BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND STEVE CLARK
Over four days from August 5 through 8, hundreds of
socialist workers, youth, and other militants involved in
struggles against class exploitation and national oppression
will gather for an Active Workers Conference at Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio.
"On August 1, a car caravan will leave from the Bay Area for Ohio," said Norton Sandler, a member of the Socialist Workers Party's Trade Union Committee and organizer of the California State Committee of the SWP, in a July 14 interview.
"On the way it will stop by Fresno to pick up a contact of the Young Socialists and meet others driving up from Los Angeles. Where else the caravan will stop will be decided in the next two weeks," Sandler added, "as party and YS members join picket lines by workers fighting a lockout by Nestle near Stockton, actions by hotel and restaurant workers trying to unionize the Marriott in San Francisco, and rolling job slowdowns by dock workers up and down the West Coast."
All across the United States, resistance to assaults by the employers continues to erupt -from the successful union organizing drive by textile workers in Kannapolis, North Carolina, to the 14-week-long strike by Steelworkers at Newport News, Virginia. These fights are further evidence of a sea change in the mass psychology of the working class since at least 1997.
The Ohio conference - sponsored by the SWP and Young Socialists - will register the progress worker-bolsheviks have made over the last year in fusing their activity with struggles by other vanguard workers and farmers. It will be an opportunity for those involved in such struggles, and building solidarity with them in the labor movement, to exchange experiences and learn from each other, and from the past battles of the workers movement.
"Structuring party branches and union fractions through mass work" - that theme will run throughout the August gathering, as it did during a previous Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh in July of last year. The Ohio conference will register what the communist movement has accomplished since the Pittsburgh gathering in responding to the opportunities and obligations presented by the new situation in the working class.
Progress has been made in an accelerated way since the end of 1998. In December, SWP national secretary Jack Barnes presented a talk at the closing session of a conference in Los Angeles jointly sponsored by the Young Socialists and SWP. The conference coincided with the third YS national convention.
Pointing to the expanding numbers of vanguard workers and farmers engaged in strikes, lockout conflicts, and farm struggles around the United States - several of whom were present at that meeting - Barnes observed that as socialist workers and youth turn toward these fights by other working people, "We will transform our movement together. We will find ourselves in small towns as well as large cities." This talk is the opening chapter of the book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Barnes, published early this year.
"I'm not making a prediction," Barnes said. "I'm not saying we should go someplace in particular. I'm saying we are open to that course, and we will follow it. We will have the courage of our convictions, and our movement's leadership will be defined by a sensitivity, a responsiveness, and a competence in moving in this direction. Political openings and responsibilities will determine organizational forms."
A rolling panel discussion that will open the Ohio Active Workers Conference and continue over the next two days will put the spotlight on the best examples marking progress the communist movement has made along this course. Sandler and Jack Willey, also a member of the SWP's Trade Union Committee, will be the moderators.
The panel will include SWP members and Young Socialists active in working-class politics and the industrial unions, operating equipment in the party printshop, as well as other workers and farmers engaged in struggles. In addition, the panel will feature supporters of the communist movement organizing to help advance the party's work in a range of ways.
On the first evening, following the opening panel, Barnes will address the overall theme of the conference from the standpoint of shifts in U.S. and world politics, accelerating class polarization, and perspectives for building proletarian parties.
Follow natural lines of resistance
Sandler pointed out that following the July 1998 Active
Workers Conference in Pittsburgh, the National Committee of
the SWP launched a campaign to increase the number of party
members working in meatpacking jobs organized by the United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and garment and textile
jobs organized by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and
Textile Employees (UNITE), as well as to rebuild a national
fraction of coal miners in the United Mine Workers (UMWA).
Doing so, Sandler said, was the road to bringing to bear in today's new situation the political lessons, working-class habits, and disciplined functioning conquered by the party in the late 1970s when it made a turn toward getting the overwhelming majority of its membership and leadership into industry and the industrial unions. These accomplishments are recorded in the book The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes.
"Coming out of the Pittsburgh gathering, we knew the party's structures would be transformed through mass work," said Sandler. "But we had no preconceived notions of the forms this would take. We followed the natural lines of resistance in the working class.
"Since last fall there have been at least three contract battles by UMWA miners: the strike against Freeman United Coal in central Illinois; the walkout by anthracite miners in Hazelton, Pennsylvania; and the Deserado strike in Colorado. At the same time, hiring for coal mine jobs increased in certain areas of the country - including hiring of younger generations of workers and of women. The combination of the job openings and our involvement in helping to organize solidarity with these struggles led the party to set up two organizing committees in the coalfields. We are in these areas early, before important class battles unfold."
A third organizing committee was formed to advance the party's work among packinghouse workers in the Midwest, Jack Willey said. "Many recent struggles by meatpackers," he pointed out, "have been tied to the fight for equal rights for immigrants, against the raids by the hated la migra and its Operation Vanguard that allows the INS to look through employers' records and deputize local cops to be INS agents."
