Presenting the opening report to an expanded meeting of the SWP National Committee here, Barnes said that socialist workers "have greater opportunities opening up to us today than at any time in many years to regroup these proletarian fighters, and the most committed young people repelled by the horrors of capitalist society, together in a revolutionary workers party."

In order to be on the soundest political footing to advance these efforts, Barnes said, "We are working to strengthen a proletarian party whose members work together, as worker-bolsheviks, from within the plants, mines, and mills, and who do so as dependable militants of the fundamental defense organizations of the working class, the unions."

In addition to National Committee members, others taking part in the September 2-3 SWP leadership meeting were a leadership delegation from the Young Socialists, members of the party's Trade Union Committee and steering committees of its national union fractions, organizers of party branches and branch organizing committees, and international guests.

Participants reported on their involvement in organizing drives under way by meat packers and other food workers from Minnesota to Massachusetts, and from Nebraska to central California and Arizona.

They described their experiences across the country alongside workers in garment shops--and together with these workers in protest actions outside the workplace--in face of the employers and immigration cops.

They recounted their participation in struggles by coal miners resisting the operators' assault on safety and job conditions, from Pennsylvania to the Western coalfields, and from Illinois to Alabama. They told of their involvement with working people in coal communities supporting miners' strikes, as well as fighting company and government efforts to deny them their health and human dignity.

They noted the accelerated social and political impact of the transformation of the composition of the working class, as concentrations of immigrant workers grow up in cities and towns across the United States.

And in an election year when other organizations calling themselves socialist or communist are fielding fewer candidates than for a long time, participants in the New York meeting celebrated the results of the petitioning drives by party members, Young Socialists, and their supporters to get Socialist Workers candidates on the ballot in 13 states and Washington, D.C.

Through all these efforts, they are reaching out broadly to win fighting workers, farmers, and youth to the ranks of the communist movement.  
 
Fighters join together
Two years ago, in mid-1998, the SWP leadership initiated a concentrated effort to transform party branches, branch organizing committees, and industrial union fractions in order to join with other workers and farmers resisting the brutal and intensifying profit drive by the employers and their government. The party extended its geographic spread, as socialist workers reached out to the factory proletariat and exploited farmers wherever fights were taking place.

Like other working people being thrust into conflicts over conditions on the job and off, Barnes said, party members needed to gain experience in acting effectively and dependably as part of a broader vanguard of fighters. This was necessary not only to help realize the potential of the new rise in militancy, but above all to be part of broadening the political scope of the militants themselves.

In the process, the party has revitalized the turn it made in the mid-1970s to deepen the proletarianization of its branches and center the work of the big majority of its cadres in the industrial working class and unions. Such a "party effort must be a universal one," explained a 1978 National Committee report adopted by a party convention and later published in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes. It must be "the goal of every single branch [and] every single individual in the party."

Two years ago when the party recognized the opportunity to strengthen its union fractions and proletarian orientation, Barnes said, doing so began by necessity "as a vanguard effort within the party." Since then, through the inspiration of spreading worker and farmer resistance, experience as part of these struggles, and discussion in party branches and union fractions, socialist workers have expanded and broadened this effort.  
 
Initiative by union fractions
Over the past several months, national meetings were held of socialist workers in each of the party's industrial union fractions: the International Association of Machinists (IAM); Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); United Auto Workers (UAW); United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW); United Mine Workers of America (UMWA); United Steelworkers of America (USWA); and United Transportation Union (UTU).

In late July the members of the steering committees elected by each of these national union fractions met at the culmination of an Active Workers Conference in Ohio. They drew on the political lessons from the conference, assessed the results of the four fraction meetings that had occurred between late April and mid-July, and made plans for the three remaining fraction meetings in August.

Building on the decisions of those meetings, Barnes said, a growing number of branches and branch organizing committees in recent weeks have taken steps forward as part of "a universal political effort in which every party unit can recognize itself in all others, regardless of their varying sizes, composition, or location." The basis has been laid for a true campaign to structure the party through mass work.  
 
