In the year and a half of the project almost 50 titles have been made ready for reprint. The project is aiming to complete by Jan. 1, 2000 the first step in reproducing books electronically. That step is to scan the books and pamphlets so that all the text is digital. The next steps are to proofread the text, create a new format for it, and to digitize the covers and photographs.

The following is a letter written by Warren Simons who is the organizer of a team of volunteers that are making digital the text of the books. The letter is addressed to the team.

Dear volunteers,

This political report will discuss the goal of finishing the scanning of all the Pathfinder titles that the Reprint Project has taken responsibility to do by January 2000.

I just finished reading Capitalism's World Disorder and found several parts in it that speak directly to why we are doing this work. Over the course of time, sitting in front of my computer, I've occasionally lost sight of the overall picture in the haze of the tediousness and time-consuming nature of the work. I found the book politically refreshing and inspiring and I repeat some of it here for you:

"Never before in history has there been a bigger disproportion between the current small numerical size and negligible social weight of communist organizations in the mass labor movement, and the leverage of the political weapons we produce, translate, edit, circulate, and get around in whatever ways we can. There is nothing like it in the history of the workers movement. I do not know what better word to choose than 'leverage' — it is an easy, physical analogy. Whether we are participating in a book fair in Tokyo or Tehran, a university conference in Cuba, or a meeting of young fighters in South Africa — we have the same experiences everywhere. Fighters want to get their hands on the Communist Manifesto, on books about the Russian revolution, on copies of New International magazine, on books about politics and the labor movement in the United States, on literature about the revolutions in Cuba and South Africa, on books about the Black struggle, on works that give a scientific explanation of women's oppression and the road to their liberation….

"Stalinism has deep historical roots in the most important working-class struggles of this century. It has affected broad social and political forces. We are not asking delegates to vote on historical assessments here. What we are insisting on, however, is that revolutionary politicians need to recognize that, because of the weakening of Stalinism's weight, our propaganda weapons give communists the greatest relative political leverage and widest potential audience we have had in some six decades….

"But a point is always reached where working people can be conned no longer and struggles begin to mount. And with revolutionary leadership, forged and tested in coming struggles, the international working class has the numbers, the social power, the culture, the values, and the program to defeat the reactionary forces loosed by finance capital. We can organize victorious revolutions and open the construction of socialism on a world scale.

"That is what we are preparing for. That is what is so important about political weapons such as the new issue of New International that we are celebrating here. That is why it is so important to get this magazine — -along with the Militant, the Spanish-language Perspectiva Mundial, and our entire arsenal of revolutionary books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder — into the hands of workers and young people who are fighters and aspire to be revolutionists….

"The bourgeoisie, with its allied landed and titled aristocrats, is the class that claims to be so magnificently educated. But the class that is truly interested in ideas is the working class. Ideas are decisive for the working class, because ideas are necessary to forge a self-confident proletarian leadership and chart a course for humanity. We have said before that if all the political books were to disappear from the world tomorrow, it would not really hurt the bourgeoisie that much. The workings and reproduction of value relations would continue pumping out profits for them, and pragmatism would be the totally sufficient 'philosophical' complement to social power.

"But if every such book in the world were to disappear — if all the continuity, if all the lessons from the rise of humanity and struggles by the toilers were erased from the written record — the workers movement would be set back an indescribable distance. That is why we place such importance on the opportunities that are opening up to distribute books and other literature by revolutionists and communists more widely than ever before….

"Workers who want to fight effectively know they'll never win if they have to reinvent the wheel every day. They resist giving up conquered ground. They want to learn from the lessons of past battles. They know previous sacrifices cannot be allowed to have been in vain. Given the changes in politics today, the concrete working-class traditions captured in the books and pamphlets produced and circulated by the communist movement become more and more important. These tools are literally irreplaceable; they are weapons of a fighting class, not just its leading party. Many before us bled — and, yes died — in the fights out of which these lessons were learned. That's why the stakes are so high in keeping in print the entire arsenal of books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder — from works coming out of more contemporary experience, such as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, the issues of New International magazine, and a broad range of pamphlets on current struggles and political topics; to classics of the communist movement by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, and others…."

We currently have 43 more books and 16 more pamphlets to finish to complete the scanning and massaging work. In addition there are 21 titles already in digitized form but not quite ready for formatting. The average size of the 43 books is 333 pages. About a dozen of them are 500-plus-page books. There are fourteen volunteers working in our department. Tom has agreed to do all the pamphlets. I will work on clearing out the 21 previously digitized not quite ready for formatting titles. Both of us will join the work on the 43 books when we are done.

This is a tall order — finishing 43 books between now and the end of the year, January 2000. I am asking each of you to consider stepping up your participation in the work in order to accomplish it.

The completion date isn't just a fetish for goals or a fascination for the millennium. The party currently does not have the resources to accomplish this task. At the August Active Workers Conference at Oberlin Mary-Alice Waters speculated that if something like the recent student rebellion that occurred in Iran happened in the U.S., Pathfinder would probably go "out of stock" on the great majority of its titles overnight. That is, a golden political opportunity to begin winning fighters to communism and no books to go into propaganda combat with. She noted that it's not possible to predict the pace of events but it helps give us a sense of urgency and the race with time that the Reprint Project faces. The sooner we complete our work the sooner we can all move onto proofreading, formatting, or graphics. And the quicker all 350 of Pathfinder's titles become print ready. We can then be assured of a political arsenal for the fighters who will come forward as the capitalist crisis deepens and the response to it unfolds.

Let's give it the best we can and see what we come up with.

WARREN SIMONS  
 
 
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