BY JACK BARNES AND MARY-ALICE WATERS
Below we print "Ours is the Epoch of World Revolution," the
introductory article to issue no. 11 of New International, a
magazine of Marxist politics and theory. The new issue will be
available at Pathfinder bookstores October 1. Jack Barnes is the
national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party and a
contributing editor of New International. Mary-Alice Waters is
the editor of New International. Copyright (c) 1998 by 408
Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission.
"We cannot think about the world clearly today without the beginnings of motion toward a youth organization. Why is this so? Because in addition to the working-class experience, composition, and continuity without which any communist organization will go off the rails politically, there are also points in history at which so much is changing so rapidly that even the best fighters will be disoriented unless they can break from habits of thought developed in the past and see the world through the eyes of a generation just awakening to political life."
These words from the featured article in issue no. 10 of New International(1) are also at the center of the "Young Socialists Manifesto," the opening piece in this issue. This document was drafted by members of the Young Socialists chapter in Los Angeles, California, in April 1998. It is the product of several chapter discussions in the course of which they put down working notes to clarify for themselves the character and activity of their organization and the necessity of its political relationship to the Socialist Workers Party, the communist vanguard party of the working class in the United States.
The brevity, clarity, and freshness of the document are a testimony to the hard work and collective effort of its authors, as well as evidence of its insight.
The "Manifesto," as others soon named it, became the center of discussion at a West Coast Young Socialists regional conference held in San Francisco, September 5-6, 1998, hosted by the California YS chapters. Participants in that conference, acting on the request of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists, issued a call for the third national convention of the organization to be held in Los Angeles at the end of November 1998. They decided YS chapters around the country should begin work to build the convention by discussing the manifesto, along with the "Young Socialists Organizer" adopted by the second national convention of the Young Socialists in March 1997. The opening section of that document, too, is printed here.
The "Young Socialists Manifesto" brings into focus what this issue of New International is about: understanding the depth of the political, economic, and social changes reshaping our world, and forging the kind of working-class parties whose units are capable of acting in a politically centralized manner, with speed and effectiveness, as we are confronted with the unpredictable challenges and opportunities created daily by capitalism's accelerating world disorder.
Without the trajectory the YS Manifesto traces for the new generation just beginning to move toward the working class politically, the other contents of this issue of the magazine might still have historical and analytical merit. Alone, however, they would not constitute a communist course for today. Marxism is a guide to revolutionary practice. As the founders of the modern working-class movement put it so succinctly more than 150 years ago: the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it.
The opportunities for organizations of communist workers and of youth to act together along the lines presented in the pages that follow have been expanding at least since early 1997. The evidence continues to accumulate that the working class in the United States and most other imperialist countries has emerged from the period of political retreat that followed the short, brutal - and demoralizing, because largely uncontested - imperial assault on the people of Iraq in 1990-91. Signs of renewed defensive action are all around us - more numerous strike actions reflecting the tenacity and resistance of the embattled ranks; a noticeable growth in the confidence and determination of women in industry; the increased weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers; an upswing in the Puerto Rican independence movement; more actions in defense of immigrants' rights. Such developments prepare the strengthening of working-class leadership in these struggles and increase the potential of the unions "to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interests of its complete emancipation."(2)
It is at moments such as these, above all, that the vanguard party of the working-class and revolutionary-minded young people who seek to build a proletarian youth movement must march together, deepening their understanding and organizing their work within the history and line of march of the modern communist movement. That is the precondition for carrying out effective mass work and recruitment to both organizations - not in the long- run, but today. It is the only way to implement a proletarian course, responding in a timely way - free of political hesitation, abstention, or ultraleft missteps - to the accelerated resistance bred by capitalism's deepening crises.
"Theory is not dogma, nor an IOU. It is the living generalization of the line of march of a class, of the strategic political lessons our class has learned through bloody sacrifice and struggle," states the document cited by the Young Socialists in their manifesto. "These lessons are the most valuable asset of the communist movement, our most valuable weapons. It is the absorption of these lessons into the day-by-day, week-by-week political practice of an organized world communist movement that makes it possible, when the crunch comes, for millions of individual communists to think and act in a disciplined way to do the necessary."
