The bosses' drive to squeeze more profits out of workers, cutting corners on safety in the process--a drive that has gone hand in hand with the U.S. rulers' increasingly aggressive foreign policy--took a deadly toll at the Jim Walter Resources Blue Creek Mine No. 5. Upon learning of the disaster, socialist workers in mining and other industries from Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York, and Alabama headed to the area to talk to miners, find out the facts, and report them for the Militant.

"Workers in the mine knew this was in the making," said Kincaid. "There was a constant tug-of-war between the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the company over safety questions"--in particular, the frequent buildup of methane. Blue Creek No. 5 was a very deep and gassy mine, she said, the deepest in the United States.

"That didn't mean, however, that coal couldn't be mined safely," said Kincaid. "Miners knew the company was turning a blind eye to the accumulating dangers."

The big-business media treats the explosion as a "horrible tragedy, an 'act of God,'" said Kincaid. And the local newspapers are pressing the company's line that there should be "no rush to judgment" on the cause of the explosions.

In reality, said Kincaid, many miners point out that such killings are a direct result of the speedup drive of the coal bosses.  
 
'An area rich in revolutionary history'
The next speaker was Ma'mud Shirvani, author of the introduction to the Pathfinder book To See the Dawn, which records the deliberations of the 1920 Congress of Peoples of the East, called by the leadership of the Communist International. The anti-imperialist congress had drawn some 2,000 delegates from Central Asia and elsewhere throughout the region.

In introducing Shirvani, who is also Pathfinder's Farsi-language editor, chairperson Mary-Alice Waters noted that Farsi is not only the official language of Iran but one of the major languages in Afghanistan as well.

Shirvani began his remarks by drawing attention to one of the displays just outside the meeting hall--a map, headlined "The Class Struggle on the 'Silk Road.'" The map featured dates and brief descriptions of revolutionary struggles in the region over the past century. (see ISR pages 4-5).

Volunteers had to research and prepare the map from several sources, said Shirvani. "There is no available map that depicts the real character of Afghanistan, showing the peoples of various nationalities and languages flowing across the borders of Iran, Pakistan, and countries in Central Asia--borders arbitrarily imposed in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries by the colonial powers." In Central Asia, those borders were drawn by British imperialism and tsarist Russia; it was the imperialist rulers of the United Kingdom and France who carved up Palestine, the Arabian peninsula, and what are now Syria, Iraq, and the so-called Gulf States.

Writing in a 1913 article entitled "The Awakening of Asia," Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin observed that "hundreds of millions of the downtrodden and benighted have awakened from medieval stagnation to a new life and are rising to fight for elementary human rights and democracy."

The oil fields in the Mideast, Iran, and Central Asia have long been a prime target of imperialist pillage, Shirvani said, as they remain central to Washington's military and diplomatic policies today. As part of struggles to regain their national sovereignty and dignity, peoples throughout the region have fought to retake control of oil and other natural resources.

"This year, in fact, marks the 50th anniversary of the nationalization of the British-owned oil industry in Iran," Shirvani said. Those anti-imperialist mobilizations built on the upsurge a few years earlier that had overturned the monarchy in Iran--the regime of the Shah--and established a republic. The toilers of Iran, Shirvani said, proved they could operate the refineries and other equipment--something the "enlightened" British imperialists had predicted they could never do--and "began to throw off the self-image that they were inferior to the colonial masters."

Reacting against this challenge to imperialist interests, Washington in 1953 carried out a CIA-organized coup against the Iranian republic, gaining an edge for U.S. oil interests against their British rivals in the process. The reinstalled regime of the Shah was "a prison house and torture chamber for workers, peasants, and oppressed nationalities," Shirvani said.

During the 1970s strikes and struggles against the military regime swept Pakistan, and a revolutionary upsurge peaked in Afghanistan in 1978, with the ouster of a pro-imperialist government. That same year a popular revolutionary struggle opened up in Iran, Shirvani said, "in which the working class emerged as the gravediggers of the Shah's regime," overthrowing it in early 1979.

"With the fall of the Shah," he said, "the U.S. rulers lost one of imperialism's two main pillars in that entire region of the world--the other being the state of Israel." And despite the slaughter of more than 150,000 civilians and soldiers during the 1990–91 Gulf War, Washington failed in its goal of establishing a protectorate in Iraq to replace what it had lost a little more than a decade earlier in Iran. "The U.S. rulers have not recovered from the blow of the Iranian revolution to this day," he said.

