BY NAOMI CRAINE AND MARTÍN KOPPEL
OBERLIN, Ohio - "A new proletarian movement is beginning to
rise," Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist
Workers Party, said at an August 9 meeting of the party's
National Committee. This movement is broader than labor
struggles; it includes rural toilers fighting to keep their
land. It is based in the city and in the countryside, in the
factories and in the fields, Barnes explained.
There is a new mood and growing confidence among groups of vanguard workers and farmers who increasingly are realizing that though they are from different classes, they have a common future and face common conditions as proletarians, as well as a common enemy - the capitalist class and its agents.
This fact, stated Barnes, gives renewed urgency to building a party that is more proletarian and disciplined, one whose membership and leadership act in a more timely way as part of the vanguard of working people. The just-completed Active Workers Conference, Barnes said, registered initial advances of worker-bolsheviks in transforming the party through fusing our activity with the struggles of these fighters, and discovering in the process the greater and greater need - and possibility - to become competent at mass work.
The National Committee meeting followed an Active Workers Conference held at the Oberlin College campus here August 5-7. It also came after a day of meetings of leaders of the SWP's trade union work, Young Socialists members and interested youth, and supporters of the communist movement involved in helping to keep Pathfinder books in print.
We can increasingly see two armies - of working people and of the capitalist exploiters - beginning to take shape and face each other, in a way that wasn't as visible before, Barnes said.
One example is the recent 17-week strike by thousands of shipyard workers in Newport News, Virginia. The shipyard struggle was impacted by battles that came before it in that region, particularly fights led by farmers who are Black to hold onto their land. As a result, the Newport News struggle became more than a union battle; it took on a social character throughout the region and beyond, becoming a source of confidence to working people both in the city and the countryside who were attracted to this example of working- class power, solidarity, and militancy.
The existence of this proletarian movement in becoming was registered at the Active Workers Conference. It was a working meeting in which fighters from the factories and the land exchanged experiences and worked toward a common political language through three days of panel discussions, presentations, and classes.
More than 460 people attended the conference, including members of the Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialists, and communist leagues in several countries; vanguard working people involved in struggles; supporters of the communist movement; and young people interested in socialism. Participants came from across the United States as well as from Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and other countries.
Many Young Socialists members, and other trade unionists and farmers, converged on the conference in car caravans from the West Coast, Minnesota, Texas and Alabama, Georgia, and other points. The caravans stopped along the way to pick up conference participants, join strike picket lines, and sell the Militant at plant gates and mine portals.
Participants headed out of the conference into a range of political activities. A carload of active workers joined the picket lines of locked-out Steelworkers at Kaiser Aluminum in Newark, Ohio, on their way home to Mississippi and Texas. Others headed to Newport News to continue discussions with workers at the giant shipyard there.
Thirty people set out for New York to take part in a week- long volunteer brigade to paint and spruce up the Pathfinder Building, where the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books are edited and printed. They were joined by another 70 volunteers over the course of the week, with the biggest concentration coming on the final two days of the project (see article on page 5).
The Active Workers Conference kicked off a new campaign to sell the book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium to bookstores and libraries in areas where workers and farmers are in the forefront of the resistance to the attacks by the capitalist rulers (see front- page article).
The conference also served as the send-off for delegations from the Young Socialists in the United States, Canada, and Sweden who participated in the August 15-19 International Seminar of Youth and Students on Neoliberalism in Havana, hosted by Cuban student and youth organizations.
Fernando Pérez, first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., accepted an invitation to attend the conference, but was denied permission to travel by the U.S. State Department.
Structuring party through mass work
"Structuring party units and union fractions through mass
work," read the banners in English and Spanish at the front
of the main conference hall. This had been the theme of the
Active Workers Conference held in Pittsburgh in July 1998.
The Ohio conference registered how the Socialist Workers
Party and Young Socialists have advanced over the 13 months
since the Pittsburgh gathering in fusing their activity with
other fighting workers and farmers.
