"At the same time," Barnes said, "we have begun to reconquer the proletarian norms and habits of work necessary to be more effective communist trade unionists, as members of unions throughout the labor movement."

Now, he said, "as we systematically continue along those lines, the party must turn toward transforming our branches."

The National Committee discussed and adopted a package of interconnected proposals to accomplish that goal. At its heart is carrying out a systematic and sustainable rhythm of activity by party branches in a workers district in cities where they are located.

Such branches, Barnes said, "by their very functioning--carrying out the ABCs of communist work, with regular and full literature tables on street corners and at plant gates--will attract to the activity of the communist movement workers and unionists, as well as militants of all ages protesting the injustices of imperialism. They will be attracted to the accurate written legacy of the revolutionary movement, a legacy that has been denied them."

"Along this path," Barnes said, "we can build an openly and uncompromisingly revolutionary party within the factory proletariat--just as the Young Socialists can build their organization among youth drawn to the struggles of the working class and its allies. At the same time, we can increase the size and effectiveness of the communist movement."  
 
Social wage, political rights
Participants in the SWP leadership meeting also assessed the results of the offensive against working people under the Clinton-Gore administration and Republican majority in Congress.

Over the last decade in particular, said Barnes, the U.S. rulers "have deepened their assault against the social wage working people won in mass labor struggles since the 1930s and extended through civil rights battles into the 1970s." In pressing this attack on social rights, he said, the employing class has at the same timed bolstered local police forces, increased the arbitrary powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, constricted the rights of the accused and convicted, and carried out numerous other measures to tighten the political space for working people to organize and resist.

"This domestic policy," Barnes said, "has been accompanied by a brutal, aggressive foreign policy--from Iraq to Yugoslavia to Cuba--that is an extension of the chauvinist antilabor course at home. Whatever the results of the elections at the beginning of next week," Barnes said, "the new administration and Congress will inherit this course and take it as their starting point."

Members of the SWP National Committee, leaders of the party's trade union work, a delegation from the Young Socialists leadership, branch leaders from around the country, and guests from Communist Leagues in other countries took part in the four-day gathering. Discussions continued for a fifth day at an international leadership gathering.  
 
Factionalism in bourgeoisie
The months and years ahead in politics in the United States, Barnes noted at the conclusion of the meeting, will be marked by "further eruptions of sharp, factional conflicts within the ruling class, such as the events a little less than two years ago leading up to and through the impeachment trial of Clinton."

Barnes pointed to some of the forms through which this tendency in bourgeois politics has been expressed. These include attacks on the gains women have won in their fight for social and political equality, sometimes veiled behind the vulgar vilification of bourgeois women such as Democratic Party politician Hillary Rodham Clinton; anti-Black and anti-immigrant demagogy in many guises; the half-hidden tolerance of Jew-hatred; and a coarsening and breakdown in the civil tone of public discourse and debate among capitalist politicians."

The SWP leadership meeting assessed a number of the factors underlying this factionalism within the capitalist two-party system.

While making inroads against the social wage and other aspects of the gains won by working people and the oppressed, and following an almost decade-long retreat of the labor movement that marked most of the 1990s, the rulers have failed to break the unions or push back the most basic conquests of the struggles for Black rights and women's equality.

Contrary to their triumphalist crowing at the opening of the 1990s, they have discovered they must still confront a working class in the workers states in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that will not willingly embrace oppression and speedup. The imperialist rulers have not faced the battle necessary to attempt to reimpose stable capitalist social relations in those countries.

"Despite the hopes of world finance capital," Barnes said, "what finally snapped in these workers states was not the working class but the weakened remnants of the Stalinist caste--the transmission belt that for decades served to bring down imperialist economic, social, and political pressures on the toilers in these countries."

Nor have the imperialist rulers forced acceptance from peoples of the semicolonial countries of national oppression and the devastating social consequences of the world capitalist crisis.

"These phenomena," Barnes said, "register the underlying weakening of the imperialist powers during the decade they've variously portrayed as their 'victory in the Cold War,' the triumph of 'a new world order, the 'death of Marxism,' a 'new era' of technology-driven permanent prosperity--and even 'the end of history.' This weakening is the product of intensifying conflicts among the imperialists, which the Gulf War of 1990–91 and a succession of wars in the Balkans have simultaneously exposed and exacerbated.

