BY MARY-ALICE WATERS AND JEFF JONES
The following report by Mary-Alice Waters was presented on behalf of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party to the second session of the fifth constitutional convention of the Communist League in Canada, which took place in Toronto April 10-12. Waters is the editor of the New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory, and president of Pathfinder Press.

The convention session at which Waters gave this presentation, on April 11, had been preceded by a regional conference that featured an "Eyewitness Report to Resistance in Kosova and Albania" by Militant staff writer Argiris Malapanis and a talk on "Rebuilding an Anti-imperialist Youth Movement Worldwide" by Jack Willey, organizer of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists. Malapanis and Willey had recently returned from a three-week reporting trip for the Militant to Cairo, Egypt, and the Balkans. Michel Prairie, organizer of the Political Committee of the Communist League in Canada, opened the convention with a report on behalf of the Central Committee.

After discussion, the report and summary by Waters were adopted by convention delegates. Conference participants who were guests at the convention also had an opportunity to discuss the report during a special session on April 12. The report is copyright c 408 Printing and Publishing and is printed by permission.

This point is on the schedule under the title "Special Report" because as we started working on a name it got longer and longer. Even by our sometimes over-wordy standards, it became unwieldy. So I will begin by stating what this special report is about.

First, it is about strengthening the proletarian character of our branches and industrial trade union fractions as we respond to the accelerating resistance by working people around the world to the conditions the capitalist owners in crisis are driving to impose on us. We've already had several hours of discussion today about the expanded propaganda openings before us: from picket lines and factory gates - from Caterpillar to McDonald's! - to young feminist conferences; to actions for Puerto Rico's independence; to book fairs from Tabriz, Iran, to Guadalajara, Mexico; to conferences on Cuba, and protests against cop brutality.

The expansion of these opportunities confirms the shift in world politics that we placed at the center of the last Socialist Workers Party convention in June 1997. Even then the evidence was in that the seven-year political retreat of the working class in the United States was behind us. The evidence indicated the same was true in every other imperialist country as well, with the possible exception of Japan.

We underscored the growing possibilities to win a hearing for revolutionary ideas among workers and youth. We didn't predict big political shifts and changes or new offensive struggles by workers leading toward major victories. We simply said the retreat had ended. We pointed to many small examples of resistance. But even more, we noted that when faced with a standoff or a lost battle, the response of workers - and those who offered them solidarity - was not always a sense of defeat or demoralization but of continued combativity. (That's what happened at Caterpillar, isn't it?) And that meant increased openings for political work such as we had not seen in a number of years. It meant increased responsibility - in every locale where our movement exists - to get a feel for the concrete resistance and its direction.

But now something else is happening. The resistance itself seems to be broadening and accelerating. And that's new.

Secondly, this report is about the sharp shift that's both possible and necessary in the way we organize through our branches to work with supporters of the communist movement. I'm not talking only about the work we do with members of national organizations of active supporters in different countries. I'm also talking about the contributions made by dozens and dozens of friends and comrades who may not belong to the party's auxiliary organization of active supporters today - because they don't want that degree of commitment or responsibility or activity - but who are genuine supporters of the party and its political course and want to be led to contribute in a way that will advance the work of the party. They want to help us respond to these openings, to maximize the striking power of the communist movement.

The increased leverage we can obtain today from the organized work of our supporters is greater than anything we have had before, except perhaps for a brief period in the mid-to late 1930s, when mounting war pressures had not yet begun to take their full toll.

Thirdly, this report is about acting on our recognition of the increasing political leverage the communist movement internationally derives from the existence of Pathfinder Press. Acting in this way means organizing and leading the human resources, first of all. But it also means deploying financial resources effectively to assure that we do not lose that leverage - above all today, as the openings and possibilities of using it increase.

We must meet the very considerable challenge before us to rapidly prepare every single title Pathfinder publishes, or is responsible for keeping in print and distributing, in an electronic format that will make it possible to use new computer-to-plate technology. We must do this now in order to reduce the size of the print shop by drawing more heavily on volunteers, cutting the labor time necessary to produce Pathfinder books, increasing the productivity of that labor, lowering the skill levels needed to work in the print shop, and driving down the production costs while sacrificing nothing on Pathfinder's standards of quality. Only that course will enable us to sustain Pathfinder production and to keep our political arsenal in print.

We must act on this understanding of the importance of Pathfinder by politically leading the effort - which we sometimes refer to in shorthand as the digitization project - in a centralized way. It must be a top priority campaign of our movement internationally. Up to now we have not done this. We launched this effort to prepare all Pathfinder titles in digital format at a West Coast regional socialist conference in Seattle at the end of January. As we started rolling, however, we slid away from what was initially outlined in Seattle and instead presented this effort as a project for the active supporters groups to focus their energies on. That was an error. First of all, this is not a "project"; it is a course of action. And it is not a course of action just for supporters, but for the communist movement internationally as a centralized force. It has consequences for all comrades - party members, Young Socialists, organized supporter groups, and friends. It can only be accomplished by transforming ourselves as we transform party branches, industrial union fractions, and our production apparatus on all levels to function in a more proletarian way. And that transformation is only possible by turning outward to take maximum advantage of the accelerating resistance to expand propaganda work and recruit. It is only possible by turning to the new resistance in the fullest way, by turning away from the patterns of the retreat.

If we advance along this course of action, our success in doing so will deepen the crisis we face in every single unit of the party, on every level of the leadership structure, and within the apparatus. And that is what we are trying to do, because only by accelerating the crisis will we begin to resolve it. We will be forced to confront the nonproletarian habits we have adopted during the retreat of the last years, habits we have become comfortable with. We will be forced to confront the erosion of centralized, disciplined, timely execution of democratically arrived at decisions; to confront the avoidance of leadership initiative and abdication of responsibility in following through to closure on every assignment.

The fact is, our units are not battle ready, beginning with the National Committee. If we don't shape up, starting with the discipline of the officer corps, the troops will disintegrate under the first test of fire.

So all that is the title. That's why we adopted the shorthand form - "special report."

The Central Committee of the Communist League in Canada asked the Political Committee of the SWP to present this report here today because, as we began discussing these points in our respective leadership bodies and collectively, it became obvious to all of us that it would be impossible to come out of this convention with political clarity on a centralized course and priorities of our work without taking up and deciding these questions. That includes correcting the initial errors and misdirection that we - the Socialist Workers Party - have given our movement internationally on how to organize this effort and carry it through to the end.

We also knew that at this conference and convention not only would there be a significant cross-section of members and supporters from North America present, but also a good number of comrades from the leaderships of most of the sections of our movement internationally. This makes it possible to address and discuss these questions in a centralized way, which we have not yet had an opportunity to do.

Through the regional conferences that began last October in Chicago and then rolled through Birmingham, Toronto, and on to Seattle at the end of January, we were able to bring into focus the political challenge we face and initiate the course of action we're discussing. But we've covered a lot of ground since then. We're better able now to pull together the lessons, to redirect and refocus our energies.