The meeting was marked by the leadership priority and hard work the party has put into collaborating with its two auxiliary organizations - the Young Socialists and the party's supporters. As a result of these efforts, YS cadres have been setting the pace in carrying out decisions of the communist movement in response to new political openings in a timely way. The meeting registered the growing ability and confidence of party supporters and their role in helping sustain the movement's publishing apparatus.
A rolling panel discussion, held each of the three days, pulled together the threads of work of the party, Young Socialists, supporters, and fellow fighters over the last year, helping conference participants generalize from these experiences. Norton Sandler and Jack Willey, members of the SWP's Trade Union Committee, chaired the panels.
Following the first day's panel and discussion, Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, spoke on "The place of the party's auxiliary organizations - the Young Socialists and party supporters - in building the communist movement." Following the second day's panel, Jack Barnes spoke on "Structuring party units and trade union fractions through mass work." A discussion period followed this presentation. These talks generalized and reinforced the lessons of the experiences described on the panels and in discussion from the floor.
On the final day, Barnes gave a summary talk on "Organizing to carry out the perspectives of the Active Workers Conference." His presentation was part of a windup rally launching a campaign to raise funds among working people for the continued publication of Pathfinder books.
Several panelists spoke about steps taken to rebuild fractions - concentrations - of socialist workers in garment, textile, meatpacking, and coal mining. This effort, known as the third campaign for the turn to the industrial unions, was launched following the 1998 Pittsburgh Active Workers Conference with the aim of politically revitalizing all seven of the party's national trade union fractions. Since the SWP's original turn to industry more than two decades ago, the big majority of the membership and leadership of the party have been rooted in the industrial unions.
Since last October, the fractions of socialist workers in the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) have grown from just a handful of members in a few cities to about the same size as most of the SWP's industrial fractions spread across the United States. On the first panel, Lisa Potash, a member of UNITE in Chicago, described how the party branch in Chicago has prioritized getting another member or two into the large garment shop where she works.
In recent months the party has established organizing committees in coalfields in the West and Midwest with the aim of getting jobs in mines that are hiring - union or nonunion - as a step toward rebuilding a fraction in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Members of these two organizing committees described the increased hiring of young workers, including women, especially at nonunion mines.
"We're early in the area, anticipating the struggles that will erupt," noted Elyse Hathaway, a member of the party organizing committee in the Midwest.
Another organizing committee was formed to deepen the party's work with meatpackers in the upper Midwest. These are also areas where working farmers have been hard hit by the crisis in agriculture, Holly Wilson stressed. "Getting to know more farmers is one of the priorities we've set," she said.
Socialist workers in the region are also prioritizing steps to reach meatpackers at Hormel plants in August, leading up to their contract expiration. Participants traveling to the Active Workers Conference from the West Coast and from Minnesota sold the Militant at Hormel plants in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska on their way to Ohio.
Land and labor struggles
Some of the panelists described fights by militant
unionists and farmers and how socialist workers have been
joining in their activities and discussions, such as the 10-
month battle by unionists locked out by Kaiser Aluminum and
the recent Steelworkers strike against Newport News
Shipbuilding Co.
Mary Martin, an airline worker and member of the Machinists union in Washington, D.C., spoke about the stakes in that strike and the teams of socialist workers and Young Socialists who met strikers on the picket lines, at the union hall, and in working-class communities where many shipyard workers live, as well as other workers in the region. They have gotten to know a number of the battle-tested ranks, who approved a new contract July 30.
Willie Evans, a member of Steelworkers Local 303L, which is on strike against Titan Tire Co. in Natchez, Mississippi, urged other conference participants to build and take part in a September 11 labor rally marking the one-year anniversary of their battle. "We're inviting people from all over, to make it a glorious occasion for mobilizing working-class solidarity," he said. Evans noted he met a number of conference participants on the picket lines, not only in Natchez but in Houston, where oil workers have been confronting a lockout at Crown Petroleum.
One of those sharing the platform with Evans, who is also a wheat and soybean farmer, was Willie Head, a tobacco and vegetable farmer in Pavo, Georgia, who has been leading struggles by farmers to defend their land from foreclosures. "We're traveling to cities to make workers aware that losing our farms doesn't affect just us - it affects you, too" through jacked-up food prices charged by big supermarket chains, he said. "These problems will continue unless workers and farmers come together and stay together."