"The high point of illusions in the permanent stability and possibilities for a prosperous world under capitalism is now behind us," Barnes said. "The retreat of working people worldwide--from the imperialist centers, to the semicolonial world, to the workers states--has bottomed out. The counterrevolutionary obstacle of Stalinism within the workers movement has been qualitatively weakened.

"What's more, over the past few years the capitalist rulers have been confronted by a rise in resistance by a vanguard in the working class and labor movement, among exploited farmers, by immigrant workers and fighters for Black rights. They are seeing a limited but crystal-clear indication of the future resistance and radicalization they will face.

"The propertied classes can see their capacity to deal blows to the toilers with relative impunity coming to an end," he said. "The days when they could simply push back are numbered; they will have to try to beat back."  
 
Brittleness of institutions
Under these pressures, Barnes said, "the U.S. rulers are increasingly vexed by the brittleness of their class institutions."

Within days of the National Committee meeting, the most striking demonstration of these trends since the Clinton impeachment burst on the U.S. political scene over the final tally in the presidential election, whose outcome was still undecided more than two weeks after the voting.

On the most basic level this situation is simply an extraordinarily close election, not a political crisis for the U.S. rulers, let alone a weakening of the power of U.S. imperialism and its executive branch. But the heat it is generating is a registration of the irresolvable divisions within bourgeois politics over how best to prepare for the social explosions and class battles more and more of the rulers fear will come.

As a result, the tactical divisions between and within the bourgeois parties are proliferating, and the ideological pitch of their disputes have become more shrill. Their toleration for poisonous rightism has grown.

The shift--on the surface a modest adjustment--to the right during "the Clinton years" is not the fruit of some plot or bipartisan program by the leading personnel in the two capitalist parties. To the contrary, it registers stages in the pragmatic resolution of their conflicts, in a situation where capitalist instability and the lash of interimperialist rivalry limit the rulers' options for broad social concessions.

No matter how strident and uncivil the tone between the two predominant bourgeois campaigns, neither a Bush nor a Gore administration will register a substantive break from the course followed by the Clinton White House and Republican majority in Congress. Both will take that "centrist" course as their point of departure.

At the same time, both the left wing within the Democratic party and right wing within the Republican (and Democratic) party continue to grow, biding their time until some sharp deepening of the social crisis signals new levels of opportunity for them. The factional divisions within bourgeois politics are continuing, above all in their reflection on the highly charged plane of so-called "culture wars"--the expression of battles over the rulers' course to increase social inequality and undermine the toilers' unity.

As the capitalist social crisis deepens and the class struggle accelerates, the coarsening and even pornographication of bourgeois politics plays into the hands of the ultraright. Along the road to attempting to smash the labor movement on the picket lines and in the streets, incipient fascist forces will first take aim at the corruption of politicians across the spectrum of bourgeois politics, conservatives and liberals alike, as well as their prominent supporters in the media, Hollywood, and other cultural and social institutions of the ruling class.

The demagogic logic of imperialist democracy, and the deadly trap it sets for working people, will begin to become apparent.  
 
Working-class resistance
Part of the heat lightning considered ominous by the U.S. rulers today is the rise in struggles over the past few years by a vanguard of workers and farmers across the United States. Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists are becoming more and more integrated in this resistance, a reality registered at the November party leadership meeting.

Alyson Kennedy reported on the national meeting a week earlier in Chicago of socialists who work in garment shops and textile mills, many of which are organized by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). A highlight of that meeting was discussion on the scope of organizing drives, strikes, and shop-floor resistance.

"From organizing drives by workers at the Pillowtex textile mills in North Carolina and Alabama, to laundry workers who went on strike to demand the company recognize UNITE in Oceanside, New York, the resistance in garment and textile industries is similar to that by workers in meatpacking, mining, and elsewhere," Kennedy said.

"And the more we're involved, the more we look and listen," she said, "the more we find."

Diana Newberry, a garment worker and UNITE member from Pittsburgh, described discussions on the job with a co-worker who has begun attending Militant Labor Forums and classes, and joining in sales of the Militant and Pathfinder books and pamphlets.