That is the course the Young Socialists Manifesto charts, and that the Young Socialists will be moving along as they build toward the third national convention of their organization in Los Angeles. That is why their manifesto deserves its leading place in this issue of New International, and the attention of every revolutionary-minded person, regardless of age or years of political experience.
At the very time delegates to the SWP convention were deliberating, the U.S. government opened a drive toward war against Iraq that culminated five months later in six weeks of massive, devastating bombing, a 100-hour invasion of that country, and the slaughter of some 150,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.
Plans to rapidly edit and publish the resolution adopted at the August 1990 convention were temporarily put aside, as the branches and trade union fractions of the Socialist Workers Party and chapters of the Young Socialist Alliance, along with communists around the world who shared the political conclusions of that document, turned to the immediate tasks campaigning against the approaching war. U.S. imperialism was to prove unable to achieve its goals in the Iraq war, however. The "grand coalition" engineered under the baton of President George Bush began to come apart even as the guns blazed, obliging the U.S. rulers to stop short of establishing the protectorate they need in that region. The outcome of the Gulf War was among the first striking confirmations of the sharpening interimperialist conflict that would mark the post-Cold War world, sounding a minor-key chord in the midst of paeans to U.S. hegemony in the new world order. The consequences of that outcome for U.S. finance capital are still being played out today.
That "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" would be published by New International only some eight years after it was written and adopted was not foreseen or intended. But its appearance now is perhaps fortuitous. What is printed here has not been rewritten with the benefit of hindsight: it is published as it was presented in the Discussion Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party in May 1990, incorporating the changes decided by the delegates to the convention that adopted it. The resolution has been edited only to eliminate unnecessary repetition, digressions, and ambiguities, and to footnote facts and references that the passage of time has left dated or unclear. We read the document today with different eyes, however. The perspective of a few short years allows us to appreciate the enormity of the consequences that followed from imperialism's historic loss, and the speed with which some of the most fundamental linchpins of world politics in the post-World War II era have changed and are changing.
z Far from the "relative strengthening of German finance capital within the imperialist system" and the formation of a European Union "increasingly dominated by German finance capital," long-term trends noted by the resolution, the German bourgeoisie, and its previously solid currency, the mark, have been politically and economically weakened by the traumatic nine- year attempt to swallow and digest the east German workers state. The resolution accurately points to the manifold contradictions inherent in the coming reunification of Germany. But it stopped short of indicating the probable consequences, since they were at such variance with the previous period marked by a sharply separated "East" and "West" Germany, as well as by a long capitalist wave of expansion.
Official unemployment rates matching those not seen in Germany since the eve of Hitler's installation as chancellor of the Third Reich, sharpening political polarization with rising fascist currents, and German finance capital's heightened vulnerability to the destabilizing consequences of Russia's economic disintegration - these are among the most visible manifestations of the new reality in capitalist Europe.
This relative weakening of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis its rivals, especially imperialist France, has been the single biggest shift in world politics since the resolution was drafted. Together with Tokyo's accelerated decline over much the same period, it has altered the popular misconception - which was reaching its zenith among bourgeois commentators leading up to 1990 - that Germany and Japan, with their respective "economic miracles," were the "real victors" in World War II. But only a new interimperialist slaughter, with new powers emerging victorious, can change the balance of forces established with the outcome of the last world war. And such a contest is being prepared.
The real victor in World War II, we should never forget, was not only U.S. finance capital, which emerged largely unchallenged among the imperialist ruling classes. The "American century" remained a sad delusion of Washington liberals, much to their surprise, due to the checkmate imposed by the working class internationally, the other victor in that world conflagration. The toilers' victory resided in the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, however weakened and deformed, was not destroyed. The working people of the Soviet Union, at an enormous material and human cost, with the support of workers and farmers worldwide, turned back the imperialist invasion and began to reconstruct. The economic foundations laid by the October revolution survived. And the oppressed nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America seized the moment created by the weakening of the imperialist system to unleash powerful national liberation struggles that changed the face of world politics and the relationship of class forces internationally to the detriment of finance capital.
z The first war on the European continent in almost fifty years had not yet begun in 1990. But for seven years now, since early 1991, it has been sometimes smoldering, sometimes exploding, throughout the lands of Yugoslavia and across the Balkans.