Gladys Williams, from Quitman, Georgia, spoke on the final evening of the conference. Williams is a member of the South Georgia Vegetable Producers Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the People's Tribunal of Valdosta, an antipolice brutality organization. She explained that in March she and other farmers hosted two youth leaders from revolutionary Cuba who were on a U.S. speaking tour.
"They impressed me very much when they told us Cuban farmers didn't have to worry about losing their land" because through their socialist revolution they have won the right to work the land free from foreclosures, Williams recounted. In contrast, she pointed out, in the United States "they are trying to take farmers' land."
Because of this reality and the fact that Cubans have wiped out illiteracy, "I'm curious and I want to learn more about Cuba," Williams said. She will be part of a fact-finding reporting team of small farmers who are planning to visit Cuba later this year, hosted by the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) of Cuba.
In his final talk on organizing to carry out the perspectives of the conference, Barnes said that communist workers should also help farmers from the United States forge ties with farmers in the United Kingdom and other imperialist countries - to begin to see themselves as part of the international proletarian army against the efforts of capitalist governments to keep them divided.
Summer schools, caravan to conference
Several speakers explained how over the past couple months
the Young Socialists had concentrated their numbers in
several cities - particularly Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Birmingham, and Atlanta - to organize a summer school to
study books containing the lessons of 150 years of the modern
workers movement. One was Migdalia Jiménez, a YS member from
Chicago who moved to Los Angeles to join the socialist summer
school program and also quickly got a job in a nonunion
textile distribution center.
Another YS member, Manuel González, moved from California to Atlanta. Like other YS members in different cities, "I not only studied Marxism but got a job in industry in Atlanta, and we deepened our participation in the class struggle," he said, including through a team that went to Kannapolis, North Carolina, to meet textile workers who had just won an important union organizing victory. The YS and SWP members there collectively studied books such as Capitalism's World Disorder by Jack Barnes, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon, and Revolutionary Continuity by Farrell Dobbs.
Jiménez and González both joined car caravans from their respective cities to the Active Workers Conference. Samantha Kern, organizer of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee and California State YS organizer, described how a caravan kicked off in Los Angeles, stopped in Fresno to pick up a youth who joined the Young Socialists at the conference, and traveled 2,500 miles across the country to Ohio, joining up with more Young Socialists and others from San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver, and Chicago along the way.
The 17 caravanistas, as they and other caravaners became known, organized a number of plant-gate sales, including at a mine portal near Rock Springs, Wyoming, and two sales at packinghouses in Fremont, Nebraska. In the Chicago area some of the caravanistas showed their solidarity on a Steelworkers strike picket line, while others sold 36 copies of the Militant at the gates of two giant steel mills, and attended a class given by Jiménez on a section of Capitalism's World Disorder.
When Mary-Alice Waters spoke following the first day's panel discussion, some 35 participants who had come in caravans -not only from California but from Minnesota, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, and New Jersey - were seated on the platform behind her.
It's important to absorb the strengthening of the Young Socialists as seen in the summer schools, in their whole range of activity, Waters said. Without the effort led by the party to deepen work in garment, meatpacking, and coal, it is impossible to advance in building the Young Socialists. And it would not be possible for the party to carry out this revitalization of the turn to industry without the Young Socialists.
In the cities where the Young Socialists concentrated their forces for the summer, it posed a necessary crisis for the party, Waters said, forcing the party to confront the habits of retreat and procrastination that have grown up over years. When the party branch in Los Angeles voted to organize to get jobs in meatpacking, the Young Socialists didn't just sit and talk about it. Two YS members got hired in a packinghouse along with the one party member who had gotten in.
The Young Socialists is becoming a more proletarian organization, Waters noted. YS cadres have taken big steps to clarify the character of the organization and its membership through the living tests they have been through in the last year.
She reviewed some of the key turning points in the strengthening of the YS and the party since the Pittsburgh Active Workers Conference and last year's summer school in California, which became the prototype for those organized across the country this summer. Shortly after the 1998 conference, the majority of the elected leadership of the YS was graduated from the organization in order to concentrate on leadership responsibilities as members of the party. A new generation took on leadership in the Young Socialists, a fact registered at the YS convention in Los Angeles last December.