The SWP also has organized units, what it calls union fractions, of party members in the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union who work in meatpacking plants, in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) who are coal miners, and in the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The extent of the participation of socialist workers and young socialists in the resistance to the bosses' assault was also evident from the fact that several party leaders were not present for the National Committee meeting so they could join with other workers at Dakota Premium Foods and Long Prairie Packing in Minnesota in rebuffing antiunion moves by Rosen's Diversified Inc., a large meatpacking company.

In addition, over the weekend the Ft. Collins, Colorado, branch organizing committee moved its base of operations to Grand Junction, also in Colorado. The move was in response to hiring opportunities in coal mines. It will enable members of the organizing committee to extend their work among miners, within their union, and as part of the developing social movement to combat worsening conditions of life and labor in the mines and coal mining communities.  
 
Union fraction work
Jack Willey, a National Committee member from Grand Junction, presented a report to the meeting on the party's trade union work. He reviewed the experiences of the party's industrial union fractions and branches as part of the resistance by members of UNITE, the UMWA, and UFCW (see article in the November 20 Militant, "NY rally celebrates socialist campaign").

Running for public office as Socialist Workers candidates, Willey said, goes hand-in-hand with competent trade union work. By explaining revolutionary politics and selling communist literature, worker-bolsheviks help other workers break out of the framework of accepting as "eternal" capitalist politics and class collaboration promoted by the trade union officialdom.

Frank Forrestal, a coal miner from Pennsylvania, explained the openness of co-workers to his campaign for U.S. Senate and the broad social and political questions he addressed. He reported that socialist workers in that mine had already sold five subscriptions to the Militant to co-workers there (and they sold three more over the next two weeks).

Joe Swanson, a leader of the Des Moines branch of the party, pointed out that posing the need to make a revolution is essential for socialist workers involved in labor and farm struggles.

"In a recent discussion with several farmers who are fighting to defend their land," he said, "I pointed to the example of the Cuban revolution and why farmers have to make a revolution to defend their land and their right to farm. It helped put the discussion in the right framework and point to the need for an alliance between the working class and working farmers."

John Becker, a meat packer from Fresno, California, described the openings the branch organizing committee there is finding to "work with farmers and the rural poor. We have found both Latino and Native American farmers who have filed suit against the federal government for discrimination, similar to the fight farmers who are Black have been waging for a number of years," he said.

Willey said the experiences described at the meeting pointed to the opportunities to "deepen systematic, long-term work to find workers and farmers who are looking for solutions."  
 
Workers districts
The political shifts discussed at the National Committee meeting, Barnes said, underline both the political opportunity and necessity for every party branch to accelerate steps to begin functioning rooted in a workers district.

This course, he said, is nothing new for the communist movement: rooting party units in workers districts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Baku, and elsewhere was a hallmark of the Bolshevik party during the years well prior to the victorious October 1917 revolution that brought a workers and peasants government to power in Russia.

"Through systematic work in the districts where they were located," Barnes said, "the Bolsheviks not only strengthened a workers cadre in the factories, but found the road to increasing space and protection for revolutionary political activity, even in face of brutal tsarist repression."

The political axis of the work of SWP branches in workers districts has begun to be organized around a steady rhythm of street tables to expand the sales of revolutionary books, pamphlets, and newspapers and magazines to working people and youth. These efforts are complemented by weekly sales at plant gates in these areas and elsewhere.

Branches need to locate their meeting halls in workers districts, carry out a weekly Militant Labor Forum series, organize public classes on Marxism, set regular bookstore hours, and involve party supporters and political contacts in efforts to get Pathfinder literature onto the shelves of bookstores and other retail outlets. This systematic work provides a stable political base from which to deepen the party's involvement in the struggles of workers and farmers in and around the city and to recruit working people and youth to the communist movement.

Along these lines, the National Committee, as part of its package of decisions, established a six-month candidate-for-membership program for workers and farmers who want to join the party. As they become integrated in the activity of a party branch, and begin carrying out organized communist work in the trade unions, these new members will join with others in the branch in reading and discussing basic works on the strategy, theory, and history of Marxism.

"This program is intended above all for the party as a whole, not simply for candidate members," Barnes emphasized. The standards of disciplined political conduct necessary to recruit workers, and the party membership's political rearming together with them, are central to transforming the functioning of the party's local units.

