The stakes represented by the Minnesota battle were brought home by the news, on the eve of the meeting, about a UFCW organizing drive that has been launched in the Omaha, Nebraska, area among workers currently employed at ConAgra, Greater Omaha Packing, and Nebraska Beef plants.

Coal miners and members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) involved shoulder-to-shoulder with miners on strike against the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Co., as well as socialist workers who are active alongside farmers fighting to defend their land and livelihood, brought additional lessons of recent class-struggle developments to the discussion.

Garment workers--from Miami to Los Angeles, and from St. Louis to New York--brought their experiences of union struggles, actions to defend immigrant rights, and selling the Militant, Perspectiva Munidal, and Pathfinder books to co-workers.

The June 24-27 meeting nominated James Harris for U.S. president and Margaret Trowe for vice president as the Socialist Workers Party ticket in this year's elections. Harris and Trowe are both veteran working-class fighters, unionists, and party leaders. A public meeting to launch the campaign was held over the weekend at Columbia University (see article and biographies of the candidates in the July 10 Militant).  
 
Cause of the resistance
In an opening report to the meeting, SWP national secretary Jack Barnes emphasized that the resistance and struggles by working people in the United States today are a consequence of the real relative successes U.S. employers and their government have had in increasing productivity and widening their competitive edge over big-business rivals in Europe and Japan.

This has been done, not primarily through the use of computers, as claimed by many bourgeois economists and commentators, but through the intensification of labor by stretching out the working day and the workweek, speeding up production lines and the pace of work, and incorporating millions of immigrant workers into an expanding industrial working class in this country.

These preconditions have laid the objective basis for the emerging fights by workers today, Barnes said, and the bosses can't change the pace. They cannot and will not slow down their production lines now, because the employers in Europe and Japan, striving to catch up, are pushing in the same direction. They now will have to fight the future-in-the present while they continue to drive in a way that guarantees the conditions for its emergence.

The employers must now respond to the resistance in unions and factory workforces in order to maintain dominance over their imperialist competitors. By pushing and probing over the past eight years, the bosses have been able to weaken the unions, Barnes said. But weakening the unions is not enough--they must face a fight that will go through these weakened but not defeated basic defense organizations of the working class.

The bosses have drawn millions into the workforce, and what we are seeing is these very gravediggers of capitalism--as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels accurately explained in the Communist Manifesto in 1848--beginning to press back against them.

As part of this process, workers in the United States who were born in Mexico, Somalia, China, or other countries have, while retaining their original nationalities, increasingly also become "American" workers, a source of strength for the working class and a problem for the U.S. bosses.

Francisco Pérez described the seven-hour sit-down strike on June 1 and subsequent actions by packinghouse workers at Dakota Premium Foods. When bosses came into the cafeteria where workers gathered that morning refusing to go to their work stations, they ran into a determined vanguard of working people, he said.

The union-organizing drive began in the midst of the sit-down strike. The pro-union slogan "Sí se puede!" (Yes we can!) became a common one at the plant in the following days. The fact that workers speak both Spanish and English, Pérez said, has not prevented them from communicating by finding a common language in struggle.

Tom Fisher from St. Paul pointed out that the party's branches and fractions--units of communist workers in designated industries and unions--must be ready for outbreaks of struggle such as this one, since they can happen anywhere, and will.

"Workers at Dakota remained disciplined and unified, and they won some important concessions from the boss," he said. The challenge now is to keep organizing and responding to the company as the bosses use a carrot-and-stick approach toward individual workers at Dakota, hoping either to intimidate them or to lure them away from the union.

Becky Thompson, a leader of the party branch in St. Paul, explained how socialist workers and YS members in the city are getting an unprecedented response from workers in the area to the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, the only publications that have been carrying consistent and truthful coverage of this struggle.

Frank Forrestal, a coal miner in Pennsylvania, explained conditions miners face on the job and the extent of the employers' assault on past gains won by the union. He gave the example of a recent incident in the mine where he works, in which for 45 minutes the workers underground were not notified that the fans in the mine had stopped functioning.