Growing political openings for propaganda work
We've already spent most of today discussing the scope of the openings we have in front of us. Right now, any branch that is responding to the opportunities - not just in the U.S. Midwest, but all over the continent! - is selling more copies of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, week after week, and more Pathfinder books than at any time since the period of the Pittston and the Eastern strikes in 1989-90, and during Washington's war preparations and assault on Iraq in late 1990 and early 1991. And most of these publications are being bought by workers on picket lines, at plant gates, and at protest meetings and by young people attracted to a communist perspective and a fighting working-class movement.

New International no. 11, which will be published in July, features, along with other articles, the political resolution adopted by the SWP convention in August 1990, "U.S. Imperialism Lost the Cold War." The first section of the resolution deals with what workers were accomplishing through the intertwined labor battles against Eastern Airlines and the Pittston coal company in 1989-90, and the lessons the party was learning from our participation in those struggles. The Eastern strike came to an end literally within hours of when the bombing of Iraq began in January 1991. The strikers proved their capacity to stay out "one day longer" than the hated owner Frank Lorenzo, and Eastern folded.

When you read, or reread, the resolution you will be struck by the fact that it was those working-class battles, and the party we became in the course of them, that prepared us for the Iraq war - a preparation we had no way of knowing we were making. That's what enabled the SWP to confront the challenge of the imperialist assault on Iraq in the way we did and to come out of it on a foundation that made possible everything we've done in the last decade.

During the Eastern and Pittston strikes and then in the run-up to the Iraq war we carried out a massive propaganda campaign. We sold hundreds of copies of the Militant at plant gates and mine portals across the country every week. In the months before and during the war, we sold some 15,000 copies of the book U.S. Hands Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations. Since then, except for some short spikes around important moments like upsurges in Peoria and Decatur, Illinois, or the UPS strike last August, we've seen nothing like the sales we're having right now.

You have heard some of the examples here today: 300 Militants at plant gates to Case Corporation workers in Illinois, in the last six weeks. Sales to striking pulp and paper workers at Fletcher-Challenge here in Canada. The response to the Militant among Caterpillar workers, captured by the message six of them sent to the Militant fund-raising rally in Chicago two weeks ago. And comrades have been giving other examples: the response to our literature and ideas that party and YS members got at the Young Feminist Summit in Boston at the end of February; the welcome we received at the Black farmers' conference that comrades from Washington, D.C., and other areas organized to get to; sales of our literature to students protesting the anti-immigrant, anti-bilingual education Proposition 227 in California.

The party's response to these opportunities, however, is extremely uneven. And here I'll speak just for the SWP. Comrades in other communist leagues can think about and discuss their own experiences. But I know how uneven it is in the SWP. This is not because the opportunities and openings are that uneven. It is because only a minority of branches have transformed their functioning enough in the course of the last months to be ready to see these openings, much less rapidly respond and be fully part of them.

The example being set by the branches of the "Iron Triangle" in the Midwest - from Des Moines, to Twin Cities, to Chicago, and down through Peoria - shows what is possible in every single branch of the party today. The resistance at Case and Caterpillar is not going against the stream! But we have to want to get out and be part of it. We have to confront, and change, the habits we've developed during a period of retreat, habits reinforced by the pressures of rising average age among the cadres of the party.

In a few branches we have made enough progress, and they are setting the example. Often, these are branches where a new generation is beginning to take political leadership in a way we have not seen in the party for years. There is a small layer of comrades in their 20s who are becoming, for instance, branch organizers, real political organizers, helping lead the branches as a whole outward in responding to the openings. They are starting to lead the union fractions. Their inclination is to do all work -in the unions and industry, as well as in the working class and public more generally - as mass work. They want the forms and norms to facilitate this, not block it. Of course, this can seem exhausting if not disruptive. But in fact it is another step to broad communist political work.

The impact of this on all areas of work is visible, as is the mutual impact that branches moving forward have on each other. That's the real meaning of the Iron Triangle.

It is only as we do this that we will be able to build a growing number of chapters of the Young Socialists. We were wrong in thinking earlier that the YS could be built as a solid national organization with strong local chapters before we had begun to make progress in transforming the party's functioning with the help of a new generation of young party leaders.

The potential for recruitment is real. This was very evident last weekend at the West Coast educational conference and California state convention in Los Angeles that nominated the Socialist Workers Party slate for the November elections. The meeting was marked by the participation of Young Socialists and contacts they brought with them from all three cities where the party has branches on the West Coast - Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle. They even did their own fund-raising to get to the meeting and bring others with them. It transformed the conference and convention. By the end there was palpable excitement over the possibilities to reach out and recruit through the kind of election campaign we haven't really run in a number of years. Politics was bubbling in that gathering.

It is not only in the United States that we see evidence of growing resistance and widening opportunities. Stop and think about what Jack Willey noted in his report earlier today. Comrades from the Young Socialists and the party participating in the conference of the Federation of Pro- Independence University Students (FUPI) in Puerto Rico were able to sell Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions to 10 percent of the participants. For a number of years FUPI almost disappeared. There was a sharp downturn in the independence movement, which retreated like other social struggles. But now we are witnessing a new upsurge, with a new generation of young people taking up the battle and linking up with the traditions and example of uncompromising veterans. What a magnificent perspective. And we are there as we have always been to fight side by side with them against Washington for Puerto Rican independence.

Comrades sold 53 copies of Nueva Internacional at the Mexico City book fair last month - 53 copies!

At the Havana book fair in February, the Pathfinder booth was one of the political focal points of the event. The most sought after title was La última lucha de Lenin (Lenin's final fight). There was also a greater interest than ever before in books like El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos (the book that is the Spanish translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics), which explain what communists do in the United States to build a party of worker-bolsheviks. And there was increased interest in all the issues of Nueva Internacional. Several Western Saharan students organized a kind of sit-in at the booth until we promised them a copy of "the book on Iraq" - that is, The Opening Guns of World War III - at the end of the book fair. The sit-in was successful. And the examples could go on and on.

Just today I learned that we have now secured a distributor for Pathfinder books in Spain - a commercial distributor that will take and process orders from bookstores, libraries, and individuals in Spain. This is something we've been trying to get for years; most buyers simply refuse to order if they have to deal with currency conversion and customs and so on. And the hassle won't be diminished by the manufacture of euros! Now we have a chance to increase distribution especially of our Spanish-language titles in Europe.

Think about what Argiris Malapanis reported earlier today concerning the interest in Pathfinder and the Militant in the Balkans. Compare that to 10 years ago and think about the implications!

Iran is another example that captures everything we're talking about. A few days ago we received a report from supporters of Pathfinder in Iran who get Pathfinder literature to book fairs and other events there. In February they went to the seventh foreign publishers book fair in the city of Mashad, in northeast Iran, hosted by the University of Ferdosi. They reported that relatively few students participated because the event coincided with a holiday to commemorate the 1979 revolution. But many university librarians and professors took part.