"A small political vanguard of the working class is converging toward our movement," Barnes said. "We are at the beginning of a period in which a layer of workers and farmers, as well as youth attracted toward their struggles, are open to the need to make a revolution in this country."

"This is new in the political lives of everybody in this room," Barnes said, "and it is becoming true on a worldwide scale. It is the beginning of a long struggle.

"Workers, farmers, and youth will be attracted to the communist movement--to the Socialist Workers Party, to the Young Socialists, to our supporters, to the books our movement produces and distributes. Right now among the biggest political attractions to worker and farmer militants and youth are the legacy of communism and the revolutionary movement represented by those books," Barnes said, "as well as the open revolutionary convictions of each worker-bolshevik they meet."

Socialist workers will recruit to the communist movement by being in the middle of ongoing struggles, presenting a clear, working-class program, and demonstrating in everything they do that they intend to build the kind of political instrument--a communist party--that can lead working people in a socialist revolution.

"The party must respond to the fact that there are workers who want to join," Barnes said. "Workers are hunting for the communist movement. An identifiable layer of the vanguard of the working class--one that is beginning to resist what cannot and will not be reformed away under capitalism--is asking for a party, looking for political clarification, looking for an organization. Only as part of the communist movement will workers and farmers find the scientific understanding to undergird their revolutionary activity and point it toward victory."  
 
Selling revolutionary books
At the center of this perspective, the National Committee adopted a report by party leader Mary-Alice Waters on transforming the production and sales of books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press. Among other things, Waters projected a campaign to increase and maintain a steady placement of Pathfinder titles in bookstores and other outlets where working people buy books.

"We can bring workers and young people attracted to the movement into this expanded effort as part of recruiting them," she said. Waters also proposed a centralized international effort to work with the supporters of the communist movement to involve them in an organized way in this campaign.

Over the past several months, she pointed out, members and supporters of the communist movement in the United Kingdom and France organized a special effort to visit bookstores and other retail outlets. All told, some 1,600 books and pamphlets were ordered by stores in the two countries, an example Waters pointed to as one to emulate.

"We know the potential for Pathfinder sales is much greater than we have tapped. The communist movement must take full advantage of the political leverage of the work we've carried out over decades to produce and keep in print the more than 350 titles that contain the program and history of the modern working-class movement. And we must continue to renew and enrich that list every year."

Prior to the National Committee meeting, the steering committee of the Pathfinder Reprint Project volunteers decided to take their next step by shouldering responsibility for producing not only reprints but formatting and proofreading new books and pamphlets as well. By assuming these tasks, the more than 200 supporters involved in this effort worldwide will make it possible for the Pathfinder staff to concentrate their time on expanding sales and promotion of these books, in addition to facilitating and expediting the work of the party leadership's editing commission in preparing new titles in English and Spanish.

"The reprint volunteers are accelerating the pace of book production, making possible for the first time an efficient worldwide web-based apparatus for the communist movement that is being put in place for use both now and in the future," Waters said.

"We now have a way of producing and keeping in print a growing percentage of the Pathfinder catalog. No matter what the circumstances down the road," she said, "we can take a compact disc with a book on it to a printer anywhere in the world and get the book in print when we need it."  
 
Financial discipline
The National Committee discussed a balance sheet of its efforts over the past two years to reassert the politically centralized functioning necessary to integrate the party more deeply into the rise of resistance among vanguard workers and farmers. In the process of doing so, the party discovered the legacy of the retreat of the working class and unions earlier in the 1990s, as more and more members of party branches continued their wholesale flight from the application of such proletarian norms.

The National Committee concluded that reversing this situation, and beginning to organize the party along a centralized political course such as that outlined at the meeting, would prove impossible unless each branch concretized its plans in a 12-month budget that it used as a political tool.

"Proletarian financial functioning requires looking to the political future of branch units," said Barnes, "not simply extrapolating from the past. The budget is the reflection in income and expenses of a political course that has been discussed, decided, and embarked on--one we are unconditionally committed to and act on."

Approached in this way, he said, propaganda activity that many branches have been treating as "break even" items at best, or losses at worst--sales of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, the weekly forum series, regional sales trips--can actually generate substantial income for the party.  
 
