BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The Militant has just announced the publication of a new booklet that will be off the press March 1. It is a compilation of articles from the socialist newsweekly and other material on the centrality of the production and circulation of revolutionary literature in building the communist movement.

The booklet begins with the talk by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, at a conference on Political and Social Publishing held in Havana, Cuba, February 2 - 3. The gathering was sponsored by Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists.

"As a publishing house, our direct line of continuity goes back to the earliest publication of speeches and writings by Lenin in the United States on the eve of 1917," says Waters at the opening of her talk.

"Following the victorious insurrection of the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the tsarist empire, revolutionary- minded working people the world over sought to emulate the example of the first worker-bolsheviks. By 1919 a regroupment of left-wing socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and others had come together to found something truly new - the communist movement in the United States, whose explicit goal was to emulate the Bolsheviks.

"Through many and varied channels they began to publish the periodicals, pamphlets, and books that for the first time in the 20th century brought to the working class in our hemisphere a communist perspective that drew on the toilers' initial experience of taking power, defending it, and using it worldwide."

For more than 80 years, Waters says, Pathfinder and its predecessors have had one and only one objective: "to publish and distribute as widely as possible the books, pamphlets, and magazines that are necessary to advance the construction of a communist party in the United States - an objective that is inseparable from the building of a communist movement internationally."

Militant readers respond
The conference where Waters gave this presentation was one of the events surrounding the Eighth International Book Fair in Havana, which Waters covered as part of a team of Militant reporters. Pathfinder Distribution in London organized a stand at the fair, staffed by an international team of volunteers from Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Meetings celebrating the publication of books on display at the Havana book fair -a major cultural and political affair in the Cuban capital organized every two years - were an important feature of the February 4 -10 event. The first section of this booklet concludes with the talk by Waters at the book launch of Pombo: A Man of Che's `guerrilla' by Cuban brigadier general Harry Villegas (Pombo) published by Pathfinder Press in 1997.

The publication of Waters's talk on Pathfinder struck a chord among many Militant readers. Robin Maisel, a long-time supporter from California, sent in $200 in mid-February for a rush order of 200 copies of the February "International Socialist Review" supplement to the Militant featuring that presentation. "I would like to do a mailing to supporters and others in southern California as a fund raiser," Maisel wrote.

Following up on his idea, the Militant editors decided to reproduce the talk by Waters along with the related materials in this booklet. Maisel's initiative builds on an offer he made earlier of volunteering his time, experience, and organizing efforts to help raise funds for the publication of a similar booklet, "Celebrating the homecoming of Ernesto Che Guevara's reinforcement brigade to Cuba: Articles from the Militant newspaper on the 30th anniversary of the combat waged in Bolivia by Che and his comrades" (see ad on this page).

Organization of labor in shop
The second part of the booklet consists of a number of articles on steps to revolutionize the organization of labor in the print shop that produces Pathfinder books. This transformation is necessary to keep the 350 titles in the publisher's backlist in print for use by working people and youth who need them to be more effective fighters.

The goal is to decrease substantially the turnaround time of book production -while reducing the size of the print shop and hours of labor - and doing so in a way that maintains and improves the high standards of quality for which Pathfinder has become known.

"For us, the care with which we edit and prepare every single book or pamphlet we produce is the most important test of our publishing efforts," Waters told participants in the Havana conference.

"We consider this to be a class question. If it is to prepare itself to be the ruling class, the working class must have access to truth, to culture, to clearly presented, accurate information. Their own history and continuity must be made accessible to new generations of fighters as they enter the struggle... The working class must learn to be exacting in the standards of quality it demands in all things. That is part of our self-respect and self-confidence. Those who belong to the class that produces everything know better than anyone when work is done with quality and when it is shoddy and unworthy of their efforts."

The perspective of keeping a pipeline of revolutionary literature flowing was central to a round of four regional socialist conferences held across North America - in Chicago, Birmingham, Toronto, and Seattle -between October 1997 and the end of January of this year. The featured speakers at each of these gatherings were Waters and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) national secretary Jack Barnes.

The articles in the second section of the new booklet explain not only the revolution in Pathfinder's print shop now under way but the political foundation on which it is based. As the main talks at these conferences outlined, there is growing evidence that the political retreat of the working class in North America, Europe, and most other imperialist countries has bottomed out; that the socialist revolution in Cuba has been strengthened in the last years and its communist leadership is playing an important role in regrouping revolutionary forces in the world as the worst of the post-1990 economic crisis Cubans call Special Period is conquered; and that a small but steady number of youth are being won to the working-class vanguard and are shouldering greater leadership responsibilities in the communist movement. Under such conditions, strengthening the ingrained habits of responsibility and disciplined functioning of the party take on even greater importance.