On the blood and bones of the Yugoslav people, the United States government has established itself as the major "European" power. As the rival national capitalist classes of Europe, wrapped in the United Nations flag, wore themselves out in futile attempts to displace one another as the "winner" in the new Balkan wars, Washington, unfurled its NATO banner in 1994 and decisively moved in. Despite demagogic rationalizations, the U.S. rulers' aim is not to stop "ethnic cleansing" or to impose "democracy," but to establish U.S. supremacy in Europe and create conditions that one day will facilitate the restoration of capitalist social relations throughout the Yugoslav workers state.
z The growing strains within the reactionary NATO alliance "from intensifying interimperialist competition and shifting alignments" noted in the resolution have sharpened not diminished. But under the guiding hand of a U.S. ruling class far from unanimous on the fateful consequences of its course, NATO is being expanded to encompass even more explosive contradictions; its center of gravity is being shifted sharply to the east. The encirclement of the Russian workers state is being tightened along its entire perimeter, from Central Europe, through the oil- rich Caucasus, and deep into Asia along the historic Silk Road to the south. This ring of fire will be fanned into raging flames with increasing frequency, as the capitalist powers seek to advance their interests. The uncontrolled forces set in motion will grow. That is the actual perspective at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Step by step, U.S. imperialism is preparing, with cold- blooded awareness, for what it is convinced must eventually be done. What was opened by the October 1917 revolution in Russia cannot be finessed out of history. Capitalism can only be established in those lands through bloody counterrevolution. The toilers in the former USSR will have to be taken on directly. Though weakened and betrayed by decades of misrule of the bureaucratic caste of opportunists, assassins, and other anti- working-class parasites, now shattered into countless warring camps, the state power of the working class must still be overthrown by military might.
As the resolution affirms, "The workers states and their proletarian property foundations have proven stronger than the castes."
z In August 1990 the skeletal forms of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics still existed. Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union and general secretary of the Communist Party. The Moscow regime still sought to justify its legitimacy by claiming to represent the continuity of the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution. None of that remains the fact today.
The disintegration of the bureaucratic castes, abandoning all pretense to speak for communism or represent the interests of the working class and its allies internationally, has removed an enormous roadblock that for decades stood in the way of revolutionary fighters finding their way to Marxism. Millions were diverted instead onto a course that was in reality a counterrevolutionary negation of what the historic leaders of the modern working-class movement, including Marx, Engels, and Lenin, fought for. But today neither tottering Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his collaborators nor their factional opponents - to say nothing of imitators throughout the various former Soviet republics - have the capacity to influence and disorient any revolutionary fighter anywhere in the world.
Gone with the roadblock is also the glue that for decades served to structure the milieu broadly referred to as "the left" throughout the world. Since the Stalinist initiation of the Popular Front "strategy" of class collaboration in the mid-1930s, "the left" has derived its political line and coherency, and often its resources, from identification with and loyalty to the actually existing castes that dominated the workers states. The attractive power of the existing fact was enormous - hence the crisis of "the left" that swept 'round the world when, as Cuban President Fidel Castro put it, "one day the sun did not rise at 6:00 a.m., nor at 7:00 a.m., nor at 10:00 a.m., nor at noon."(3) The mettle of all those calling themselves socialist or communist began being tested anew - a test that is deepening and broadening today.
Currents claiming to be revolutionary no longer have any power in the workers movement outside themselves to blame, or to credit, for whatever they prove capable of doing, leading, and becoming.
z At the beginning of 1990, the superinflated Japanese stock and real estate markets had just collapsed. That this marked the opening of a world deflationary crisis is only today - belatedly, and in more and more panicky tones - beginning to be acknowledged in certain quarters of bourgeois public opinion. Contrary to expectations, the recovery never occurred. The crisis has only continued to deepen.
Eight years later, as the "Asian crisis" spreads and the international collapse of capitalism's banking system looms threateningly on the horizon, no one yet knows if we are in fact already living through what will soon be universally recognized as the first year of a new world depression. Will 1998 be looked back on as a new 1929? Yes or no, the answer changes little. What is incontrovertible is that we are witnessing the last desperate and feeble efforts of the capitalist rulers to stave off the inevitable.