Acting on logic of politics
Participants in the meetings of each of the union fractions discussed how they could advance the party's efforts to deepen its integration in the growing struggles of workers and farmers. They reviewed in some detail the character of the employers' attacks and defensive skirmishes by workers in their own industries and unions.

At the same time, each of the fractions paid special attention to the party's campaign to deepen its work in coal-mining communities, among garment workers, and in packinghouses. This is where resistance to the capitalists' profit drive is currently most advanced, both in the union movement and on a broader social level; where immigrant workers are having among their greatest impact on the labor movement; and where the political experience of vanguard workers has been the richest.

It was in the unions that are key to these sections of working people--the UMWA, UNITE, and the UFCW--that the party's fractions had been reduced the most during the retreat of the labor movement throughout much of the 1990s. In mid-1998, Barnes reminded the National Committee, there were fewer than 10 party members each in the UNITE and UFCW fractions in a handful of branches, and the party no longer had a single working coal miner.

In deciding at that time to make a special effort to reinforce these three union fractions, Barnes said, the party was acting on the logic of what had begun developing in politics and the class struggle. Had the party waited to do so "until the evidence was in," worker-bolsheviks wouldn't have been in these unions and industries as the fights began spreading.

What has happened over the past two years is confirmation of the course discussed and adopted by the party's National Committee at a meeting held in Chicago in October 1998, Barnes said. "And flesh and blood has been put on what we described in broad strokes at the joint party-YS conference in Los Angeles a few months later in December," he added. Barnes's summary presentation to that conference has been printed under the title, "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," as the first chapter of the book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium.

Since that time more and more of the party's cadres have gotten jobs in garment shops, meatpacking plants, and coal mines. This is a great accomplishment of all seven of the party's union fractions, Barnes said.  
 
Party policy in the unions
At their meetings over the spring and summer, the UAW, IAM, USWA, and UTU national fractions meetings discussed and resolved important policy questions to guide the activity of socialist workers in these unions. They reaffirmed the party's course of having its members at the center of production in these industries, with two or more of them employed in the same workplace with the same union and common co-workers.

The fraction meetings adopted goals to get the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and revolutionary books and pamphlets into the hands of other workers in these unions. They discussed recent and ongoing struggles by workers in the UAW, IAM, USWA, and UTU.

At the Steelworkers fraction meeting, for example, there was substantial discussion of the effort by USWA-organized rubber workers at Bridgestone/Firestone, whose contract had expired, to hold off further concessions and regain some of what they had lost in 1994. On the day after the SWP National Committee meeting concluded, the USWA announced a tentative contract with the company, which union members will be voting on this month.

Each of these fraction meetings also decided that their members would continue joining jobs-search efforts to strengthen the party's presence in workplaces and unions decided by their branches and branch organizing committees. A number of them either have already gotten jobs in garment shops, meatpacking plants, or coal mines, or are well on their way to being hired.

Cadres from the generations that led the party's turn in the 1970s and 1980s, Barnes said, are joining with those from younger generations won to the party in the 1990s in a collective effort to strengthen the party's proletarian course.

During the discussion, SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters pointed out that over the past three months "since the sit-down strike by meat packers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, we have been through a radical learning experience that is strengthening our continuity not only with the turn to industry but with the struggle for a proletarian party that shaped the modern communist movement decades ago.

"We are conquering the understanding that our effort to revitalize the turn is not about just transforming the industrial union fractions," she said, "but above all about the transformation of the party and of our movement as a whole."  
 
Party supporters
An early signal of the political opportunities to strengthen the party came more than two years ago, Barnes said, with the initiatives of party supporters to help the communist movement respond to new openings. They were inspired by the example the socialist revolution in Cuba was continuing to set in world politics, and by the shifts they and others were just beginning to see in the U.S. working class and labor movement.

In their work to aid the party, Barnes said, these supporters are drawing on the training and discipline they previously gained over decades when many of them were SWP members.

On the second day of the leadership meeting, Norton Sandler reported on the increased work of the party supporters in turning books and pamphlets into digital files ready for production in the printshop of Pathfinder Press.