Speaking on the second day of the conference, Jack Barnes stressed the importance of the fact the YS leadership had decided, based on their own criteria, where to deploy their cadres who are not party members among the summer school centers. The party - even more than the YS - needs the Young Socialists to act as an organizationally independent youth group. They often make decisions that are slightly different from those party leaders would make, often strengthening both organizations in the process.
Selling `Capitalism's World Disorder'
The panel presentations also registered the efforts by
socialists to increase the sales of Pathfinder books, which
have been declining over the past few years despite the
growing objective opportunities to get these political
weapons into the hands of working people and youth. Toby
Smith, a leader of the Communist League in the United
Kingdom, reported that at a recent conference in London the
members of the Communist League had decided to launch a
campaign to sell 200 copies of Capitalism's World Disorder
through the end of 1999, building on the 200 they had sold so
far since the book was published earlier this year.
They decided to organize teams immediately to begin visiting bookstores on a systematic basis. To make it possible to get rapid results they decided that, rather than wait for appointments with book buyers that might be scheduled for several weeks later, they would show up directly at bookstores, armed with Pathfinder catalogs and books.
The result was that within the first three days, these teams had already placed 39 books in commercial bookshops in London and Manchester, and, through their boosted confidence, sold a few more to coworkers at industrial jobs.
The SWP National Committee decided at its August 9 meeting to launch a campaign to sell Capitalism's World Disorder to bookstores and libraries through the end of the year. Through this drive, the communist movement can begin to organize on a systematic basis to sell the whole array of Pathfinder books to commercial outlets - where most workers buy books - an effort that had virtually collapsed over the past couple of years. The campaign will be led by communist workers in the trade unions.
During one of the discussion periods in the Active Workers Conference, Kitty Loepker, a steelworker in Granite City, Illinois, gave a vivid account of how she has been using Capitalism's World Disorder on the job to discuss a range of political questions with coworkers, from the nature of Bonapartism to why wage increases do not cause inflation.
She was pleasantly surprised to discover that a coworker she visited had a copy of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics on her living room coffee table; she had purchased it at a campus bookstore. Barnes, in his presentation later that day, remarked that there was no better argument than Loepker's story for the need to get Pathfinder books in bookstores and libraries as an integral part of becoming more deeply involved in the emerging proletarian movement.
Similarly, Ellie García, a rail worker and member of the United Transportation Union in northern New Jersey, related some recent experiences in selling the Militant and Pathfinder books to coworkers, taking advantage of the interest in the Newport News shipyard strike. "In the last three weeks I started showing the Militant to everyone I could on the job," she reported. As a result of her work, García sold 10 copies of the Militant and three books to coworkers, one coworker attended a Militant Labor Forum with her, and another went to the Pathfinder bookstore in New York for a broad-ranging discussion of politics. She also went with a team to Newport News to deepen political relationships with workers there.
Dean Cook, a leader of the fight by locked-out Crown refinery workers in Pasadena, Texas, spoke of the value of Pathfinder books he has read, including Capitalism's World Disorder.
In her talk Waters underscored the objective place of Pathfinder in the world by pointing to the recent protests by students in Iran, the largest protest actions there since the 1979 revolution, in which workers and peasants overthrew the U.S.-backed monarchy.
In five days of protests against the closing of a newspaper and murderous police attacks, students demonstrated in Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, Urmia, Kermanshah, Isfahan, Shiraz Hamadan, Gilan, Zanjan, Ardabil, and other cities.
"You've heard many of these names before," Waters told the audience. "They are cities where Pathfinder supporters and sales representatives have taken part in book fairs over the past months," getting a broad range of books into the hands of young people and others - from titles by Ernesto Che Guevara to pamphlets on the fight for women's rights and writings of Marx and Engels. The same conditions that sparked the student protests have led to greater interest in the books Pathfinder distributes
She pointed to the importance of Pathfinder literature for building communist parties. As working people are propelled into action, these books are the only way they can find a political way forward. There is no other way to cross the bridge from rebellion, no matter how just, to becoming an effective, disciplined part of the communist movement, Waters stressed.
