At the same time, it is the judgment of the SWP National Committee that there has been a shift in the political conjuncture. The momentum whipped up by the U.S. rulers for military action in the aftermath of the events of September 11 "is largely exhausted," said Barnes.

The meeting, attended by nearly 100 people, took place at the Pathfinder building during the sixth "red weekend" of volunteer work brigades aimed at transforming the apparatus of the communist movement that produces the revolutionary books, pamphlets, and periodicals needed by workers around the world to advance their struggles. Participants came from the East Coast cities of Boston; Newark, New Jersey; New York; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C., as well as Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh; Cleveland; and Montreal, Quebec.

Over the course of the weekend, volunteers moved Pathfinder's stock of warehoused books to make them more accessible to the Pathfinder offices where orders are processed and shipped out to customers around the world. Crews also organized an inventory of the entire stock of Pathfinder books. The e-mail addresses of several hundred Pathfinder customers were entered into the publishing house's billing system, enabling the staff to send out electronic invoices, saving time and money.

Other volunteers participated in crews working on the wiring, plumbing, and other tasks needed to move the computer-to-plate machinery in Pathfinder's printshop onto the shop floor near the presses. Completing the move will mark a major step in press operators integrating all the operations needed to print jobs.

Among those participating was Christina Pearsoll, from West Islip on Long Island, who was at her first red weekend. Pearsoll is involved in the Volunteer Workplace Project, which supports the fight for justice by immigrant day laborers in the area. She liked the fact that everyone involved in the weekend was "working toward the same goal. It's nice to be with people who think along the same lines as I think," she stated. "I believe in what you're trying to do, and what the SWP stands for. We need to change this system big time."  
 
U.S. rulers need war dead
In his talk, Barnes explained that the U.S. ruling class cannot sustain widespread acceptance of patriotic war fever without a significant number of U.S. casualties on the battlefield, where blood is shed day after day. Only under those conditions can the trade union bureaucracy succeed in carrying out the bosses' bidding to force major concessions on working people under the pretext of "defending the homeland." And only with sustained casualties and war dead can the misleadership of Black or other organizations win a section of their membership to "temporarily" put aside their fight to support an imperialist war, Barnes explained.

With the effects of the September 11 attacks fading, working people and broader layers of the population find other concerns more pressing, including unemployment, the future of the pension and health care benefits as companies like Enron go belly-up, police brutality, and assaults on workers' rights.

Meanwhile, said Barnes, Washington is being drawn into carrying out in Afghanistan what it pulled back from 10 years ago in Iraq--the establishment of a U.S. protectorate along the lines of the one set up in Japan under Gen. Douglas McArthur coming out of World War II. There can be no cohesive pro-imperialist government put in place in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Washington's imperialist allies in Europe--whose forces are already getting shot at--are reluctant to be the military police over the entire country. Instead, Washington will be pressed to put masses of troops on the ground there.

In an attempt to pick up some of the steam lost in the months after September 11, the Bush administration is seeking to continue the bipartisan course it accelerated coming out of September 11 by saying that "America" must fight against the "axis of evil" of Iran, Iraq, and north Korea. These three countries have the capacity to produce and deploy weapons of mass destruction and are often at odds with Washington.

The Bush administration's drive against Korea under the guise of getting rid of such weapons, noted Barnes, may create the greatest division between Washington and Tokyo since the end of World War II. The north Korean government has already test-launched missiles over Japan and has built up its defenses in the face of nearly 40,000 heavily armed U.S. troops in the south of their country.

The SWP defends Korea's right to develop nuclear weapons and missiles as a necessary measure to defend themselves against Washington's ongoing threats, said Barnes.

The two nuclear powers in the Middle East--Tel Aviv and Washington--are chained together in defending each other's interests even as the Israeli state is in decline. The possibility of either Iraq or Iran developing missiles capable of landing a warhead in Israel, or hitting a U.S. military base in the region, is leading both the U.S. and Israeli governments to prepare to strike at these two regimes that are in conflict with imperialism.  
 
Party-building lessons
Romina Green, a garment worker and leader of the international Young Socialists, spoke about the recent Militant reporting trip to Argentina during the upsurge of protests in December and January after the collapse of Argentine peso.

"The purpose of our trip was to meet revolutionaries and convince them of the need to join in building a new communist international," she said. "We had the same responsibility as communists had on other international trips to the world youth festival in Algiers and the Havana Book Fair--activities that are an extension of what we do among co-workers and at events in the United States like the recent rally of striking nurses in Long Island."

Green pointed to some of the shortfalls of the reporting trip and lessons that the communist movement can draw. "We didn't tell revolutionary workers and students we met that their political trajectory was toward becoming communists," she said. "They're just not organized into a communist party and part of an international movement yet." Green said the team placed too much emphasis on meeting with trade union officials, who, like many lower-level officials in the United States, use radical rhetoric at the same time as they demonstrate their contempt for working people.

"We saw tremendous resistance among working people," Green reported, "but this does not imply an inevitable collapse of the capitalist system." The imperialists and native bourgeoisie will reorganize, alternating between different government factions, and continue to come out on top until a revolutionary movement is built that is capable of leading workers and farmers to overturn the capitalist system, she said. Reporting teams provide one avenue for getting books with the legacy of the communist movement into the hands of people who are part of an emerging--even if atomized for now--proletarian leadership that is searching for the most effective strategy to fight and win.