Among others, the head librarian of the central library of Isfahan University, one of the large universities of Iran, came by the Pathfinder stall together with one of his deputies, got a catalog, and looked over the books on display. They came back another day and purchased 43 different titles - everything from The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and The History of the Russian Revolution; to books by Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, George Novack, and Rosa Luxemburg; to copies of New International on the "The Opening Guns of World War III," "The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution," and "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War."

A group of students came by with their professor, picked up a catalog, and came back later to buy 12 different titles, including America's Revolutionary Heritage; Fighting Racism in World War II; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; and New International no. 7 on "The Opening Guns of World War III."

Malcolm X's February 1965: The Final Speeches was the single best seller at the Mashad book fair. In all, Pathfinder supporters sold 88 copies of different titles for around $800.

They have also received clearance to publish "The Opening Guns of World War III" by Jack Barnes in Farsi. It will be available at the Tehran international book fair in May.

Each one of these examples alone opens a window on what is changing in the world and the opportunities for building the communist movement.

Word and deed
At the June 1997 SWP convention, we discussed and adopted a report that concluded that the retreat of the working class that had marked everything in the years following the Iraq war had bottomed out. The vote was unanimous. But the party as a whole did not come out of the convention acting in a manner consistent with that vote. Just days after the convention, in Detroit, tens of thousands of workers marched in a national demonstration of solidarity with the struggle of newspaper workers against the Detroit News and Free Press. But relatively few party members - or Young Socialists members - were there. What we said about what was happening and what we did about it were not yet in harmony. And we continued to miss other opportunities as well.

The convention report we adopted was accurate. In fact, we now know it was a little belated. But after the convention we were still lagging behind the pace of events. Not a happy situation for those who seek to be a working- class vanguard. We had to change what we did and how we acted.

Even last November, during Washington's buildup to another assault on Iraq, we failed to respond like a communist vanguard must, with initiatives for action, in the streets. We started tail-ending various liberal and centrist groups. And we started adapting to the imperialist campaigns on "free trade" and "human rights" that are part of the march toward fascism and war. Those were the questions we confronted in a substantial way at the national and international conferences in Chicago, Birmingham, Toronto ,and Seattle between October and January, and that the Communist League in Canada took up at the first session of your convention New Year's weekend. And we began to make progress, however unevenly.

In a similar way, eight years ago, in 1990, an SWP convention adopted a political resolution in which we drew the historical balance sheet that U.S. imperialism had lost the Cold War. Despite the vote, it took time for the real meaning of that fact to register. The truth is, we still react with surprise at changes that are nothing but the practical unfolding of that historic development. We had to go through several years of experience to absorb the consequences, for consciousness to catch up with reality. The reports we got earlier today from the Militant's reporting trip to Kosova, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Cairo help bring home what we meant when we explained that the Stalinist roadblock had crumbled, that it would now be easier for revolutionary-minded fighters to find each other and to rebuild a communist vanguard internationally as the class struggle deepened.

Think about it: a team of Militant reporters, with a suitcase of communist literature, fly to Belgrade, get on a bus that takes them to Pristina, go to the heart of the region where barely a week earlier Serb police forces had carried out a massacre of Albanian residents of Kosova. The comrades visit factories, farms, homes, and schools; large cities and small towns. They are welcomed by fighters to whom they explain they are reporting for a revolutionary socialist newspaper published in New York. One of the young people they meet already knows the Militant and the party because she read the paper and came to meetings sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum when she lived and studied in the United States.

Then the reporters get on another bus and go south to Macedonia, and follow up the next week with a repeat in Albania. You have to have a sense of history to understand what has changed. Our reporters didn't end up in a hospital or a morgue. They are here telling us about the deepening resistance of workers, farmers, and youth throughout the region to imperialism's efforts to impose capitalist production and rebuild bourgeois social relations. A decade ago it would have been unthinkable to even consider such a reporting trip.

We're still lagging behind reality. The Stalinist bureaucratic castes, regimes, and parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are gone. Unless we were to have a revolution as powerful as the October revolution all over again, with all the historical conditions that created that revolution, and then its long degeneration, the world Stalinist murder machine can never be put together again. That period of history - when Stalinism was an enormous force within the working-class movement, and overwhelmingly the weightiest obstacle to building a communist leadership on a world scale - is over. That powerful counterrevolutionary current within the working-class movement - one that for decades held its position of dominance through terror, corruption, and worship of the existing fact - has shattered. The speed with which it disintegrated was striking confirmation of the fact that it was a caste, not a new social class as so many had argued. It never had a necessary, historically progressive role to fulfill. It finally crumbled like a dead leaf.

The world in which that current had such destructive weight - which is the world most of us in this room have known for our entire political lives - is gone. This is the political reality we are all trying to catch up with and absorb, so we can act in a way consistent with that understanding.

For fighters around the world who now want to reknit the continuity to communism, who want to discover the real history of the modern working-class movement, who want to educate themselves to be prepared for the coming struggles - the only place they can readily turn to find that historical record distilled is the books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press.

That is the objective place of Pathfinder in the world today. There is nowhere else to find the history of the dynamics of the 20th century and the course of communists acting to try to affect it; nowhere else to find the materials necessary to study this political continuity from the point of view of the working class. That's why I think it's accurate to say that Pathfinder has an objective weight in the world today.

I'm not saying that our movement yet has objective weight in the broad working-class movement. We don't. We know that all too well. We can't affect the course or the outcome of a strike, or of the historic battle for affirmative action, for example. We're too small, and the objective conditions that would allow something different do not yet exist.

But our program, the program of the communist movement, the history and the lessons of 150 years of the modern working-class movement - embodied in the 350 titles Pathfinder publishes and keeps in print -does have an objective weight in the world today. Not only are those books needed, desperately needed, but they can be found nowhere else.

So what we're addressing here is how to respond to the historic new openings that flow from these world-shaking changes that we are beginning to absorb.

I want to say a few more things about the enhanced leverage we have due to the party's organized active supporters groups and the broader circles of party friends and supporters.

In the early 1960s, when I joined the party, we would often discuss the fact that the Communist Party, the Stalinist movement, was vastly reduced in size and influence from 20 or 30 years earlier. While the CP in the 1960s was still considerably larger than we were at that time, the obstacle they posed was smaller than it had been in the 1930s, and that change was an important one politically. At the same time, we were very conscious that one of the realities the Communist Party drew on to enhance its political weight was the size of its periphery. There were thousands of former members and long-time fellow travelers who had joined in the heat of the tumultuous battles of the '30s or the high point of class collaboration during World War II, and then dropped their membership in the late '40s and '50s.

For those who remained even marginally active politically, "the party" was still the Communist Party. The CP counted on them for financial and political support in many ways. This periphery was qualitatively larger than what our movement had at the time, and we felt its weight. It defined the channels through which "the left" - both the "old left" and the "new left" (which had little new about it) - traversed its twisting course.