Waters added that if a political upsurge comparable to that in Iran broke out in the United States, "all our books would go out of print within days." This makes the work of party supporters who are converting all 350 Pathfinder books into electronic form crucial to the building of a revolutionary party and maintaining a publishing apparatus.
Keeping Pathfinder books in print
Tom Tomasko, a member of the steering committee of the
Pathfinder reprint project, explained the task that some 100
party supporters have taken on of putting all Pathfinder
books in digital form. This allows the workers in
Pathfinder's printshop to produce the books using computer-to-
plate equipment, allowing great savings in labor and costs
over the old methods.
"We put a lot of pride and effort into meeting our goals," he stated. "We know that what we accomplish in August determines what books the printshop will produce in September." This pride came through in the extensive display supporters put together to show each stage of how the books are produced.
Tomasko pointed out how far this effort has come over the last year. At the time of the Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh in July 1998, the supporters had finished digitizing two books. By now the number is 40, and the supporters are working to increase the pace from the current average of 4-5 books each month to 10.
Thirteen months ago "we did not expect to be doing the graphics," Tomasko said. Now, volunteers are digitizing all of the graphics for every book - from the covers to the photographs - greatly improving the quality over earlier editions. The challenges of organizing the work flow to fully utilize everyone who offers to help have also been conquered, using a website database to transfer work in progress from one volunteer to the next.
Reprint project volunteers have also instituted a monthly pledge of $10-25 each to raise the $1,000 per month needed to finance the entire project. At the closing session, Tomasko reported that over the course of the conference the monthly pledges rose from $675 to $1,077. More than a dozen conference participants signed up to be part of the project. "We know the act of getting one of the books Pathfinder produces can change the course of a person's life - and that's our motivation for doing this," he declared.
The reprint effort is not simply a project but "part of a course of action for every member of the communist movement," Waters said in her talk on the first day of the conference. It is the work of organized supporters of party. Only those who have a political interest in not only producing the books but helping distribute and use them in various ways - whether by staffing Pathfinder bookstores, helping organize Militant Labor Forums, or other ways - can sustain the consistent effort needed.
The impressive rallying of support for the party over the past couple of years has pressed the party to organize the broader spectrum of its supporters. Delegates to the April 1-3 SWP convention earlier this year recognized that the explosion of support for the party went far beyond the structure of a national group of active supporters that had been organized for many years. The desire by growing numbers of supporters to be organized into more work for the party forces every SWP branch to function in a more disciplined and centralized fashion.
Speaking from the floor the second day of the conference, Michele Smith, a supporter from the San Francisco Bay Area, asked how supporters could start selling Capitalism's World Disorder and other books to bookstores, if the party branch in their area hadn't started doing it.
Waters replied by explaining that this situation had begun to be turned around in the Bay Area because of the persistence of Smith and others who pressed the party to get organized. Party branches now have to begin this process everywhere to more systematically involve supporters in a range of activity organized by party units.
Transformation of printshop
A computer-to-plate machine installed last October - made
possible by capital contributions by supporters of Pathfinder
since the Pittsburgh conference totaling $840,000 - has made
possible the initial steps in the transformation of the
Pathfinder printshop. Workers in the shop have been able to
greatly increase their productivity and reprint books quickly
without tying up resources in extra stock, while freeing up
nearly one-third of the staff for party-building work around
the country.
Phyllis ÓConnor, the shop production manager, pointed out that when Washington launched its assault on Yugoslavia earlier this year, Pathfinder quickly ran out of The Truth about Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention. The reprint project volunteers put it at the top of their priority list and prepared a digital file of the book in only three weeks. The shop was able to deliver the book within four days of receiving the digital file.
At the conference, a new capital fund appeal was launched to raise $300,000 by the end of October. This will cover the costs of renovating the press room to remove the wall separating the sheet-fed and web presses, installing better dust and climate controls, and upgrading the lighting.
"We need a clean, well-lit factory with clear aisles," said lead press operator Nell Wheeler, explaining how the money will be used. "We will see gains in productivity," as well as improved working conditions for the press operators, she said. At the conference $80,000 was raised to kick off the new stage in the capital fund.