Pierre Toulouse, a leader of the Young Socialists in Haiti, announced an educational conference hosted by the YS and the Federation of University Students of Haiti over the May 17-18 weekend. He pointed to his organization's focus of reaching out to workers and peasants to build the socialist movement, and to the powerful example of the Cuban Revolution. His organization first met and began collaborating with the international Young Socialists, the Union of Young Communists of Cuba, and other groups of revolutionists at the anti-imperialist youth festival that took place in Algeria last August.

Michel Prairie, the director of Pathfinder's French language program and a leader of the Communist League in Canada, spoke on the fruits of the communist movement's international work and on the next steps in the work to translate and publish more Pathfinder books in French.

"Today, 30,000 people rallied in Victoria, British Columbia, against cuts in public services," he said. "Socialists sold 230 copies of the Militant and a few dozen people signed up for more information about the league and the YS."

At the demonstration, said Prairie, socialists met an Argentine who first ran into the Young Socialists at the São Paulo Forum in Cuba last year and a Palestinian who talked with YS leaders at the Algiers festival.

"We decided several years ago that in order to build a party of equals in Canada--with a large French-speaking oppressed nationality in Quebec--we had to translate into French the books presenting the strategic course and theory of the communist movement," stated Prairie. Now these books are getting in the hands of people around the world. Communists who are part of the French translation team have moved up by a month the publication of History of American Trotskyism by James P. Cannon to have it available for the conference in Haiti. Two YS members in Haiti have joined the translation effort.  
 
Building on initial steps forward
SWP leader Jack Willey reported on the important step taken in beginning to ship the Militant from the Garment District branch hall each week. "This brings together members, supporters, and those we want to recruit, to be part of an international responsibility of getting the paper into the hands of working people and youth from Peru to Sweden to New Zealand," Willey said. "We are moving the editorial offices of the Militant, Pathfinder, and the party's national office to be in the same location as the New York local of the party," he said, "because we need the totality of the membership of the party branches available in order to meet the opportunities we have in the area."

By the end of the red weekend the Militant, Pathfinder, and SWP National Office had begun using simplified web-based shipping programs to prepare all their shipments and to send tracking numbers to customers by e-mail. "This is one of several steps to simplify our work, and cut down on paper waste and preparation time," he reported.

Willey pointed to the response by miners to the Militant and to the emerging social movement in the coal communities around health and safety. At a recent sale at a Pittsburg and Midway mine on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, socialists sold 50 papers. At the P&M mine in Kemmerer, Wyoming, they sold another 10.

Widows of miners killed by black lung as a result of the bosses' greed are marching from Charleston, West Virginia, to Washington. "These workers are buying the paper knowing that it's written by communists. They read it for the same reason the people at this meeting read it: to broaden their political scope."  
 
Building the communist international
Jack Barnes returned to some of the themes addressed by other speakers. He said that Pathfinder's printshop is leading the effort to transform the apparatus of the communist movement, which produces revolutionary books and periodicals. The communist volunteers in the printshop have put together a smaller shop of disciplined, cross-trained, competent press operators who are selling commercial work at the same time as they produce the range of Pathfinder titles.

Barnes read from a letter by Peggy Brundy, a leader of the Pathfinder Reprint Project, in which she pointed to the discipline and rigor necessary to learn all the tasks of running a small shop with a working foreman--an operation like the one she was part of in the 1960s. She compared it with the recent steps the cadre of the current shop have taken to reorganize their work.

Referring to Toulouse's earlier remarks, Barnes noted that each advance in political consciousness, convergence, or regroup–ment of revolutionary forces is part of the new stage of building a communist international. This involves proletarianizing and broadening the international scope of the SWP and Communist Leagues, he said.

He pointed to the example of several Haitians studying in Cuba who stopped by the Pathfinder literature table at the Havana Book Fair and signed up for more information about the Young Socialists. Some had gone with the Cuban delegation to the Algiers festival and met the YS there.

What is taking shape in Haiti is only the beginning, as communist organizations that use Pathfinder books will be built in country after country, he said. The task of communist workers is to convince fighting workers and youth in the United States and abroad that they are acting like communists and that together it is possible to build a world movement of working people that can fight for power in country after country.

As the U.S. war fever fades, more workers are growing angry about assaults on their livelihood. Barnes explained that the fact that U.S. imperialism carried out its assault on Afghanistan with few U.S. casualties, and consequently did not emerge from its victory with accelerating war fever, provides precious time to working-class fighters to utilize the political space open to them.

"Workers' rights are not protected by law; it's not possible under capitalism," Barnes said. "We are living at the highest point of imperialist democracy. This is as good as it gets."

One good example of this fact is the party's campaign to defend Michael Italie against his political firing by Goodwill Industries, prompted by his speaking out as a communist at a candidates' debate when he was running for mayor of Miami. Bourgeois law is not designed to reverse such an action. Workers' rights, however, are defended by other workers who respond to such attacks and join in the fight.

Barnes encouraged everyone at the meeting to focus their work in support of Italie's fight on reaching out to co-workers, workers and farmers in struggle, and militant youth who are outraged at yet another worker being vamped on by the bosses. Many will want to learn more about the political views that led to his firing, and some will be interested in joining the communist party, Barnes said. The SWP leader pointed out that communists do not offer "socialism" to other proletarian fighters. "What we offer is the perspective of the glorious battle to overthrow the state and monopoly of the means of production that is in the hands of the superwealthy ruling class. That struggle opens the door to fight for socialism." Under capitalism, all reforms are temporary and a by-product of revolutionary struggle, he noted. Ultimately, they can only be maintained and advanced after workers and farmers have been led to take power.  
 
 
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