To respond to these new political openings, SWP and Young Socialists members in industrial unions are holding a round of national meetings to discuss how to campaign more effectively among their co-workers and other unionists. Socialist workers in the United Auto Workers, for example, are holding such a meeting in Chicago February 28 - March 1. Among other points, SWP members in the UAW will discuss the rejection by fellow unionists at Caterpillar of a contract proposal just a week earlier (see front-page article). And they will discuss the kinds of habits of disciplined functioning that make it possible for a workers party to respond effectively to openings such as these.

Branches, active supporters
Coming out of the round of regional conferences, the articles in Part II of the booklet point out, party branches have begun taking steps to expand and regularize sales of communist literature at factory gates, to join strike picket lines and maintain links with workers once the walkout ends, to organize their forces and political reach in a variety of plants and unions in each city, to clean up meeting halls and safeguard their functioning, to plan more effective public forums where the voice of militant labor can be heard in each city every week, and to function in a more disciplined and collective manner.

SWP branches are also organizing meetings of party active supporters, who - together with literally hundreds of other party partisans - are pitching in to help build the communist movement with greater enthusiasm and determination and in larger numbers than most members of the movement have ever seen. Their activities include staffing Pathfinder bookstores, fundraising, translating forum flyers into Spanish or French, and other tasks that free up party members to do more plant-gate sales, to organize regular political and propaganda work on campuses and in Black and other working-class communities, to travel to reach out to political and union struggles in the region, and to pay more attention to recruitment.

These openings for the communist movement to recruit have encouraged the steps now under way to transform the production of revolutionary books and pamphlets in Pathfinder's print shop. Print-shop workers are making the rounds of other printing plants in the Northeast to get familiar with modern computer-to-plate equipment that will make it possible to bypass labor-intensive production processes - film processing, film stripping, and plate burning - by going direct from electronic files of finished manuscripts to metal or polyester printing plates, drastically cutting labor time and costs in all shop departments.

Shop workers are within a couple of weeks of making a proposal on the kind of equipment to be purchased and of submitting reconstruction plans necessary for the machinery's installation, which will involve other volunteers. As this work progresses, the Militant will launch a capital fund to raise the funds necessary to make this acquisition a reality.

Volunteer efforts
Supporters and friends of the communist movement have responded to an appeal during the Seattle conference to set the pace in this effort by organizing to produce digital manuscripts of books ready for printing plates.

Volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area have taken on the responsibility to be the organizing center for this worldwide effort to scan and proof Pathfinder books and then turn those electronic files into final page layouts using desktop publishing. The new booklet reprints a letter by Ruth Cheney, organizer of a steering committee of four that leads this project from San Francisco. The letter lays out the guidelines for the work, which include demonstrating ability to sustain Pathfinder's exacting standards in order to qualify for full participation. These volunteers - some of them active supporters of the SWP, others not - work directly with the Bay Area organizers. No member of the SWP, Young Socialists, or their sister organizations in other countries is directly involved in the digitization work, which frees them up for political activity in the trade unions, working- class communities, and movements of social protest.

The effort to revolutionize the way communist literature is produced is built on the course presented in the 1991 report by Waters, "Extending the arsenal of communist propaganda and reconquering the apparatus through revolutionary centralism." This report, adopted by the SWP convention that year, concludes the booklet.

The report explains the character and purpose of Pathfinder's print shop. "The shop's reason for being is to take the production workload off the leadership committees and the writing staffs of the Political Committee departments, staffs that are built around writing and editing political material under deadline," Waters notes. "The comrades assigned to the print shop provide labor power for the production work generated by the entire world movement...Working in the shop is plain hard labor. As many of the party's cadres as possible volunteer for three years - sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but roughly three years - to work hard, to provide the labor power that the party needs to expand the arsenal of communist propaganda... It's not political work - that is, it's not setting political line or implementing a party campaign; it's producing the arsenal for the campaign. Unlike the Militant or Pathfinder staff, you're not held accountable for political line and clarity of presentation.

"The shop can only be built on the labor of communists, of 100-percent conscious, communist cadres," Waters continues. "But comrades don't get a political life working ten hours a day, five days a week in the shop... That's why the shop schedule has to be organized in such a way that comrades have a political life through their branches. The normal workday and normal workweek has to make it possible for comrades to do that." The current reorganization of labor in the print shop outlined in the booklet is aimed at addressing exactly this challenge and many others presented by Waters in the 1991 report.  
 
 
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