Consistency is key
Socialists in the New York Garment District branch have been setting up tables every Thursday and Sunday to sell revolutionary literature to a cross-section of working people and youth in that area. In addition, they are organizing weekly sales in front of buildings in the district where there are garment shops employing a substantial number of the nearly 80,000 sewers and other clothing workers in the city.

Young Socialists and party members have been holding a regular Militant Labor Forum series and classes at their hall in the Garment District, as well. This work has given a living face to the revolutionary movement that has begun to attract some workers around it.

On a recent weekend, several leaders of the struggle by workers in Long Island for the right to work jobs and against racist, anti-immigrant attacks spoke at a forum in the Garment District. The next day two of them joined sales tables in Brooklyn and Manhattan, then participated in a class on the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes, along with three other workers new to the communist movement. Two workers came up to the class after meeting socialists on the street table below.

The Garment District branch is currently leading the party in sales of Pathfinder titles off street tables, on the job, and through its bookstore, showing the possibilities for generalizing and systematizing these experiences.

Amanda Ulman, a volunteer in Pathfinder's printshop, described the work of the Upper Manhattan branch in the Washington Heights workers district where they have established a hall and Pathfinder bookstore. "As we've begun to build up a systematic presence, a number of workers start to expect us to be there at a regular time once or twice each week," she said.

And Dave Prince described the regular sales of the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder literature by the Brooklyn branch over the past few months in Sunset Park--an area where there are garment, meatpacking, and other factories; working-class housing; and a big shopping district. Out of this work, he said, the branch has decided to get a hall and base its activity in this workers district.

One example of the convergence of a layer of vanguard workers with the communist movement was described by Deborah Liatos, a meat packer from San Francisco. During a tour stop in the Bay Area, James Harris, Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. president, met with workers on strike at a big Safeway warehouse in Tracy. Several attended the public campaign meeting the following day along with 40 other people. A garment worker who recently met several party members has begun bringing other workers to the Pathfinder bookstore, including several newspaper carriers involved in a contract dispute in the city.

Jon Issacson from Sweden described a meeting of 50 people in Stockholm to hear Harris, which included immigrant workers from several countries as well as young people interested in socialism. Out of this activity, the Young Socialists "have several more people who are discussing joining the organization."

Party and Young Socialists members in St. Paul, Minnesota, have begun a class series on Marxist works such as the Communist Manifesto and The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning at the request of several co-workers who are meat packers and other workers socialists have met in the area, reported Tom Fiske.

Party members in St. Paul have also collaborated with a young worker at a local pallet factory who recently expressed interest in working with the branch to place Pathfinder books in stores that have a substantial Spanish-speaking clientele. A trip with him to the first local bookstore he suggested netted a sale of 24 books, including the Spanish translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes and a range of titles by Malcolm X, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

At a St. Paul meeting to raise funds for the $110,000 Militant Fund, another person--a worker actively involved in the effort of the new union at Dakota Premium Foods to win a contract--not only made a donation to the fund but volunteered to help expand distribution of Perspectiva Mundial by joining sales teams at plant gates in the area.

Karen Ray, from Chippewa Falls, Minnesota, said the branch organizing committee in that city has had similar experiences, working to place several Pathfinder titles in a local tienda and starting a class series with a worker interested in joining the party.  
 
From Balkans to Palestine
Among the participants in the SWP leadership meeting was Argiris Malapanis, a Miami garment worker and member of the party's National Committee who had returned several days before from Yugoslavia, where he had been part of an international reporting team for the Militant.

Malapanis pointed to the predominant weight of the working class in the political strike and mass rallies that brought down the Milosevic regime. Through that upsurge, Malapanis said, working people in Yugoslavia have won more space to wage union struggles, obtain and discuss revolutionary political material, and build political organizations.

"But a revolutionary workers political organization will not simply grow out of the unions, and their struggles," he added. That course can only be advanced through a combination of further class-struggle experience and collaboration with the cadres of communist organizations elsewhere in the world.

Malapanis described the wide-ranging discussions the reporting team had with workers and students in Serbia, getting communist literature in their hands. As a result of repeated reporting trips such as this in the Balkans since the early 1990s, a layer of workers and youth there have gained access--through Pathfinder literature in English, French, and Spanish--to the program and history of the revolutionary workers movement.