The numbers of volunteers actively involved in this international reprint project continues to grow, as does their experience and the resulting productivity of their efforts. Seven titles were completed and turned into Pathfinder in August, a new high for the project, Sandler said. Eight books were formatted during the month, also a record. Thirty-seven supporters participated in indexing, which had become a production bottleneck.

The supporters have a solid start on their goal of completing an additional 30 titles by January 1, 2001, and having 50 percent of Pathfinder's titles completed by next May Day.

The New York leadership meeting also launched international campaigns, beginning September 9 and running through November 12, to sell 1,000 subscriptions to the Militant, 350 to Perspectiva Mundial, and 1,500 copies of the new pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism. A $110,000 goal for a fund drive for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial was also set (see article, page 7).  
 
Recruitment to the party
An important test of the party's course, Barnes said, is how it organizes to meet the new opportunities before it to recruit workers, farmers, and revolutionary-minded youth. This includes winning to its ranks working people with leadership experience in class battles who have come to consider themselves socialists and agree with more and more aspects of the party's program.

Some of these militants who join the party, Barnes said, will live and work in areas where there is currently no SWP branch or branch organizing committee.

The party must embrace the new political opportunities to expand the geographical reach of the communist movement in this way.  
 
Intensified labor in coal
Frank Forrestal, a coal miner from Pennsylvania, reported that the prolonged upswing in the capitalist business cycle in the United States, and the still-accelerating energy "crisis" worldwide, have led to increased demand for coal and hiring at coal mines across the country. Coal-fired plants produced 52 percent of U.S. power needs, making it the most important single source of electrical power generation.

Forrestal said that the coal bosses are maintaining and in some cases intensifying their many-year-long drive to boost profits--to "increase productivity"--by assaulting health and safety, pensions, conditions on the job, and the UMWA itself.

The expanded use of contracting companies over the past decade to provide crews for work in the mines, including union mines, is one example. From 1990 to 1998, some 181 workers employed by contractors died while working on mine property, according to figures compiled by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. Half of those killed were in West Virginia.

Jan Miller, a coal miner from Colorado, described the victory rally August 13 in Tse Bonito, New Mexico, of mine workers, their families, and supporters at the conclusion of a successful three-month strike against the Pittburg and Midway Coal Co. (P&M). That victory strengthened UMWA members at Peabody coal company, who a week later, on the eve of a strike, faced down the company and beat back its demands--similar to those of P&M--for a 12-hour workday, as well as cuts in health and pension benefits.

Tom Morris, from eastern Pennsylvania, explained the conditions facing some 2,000 workers in the anthracite coal mines in that area. "Union miners in the anthracite coalfields do not have the same health benefits as those in bituminous mines," he said, "and their pensions are only $90 a month."

Many are subject to long periods of unemployment every year. In one mine the company unilaterally stopped paying health insurance premiums, Morris said, leading to protests by workers. At the same mine, workers staged a work stoppage when the boss shorted their pay by eight hours. In both recent cases the company gave in.

"A number of workers make a conscious effort not to succumb to pressure to speed up, such as not driving haul trucks too fast," Morris said. "This is the kind of push-and-pull that is going on in anthracite."

In his report Barnes pointed out that CONSOL Energy, Inc., a leading U.S. producer of bituminous coal, had more than doubled its fourth-quarter earnings, with its share price shooting from $10.12 in April to $15.75 at the end of June. A company press release bragged that production jumped to 47 tons per man-day, up 16.5 percent from a year ago.

"Where do these profits come from?" Barnes said. "They come from gratuitous deaths in the mines, increased use of contract miners, doubling the levels of coal dust miners breathe in the mines, and intensification of work, including lengthening of the workweek. That's where the profits come from.

"In face of the resistance coal operators have already seen to their efforts to shove further concessions on miners," Barnes added, "and given the growing demand for coal, companies are also deciding to settle strikes or not to take a strike right now."

Participants in the meeting discussed ways to expand their work among coal miners, from fielding teams to sell the Militant and PM and meet miners and other working people in the coalfields, to reporting for the socialist press on developments among UMWA and nonunion miners, to responding to the hiring possibilities.