This can rapidly lead to a buildup of deadly methane gas, the cause of many mine explosions that have taken the lives of countless coal miners. The mine transportation system was shut down as a result. The mine crew had to walk underground as far as eight miles to reach the surface, taking some of the workers four hours to get safely out of the mine.

Jan Miller, a coal miner in the Western coalfields, described her recent visits to meet UMWA strikers at P&M mines near Gallup, New Mexico, and in Kemmerer, Wyoming. These miners are in the middle of what is shaping up as a prolonged battle against concessions demanded by the bosses on health care, overtime pay, and the length of the workday and workweek.  
 
Fightback has begun
In his report Barnes said this resistance in the United States in many cases takes on greater political ramifications than it appears on the surface because of what workers are increasingly having to confront. Immigrant workers not only have to stand up to the company and their hired thugs; they are also the targets of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) cops and other federally organized harassment and violence, Barnes noted. As these workers defend themselves against such attacks, they set an example to other workers in taking on political questions that are the most vital to the entire class.

This year, May Day marches in several cities across the country were organized by immigrant workers. These were proletarian-led actions placing political demands on the U.S. government, such as an end to INS workplace raids and deportations, and equal rights for all immigrants, Barnes emphasized.

Barnes noted that the working class in the United States, unlike that in most other imperialist countries, does not have a revolutionary-political tradition which grew out of resistance and struggle against a military dictatorship, fascist tyranny, or repressive state regime that threatened the rights and ability to politically organize by broad layers of the population. In Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere, millions of workers have organized revolutionary mobilizations that posed the question of power. The infusion of millions of immigrant workers from Mexico and Latin America who have revolutionary traditions and class-struggle experience under repressive regimes and dictatorships brings an important new element along these lines into the U.S. working class.

Organizing drives and struggles such as those by miners and steelworkers cropping up across the country are beginning to link up rural and urban toilers, as well as show the weight of the leadership of working people who are Black or immigrant, Barnes said.

It is possible to see a class-struggle-minded leadership beginning to develop among the ranks in these fights today. These fighters do not start with any preconceived ideas other than determining through deeds who they trust and who they are fighting together with against the bosses and their government, Barnes stated. This is how they will judge communist workers and their party and program.

For the past two years, the party has been taking more and more steps to fuse its work with the emerging worker and farmer fightback. As a result, party and Young Socialists members find themselves in the midst of these struggles. As this happens, worker leaders of the revolutionary party step forward and are chosen by fellow fighters who recognize the qualities and attributes of proletarian leaders. How fighting co-workers judge them will increasingly be an important criteria for the party in the election of its leadership.

Placing these class-struggle developments in the broader political picture, Barnes noted ultrarightist leader Patrick Buchanan's success in taking over the Reform Party. This means that today a fascist-minded political figure has a nationwide party, with access to federal funds and other resources, to use as his political organizing center. This is a new feature of U.S. politics, Barnes said. Buchanan will use this party to keep one foot planted in a national electoral form as he works to develop a cadre who, down the road, will fight in the streets against the working class.

The strikers involved in militant struggles today, Barnes said, represent the first seeds of what will become the working-class answer to the Buchanans and their street thugs of the coming years. The lessons and working-class methods of struggle they are acquiring through experience today--from picket lines to sit-down strikes--are an invaluable preparation for these future battles.

Communist workers will have a new weapon in their political arsenal with the publication by Pathfinder of the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Education--The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism. The booklet's contents, which are taken from Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, by Jack Barnes, together with an introduction by the author, take up some of the broad political questions that were addressed at the SWP leadership meeting (the introduction is reprinted elsewhere in this issue).  
 
Class struggle in U.S. and Cuba
Mary-Alice Waters, a party leader and editor of the Marxist magazine New International, presented a report on "The Convergence of the Crisis of Class-Struggle Politics in Cuba and the United States."

The intertwining of the class struggle in Cuba and in the United States has been brought more sharply into focus over the past year, she said.