Doug Nelson, a member of the Young Socialists who works in the printshop bindery, pointed to the "challenge to improve the productivity of our labor and efficiency" to sustain the shop. He reviewed several recent steps that will help do this. These include using computers at each machine on the factory floor to punch in and out each day, for breaks, and on each job. This makes it possible to use objective statistics to track efficiency and productivity. The conference display on the reprint project and the shop included a computer showing how this time clock works, as well as architects' sketches of the new floor plan for the press room.
The shop has also begun to implement policies on attendance, probation for new volunteers in the shop, and a shift structure with fixed breaks to organize the shop as a factory with strict lines of responsibility. In making these changes, the workers in the printshop drew from the actions and writings of Ernesto Che Guevara and Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin on the organization of production under workers' control in Cuba and Russia.
Financing a proletarian party
At the end of May, the SWP's National Committee discussed
steps necessary to reconquer proletarian norms of finances.
The decisions of this meeting were available to all
conference participants in a new Education for Socialists
publication titled In Defense of Revolutionary Centralism.
Norton Sandler reported on the initial progress in lowering
the debts of branches to the SWP National Office, the
Militant, and Pathfinder from $19,000 in May to $14,700 by
the end of the Active Workers Conference.
Meeting after the conference, the National Committee adopted the goal of lowering the back debt to $10,000 by the end of September - with half of the branches becoming debt- free by that time - and cutting this debt to $5,000 by the end of the year.
Another key piece of the financial campaign is to increase the sustainer pledged by branches to the National Office - which has fallen since the start of the year - to an average of $10 per member per week, from $9.26 in July. "Our goal is to stabilize both national and branch finances," Sandler said.
The May National Committee meeting also decided that all branches would submit three-month budgets, plans to reduce their debts, and a review of the size and cost of their current headquarters. During the second day's panel, Angel Lariscy, a member of the International Association of Machinists in Miami, explained that just before the conference the Miami branch had moved to a smaller headquarters that better meets their needs and financial resources. "Until now, we were giving 30 percent of our sustainer income to the landlord, and only 15 percent to the party's National Office" in a weekly per-member sustainer pledge. The new place "is the size we need," and more money can go to the party's political priorities. Lariscy described the work the party is carrying out in Florida reaching out to working farmers and others in struggle.
Sara Gates, a party supporter from Seattle, reported on the campaign by supporters of the party to increase their monthly contributions to the party from $139,000 per year to $175,000. "These funds go directly to the party. They can be counted on and budgeted nationally," Gates explained. "Supporters are excited about politics today, and about the increasing striking power of the party. The financial campaign organizes a means to express that support."
Midway through the conference, Gates announced that the $175,000 goal had been surpassed, and proposed a new goal of $190,000.
This too proved conservative. As of the closing rally August 7, monthly pledges from party supporters added up to $201,100 per year. The number of supporters pledging a monthly contribution had jumped from 181 at the start of the campaign to 245. "Now we have to translate this into a flow of $16,770 every month to the party's national office," she said at the closing rally, to loud applause.
Many panelists referred to displays just outside the main meeting hall, which were a central attraction before and after every session. They included a photographic display showing how the socialist summer schools combined study of Marxism and party history with participation in labor and farm struggles and other social protests.
An extensive display showed the careful work of the supporters of the communist movement who are preparing Pathfinder books in digital form, and the steps the worker- bolsheviks who staff Pathfinder's printshop are taking to more efficiently produce these books. Participants could preview the new Militant website that will be launched in September. And a thermometer showing progress in the campaign to increase the financial contributions of supporters of the SWP kept going up every day - through the final evening.
U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War
In his talk, Jack Barnes reviewed the analysis of world
politics that the course of conduct of the SWP has been based
on over the last decade. At a time when bourgeois
spokespeople were proclaiming the "end of history" following
the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe, the party adopted a resolution in 1990
declaring that "U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War."