Participants in the SWP leadership meeting had also been involved in recent actions in defense of the Palestinian people, backing their struggle for self-determination. Paul Pederson, the organizer of the Brooklyn branch of the party, spoke on this struggle at the election campaign wrap-up rally November 5.  
 
Assault on social wage
In the political report to the meeting, Jack Barnes pointed out that one reactionary landmark of both the Clinton administration and Republican-controlled Congress was the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996--the legislation that eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children and limited welfare payments to any particular family to a total of five years.

Clinton had campaigned in the 1992 elections on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it." But it was only two years later--with the sweeping in of the Newt Gingrich-led "Republican Revolution" during the 1994 congressional elections--that "welfare reform" legislation was actually adopted by Congress and signed into law by the White House.

The two years following the 1994 elections demonstrated that the Republicans had pressed too far too fast to the right with their "Contract With America." They failed to get most of their legislative proposals either adopted or signed into law. At the same time, Clinton was heading toward his fourth year in office virtually without a single significant piece of domestic legislation to his name.

Out of this conflict between the Democratic White House and Republican Congress came--among other anti-working-class legislation that same year--the summer 1996 "welfare reform," largely based on the Personal Responsibility Act plank in the Contract with America. The legislation was adopted with the votes of 230 Republicans and 98 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 53 Republicans and 25 Democrats in the Senate. Clinton signed the bill and has sought to bask in its reactionary glory ever since.

As a result of that legislation, Barnes said, working people were the target of the first great constriction in the social safety net won in the 1930s and extended in the 1960s and early 1970s. There had been encroachments before in the 60-year-old federal Social Security system--a stair-step increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67; inadequate cost-of-living protection; and higher payroll taxes. But the 1996 act was the first time an entire category of working people--single mothers and their children--had been eliminated from the kind of social protection Social Security had guaranteed for children, women, workers injured or thrown out of a job, and others affected by the instabilities of a well-working capitalism.  
 
Changes in family structure
Barnes pointed out that the dramatic increase in the number of households headed by women marks one of the greatest shifts in family structure in modern capitalist society. The number of single-parent households, the overwhelming majority of which are headed by women, has risen from 12.7 percent of all families in 1960 to 32 percent in 1998.

In capitalist society, Barnes said, the nuclear family among the toilers is modeled by "public opinion" on a sentimentalization of the bourgeois family. But it serves a quite different balance of functions.

While the family is not a producing unit among workers--as it is among farmers and layers of the petty bourgeoisie--since the rise of industrial capitalism it has borne responsibility for the production and reproduction of labor power. It has served as a substitute for a social wage. The family takes care of the young, old, and sick; of basic education; of food, clothing, and shelter. It is a "haven in a heartless world" to turn to when a worker is disabled or unemployed.

In order to maintain this social structure by means short of force, it was necessary for the rulers to make divorce, if not taboo, at least discouraged in the eyes of bourgeois opinion and hard to obtain on the level of the state.

This all began to change with the drawing of large numbers of women into industry during World War II. Despite a sudden but temporary reversal of this trend in the immediate postwar years, both the numbers and percentage of women in the workforce soon resumed their climb, including by the 1970s into a broader range of industrial jobs. The social acceptance, both legally and de facto, of a woman's right to divorce her husband has grown.

For women in the middle class and better-off sections of the working class, these trends brought more economic independence and a greater degree of social equality. But especially for the economically worst-off sections of the working class, the changing structure of the family unit--more and more often a mother, children, and sometimes a grandmother or aunt ("the sisters")--has increased women's vulnerability to the combined workings of the capitalist system and the rulers' political course.

"And with the next major downturn in the capitalist business cycle," Barnes said, "the working class will be hit with the full cumulative effects of these social policies."

The elimination of Aid for Families with Dependent Children in 1996 is already having a differential class impact on the female population in the United States. While middle-class and bourgeois women establish more financial and economic independence and stability, it becomes harder and harder for working-class women to make ends meet. Their wages are low, they have few benefits, and their jobless levels are high.