And what is coming will be more devastating for the world's toilers than the aftermath of 1929. This time it will be of truly global dimensions.
During the world depression of the 1930s, capitalist social relations were marginal throughout most of colonial Asia and Africa - and even parts of Latin America. For the huge peasant majority under colonialism, the economic and social consequences of colonial superexploitation meant life on the knife's edge. But subsistence and survival took place largely outside the reach of the world capitalist market, and conditions of life for the majority of the world's toilers were often not qualitatively worsened by the Great Depression. Today, capitalism has penetrated agriculture more deeply in most of these countries, and an industrial working class of wage-labor that is not always small has developed in many of them.
The peoples of the Soviet Union, protected in the 1930s from the ravages of world depression by the revolutionary conquests of October that laid the economic foundations of nationalized property and a planned economy, are now infinitely more vulnerable.
The fate of the toilers everywhere has been drawn much more tightly into the workings of the world capitalist market. Hopes for a better tomorrow are just beginning to be dashed.
This world of the twenty-first century, born prematurely in the closing hours of the twentieth, may be rudely disorienting for many whose lives and consciousness were shaped by the upheaval and consequences of World War II. For the generation coming to political life today, however, this is the only world they have ever known. For all of us, "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" implies practical tasks and perspectives that fit well today's growing working-class resistance and puts in political relief the forces that will shape the titanic battles that are approaching. Above all, it explains to us why - bourgeois propaganda notwithstanding - the historic odds in favor or the working class internationally have been strengthened, not weakened.
With the implosion of the bureaucratic castes, regimes, and parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the U.S. imperialist rulers hoped the government of the workers and farmers of Cuba would become easier pickings. They failed to understand - as they have from the days of the revolutionary war against the Batista dictatorship - that the leadership of the revolution in Cuba is not a tropical variant of Stalinism, but a truly revolutionary internationalist party that is blood and bone of the Cuban toilers.
The U.S. rulers anticipated that the sudden, brutal slashing of the standard of living in Cuba - the result of the abrupt end in 1990-91 of preferential trade agreements with the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states, accounting for 85 percent of Cuba's foreign trade - would starve Cuban working people into submission, or at least create fertile conditions for the overthrow of the revolutionary government.
The world political perspective presented by Cuban Communist Party leader José Ramón Balaguer in "Socialism: A Viable Option," published in this issue, confirms the error of this view. "In the present international conditions, we reaffirm that socialism is a necessity," Balaguer told participants in the international conference on "Socialism on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century," held in Havana, October 21-23, 1997. "Not only is it the logical result of the development of the productive forces on an international scale, it is the only alternative to guarantee the survival of humanity."
Referring to the "collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR," Balaguer noted "it is not socialist truth that failed." Rather, what occurred there was "the crumbling of a dogmatic and vulgar type of Marxism, which in those countries was raised to the status of official theory, burying many of the central principles of our classics and elevating to the position of universal law certain doctrines that served only to rationalize political positions and had virtually no scientific basis."
The international conference of representatives of political parties at which Balaguer spoke, and in which some of the editors of New International participated, including the authors of this article, was hosted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. It was one of several events over the past two years that confirmed the Cuban revolution has conquered the worst days of what they refer to as the Special Period - the economic and political crisis precipitated by the abrupt disintegration of the governments and parties with which they had maintained the closest ties for more than a quarter century. A crisis deliberately compounded, of course, by intensified economic warfare waged against Cuba by the U.S. rulers.
Others events have included:
* The fifth congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, held in Havana, October 8-10, 1997, which reaffirmed the political course of the revolution, knitting the lines of continuity between the rectification process begun in the mid-1980s and the policies of the Special Period. Among other decisions by the delegates, the congress strengthened the party leadership, resolutely cutting the size of the Central Committee from 225 to 150 members, while incorporating some 50 new members from the younger generations bearing the direct weight of day-to-day leadership in every arena. The congress registered the reality that the transition in leadership in Cuba, the topic of much speculation by the revolution's enemies abroad, lies not in the future, but is ongoing in the present.
* The commemoration in the fall of 1997, and throughout that year, of the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutionary campaign waged by Ernesto Che Guevara and his comrades in Bolivia, reaffirming the proletarian internationalism that has been and remains the heart and soul of the Cuban revolution.
