These are: February 1965: Final Speeches by Malcolm X, American Labor Struggles by Samuel Yellen, Problems of Women's Liberation by Evelyn Reed, Women and the Nicaraguan Revolution by Tomás Borge, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches by Malcolm X, From Lenin to Stalin by Victor Serge, Cuba for Beginners by RIUS (Eduardo Del Rius), and Revolution in the Congo by Dick Roberts.

The first four titles listed have been selected as Pathfinder books of the month for October. They will be available to Pathfinder bookstores at a 60 percent discount and may be purchased by members of the Pathfinder Readers Club at a 25 percent discount through October 31.

February 1965: The Final Speeches by Malcolm X contains interviews and speeches by one of the 20th century's outstanding revolutionary leaders, given in the last three weeks of his life. Malcolm's condemnation of U.S. military intervention in the Congo and Vietnam are particularly relevant given the war Washington is launching against Afghanistan today.

"We had a situation where a plane was dropping bombs on African villages. An African village has no defense against the bombs. And an African village is not a sufficient threat that it has to be bombed.... When these bombs are dropped on African villages in the Congo, they are dropped on Black women, Black children, Black babies. These human beings are blown to bits. I heard no outcry, no voice of compassion, for these thousands of Black people slaughtered by planes.

"Why was there no outcry? Why was there no concern? Because, again, the press very skillfully made the victims look like they were the criminals, and the criminals look like they were the victims.

"They refer to the villages as 'rebel held,' you know. As if to say, because they are rebel-held villages, you can destroy the population, and it's okay."

The U.S. ruling class's willingness to unleash violence against working people within the United States too is graphically portrayed in American Labor Struggles: 1877–1934 by Samuel Yellen. This book tells the story of 10 strikes--from the 1877 rail workers strike to the 1934 strike of longshoremen on the West Coast. Yellen describes the violence used to crush a strike in Gastonia County, North Carolina, during the 1929 strike wave by textile workers throughout the South. There had been "a good-sized flurry in unionization among the southern textile workers during the World War" of 1914–17, Yellen says, but "practically every trace had been stamped out in the two years following the war."

The Gastonia strike was led by members of the Communist Party, which at that time--politically disoriented by the Stalinist misleadership, which by then had expelled revolutionists from its leading bodies--was carrying out an ultraleft course, including in the labor movement. The bosses resorted to intense red-baiting and racist demagogy from the start.

"Across the front page of the Gastonia Daily Gazette was printed a picture of an American flag with a snake coiled at its base, and the inscription: 'Communism in the South. Kill it!'... Handbills were distributed: 'Bust up your Russian union and let's go back to work' and 'Would you belong to a union which opposes White Supremacy?' The issues of communism and race equality were drummed up until soon Gastonia was ripe for intimidation and violence."

Yellen goes on to describe the attacks by police, courts, the National Guard, and vigilantes on the union and the heroic and tenacious resistance of the strikers. Harking back to the imperialist slaughter of the previous decade, mill president R.W. Baldwin commented on one of the murderous assaults, in which six workers were killed and 18 wounded. "I read that the death of each soldier in the World War consumed more than five tons of lead. Here we have less than five pounds and these casualties. A good average, I call it."

The strike was lost. Yellen's book does not provide an accurate political assessment of the leadership factors contributing to the defeat, or the disastrous consequences of the factional course of the Communist Party leadership in organizing the defense of the 100 workers arrested during the strike, seven of whom were convicted of second-degree murder. For that, readers will have to go to another Pathfinder book, James P. Cannon: Writings and Speeches 1928–31--The Left Opposition in the U.S. Cannon was a founding leader of the Communist Party who, after his expulsion from the party in 1928, continued to lead the fight to build a communist party in the United States until his death in 1974.

Evelyn Reed, a veteran socialist and longtime advocate of women's equality, wrote Problems of Women's Liberation as the second wave of feminism was emerging in the 1960s. Reed identifies the source of women's oppression by tracing its economic and social roots from prehistoric society to modern capitalism. Her conclusion is that a socialist revolution is necessary to win total emancipation. Reed explains how disastrous it is for women to look to the capitalists to defend their equality instead of depending upon themselves and their allies.

"During a capitalist war women can be taken out of their homes by the millions and put to work in the factories. But when they are no longer needed as producers, they are sent back home to become primarily consumers. In both instances, what is decisive is not the needs of women as human beings but the interests of the monopolists. These masters of America shape the lives and livelihoods of womanhood and the whole family according to their own corrupt and corrupting aims.

"Women's destiny cannot be fundamentally transformed until this truth is understood and acted on. The feminists of the past could achieve their limited reforms within the framework of a still-ascending capitalism. But today it has become dead-end capitalism.... [Women] should now become socialist-minded, because only a root-and-branch change in the whole venal system can save us all from further dehumanization."

Along these lines, Women and the Nicaraguan Revolution, by Tomás Borge--at the time a member of the National Directorate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front--shows the role a workers and farmers government can play in the fight for women's liberation even while fighting a war against the U.S.-backed contra army. In this 1982 speech Borge pledges, "The Nicaraguan revolution must unleash all the energies and capacities of women so they can become full members of the new society with full rights."  
 
 
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