Capitalist relations cannot be reimposed on these workers states, the resolution explained, short of a bloody defeat of the working class by imperialist military might. Moreover, the counterrevolutionary obstacle represented by the bureaucratic regimes, which for decades had kept workers in Eastern Europe and the USSR out of politics, had been removed. Far from an expansion of liberal democracy, peace, and prosperity, the approaching world capitalist depression would increase conflicts and contradictions, and increase the use of military threats and force by Washington and the other imperialist powers. Almost a decade later, there is nothing to take back from this analysis, Barnes said.
A growing number among those who speak for the U.S. ruling class now acknowledge that to achieve their goals they must use force. Barnes pointed to an article by Thomas Friedman, a senior New York Times columnist and prospective editor, featured in that paper's Sunday magazine in its March 28 issue. The cover bore the image of a red, white, and blue fist with the headline, "What The World Needs Now - For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is." The article argued that capital investment alone will not bring stable, profitable capitalist relations to the semicolonial countries, Russia, and the other workers states. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps," Friedman wrote.
A couple of the panelists gave illustrations of the big openings for socialist workers to function in the world today. Addie McClellan described the Militant reporting team to Yugoslavia she participated in last April and May. Building on previous trips since 1992, the worker- correspondents on the team were able to talk to workers and students of all nationalities in different republics of the former Yugoslavia, including putting some of them in touch with each other.
"As we sent in our articles, we were getting reports such as the 55 miners in Kentucky who bought the issue of the Militant headlined `Working class is target of U.S.-NATO assault on Yugoslavia,' " she said. "That didn't just give us a boost; we related that story to workers at the Rekor shoe factory in Albania." McClellan also described the response of workers back in Britain when she returned. One lunchtime meeting at a plant in London sparked a lot of discussion that led to socialist workers in the plant selling two subscriptions to the Militant and three copies of Capitalism's World Disorder.
Workers and students in Indonesia also welcomed a working- class explanation of the developments in Yugoslavia, said John ÓNeill, who spoke about the Militant reporting team there he took part in last June.
The biggest challenge for socialist workers today in staying on the course that led to the Active Workers Conference, Barnes said, is to be timely. Party members, and especially party leaders, must cultivate the habit of rapidly internalizing decisions and acting on them. Instead of being disappointed when the top Steelworkers officials called off a July 23 "Stop Navy strikebreaking" rally the union had planned for Washington, D.C., to support the Newport News strike, socialist workers should have responded right away to the fact that thousands of strikers and other workers would be gathering in Newport News that day to discuss the contract. A pause of a couple of days lessened the participation of socialist workers in the wide-ranging discussions that took place that day and limited their knowledge of what the ranks were going through.
In the discussion, Alyson Kennedy from St. Louis spoke about the 21st national conference called by the Coal Employment Project (CEP), a group formed by women miners to help get and keep jobs in the mines. At the June 25-27 conference, the CEP board proposed the organization be dissolved, saying there is no hiring in the mines today. In fact, there is more hiring today than in many years, which gives more value to an organization like the CEP.
But the socialist workers who attended the CEP conference had not been prepared to discuss this clearly with others who were at the gathering. One-third of the participants were working miners, a larger proportion than in recent years. While the outcome of the vote was not likely to change, advocating the need for the CEP would have strengthened those who wanted to fight for getting women into the mines.
At the closing event of the conference, Barnes pointed out that the biggest problem had been the lack of decisiveness and timeliness by the party's national trade union leadership in working with the party members attending the CEP conference to prepare them ahead of time for the meeting.
A party of worker-bolsheviks
One of the main themes Barnes took up was the character of
the revolutionary party, which assumes increased importance
today with the beginnings of a new proletarian movement.
In times of mass working-class upsurge, he noted, such a party can grow rapidly, as the Bolsheviks did in the months leading up to the October 1917 revolution. But the Bolsheviks were able to lead the vanguard of workers and peasants in Russia then because of the decades of prior work in building a party of disciplined, proletarian cadres.
Because it was serious about leading millions to take state power, the Bolshevik party was distinguished from other currents by the fact that from its working-class base it worked among all classes and sections of society - peasants, students, and others.