* The solemn and unifying welcome home given what Cuban president Fidel Castro in October 1997 called Che's reinforcement brigade, as the mortal remains, along with the "immortal ideas" of Che and his comrades returned to Cuba "to reinforce us in this difficult struggle we are waging today to save the ideas for which you fought so hard, to save the revolution, the country and its socialist conquests - the part of your dreams that have been fulfilled."
* The hosting in August 1997 of the 12,000-strong World Festival of Youth and Students by the Union of Young Communists and other youth organizations of Cuba, as part of the political battle to reach out and find the new generation of fighters around the world attracted to the example of the Cuban revolution.
* The "Declaration of the Mambises of the Twentieth Century," initiated in February 1997 by the generals of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and signed by 250,000 FAR officers and troops, as well as, over the next few months, by more than 5 million other Cubans. Linking up with the continuity of the Mambises - the Cuban independence fighters of the late nineteenth century who fought Spanish colonial rule - the declaration repudiates the crude and insulting attempts of U.S. president William Clinton to foment divisions among the officers and ranks of the military with offers of aid in return for overthrowing the revolutionary government through which Cuba's workers and farmers exercise their political power.
* The welcome extended to Pope John Paul II on his state visit in January 1998, during which the revolutionary leadership set an example for working people the world over of courtesy towards religious believers and nonbelievers alike - while taking the moral high ground for the proletariat and speaking the truth to the world about the historical role of the Catholic Church hierarchy as an instrument of scientific obscurantism, racial prejudice, oppression of women, colonial conquest and slavery, and reaction in all its forms. The pope's visit was an event from which the working people of Cuba emerged more confident in themselves and their leadership, and more certain that their class, not the representatives of capitalism or feudalism, will be the bearers of culture in the forward march of humanity.
* The seventeenth congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), held April 27-30, 1996, which registered the confidence of the working class in Cuba as it brings its direct weight to bear in determining the future of the revolution, and its capacity to surmount the enormous obstacles to increasing production under the conditions imposed by the Special Period. As the theses adopted by the delegates expressed it, the organized working class of Cuba met to determine what they could do "to assure, under whatever circumstances, the revolutionary power of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers."
"One day we may have to erect a monument to the Special Period!" Fidel Castro noted in remarks to congress delegates. In meeting the challenge of the most difficult years of the revolution, the Cuban working class has emerged stronger and more self-confident than at any time since the Special Period began.
Each of these events required substantial material and leadership resources that would have been impossible to muster in Cuba during the darkest hours (literally as well as metaphorically) of the Special Period. Taken together, as Cubans jokingly remark, they clearly demonstrate that the revolution is now out of the intensive care unit - that it is no longer necessary to devote every fiber of being to the battle for survival alone. Cuban working people can now enjoy the luxury of directing some energy to thoughts of recovery and how to advance the international revolutionary struggle in today's world.
"Socialism on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century" was perhaps the most important such gathering to take place in Havana in more than thirty years - since the international leadership initiatives in the 1960s that culminated in the Tricontinental conference in January 1966 and the OLAS (Organization of Latin American Solidarity) gathering in August 1967.
Political conditions were vastly different then, of course. The heroic example of the Vietnamese national liberation struggle was galvanizing millions into action worldwide, as hatred for U.S. imperialism's murderous war against the Indochinese peoples deepened and spread. A wave of anti-imperialist struggle was rising throughout Latin America, borne on the crest of the Cuban revolution. Support for the Palestinian people and their struggle against dispossession by the state of Israel was exploding throughout the Arab world. The forces attracted to Havana's initiative then were substantially larger. In their big majority they were young and ready for action. Despite the political disparities, however, the objective place and weight of the leadership initiatives taken thirty years apart are similar: to reach out around the world and find the forces ready to chart a revolutionary strategy to move forward and to apply it.