Party supporters: powerful leverage for movement
That balance of forces has shifted. The size and political character of the supporters of our movement today, both organized and unorganized, add to our striking power in a way we have not previously had for any extended period in our history. They expand the effective size of our forces, which are never sufficient to do what is necessary. And it will probably be a while longer before the pace of recruitment is great enough to reverse the net decline in party membership.

We have a substantial layer of capable and political comrades around us who were won to our movement on the basis of program and class-struggle experience - not like the periphery of Stalinist parties in the past. The Stalinist movement was never built on program. It was built among those attracted to worship of the existing fact, and to defense of the interests and privileges of the Soviet caste, so long as they could get a piece of the action. Some tried for a similar relationship with Beijing, or the caricature of it, with Albania for instance.

Now that the Moscow host is gone, they have no raison d'etre. Attempts of the parasite colony to find a new host in Havana have failed, since there is no caste on which to attach themselves. Revolutionaries are not a good substitute. Nostalgia for what is no more, and what shall never be again, does not a Stalinist party make. And the leadership of revolutionary Cuba, no longer encased in a "community of socialist countries," has to be dealt with directly.

One objective test of the accuracy of what we're saying about the world is that a significant number of party supporters and friends who we haven't seen a lot of in recent years are coming around to activities again. They sense big changes are bubbling. They want to get oriented by their party, so they can find a way to contribute. We noticed this during the regional socialist conferences that began in Chicago last October and have continued through the West Coast meeting that took place in Los Angeles last week.

Every single one of those gatherings drew a larger than expected layer of supporters and friends of the party, some of whom we hadn't seen in a number of years. They brought their enthusiasm with them and helped to infuse the conferences with it.

Joe Swanson, an SWP leader from Des Moines, Iowa, made the remark after the Seattle conference that he felt like he had been lifted up on the shoulders of a hundred party supporters. And there could have been another couple dozen supporters there had the conference steering committee been more confident, less blind to the importance of what was happening. We had to apologize to some of our supporters afterward for not enthusiastically welcoming their participation in that conference.

The reaction of these comrades is purely political; they see what is opening up and start pressing the party to respond to it. We began to feel the nudges from some of them who said, "Isn't there something more we can do to help make the party's response to the political opportunities even more effective?" One reason for this, I think, may be that party supporters don't have the same pressures as party members do to meet the demands of the weekly rhythm of party- building work. They keep a different pace by choice - or possibly by necessity.

And of course our supporters, especially those comrades who are members of organized active supporters groups, know the party well. A large number are former members with years of experience as party cadres. They know our weaknesses - along with our strengths - almost as well as we do. They know that not every branch executive committee rises equally to the political challenge of leading the active supporters groups to maximize what they can do to advance the work we share as a common goal and perspective.

So this is the first thing we're posing here. Branches need to respond to the initiatives and help we're being offered, by organizing comrades who belong to our active supporters group to take on additional tasks and responsibilities that release time and energy of party members to get out on more plant-gate sales, more regional teams, more campus tables; to use our election campaigns more effectively; to organize better forums; to spend more time on recruitment and education.

There are many things comrades who are active supporters can do to help us get out of the headquarters to meet and talk politics with new people. They can staff Pathfinder bookstores for a larger number of hours. They can help get out Militant Labor Forum mailings, make forum and campaign leaflets, and translate them into Spanish. They can do the financial accounting for the bookstores. They can help make pre-forum dinners possible, as well as receptions at special events. You can all draw up a longer list of your own. Together with the expanded fund-raising work they want to do, these are the first things we should work with local active supporters groups to take on, because they free up party members to get out and do politics, do mass work. (By the way, talking to a couple McDonald's employees within a few miles of your workplace, headquarters, or home can be a meaningful form of mass work today.)

This takes leadership effort by the party, however. It's not something that will organize itself. It also - and most importantly - takes a real desire by party members to do more plant-gate sales, more regional teams, more campus tables; to build and participate in more conferences and other political activities; to insistently nose around small pockets of working-class unrest in the city; to have more time to prepare classes and better forums; and to organize social events and relaxed evenings of political discussion with contacts and new members.

We know there is resistance to this - sometimes unconscious, sometimes conscious. We have to drive a stake through the heart of the perpetual clubhouse meetings and ways of carrying out necessary administrative tasks that turn into their opposite - that become substitutes for effective action, instead of facilitating and expediting it. We must have organization and administration designed to get us out where the resistance is accelerating, and to do so consistently, not in the surge-and-collapse mode.

When we set in motion the work that has become known as the "digitization project," the work to revolutionize the production of Pathfinder books, we got off on a wrong track. In a number of cities, active supporters groups were asked to take on the work of scanning, proofreading, and formatting the Pathfinder arsenal as a project. They were told that this is what the party wanted active supporters groups to do, and they diligently set to work organizing the members to do it.

But this was wrong on a number of counts. We have to start with the range of tasks and responsibilities that can be taken on by individual active supporters to help free up party members to turn outward to take advantage of the political openings to step up propaganda work and recruitment. Then we can look at how to get the Pathfinder work done by drawing on ever broader layers of friends and supporters. The last thing we are suggesting is that the active supporters group as a group take on the Pathfinder electronic formatting work, as if they should go off by themselves and form a digitizers group.

I'm making a caricature here, but we all know that branches sometimes run away from the political challenge of leading the active supporters to help meet the party's needs.

Revolutionizing book production
To the extent we qualitatively transform the timeliness and consistency of our propaganda work, responding to the political opportunities, we're going to have to reprint Pathfinder titles more frequently. The more we sell, the more titles will go out of stock if the print shop can't keep up. This is what is happening now, since production is not organized to make it possible to reprint many titles frequently and quickly in small quantities.

This is not something we have just discovered. We have known for several years that we must transform our production methods, transform the print shop, transform Pathfinder's functioning, or sooner rather than later lose our ability to maintain the political arsenal. But the challenge of responding to new opportunities had to be sharply posed, I think, to force us to resolve the growing crisis rather than hide from it by pretending it could be postponed.

The course we would have to take was in fact already clear a year and a half ago when we decided to end the practice of storing tens of thousands of copies of books -wasting resources on warehousing costs, and misallocating precious production footage for dead storage. Rather than piling up large inventories of deteriorating books, we decided we had no choice but to keep the expanding arsenal of Pathfinder titles available for use through just- in-time printing with methods that would lower production costs. Technological changes have made this a feasible goal without sacrificing Pathfinder's quality standards. But the challenge was enormous. As we said at the time, we are getting rid of the safety nets.