There is a growing gap between the traditional women's rights organizations, dominated by better-off middle-class women who praise the Clinton administration for its record on abortion rights, and the reality of the impact on the vast majority of women of the bipartisan policies signed and administered by the White House.

The fight to defend and extend the social wage, Barnes said, can't be disconnected from the fight for the rights of women, Blacks, and immigrants. As a result of the normal workings of capitalism and the class bias of all bourgeois institutions, even gains such as affirmative action--granted by the rulers in face of mass social struggles--cannot stem the tendency of class society to become sharply re-stratified and re-polarized.

"That is why the working-class vanguard must press for the labor movement to defend every single gain the working class has made," Barnes said.

"The labor movement must fight for a social wage to be guaranteed to the working class--the class that transforms nature to produce all wealth, yet has no unencumbered wealth of its own. This is why the revolutionary government in Cuba always gives priority to not simply increasing individual wages, but to expanding the social wage, including access to health care, education, unemployment and retirement benefits, elder-care facilities, child care, and other measures.

"Without this class-struggle approach," Barnes said, "there is no way to advance the unity and combat capacity of the working class and its toiling allies in the fields and on the seas."  
 
Assault on rights
Barnes also pointed out that "millions of workers are already feeling the consequences of government restrictions on the use of what we consider rights and on political space in this country."

Along these lines, he pointed to assaults on Fourth Amendment rights under the 1994 Federal Crime Bill and on workers born abroad through the Illegal Immigration and Reform Responsibility Act adopted two years later.

As the SWP leadership was meeting, Clinton sent back to Congress a bill to criminalize the disclosure of classified documents, encouraging some modifications before he signs a new "secrecy act" he claims is essential to U.S. "national security."

A host of other bipartisan measures extended the use of state-sponsored executions, mandatory prison sentences, and "sex offender" registration laws. In 1996 Clinton and Congress also expanded the ability of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other cop agencies to circumvent warrants, to broaden use of wiretaps, and to arrest and jail people using "secret evidence." And the so-called Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was adopted and signed into law that same year.

Over the past half decade, Barnes added, "there has been a substantial reduction in the right of habeas corpus as applied to prisoners on death row. At the same time, there has been no letup in police brutality, frame-ups, and the railroading of workers to prison through the court system.

And Clinton, Congress, and the courts have presided over a sharply accelerated use of the death penalty against working people--"both state-sanctioned and on the streets," Barnes said. "The fundamental rule you are taught underlying capitalist justice is: you don't have to do something wrong; you just have to be something 'wrong.'"

Finally, Barnes pointed to the 2001 agricultural appropriations bill recently adopted by Congress and signed by Clinton. The bill benefits wealthy agribusiness at the expense of working farmers. It also contains a rider reinforcing the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, and writes into law what had previously been administrative regulations preventing travel by most U.S. residents to Cuba.  
 
War in Mideast
In the weeks surrounding the SWP leadership meeting, the Israeli government continued its murderous assaults on Palestinians. And in what has become a weekly occurrence, largely unreported in the press, U.S. and British government air strikes pounded Iraqi villages November 1 and 11, wounding 10, bringing the total to 316 killed and 946 injured since the two imperialist powers launched "Operation Desert Fox" against the Iraqi people in December 1998.

In his political report to the meeting, Jack Barnes noted that the recent events in Palestine "mark the eighth war Palestinians have had to fight for their elementary national rights, counting those from the Palestinian uprising in 1936-39 against the British Mandate, through the intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s against the expansionist colonial settler state of Israel."

There is no way that either Tel Aviv or Washington can "solve" the conflict short of recognition of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, something that stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the existence of the state of Israel. "The driving force of this conflict is still summed up in the statement painted on a wall in Palestine two decades ago, and broadcast through photographs around the world--'We fight Israel because it occupies our land,'" Barnes said.

Barnes said a new factor in this long-term state of war is the existence of the Palestinian Authority. "It is neither a government nor a state," he said. "It is not even an embryo of a state. To the contrary, it has no true sovereignty over the patchwork of land it supposedly administers--and is held responsible by Tel Aviv to police."

Nonetheless, the Israeli government uses the very existence of the Palestinian Authority as a pretext for murderous assaults on the Palestinian people.

"From the point of view of Washington and Tel Aviv," he said, "the Palestinian Authority is only 'working' if it is serving as an effective mechanism of control over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip."