At the same time, he explained, "The toilers of Iran were not able to forge a proletarian leadership capable of leading them in establishing a workers and farmers government in 1979. Such a victory could have opened a new stage in the struggle by revolutionary-minded peasants, workers, and youth against imperialist oppression and for socialism throughout the region."

This failure in Iran was due in large part, Shirvani said, to betrayals by the Stalinist regime in Moscow and its backers in Iran going back to the post-World War II revolutionary upsurge in that country. The bureaucratic course and murderous factionalism of the pro-Moscow misleadership in Afghanistan, compounded at the end of 1979 by the disastrous Soviet invasion, set back the popular struggle there as well.

Stalinism's legacy throughout the Middle East and Central Asia was to leave the battle against imperialism bereft of revolutionary working-class leadership, Shirvani said. The methods used in the attacks on September 11 are a product of this leadership vacuum and resulting political retreats.  
 
Explaining imperialism's roots
In her welcoming remarks at the opening of the New York meeting, chairperson Mary-Alice Waters had pointed out that "the communist movement has at our disposal a wealth of material explaining the roots of imperialism's unrelenting drive toward war. We have newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets that help us explain the line of march of the working class in the worldwide struggle for national liberation and socialism," Waters said.

She explained that week in and week out, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists are introducing revolutionary literature to other workers, farmers, and youth. They sell the Militant, the Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial, New International magazine, and books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press off street tables in working-class districts in cities and towns across the United States, at plant gates, on campuses, and at political events.

She pointed, for example, to titles from the past decade such as issue no. 7 of New International, featuring "The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq," and Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, both by Jack Barnes, as well as U.S. Hands Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations by Fidel Castro and Ricardo Alarcón, and To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's 'Cold War' against Cuba Doesn't End by Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara.

Among many other titles on sale at the large literature table at the New York meeting were The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International; The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon; In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky; and Teamster Bureaucracy and Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the United States by Farrell Dobbs.

Both before and after the program, participants pored over these and many other books and pamphlets on the Pathfinder literature tables outside the meeting hall. Young people carefully studied titles, looking over and discussing the books. A table with steeply discounted shopworn books proved especially popular, with many purchasing a box or bag full of titles purchased for $1, $2, or $3 each.

Participants also gathered around a range of attractive displays with illustrations and text about the recently concluded World Festival of Youth and Students in Algiers, miners' fight for safe working conditions, the record of the Militant newspaper in opposing imperialist war, "Bolshevism versus anarchism," and other topics.

Supporters of the communist movement had prepared a large buffet of snacks, desserts, and beverages for the opening reception and informal discussion following the close of the event.  
 
Pathfinder sales campaign
In introducing the third speaker at the September 30 meeting, Steve Clark, editorial director of Pathfinder, Waters reviewed some of Pathfinder's publishing plans for the end of 2001 and early 2002.

These include, among others, a new issue of New International magazine; a book-length interview with Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke; the first-ever Spanish-language and French-language translations of The History of American Trotskyism 1928–38 by founding SWP leader James P. Cannon; a Spanish translation of Barnes's Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today; and a new edition of the popular booklet by Joseph Hansen, Too Many Babies? The Myth of the Population Explosion.

Waters also described the campaign launched by Pathfinder to reach total sales of $500,000 in the 18 months to June 30 of next year. The army of volunteers around the world that helps in both the production and sales of Pathfinder books, she said, is "responding to the growing potential and what we know will be a political thirst for these books."

In addition, participants in the meeting contributed or pledged just shy of $35,000 towards a fall $125,000 Pathfinder Fund.  
 
Washington deepens its war trajectory
In his remarks to the meeting, Clark responded to the assertion trumpeted by much of the big-business press, and echoed by many middle-class radicals, that Washington's post-September 11 militarization drive registered a fundamental policy shift.

"This is simply false," Clark said. "The U.S. rulers are taking the opportunity to put into play the course they have been preparing for, step by step, for some 15 years. With ongoing tactical differences over how far and how fast to move, the Congress, Clinton, and Bush the elder and younger have been pressing along this bipartisan course ever since the deepening crisis of the world capitalist order signaled by the 1987 stock market crash and collapse of the Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union a few years later.

"With the collapse of those regimes," Clark said, "also came the collapse of the capitalist rulers' hopes that they could defeat the toilers of the world through a 'cold war.' But accomplishing that goal will take gigantic class battles and a 'hot war'--a coming conflict in which the toilers, with revolutionary leadership, can triumph."

The war against Afghanistan, Clark said, "is not some 'turn' in U.S. policy, but another step--and a new opportunity for the rulers--to try to recoup some of what they failed to accomplish in advancing imperialist interests during the bloody 1990–91 war against Iraq."