Most of you here today have had a chance to read the talk "Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution" that was presented to a conference in Havana, Cuba, on Social and Political Publishing in the '90s. The conference was sponsored by Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba, and took place just before the opening of the Havana book fair in February of this year. It wasn't a large conference, but it involved some of those most centrally involved in publishing in Cuba, especially the kind of publishing we do - the political kind. The response to the presentation was interesting. Many compañeras and compañeros came up to us afterward to say, "Well, now I understand where you come from and how you can do what you do. It was a mystery before. We couldn't understand how you managed to produce and keep in print so many communist books with such high quality. How was it possible?"

They are political people. They know the communist movement in the United States is not large, that support within the working class in the United States for a communist perspective is not massive. Yet we have more titles in print than most of the publishing houses in Cuba.

Once they understood the role of volunteers not only in producing the books, but in translating, selling, staffing bookstores, organizing street sales, taking the literature to book fairs all over the world - then it all made sense.

One thing that impressed them the most was something I did not expect. One person asked, "Do you have your own print shop?" When we answered, "Yes," her response was, "Well, that explains a lot. It would be hard to do this without your own shop." Many publishers in Cuba share the same presses. When acute paper shortages and equipment breakdowns are added to the equation, they have to make many painful decisions on who gets priority press time for which titles.

A number of people commented on the speed with which we get out new publications. We laughed because we know the other side - how long it takes us sometimes to get out many books. But they saw the opposite. They saw the booklet published by the Militant, distributed by Pathfinder Press, and produced by the print shop on "Celebrating the Homecoming of Ernesto Che Guevara's Reinforcement Brigade to Cuba." They knew the last of the articles collected in that bulletin was published in the Militant in January. Two weeks later the entire series of articles was available in two 88- page bulletins, in English and Spanish, and in a relatively inexpensive format that made it possible to use the publication broadly. Many people at the conference and the book fair were impressed.

"After we finish editorial work it takes us months to get similar publications through a print shop and into circulation," they told us.

Comrades also liked what we said about quality standards and accuracy - that the care with which we edit, prepare, and produce every single book or pamphlet is a class question for us. The quality of cover designs and of the print job; the high standards for copyediting and low tolerance for proofreading errors; the readability of type fonts and sizes; the accuracy and smoothness of translations; the care that goes into preparing all the auxiliary features, such as pictures, maps, glossaries, chronologies, and indexes that make a book attractive and more accessible to new readers - all these are elements of producing the political weapons the working class deserves and must have in order to win.

The fact that Pathfinder's backlist is our important list - the crystallized work of more than seven decades, the presentation of which we upgrade and improve when possible - was just put to another test. A comrade who works in the Sparrows Point steel mill in Baltimore recently gave a copy of the Pathfinder catalog to some co-workers. One of them took it home and looked it over for a couple days, then came back with a couple of titles marked that he was particularly interested in getting. One was the pamphlet Workers' Rights versus the Secret Police by Larry Seigle, originally published in 1981. It deals with the long history of how the bosses and their governments have used police spies and provocateurs and frame-ups against the workers movement since the earliest days of the modern revolutionary movement, 150 years ago.

"That looks interesting. Could we get that one?"

It's a wonderful example. That's not a title we sell huge quantities of right now. But it deals with an extremely important question, and what's in that little pamphlet is not easily available anywhere else in the world! It's an issue workers will confront again in a big way - and in a more and more complex manner, with larger stakes - as resistance accelerates. One or more of the co-workers who wanted to read the pamphlet had some experiences on this question, or had friends and family members with experiences, going back to the Black Panthers in the 1960s. He had reason to want to get it, and it will lead him to further reading!

During the Havana book fair I overheard two friends who were looking at books at our booth talking with each other about things happening in Yugoslavia and Iraq. One of them pointed to titles on display and said, "Any place things are happening in the world, Pathfinder has a book that will help you understand what's going on. You can find it here."

It's a slight exaggeration. But not much. The political point they were getting at is accurate. If you want to know something about an issue in world politics, you'll find a book or pamphlet at the Pathfinder table that will help you figure out what's happening and why. And, most importantly, it is something you can share and that will better arm you to act effectively.

As our opportunities to intensify our propaganda work expand, we either revolutionize our production methods or we die. That is what capitalism is all about, and none of us have any illusions but that we live in a capitalist world. There is a wonderful passage of The Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels write:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

"Everlasting uncertainty and agitation" - isn't that precisely what dominates every worker's conditions of life and labor under capitalism? Uninterrupted disturbance. Constant revolutionizing of production. Never-ending change.

This is what we are confronting. Think about the printing industry. For how many centuries did type, set by hand for use by various forms of presses, dominate the printing industry? Literally, it was centuries. Despite the development of photography, electricity, and greater mechanization in the 19th century, the fact is that "if Gutenberg or his contemporaries had stepped into the average printing plant in 1950, they could have stood at a typecase and set type by hand almost exactly as they did over 500 years earlier," according to the Pocket Pal booklet used as part of the training of all comrades in the shop.

The revolution in both typesetting and printing presses came only in the second half of the 20th century, with the combination of mechanization, photography, and the computer. The prevailing use of metal type set in blocks and solidified by molten lead began to be displaced by cheaper and more versatile photo-offset techniques only in the 1960s.

The Militant went photo-offset in 1965. I still remember the old hot-lead print shop in Greenwich Village run largely by some Italian anarchist workers where the Militant was printed when I first came to New York. The New York Times didn't go to photo-offset until 1978! Now, long before we get to the year 2000, digital technology has revolutionized both typesetting and printing again. A few short decades. It's a wonderful illustration of what Marx and Engels described 150 years ago.

This is what we face. Pathfinder still reprints and distributes some books and pamphlets that were originally set using the methods Gutenberg would have been comfortable with. Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution is a really fine example of old-school design and composition in which - as a recent New York Times article on "Mourning the End of a Printing Era" put it - "Seamless printing jobs, with neat, carefully spaced letters and with layout so pleasing to the eye that it is not even noticed, are what is important." Our current edition of The History of the Russian Revolution is done by photographing printed pages and reproducing them using the photo-offset process.

The majority of our books produced in the last three decades, however, were composed using one or another generation of photographic techniques to produce pages and then film that was painstakingly, manually stripped up into big sheets from which plates were burned for the presses.

But computers and digital technology have again revolutionized typesetting and design and are increasingly displacing photo-offset printing technology as well. Digital technology is displacing the old methods for the same reason photo-offset technology drove out hot-type composition and presses based on that a half century ago. It lowers production costs and can be run by workers with less skill.

We can no longer continue using production methods that are more and more antiquated, because doing so demands too much labor power to produce the books. It takes too many hours. It requires a shop that is larger than we can sustain. It requires more expensive raw materials that make frequent, short runs of books prohibitively expensive.

We need a revolution.

But this is just the flip side of meeting the openings we discussed. There would be no reason for us to join in, and even goose, this "uninterrupted disturbance" if growing opportunities weren't already outpacing our ability to respond. If there were no need for us to have more books to sell, if we didn't go out to sell them, then the small quantities we now have sitting on shelves would be sufficient. And having only a small percentage of our backlist in print at any one time would be a bearable weakness. But that's not what is happening.