At decisive moments in the class struggle, Barnes pointed out, class-conscious working people will turn to the revolutionary party. But they will trust the party only if they have learned through experience that party members with whom their struggles are intertwined will act as the party says they will. At that point, they will trust the organization even if they find themselves in the trenches alongside party members they don't know.
In replying to a longtime supporter of the communist movement in Canada who asked how the party could guide him in his attempts to carry out work in the trade unions, Barnes explained that no one can be a bolshevik alone. A worker- bolshevik has no meaning as an individual - only as a disciplined, organized part of the proletarian vanguard.
Individuals who have left the revolutionary party and attempt to carry out communist work in the labor movement will invariably act as centrists, coming under alien-class pressures. The party cannot counsel such individuals on a course of conduct, because it cannot take responsibility for such conduct outside its organized membership without corrupting the trust it asks of fellow fighters who look to the party.
The Socialist Workers Party's revolutionary centralist character is stated at the opening of its constitution: "Every person who accepts the program of the party and agrees to submit to its discipline and engage actively in its work shall be eligible to membership."
This section of the SWP constitution expresses the essential difference that existed between the Bolsheviks and centrist currents within the Russian workers movement in the early part of the century. These centrists stated their agreement with this membership requirement except for the crucial part "...agrees to submit to its discipline" - that was the divide between Bolshevism and Menshevism. While the Mensheviks acted as individuals - each carrying out their own line - and could not be trusted, working people learned they could count on the Bolshevik party and its members.
Hunger for politics and theory
As the party revitalizes its turn to industry and the Young
Socialists become a stronger, more proletarian organization,
the hunger for working at politics and theory will grow,
Barnes said in his presentation on the second day of the
conference. The lifetime effort of learning to think in broad
class terms and as citizens of time is essential to be a
worker-bolshevik.
Combined political activity and study in the socialist summer schools strengthened a whole layer of young socialists who are beginning to develop this hunger for theory. And it had a big impact on party branches where the summer schools were concentrated.
Throughout the Active Workers Conference, it was evident that many of the young people who had gone through the summer schools had gained a greater appreciation for the need to read and study together. Two sessions of classes were held during the conference that continued many of the themes of discussion from the other conference sessions. These classes were based on questions that had come up in the various summer schools, posed again to draw out the broadest Marxist discussion of them.
The class titled "For a workers and farmers government in the United States," given by Steve Clark, answered the question "Why did the SWP return to this governmental slogan in the early 1980s, following the turn to industry," which had come up in one of the California classes. Another popular class was on "What Is to be Done?: Why Marxism must be brought to the working class from outside the direct experiences in trade union and economic struggles," based on Lenin's 1903 pamphlet by that name, which argued for the political course of what became the Bolshevik party.
Classes were also given on "The Russian revolution: birth of the worker-bolshevik," "Struggle for a proletarian party: Organizational Norms of the SWP," "The increased weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers," "The right of nations to self-determination," "The threat of Bonapartism and the social conditions that breed it," and "Socialist revolutions occur in nation-states; the class struggle in each country shows the dialectic of world revolution."
The closing rally of the Active Workers Conference launched the 1999 Pathfinder Fund. The $125,000 fund drive, which will run through November 15, will help finance Pathfinder's continuing reprint program and several new books. The Spanish- language edition of Capitalism's World Disorder will be ready by the time of the Havana Bookfair early next year. Making History, containing interviews with four generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces - Enrique Carreras, José Ramón Fernández, Néstor López Cuba, and Harry Villegas - will be published in November, in time to be launched at the Guadalajara book fair in Mexico together with the Spanish- language edition published by Editora Política in Cuba. Che Guevara Talks to Young People, prepared in collaboration with Editora Abril in Cuba, will be appear in early 2000.
The following day, August 8, many conference participants took part in further meetings to build on the work of the Active Workers Conference. Members of the steering committees of the SWP's national trade union fractions met together to discuss how to be more effective and timely in leading the fractions' participation in the incipient proletarian movement.
The Young Socialists National Committee met, followed by a meeting of all YS members and interested youth, to plan their priorities for the coming months. And some 60 party supporters working on the Pathfinder reprint project held a series of workshops to hone their skills - scanning, proofreading, preparing graphics - in producing the political books working people need.