In Balaguer's opening presentation to the delegates, there was no talk of tragedy having befallen Cuba or other revolutionary forces in the world. There was no bemoaning globalization, nor cowering before the relationship of class forces that has allowed the implementation of neoliberal policies throughout Latin America. Instead, there was a scientific examination of the world class struggle in the closing years of the twentieth century -with eyes fixed on the coming battles being born of the imperialist reality - and a program that constitutes a necessary and sufficient starting point for revolutionary action:
* No, to any variant on theories of globalization and superimperialism that lead to undervaluing the struggle for state power against our own bourgeoisies. "Socialism will not appear on the historical scene through a modernization of present society, but through a revolutionary transformation of its dominant structures. In this sense, the question of the seizure of power remains a basic requirement. . . ."
* Yes, to the political course of rectification and the Special Period, as opposed to the "model of economic management copied, in large measure from the Soviet experience . . . that diverted the construction of socialism onto paths that had nothing to do with being revolutionary."
* No, to any policy of alliances that is not built "from, by, and for the ranks," or that demands revolutionaries renounce "conviction and firmness of principles."
* Yes, to the fight to take the moral high ground, to "show not only the possibility and viability of socialism but also its desirability. . . . For us, socialism is the only possible, the only valid option for placing social relations on a moral footing," said Balaguer. "We cannot relax our efforts to demonstrate - on a theoretical level, and on a practical level - its clear superiority in shaping the highest of human values: justice, equality, fairness, freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, national sovereignty, solidarity. This socialist society continues to be a clear alternative not only to capitalism, but also to the failed experiences of Eastern Europe and the USSR."
The Socialist Workers Party resolution, "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," underscores that "the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba is the first since the Bolsheviks to give communist guidance to the development of a workers state." At the helm of the Cuban government, and in the face of U.S. imperialism's unrelenting economic, political, and military pressures, they have maintained a revolutionary course for forty years. "This `subjective factor' - the genuinely internationalist character of the proletarian vanguard guiding the workers state in Cuba - is the most important objective outcome and contribution of the Cuban revolution."
This is even more true today than it was in 1990. The objective weight in world politics of the only living example of a fighting, confident dictatorship of the proletariat - one with a seasoned combat leadership that has proven its capacity year after year for more than four decades - has grown not diminished. For revolutionary fighters the world over, it is not enough to recognize that imperialism really has lost the Cold War. That alone does not allow revolutionists to chart a way forward. They need the living example of Cuba, as well.
This is just as true for new generations of revolutionary- minded fighters inside Cuba as for young people elsewhere in the world. The real history of the Cuban revolution - the stories of the men and women who overthrew the Batista dictatorship, stood down the Yankee empire at the Bay of Pigs and during the October "missile crisis," and served in volunteer internationalists missions from Latin America, to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East - is a vital link in the revolutionary continuity that must be traced.(5)
A strategy of attempting to build socialism in one country - even in a country as vast and rich in resources as the Soviet Union, let alone a Caribbean island with a historical legacy of centuries of colonial and imperialist domination - can only mean the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, the demoralization and demobilization of the fighting vanguard of the toilers, and certain defeat. But communist workers assume no a priori limits on the capacity of Cuban working people to resist and survive, to hold off the imperial enemy until reinforcement brigades of the international class struggle arrive, to maintain the foundations of their state power, and to keep strengthening their internationalism and advancing their class interests.
That is a practical question, not an analytical one, where the example of Cuba itself weighs heavily in the balance.
Those opening words of "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" place in historical perspective the growing resistance in 1989-90 by workers in the United States to the bosses' union- busting drive that marked the period when the resolution was drafted. The high point of those defensive battles were two overlapping and interlined strikes - the twenty-two-month strike by the International Association of Machinists against Eastern Airlines that began in March 1989, in the course of which the ranks successfully forced the hated boss Frank Lorenzo into bankruptcy and then liquidation, rather than allow his carrier to operate nonunion; and the eleven-month strike against Pittston, settled in February 1990, that set back the coal barons' drive to break the United Mine Workers of America in the eastern coalfields.
Those hard-fought conflicts - in which the ranks put their stamp on the strikes' leadership - and the example they set for the entire labor movement, foreshadowed bigger class battles to come at the beginning of the 1990s. Communist workers organized in industrial trade union fractions of the Socialist Workers Party - who had participated in and been transformed by the Eastern and Pittston struggles - confidently looked forward to the opportunities to respond as new tests developed, better prepared as a fraction of the fighting vanguard of the working class.