Through the last decade of confronting the effects of the world capitalist economic crisis, the Cuban working class has come out stronger, while at the same time resistance by workers and farmers in the United States has increased. This combined development is the fundamental reason that six-year-old Elián González was finally able to return home to Cuba, Waters said. If not for these political facts, Washington would have felt considerably less pressure to modify its arrogant refusal to respect Cuba's sovereignty and return the boy.

Waters explained that the Clinton administration seized on the unexpected opportunity offered by the case of the child both to strike at Cuba's sovereignty and to set precedents damaging to the rights of working people by strengthening the powers of the INS to implement policies and procedures exempt from normal judicial appeal and review.

Throughout the past seven months since the case began, the Socialist Workers Party both demanded that Washington immediately return the child to Cuba and kept posing the fundamental class questions involved, Waters said. This included a clear stance that the INS is a deadly enemy of working people, and that workers and farmers must oppose moves to strengthen the powers of Washington's police agencies and executive branch of government. Waters noted that communist workers took the campaign to defend Cuba's sovereignty and the rights of the working class into the mines, mills, and factories, and to fighters across the country.

Rachele Fruit, a member of the International Association of Machinists in Miami, said political developments in that city "help make it more clear that the class struggle in the United States is connected to Cuba. For example, at a recent event in defense of the Cuban revolution, a Cuban activist in the Alliance of Workers of the Cuban Community (ATC) reported that workers at the plant where he works, RC Aluminum, were involved in a union-organizing drive. They're winning support from other workers in the city, like those at Goya Foods, who are fighting for a contract. Socialist workers in Miami have joined in promoting solidarity with this fight.

The political discussions and interest sparked by the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books, as described by participants in the National Committee meeting, said Waters, are strikingly similar to the response by revolutionary fighters in Cuba, who give serious consideration to the articles in the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial and appreciate the class clarity they get from no other source in the United States.

Waters noted the importance of the two recent delegations of working, fighting farmers from the United States who visited Cuba. The delegations, hosted by the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), were made up of farmers from several different regions of the United States who have been involved in protest actions against the devastating conditions they face.

A recent Chicago Militant Labor Forum and lively discussion featuring three members of a delegation that visited Cuba in May--Randy Jasper, a Wisconsin dairy farmer; Basu, an Illinois organic vegetable farmer; and Maggie Trowe, a Minnesota packinghouse worker--showed how easily and naturally U.S. workers and farmers involved in class-struggle developments link their conditions in battles to those of the fighting toilers in Cuba, and how they seek to learn from each other. "They were talking about their trip to Cuba," Waters noted, "but it wasn't a 'Cuba meeting.' It was about deepening the struggle here."

Through their experiences as they try to change what they face, farmers can more and more see the common proletarian condition the toilers face, and can also be attracted to the potential power of the working class and the revolutionary perspectives the Socialist Workers Party advances, Waters emphasized.

Ted Leonard, a Boston textile worker, and Joel Britton, a Chicago-area packinghouse worker, reported on discussions they each have had with farmers who were part of these delegations. These farmers were eager to speak about what they had learned about life in Cuba, which contrasts sharply with the common distortions prevalent in the big-business media in this country.

Joe Swanson, a veteran socialist from Iowa, pointed out that the Socialist Workers Party will recruit farmers as well as workers in meatpacking plants, mines, and other industries. "We will urge farmers who join the party to help recruit other farmers like themselves," said Swanson.  
 
Branches and industrial union fractions
A centerpiece of the National Committee meeting was how to strengthen the party's branches and industrial union fractions, and put them in fighting trim as the party deepens its participation in these struggles.

One aspect of the restructuring of the party has begun with a few branches moving to set up halls in workers' and industrial districts in the towns and cities where they are located. This is not unusual for a proletarian party in times of an upswing in labor battles, Barnes said.