It is the colonial-settler state of Israel--not "the Jews," nor the Israeli Jews--that is the instrument of the oppression of the Palestinian people, Barnes said. It is a capitalist state whose very origin is based upon the dispossession and national oppression of an entire people, the Palestinians. It is a state that serves as a bastion of imperialism in the region--and whose capitalist rulers advance their own class interests, those of Israeli finance capital. Their interests are not identical to, and come into conflict with, the interests of the U.S., British, French, and other imperialist ruling classes.

Communists, Barnes said, champion the demand for a democratic, secular Palestine and point out that Israel is at the same time a death trap for Jews. And they demand Tel Aviv's immediate withdrawal from all the territories it occupied during six days of aggression in June 1967.

"We should not expect that the borders of a democratic, secular Palestine will necessarily be the same as those of Israel--either as it existed after 1948, nor the 'Greater Israel' established through the further conquests by Tel Aviv during its 1967 war against the Arab peoples. The majority of the population in Jordan is Palestinian," Barnes said, "as well as a substantial portion of the population in southern Lebanon.

"The communist movement," he said, "joins not only with the Palestinians but with the toilers of the oppressed nations of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and throughout the Mideast in their struggle against imperialist domination, including by the Israeli state. At the same time, we work to build proletarian parties made up of working people organizing and fighting in the face of a capitalist state in each country.

"In the imperialist bastion of Israel itself," Barnes said, "the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people will be a powerful impetus to an anticapitalist revolution. The degree to which a communist leadership is built will have a direct bearing on the course of the struggle."

In that regard, the SWP leader noted the importance of the size and confidence of demonstrations in New York and other U.S. cities of thousands of Arabs and Palestinians, along with others, over the past few months.

"There are many working people and young people involved in these actions--Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim--who live and work in the United States," Barnes said. "They, like other immigrants arriving here in record numbers, are a growing part of the American working class, and an increasing percentage of the hereditary proletariat in this country."

Barnes noted that three weeks earlier, on two consecutive days, there was a pro-Israel demonstration in New York City of some 10,000 people, followed by a pro-Palestinian rally of equivalent size or larger. "This would have unthinkable even a few years ago," he said. "We still have not absorbed its implications.

"We should be on the lookout for workers and youth of Arab origin who are drawn more deeply toward the class struggle in this country," Barnes said, "and thus can be attracted to the communist movement."  
 
Regional conferences
"The branches of the Socialist Workers Party are incapable of recruiting vanguard workers and farmers to the communist movement unless our party units are transformed through having a hall and carrying out regular public propaganda activity in a workers district," Barnes emphasized in his closing summary at the November National Committee meeting.

"And this transformation cannot go forward in a sustainable way unless the party and Young Socialists take advantage of the openings that exist right now to recruit working people and youth to the communist movement."

With this reality in mind, the party's National Committee will reconvene in New York from Saturday, December 16, through Monday, December 18, to assess what has been demonstrated about the shifts in U.S. politics and the class struggle since their previous meeting, as well as some of the initial steps by branches in carrying out the course decided by the NC.

On Saturday evening, at a regional public meeting, Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP, will present a talk that will be discussed and voted on by the National Committee the following days.

Coming out of that meeting, the party's leadership is calling on branches in various parts of North America to organize regional educational conferences over the three-day New Year's and Martin Luther King Day weekends to discuss these perspectives and to organize classes on the change in family structure, the Jewish question, and other topics that bring to bear the history and theory of communism on politics and the class struggle today. Central party leaders will participate in each of these gatherings.

Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists have the possibility of going through experiences with workers and working farmers in the years ahead--strikes, rising social protest movements in city and countryside, mass upheavals--where possibilities to change the current social order short of a socialist revolution will be tested and exhausted.

"What's important is not the amount of calendar time this will take--no one knows--but the set of experiences the workers movement will go through," Barnes said.

"These experiences will open workers to an organization that is truly revolutionary, as they go through these struggles together and learn the irreplaceable practical value of the written record of the struggles of revolutionary generations preceding us.

"They will draw conclusions about the value of being a worker-bolshevik and building a proletarian party to which everything is subordinated to a single aim--the socialist revolution."  
 
 
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