A report from a team of socialist workers and Young Socialists in New Mexico and Arizona was received during the meeting. The team had sold 60 copies of the Militant to coal miners and others in the area, 50 of them at mine gates.  
 
Struggles by meat packers
Numerous struggles by packinghouse workers were discussed at the National Committee meeting, as well.

In meat packing too, Barnes said, some of the largest employers are raking in record profits. He pointed to the example of Smithfield Foods, which had just reported quarterly earnings of $44.6 million, up more than 600 percent from a year earlier. Smithfield's share prices had jumped from $16 in early March to $27 at the beginning of September.

Tony Galiano from Boston reported that an organizing drive has begun at a meat processing plant in Massachusetts, spearheaded by workers--many of them originally from Central America--who have been part of previous attempts to win a union there. Workers are taking steps to counter the company's divide-and-conquer tactics.

"Finding ourselves a part of this fight, and acting accordingly as a branch, is putting us on a footing--for the first time--to join in the effort that many other branches and branch organizing committees have already begun," Galiano said.

"We've now set out on a different course from our past routine, one that affects everything we do: where we work, how we use our time, and the way we think about the location of our headquarters."

An organizing drive in a number of packinghouses in the Omaha, Nebraska, area is facing determined resistance from the giant ConAgra corporation and other packing bosses, said Joe Swanson from Des Moines, Iowa. Socialist workers from that city have been traveling to Omaha to keep in touch with the fight and get to know some of the workers involved.

A few days after the SWP leadership meeting, Swanson found out during a return visit to Omaha that one of the organizing drives he had described--at an IBP plant in Norfolk employing some 600 workers--had been successful. After more than 50 percent of the workers signed union authorization cards, IBP--only 16 of whose 48 plants had previously been union--announced it was recognizing the UFCW.

At the Swift packing plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, six workers on the kill floor walked off the job, protesting that not enough workers had been assigned to the crew, which is supposed to have eight. Their action quickly led to the line being shut down, forcing the bosses to add two more workers to the crew. The six received written warnings for their action, but no other penalty.

Becky Ellis reported that workers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul are standing up to the company's moves to overturn the results of a representation election there in July, in which workers voted 112-71 for the UFCW. The determination to win a union, the democratic methods of workers leading the drive, and the refusal to be intimidated by the bosses have all left the company without much of a leg to stand on, she said.

"These workers are also reaching out to other fights in the area, such as the Pepsi workers, who recently ended their strike after scoring significant gains," Ellis said. "Such mutual solidarity between workers involved in fights strengthens the labor movement."  
 
Blow struck to ConAgra
Norton Sandler pointed to a recent ruling against ConAgra by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which upheld a union complaint that the company improperly limited union organizing activities at its Omaha meatpacking plant. The NLRB proposed the company post notices at its plants for 60 days acknowledging the violation and promising not to do so again. ConAgra refused and is appealing the ruling.

"The common conditions workers face in meatpacking plants across North America make this a politically rich and powerful struggle," Sandler said. A meeting of socialist workers in the meatpacking industry across North America will take place in St. Paul September 16–17, he said.

In addition to deepening their involvement in this growing fight, Sandler added that "it is important for workers in this industry to reach out to farmers, who are facing devastating conditions. We need to make connections with the farmers who sell their cattle and hogs to the meatpacking companies." He pointed to the expansion of so-called contract farming and other methods used by big capitalists to increase their exploitation of working farmers.

The day after the National Committee meeting, a number of packers involved in the fight to organize a union at Dakota Premium traveled to Wisconsin to strengthen their mutual links with dairy farmers taking party in nationwide "milk dump" actions on Labor Day. The farmers were protesting the ruinously low prices they are being paid for their milk by big processing companies.

The SWP National Committee approved a proposal that the party's trade union leadership organize training for party and Young Socialists members who want to get jobs on the kill and cut floors in meatpacking. Lessons on how to handle a knife and keep it sharp--in order to prevent repetitive-motion injuries--as well as training in other safety measures will be provided to every socialist worker prior to getting hired.

