Among the titles released were Pathfinder bookstores' best sellers for the month of October: New International no. 7 featuring the article "Opening Guns of World War III" by Jack Barnes, Marxism and Terrorism by Leon Trotsky, and The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes.

Other reprints produced in October were: Thomas Sankara Speaks; Che Guevara habla a la juventud; The Assassination of Malcolm X by George Breitman; New International no. 8 featuring the article "The Politics of Economics: Che Guevara and Marxist Continuity" by Jack Barnes and Steve Clark; The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution by Leon Trotsky; Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement 1918–1922 by Farrell Dobbs; El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Socialism and Man in Cuba) by Ernesto Che Guevara; and Genocide against the Indians: Its Role in the Rise of U.S. Capitalism by George Novack. Through December 31, Pathfinder will make each of these titles available at a special 60 percent discount to Pathfinder bookstores.

The publishing house is also featuring the four titles reviewed below as its December Books of the Month specials for members of the Pathfinder Readers Club.

The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution contains the resolution adopted as the party's program at the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. The document was then submitted by the SWP for adoption by the Fourth International, the world movement the party helped lead at that time. The resolution, often called the Transitional Program, was drafted by Trotsky, a central leader of the October 1917 revolution in Russia who led the fight after the death of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin to continue applying Lenin's communist course against a privileged, petty-bourgeois layer headed by Joseph Stalin.  
 
Fight for jobs for all
The program was drafted during a depression-marked period in which the working class still faced prospects of making a socialist revolution and halting capitalism's march toward fascism and a new world war.

"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution," Trotsky wrote. "This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."

Trotsky applied this method to the fight around the most pressing issues facing workers in the United States during the Great Depression and buildup toward World War II.

"Against unemployment, 'structural' as well as 'conjunctural,' the time is ripe to advance, along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours," the program states. "On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, with a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices."

Anticipating objections that such solutions are unrealistic, Trotsky answered: "'Realizability' or 'unrealizability' is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery."

In Birth of the Communist Movement, the second volume of Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the United States, Dobbs describes how Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership of the October revolution helped form the Communist International and provide leadership to working people around the world--including in the United States--who sought to emulate what the workers and peasants had accomplished in Russia.

One of the Bolsheviks' greatest contributions was to help the U.S. communist movement discard its initial infantile ultraleftism, which was isolating it unnecessarily from the working class.

In the year of its founding, for example, the ultraleft stance of the CP leadership prevented the party from relating effectively to large-scale strikes that took place in 1919. This ultraleftism also made it easier for U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the FBI to carry out a witch-hunting victimization of party cadres in the wake of defeats in those class battles--the so-called Palmer Raids. Based on his own later experience as a leader of the communist movement for some 45 years, Dobbs explains that Marxists "mobilize the maximum support to resist in every possible way capitalist efforts to isolate them from legal, public political life. They fight to uphold their own democratic rights and those of the entire labor movement and its allies. Moreover, Marxists strive to win expansion of those rights for all the exploited and oppressed. They recognize that such a course is imperative if the working-class vanguard is to maintain close touch with the working class as a whole and carry out the all-sided political activity basic to its objectives.... In this country the communists were also in a position to use election campaigns in the fight against capitalist repression."

Genocide against the Indians: Its Role in the Rise of U.S. Capitalism by Novack presents a materialist explanation of the evolution of Native American culture, social and property relations, and the murderous treatment meted out on a mass scale to American Indians at the hands of European settlers.

Novack polemicizes against bourgeois historians who are incapable of understanding there was a stage of history before capitalism in North America, just as there will be one after capitalism. He challenges their interpretation of the first American Revolution of 1776–83.

"The colonial uprising, for all its importance, was neither the first social transformation in America, nor can it be considered the most fundamental one. It was preceded, interwoven, and followed by the white invasion and penetration which overthrew the Indian tribal network. This process of struggle, undertaken to install the rule of private property and its corresponding institutions in place of communal property and its specific institutions, was an even more radical social upheaval than the contest between the colonists and the mother country."

The fourth book of the month is El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba by Ernesto Che Guevara. Pathfinder also publishes and distributes this work in English, French, Swedish, and Farsi. This pamphlet contains lessons drawn by Guevara--based on the actual experience of the Cuban Revolution--of the political tasks and challenges of workers and farmers in organizing the transition from capitalism to socialism. Also included is Fidel Castro's 1987 speech on the 20th anniversary of Guevara's death.  
 
 
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