The effort to transform how Pathfinder books are reprinted, and how new ones are produced, does not start with "digitizing" and using computers. It starts with the class struggle - with the world unfolding before our eyes. It starts with our place in the ranks, in the formation of proletarian fighters. It's about expanding the cadre of a proletarian party.

As we started organizing this work, the Political Committee made the decision that no party member in any branch would be directly involved in the project of scanning, correcting, proofreading, and formatting the backlist of Pathfinder books, or redesigning the covers and other graphics. There are plenty of competent, disciplined volunteers to be organized to carry out that work, and members of the party must be stepping up other activities to expand our sales and use of the books being produced as we reach out to recruit.

Secondly, we decided that the Pathfinder backlist effort is not a task for active supporters groups. A number of individual active supporters of the party will be involved in this work. Many of them want very much to be. And they are encouraged to do so. But as an auxiliary organization of the party, active supporters groups have a much broader scope and different overall objectives. The party prioritizes for our active supporters a course of action that maximizes the use of as close as possible to 100 percent of the energies of every member to increase the party's centralized participation in mass work.

Moreover, as rapidly became clear, not all active supporters want to work on the Pathfinder digitizing project. Many prefer making themselves available to do other things to meet the needs of the party. But since we've given most active supporters the impression the last month or so that participating in this project is what the party wants them to do, many have volunteered anyway. "I don't have a computer, but maybe I can proofread." Or "I don't have a scanner, but I'd like to get a scanner anyway, so I'll buy one. And maybe you can teach me how to use it."

It's not surprising that members of active supporters groups would overwhelmingly respond that way, if that's what the party needs. But that's not what we need. That's not what we want. This is work that should be taken on by comrades who really want to do it, who are reasonably comfortable with the computers and technology involved, and who are willing to be disciplined in working to deadlines and meeting Pathfinder standards for quality and accuracy. Ruth Cheney and the other comrades on the steering committee in the Bay Area will make sure of that.

We also quickly discovered one of the biggest flaws with how far off course we had gone in initially presenting this project to meetings of active supporters groups in some cities. Comrades enthusiastically said, "Okay, we'll take it on." Then reality came down. "But we don't know how to do any of these things ourselves - scanning, massaging, proofreading, formatting. So first we'll all have to learn each of the steps so we can help each other. In the meantime, we'll have to tell others who would like to be involved to wait because we can't train them."

Not infrequently, however, comrades who were not members of the active supporters group happened to be more qualified and more comfortable with computers and the technology. They should have been training the active supporters who wanted to help, not the other way around. In many cities there was a lengthening list of volunteers who were being told, "Thanks for the offer, but we'll have to wait to get back to you once we learn how to do this."

Don't think geographically, use the net
Among the mistakes we made was to project organizing the work on a city-by-city basis instead of allowing the technology we are using to free us from such physical, geographical constraints. The mistaken idea - consciously in some cases, less clearly in others - was to create in every single city a mini-production apparatus to prepare Pathfinder books in an electronic format. A group of volunteers in each area would find and train people they could count on to scan, correct, do first and second proofreads, and eventually format the book digitally in finished page layouts. Those books would then be ready for the shop to print, using new computer-to-plate technology.

But this was a pipe dream. We still haven't reached the point of being able to do this in one city, much less several dozen. And it's unnecessary.

Even the comrades most comfortable with using computers were thinking in terms of geographical units, instead of taking advantage of what technology and the internet enable us to do. There's no reason why the person scanning a book in Greensboro, North Carolina, has to pass the scanned text along to somebody in the same city to proofread as opposed to posting it electronically and having the San Francisco center arrange for someone in Manchester, England, or Auckland, New Zealand, to take the next step. Using various methods of sharing and transmitting electronically, Auckland is just as close as Atlanta.

Comrades organizing this work were bumping into unnecessary and frustrating bottlenecks. There would be a volunteer in San Diego to scan, but no proofreaders. There would be three proofreaders in Seattle but nobody to scan. With dozens of enthusiastic volunteers waiting for work to do, we have yet to finish our first book!

Another problem became evident, too. In many cities, volunteers began meeting to make their own local decisions on how to allocate the work to prepare a book assigned by the Bay Area steering committee. Training and qualifying people became the responsibility of a multiplying collection of groups, with very uneven rates of success. The steering committee quickly lost control over vital decisions and standards that have to be determined in a centralized way. They didn't know who were the best scanners, the most exacting proofreaders, or the most competent formatters in each area. Too often comrades wasted time - or made decisions that had to be reversed later, resolving problems that had already been confronted and settled elsewhere.

Before we even got started, the centralization on which the success of the project hinges was being dissipated. Without realizing it, we were creating little bureaucracies in cities all over the world. Party units and active supporters groups with varied levels of understanding and/or technical competence were acting as intermediaries. Instead of maintaining centralized leadership and control of the project - without which we cannot succeed - we were headed toward whatever the sum of branch-led active supporters groups could lead and produce, with all the inevitable unevenness.

We weren't making the best use of the labor time of all the volunteers, and that's important. If we don't value the time of every comrade and use it well, volunteer labor dries up real fast.

So we're changing course. The Political Committee assigned Argiris Malapanis, Jack Willey, and myself to meet with the steering committee and Norton Sandler last week in the Bay Area. After some discussion, we clarified how we will proceed.

A steering committee of four supporters of the communist movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, headed by Ruth Cheney, is centralizing the work of the international project to put some 350 Pathfinder books into electronic format. The other members of the steering committee are Jerry Gardner, Bob Roberts, and Tom Tomasko. Norton Sandler is assigned by the SWP Political Committee to be the sole liaison with the volunteer organizers in the Bay Area in all communications from the Pathfinder Building. Argiris Malapanis is assigned by the Political Committee to centralize the work of all departments of the apparatus related to this effort.

All communications go through Argiris to Norton and then to Ruth and back. There's no freelancing. And there are no exceptions. All technical questions of how best to do the work will be resolved by the steering committee in collaboration with the volunteers, not referred back to the print shop or Pathfinder. By proceeding in this way, comrades in the Bay Area are already tapping into a reservoir of talent among the international volunteers. All political questions that need more discussion to resolve will be under the supervision of the Political Committee.

The best analogy here is outsourcing. The work of digitizing the Pathfinder backlist has been outsourced. Pathfinder's only relationship to this is to approve the templates and prepare the formatting instructions - those are political questions having to do with how the finished product looks. The shop's only interest is that the job meets specifications when it comes back.

The steering committee has made clear from the beginning that only those who demonstrate the ability to sustain the exacting standards for quality work that Pathfinder is known for will be allowed to participate.

All volunteers will be organized directly by the steering committee in the Bay Area, not through local groups. They will be under the direct supervision of the committee headed by Ruth. If a volunteer needs training to get started, or needs help working out equipment, software, or other problems, the steering committee will find someone to work with them - perhaps from the same city, perhaps from elsewhere. And like the members of the young tank corps of the Rebel Army getting ready to meet the invasion at Playa Girón in 1961, those who learn in the morning will teach in the afternoon.