Participants in the meeting also reported on their work with tomato workers in Arizona who recently won a union election by a 116–70 vote and are now represented by UFCW Local 99. This is the first union election ever won by agricultural workers against growers in Arizona, of whom there are 56,000 statewide.  
 
'Temps' can join union
In his report, Barnes pointed to the significance of a recent NLRB ruling establishing union rights for temporary workers. The decision authorized these workers to join the same union as permanent workers they are laboring alongside without first obtaining permission from the agency that got them the job.

"One front in the employers' speedup drive and intensification of labor has just been breached," Barnes said. "The great American trusts have been relying on the expansion of what they sometimes call a 'contingent work force' that can be hired and fired at will as the basis of their 'miracle' economy--as their chief banker Alan Greenspan is so proud of reminding U.S. imperialism's competitors around the world."

Some 1.2 million people are employed by temporary agencies, and it has been one of the fastest-growing sections of the workforce, registering a six-fold increase from 1982 to 1998. A quarter of U.S. workers work for contracting firms or temporary agencies, hold part-time jobs, or are on call.

"The NLRB ruling weakens capital's ability to blackmail this growing section of labor in the United States," Barnes said, "objectively accelerating the opportunities and potential of union organizing campaigns across the country."

 
 
Bosses need 'la migra'
"Short of a deep recession, the U.S. employers today have a great economic need for a large-scale increase in immigration," Barnes said. "That is the only way they have left to draw millions more into the workforce to keep churning out profits.

"Throughout most of Latin America unemployment continues to rise. Workers and peasants are being pushed out of their countries because of the conditions they face. And they are simultaneously being drawn into the fields and factories in the United States."

"Why didn't the bosses at Swift just fire the six workers in Iowa who walked off the kill floor and shut down the line?" Barnes asked.

Part of the answer lies in the labor shortage in many parts of the country. In Iowa, for example, unemployment stands at 2 percent. A governor's commission recently proposed Iowa become an "immigration enterprise zone." Another, related part of the answer is that the packing bosses in Iowa and across the Midwest are beginning to get a taste of the kind of resistance they can set in motion when they press just a little too far.

That's why, concurrent with this immigration flow, Barnes said, the employing class will "increase its use of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Border Patrol, the hated la migra." They need to police and intimidate immigrant workers to the best of their ability, to try to keep them from acting in their own interests and as a growing part of the vanguard of the U.S. union movement.

Federal government statistics show that the number of immigrant workers in the United States jumped to 15.7 million last year, up 17 percent from three years earlier. This represents 12 percent of the workforce. (These figures do not include many, many workers who do not show up in the official statistics.) These workers are very often relegated to the hardest and lowest-paying jobs.

But the organizing drives and determination of these workers are having an impact on these conditions, Barnes said. He pointed to the recent agreement by two greengrocers in Manhattan to pay $100,000 in back wages to a mostly immigrant workforce. This settlement came after a state attorney general's investigation, prompted by UNITE, found that workers were routinely receiving $200 in pay for 72-hour workweeks.  
 
Fights in garment shops
Marian Russell, a garment worker and UNITE member in St. Louis, and Lisa Potash, a garment worker from Chicago, both reported on resistance by workers against often degrading conditions and low wages inside garment shops. The drive by the garment bosses to intensify labor--reinforcing the brutal piece-work system, and extending the workday and workweek with no overtime pay--is laying the basis for more such struggles throughout the industry.

Building fractions of socialist workers in garment shops in coal mining regions is part of becoming involved in the social movement growing in those areas, Potash pointed out. Potash had recently returned from two trips to meet with Western coal miners who were involved in the strike at the P&M mines in New Mexico.

The coming struggles in the garment industry will have a social character, as well. This can already be seen in the number of garment workers taking part in actions to defend immigrants rights, for example. And it was registered in the size and militant spirit of the May Day marches a few months ago, which were larger in New York and some other U.S. cities than celebrations of this international workers' holiday have been for many years in the United States.