As the resolution notes, the end of the third "dog days" in the history of the communist movement in the United States seemed to be in sight. Those days had begun with labor's retreat in the wake of the deep 1981-82 recession. They extended through the all- out rout that began to be reversed only with the resistance mounted by packinghouse workers in the Midwest in 1985-86. They coincided with the heavy blows dealt by imperialism against revolutionary advances in Nicaragua, Grenada, and elsewhere.
Contrary to expectations when the resolution was adopted in 1990, however, the dog days for the working class in the United States (and the majority of other imperialist countries) lasted for another half-dozen years. The U.S.-organized military buildup and murderous war against Iraq between August 1990 and March 1991 marked all of politics for more than a year. The outcome of the war was a debacle for Washington, but the patriotism and triumphalism promoted by the U.S. rulers before, during, and after the largely uncontested assault on Iraq dampened working- class combativity for a period longer than the war itself.
The U.S. capitalist economy went into recession during the eight months of the buildup and war. The subsequent upswing in the business cycle was so sluggish that official unemployment continued rising during the first year of the "recovery." Evidence grew that a world deflationary crisis for capitalism was looming.
Labor was pushed toward the wings; the retreat was extended.
The Eastern and Pittston battles, it turned out, prepared communist workers in the immediate period not for bigger defensive strikes and other labor battles, but for the test of imperialist war. New International no. 7, "Washington's Assault on Iraq: Opening Guns of World War III," documents how well that test was met by communist organizations around the world, as they carried out a disciplined, centralized campaign, on the job, in working-class neighborhoods, in the unions, and on the campuses against the brutal war orchestrated by Washington.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, communist workers rose to the challenge of applying in practice their understanding of the world that was coming into being. The war in Yugoslavia, the Mexican "peso crisis," the political rise of Patrick Buchanan and character of his incipient fascist current in the United States, the challenge of building communist youth organizations as the first signs of renewed struggle by young people appeared on the horizons - all were among the elements of the political reality that unfolded in the half decade following adoption of the resolution presented here. They are dealt with in Pathfinder Press's forthcoming book, Capitalism's World Disorder.(6)
Since early 1997 the evidence has grown that the dog days are now indeed receding. Signs of resistance, from Caterpillar to the airlines, from the United Parcel Service workers strike in 1997 to the five-week strike by General Motors workers in 1998, changes taking place among coal miners, organizing efforts by the United Farm Workers in the fields of California, and new forms of leadership initiative by workers who are Black and by women in the plants - all attest to rising opportunities for communist workers to turn toward mass work on a level that was simply not possible for a number of years.
The opening section of the 1990 resolution, entitled "Labor Movement Remains at Center Stage," can now be read, not with disclaimers that conditions are different, that much of what is written there may not be a useful guide to action today, but with confidence that the opposite is more and more true.
The six-story high Pathfinder Mural, a reproduction of which appears on the cover of this issue, was unveiled in November 1989 in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the world financial center of U.S. imperialism. Only days after the Berlin Wall came down, and the capitalist masters of the world were trying to convince us all that they had emerged victorious in a historic battle against the toilers of the world, the ribbons were cut on that work of art celebrating the past, present, and future of the struggles waged by the modern working class and its allies on the road toward emancipation. That timing was an accident of history, but the symbolism could not have better captured the reality of our times. What the Pathfinder Mural depicts is the theme of this issue of New International.
Ours is the epoch of world revolution.
September 1998
Footnotes
1. "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War" by Jack
Barnes, published in issue no. 10 of New International, had been
discussed and adopted by delegates to the Socialist Workers
Party's August 1994 national convention.
2. From "Trade Unions: Their Past, Present and Future," the founding trade union document of the communist movement. Drafted by Karl Marx for discussion and adoption by the First International in 1867, it is published in the book Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (Pathfinder, 1990).
3. Speech to the congress of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), November 1993. See "Defending Cuba, Defending Cuba's Socialist Revolution" by Mary-Alice Waters in New International no. 10, p. 30.
4. From part 2 of "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War."
5. For a powerful example, see Secrets of Generals, interviews by Cuban journalist Luis Baez with forty-one top officers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Havana: Si Mar, 1996), distributed by Pathfinder.
6. Available December 1998, by Jack Barnes.