Similarly, the rulers' accelerated assault on political rights in the United States does not involve primarily new legislation or executive orders, but "the implementation of what was put in place over the previous eight years by the Clinton administration and Congress." Clark pointed to the reinforcement of a so-called homeland defense command structure; the use against immigrants of "secret evidence," "preventive detention," and curtailment of review and appeal rights under the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act; the bolstering of commando and SWAT-style squads on the federal, state, and local levels; the establishment of a White House "counterintelligence czar"; and other such measures.

"They've had all this ready for use for several years, in anticipation of the rise in struggles by workers and farmers they know is coming in the United States," Clark said. "Now they have the pretext to ratchet up the pace."

Even the layoffs of airline employees and other workers the bosses are blaming on "terrorism" were largely planned well beforehand, as profits were being squeezed by overcapacity and increasingly volatile world competition, and as capitalism headed into its first worldwide recession since 1990–91. "The employers just seized the opportunity to wave the bloody flag against workers and unionists who stood up to defend the rights and livelihoods of working people," Clark said.

None of this would come as a surprise to anyone who's had a chance to read and think about some of the books and magazines referred to by Waters at the opening of the meeting, Clark said. He pointed to several others, including "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" in issue no. 11 of New International magazine, and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes published earlier this year.

Working people and youth in the United States who want to combat the social evils we see accelerating all around us, Clark said, need to look for revolutionary solutions and reach out to the struggles of workers and farmers the world over. The impoverishment and lack of industrial development in the countries where the great majority of humanity lives, and the vast inequities in social and cultural conditions, are the product neither of "conspiracies" nor "chaos," Clark said. "They are the inevitable result of how capitalism works, not how it doesn't work."

When the leaders of the victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia launched the Communist International some 80 years ago, its statutes said it was breaking "once and for all with the traditions" of most previous organizations that claimed to be socialist "which, in reality, only recognized the white race." In the new communist world movement, it said, "are fraternally united people of all colors--white, yellow, and black--the toilers of the entire world."

Clark welcomed those at the meeting to join with the Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialists, and their supporters in the ongoing effort to build such an international movement.  
 
Young people stand their ground
"No one is more deeply affected by war than young people," said Waters in introducing the next speaker, Arrin Hawkins. "Young people recognize the implications for themselves and their generation when the rulers go into overdrive, playing upon human solidarity and sympathy to whip up support for their war drive."

Hawkins spoke on behalf of the national leadership of the Young Socialists. She is also a member of the steering committee of the party's United Food and Commercial Workers union fraction. Hawkins was a leader of the 160-strong delegation from the United States to the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange held in Havana in July, and then participated the following month in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Algeria. Other members of the World Youth Festival delegation were also seated on stage, as well as elected leaders of the party's UNITE, UFCW, and UMWA national union fractions.

"Since coming back from Cuba and Algeria, Young Socialists have been on a campaign to talk to young people about our experiences, and about the possibilities opening for an international anti-imperialist youth movement and to build the YS," Hawkins said.

As it happened, she and another delegation member were due to speak at a community college in Minnesota on September 11. "The professor asked me, 'Are you still comfortable speaking?' He said the subject--building an anti-imperialist youth movement--might imply that by 'imperialist' we meant the United States!"

"I answered him that, 'yes,' we want to go ahead with the meeting," Hawkins said. "We want to talk about the imperialist United States, and about the socialist alternative we can learn a lot about by looking at revolutionary Cuba."

In the meatpacking plant where she works in Chicago, Hawkins has also found daily opportunities to talk with co-workers about her opposition to the U.S. war drive and its patriotic trappings.

"One co-worker became visibly disturbed when I was talking to another worker," she said. "I told him, in a calm and civil tone, that this war is against the interests of working people. He didn't succeed in shutting down my conversation. And the next day he greeted me, as he usually does, with, 'Hello, how're you doing?'"

In closing her remarks to the meeting, Hawkins emphasized that "it's important to reach out to new people, to deepen our work among them.

"Young people are looking for a way forward. The SWP and Young Socialists need to organize systematic sales and other political work on the campuses, to introduce rebel-minded students to communist literature, and to win them to the Young Socialists."
 
 
Other articles from the ISR:
Communists and the struggle against imperialism today
Lessons of U.S. war against Iraq
Socialist workers in unions discuss campaign against imperialism and its war drive
Anti-imperialist struggles by the peoples of Afghanistan and surrounding countries  
 
 
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