Elena Tate, a leader of the Young Socialists, said her experience working in a garment shop in Brooklyn over the summer would help her political discussions with fellow students when she returns to school at Hunter College this fall. It would help her make a convincing case, she said, that the problem is not sweatshops in other countries, which some students get drawn into campaigning against as part of the U.S. rulers' reactionary protectionist policies.

The child labor she experienced in the nonunion shop where she worked--with some in their early teens working alongside her--underlines in a strikingly graphic manner the need for organizing drives and strong unions in garment right here in the United States, Tate said.  
 
Work among farmers
Experiences in joining with farmers fighting to defend their land and livelihood were addressed by a number of participants in the meeting.

John Benson, a packinghouse worker from Fresno--in the center of one of California's main agricultural areas--spent a good deal of time during the National Committee meeting talking with other participants about plans for the Labor Day protests by dairy farmers. Withholding the product of their labor from the market, they planned to dump milk or turn it over to be processed into cheese for use in local food banks (see articles on page 3).

Nan Bailey from Los Angeles described how socialist workers there and in the San Francisco Bay Area have reached out to dairy farmers in the state in recent months.

Eva Braiman said socialists in Cleveland organized an event for farmers to meet Mike Fitzsimmons, a garment worker and Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio. Nine farmers attended, and there was a wide-ranging discussion and back-and-forth on the causes of the crisis facing working people.

"Farmers in Texas and parts of Oklahoma face the worst drought conditions since the Great Depression," Barnes said.

"There's nothing 'natural' about farmers reaching out to trade unionists," he said. "They tend at first to look for solidarity and leadership to other independent commodity producers and to small businessmen. They're vulnerable to crank ideas that interest rates and the banks--not the profit system and the capitalist class--are the source of the crisis facing working people.

"But tens of thousands of farmers, confronted with deepening indebtedness and foreclosure, are more and more facing the proletarian condition," Barnes said. "They start to see the social power of the workers movement and the unions, recognize a common interest, and get connected to them."

Expanding the work of every branch and branch organizing committee among farmers and other working people in rural areas is an essential part of building a proletarian party, Barnes emphasized.

There will be no successful revolutionary struggle for a workers and farmers government, he said, unless the communist vanguard in the working class and unions has won the political confidence beforehand of large numbers of fighting toilers on the land.  
 
Pressure on wages
"Since the early 1970s real wages of most workers have stagnated or gone down," Barnes noted.

A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute confirms what most working people know: there is a growing gap between the income of working people and that of better-off layers of the middle classes and the rich. The national poverty rate in 1998 was 12.7 percent--after the longest upswing in the history of the U.S. business cycle, just one tenth of a percentage point less than in 1989 and higher than in 1979!

"Class polarization is continuing in Europe as well," Barnes said. "The recent 'tax reforms' in both Germany and France are giant giveaways to the wealthiest propertied families."

More importantly, he said, the capitalist rulers in Europe are "setting the stage for 'American-style' assaults on social welfare and on the wages, conditions, and job security of working people. They are being driven to do so by intensifying competition with their imperialist rivals, above all in the United States."

Barnes also commented on the statements by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman calling for "a constitutional place for faith in our public life."

Lieberman's campaign to legitimize the place of religion in bourgeois politics and government "is reactionary," Barnes said.

"The secularization of society has been gaining ground for hundreds of years," he said. "Any attempt to shift the tide in the opposite direction is a threat to the working class, as is any campaign to pose a 'religious left' as a counter to the 'Christian right.'It's also a boon to Jew-haters and anti-Semites of all stripes."  
 
Aiming for 'first strike'
Barnes commented on the September 1 announcement by U.S. president William Clinton that he was postponing a decision on deployment of a National Missile Defense system, a program pushed by his administration.

Presenting further rationalizations for his eight-year record as a war president and chief spokesperson for world imperialism, Clinton insisted there is a "real and growing" threat from Iraq and North Korea.

From the outset, Barnes said, Clinton's scheme for a land-based missile defense system using radar has been a stalking horse for "the only kind of missile shield that will do the job the U.S. rulers are driving toward. Clinton has opened the way for the next administration--Democrat or Republican--to push further in that direction.

