BY MICHEL PRAIRIE
MONTREAL - The fifth issue of Nueva Internacional, a Spanish-
language magazine of Marxist politics and theory, was shipped
from the Pathfinder printshop in New York Friday, April 30 -
just in time for the beginning of an international campaign to
increase the readership of the communist periodicals the
Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, and of the New International
magazine in four languages.
This new issue of Nueva Internacional is the translation of New International no. 11, featuring "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War." Its publication follows that in March of the sixth issue of Nouvelle Internationale, the translation in French of the same issue of the magazine. A translation in Swedish will be published later this year as the third issue of Ny International. A translation in Icelandic is also under way.
The documents in this issue of the magazine are if anything more essential today than when they were published in English barely six months ago.
U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War
The feature article of the magazine by Socialist Workers
Party national secretary Jack Barnes is a political resolution
discussed and adopted in 1990 by the SWP in the U.S. and
communist leagues in other countries. Its main points can be
summarized as follows:
Imperialism is weaker today than ever before. "The exploiters," writes Barnes, "have not been able to resolve the increasing stagnation and vulnerability of the world capitalist system. They have not been able to impose crushing defeats on the working people and labor movements of a single imperialist country. They have not been able to overcome the political obstacles to their capacity to carry out sustained wars, or to prevent rebellions and fights for liberation by workers and peasants of the colonial and semi-colonial world. And they have not been able since 1917 to restore capitalist property relations to a single one of the countries where it has been overturned."
Capitalism has suffered a historic defeat in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes. To restore their system of exploitation, the imperialists now have to directly confront millions of workers, farmers, and other toilers who have for the first time in more than half a century gained space to discuss, organize, and fight for their rights and reach out to their fellow brothers and sisters in other countries.
Stalinism was a counterfeit of communism. Its worldwide disintegration opens the way for rebuilding a world communist movement capableof leading workers and farmers to power - a key precondition for them being able to begin rebuild society on the basis of human needs and new proletarian values of solidarity, cooperation, and dignity.
The fight for national self-determination: the only road toward a world without borders. A key section of the resolution summarizes the strategic and programmatic conquests of the communist movement on the intertwining of the struggles by oppressed peoples with the socialist revolution. Thinking working and youth will find it especially useful for understanding the crucial place of the fight for Kosova independence today in the defense of the Yugoslav workers state.
Despite a decade of assault, states the 1990 resolution, the "labor movement remains at center stage of U.S. politics" and in other imperialist countries. This conclusion, drawn from hard-fought strikes by rank-and-file Machinists and coal miners against Eastern Airlines and Pittston Coal at the end of the 1980s in the United States, is even truer today.
"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 ... imperial assault on the people of Iraq in 1990-91. Signs of renewed defensive action are all around us," write Barnes and New International editor Mary-Alice Waters in the opening piece of the magazine, titled "Ours Is the Epoch of World Revolution."
Rebuilding world communist movement
This change in the mass psychology of the working class has
in fact accelerated since that sentence was written last
September, underlining even more the other, inseparable thread
that runs through the issue: the opening that the deepening
capitalist crisis and the shattering of the Stalinist roadblock
provide for rebuilding a world communist movement.
Readers will find of special interest:
The "Young Socialists Manifesto," drafted by members of the YS chapter in Los Angeles a year ago in order to clarify for themselves the character and activity of their organization and its relationship with the Socialist Workers Party, the communist vanguard in the United States. The editors decided to put this document right at the front of the issue in order to stress the fact that the point for revolutionaries is to change the world, not just to talk about it.
The centrality of the Cuban revolution and of its communist leadership throughout the whole issue. As the 1990 resolution explains, "This `subjective factor' - the genuinely internationalist character of the proletarian vanguard guiding the workers state in Cuba - is the most important objective contribution of the Cuban revolution."
This proletarian course by the Cuban leadership is confirmed in another piece of the issue, "Socialism: A Viable Option" by José Ramón Balaguer, a member of the Political Bureau of the Cuban Communist Party. In this talk to an international conference of political parties held in Havana in October 1997, he reiterates, "In the present international conditions, we reaffirm that socialism is a necessity. Not only is it the logical result of the development of the productive forces on a world scale, it is the only alternative to guarantee the survival of humanity."
The final section of the 1990 resolution, "Rebuilding a World Communist Movement," and the related article "The Communist Strategy of Party Building Today," by Waters, which closes the magazine.
This rich and concrete discussion includes an assessment of what the proletarian cadres of the communist movement had just accomplished during the Eastern and Pittston strikes.
It goes over the norms and institutions of a turn party like the SWP - a party "whose rhythm of work, norms of behavior, and political milieu are determined by the fact that the majority of its membership and leadership are industrial workers and members of industrial trade unions," as explains a translator's note added to the French and Spanish translations of the issue.
And it codifies important conquests of the communist movement - like the "incompatibility of all forms of race- baiting with the construction of a communist party and leadership." Race-baiting is a very widespread petty-bourgeois practice by individuals of an oppressed nationality (or someone claiming to speak in their interests) of using demagogic methods to prejudice the credibility or leadership qualifications of someone of a different skin color.
The printing of the new French- and Spanish-language issues of this magazine significantly increases the scope of the communist arsenal. It will help put the articles they contains into the hands of workers, farmers, and youth whose language is French or Spanish - in Quebec, the United States, France, and many other countries. This happens at a time when the hunger is deepening among workers, farmers, and youth internationally for a clear working-class explanation and line of march in face of the accelerating crisis of the world capitalist system of exploitation - a crisis now dramatized by the murderous assault on working people in the Balkans by Washington and its imperialist allies and rivals.
Michel Prarie is the editor of Nouvelle Internationale.