He pointed to the seamen's branch of the party in the 1940s, which was located in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, close to the docks along the Hudson River. The very location and character of the hall made it virtually impossible for its entire membership not to become involved in the struggles of merchant seamen, as well as other working-class protests that broke out. They were able to harness the full striking power of the branch, both sailors and non-sailors.

Our goal, Barnes said, is to get the hall of every party branch located in workers' and industrial districts, so the very act of doing political work in the area near the hall leverages the work of every single member of the party.

Paul Pederson, a worker in Pathfinder's printshop and a leader of the party's Brooklyn branch, described how that branch is organizing plant-gate and street-corner sales in order to learn more about the garment and meatpacking industries in that borough of New York. "This is how we are going to discover where we need a hall to operate out of in order to effectively orient to meat packers and garment workers and their unions," he said.

The National Committee discussed the next steps in what has been a two-year campaign, as a report by Norton Sandler was titled, to "Structure the Party Through Mass Work." Sandler, from San Francisco, who organizes the party's Trade Union Committee, returned to some of the questions involved in the ongoing struggle by workers at Dakota Premium Foods. "The workers at Dakota are concentrating on the goal of winning the union representation election set for July 21. The workers and union organizers are producing a newsletter called Workers' Voice, which answers the company's antiunion moves and organizes workers into the fight," he said.

"Every day counts in an organizing drive," Sandler emphasized. "We can and must help link fighters together, working through the existing union and UFCW structures."

"Fighting workers correctly consider the union ours and the union hall ours," Sandler said. "The officials and functionaries are the officials and functionaries of the union, which is ours. We work to make the union into a fighting instrument and, through these struggles, to develop a leadership that can build on these conquests and widen the battle."

Sandler described the scope of the struggles that have opened in the coalfields over the past nine months, registering the beginnings of a social movement led by miners. He pointed to a series of strikes; a rally the previous day of 150 miners and their supporters in New Mexico, where the union has established a women's support group for the strike; and the May 17 national rally called by the UMWA to demand government funding for miners' lifetime health care and pension plans.

The drive by the coal bosses against the UMWA and conquests such as health care affect broad regions of the country and hundreds of thousands of working people beyond miners themselves, he said. "The fact that there were thousands of retired miners and their supporters, including a few hundred high school youth, at the May 17 rally in Washington is a sign of strength for our class," Sandler said.

"We have met a real interest in the Militant among miners who deeply appreciate both the objective coverage the paper gives their struggles and the broader picture of the world it contributes. Miners in struggle expect socialist workers to be there on the picket lines and in the midst of the battle," Sandler said.

He described recent moves by socialist workers in the United Auto Workers union (UAW) to organize a national fraction based in key sectors of auto, aerospace, and agricultural implements plants. Over the past years, the concentration of socialists in these key industries had become more diffuse, and all fraction members employed in UAW-organized shops had ended up working in plants alone.

Socialist workers in the UAW discussed the need to reverse this situation at their meeting in Chicago at the end of April, and decided to get communist workers together in units of two in priority factories by June 15.

"No one functioning alone in a plant is a fraction of the communist movement," Sandler said. "The national fraction is made up of local fractions, not individual members holding a card in the union. Party members in the UAW decided to strengthen the fraction because of what is before us right now in the class struggle," he said. "Our goal is to establish a national UAW fraction again, and we are on the way to that goal. We want to do this in every fraction in the party and harvest in practice the potential of what a party of hundreds of worker-bolsheviks can do."

The branch executive committees of the party now have an especially important role to work with members to help get fractions of two in plants and mines. This was a key factor in ensuring the success of the moves decided by the UAW national fraction, Sandler said.

The party's traditions, norms, institutions, and constitution--products of decades of class-struggle experience--become more and more invaluable as the class struggle heats up and the party becomes deeply involved in day-to-day struggles and union battles, a number of participants in the meeting emphasized. They allow the party to apply revolutionary centralism as a nationwide organization, to be trustworthy to fellow fighters wherever they find it, and to be a disciplined and effective vanguard in the increasingly sharp struggles of today and tomorrow.  
 
 
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