"What the rulers are going after," Barnes said, "is a system using satellites that can detect a missile launch anywhere in the world--stationary radar can't see past the horizon--and that can launch weapons from submarines in or near 'enemy' waters to shoot down missiles in their boost phase.

"The logic of Washington's course--one the bipartisan rulers are dead serious about--is to establish a first strike capacity for the first time in the nuclear age," Barnes said.

Barnes pointed out "that the Clinton years have been marked by initiatives to move the two-party, bipartisan core of bourgeois politics to the right in the United States."

This is true not only on measures such as missile defense "to further strengthen U.S. imperialism as the undisputed military power on the face of the earth," he said, "but on driving the beginning wedge against Social Security in the name of 'welfare reform.'

"True to his origins as governor of Arkansas, Clinton has also made his mark as the 'execution president' over the past eight years," Barnes pointed out, "increasing the violence of the police and courts against working people.

"Those to Clinton's right in the mainstream of bourgeois politics," Barnes said, "simply take the openings presented by the Democratic administration, point out that these measures are inadequate to do the job, and then push further against working people at home and abroad."  
 
Wen Ho Lee frame-up
Barnes also called attention to the September 1 action of a federal appeals court, acting on a government request, denying the release on bail from prison of Dr. Wen Ho Lee. Lee is the target of a government frame-up on allegations that he stole nuclear weapons secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratories where he worked. The appeals court, in an unusual move, issued its ruling before federal judge James Parker had even made his action public.

"It is clear that the government has no evidence on which to base a charge against Wen Ho Lee," Barnes said. "But they have imprisoned him without the right to bail for months, under deplorable conditions. This is one of the forms taken by the drive of the U.S. imperialist rulers to strengthen the arbitrary powers of the executive branch--to strengthen their arbitrary powers to jail, to prosecute, and even to execute, all rationalized by claims of a threat to national security.

"The crisis of capitalism is deepening, and with it comes increasing polarization and instability," Barnes said, "as well as a coarseness that more and more marks bourgeois politics. All this proceeds in tandem with the grinding and brutalizing speedup in the pace of work--the assault on the very life and limb of working people--that the bosses need to continue what they call their 'productivity miracle.'"

This underlines the importance of struggles by workers and farmers for dignity and against scapegoating of any kind; of strikes demanding an end to inhuman conditions on the job; of struggles against cop brutality and the death penalty; of opposition to the climate of violence and intimidation promoted by woman-haters and the ongoing probes to push back women's rights.

It underlines the importance of actions by labor to take the moral high ground in asserting social solidarity against capital's assault on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs through which working people receive some measure of relief from the conditions they face--and some measure of the wealth they, and they alone, produce by the application of their labor to what nature has bequeathed humankind.

"Now is the time to prepare a proletarian party and widen its influence and trust among broader layers of fighting workers and farmers," Barnes said.

"The capitalist class fears the unknown," he said. "Their debates on military policy reflect their fear of what is coming. All they can do is prepare to meet the unknown with force and violence, with fascism and war.

"The communist party keenly looks forward to the currently 'unknown' resistance gestating among working people," Barnes said. "We follow the natural lines of resistance in the working class in order to be able to be a part of the broader vanguard.

"We keep our eyes out for struggles," Barnes emphasized, "and we adjust the party's forms and structures to facilitate our involvement in them. We increase the distribution, sales, and availability of revolutionary political material--the books and pamphlets produced and distributed by Pathfinder, the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and New International.

"If we follow the course we have discussed and reaffirmed at this National Committee meeting," Barnes said, "if we follow the course our union fractions and more and more branches and branch organizing committees have already begun to blaze--then by the end the year 2000 we will once again be building a party like the one whose proletarianization we set out to deepen with the turn to industry some quarter century ago.

"And this time we are doing so with more favorable conditions in the U.S. and international class struggle," Barnes said, "and with wider opportunities to recruit workers, farmers, and youth to the communist movement."  
 
 
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