When a volunteer in one city finishes scanning a book, the Bay Area steering committee will determine which of the qualified proofreaders is available and who should take the book for the first read, then the second read. It could be someone in the same city or someone thousands of miles away. When the proofreading and corrections are done, the electronic manuscript will be posted for someone who has been qualified to do formatting - the final stage of preparation before the book is sent to the shop in its finished form.

Quality control at each stage remains in the hands of the comrades in the Bay Area who are centralizing the work. They will collaborate with the volunteers on the methods and techniques used. The only criteria are that deadlines are met, that quality is assured, that text and formatting approved by Pathfinder have not been corrupted, and that the final product sent to the shop meets the required standards it has set.

Reorganizing the battle plan along these lines took a little time. We had to work our way through all our false starts and misconceptions. The initial response to the new battle plan from the comrades responsible for organizing the work in the Bay Area was terror. Ruth told me earlier today that she estimates roughly a hundred comrades have already volunteered to work on this project. So the idea that the steering committee would organize each one of those volunteers directly from the Bay Area initially seemed like an impossible task.

But the more we talked it out along these lines, the more it became clear that this is the only conceivable way we can ever reach our objective. This is a production process. We have to have an assembly line, not an electronic bookmakers guild. We have to meet quality standards of Pathfinder production. This can't be done in a uniform way unless each step of production is under the control and supervision of the committee designated to organize the volunteers around the world.

The steering committee will be getting special help from a few particularly qualified comrades who live outside the Bay Area. Toni Gorton is an example. Toni, now an auto worker in Detroit, has decades of experience designing books, covers, and everything else. She is the most experienced graphic designer in our movement. Many of us know Toni through the artistic quality of the covers she has prepared for dozens of Pathfinder books the last decade. But she knows a great deal about every aspect of the printing process, having run a print shop in Britain and worked in Pathfinder's print shop for many years as well.

Working directly with the Pathfinder staff and comrades in the shop, Toni is designing the book templates that will be used for formatting. This is a crucial piece of the project, essential for the quality and the artistic standards we must maintain. We will also draw on her to help oversee other work such as digitizing graphics and redesigning and adjusting covers. This is not just a task for those selected titles that Pathfinder's editorial leadership decides each year should have new covers; design adjustments must be made for the cover of virtually every book as it is digitized, since the number of pages often changes, altering the width of the spine.

Robbie Scherr, a supporter in Seattle who works in desktop publishing, has helped solve many of the technical problems encountered by comrades learning to format. We need - and around the world we will find - more and more volunteers with these kinds of talents and training as the work expands.

Like both Robbie and Toni, many of the volunteers have worked in the print shop in the past - including comrades with experience in the prepress department, as well as in the other departments whose functioning depends on quality prepress work. Ruth Cheney was part of the composition department in the shop for a period of time, for example. These comrades know the challenges from the inside, and their knowledge of what goes into Pathfinder book production is invaluable for the success of the project. It's one of the reasons we think we can make this audacious shift of an extremely important part of the production of our beloved and invaluable publications out from under the roof of the brick, mortar, and steel edifice located on the west side of lower Manhattan.

We need to stop and think about the scope of what we are undertaking. Comrades on the Bay Area steering committee have been thinking about it very much. Comrades from Seattle to London to Santa Cruz are thinking about it. There are 350 titles that must be put into electronic format ready to press a button and have plates come out the other end of a machine. Even if the volunteers completed one book a week, it would take about seven years to finish the project - allowing for a generous two-week vacation each year! Of course, we're nowhere close to that rate yet, but once we get the worldwide multiline assembly plant set up, we'll start cooking. That will be Pathfinder's version of globalization.

The problem is that a seven-year framework is unacceptable. We must complete this transformation rapidly. We have to think in terms of months, not years, because the objective is to reduce the size of the shop, starting now, not at some undetermined point in the future. Anything else will fail. Even before the shop has on line the equipment necessary for computer-to-plate production, everything will be going to press using digital files.

So we need an efficient and productive assembly line to produce the electronic book files. And that is possible. Not everybody has to conquer all the skills - any more than they do in the largest, most technically proficient printing companies in the imperialist world. Individual volunteers will become proficient at different pieces of it. We will have world class scanners, proofreaders, formatters, and designers. We will draw on and learn from comrades working in the trade. We will adapt our methods and tools as we learn how the best in the industry do these things. Our productivity can go up very rapidly. And we'll have regular progress reports in the Militant, so we all can follow how we're doing.

While party members will not be directly working on this assembly line, and active supporters groups will not be organizing the volunteers in city-by-city work brigades, party branches, with the help of active supporters, do have the central political task to carry out of lining up volunteers - both active supporters and other friends of the movement - who are interested and want to participate. We want to get them hooked up directly with the steering committee in the Bay Area. Even more important, of course, is the political support and encouragement of party members in each city. The successful realization of the effort we're undertaking means the expansion of our effective forces in a dramatic way.

Centralizing the work internationally
The need to centralize our work internationally was posed here in Canada. As comrades on the Political Committee and Central Committee of the Communist League in Canada were discussing the project, the question came up, "Shouldn't we propose that supporters of our movement in Canada take on a piece of this?" Their initial suggestion was that comrades in Canada take responsibility for putting in electronic format Pathfinder's French-language titles. "That could be our contribution to the project," comrades proposed.

But after discussion, we all rejected this course. If we started along that road, the work would become decentralized again. There would be differing priorities for different groups of comrades, rather than a single centralized effort.

After what has already been presented, it should be obvious why our international movement must take this on in a centralized way. To carry out the project and bring it home quickly, we must do it as an international political priority. Whatever title is up next for reprint because it is going out of stock within a few months (our ability to plan is not perfect: sometimes the pleasant surprise of an unexpectedly large sale of a particular title can pose the sudden need for a reprint in a few weeks) has to go to the top of the list to be prepared in digital format. If it is a French-language title, odds are strong the steering committee would ask comrades in France or in Canada -where not only in Quebec but across the country there are a large number of comrades and supporters fluent in French - to work on it, especially the proofreading. But if the top priorities are English-language titles or Spanish, the steering committee won't hesitate to ask comrades in Canada to work on them ahead of French-language titles that are further out on the reprint schedule.

Only by acting in a centralized way can we have an assembly line capable of producing with the necessary quantity, speed, and quality.

Acknowledging that we must rapidly carry through this transformation of our production or lose the capacity to maintain our political arsenal will of course affect production of new books in the immediate few months. This holds true for the editorial work priorities of the Pathfinder staff in New York. And it will postpone some new Cahiers de formation communiste in French that comrades here in Canada have been discussing.