Members of the SWP and YS are also strengthening union fractions in garment and textile plants in cities where the party has branches and in mills in surrounding areas. Willey pointed to an important recent victory won by textile workers - the successful unionization drive in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
"Reinvigorating the party's political and trade union work among workers in garment and textile factories, packinghouses, and coal mines," Sandler added, "is also the best way to put SWP and YS members in the auto, steel, rail, and machinists unions back on the disciplined footing we conquered during the opening years of the party's turn to industry."
Willey said that as the party makes progress along this course, "We are meeting people again we had gotten to know years ago, as well as meeting new militant workers." For example, he said, the SWP last month established a branch organizing committee in St. Louis, where there had been a party branch until the mid-1990s. Socialist workers have maintained contact with airline workers there who have been engaged in fights at TWA over the past year, as well as with workers in other industries. And they are getting to know other working people in St. Louis who have been involved in union battles and in building solidarity with fights elsewhere in Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa.
The party looks a little different today than a year ago, Willey said. "We are expanding to some smaller towns, often surrounded by cornfields or ranches." Both there and in larger cities where SWP units are organized, worker- bolsheviks are now gaining some new experience in integrating their political work with efforts by farmers fighting - in face of declining produce prices and rising indebtedness - to hold on to land and to their means of livelihood.
Across the South, SWP and YS members have taken part in at least a dozen meetings by farmers this year, most around the settlement in a class-action discrimination suit filed last year against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) by farmers who are Black, said James Harris, who works in a UNITE-organized warehouse in Atlanta.
"A few of these farmers have been attending Militant Labor Forums in Atlanta occasionally, driving hours to do so. They have also invited us to take part in fights in their areas, like a rally against racist violence in Ashburn, Georgia."
In response to the shifts in class politics, socialist workers have found receptivity among co-workers to taking part not only in union solidarity activity, but also in actions to support working farmers and protests around a range of social and political issues. In the New York and New Jersey area, for example, a party member working in rail brought a co-worker to a Militant Labor Forum on the fight for Puerto Rican independence, while two other party members there brought independence activists from Puerto Rico they had met to a picket line for striking Domino Sugar workers.
Structures that meet party needs
As the SWP has responded to changes in working-class
politics by extending its reach geographically, it has needed
to make use of the state and district structures provided for
by the party constitution. State organizations of the SWP
have been established in California and Minnesota, as well as
a Southern regional committee and a district organization in
New York and New Jersey.
In early June, the SWP National Committee also made a number of decisions to structure party units along lines better suited to meeting current political opportunities. "Establishing organizing committees in new areas means we'll have smaller units in some other places right now," Sandler said.
"More than half of SWP branches are in the process of moving to headquarters that fit their current size and financial resources by the end of September," he said. "And all branches are on a campaign to become debt free and reconquer a proletarian approach to financing a nationally centralized party."
The party's nationally organized supporters have also taken an August 5 goal of increasing monthly contributions to the SWP from just under $140,000 to $175,000 per year. To advance towards this goal, all party units are organizing meetings of supporters in their areas this month. "At the Active Workers Conference we'll work to meet this goal and discuss the next steps," Sandler said.
Summer schools, conference classes
In June and July, the Young Socialists and SWP organized
summer schools in cities across North America to study and
discuss central questions in world politics, the lessons and
history of struggles for power by the working class and its
allies, and the continuity of efforts by vanguard workers to
build communist parties. Readings include Capitalism's World
Disorder, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by founding
SWP leader James P. Cannon, and In Defense of Marxism by Leon
Trotsky, a central leader of the Bolshevik-led October 1917
revolution in Russia.
Classes at the Ohio conference will focus on clarifying questions that came up during these summer schools.
"What's a `nascent country' and what's the continuity of communism on the fight against national oppression?" This is one of the questions discussed at the summer school classes on James P. Cannon's History of American Trotskyism in Birmingham, said Roberto Guerrero, a YS member who recently moved there from Houston. "We've discussed the struggle for Quebec independence, spurred by the presence here of two YS members from Canada, and we plan to read something by Lenin on the right of self-determination of oppressed nations."
Guerrero said another question that has sparked a lot of interest there is the historic weight of workers who are Black in the changing South. He had just returned from a visit to Phoenix City, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia, where YS and party members sold nine copies of the Militant at the plant gates of two Fieldcrest Cannon mills and talked to workers about the union representation victory in Kannapolis and the Steelworkers strike in Newport News, Virginia. YS and party members had also set up a literature table the day before at Auburn University in Alabama, where five students have purchased copies of Capitalism's World Disorder. "We have now set up a class on campus with one of these students who is interested in coming to the Active Workers Conference."
Reading, studying, and discussing with each other, while actively taking part in the class struggle - that's been the pattern of the summer schools that have been the most successful. This is especially true in areas where Young Socialists moved for the summer, creating new concentrations of YS members.
In Los Angeles, for example, two YS members who moved there from northern California got jobs in a union meatpacking plant. A third YSer from Chicago got into a UNITE- organized garment plant two weeks earlier.
"This had a big impact on the 40 workers and young people who took part in the July 11-12 statewide educational weekend at a mountain camp in Ben Lomand, California," said Samantha Kern, California state organizer of the Young Socialists and a member of the YS National Committee. "One of the YS members who got the meatpacking job in LA gave a class on `Leading the party into industry' from Changing Face of U.S. Politics. We now have union fractions in meatpacking in both San Francisco and Los Angeles."
