They will ultimately finance and support growing rightist and fascist movements, because the capitalists cannot defeat the working class using "normal" methods. There will be massive street battles between fascist legions and the forces mobilized by the class-struggle-minded labor movement.

That is the nightmare for the world's capitalist classes and their temporary political spokespersons--the Clintons, the Gingriches, the Majors, the Blairs, the Zedillos. In their big majority, they do not want to confront those class battles, because they are far from confident they can win. They try to put off the confrontations and finesse them. They buy off this or that middle-class layer in order to weaken our class organizations and try to con us into accepting more and more sacrifices for the good of the "nation."

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 right wing in this country puts a lot of time and money into TV talk shows and radio call-in programs. The Rush Limbaughs, and others far to the right of him, mix suggestive coarseness and cynicism with saccharine sentimentality. The radical right trades in demagogy. They seek to tap fears and anxieties. They try to whip you up emotionally. They treat sex as a commodity and gender as a joke. They debase and corrupt politics, life, and civil discourse -- as do their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and all over the world.

But the one thing they do not do is urge those to whom they are appealing to read books -- to really read books. They want you to scapegoat two or three layers in society -- immigrants, welfare mothers, labor unions, the "femi-nazis," whatever -- and blame them for all the problems created by capitalism. The last thing the rightist demagogues ever want you to do is to read and work at understanding sober, scientific explanations of the capitalist system. They do not want you to learn from history and draw the political lessons. The radical right will never call on anybody to read more -- because they have no respect for those whom they seek to mobilize as a mass social base. They have no confidence in the worth of human beings, no sense of social solidarity.

Disgruntled middle-class layers, enraged bourgeois youth, thin strata of demoralized workers --these social layers are radicalized by mounting fear, envy, and resentments. They respond to prejudice and demagogy. Their growing radicalization is reinforced and focused by the rhetoric of a Patrick Buchanan, telling them how much they are being mucked over by the degenerate elites, the illegal aliens, the un-Americans. That is why no fascist movement is ever going to have a serious education program. They never have; they never will.  
 

Reading--the most powerful weapon

The opposite is true of the revolutionary workers movement. What the working class needs is not demagogy, not scapegoats, not crank theories, even if spun by Ph.D.s from Harvard or Yale. As workers, farmers, and youth organize to resist the assaults and probes by the capitalists, we need in the process to develop a clearer understanding of the entire world picture. We are confident that those who work at studying the past experiences of our class and who take the time and effort to think about and discuss what we are facing today will come to communist conclusions.

We know that only by fighting and by reading can the working class prepare itself to do what it must to ensure the future of humanity.We know that reading, discussing, and coming to understand the truth is the road to more effective working-class action and organization. It is working people's most powerful weapon in charting a revolutionary course that can take on the imperialist war makers and win.

These are the communist conclusions that best fit the facts of how history has actually unfolded in this century. And these communist conclusions are thus the best guide to action for vanguard workers and revolutionary-minded youth.

There is no way for any individual or group of individuals to arrive at these lessons from their involvement in any one struggle in their factory, city, or country -- or even from a number of such struggles. Nobody can come to these conclusions just from good trade union work, for example. Nobody can do so just from effective participation in a Cuba defense coalition, an abortion rights fight, or other social protest activity. It is not even possible to draw communist conclusions from any single revolution in this century, even the most important ones such as the Russian and Cuban revolutions. We cannot just follow how the socialist revolution is developing in Cuba, look forward to the working-class resistance we know is coming in Mexico, and from that derive a proletarian orientation in world politics.  
 

No way to reform capitalist system

Fighters can draw very militant, very revolutionary conclusions. They can become very determined, very steadfast in their commitment, and very courageous in their actions. But on the basis of experience from a limited number of struggles in any single place or time, it does not necessarily follow that the only way for the working class to win and permanently consolidate its gains is to overthrow the political power of the capitalists, establish a workers and farmers government, wrest productive property out of their hands, and join in the worldwide construction of socialism.

It is only when we begin to understand the world capitalist system as a whole that we can draw the communist conclusion that there is no way to reform any one piece of that system.

It is only when we begin to dissect the relations among all the classes in society--looking not just at the workers and our exploited allies, but also at the exploiters and the middle-class and professional layers--that we begin to absorb the true history and lessons of the international working-class struggle. Only then do revolutionary conclusions become unavoidable.  
 
 
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