Before the year is out, we plan to publish not only issue no. 11 of New International - as I reported earlier, built around the 1990 SWP resolution, "U.S. Imperialism Lost the Cold War," - but also the corresponding editions of Nouvelle Internationale, Nueva Internacional, and the Swedish-language Ny International. The lead article, "Ours is the Epoch of World Revolution," will take a look at how well that 1990 resolution stands up eight years later and deal with the deepening class conflict that is now accelerating. The issue will also contain the article, "Socialism: a Viable Option," by José Ramón Balaguer, head of the Central Committee Department of International Relations and member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba. Balaguer presented this article at an international workshop on Socialism as the 21st Century Approaches, that took place in Havana last October. The issues he deals with complement the other pieces in the magazine.

The comrades representing the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party who participated in the Havana conference Balaguer's talk inaugurated also had a major hand in drafting, presenting, and editing our 1990 resolution.

This year we will also publish the new book, Capitalism's Growing World Disorder: Working-Class Politics in the 21st Century, a collection of reports and talks by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, spanning the period between the end of the Iraq War and the explosion of the so- called peso crisis in Mexico at the end of 1994. It will add substantially to what is outlined in New International no. 11 and make available in an attractive, publicly useable form some of the main documents and reports we have adopted to guide our work that show the line we have marched along to get where we are today. By the end of the year or early next year we will publish that book in French and Spanish as well. That's seven new books in less than a year, which is no small feat. But it is the seven we need the most if we are to extend our mass work and use our magnificent backlist of titles taking us from 1848 to today.

We're working on other new titles as well, some of which we will be able to publish this year. They will not take priority, however, over whatever needs to be done to maximize the pace of the digital revolution.

We have three powerful interviews with generals of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba that we plan to publish first in the Militant, then as a small book. Pathfinder is preparing a new two-volume collection of speeches by Fidel Castro from the early years of the revolution, 1959-1970 - some of the richest materials ever on the line of march of the proletariat and the consolidation of the socialist revolution in Cuba. New editions of Che Guevara Speaks and of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution are in the works, as well as The Assault on Moncada by Cuban historian Mario Mencía.

We want to do a new edition of The Truth About Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention. And a new pamphlet on the Puerto Rican independence struggle - which to me will be a high point, whatever its size, of our progress, as well as an arrow directly into the 21st century.

How fast we can print new books and pamphlets, however, depends on our capacity to move ahead rapidly on transforming the basic political arsenal of Pathfinder into electronic form.

The leadership challenge in the apparatus
We've concentrated in this report on the challenge of leading our international volunteer minibrigade - one destined to be transformed into a permanent, professional division of the rebel army.

The fact remains, however, that our biggest challenges lie not there but in the shop and Pathfinder, in the leadership of the party apparatus. Once the volunteer brigade gets rolling, it will rapidly bring real pressure to bear on the apparatus, which is what we count on. It is in the party leadership and the apparatus that the dead hand of the retreat weighs heaviest - as it always has at turning points such as this in the history of the communist movement. Breaking through the resistance to change will require a sustained leadership effort. It's easier to pretend that all we are talking about is a project for active supporters, who will organize and lead themselves, supposedly, and not bug us to do things differently, even if it might be better. We're tired and working insupportably long hours, but even that familiar habit remains more comfortable than the terror of the unknown.

As we're clarifying and deciding here today, however, what's involved is the centralized and disciplined line of march of a proletarian movement internationally, through which we will transform ourselves as we transform the production of books. The banner the digitizing brigade will carry and pass on to the apparatus when earned is "sí se puede" - of course this can be done, and done rapidly.

This is where some of the youngest and newest members of our movement who are taking on more responsibility in the print shop as well as branches and fractions make the biggest difference. They respond to this challenge with the same elation we feel about increased sales of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial to Case and Caterpillar workers, to pro-independence Puerto Rican students, to Black youth demonstrating against police brutality, to young fighters in Kosova. They are not comfortable with the modes of survival in a retreat; they are impatient - a one-sided but lesser problem.

I hope you all have a chance to hear veteran Puerto Rican independence fighter Rafael Cancel Miranda speak sometime this year. He's being invited to a lot of gatherings, addressing meetings on the theme of "100 years of struggle since the Spanish-Cuban-American War" and other events. It's a genuine pleasure to hear him, because he is a proletarian fighter. He spent as many years in the prisons of the Yankee empire as Nelson Mandela spent in the dungeons of the apartheid regime. And he came out fighting with as strong a conviction as when he went in. As he puts it, "I was in prison for many years, but I was never a prisoner."

Cancel Miranda learned English in prison. One of the things that helped him do that was reading the Militant. He was also one of the Militant's prison correspondents. The Militant may have been the only newspaper in the United States of America that defended the Puerto Rican nationalists when they carried out their armed demonstration against Yankee colonialism - their imaginatively sweeping recall effort - in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954. So when we see a resurgence in the Puerto Rican independence struggle with fighters like Cancel Miranda and other veterans playing a role, it gives us a big boost. A renewed determination to march under the banner of "sí se puede."

As we make progress along this course, we will launch - soon - a capital fund to be able to buy the equipment necessary to revolutionize our production. But first we need political clarity on what we're doing and why, and how we're going to act to transform the party and our entire movement to respond to the historic shifts in world politics of the last decade. Then we will be able to raise the funds. If we're clear on where we're going, comrades and friends who have access to resources will be the first to contribute.

The members of the SWP and other parties in our international movement are under pressure from three directions today.

One source of pressure is our class - the accelerating resistance to capitalist exploitation, imperialist oppression, and national domination - and the resulting expanded political openings to build communist parties. It is the pressure to respond in a proletarian way to those opportunities. That's a wonderful pressure to have.

We are also under pressure, to a degree, from the party's close periphery and long-time supporters, who feel the winds of change and want to do more to help. They're saying, "Come on, let's get going." That is what makes it possible to cut back the size of the print shop and use volunteer labor to transfer the entire Pathfinder arsenal into electronic format and save it rather than having to give up big hunks of it. We must recognize - and act on that recognition - that our own Territorial Troops Militias are forming. The war of all the people is the only possible road for revolutionists, not just the professional army at its core.

Finally, we're under pressure from the youngest and newest cadres of the party, as well as the members of the Young Socialists. They don't bear the same scars from the period of retreat. If they have picked up some of our bad habits, these habits are still relatively easily changed, if we move quickly. Such habits are not so deeply ingrained as those rationalized by age, which even communists sometimes succumb to or temporarily weaken in front of. The pressure to close the gap between word and deed comes most strongly from the young cadres who are gaining confidence and learning to lead.

This is what we want. These are the pressures that will help us rise to the challenges we face and respond to the opportunities. There are no guarantees, of course. But the odds are qualitatively changed by the accelerating resistance of the working class the world over to what capitalism is trying to impose on us, combined with the defeat of the Stalinist murder machine and the obstacle that has been eliminated as a result.

Our response can only be, "Hallelujah!"

 
 
 
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