party will also be forming joint fraction- building jobs committees with the Young Socialists, Manuel said, where YS members have decided to get into industrial unions.

The goal of every party branch is to have several fractions of two to three members each in a number of different unionized plants in the region, carrying out consistent propaganda work on the job with a weekly rhythm that fits working-class life, the SWP leader said. In addition, every party member is assigned to a team that sells communist literature at a plant gate once a week. Branches are now taking steps to regularize these weekly plant gate sales at all the factories where the party has union fractions, reinforcing the propaganda work of communists inside the worksite, as well as at other plants and mine portals.

On the job socialist workers get the Militant around, sell books, and convince fellow workers to participate together in Militant Labor Forums, classes at the party headquarters, and other political activities, Manuel said.

"We measure our success by how well we do in meeting quantitative goals we set for ourselves on selling socialist literature," he stated. He reminded participants of a series of motions that established monthly goals for sales of Pathfinder books on the job and city-wide everywhere there is a party branch. These decisions were made by a party trade union leadership conference and an expanded meeting of the National Committee last February.

"When struggles break out, the structure, proletarian methods of functioning, and steady-as-she goes approach become more, not less, important," Manuel said.

SWP branches in New York and New Jersey took steps to revitalize such Bolshevik methods of functioning and forms of organization during a recent organizational tour by party and YS leaders of the branches and YS chapters in the region. The lessons of that tour were incorporated in the reports by Manuel and other speakers at the conferences, beginning a discussion to generalize that experience throughout the party.

The four Thanksgiving regional conferences were the first in a series of party and YS meetings leading up to the SWP convention in June of 1997, Manuel said. Propaganda-producing apparatus
"The last time the communist movement made a concerted effort to qualitatively transform its striking power and reconquer proletarian methods was while waging a working- class campaign against the imperialist assault on Iraq in 1990-91," said Joe Swanson, a meatpacker and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Des Moines, Swanson is also a member of the party's National Trade Union Committee. He gave the concluding talk at the Washington, D.C., conference.

He pointed participants to the dedication in issue no. 7 of the New International, featuring the talk by Jack Barnes "Washington's assault on Iraq: Opening guns of World War III."

"Numbers 7 and 8 of New International, issues against imperialism and war and on the political contributions of Ernesto Che Guevara, are dedicated to the men and women, who, in unflinching opposition to the war drive of Washington and its allies, produced a vast arsenal of political weapons - publications that tell the truth about imperialism and war and why the interests of working people the world over are irreconcilable with those of the exploiting classes," reads the dedication.

Those issues were also dedicated to worker-bolsheviks in ten industrial unions in North America, and those like them in other countries, "who took this arsenal and transformed their capacity as thinking workers to oppose imperialist war and to join with others in fights, on and off the job, against exploitation and oppression."

At that time the party made simultaneous progress in the union fractions and the apparatus producing these political weapons, Swanson said. "That's what we are also doing today."

At its 1991 convention, the party adopted a resolution by long-time SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters that is titled "Extending the arsenal of communist propaganda and reconquering the apparatus through revolutionary centralism." The document, which had been published in an internal party bulletin, was made available for sale to all participants at the conferences, and 85 copies were sold.

Classes on this resolution were organized at all the conferences, and were among the best attended. Many of the young people at the gatherings took part.

Chris Hoeppner, general manager of the printshop that produces Pathfinder books, and Kevin Dwire, who heads up the shop's bindery, presented the class in Washington, D.C.

"As Waters says, the only reason for the existence of the apparatus is 'to implement the decisions of the party's democratically elected leadership committees related to producing and improving our growing arsenal of communist propaganda,'" Dwire said in his presentation. "The document also laid the basis for reconquering the centralist methods of functioning that eroded in the 1980s. Worker-bolsheviks who quit their jobs and volunteer for three-year stints in the printshop come out of the experience politically stronger."

Hoeppner explained that by January 1 the warehousing and shipping of Pathfinder books and pamphlets will be transferred back to the Pathfinder building in New York, which houses the publisher's printshop and editorial facilities. For the last five years, Pathfinder books and pamphlets were stored and shipped out of a commercial warehouse.

The entire "pick-and-pack" operation will now be run out of the Pathfinder building and will be organized by the shop, utilizing previously wasted space on the third floor of the building. This will expand the factory producing the arsenal of political weapons, Hoeppner said.

The shipping and fulfillment operation will be organized on a just-in-time production schedule. Books will be produced every week to ensure none of the 300 titles Pathfinder distributes go out of stock. The publisher will provide a six-month list of books that are running low, which the shop will reprint in short runs, Hoeppner said. "Doing so, will allow us to decrease capital tied up in inventory as well as increase productivity, cut waste, and reduce printing costs." Capital fund
At the conferences, over 35 participants - from some of the newest YS members in Spokane to veterans of the communist movement - volunteered to come to New York in December to help with the needed renovation, setting up shelves, and transfer of over 100,000 books.

To make this project possible and to finance other long-term capital needs, such as completing the repair of the south wall of the Pathfinder building, which was beginning to sustain structural damage from water leakage, a $280,000 fund was launched at the four conferences.

The capital fund will last until February 28. So far some $190,000 has been raised from more than 50 contributors. Donations come from individuals who through inheritance, job bonuses, company profit sharing, or other financial windfalls are in a position to contribute $1,000 or more.

Those who would like to contribute can write to Pathfinder at 410 West St., New York, NY 10014, or call (212) 741-0690.

 
 
 
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