YS National Committee member Cecilia Ortega and another party member, who work in a UFCW-organized meat-processing plant in the Bay Area, brought one of their coworkers to the California summer school special weekend. In addition, a farmworker from Watsonville - who took part in a drive to unionize Coastal Berry farms last year and was beaten up by company thugs -attended the first day of the educational weekend.
During the weekend, Kern said, one participant asked why the SWP since the early 1980s had resumed its call for a workers and farmers government, instead of a workers government as it had done for a number of years in the 1960s and 1970s. This initiated a discussion on the central place of the worker-farmer alliance in the revolutionary struggle for power in the United States and other imperialist countries.
The California SWP State Committee and party branches in Los Angeles and San Francisco are making a special effort, including fundraising, to ensure that every YS member and contact come to the Ohio conference. A similar effort is needed across the United States.
YS and party members in California are now organizing a team to join steelworkers locked out by Kaiser Aluminum at a July 17 solidarity rally in Spokane, Washington, Kern said. "We will bring these experiences, and hopefully some of these fighters, to the Active Workers Conference."
Place of Young Socialists, supporters
On the second day of the conference, Mary-Alice Waters,
editor of New International magazine and president of
Pathfinder Press, will present a talk on the place of the
SWP's auxiliary organizations - the Young Socialists and
nationally organized party supporters - in building the
communist movement today.
Since its launching half a decade ago, the Young Socialists - building on the continuity of its predecessor, the Young Socialist Alliance - has proven itself as a training ground for cadre of the revolutionary party and in helping to deepen the proletarianization of the communist movement.
Experience from the past few years also confirms the importance of organized party supporters in maximizing the striking power of the proletarian party, helping to finance the SWP, and aiding the party's effort to keep in print the revolutionary political continuity of the workers movement.
An indispensable part of this expanding support movement are the 100-plus volunteers around the world who have been digitizing Pathfinder books. "At the Pittsburgh conference last year," said Sandler, "volunteers had completed putting into electronic form two titles. They have now finished 34 and will be close to 40 by the beginning of August."
Their work has become an integral part of Pathfinder book production, allowing the communist movement to keep its revolutionary arsenal of books and pamphlets available to workers, farmers, and youth at a lower cost and with improved quality. As the communist movement transforms the timeliness and consistency of its mass work, reprinting Pathfinder titles is needed more frequently.
"Capitalism's World Disorder is proving itself to be a book never to be seen without, on the job or wherever else you are," said Willey. "Whatever political question explodes in U.S. and world politics - the war in Yugoslavia, a deadly refinery explosion, a racist cop beating, an assault on abortion rights - this book has something to say from a working-class point of view. It helps workers, farmers, and youth better understand what we can do about the system of capitalist exploitation that is dragging humanity toward social devastation, fascism, and world war." Members and supporters of the communist movement have sold more than 1,200 copies of the book between mid-March and the end of June, and its publisher, Pathfinder Press, has sold 2,800 copies in all since it came off the presses earlier this year.
The growing political receptivity to revolutionary books and newspapers among fighting workers and farmers is being confirmed every week. In early July, Danny Booher, a Steelworkers union member from Pittsburgh, joined USWA members locked-out by Kaiser on a solidarity bus from Newark, Ohio, to Newport News (see front-page article). During the trip, Booher and another socialist worker from Cleveland sold eight Militant subscriptions and four Pathfinder books, including a copy of Capitalism's World Disorder, to workers on the bus and at union rallies. Kaiser workers from Tacoma and Spokane, Washington, and from Gramercy, Louisiana, took part in the weekend's events.
"A number of these workers have gotten to know and respect party members from Houston to Seattle and Cleveland because of their systematic solidarity work and had bought copies of the Militant before," Booher said. "We'll be working hard to get some of these workers to the Ohio conference."
Saturday rally, Sunday events
At a Saturday evening, August 8, rally, Barnes will review
what has been registered through the panels, educational
classes, and discussion over the previous three days and
point to some conclusions for the party's ongoing political
and trade union work coming out of the conference.
On Sunday, many conference participants will stay over for a fourth day of activities.
Members of the steering committees of the SWP's industrial union fractions will hold a joint meeting with the Trade Union Committee for a full day of discussion to help guide the party's trade union work.
The Young Socialists are organizing a Sunday meeting.
And there will be a range of training workshops for participants in the Active Workers Conference who are volunteers in the international Pathfinder reprint project.
On Monday, August 9, the SWP National Committee will meet to discuss and adopt decisions to continue advancing the party along the course registered at the Active Workers Conference.
Over the week following the conference, a volunteer brigade of participants will travel to New York to join in a special effort to repaint and make other improvements in the Pathfinder Building, where the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and revolutionary books and pamphlets are produced.
There will be a $20 per day conference registration fee for Thursday through Saturday, as well as $14.25 per night for rooms ($5 for budget housing). A breakfast and dinner plan will be available for $12.75 a day, a three-meal plan for $18.
For information on participating in the conference, see the ad on page 5.